Use Your Power To Hear The Real Risks
How power, perfectionism, and self-compassion shape psychological safety on your team and a tiny “power audit” you can run this week.
New here? The Inner Game is a weekly note for founders and startup leaders about the psychology and practice of building.
Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.
Your team says they want more ownership, but the moment you join the meeting, the energy shifts and everyone looks to you.
You tell yourself, “I’m just here to listen,” and five minutes later you’re driving the agenda, answering questions, and making the call.
In coaching founders, I see this a lot: as the company grows, your role and power increases faster than your awareness of how it lands. As a result, people talk less, challenge you less, and experiments get shaped more by your certainty than by real data.
In this issue, you’ll get a simple way to think about power as a role (not a personality trait), a short “power audit” you can run on your own behavior this week, and a lens for using your authority to make it safer for people to tell you the truth. I’ll also share a few lessons from a conversation with therapist about perfectionism, people-pleasing, and self-compassion, patterns that quietly shape how you show up with your team.
The Inner Game in 3 Lines
What’s really going on: once you’re “the boss,” people read your smallest signals as instructions, even when you think you’re just brainstorming.
What changes: power used well doesn’t mean taking up all the space; it means making more space for reality to surface.
This week’s experiment: notice where your presence makes the room go quieter, and deliberately switch from “answering” to “asking” in one recurring meeting.
Brain Stuff for Builders
Power is a role, not a personality
In Acting with Power, social psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld argues that power is less about who you “truly are” and more about the role you’re inhabiting in a given context.¹ As a founder or CEO, people don’t just see “you”, they see the person who can promote them, fire them, approve budgets, or shape their future.
That means you’re always broadcasting more than you think. Your silence, your sigh, your “small suggestion” all carry extra weight because of the role, not because you’re trying to be intimidating.
Research on power backs this up. When people feel powerful, they tend to focus more on their own goals and internal states, and less on how others might be affected.² That’s useful when you need to push through resistance, but it also makes it easy to miss the ways your behavior is shutting others down.
The perfectionism / people-pleasing trap for founders
In a recent conversation on the Little Pursuits Podcast, therapist Alyssa Kushner talked about high-achieving women who “seem to have it all together” on the outside, yet secretly feel like it’s never enough.
A few patterns she sees over and over:
Perfectionism as a survival strategy
Growing up, love or approval often felt conditional: you were praised when you performed, achieved, or took care of others. Over time, achievement becomes the way you secure worth and safety, not just success.Self-worth tied to doing, not being
Rest feels “unproductive” or like something that has to be earned. Busyness and overworking become proof that you’re enough. If you’re not doing more, you feel like you’re falling behind.People-pleasing and fear of criticism
You say yes to more than you realistically have capacity for, because you’re afraid of being judged, rejected, or seen as “not pulling your weight.” You’re kind to everyone else and brutal to yourself.
Founders are not immune to any of this. In fact, the stakes and visibility can make it worse.
Translated into leadership, those same patterns can look like:
jumping into every discussion so nothing “falls through the cracks”
rescuing people from discomfort instead of letting them wrestle with a hard decision
never saying no to another meeting, another request, another “quick favor”
using your power to keep everyone happy, rather than to keep everyone honest
From the outside, you look like a dedicated, accessible leader.
From the inside, you’re exhausted. And from your team’s perspective, there’s less and less room to bring you half-formed ideas, bad news, or dissent.
Why this matters for experiments and learning
If you take Lean Startup seriously, your real job is creating a system where the best evidence wins, not just to have the best ideas. The whole build–measure–learn loop depends on people running small experiments, surfacing bad news early, and telling you when the hypothesis is wrong.³
That’s impossible if your team doesn’t feel safe saying, “I think this is the wrong bet,” or “The data isn’t supporting what we hoped.”
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety showed that teams where people feel safe to speak up and admit mistakes report more errors and learn faster as a result.⁴ Google’s Project Aristotle later found that psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams.⁵
Power, perfectionism, and safety are tightly linked:
If you overuse power (talking first, answering your own questions, defending your ideas), people protect themselves by staying quiet.
If you underuse power (never making a call, being vague, avoiding conflict), people lose clarity and drift.
If your self-worth is riding on being “the one who gets it right,” you’ll either cling harder to your own ideas or shut down when things go off script, both of which make it harder for others to be honest with you.
Using power well as a founder means two things at the same time:
Owning the role: being clear about decisions, direction, and standards.
Lowering the cost of truth: making it feel safer (not riskier) for people to tell you what they really see, especially when it might be tough for you to hear.
Self-compassion and boundaries as leadership tools
One of Alyssa’s core themes is that perfectionists often weaponize self-judgment as a motivator: “If I’m hard enough on myself, I’ll finally do more, be more, fix this.” In reality, it usually leads to burnout and shame, not better work.
She invites her clients to notice:
How would you talk to a close friend in the same situation?
How do you actually talk to yourself?
There’s usually a big gap.
For founders, that inner voice doesn’t stay inside. If you’re relentlessly harsh with yourself, you’ll either:
project that harshness onto your team (high pressure, low psychological safety), or
over-correct by trying to protect everyone from disappointment, which can make you vague, avoidant, or conflict-averse.
Self-compassion here doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means separating your worth from the outcome, so you can look at reality more clearly.
A few concrete things Alyssa shared that map directly onto leadership:
Micro-rest beats all-or-nothing
Instead of waiting until you’re fried to “earn” a break, build in tiny pauses: a 5–10 minute walk, stepping away from the screen between meetings, a short check-in of “How am I actually doing?” This keeps your nervous system from running on fumes when you walk into that high-stakes meeting.Simple grounding practices
One hand on your heart, feet on the floor, three slow box breaths (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4). It sounds small, but arriving in a room regulated changes how everyone else experiences your power.Boundaries as an act of care
Saying no to “just one more” meeting slot, ending your day on time, or protecting one evening a week from work isn’t selfish. It’s what lets you show up with presence rather than resentment.
Your real “presence” as a leader is a combination of recognizing your role, the power that comes with your role, and regulation of your nervous system. If your body is in permanent fight-or-flight, your team will feel it, even when you’re saying the right words.
A tiny “power audit” you can run this week
Pick one recurring meeting where you notice people are more guarded when you’re there: product review, leadership sync, retro.
Run this three-part experiment:
Change how you enter.
Before the meeting, decide: “My role here is editor and question-asker, not idea generator.”
Open with: “I’m here to understand how you’re thinking, not to pitch my own solution first.”Talk last on decisions.
When a decision is on the table, ask everyone else first:“What options are you seeing?”
“What feels risky about this path?”
“What would you do if I wasn’t in the room?”
Only after you’ve heard them, share your view and make the call if needed.
Name your power, lower the threat.
Close with something like:
“I know my opinion carries extra weight because of my role. If there’s something you held back today, I’d rather hear it early than have us discover it in the metrics later.”
You can invite follow-up in Slack or 1:1 if that feels safer.
You’re not pretending you don’t have power. You’re using it to expand the conversation, not narrow it.
Community
Share this with your co-founder, leaders, or a friend that might find this valuable.
Founder Circle
In speaking with 100+ founders, I’ve noticed how lonely building can feel: constant pressure, high stakes, and very few spaces where you can be fully honest about what’s working and what isn’t.
The Founder Circle is a small cohort (6 founders max) for early-stage, funded, or serious bootstrapped founders who want clearer priorities, better decisions, and a peer group (plus two coaches) so they’re not carrying everything alone.
Sign up is easy! Enter your information in the form below and I’ll add you to the next circle for free so you can try it out.
Here’s what past participants have said:
“Hearing other people’s stories and what they’re going through… now I don’t need to wait until I get there. I already have a good idea how I’ll act when I do.”
“Talking through the dilemma I had and having someone ask a few questions… that made all the difference.”
“Knowing there are so many founders out there makes me feel I’m not alone and I don’t need to worry. Anything can have a solution.”
If you want to go deeper on perfectionism, people-pleasing, and self-compassion, listen to my conversation with therapist Alyssa Kushner, LCSW on the Little Pursuits Podcast when it drops: she shares practical ways high achievers can be kinder to themselves without losing their edge.
P.S. Hit reply and tell me about one meeting where you notice your team goes quieter once you start talking and one small change you’d like to try next time. I read every response.
If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:
¹ Gruenfeld, D. H. (2020). Acting with Power: Why We Are More Powerful Than We Believe.
² Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.
³ Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business.
⁴ Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
⁵ Google re:Work. (2016). Guide: Understand team effectiveness (Project Aristotle).
⁶ Little Pursuits Podcast (2026). Conversation with Alyssa Kushner, LCSW.
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