Every time something hit me, I closed down a little further; I didn’t notice it happening.
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An abusive childhood taught me that the world isn’t safe.
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Losing my father when my family needed him most taught me that people leave.
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Being betrayed by people I completely trusted taught me to keep everyone at arm’s length.
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Building businesses from nothing, watching some of them crumble, and building again taught me to rely on myself and nobody else.
Good lessons were learnt from all of them – survival lessons. But I learned every one of them too well.
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I made decisions without hesitating,
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trusted my own judgment above everyone else’s,
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and told myself the distance I kept from people was independence.
I’d been tested, severely and repeatedly, and I was still standing. What more proof did I need to know I was strong?
But here’s the kicker… all of that surviving had turned me into someone who couldn’t be reached.
I’d stopped hearing people who pushed back on my thinking, because I’d stopped trusting that anyone who disagreed with me had my interests at heart.
My colleagues stopped challenging me, because they could tell I’d already made up my mind.
And the business had started depending entirely on someone who couldn’t bend.
I called it strength – and it looked like strength from the outside, too.
And because it looked like strength, I never questioned
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what it was costing me,
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the people around me,
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and the business I was trying to build.
I spent years thinking I was making the right decisions quickly and continuously evolving.
What I was actually doing was making smaller and smaller calls about smaller and smaller things, because the big decisions required trusting someone else’s judgment, and trust was the first thing I’d closed off.
The cost doesn’t hit you on day one.
It occurs in the colleague who stops bringing ideas, because they’ve learned you’re not going to hear them.
In when you feel more isolated every month and can’t work out why.
It occurs in
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the conversations that never happen,
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the challenges nobody raises,
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and the blind spots that grow larger
because nobody feels safe enough to point at them.
The hardest part was realising what was happening underneath the hard shell I’d created.
My fast decisions were actually avoidance.
The distance I kept from people was fear in a fancy suit.
The same instinct that kept me safe from the next betrayal was keeping me safe from
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the next good idea,
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the next honest conversation,
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the next colleague who might help grow the business better than I could alone.
Everything I’d built around myself in the name of survival was the thing standing between me and the business I actually wanted.
I didn’t see any of it until I started examining, deliberately and uncomfortably, over years.
What they’d shown me about the kind of leader I’d become, and the kind I wanted to be instead.
If you’ve been through real difficulty that’s left a mark, you’ve built something from it.
Everyone has; but the question you need to ask is “What?”
Most founders never ask the question; they’re either too busy building or too busy proving the hard times didn’t beat them.
And nobody around them raises it either, because from the outside, hard and strong look identical.
But if you stop long enough to reflect, you feel it
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when someone pushes back and your first move is to shut the conversation down instead of staying in it,
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when trust doesn’t come naturally anymore,
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in how quickly you close a door rather than leaving it open,
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and in the voice at the back of your head that says the safest thing to do is handle it yourself.
That’s what hardening is – and it doesn’t have to be permanent.
The work starts with one question: “Has what I’ve been through made me more open, or more closed off?”
Most people fail because they give up before the discomfort turns into meaningful value.
But ask that question, hear the honest answer, and do something about it, that’s what turns years of challenges into something you can actually build on.
Something that bends instead of breaking.
Start with the people closest to your business; ask them what they’ve stopped telling you and ask yourself why they stopped.
The answers won’t be comfortable, but they’re worth more than another year of fast decisions that don’t produce tangible value.
The hard chapters happen. The question is what they build in you, and whether that’s the founder you actually want to be.
