(1) Why this deep dive?

I’ve been coaching since 2017, and over that time have worked with hundreds of people in the climate entrepreneurship ecosystem.

In spring 2022, I took some time to look back at the clients I felt I’d done my best work with over the past five years.

Here’s what I noticed:

• Most were start-up leaders, founders, or executives in the start-up and scale-up space

• They were driven, curious, intuitive, and highly purpose-led

• Many of them worked in climate change (and, failing that, in purpose-led business)

• All of them experienced some degree of self-doubt

And so I asked myself:

What’s particularly unique about climate entrepreneurs’ experience of self-doubt? Do climate entrepreneurs experience this differently to ‘traditional’ entrepreneurs? And if so, how?

I suspected that there were two broad ‘categories’ of self-doubt when it came to climate entrepreneurship:

(a) “Can I do this?”

(Am I the right person for this job? Do I have something others will value? Can I succeed?)

(b) “Can we do this?”

(Can the system change in time? And can I contribute to this change? Is this the right vehicle to effect this kind of change?)

~

Let’s unpack my hypothesis:

(a) Building and growing a business can already be catnip to self-doubt.

The start-up world is volatile, uncertain, and unpredictable. Entrepreneurs are often building the road as they walk it, wearing multiple hats without feeling like an expert in enough of them. And as soon as they master one area, the business changes and they need to adapt their leadership.

Entrepreneurs, especially founders, can also find it hard to separate their identity – and success – from that of the start-up. This is fertile ground for loneliness, workaholism and burnout. And very early-stage founders can find it particularly intimidating to become more visible online, because there’s no separation between their brand and their identity. This can especially be the case for those offering services (as opposed to products).

And for climate entrepreneurs, who are motivated in part by their purpose, it can be especially challenging to draw boundaries around the impact they want to have. After all, there’s always more impact they could make, or a solution that could be even better.

All this is prime territory for self-doubt.

= Can I do this?

(b) Self-doubt in the climate space is particularly complex.

For entrepreneurs in climate change, they aren’t just navigating the ‘normal’ self-doubt of entrepreneurship (above). They’re also working within big, complex systems for which there’s no silver bullet, and within which they’re also implicated.

They’re familiar with a different level of scarcity (not enough... time, money, action) and overwhelm (too much ... complexity, urgency, destruction). They may feel grief, anger, numbness, or loneliness around the climate emergency, while they’re also trying to mobilise action and influence others. This can make it really hard to have compassion for themselves or others in the midst of it. It’s also easy territory for binary thinking, which is anathema to creativity, curiosity, and innovation.

All this is prime territory for systemic self-doubt.

= Can we do this?

~

I decided to go out and test this hypothesis. I wanted to learn more about how these dimensions — personal self-doubt, and systemic self-doubt — intersected, so that climate entrepreneurs could be more effectively supported.

I was especially curious to see if I could spot trends along the way. For example: 

• How did the stage of business impact the experience of self-doubt? 

• Was there a big gender difference? 

• What were the most common ways that climate entrepreneurs stayed resilient? 

So, off I went to find the answers.

~

(2) Interview format and demographics

I put the call out to my LinkedIn network. I asked each interviewee to fill out a brief multiple-choice form that gave me some basic info. 

Then I met everyone for a 45 min research interview on Zoom.

Here are the stats:  

• I interviewed 18 people, from all around the world. 

  • Interviewees were mostly based in Europe – Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the UK, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain  – but also China and the USA. 

  • However, people sometimes had a different cultural identity (e.g., French, Turkish, Kiwi, Australian) and many were multicultural.