EMOTIONAL OVERDRAFT FRAMEWORK
Most founders who come to coaching arrive with a presenting problem. A difficult hire, a stalled decision, a business that’s growing but somehow getting harder to lead. The presenting problem is real. It’s rarely the whole picture.
The Emotional Overdraft Framework is a diagnostic tool I developed from the thinking behind my book, The Emotional Overdraft. I use it to understand what’s actually driving a founder’s behaviour, underneath the immediate issue they’ve brought to the session.
The book’s core observation is that founders routinely fund business performance at personal cost. That pattern doesn’t just affect their wellbeing. It affects the quality of their decisions, their capacity to lead and the way they show up for the people around them. It’s a coaching issue as much as a personal one.
THREE STATES, ONE PICTURE
Under pressure, founders tend to be pulled in three directions at once.
Tunnel Vision. Everything narrows to the immediate. Future thinking disappears, personal reserves get quietly depleted and decisions that need making get pushed into next week, then the week after.
Orbit. Everything revolves around the founder. The business becomes dependent on them rather than on its own systems and people. They’re involved in too much, trusted with everything and unable to step back without something wobbling.
Hand Brake. Caution takes over. Decisions slow, investment feels too risky, the founder becomes the thing that’s limiting the business rather than the thing that’s driving it.
These aren’t three types of founder. They’re three forces that are always present. Most founders are feeling all of them to some degree. The question is which one is running the show.
WHAT YOU GET
At the end of the process, I put together a Founder Portrait summary. A direct, honest account of what we found: your strengths, your patterns under pressure, the behaviours that are serving you and the ones that are quietly costing you.
It becomes the route map for our work together. When we sit down for the first session, we’re already orientated. We know what we’re working on and why.
THE STABLE STATE
The goal isn’t to resolve each of these pulls individually. It’s to operate from the centre, the place where none of them dominates. Where the founder has enough perspective, enough clarity and enough capacity to lead deliberately rather than reactively.
That’s what the coaching works towards. The Emotional Overdraft Framework gives us a shared language for what’s happening and a way of tracking where a founder is at any given point in our work together.
THE BOOK
If you want to go deeper into the thinking behind the framework, The Emotional Overdraft is the place to start. It’s an Amazon number one bestseller and won Business Book of the Year.
If you’d like a copy, get in touch and I’ll send one across.