How The Pressure To Make A Million Dollars Drove Michael DeVenney Into Depression
HALIFAX — A million dollars. That’s what Michael DeVenney had to clear to keep his company going. One million dollars to keep the lights on, his clients happy, and his people paid.
In the days before his depression overtook him and cost him his business, that million dollars weighed on him.
“When I walked through the door, just before I kind of fell off into it… it’s almost just like you felt a wall of water coming at you. And when I walked in, I felt that million dollars [every] month. I just thought, a million dollars, I’ve got to find a million dollars [to keep this thing going],” the Halifax entrepreneur recalled.
Like many entrepreneurs, DeVenney had convinced himself that 80-hour workweeks were essential and that stepping back to confront his mental health challenges was a weakness.
But while his story of losing his business is extreme, DeVenney’s mental health struggles are in no way unique.
After losing his business, the Halifax entrepreneur went on to found the Mindset Project, a research project exploring mental health and entrepreneurship. Through his research, he discovered entrepreneurs are significantly more likely than average Canadians to experience mental health challenges.
This is a big problem for a profession steeped in the mythos of unflappable visionaries, laser-focused on a single goal who overcome every challenge hurled their way.
Those superhero-like qualities have steered many entrepreneurs to serious success. But they also make it very difficult for them to acknowledge weakness or ask for help.
Covid-19 has only made the problem worse.
Depression, low energy common among entrepreneurs
A new study from The Business Development Bank of Canada looks at the state of mental health among the country’s entrepreneurs, in the context of Covid-19.
It found that nearly 40 percent of business owners feel depressed at least once a week and that two-thirds felt tired or experienced low energy.
While the study also highlighted some positives for entrepreneurs’ overall mental health, experts involved called the findings “worrying.”
DeVenney says it’s not surprising entrepreneurs are suffering symptoms of depression and anxiety as they struggle to keep their business afloat during the pandemic.
Most business owners, he explains, experience a kind of “role fusion” where their self-identity is tangled tightly into their business.
“If things are going well we think positively about our self, our self-worth is good. And when the business goes down or fails then we’re a failure,” he says. “It’s a very personalized situation.”
DeVenney says that now, more than ever, business owners are feeling the weight of that supposed failure.
“We have to do what we can to keep the business afloat so we can keep people employed and keep our families safe and keep alive what we have put so much into building,” he says. “That’s a lot of pressure, and I just don’t think that’s something that we are open to talk about.”
For leaders, mental health issues are often seen as weakness
As DeVenney’s research and personal experience show, Covid-19 may have amplified mental health challenges among entrepreneurs, but it certainly didn’t create them.
DeVenney says that when he started the mindset project he envisioned entrepreneurs coming together to talk openly about the toxic environments and expectations they’d created for themselves.
“But no one wants to talk publicly, I was kind of left standing alone,” he says.
He vividly remembers giving a talk about mental health to a group of CEOs and seeing deep recognition on all their faces.
When he finished, someone said he loved everything he had just heard but wouldn’t want DeVenney to say it all at his company “because everybody would think there’s a mental health problem here.”
Annie Marsolai is BDC’s Chief Marketing Officer and Mental Health Advocate.
She says most business owners don’t talk about mental health, “because it goes against the expectation they have for themselves: it means I’m weak, it means my employees won’t’ trust me, it means my customers might not come back, it means my vendor might not support me. This is why the stigma in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is so high,” she says.
Marsolai also talks about the entrepreneur mythos, pointing out that it comes not just from the entrepreneurs themselves, but others around them; there’s a certain expectation many have about their leaders and not displaying that can be seen as weakness.
DeVenney, who has since started a new business, says even though he’s arrived at a much healthier place with his mental illness he still feels that pressure.
A colleague told him recently he often noticed him “change in the elevator” on his way to meet with clients.
“I can be going through just a really tough time [and] we’ll have pitch meetings for proposals and things like that and I’ll be down—and yet in the elevator on the way up to the meeting it’s like I completely change, you get off the elevator you’re positive, you’re energetic, you’re joking,” he says.
“As I always say, I put the armour on and go for it. You just don’t want people to see [your struggles].”
Mental health impacts will be Covid-19’s legacy
DeVenney believes that more than its economic or health impacts, Covid-19’s impact on mental health will be its lasting legacy.
He urges everyone, but business leaders specifically, to take a step back and engage with their mental health. As Marsolai explains, it’s normal to feel sad or anxious during high-stress times, but when those feelings become more than just temporary it’s the sign of deeper issues.
“If you’re just tired from working a lot, and you take a break and you’re still tired. Or, when you get up in the morning and you’re bone-weary tired, that’s not tired. There’s something else going on,” DeVenney says. “It’s natural to worry, but when worry takes over and it turns to rumination, you’re going a path.”
He says being open about your own struggles is the best way to keep that from happening. But that means being honest and fully open.
The BDC report showed that about 30 percent of business owners were talking to someone about mental health. But DeVenney says talking about financial concerns or the health of your business is not the same thing as talking about how you’re holding up.
He encourages leaders to seek therapy and step back a little from their business. Try and untangle your business-as-self identity: delegate, open yourself up to being questioned, take a day off.
Covid-19 has created an environment where more and more people are talking openly about mental health because everyone is going through it together.
If there’s ever been a time for a massive shift in how entrepreneurs talk about mental health, this is it.
Trevor Nichols is a reporter for Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].