When I started a company in my early 20s, I didn't have a great way of dealing with uncertainty and stress. Even though we bootstrapped the company to an exit, I was miserable a lot of the time, and when I finally moved on, I wasn't sure I'd ever want to start another business.

Entrepreneurship felt like a calling, yet my lived experience of it had often been quite painful. I spent years in traditional talk therapy and reading self-help books to try and make sense of my experience, but I still felt stuck. I couldn't see myself doing anything else, yet I couldn't see myself being happy starting another company.

I'd always been a bit of a psychology nerd (I originally got into meditation after reading a meta-analysis of its positive effects), and one day I stumbled upon a book, Values in Therapy, that explored a little-known framework from behavioral psychology that was a lightbulb moment for me. It finally helped me understand why I was so unhappy running my last company, and I finally began to see how I might be able to approach the stress and uncertainty of entrepreneurship in a new way: one that was life-giving instead of soul-sucking.