When you overcome your business challenges at the expense of your own mental or physical resilience, you’re effectively subsidising the business with an emotional overdraft.

In The Emotional Overdraft, Andy Brown explores how many founders start their businesses because they are good at something and, in order to expand, they grow their organisations. This brings them challenges as their role is no longer simply to be the subject matter expert that they once were, but the leader of an increasingly complex organisation.

This is something that they may never have trained for. They can find themselves dealing with new experiences and demands on their time, and struggle to identify and prioritise their critical activities. Despite engaging coping mechanisms they have developed over the years, they still finish each day with the feeling that they could have performed better or done more.

The currency spent in increasing your emotional overdraft is your resilience. This is unsustainable if it carries on for too long. All leaders will draw on their emotional overdraft facility, but a healthy leader uses their emotional overdraft to increase their impact in the short term only – clearing it quickly, embracing new behaviours and enabling their business to flourish.