Episode191: How Entrepreneurs Accidentally Build Businesses Around Their Trauma Responses

May 12

Episode Summary

What if some of the things you call “leadership style” or “business strategy”… are actually protection patterns?

Well-meaning CEOs typically believe they’re building their business around their values or vision. But many entrepreneurs are unknowingly building around something else entirely: a pattern that began long before starting their business.

This episode pulls back the curtain on how trauma responses quietly shape communication, pricing, delegation, decision-making, team dynamics, and more, and why so many capable founders end up optimizing for patterns that are undercutting results.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

How trauma responses become baked into pricing, marketing, delegation, and team dynamics
The shift that helped one CEO stop over-explaining and how it changed the way her entire team operated
How to tell when you’re optimizing a protection pattern instead of actually resolving it

Press play for a clean look at what might actually be running the show in your business, and a path towards your cleanest, most intentional leadership.

Who This Episode Is For

This episode is for the entrepreneur or leader who believes she has built her business around her values, vision, or personality… but is starting to suspect that many of her business decisions are actually driven by protective patterns.

She may appear highly capable, collaborative, caring, thoughtful, or “good with people.”
But underneath that:

She overexplains, softens, or cushions communication
She delays hard conversations and carries the emotional burden privately
She struggles to hold firm boundaries or clear standards
She unconsciously seeks buy-in before making decisions that are already hers to make
She confuses emotional comfort with good leadership
She notices that team dynamics, pricing, marketing, or delegation somehow keep creating exhaustion, ambiguity, or resentment

This episode is especially for her if she senses:

“I may not just be managing my business this way… I may have built the business around what once felt emotionally safest.”

Core Concepts in This Episode

Trauma-Structured Leadership

Businesses often become unintentionally organized around unresolved protection patterns rather than vision, strategy, or operational clarity.
Leadership behavior, communication, pricing, delegation, and team dynamics begin adapting around emotional safety instead of business truth.

Protection Pattern Optimization

Many entrepreneurs try to solve recurring friction by improving communication skills, systems, or frameworks, without addressing the underlying protection pattern driving the behavior.
This optimizes the old operating system instead of dissolving it.

Leadership Capacity in Business

Leadership capacity expands when a founder can tolerate discomfort, directness, visibility, and potential disapproval without collapsing into over-management of others’ emotions.
The business stabilizes as the leader becomes more self-directed and decisive.

Power Consolidation in Scaling

When leaders soften authority, over-seek consensus, or reopen decisions to avoid discomfort, power disperses across the organization.
As authority consolidates back into clear leadership, teams become calmer, more productive, and more aligned.

Identity-Based Business Operations

The business reflects who the leader is under pressure, not just what strategy they claim to value.
Operational patterns emerge from identity-level beliefs about safety, rejection, authority, and belonging.

Emotional Comfort vs. Strategic Clarity

What feels like care, collaboration, or kindness is often emotional comfort-seeking in disguise.
True strategic care creates clarity, certainty, direction, and emotional steadiness for the team rather than protecting everyone from discomfort.

Key Takeaways

How trauma responses become baked into pricing, marketing, delegation, and team dynamics
The shift that helped one CEO stop over-explaining and how it changed the way her entire team operated
How to tell when you’re optimizing a protection pattern instead of actually resolving it

Full Episode Transcript:

In this episode, you’ll discover how entrepreneurs often think they’re building a business around values or vision, but often they have accidentally built a business around their trauma response

Welcome to The Uncommon Way where high achieving women, entrepreneurs and leaders ditch the rule, book and design success on their own terms. I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, a top ranked business coach sharing business growth strategies of mindset, mastery, and power boost to help you attract ideal clients, leverage your unique genius and scale with freedom. Let's dive in.

Welcome, welcome back to The Uncommon Way.

Let me give you a sneak peek behind the office door of a CEO. She spends 45 minutes drafting a Slack message to her team. It's not a company announcement, it's a task assignment. She rewrites it four times, softening the tone, adding context, cushioning the way she asks, and finally, she hits send. And then she waits, anxiously, to see how it lands. If you had watched her do that, you might think, hmm, she probably needs to work on her communication skills. But here is what else is true about her. She has a difficult conversation that she needs to have with one of her salespeople. She decides to wait. It's almost Thanksgiving and she doesn't want to be responsible for ruining this holiday.

Her husband notices she's spending her own Thanksgiving gaming out the conversation. What she'll say, what he might say back, how awkward it'll feel, running that loop over and over while the turkey goes cold.

So she is protecting him from a hard conversation, and it's consuming her holiday, her energy,

her peace of mind, while he has no idea any of it is happening. That is not a communication problem. That is a protection pattern running a business. And protection patterns, aka trauma responses, show up whether you're a solopreneur who's just starting out and deciding who to serve and how to connect with them, or you're running a larger company with multiple locations and income streams.

And that's what we'll be talking about today.

In this episode, you'll get clear on how trauma responses become baked into pricing, marketing, delegation, and team dynamics. You'll hear about the shift that helped one CEO stop over explaining and how that boosted team productivity. And you'll know how to tell when you're optimizing a protection pattern instead of actually resolving it. Most early stage founders believe their businesses reflect their strategy, their vision, their values.nBut there's a second architect working in the background, one that you've never hired and you will never see on the org chart.

It's the part of them that learned, long before entrepreneurship, that certain things weren't safe. Taking up too much space might make people resent you. Being too direct or expressing your thoughts might make people act threateningly. Relying on others might leave you vulnerable and worse off in the end. Expressing feelings or opinions might lead to ridicule. And doing anything imperfectly might bring criticism and rejection.

So that part developed workarounds. Like in the case of the CEO I told you about, those workarounds looked like softening language or over explaining decisions or soliciting more input than was really necessary. These things were not character flaws or weakness.

They were very intelligent adaptations from a smart brain that needed to create this adaptive

behavior in order to succeed.

The problem is that those adaptations, they get promoted into business strategy or leadership

Strategy. So, if the pattern is avoid rejection, you might see pricing stay lower than it should

Raising it might lose clients. Or delivery simply becomes whatever the client wants, leading to burnout and resentment. Or marketing stays vague, never staking a clear position that someone could disagree with. If the pattern is avoid conflict, let's say, then you might see underperforming team members get managed with hints instead of direct feedback. Or decisions get reopened after they've been made because someone pushed back. Or the founder absorbs problems silently rather than bringing them up to the team.

One more example, if the pattern is avoid being perceived as overbearing or bitchy, then the founder really tamps down her own authority and meetings. So instead of stating what needs to get done, she's making suggestions. She might spend disproportionate time crafting how things will land, not what needs to be said. And team members inadvertently become co-decision makers on things that should not even be up for a vote. These businesses aren't disorganized. They're actually very organized around her protection patterns. And everything, team members, clients, audiences, behave differently in light of that.

I want to tell you a story about a client I worked with recently. She was very smart. She owned multiple growing businesses with multiple locations, dozens of employees. Her team liked her. From the outside, things looked great. But here is what was actually happening inside her week. Before almost any significant conversation with her team, she'd go through this elaborate internal process. She'd kind of draft it out in her head. She'd reconsider it. She'd strategize, you know, all the best things to say, what would lead from here to there. And she'd run it through a filter that asked over and over, how is this going to land? Will they think I'm being harsh? Will they still think I'm a caring person? And then when it did come time to speak, she'd soften her tone of voice and say things like, it's just my opinion. She wasn't doing this because she's a pushover at all. She was doing it because she had learned that the way to keep people close and avoid a lot of misery was to make sure they were always comfortable. That being seen as caring meant never being the one who made things hard. So she'd built a leadership style around that. Now in her mind, she was thinking she just wanted to create a really collaborative and supportive environment. But her team had, without realizing it, started filling the space that she kept leaving open. They'd weigh in on things that weren't really up for debate. They would push back on decisions that should have been final. They would sometimes not follow through on the things that she asked for. Not because they were overstepping, but because she kept creating that vacuum. What's worth noticing here is that the business wasn't organized around her vision or her strategy. It was organized around her need to not be perceived unfavorably.

And it was costing everyone. When she first came to me, though, she thought that what she needed was a communications coach. Thank you, ChatGPT, for suggesting me to her, even though I've never labeled myself as a communications coach. But what really helped her shift into a new way of being was not a communication framework or being more assertive in some performative way. What happened was one day I asked her, do you believe you deserve to be happy and comfortable at work?

And she got tears in her eyes as she thought about it. And then we did this thing where we imagined looking at a picture of her as a little girl and telling that little girl that her happiness doesn't really matter because everyone else's comes first. So she came back the following week and she'd had this revelation. She said, you know what, I've put everything on the line to buy this business and run this business. I should be happy here. And once her thinking changed, the way she operated changed with it. And it changed naturally, not forcefully. She told me that in meetings where she used to hear someone out and then say, good idea, let me think about it just to avoid the friction of disagreeing. Now she listens. And then she says, okay, this is the plan and this is what we're going to do. Not harsh, not cold, just clear. Because she had stopped needing them to agree with her in order to trust herself. And then there was the salesperson, the one from the Thanksgiving story. When she finally needed to follow up on his work, she told me, normally I'd make sure we had some small talk first, I'd cushion his feelings so he didn't take offense to me checking in. But this week, I just asked directly, what's on your agenda today? I didn't beat around the bush. It took such a weight off my shoulders. You can't believe it. She didn't become less caring. What happened was she stopped conflating their uncomfortable with I've done something wrong. And her team, as it turns out, didn't need her to be so careful with them. They needed her to trust herself enough to lead them. When she was softening everything she said and over explaining every decision, she felt like she was being considerate. But what was her team actually experiencing? Ambiguity, unclear expectations, the subtle, exhausting message that decisions weren't really decided. And the frustration of being led by a leader who seemed uncertain about her authority. That's not caring. That is comfort seeking dressed up as care. Real care for a team looks like I respect you enough to be clear with you. I trust you enough not to have to manage your feelings. I believe in this direction enough to commit to it so you don't have to carry the weight of my indecision. Her team didn't become less cared for when she got direct. They became less anxious. But I will be honest, she wrestled with this for a while before she was ready to change. Her worst fear was what if I stop being someone I respect? What if I become disconnected or cold or toxic? That's really common for our brains to jump to imagining the worst. It's one of the reasons so many of us stay stuck in the status quo. But that is the benefit of having someone outside your own brain who can help you see what you're not yet even considering.

Because together we realized there were many ways in which the status quo was making things harder for her team, and how a new way of being might not only give them peace and clarity,

but also inspiration and even excitement. Because she hadn't really believed it was the right thing to do, she never would have been able to create and stick with a new operating system, a new way of being. And she wouldn't have been able to witness how much her business changed.

It was so exciting to see productivity increase because everyone knew what to do. And to see cohesion increase because nobody felt that they needed to jockey for influence or territory in this shifting environment anymore. And satisfaction increase because people were clear on what success looked like and what kind of KPIs they needed. Ironically, one of the old timers approached her one day, a person that she used to really be careful with when she spoke because he'd been there long before her and he had kind of a gruff demeanor, and he complimented her about how her leadership style evolved. He said he'd noticed a change in her ability to be more direct and address things right away rather than letting too much hair grow on it. His words. The beautiful thing about all of this is you don't need to excavate your childhood to

create change. You just need to get honest about your operating patterns, those default moves you make, especially when you are under pressure or during conflict or when you're being evaluated.

If you suspect you too might have a pattern of avoiding conflict or negative opinions and you're curious about how your own trauma responses might be influencing your business model or your leadership style, then here are some questions for you to consider. I've got three.

Where do you spend more energy on how to say something than on what actually needs to be said, whether that is marketing or communicating with team members and clients?

Number two, what decisions in your business are technically yours, but in reality feel like they require the buy-in of your team or your clients?
And three, what would you do differently as a leader if you were certain your team, clients, or audience would still respect you afterwards?

The gap between your answer and your current behavior, that is how it's showing up. Most business owners try to fix friction with the team by getting better at communication. They take courses, they learn frameworks, they find more sophisticated ways to say the difficult thing. But that's just optimizing the protection pattern. It's making it more efficient. It's not actually dissolving it. Just like if you avoid being on social media because you have a pattern of making yourself invisible, but then you learn a way to make videos that you don't actually need to be in, the pattern hasn't gone away. It still guides your choices and perception because it's still there.

It's in your brain, and your brain is what's running the show. The uncommon move is to stop treating those challenging areas as skills to either improve or skirt around, and start treating it as an identity to inhabit. So the question isn't, how do I say this so they receive it well? The question is, who am I being when I already know what needs to be said and I say it without

Shame? That is not an optimized version of the old way of operating.

It's a different one entirely. So my friend, the business you're building right now is organized around something. The question is whether you've chosen what that something is, or whether it chose you a long time ago. If you want to see the cleanest, most powerful version of your business going forward, if you really want to see what's possible, the first step is getting clear on the ways your own patterns have become baked into business operations.

And the second step is getting clear on the roadmap for becoming someone you've never been before. You can do both by signing up for a Clarity and Results roadmap session with me. It's free, and the link is down below in the description. Thank you so much for joining me here today, and let's talk again soon.

Links Mentioned:

1) the ways your own patterns have become baked into business operations and

2) the roadmap for reinventing yourself and your business intentionally.

Work with Jenna

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The Uncommon Way is a leadership and business podcast for ambitious women entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders who are scaling companies and expanding their influence.

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