In this episode of The Blockchain Startup Show, I'm joined by Emily Rose Dallara, a somatic leadership coach who brings nine years of Web3 marketing experience to her work helping leaders regulate their nervous systems and lead more effectively. 

Emily shares her journey from marketing executive to leadership coach, having experienced how the high-pressure crypto environment can lead to burnout cycles, and offers practical approaches to building resilience.

Episode Outline and Highlights:

[00:00:33] Introduction to Emily Rose Dallara

• Harrison introduces Emily and her background in Web3
• Discussion on the importance of "soft skills" for leadership effectiveness

[00:02:00] The Evolution of Content Creation Tools

• Emily and Harrison discuss AI tools for content repurposing
• The efficiency of modern marketing tools compared to traditional approaches

[00:07:00] Lean Team Building in Web3

• The shift from industrial to information age working models
• How crypto companies can operate effectively with minimal headcount
• Optimizing team structure for efficiency rather than size

[00:12:27] Marketing Team Structure for Web3 Projects

• Emily's approach to building the right marketing team based on stage
• Why companies don't always need to hire a full marketing team early on
• The importance of finding the right person who can take you to the next level

[00:14:00] Common Hiring Mistakes in Crypto Startups

• Harrison shares his recruitment mistakes and lessons learned
• Why hiring junior staff doesn't always lead to efficiency gains
• The role of tools and technology in scaling without adding headcount

[00:21:00] Emily's Journey from Marketing to Somatic Leadership Coaching

• Her experience working in high-pressure crypto environments
• How burnout cycles led to a personal transformation
• The impact of poor leadership on team wellbeing and performance

[00:29:00] Nervous System Regulation for High Performers

• How crypto work culture creates unique stressors
• Understanding the body's responses to chronic stress
• Practical approaches to nervous system regulation and resilience

[00:36:00] Understanding Somatics and Nervous System States

• Emily explains the fundamentals of somatic work
• The different nervous system states: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn
• How functional freeze and high-functioning anxiety affect performance

[00:42:00] The Social Media Challenge for Crypto Professionals

• Managing the 24/7 nature of crypto markets and communication
• Setting boundaries in a boundary-less industry
• Compartmentalizing social media to preserve mental energy

[00:51:00] Setting Boundaries in Business

• How clear boundaries can increase respect from clients and colleagues
• Communicating your availability and work preferences effectively
• Finding your optimal work schedule based on personal energy patterns

[00:55:00] The Personal Brand Imperative in Web3

• Why founder visibility has become essential in crypto
• Handling the emotional challenges of public visibility
• The relationship between personal branding and trust in Web3

[01:02:00] The Leadership Bubble of Balance

• Emily's framework for resilience and leadership effectiveness
• Balancing internal regulation with external communication
• Practical tools for increasing nervous system capacity

[01:08:09] Parting Thoughts on Sustainable Success

• The importance of "staying in the game" during crypto cycles
• Why nervous system regulation is the ultimate strategy
• Breaking free from productivity myths and burnout cycles

Key Insights for Founders and Leaders

Emily emphasizes that your nervous system is the foundation of sustainable performance. No matter how good your business strategy, if you're constantly in fight-flight mode,you'll eventually crash.  The conversation gets into practical ways to build resilience that don't involve meditation retreats or quitting Twitter cold turkey.

Leadership Balance

Success in crypto doesn't require working 24/7. Emily's "Leadership Bubble of Balance" framework offers a practical approach for founders to maintain high performance without burning out. As we head into another wild market cycle, founders who can regulate their stress responses will be the ones who not only capitalize on opportunities but actually stick around long enough to enjoy the results.

Handle this industry's greatest challenges and make the impact you've always dreamed of.

Emily works with leaders to help 'em regulate their nervous set of systems and lead better, which, uh, you know, I think we're all dopamine addicts and, our brains are terminally [00:01:00] fried from being on Twitter 25 hours a day and so on and so forth. So, I think this is gonna be a really, really valuable episode.

And, you know, when we talk about leadership, most of the advice you'll find out there is for a sort of process oriented, outcome oriented things, how to do, you know, how to do go to market, how to do product, how to do engineering. there's very little focus on what we call soft skills, which I think is a misnomer for what they actually are, how to actually be an effective person.

Which then enables everything else. So I'm really excited to talk about that with Emily today. Emily, welcome.

[00:01:37] Harrison Wright: Oh, hey, it's my pleasure. I'm really happy to have you here.

[00:01:45] Harrison Wright: Yeah, pretty much. Uh, always the way it goes. So sometimes I get off just calls that I'm doing for other purposes. I'm like, Hey, I should have recorded that. It should have been a podcast.

[00:02:04] Em: but you can though. You know, there's so many tools that you can use to like take your meeting notes and clip them. Someone taught me that ages ago. It was like, you need to take your client calls and clip them and use them as case studies when you're doing your social media.

[00:02:37] Em: I was saying to my husband last night, I wouldn't be able to, like on my business is so efficient because of tools like, and I'm consulting for this other project and they're like, don't we need to hire for this. I'm like, no, you literally don't need to hire right now for this. Like, I can literally set this up for you in two hours. Um, but the one thing that I really like is being [00:03:00] able to automate things that would've taken me personally a really long time. Like yesterday, I was putting together a Black Friday offer. Right. So when we're recording this, it's Black Friday this week. and it was a course, like a mini course, and I put in the title when I was first setting it up in the background, I had all my course already set out, all the modules done and stuff, literally put it in.

And then Kajabi, which is the tool I use, has an automation now that literally does the landing page, it does the nurture series, it does the, social media posts. I was like, wow, this is crazy. Like I, I wasn't gonna use them because I'd already done my own, but if you don't know how to do that, that's incredible.

But most people are completely unaware that you can even do this. And speaking of. Content. If you've been watching the blockchain startup show since the beginning, for the first, I don't know, maybe seven, eight episodes. I lose track exactly, but I used to have an agency that would produce the [00:04:00] podcast.

So they would do the editing, they would do the clips, they would draft up the show notes and the newsletter and things like that. And, you know, I had some creative input into that. But they did most of the work. And now, I realize we could use a series of AI powered tools to do all this ourselves.

my colleague now edits the podcast. she's not a video expert. she's our rev ops person. but Nicole edits the podcast, uses tools to come up with the show notes and a newsletter, et cetera. I'd say if you were really casting a discerning eye over it, you'd probably say, the work the agency doing was a little bit better than what we're doing with the AI tools, but it was maybe

I'd say it's 90% as good as it was, and costs almost nothing by comparison. it just makes sense. And I think where people go wrong with AI is they try to use it to be lazy in ways that you can't be lazy. Like, oh, I'll just use AI to write all my LinkedIn posts for me. I mean, you can spot 'em a mile away.

Oh, go away. so you need to go through and change it. I think everyone's gonna have a different perspective or calculus in this. I think that's an efficiency worth taking, even if it hits the quality a little bit because no one cares that the show notes are exactly perfect.

[00:05:19] Harrison Wright: But I would never use GBT to.

[00:05:23] Harrison Wright: I do, but I'm weird.

[00:06:00] Harrison Wright: it's phenomenal, isn't it?

[00:06:04] Harrison Wright: Now you see why the, if you think about it, I made a post about this some time ago, and I can't remember the exact figures, but the revenue per head for unis Wap, I think was something like from memory, $14 billion. Whereas for IBM, it's a couple of hundred thousand. And for, you know, a pre software, sort of pre-computer age company, I'm sure it'd be significantly less than that.

[00:06:30] Harrison Wright: the trend that you're seeing is just as in, if you divide the annual revenue of the company by the number of employees. So how productive is each person within the company on average?

[00:06:41] Harrison Wright: And I wonder what it is for, are they, I mean, it must be huge

[00:06:51] Harrison Wright: Yeah. They just take the revenue and divide by the headcount. Um, you see this, I mean, now with ai, you can imagine it wouldn't surprise me if, [00:07:00] uh, maybe five or 10 years from now you see the first billion dollar company with one employee.

[00:08:32] Harrison Wright: Yeah. And, and you know, I think there's another element to it with lean teams, which is that, uh, something I talk about a lot, hopefully not to the extent that it, oh, here we go again. But you have the industrial age working model and you have the information age working model, and they're very different.

in those days you needed a large headcount because productivity came from, just physical output. you can even look if you want to get philosophical about it. the whole middle class thing you could argue is an anomaly of the industrial age because productivity was generated by people working production machinery or, physical assets of some kind on at mass scale, which were all in a particular place.

But in an information age economy, there's much more leverage than an individual person can have. there's much less need for this sort of middle layer of people who just work the system. all that's done by tools now or ai it's just unnecessary. So, if you look at a defi protocol versus a bank defi protocol, might have seven employees do the same thing that a bank needs a thousand employees for.

And why is that? Well, it's because the brand does most of the work. You know, there's only three or four companies you can buy this particular product from. there's not gonna be any more competitors just randomly pop up because you need billions of dollars to get into the business. a lot of those people will buy simply because of the brand, because one product is better for their needs than another.

There's limited influence a salesperson can have. Then the territory in which they can sell is finite. there's no untapped ground there. There's the four companies battling it out. If someone else comes and SA territory, maybe they can squeeze out a few gains here or there, but they're not gonna drive an exponential growth.

Whereas today you could take your average defi protocol, you could hire, put 10 engineers into that team. it would actually just create friction.

[00:11:11] Harrison Wright: but what. Exactly, but if you get the right person and enable them right things, you know, they can literally be 10000% more effective than another person you could have put in that place.

And it's a very different model.

[00:12:27] Harrison Wright: Yeah, that's a really good way of looking at it.

I actually don't have anything to add there. I think I was trying to think of something smart to put, but No, you're exactly right.

[00:12:39] Harrison Wright: I.

Then they've been put into a bigger role, head of marketing, and now they're like, shit, like, I have to be responsible for KPIs. I have to like [00:13:00] communicate them. I have to understand how to push back and like put my ideas forward. And so that's where, what I mean by the optimization, you have to teach 'em how to do the job basically, but there's no need to go and hire another person when you can all, it's kind of like getting. bang for your book, if you wanna put it like that. It's like you don't need to go and look for the people if it's not absolutely necessary when you expand. That's where we need really specialist people like you, for example, to come in and get the scope of work and understand the team and who they need, and then go and find that person. But until then, you can just continue to optimize who you have.

[00:13:45] Em: Yeah.

But back in the last cycle, you know, we got really, really busy. I was never originally intending to be anything but a sort of operation. but we got so [00:14:00] busy and I was, okay, I need some help now. and I thought, you know, the usual model that recruitment companies go for is, Hey, let's put a junior person on this who can do the grunt work.

So that's what I did. And, it was a colossal mistake for so many reasons. what I did is I created this role where. If you're familiar with the, tech sales world, you could think of it like an SDR sales development rep. But for recruiting, so he would do the initial outreach to candidates.

so, you know, we called outreach candidates. We'd advertise jobs where we're headhunters. So his job was to run the email campaigns, make the phone calls, link to message, get 'em on that initial call. You get that sort of discovery process done. And if he thinks there's a fit, hand it over to me and I take it the rest of the way.

And so actually when you look at the numbers, my stats at the time were for every four point something, recruiting calls that I had, I would recruit one person. His numbers were 17 to one. So he needed to do over four times more work than I did to produce the same result. Uh, and then on top of that, the efficiency savings ended up being quite questionable anyway.

'cause even he'd had that initial conversation, we then needed to add another step when I need to talk to the person again. So added an additional step to the process and, and then it was costing me quite a lot of money at the same time, you know, not honorary salary, but tools and so on. And then on top of that, so we were talking about tools earlier.

I then discovered things like, uh, uh, I'm hesitant to give away the alpha on this, but there's this, there's this thing called a parallel dialer, which I think a lot of people in tech sales would know about now. But in crypto, not so much. Essentially enables you to dial multiple people at a time.

[00:15:50] Harrison Wright: Um, and then it detects who picks up and patch the call through. So, you know, on average now, if you get a list of people, your pickup rate's only gonna be about [00:16:00] 5%. So you can sit there all day dialing. But with the parallel dialogue, I can, I can dial. If you, if you bet you can choose the number of parallel dials and generally you want to adjust it so that you're being efficient, but you are not burning people who pick up the phone and then get hung up on, which is really annoying for everyone.

Um, but let's say you have a list where people aren't picking up because you've already dialed it a few times or you're just chuck it on 10 line parallel dialing. I can dial through a hundred people in five minutes.

[00:16:24] Harrison Wright: so when I adopted some of these, it is crazy. Uh, but it is, I, I, you know, I can, sitting here doing it manually would be a nightmare.

Uh, the pickup rate is so low, but if you use tools like this, you can, it's actually worth doing. Again, I'm very effective, but, so I can, I can now do in an hour, you know, if we, we've got a fresh search, I can have, you know, 10 conversations in an hour, um, which is almost the work he was doing in two or three days.

But now I'm looking, I'm, I'm thinking about expanding again more carefully this time, but the, the role definition would be very different and much more senior this time and using a lot more leverage.

Right. or if you use a tool, then you wouldn't have to worry at all. But I've made the same mistake a million times. Like I've hired multiple SDRs and it's been shit and not work because I'm not a salesperson, so I'm not able to give them the

I.

brief most of the time. It's like when people hire agencies, like marketing agencies, well, if you can't give them the right brief, you're not gonna get the right stuff out.

It's like GBT. Um, I also, I now use an SDR tool I've, I've nailed, I think it call it, is working really

[00:17:49] Em: um, in a, it's more of an engagement tool that I use it for, but the whole purpose is to get sales calls

[00:17:55] Em: and the podcast in

They can't figure it out because they're a mid-level person and it's. it's not their responsibility for like one out of, one out of 20 times that might work. And you get lucky and they manage to figure it out. The rest of the time you're just burning your money and then, then they end up blaming the marketing person for not being any good.

But it's your responsibility as the founder to figure out the process and get it to work and then delegate it. Um, and that's a lesson I've had to personally learn as well.

So they just continue to do it, and they [00:19:00] don't think about, okay, maybe we should actually get some advice here to understand, maybe we should even get someone else to write us the brief.

I think that's smart.

[00:19:44] Harrison Wright: Exactly. And sadly, uh, I'm wondering if we're gonna see this repeat in 2025, but, you know, when the VC money's flying around, when the interest rates are zero, you know, it was ridiculous the things that people were spending money on back in 20 21, 20 [00:20:00] 22,

[00:20:00] Harrison Wright: uh, myself included, you don't wanna know how much my burn rate ran up to for my little company.

it was absurd. And people just. I think in crypto as well. You know, most people who work seriously or run companies in crypto also invest in crypto. It is easy to lose track of the value of money when you can, you know, oh, I just turned my $10,000 into 300,000. Yeah, easy come, easy go.

[00:20:21] Harrison Wright: Let's burn all the cash.

[00:20:51] Harrison Wright: Yeah, it's really easy to do. So I'm really curious, how did you go from marketing to leadership coaching, [00:21:00] Emily?

I'm 35 now. Um, don't tell anyone, but I was 23 and I was working for a tech company, data cloud software, data centers, satellites really like hardware stuff. Um, and I was taught how to manage a team, like they hired me as a marketing. Assistant and then they trained me to be a marketing manager.

It's like, you've got this skillset, so we trust you to do this. so that's what I did. I led teams. I, um, put ideas out there. They got accepted by the big bosses, and I was given a lot of freedom. And so it gave me a lot of confidence. And so I worked my way up the ladder, I guess you could call it that very quickly.

And it really started to chip away me. But because I worked with people with low emotional IQ that happened every day constantly, and there was no emotional iq and there was no communication structures, there was no compassion in a lot of the companies because it was all just very efficient. Sorry to say it, men. technical roles. So they didn't care about your emotions, they didn't care about how you feel. They didn't care about building a team and a culture. All they cared about was building the product making money. Fair enough, right? That's what a business does. But I found it really difficult.

It was like, I didn't notice, my partner at the time noticed, I couldn't even hold a conversation properly. I was working until 2:00 AM getting up at 6:00 AM going for massive runs, not eating enough, losing loads of weight. But I was obsessed with proving to them that I was good enough. So all this stuff, I didn't know that at the time.

[00:26:48] Harrison Wright: You know, I think it's a really common thing to struggle with in crypto and I think you can see how the culture of an industry is built up around the main demographic that works in it. So I mentioned earlier that [00:27:00] my first industry I recruited was industrial automation.

But I dunno what it is now that industry is mainly, you know, the things people normally talk about there are robotics, IO ot. there's kind of a little kind of connection with deep in there, a little bit on the Web3 side. But back when I was working in it. At least in the uk the average age of an employee in industrial automation was 54.

which was a, a that's why I say, I dunno what's happening. This is 15 ish years ago now. So all those people were gonna be retiring. There was no one new coming into the industry, which is not interesting to people anymore. So I dunno what became of it, but at the time you could see that play out in how the industry operated.

And that would just never happen in an industry where the average age was 54. But if you're not the average Democrat of the industry, maybe you have to figure out a different way of working as well. Because I know when I was 27, I look back at that, I think, wow, how did, I did not appreciate what I had when I had it.

I used to get up at six in the morning. I'd go to spin class for an hour, just get outta bed and go, I'd come back, get in a shower, get ready for work, then I'd go to work. Back when we used to have an office, I'd walk to work because for 20 minutes walk away. I would sit there and this, you know, this is the days when recruiting was just a, you know, make lots of phone calls

I would just sit there relentlessly making phone calls all day long without a break, apart from, you know, grabbing a bit of lunch, just completely focused on point all day. Then, you know, come five, six o'clock maybe I'd go down to the gym or jujitsu or whatever else I was doing. Then we'd go out and drink sometimes till one, two in the morning.

Then I'd go to sleep and do it all again the next day. on the weekends I used to, you know, go out on 12 hour motorcycle rides 'cause I felt like it, and I get home and go to the gym straight away.

[00:28:58] Harrison Wright: Like, that's just the amount of [00:29:00] energy that I had.

Exactly the same. It's like go like get up early like 6:00 AM gym, why didn't need to go to gym at 6:00 AM Literally could have got it work or whatever, right? But it was like, I have to go to the gym at 6:00 AM go to work, sit in the car for 40 minutes as well. Um, but what I noticed when, when you say that and when I reflect on my story, is the disassociation of our body. Our bodily impulses. Right. So you said you used to sit there relentlessly in phone call. I used to do it too, but I would literally sit and ignore my body's impulses of hunger, of thirst, of needing to go for a pee, right? All these kind of things. And I truly believe that. [00:30:00] If we go to the nervous system to be connected to what your nervous system means and to regulate, you have to be super in tune with the body impulses.

And so if you're not acting on them like quickly, you start to lose ability to regulate and the capacity to deal with everything else. And I think that we do a lot of damage in our twenties to our nervous system of these kind of things. Like we're out until like 6:00 AM taking drugs, drinking, smoking, doing whatever. we looking after our nervous system? No. Like we've do, we do a lot of damage in our earlier years that we kind of get to our age, like mid thirties, I would say. we are kind of repairing it now. been my experience. It's like it is time to repair, time to reconnect because it's the only way we can move forward and live the life we want next.

This particular gym had no air conditioning. It was on the second floor. It was a really busy gym. This was mid summer, like July. So it was what. 33, 34 Celsius, 90% humidity, indoor stuffy room. So I was, I was the, I noticed by that time of year, I was basically the only gringo in the gym everyone else had, you know, they couldn't handle it anymore.

Uh, but I had to change gyms in the end. I was getting through like two bottles of water in 15 minutes. 'cause I was just sweating so much. the first time this happened, I was, I was there at the gym and I just got this, I don't even really know how to describe it, but it was like this kind of lightheaded feeling, but it wasn't like a lightheaded, like, I'm gonna faint sort of feeling.

It was like a nervous system reaction. And, and it, and I, and it sort of, I felt kind of weird in a chest and it would pass and I'd feel normal again. And that would happen again. And so I was like, that's weird. And then it started happening more and more. I'd just be out walking or something. I could be walking along.

Now she's, well have kid and everything else, it's great. Um, but she got me to do things like, use the infrared sauna, meditate, you know, within a week or two doing those things, it went away and it's never come back, thankfully. Uh, but I think there's probably some combination of like the things you want, the heat, the stress, and so on.

And you know, that pool is getting gradually decreased every year that I get older. Um, and sometimes I'm think, man, I need to get to a point where I can just take three months off and focus on all this stuff and get it to a sort of equilibrium again. 'cause like, when you're 20, you can do all these things, but if you see some people's description of optimal life paths, well you, in your twenties, you should work 80 to 100 hours a week.

So, so you can get to a place where you can do this. By the time you're 40, you really shouldn't be working much more than 40 hours a week 'cause it's not sustainable for you anymore. Um, unless you are sort of, you are abnormal in the amount of energy and, and so on that you have,

[00:33:35] Harrison Wright: I think there's a lot of truth to that and a lot of people fall into this trap of not taking care of these things until

[00:33:41] Harrison Wright: they really should have done it years ago.

Mm-hmm.

[00:33:56] Harrison Wright: Mm-hmm.

I'm looking after you. You can be okay right now, like what you're telling me here. When I work with people, so we talked a bit about Emily, the marketer. Emily the marketer, has helped her to build a business in coaching, is great. Um, I [00:35:00] like, honestly, I feel like I'm an even better marketer. I feel like I've like leveled up big time because I had to build my own B2C business. Um, I'm B2B now

believe the marketers helped her to build a leadership business, I'm also on top of this, a somatic practitioner and that's. More the majority of the work I do now. So I bring somatics and just to quickly explain, what is sematic?

Shut down. like the mouse in the cat's mouth. You've gone limp. Your body's doing it to preserve and prepare you for death. Basically on a very morbid level, that's what freeze is. But functional [00:37:00] freeze is when your prefrontal cortex, so basically the CEO of your brain is online and can make decisions and can do things.

So lots of people find themselves in this state, especially women who are mothers who have got so many things to do that the easiest way to do it is to do it and not feel so they just get through the day, they go through the motions, but they're absolutely exhausted. So if any of you listening to that and you're in that category, some men get it too.

Well, anyone can get it. Anyone can be in that state. It's not a disease. They're in state. Um, so if any of you're listening to that now and you feel like you're just going through the motions, you could be in functional freeze On the other side, you've got high functioning anxiety, which is where you wake up. You actually probably enjoy doing what you do, but you've got this like feeling of anxiety all the time. But you're not anxious and you're not stressed, so you dunno what's going on. That was me all the time. I was like, there's nothing to be stressed about. everything's fine. Everything's going okay.

We work on the body. How do you feel? What's your nervous system doing? what your impulse is right now? Do you feel like you wanna go and punch that person in the face? Okay, cool. Here's what we're gonna do about it instead of punching them in the face. All these kind of things. Um, and so the somatic practitioner side is something that I'm a bit obsessed with. So when you tell me about this thing that happened in the gym coming back around again, um, it sounds to me like your body's literally screaming at you. Like, to me. Something's going on right now, and I'm gonna just make sure that you know about it in random times. Because when something has happened in your past or your either [00:39:00] near past or far past, um, it will find its way back. Like, it's like it'll, even if it's happened, um, I won't go too woo on this, but if it's happened in another generation as well. For example, if one of your ancestors were in a jungle and they were getting chased by a lion and then they froze and they wanted to faint, and then they couldn't do anything and they never processed that, and then that was passed down.

Generation, generation, generation, and you're in a hot gym and you feel overwhelmed and you are doing your workout and then you get the same kind of response. So, so many things can happen. it is not just easy as diagnosing it as a disorder.

[00:39:48] Em: Yeah, and like generational, like DNA and condition is a thing. they say that you, 'cause I'm trauma. I study trauma and we focus on a lot of [00:40:00] trauma when I do somatic coaching. But your trauma and your experiences can be passed genetically by two generations. So our generation had, grandparents in the war, right in the uk.

And if you're in Europe, that impacts you now, especially if you've lost someone in their family and they've gone through incredible grief that's impacting you now. so being aware of that and being able to notice your nervous system states and process the emotions, process the trauma, and learn about your ancestry is really important to help you live your best life now.

[00:41:00] Em: You'll find actually that these high perform, 'cause that that's who I work with. High performance, high performance, um, ambitious founders, leaders, entrepreneurs, all of them, would say 99% of them have high functioning anxiety most of the time. that an anxious feeling, that feeling that they have to succeed. That's coming from something that's happened.

[00:41:38] Em: Yeah. Oh yeah. It's definitely

[00:41:41] Em: all these things are benefiting you and that's why you keep doing it

[00:42:03] Em: The hardest thing I see and and something that impacted me as well, is not feeling like you're ever up. Like you feel like you're always missing out and some fomo I would say. Especially when you're just starting out or you're just building a business. It's like I have to be at like six at conferences at once, and I have to be on these phone calls, and I'm making excuses to my partner why I am on the laptop at 12, at midnight when they're going to bed.

It's like it really takes a toll because they don't know that it's okay not to do these things. Like that's how they've seen successful people succeed. That's what success is to them. So they don't literally don't know another way. In this industry specifically, they've been told that you need to hustle, you need to work hard, you need to do all this.

Like they just don't know that it's just not the case.

They didn't exist yet.

[00:43:15] Harrison Wright: there was no working at home. There was no getting emails on your phone. You know, once we finished at five or six or whenever it was, we'd literally turn the phones, um, to voicemail and then if, if it was a Friday afternoon, we turned the phones. So we, we had early finish Fridays, and then you see the light pop up on the phone.

You had to make that decision. Do we want to check the voicemail or do we want to go down to the pub? 'cause if we check the voicemail, we might have some drama to deal with and then see you later. Um, and then we, you know, we even had a, a physical server in the office and whoever left the office for the day had to take the tape back up.

Drive home with them.

[00:43:49] Harrison Wright: You, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What do I have on Twitter or the crypto people. So I'm looking at, I'm looking at work, then I'm doing work. Then it it, and you can never switch it off 'cause it's always there.

[00:44:20] Harrison Wright: And even if you look at markets where the crypto markets don't close like traditional markets do.

[00:44:25] Harrison Wright: it can easily become something overwhelming.

Maybe they do have to be on at a certain level, but they have to be able to build routines and rituals that, support them in that. Then, so I'll give you one example. So actually, oh, no, no. I won't name him, but, um, yeah, 'cause quite

[00:45:24] Em: probably know him. But anyway, he's um. I've been with him for nearly two and a half years now.

He's got two big, really successful companies in this space. And when he came to me, he was just overwhelmed. He had really grown his company really quickly. Been through two rounds, uh, yeah, two rounds. He had investors, like all this stuff was happening on the external, and he felt now this huge responsibility to do his best, to make sure everything worked.

[00:47:22] Harrison Wright: You know, it something that I've noticed, right? I dunno if other people have the same thing, but I think you have a limited supply of focus and willpower each day. And if you have a commercial role in particular, it's, you know, part of the job is social media interacting, posting, and it's, so I find now it's gotten to the point where it, sometimes it can take me two hours to every day, every morning to catch up with LinkedIn and Twitter and all these things.

It was a lot easier naturally to focus before social media was something you had to do for work.

[00:48:39] Harrison Wright: I didn't know that. You know, I've never actually had an Instagram, so I don't, but that's.

[00:49:38] Harrison Wright: That's interesting. I'm gonna look into that.

[00:49:53] Harrison Wright: That's really interesting. I'm kind of wanting to avoid [00:50:00] Divergent from the point of the episode too much, but I just, since you brought that up, you know, Hey, it's my, this is, no, this is my fault. But you know what, when I started this company, I used to live in Cyprus, which is 10 hours east of Pacific time us.

[00:50:15] Harrison Wright: I, you know, just, I'm a business quite US-centric. So just by, by nature of things, you know, it wasn't really much of a choice. I think I started work at two, three in the afternoon, worked through the midnight 1:00 AM uh, and I did that for a few years. I found it became increasingly more draining.

but there are other people who would have a, you know, they would start work at 2:00 PM and make calls into the night and that would sit them great. Um, I thought it was an interesting switch.

[00:51:08] Harrison Wright: Yeah. I found there were some people who, like, there's a guy that I know he's in, he's in East coast us. The rest of the company he works with is in China. He has this kind of thing where they do meetings in the morning and then he does his thing and then he has another meeting with him late in the evening that works for him.

I know other people couldn't stand that sort of working arrangement.

[00:51:27] Harrison Wright: Um, but it is very individual.

[00:51:58] Harrison Wright: [00:52:00] You know, you touched on something there. So there's a supplier that I use for design and she works nine to three. And not outside of that. she's very clear about, okay, this is when I'm available, this when I'm not available. she's taken this week off for Thanksgiving.

I'm not gonna be available this week. If IE email her outside of that I won't get a reply. She's very efficient when she's working, but I find that she's stated, I re I respect that. Whereas other people, you kind of, they train you to expect an immediate answer. You email them at 11 and 30 seconds later they're emailing you back and you expect to get that from them.

and then you're disappointed when it isn't there.

[00:52:38] Harrison Wright: So you almost train other people how to put yourself in the prison of your own making.

They like, they're sending messages at bloody 2:00 AM in the morning, expecting replies. They've been replying. Now what do I do if I stop? How do I communicate that they're scared that they'll, it'll be bad and it'll backfire. That's another hurdle to come over because the end of the day, setting boundaries or not setting boundaries is to do with fawning. And fawning is a blended nervous system state between fight, flight, and freeze. It's you trying, it's like your last ditch attempt to save yourself before you like collapse and die. But it's like when someone's coming to fight you or someone's like, yeah, let's use that, that metaphor, if someone's coming to fight you and you're trying to talk them out of punching you in the face, that's what, not setting a boundary is like. Like, it's okay. I'll just reply. I'll, it's like people pleasing.

[00:54:01] Em: Yeah,

[00:54:19] Em: just gives you, you set the playing field so everybody knows where they're at respect them because of that. And actually, part of you probably wishes, oh, I wish I was doing that. It's like a, you, you, you relate on it. It's more of an energetic level.

But even then, everything was significantly less public, you know, back in the days of recruiting. That's [00:55:00] what I know, that's what I've been doing. You know, recruitment company brands didn't mean a whole lot. you'd sit there, you'd make phone calls, you'd go work at a different company, no one would know that you'd left until they get a phone call from, oh, I'm at this company now.

And, you know, none of these things didn't tend to have much wider impacts. Um, now. Everyone can see you online. People can leave reviews for you. People talk about you publicly. and now, which is where I'm really going with this, is, you know, it's normal if not expected. Now, for founders of companies in crypto to be many celebrities online, or in person.

You know, given speak founders, 20 years ago did go and give speaking engagements, but it wasn't common or needed. Now, you know, it's, Hey, I need to be posting online all the time and I need to be presenting these events. I need to be speaking at this. Speaking at that, do you find that creates its own set of unique pressures being a public figure?

It's the same thing. We are building smaller, leaner companies. And so you need to know that they're legit and you need to know that you can trust them and you can trust the people who you're giving money to. Does that make sense? And so that's why

[00:56:26] Em: brands have shot up in terms of our a marketing strategy.

And to get okay with that, you have to learn how to regulate, like I say all the time, nervous system regulation, emotional regulation, being able to see different perspectives, being able to get support external and internal. That's what happens when you become visible. Like you can't just be visible and expect to be okay.

[00:58:19] Harrison Wright: Yeah, I think especially when it comes to bd, it does make it more personal. You know, back, in the pre-social media being mainstream days, you just make phone calls, Hey, it's just a guy on a phone. Like, there'll be another guy on the phone. There's no, now everything's networked and interconnected and you can see who knows who and so on.

I do agree with that, but it's not true that cold calling doesn't work.

[00:59:05] Harrison Wright: think that people are very scared to do it in a way that previous generations of people were not. Maybe because of the public element of everything.

[00:59:31] Harrison Wright: Yeah, I spoke to a guy, not so long ago who co-founded a very well contextually, very successful NFT project, but they literally launched it by DMing something like 30,000 people manually to get people invested in their thing and build up their little community,

[00:59:51] Harrison Wright: which is

[01:00:15] Harrison Wright: exactly, I think, when they're new to this, a lot of people expect that, oh, I just put content out there and people come to me. It doesn't usually work that way. I mean, if you ha if you sell something that is very unique, maybe, but if you are, if you're competing in a category, people aren't just gonna knock on your door because you're posting good content

[01:00:35] Harrison Wright: occasionally, but not as much as you'd think.

[01:01:04] Harrison Wright: Yeah. I think that's true as well. What, it's such a broad topic, I think it's hard to distill down to these things, but would you say as a general rule, there, key principles you'd recommend people in crypto keep in mind. For ma resilience, managing all these factors.

It's like a real thing that you need to get on top of. Um, they need to keep up their energy. What else is in the, in the, in the, in the bubble? Um, physical health. So keeping on top of your, like we talked about before, infrared saunas. Um, body brushing, like stimulation, like taking care of your skin. We call it tactile, input.

So we run her few through an identity framework and helped her really imagine and get clarity on who she wanted to be. We did lots of visualization around it and helped her to step into that role. What would that kind of person look like? What would they be doing? All these kind of things. So that's your outer bubble.

[01:05:07] Harrison Wright: It makes sense and it's almost the opposite of, what a lot of high performance people do with like, Hey, let's ignore everything else. 'cause they've got more and more work to do.

[01:05:18] Harrison Wright: So I've seen so many people who, they're really good at this one domain, but everything else in their life is falling apart.

He's a co-founder of Kajabi. He's written an amazing book called High Performance Habits. He actually tackles it really, in, in, in a really interesting way because. He tackles it. Like how I see resilience, [01:06:00] resilience is you increase in your nervous system capacity and your ability to deal with difficult situations. It's you not falling apart when crisis hits, basically. And so he tackles it from a lens of physical health, looking after your body, support networks, all that kind of stuff. And so if anybody's interested in that, go read that book. It's really interesting. Um, I take a few of his tools and utilize them in my coaching, but from my perspective, the inner bubble and outer bubble is all you need to remember.

Like, am I working on me? am I working on how I'm integrating the rest of the world with me too?

[01:06:45] Em: Fingers crossed.

[01:06:54] Em: I would say if you are struggling with, if you feel like you're waking up [01:07:00] every morning and you've got that anxiety on your chest and you feel like you can't switch off from work and you're just go, go, go, but you really enjoy work, so it's like you don't wanna really stop doing it, but you know that you really can't keep this up forever, then come and have a chat with me because you are the kind of person who I could really help. Um, and I'm, I'm, one of my big missions is really just to help everybody learn how to do this. it's not bloody rocket science, it's just learning how your nervous system works and being able to down regulate and then integrate that with your leadership. You don't have to be a leader to do this stuff, by the way, this is just, I like to integrate it with leadership so we can impact more people, but anybody can do this work. So that's all. And also, I have a podcast bubbling out if you wanna come listen, we talk about leadership somatics, woo stuff. Whatever you like.

[01:07:54] Em: me on LinkedIn, Emily Rose Dara. I have a website. If you go to [01:08:00] websites, Emily Rose dara.com and Instagram, which is Emily Rose Dara, coach.

[01:08:09] Em: Yay.

at the end of the day, I think so much of success is actually just staying in the game. it is no use. Making every effort to capitalize on something and destroying everything else in the process.

If you burn out then you're sidelined for the next three years anyway. I'm mentioning that as much for myself as anybody else. So I think there's a lot of wisdom here to be learned.

[01:08:56] Harrison Wright: I dunno if this is just me or [01:09:00] other people experience this as all, but I have often had the thought, if I could just figure out how to be 100% productive on the things I'm supposed to be productive on at the time when I'm meant to be productive on them, I would easily achieve everything that I ever want.

That is the key. And, um, sometimes it doesn't happen. sometimes I'm very productive. Other days not, but I'm sure this is common. Some days the morning will go by, what did I actually do? But I was supposed to do this thing and none of it got done.

[01:09:28] Harrison Wright: the day before, that thing needs to be done magically.

It will get done somehow. But I could have done it weeks ago.

There are programs in there that are not working for you anymore. We need to upgrade the system, and you can do that by starting with your nervous [01:10:00] system.

Um, I tried to start up six or seven different businesses before I relented and started a recruitment company. Why? Because I thought. I thought there would be more. The, these other businesses that I was trying to work on, I thought would offer more sort of potential for scale with less hostile, you know, less of me being chained to a desk all the time.

recruiting is a very difficult business to scale. That's why most recruitment companies are small. You know, that's 90 something percent of recruitment companies has less than 10 stuff. Um, and that's always been the case. but in the end I run, you know, this is the thing that I'm good at. I'm just gonna, I think the world is telling me to start a recruitment business.

It's very difficult to get leverage. So, you know, it just ends up in long hours. no escape. And then, you know, in crypto, you add to that, and I didn't fully appreciate this when I started a company. In the bull market, everything's crazy because you're gonna miss out if you don't work all the time.

And in a bear market, you've gotta work all the time just to survive until the bull market comes back. 'cause hardly anyone's hiring. And if they are, they don't, you know, um, they don't need recruiters as much as they do in a bull market, which is the same cycle that everyone else working in crypto deals with one form or another.

But where was I going with this? where I was going with this is that there's that context. I used to work with someone years ago. she was a mom. She had two young kids. She worked four hours a day, four days a week. And she didn't perform any less well than anyone else in the company.

She came in, she was exactly focused for that entire four hours. She knew who she was calling. She sat there, she made those calls, she did what needed to be done. She went home

[01:12:00] Harrison Wright: hours a week. Um, she was, you know, I'd say slightly above average performance at the company, um, of the, of the, of the spread.

And it makes you think, well, maybe there's another way to do things here. you know, I'll see regularly see people in crypto say, oh, you have to be on all the time. I've seen the sentiment that comes up sometimes where, hey, I judge people by.

I send them a telegram dm, do they respond in 30 seconds? And there's this other trip that goes around. Actually, I found this to be true, where people will point out that the more senior someone is, the quicker they'll tend to respond contrary to what people and I do. I do find that it's often true, but I also think it's a false dichotomy.

You know, personally, I get dms and messages all the time, but if I'm on a meeting or something, I'm not gonna sit there replying to telegram messages. personally, I'm just of the mindset that, you know, I get, whether it's for work or personal stuff on WhatsApp or what have you, I don't wanna sit here replying to, there's a time and a place where I feel like I wanna, oh, okay, I wanna get into these messages now, but I might ignore them all day unless it's something urgent.

[01:13:02] Harrison Wright: Yeah. is the takeaway here that it's just not true, that you have to work 24 7 to be successful in crypto?

[01:13:18] Harrison Wright: Well, cheers to that,

[01:13:22] Harrison Wright: Emily. It's been, uh, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

[01:13:28] Harrison Wright: Same and my pleasure. To everyone listening, uh, thanks for tuning in. I hope you found this valuable, and we'll see you soon.