We often celebrate success without asking what it takes to achieve it. The pressure to keep moving, growing, and performing can quietly come at the expense of our wellbeing.
“Success that costs you yourself isn’t actually success.” In this inspiring conversation, Dr Georgia Smith explores founder psychology, sustainable ambition, and why true success should never come at the cost of who you are.
Could you tell a little about yourself and the work you do today?
I’m a Clinical Psychologist and the founder of Founder Flow Therapy, where I work with founders and entrepreneurs to help them build genuinely sustainable success, not just outward success that masks burnout underneath. I’m based in London, and when I’m not in the therapy room you’ll usually find me outdoors finding new coffee spots or making my next travel plans.
What first inspired you to become a clinical psychologist, and what has kept you passionate about this path over the years?
Honestly, the truth is quite simple, I loved reading about psychology, I was fascinated by people, and I wanted to understand what makes us tick. The more I studied psychology, the more I loved it, and it just kept unfolding from there. Clinical psychology and being a therapist felt like a completely natural fit for who I am.
What’s kept me passionate over the years is that this field is exciting to be a part of right now. Cultural narratives around psychology are shifting fast, AI is changing how we understand and work with the mind, and we simply know more than we ever have before. But beyond all of that, it’s the privilege of it, sitting beside people as their authentic, messy, human selves and getting to really connect with them at that level. That never gets old.
You chose a different route by moving into private practice early in your career. What led you to make that decision, and what did you learn from it?
When I finished my doctorate, I made the decision to move straight into private practice rather than staying in the NHS first, which is the more typical path. At the time, it felt bold and a little scary. I didn’t know anyone else in my cohort making that move, but it also felt completely right.
Part of it was practical: the NHS comes with so much red tape and so many structural barriers that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to support people in the way I wanted to if I stayed. But honestly, a bigger part of it was wanting the autonomy to find my own feet and my own style as a practitioner, without those blockers around me.
Looking back, I was thinking like a founder, wanting to build something of my own, be my own boss, and have the freedom to shape it my way.
What I learned along the way is something I now say to almost every early-stage founder I work with: it’s a slow build, and that’s okay. I had this idea that taking the leap meant I should have it all figured out quickly, and the reality was much slower and messier than that.
I had to learn to be kind to myself through that, rather than treating the slow bits as a sign I’d made the wrong choice. Taking a risk doesn’t mean everything moves fast afterwards. It just means you’ve given yourself the chance to build something different, one step at a time.
You’ve worked in many different mental health settings. Is there an experience that changed the way you understand people and shaped your approach to therapy?
During my doctoral training, I did a specialist placement in family therapy. One case from that time has always stayed with me. I worked with a family where the teenage son had been labelled ‘the problem’, he was withdrawn, struggling at school, and everyone, including him, had come to see him as the source of the family’s difficulties.
But as we worked systemically, it became clear the story was much bigger than him. His father had recently gone through redundancy and had quietly taken on a narrative that he’d failed as a provider, something no one in the family was saying out loud, but everyone was orbiting around. The son had absorbed that tension and was, in his own way, expressing it for the whole family. Once we could gently unpick that wider narrative together, rather than treating him as the problem to be fixed, everything started to shift.
That case taught me something I still carry into my work now: people get stuck inside narratives that don’t actually belong to them alone, they belong to the whole system they’re part of. I see exactly the same pattern with the founders I work with today. A founder often turns up feeling like they’re the problem; burnt out, anxious, unable to switch off, when really, they’re carrying a story the whole business has absorbed: I have to be the strong one, this all falls apart without me, I can’t stop. Once we can question that story together, rather than just treating the founder as broken, things really start to move.
I found this approach so helpful in taking the ‘problem’ away from individuals, that alongside my doctorate I also completed a foundation year of training in systemic family therapy, to find out more and more about how I could keep this in mind for everyone I work with.
What inspired you to create Founder Flow Therapy, and why did you feel founders needed a different kind of psychological support?
There’s research showing that entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to experience mental health difficulties than the general population. Yet other research suggests as many as 77% of founders don’t seek qualified professional support, with the majority hiding their stress even from people close to them, including their own co-founders. That gap is exactly why I started Founder Flow Therapy.
A lot of what’s out there for founders is business coaching or performance coaching, and that has real value, but it’s not the same thing as clinical psychology. Coaching tends to focus on strategy, goals, and performance. What I do is different: it’s about understanding the underlying psychological patterns anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, fear of stopping, that are actually driving the behaviour coaching alone can’t touch.
I also think therapy hasn’t always felt accessible to founders, and part of that is on us as a profession. Founders are brilliant at masking, performing energy and competence even when they’re privately running on empty, and that can be really hard for a therapist to spot if they’re not specifically attuned to how founders operate.
A lot of traditional therapy isn’t built around the pace, pressure, or particular way founders think and work, so it can end up missing them entirely. I wanted to build something that actually meets founders where they are.
In your experience, what are some of the biggest mental health challenges entrepreneurs face that often go unnoticed?
I think one of the biggest challenges founders face is that they’re operating in a near-constant threat state, and it’s largely invisible from the outside. Social media comparison plays a part, everyone’s watching everyone else’s highlight reel and quietly measuring themselves against it. But I think something has shifted more recently with AI.
There’s a growing cultural assumption that anyone can build a business now, that the barriers have basically disappeared. And while there’s something exciting about that, it also creates a much harsher internal narrative: if anyone can do this, there’s no excuse not to succeed, which quietly removes the permission to struggle, or to admit things are hard.
So founders end up carrying a kind of pressure that rarely gets named. It’s not just ‘I’m working too hard’, it’s a persistent, low-grade sense of threat: that they’re behind, that they should be further along, that struggling itself is a sign of failure rather than a normal part of building something. That’s often what goes unnoticed, because from the outside, founders can look like they’re thriving right up until they’re not.
You have a growing interest in the connection between neurodivergence and entrepreneurship. What have you discovered so far, and why do you believe this conversation matters?
What we’re learning from the research is fascinating. Studies are showing that entrepreneurs with ADHD traits tend to have a more intuitive cognitive style and higher levels of what researchers call ‘entrepreneurial alertness’, essentially, spotting opportunities faster than others. Traits like hyperfocus, rapid pattern recognition, and comfort with risk and uncertainty, which can be really challenging in a conventional nine-to-five structure, are often exactly the traits that make someone brilliant at building something from nothing.
But here’s the part I think matters most: those same traits that look like superpowers can tip into real difficulty if they’re not understood and supported properly. Hyperfocus is a great example; it can let someone work with incredible intensity and produce brilliant work, but without the right support, it often comes with a dip afterwards: burnout, crashing energy, or difficulty switching contexts once that focus breaks. If a coach or therapist doesn’t understand that pattern, they can end up treating the crash as a discipline problem or a mindset issue, when actually it’s a completely predictable part of how that person’s brain works.
That’s why this lens matters so much to me. A typical coach, or even a therapist without this specific understanding, can easily miss what’s really going on for a neurodivergent founder, and can end up giving advice that doesn’t fit, or worse, that adds shame to something that was never a flaw to begin with. When we understand the pattern properly, we can help founders harness those genuine strengths sustainably, rather than riding them until they burn out.
What is one common misunderstanding about therapy that you would love to change?
I’d love to change the idea that therapy is only for when things have completely fallen apart. So many of the founders I work with wait until they’ve hit a real breaking point before reaching out, because somewhere along the way they absorbed the idea that therapy is for crisis, not for people who are functioning well, achieving, and ‘coping fine’ on the surface.
But that’s exactly the group I’d love to see get support earlier. You don’t need to wait until you’re burnt out or in crisis to benefit from therapy, some of the most valuable work happens when someone is still doing well, but wants to understand their patterns, build genuine resilience, and make sure the way they’re succeeding is actually sustainable. Therapy isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s also about protecting what’s working, before it isn’t.
Receiving recognition for compassionate care is a meaningful achievement. What does compassion look like in your work, and why is it so important to you?
For me, compassion in practice isn’t just a feeling, it’s something very active. It means genuinely believing that the person in front of me is doing the best they can with the resources and understanding they currently have, even when what they’re doing isn’t working for them. It means slowing down enough to really listen, rather than rushing towards a solution, and holding space for someone’s mess and complexity without judgement.
With founders especially, I think compassion often looks like helping someone be kinder to themselves than the story they’ve been telling themselves, because so many founders are running a relentless internal narrative that they’re not doing enough, moving fast enough, or being strong enough. Part of my work is gently challenging that.
It matters so much to me because I think real, lasting change doesn’t come from being pushed or criticised into it, it comes from feeling truly seen and understood first. That’s when people actually have the safety to look honestly at themselves and start to shift.
Supporting others every day can be emotionally demanding. How do you protect your own wellbeing and create balance in your life?
Honestly, I think the most important thing is remembering to practise what I preach. I truly care about every single person I work with, that’s not something I can switch off, and I wouldn’t want it to be, but caring deeply also means I have to be really intentional about my own boundaries.
I’ve learned not to let the job get to me by compartmentalising well, so that I can be fully present with clients when I’m working, and then genuinely step away when I’m not.
Beyond that, it’s the basics, done consistently: getting enough sleep, staying active, and eating well. But if I’m honest, the two things that really carry me are my support network, I’m incredibly lucky to have people around me I can be completely honest with, and getting outside into nature.
Every week I try to go swimming, there’s something about being in water that resets me in a way very little else does. I think if you’re going to ask people to look after themselves, you have to be willing to actually do it yourself.
What is one area of mental health or psychology that you hope will receive more attention in the coming years, and why?
I’d love to see founder mental health taken far more seriously as a genuine occupational risk, not just a personal wellbeing issue. We’ve made real progress talking about mental health in the workplace generally, but founders often fall through the gap. They’re not employees with HR support around them, and there’s still a cultural assumption that struggling is just part of the deal if you choose that path.
I’d also love to see more attention on the overlap between neurodivergence and entrepreneurship specifically. So many founders are neurodivergent, often without realising it, and I think there’s a real opportunity for more understanding, from therapists, coaches, and founders themselves, about how to work with that, rather than around it. When we get that right, it stops being something someone has to manage in spite of, and starts being a genuine advantage.
Finally, what advice would you give to founders, professionals, or anyone trying to succeed without losing sight of their mental health and themselves?
I’d say that success that costs you yourself isn’t actually success.
Take the time to really think about what success means to you, not the version you’ve inherited from everyone else, but one that’s aligned with your own values. Build in the habits and support that let you sustain this for the long run, not just survive the next quarter.
And get to know your own early warning signs. We all have them, they’re the tell-tale signals that stress is building before it tips into something bigger. The founders who go the distance aren’t the ones who never wobble; they’re the ones who notice those signs early, put support in place before they hit a crisis point, and stay honest with themselves about how they’re actually doing, not just how it looks from the outside.
Struggling doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re human, doing something hard, and reaching out for help when you notice those early signs isn’t weakness – it’s self-awareness.
