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Why Founders Burn Out—and How to Reclaim Control with Zaheer Merali
73 Plays5 days ago
Entrepreneurship isn’t just about hustle, funding rounds, or scaling fast. It’s also about the inner game—mastering your mindset, aligning your purpose, and creating a business that doesn’t consume your life.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Zaheer Merali—founder, investor, and executive coach—shares what he’s learned from two decades of advising entrepreneurs and navigating his own personal reinvention. We dig into:
- Why overthinking and overworking plague founders
- How to break free from the addiction to hustle culture
- The power of pausing, pivoting, and uncovering your true passion
- Why aligning your inner compass is more important than any revenue target
This isn’t about working harder. It’s about working better—on your terms.
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Transcript
Introduction to Zaheer Morali
00:00:10
Speaker
It's Mark Evans and you're listening to Marketing Spark. If you're a founder or entrepreneur, you've probably been there working long hours, struggling too many priorities, stuck in your head, and wondering if all the hustle was really worth it. Today's guest, Zaheer Morali, knows that feeling all too well.
00:00:29
Speaker
Not only has he lived
Zaheer's Professional Journey
00:00:30
Speaker
it, but he spent the past decade helping founders break free from the cycle of overthinking, overworking, and misalignment. Now, Zaheer isn't your typical executive coach.
00:00:41
Speaker
Before
Mastering the Inner Game
00:00:42
Speaker
stepping into this space, he spent more than 20 years in the trenches, advising CEOs, investing in startups, launching ventures of his own, and navigating the ups and downs of leadership, marriage, divorce, fatherhood, and personal growth.
00:00:57
Speaker
In other words, he gets it. What makes Zaheer stand out is his focus on what he calls the inner game, helping highform hot helping high performers master their thoughts, emotions, and limiting beliefs to show up with clarity, purpose, and presence.
00:01:14
Speaker
His message is simple, but powerful. We don't need more strategies, hacks, or to-do lists. We to understand ourselves more deeply. In this episode, we'll dig into how founders can find alignment, reclaim their time and build businesses and lives they actually enjoy.
Finding Alignment in Life and Business
00:01:33
Speaker
It's a conversation about clarity, not just productivity. It's about doing less, but achieving more and showing up as the kind of leader you actually want to be.
00:01:43
Speaker
Zahir, welcome to Marketing Spark. Zahir Zahir Thank you for having me on. You help founders eliminate overthinking, overworking, and misalignment.
Pressures of Entrepreneurial Success
00:01:53
Speaker
Why do you think these challenges are common among ambitious entrepreneurs and executives?
00:01:59
Speaker
It's because we're sold a story and we buy into it. We buy into a story that says success or peace or happiness, whatever we're in search of, is at the end of something, at the end of a journey.
00:02:11
Speaker
You'll get it when. i remember feeling this myself and talking myself out of doing things that I really wanted to do. in order to get this success mark and finding so many different pressures, so many contradictory pressures.
00:02:23
Speaker
It wasn't just success as a business owner, it was success as a father, success as a partner. You start to
The Myth of Long Work Hours
00:02:30
Speaker
realize we're wearing so many different hats and the message in every one of those roles seems to be to excel, you need to do more.
00:02:39
Speaker
You need to add more capabilities, add more skills, fix your weaknesses. And I feel that traps us in this never ending cycle of needing to add more.
00:02:49
Speaker
That kind of tension creates the kind of loop that I talk about, the overthinking, the overworking, the misalignment. Once you get into that loop, it's a spiral down. I find more is better mantra or philosophy permeates itself, especially through the tech world.
00:03:08
Speaker
You hear entrepreneurs who proudly say that they work 80, 90, a hundred hour a weeks as if it's a badge of honor, as if it's something that everybody should aspire to.
00:03:19
Speaker
As someone who values work-life balance, I can't imagine what that would be like. My question is why some people, many entrepreneurs celebrate this work ethic, the idea that to work hard, you need to work long.
Unmasking Hustle Culture
00:03:44
Speaker
Let's get those ones out the way. It's the stories we see in the media, the way things are celebrated, the unicorn status, everything. And everything boils back down to you just got to hustle harder. You've got to send 10,000 more emails and intros. Those are the kind of immediate tactical things that people gravitate to, 5 a.m. wake-ups.
00:04:02
Speaker
But it's a signal of a deeper sense of unrest, a deeper lack of meaning and lack of clarity with a goal and an ambition and a purpose in your life. That you're chasing so many different things and chasing to the nth degree because it's only in the external validation of all that effort that you find that peace.
00:04:22
Speaker
If you look at it, that's what we're all doing. they came at this from a consulting standpoint. The tech side is the third round. Consulting was the first and used to wear those 100-hour work weeks on the sleeve like that and think I could just do it with four hours of sleep.
00:04:36
Speaker
I crashed and burned in that timeframe.
Lessons from Consulting and Banking
00:04:38
Speaker
I did it for a long time, but eventually crashed and burned because i was trying to start a young family at the same time. I did it in banking as well. And now tech has come around and I can see the same pattern. What I started to notice is that we get trapped for a while in that pursuit because we're paying attention to all the noise that we're seeing.
00:04:57
Speaker
And we're not really deeply connected to a sense of purpose within. a resonance, not just a mission that you can put in words and slap it up on a set of neon lights behind you on the podcast, but the real resonance with a mission that's going to shape and change like a river moves down to the sea.
00:05:13
Speaker
We're missing that kind of story. So absent a story, we take on whatever's outside there. And so many of us are looking for that in our work in the fulfillment because... The metrics that we measure are the ones that seem to matter.
00:05:26
Speaker
And that's dollars or share price or hours worked. Going back to the work long is the formula for being successful.
00:05:38
Speaker
Entrepreneurship is hard. And a lot of people think that the key to success brute force. I will simply work longer and harder than other entrepreneurs. And that will get me to where I want to go.
00:05:50
Speaker
But one of the realities of entrepreneurship is success is elusive and failure is often the reality for many entrepreneurs. It's not for a lack of trying or how smart they are or whether their idea is any good.
00:06:06
Speaker
There's lots of variables that come together that make you successful or not. You said that we struggle to apply what we know and we lack the courage to change and we give up too soon. And I think that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs do when they sense that success is not as easy as they want it to be.
00:06:28
Speaker
And it's not coming as fast as they would hope. How do you come to realize that these were the root causes that were holding people back? The ability or the willingness to give up too soon and to recognize that there are other ways to be successful?
00:06:45
Speaker
I
Entrepreneurship as a Learning Journey
00:06:46
Speaker
lived it. I went through it. A long career in consulting banking is successful, but lots of small failures and stuff along the way, things that we would call failures. And it's a big part of this, which what we take on this notion of entrepreneurship is hard. I'm not saying it's not, but relative to what?
00:07:02
Speaker
It's not an absolute hard. And then second, we don't realize that this is part of a journey. part of a learning set of skills. If i put you back to when you were walking, you would say, hey, look, walking's pretty hard. Hardest thing I've ever done.
00:07:13
Speaker
But we still managed to power through it. But then we use words like power through it. and Learning how to walk, it wasn't a power through it message. It was just, say, we get up and try again. And we learn each time to do it better. But the biggest thing, I think, is that we mistake the playing field as the same playing field.
00:07:29
Speaker
What I mean by that is you can take a patch of grass and you can put two posts at the end of it and it looks like a football field. But you can change countries and put two golf things at the end and it's a soccer field or you put a thing in the middle it's a cricket pitch and everything else. And you've got to start figuring out which playing field you're on, which one matters to you, what goalposts you have, what game you're doing. Because if you don't, you that's when you start to burn out because you're playing cricket.
00:07:54
Speaker
and a soccer pitch and people don't get what game you're playing and you're burning out because you're trying to send a message of this. It's totally different. And having gone through that, myself, founders going through it, I remember one, investing in one where the target market we were looking at were people who were preparing for end of life.
00:08:13
Speaker
We were trying to do something really helpful for them to organize all their
Perseverance and Adaptability
00:08:16
Speaker
affairs. Noble mission, everyone deals with it. All the things that you would normally check off on a list for the target market, but no one wants to talk about it.
00:08:24
Speaker
No one wants to have that conversation. And it's so hard to market to that demographic or that group of people. We did that for so long and so many people gave up.
00:08:35
Speaker
Ten different competitors from the last eight years raised tens of millions of dollars and all of them gave up. we've continued to do is pivot from end of life, knowing that this was a mission, this was a purpose, has had something to do with it, but move to a different demographic.
00:08:51
Speaker
In continuing this path, we've found something different at the other end of the spectrum, beyond the university end, where their students are growing up and not feeling like they're ready to adult in a world that's a lot more complex than maybe what their parents grew up in.
00:09:04
Speaker
More digital, so many more relationships, so many more connections, but they're looking for something different. And what we built for one end of the market ended up working for the other because we persevered for eight years, keep running through this process to go, who does this really work for? And who's ready to have this conversation?
00:09:21
Speaker
That would be the kind of persistence I would say. We didn't
Embracing Change in Entrepreneurship
00:09:23
Speaker
raise crazy amounts of money. It's been family, friends, little angels, but we've kept at it. And it's because the founder had this mission and couldn't give it up.
00:09:34
Speaker
We're still at it, but it's an example of when There's something important and you're guided by something more important than ah success metric that says total return to shareholders or whatever.
00:09:47
Speaker
The point that you're raising here is the ability to change and veer from one path to another. In tech, we call it a pivot. But one of the challenges for entrepreneurs is they drink the Kool-Aid so long that it's hard for them to see another path forward. They get stuck in a bubble where this is the way it's going to be. This is the business we're going to build.
00:10:13
Speaker
This is how we're going to do it. When things don't go according to plan, they don't know what to do. The idea of a pivot is almost at admission of failure. Yes. Their idea...
00:10:26
Speaker
that they rallied around and they raised money around and hired employees isn't working. Often they fail and they disappear because they can't change. In terms of like a mental approach to entrepreneurship, what have you learned in terms of helping entrepreneurs embrace change, recognize that change is a positive, that Getting off the beaten track and doing something different is okay. And in fact, that might be the better path overall, but there are barriers to that. There are obstacles. How do you work with entrepreneurs to overcome those barriers? The part of it is naming the obstacles. The biggest part is actually pausing.
00:11:01
Speaker
It's counterintuitive, right? Because we get trapped in this thing of this, I'm just going to do more. And I've heard the stories about work harder. Everybody else says, do this. So we pick up selective soundbites. Alex didn't say particularly that. He said, do this when you've got clarity in your mission, then go pound the pavement. But it's not when you're scattered.
00:11:17
Speaker
But we take little soundbites, we hear them, and then that's take on. Part of it's slowing down to listen and see what you're actually missing in the environment. It's the... Reverse of this effect that we see, Badermeyenhoff, other kinds of effects where when you have selected something your mind, I want to buy a Jeep, and suddenly you start to see Jeeps everywhere or you see a certain brand everywhere, that's an effect working that way.
00:11:39
Speaker
We do the same thing with problems. When we see something's not working, we're more finely attuned to those pieces. We miss the opportunities where someone goes, I would actually use this way, but what I meant was I built it for this market.
00:11:50
Speaker
And so if it's not about that market, I suddenly got the blinders on and I missed that opportunity to have that conversation that would open that door. And so a lot of it is just having them slow down. And we go back to first principles in terms of their business.
00:12:04
Speaker
What was the one mission critical problem they were trying to solve and for which customer? And what in that has changed? Did they go talk to other customers and try to solve that mission critical problem for a different kind of customer because that was easier?
00:12:17
Speaker
That was in their network. That was a warm intro from a VC or whatever. Or is it something with the product? We're not solving an actual mission critical problem. We've got great customers and great access, but we're missing that piece of it. Slowing down is the first piece that we do.
00:12:32
Speaker
From that, it's a series of really simple techniques that I find clarify the space because what ends up happening is you take on so many of everybody else's opinions and thoughts that you're missing your kind of signal inside.
00:12:47
Speaker
We use breath work and we use techniques like that to clear the space. We start brainstorming
Reevaluating 'Follow Your Passion'
00:12:52
Speaker
sessions or we start product ideation sessions with a little bit of a technique like that creates a space and some clarity.
00:12:59
Speaker
From that, their natural creativity springs. It's like when they were back in the throes of coming up with the idea. when nothing else mattered. They had that heads down focus on the idea, but they were expansive in their thinking because they were creative at that point and not now hemmed in by all the pressure and the failure that we've taken on. Because we do, we take on words like pressure and failure and they kick off a cascade of thoughts and emotions that put us down in the dumps and not look at it as signal.
00:13:29
Speaker
We keep looking at things like burnout and failure and other things and we attach a label to them that drives us to look at them as something to run away from, not something to look at as a piece of signal and a lesson that's either pulling you towards something or pulling you away from something.
00:13:44
Speaker
On a related note, a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly successful entrepreneurs who have the luxury of pontificating, will declare, and I'm talking about people like Gary Vaynerchuk, who will declare that we should follow your passion.
00:13:59
Speaker
And that is the mantra for entrepreneurial success. If you're focused on the things that you're passionate about, then your chances of success are that much better, as opposed to being pragmatic and solving a problem that other people haven't addressed yet.
00:14:15
Speaker
i always find that to be trait or a quaint way to look at entrepreneurship, because again, entrepreneurship is hard and you're ideally solving problems that people will pay for you to solve.
00:14:32
Speaker
What is your take on and follow your passion when you have entrepreneurs and you may have clients for that matter who love that idea, who believe wholeheartedly in them that idea, even though from a business perspective, it may not be applicable or may be a recipe for not being successful at all.
00:14:50
Speaker
I come in to say differently. It's more of an uncover your passion. It sounds like a simple language flip, but it means the world of difference. Because follow your passion for a lot of us means go look out in the world and find something to go and do and make that your passion. Go acquire something more. and acquire another interest that will now pay. And let's put the Ikigai Venn diagrams together. We keep missing the point that what we're here to do and what we're driven by is something far deeper and more profound than what we've learned from school
00:15:23
Speaker
I want to rest there because think this is where we tend to get trapped a lot in is we've taken on so many of society's expectations around jobs, entrepreneurship, and what should be doing.
00:15:34
Speaker
Passion is about uncovering that spark in you that you can't wait to unleash. And we miss that as we grow up because we conform to a standard based on education, competition, education,
00:15:50
Speaker
the reward mechanisms, everything else, messaging that we see that says entrepreneurship should look like this and this. These are the success metrics X, Y, and z We trap people in these cycles of passion needs to look a certain way and need to be paid for it.
00:16:04
Speaker
I look at it the other way and I've helped founders not change what they're doing. It's changed the relationship to what they do. This is the really important part. Most people don't end up leaving everything they've done and sitting on a couch somewhere, vegetating, because now they're looking for their passion. and They found their passion is just sitting around doing nothing. No one's passion is sitting around doing nothing.
00:16:27
Speaker
Their passion and the reason they're sitting around doing nothing is because they're unmotivated by the cacophony of noise and thoughts that are holding them down in that. What I try and do with people is to uncover what's up inside of you, but is buried under the weight of conditioned expectations that you should live in this town, work in this job, be with this person, do this kind of work because Your family's always done it. Your family's been dying to do it. You've picked up so much from everybody else that you have completely masked what's inside of you, that you actually have and interest and passions.
00:17:02
Speaker
You have a creative piece in you that's trying to express itself through a business or a piece of art or whatever that is. My job is to help you reconnect with that piece of truth because you started down that path and then you've ended up in a really dark spot. I work with people that have hit rock bottom It's really hard. I can't figure my way out of this to here. I'm at my wits and I'm either folding this company, we're getting divorced or whatever it is.
00:17:28
Speaker
I meet people at the cliff top. People who have achieved everything, have got so much money, have got so much freedom and still feel so trapped that they would give it all away in an instant if they could get rid of this feeling that this was not worth it.
00:17:42
Speaker
And so those the two things because they join in the same spot, which is a lack of... meaning and purpose in your life, those two points bring that to a head for people.
00:17:53
Speaker
And so that's where I find the the language you've taken on around entrepreneurship traps us in these cycles. It's about pulling that off and uncovering your passion. Your passion might be writing and helping people to understand new things. Your passion might be service and volunteerism.
00:18:12
Speaker
I try to help people find that and you can be an entrepreneur doing that. Entrepreneurship being the freedom to decide what you get to do, the freedom to work with whoever you want to do that with, the freedom to spend your time the way you want to spend your time. That's how I look at entrepreneurship. When I look at it in those dimensions, there's nothing about it has in a certain industry.
00:18:27
Speaker
a certain revenue target or whatever else. Did i spend time doing the thing I love to do today? And did I do enough of it? And if I don't, then tomorrow's another day to do more of it.
00:18:39
Speaker
The reality for a lot of entrepreneurs who aspire to success is how much venture capital did I
Defining Personal Success
00:18:44
Speaker
raise? How many invitations did I get to appear on stage? How much media coverage did I get? Those things are important to many people, but at the end of the day, they're tick marks. I want to go back to something that you say often is align your inner compass.
00:18:59
Speaker
What does that mean? How would a founder who's feeling stuck or burnt out begin that process. A lot of entrepreneurs find themselves spinning their wheels. They don't know how to follow a different path. It's almost like Groundhog Day. Every day is the same. They get up, manage people, hire people, fire people. They try to grow sales, but they can't get out of that cycle.
00:19:22
Speaker
How do you take a step back as an entrepreneur and, as you say, align your inner compass? Let's say we've done enough introspection to quiet down enough to actually hear something come through. The really quick kind of piece is what would you do every day if there was no applause?
00:19:39
Speaker
What would you do every day if you couldn't tell anyone about it and you couldn't get any praise for it or any recognition or whatever? I find that's a really good way of linking back to the core things that matter most to you that you would do, that you enjoy doing, you would spend time on.
00:19:53
Speaker
And then find a way to pull that forward into a vocation that pays you if that's what you need to do. A lot of the people that i work with don't necessarily need to be paid that much anymore. They've changed. Some of them have made so much money they don't need it.
00:20:08
Speaker
Some of them have decided that through this work, their metrics of success and material consumption have changed dramatically. A lot of us have gone through i think through the pandemic, through a more radical focus maybe on what's essential to us.
00:20:23
Speaker
People change those things. So you start to change the nature of work through that. But I find that's the easiest way. What would you do if there was no applause for it? Is a really good way of connecting back with that sense of knowing inside.
00:20:34
Speaker
That inner compass being a wordless feeling of what's right and good and true for you. Most of us can't hear it anymore because... We've spent so much time in the noise and in our phones and addicted to the dopamine. So it's about really quieting that to understand that. It's hard. You think about the digital world in which we live.
00:20:54
Speaker
Every social post is we're consumed by how many likes or comments or reposts or... Things that validate the success of what we're doing. i think it's hard for an entrepreneur to step back from the brink and say, if I wasn't getting that recognition, pursuing the likes and the comments, what would success look like to me? What would make me happy?
00:21:16
Speaker
I think that's part of it. We look back at another metric. What would success look like? I'm drawing you back to what would you do with your hours? I draw people back to you have a thousand minutes of awake time in a day.
00:21:30
Speaker
How will you spend those? You have eight hours of sleep that you're spending. How are you spending those times? How are you spending those hours? What would you do with no applause for a thousand minutes? How would you fill that day?
00:21:43
Speaker
I think for most people, how we spend our time is the downstream impact of how everyone else wants us to spend our time because they've put in calendar invites and emails and everything else into our calendar day. That's how we drive our task list.
00:21:59
Speaker
I pull founders back to, hey, look, stop reacting to the noise in the field here. Start leading from your sense of presence and purpose about what you're here to do. The noise masks what's underneath for us. And what's underneath for us is pretty effortless power to do as much creative work as we want. We've got the tools around us that make that even easier.
00:22:23
Speaker
a psychic, an intern that can do just about anything you can do, but quicker, faster, better. So for most solo founders now, it's about having them realize that they can delegate a lot of their busy work, mind work, to something else.
00:22:39
Speaker
Many founders chase growth and impact, and that could be financial impact or societal impact or what are the expensive happiness and freedom? Why do we often treat these goals as if they're in conflict?
00:22:55
Speaker
You can have one or the other. This whole idea of work-life balance where you've got a successful, and we can define success, professional life where you're happy and satisfied and you're doing what you want to do.
00:23:08
Speaker
At the same time, you can have a very healthy and happy personal life where you've got a great relationship with your partner. You've got lots of friends and family. You enjoy spending time with your children.
00:23:20
Speaker
You can pursue your non-professional hobbies or interests. You can have it all, but often we fall into this where you can have one or the other. You can't have both.
00:23:32
Speaker
Why are those goals in conflict and how do we eat our cake and have it too? Where do you think we get that from? you can have one, but not the other. You mentioned it, but where do you think that comes from?
00:23:45
Speaker
Some of may come from expectations of what success looks like from the outside looking in, and we may find ourselves becoming addicted to what other people to define as success, as opposed to establishing our own parameters for what makes us happy and what makes us successful. I think that's one of the problems with entrepreneurship is that It's like you join a cult. You give up a lot in the process as part of that cult. It's the rules of the agents, which means you need to work 80 hours a day.
00:24:17
Speaker
You need to be 100% focused on this activity so that you can achieve these societal goals. You can't have one and the other. It's impossible. i go back to my original question about long work hours is that you can't be successful entrepreneur unless you dive in 100%.
00:24:34
Speaker
You completely give yourself into it. and surrender to it. Otherwise you won't be successful.
Questioning Entrepreneurial Myths
00:24:40
Speaker
And then that obviously that means that you're abandoning the things that you love, your family, your friends, your hobbies and interests. I'm biased because I I don't like to work long hours. I hear you because I've lived in this life three times thinking, if I just change the environment, it'll be fine. It had nothing do the environment. It was always about the beliefs Zaheer had picked up in his life that now framed how he looked at the world. They were the goggles he put on.
00:25:06
Speaker
There's white snow outside and he's got these orange goggles on or blue goggles on and that's how he sees the world. It wasn't until I realized that I had these goggles on that I got to take them off and go, hang on a second. Part of that piece that you talk about, the entrepreneurship piece, is like forming a club. It's a clique.
00:25:20
Speaker
Everybody behaves this way. But it's not as insidious as that, not as I over-increate least. It's like a sport. You can play baseball. You can be the top success in baseball. As long as you don't play hockey at the same time, because you can't play pro hockey. We create these clubs around the thing that we believe.
00:25:38
Speaker
The second part is it's somewhere in the future. So I've got to do X and then I'll get Y. These things fundamentally start this false choice. It's a false choice that you have to pick something now, act a certain way in order to get the reward at some point in the future.
00:25:56
Speaker
The reward is already here right now, except for the lack of insight and patience and ability to see that it's actually here right now.
00:26:10
Speaker
What we're doing is dragging ourselves in every moment to make a plan to do something to acquire that same thing that we're looking for right now at some point in the future. And that's what traps us.
00:26:22
Speaker
We say, I'll do X, Y, and zd until I'll get it there. But this is the trade-off. I won't be able to have time in my family. Where did this goal come from? Who says that's the only way to do it? What are you actually searching for? If what you're searching for in your work is to feel fulfilled and to have the peace of mind that you gave everything today to the best of your ability, you can sleep well at night.
00:26:41
Speaker
ah your family's well taken care of then there's lots of ways to get at that but not all of those require a billion dollars or a unicorn valuation or 80 hours 100 hours of work but the story that says i'm an entrepreneur and i get to put that on my profile and i wear that label on my jacket then yeah If the label is what you're after, you're going to get stuck in there.
00:27:01
Speaker
That's what I realized. I was after the labels that said I was a consultant and a banker and a VC guy and a startup guy. These were the labels I was chasing and the labels had a definition underneath them. The realization that was that was every part of that identity.
00:27:15
Speaker
As a father, as a husband, the things I'd failed at, the distance parenting, all these things were labels. They were labels about what I didn't want to do As a kid, reacting to my upbringing, you will take on things that, hey, look, I won't do that when I have kids. I'll do something different.
00:27:36
Speaker
I want to to do something different. And in the course of life happening, it was really different. Distance experiencing was the last thing on my mind when I was thinking about how I was going to be.
00:27:47
Speaker
It forced me to look at things in a different way to go, OK, Can I still be at peace though now because this is my circumstance? Is there a way of looking at the world that is available to everyone, not just by circumstance, not because you're rich or poor or you grew up in this country or that?
00:28:03
Speaker
Is there some way of looking at the world, some way of perceiving it that allows everyone to look at their circumstances and realize that they're actually okay and they have their peace of mind in this moment? And realization around those labels and identities...
00:28:18
Speaker
kick-started some kind of process in me to unwind what had happened for God knows how many years of believing this story and making it such a habit to believe it and that I can drop it right now and say entrepreneurship for me, it's a word that we use to describe a complex set of feelings that all work together, that we've agreed all kind of work together.
00:28:43
Speaker
But the underlying intent of it is to give someone the freedom and the passion to pursue the thing that they want to serve in the world to make it a slightly better place than what they founded.
00:28:54
Speaker
If that's what I'm looking for, all the other mechanisms are blockers to it because it's someone's definition of how to get there, someone's definition a path. I'm just going to look at what the core of it is.
00:29:05
Speaker
The core of it is the clarity to see that ball playing out. The trust that what's happening right now is happening the way it is.
00:29:16
Speaker
And the capacity step back and just respond to each moment as it happens, as you're building your companies, you're building your business with a little more grace and presence. We had a workshop this week. She was supposed to be there for two days, couldn't make the two days, loved day one. Day two was blew up.
00:29:32
Speaker
Customer called in, an issue they hadn't found, an issue that the team hadn't noticed, had now hit the customer. They're an enterprise risk management piece of software. And it's really important that when the customer's raising it as a, hey, look, it's a heads up that we found this thing, it's totally okay, that the founder had already jumped up the wall in terms of their mind thinking that this is the end of the world, everyone's going to find out and this is going to be end of their company. And you can see the energy kind of flow between those things, but she's able to catch herself and stop and slow down and now respond to that customer with a, hey, look, oh, that's good. They've now got a tighter relationship because they now trust each other to respond in the moment with what was needed, not a series of cascading blames, which is what tends to happen, or, hey, look, what does this say in our contract about this issue? And so it's just what I've seen over and over again in every one of the roles I had.
00:30:22
Speaker
It's leading from that kind of presence, which makes all of those noisy hours you have to work, et cetera, start to dissolve. They disappear. And the hours become more creative and productive, more free of the mental chatter about the shoulds and shouldn'ts, which is really what that would have been about.
00:30:41
Speaker
We should have caught this earlier. We should have said something like this. And I wish I'd done this earlier. Otherwise, my company's not imploding. You said that coaching has transformed your life. What does your life look like now?
00:30:53
Speaker
And how it feel different than the one you left behind?
00:31:00
Speaker
Externally, it can largely the same and also the different. I told you from an RV, we've moved out of Toronto. We made some pretty radical changes to our life because entrepreneurship gives me more freedom.
00:31:11
Speaker
Being chained to who a VC-backed startup and the hours and the demands of meeting every investor and everything else wouldn't allow me to do that, but changed certain pieces. It changed the conditions of my life.
00:31:23
Speaker
But a lot of the work I'm doing is the same. Like I'm still running a company. I'm doing coaching. I've got a documentary coming out. I'm doing podcasts. And so I'm finding that maybe against other dimensions, I'm probably doing more work, more creative work than I've ever done before.
00:31:40
Speaker
Less
Zaheer's Personal Transformation
00:31:41
Speaker
pushing of paper, more interesting deep work. That really fills me up inside. I've got bags of energy to do anything i want, and I've got time outside in nature to to spend it. But the bigger thing is inside. I don't have any kind of noise inside that says,
00:31:58
Speaker
I should be here or I should be there at a certain stage in my life or in my career or a certain metric or certain amount of success. My startup has been slow to grow. It's been hard. I've been finding resistance in interesting places, but whenever I see someone light up after using it, it still pulls me forward. And so I know that North Star is there.
00:32:20
Speaker
For me, i find the coaching is a way of expressing this learning. It's a way of bringing more people into A different way of being, a different way of relating to this. It's not just founders. I'm connecting with people from all walks of life that are finding resonance in something that is about slowing down, about finding a bit of stillness, and about creating from peace rather than busyness.
00:32:46
Speaker
I started writing a kid's book the other day, and it's the kind of book I wish I could have read to my kids. And it's the kind of thing that, hey, look, I'd love to share with them now. They're all far beyond the ages of needing a kid's book, but it's written for our inner child inside.
00:33:00
Speaker
And so I'm creating and doing all these things that I would have been spent doing, i don't know, strategy reports for a bank or creative innovation around a credit card product, or how to get more dollars out of the US healthcare care system.
00:33:15
Speaker
Those are the things I used to do, and they're all great. They taught me a lot of great skills. I've built these really interesting skills of these crews, but it's the pattern recognition that has served me this because I can see the same pattern in me and the same pattern in founders and seeing that pattern is what sets you free.
00:33:31
Speaker
Where can people learn more about you you and what you do? On my website, on LinkedIn, Zaheer Morali, I do a clarity workshop that's open to everyone. There's no charge for it.
00:33:42
Speaker
It's small format, but the idea is to help people find this little place of stillness in them and lead from there because it made the world of difference. I've lived a really busy life, an executive founder life, and found something really different when I jumped out and tested the waters.
00:33:58
Speaker
Thanks, Sunir, for the great conversation. And thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:34:09
Speaker
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00:34:20
Speaker
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