I had employees, investors and a wife asking different versions of ‘is everything okay?’ and I was giving all of them the confident answer. My counsellor was the one person I did not have to manage. That became incredibly valuable.

I thought technical competence would be the hard part of running the firm. Some weeks it feels like I need a degree in race, culture, gender, generation and politics just to get through one team meeting. I was scared of saying the wrong thing, angry at some of what was happening, and tired of being expected to absorb everybody's perspective perfectly. Having a private place to unpack my own reactions before I walked back into the room has made me a much better leader.

Having to retrench people nearly broke me. I knew the business case. I still had to live with being the person making the decision.

I do not need my counsellor to tell me how to run my company. I need one person who can hear the messy version of my thinking before I take it to the team.

The hardest part of my business is not the actual business. It is people. One person is burnt out, another thinks the younger staff have no resilience, the younger staff think the older managers do not listen, somebody's marriage is falling apart and suddenly I am the emotional first responder as well as the CEO. It all stops with me. There have been days I have genuinely wanted to sell the company just so I never have to deal with another people issue. My counsellor has helped me work out how to be empathetic without becoming everyone's therapist, and how to lead rationally without switching off the human part. I still find it exhausting. I just do not feel as swallowed by it.

As a solo founder I could go an entire day making decisions and not have one conversation where somebody was not asking me for an answer.

I thought taking every call was commitment. Eventually I realised I had trained the whole business to need me for things it could absolutely handle without me.

Cash flow anxiety is not irrational when the cash flow is genuinely tight. The sessions helped me stop treating every possible problem like it was already happening today. Then I could actually deal with the numbers.

I use Headroom completely ad hoc. Funding pitch, CCMA issue, business-partner disagreement — I book. Sometimes I do not need a session for six weeks. It works because my counsellor already knows the business history and I do not have to start from zero every time.

My company survived a very bad year. My marriage nearly did not. That was the point where ‘the business needs me’ stopped being a good enough answer for everything.

I built this business over 18 years and AI now seems capable of doing half of what we sell. Every new article made me feel physically sick. I was frozen between pretending it was not happening and wanting to change everything overnight, while staff kept asking me what it meant for them. Counselling did not give me an AI strategy. It got me out of panic enough to start making one.

The business failure felt like a bereavement and an embarrassment at the same time. Everyone wanted to know what I was doing next. For a while I needed somewhere I did not have to have a comeback story yet.

My business partner and I agree on the product and disagree on almost everything around it — how much risk to take, how hard each of us is working, what to reinvest, who gets the final say. We were avoiding the conversations because every one felt capable of blowing up the partnership. My sessions have basically taught me the diplomacy I did not know I needed when we started the company as friends.

Our biggest year financially was also the year I came closest to burning out. Growth created staff, payroll, complaints, bigger clients and about 400 decisions a day. I had somehow assumed success would feel calmer.