Leadership Coach Leo Widrich on Emotional Wellness for Distributed Workers

Read more about Leo Widrich in “How to Stay Connected in a Distributed World.”

Leo Widrich co-founded Buffer, the social media management software company, in 2010. But like many founders, the frantic pace and daily stresses of startup life caught up to him. After spending a couple of years in a Buddhist monastery studying mindfulness and learning to build emotional resilience, Leo now coaches other business leaders. In this episode, Leo shares tips for distributed workers on how to build healthy habits and avoid the “loneliness spiral.” 

The full episode transcript is below.

***

Matt Mullenweg: Imagine starting a company with your buddy, turning it into a multibillion dollar business, and offering a service used by brands all over the world, and then walking away from it all to live in a monastery. That’s exactly what this week’s guest did. We’re going to hear all about why he did it. With the startup Buffer, Leo Widrich has achieved success by any measure. But something was missing. His dissatisfaction with the lifestyle led him to pursue deeper truths that he came to realize cannot be found in the pursuit of material success.

Leo studied Buddhism. He spent some time living with monks, and learned to appreciate an intentionally slow lifestyle. Now, he coaches entrepreneurs and even other coaches with the goal of helping them manage the stresses of their careers with a combination of ancient wisdom and a sprinkling of modern neuroscience. He wants people to learn how to build emotional resilience, and the ability to self-regulate their emotions so they can deal with their issues and avoid the full-scale burnout that he suffered.

Buffer is a remote company, so it’s clear that Leo has a passion for unconventional work arrangements. However, he’s extremely sensitive to potential emotional and psychological pitfalls associated with working from home. In this episode, I learn about the loneliness spiral, what can happen if you don’t exercise your social engagement circuits through regular social contact, and Leo shares a few tools that we can use to care better for ourselves and the people we work with.

Leo Widrich: I started a company called Buffer close to a decade ago with a friend and we worked completely remotely.

Matt: Where were you both when it started?

Leo: We both first lived in Birmingham, U.K., so in England, we both studied there. And then we flew out to San Francisco and said hey, Silicon Valley is the spot. That’s how we got started. And we went through all the startup struggles and ups and downs and a couple of the things that were really wonderful as we built the social media management software. And we did it eventually fully remote also, to a level of transparency where I really wanted to put everything on the table about what was going well and what wasn’t going so well in the business. 

Matt: An unheard of level of transparency. So Buffer publishes its revenues, its salaries, its options. Everything, right?

Leo: Right. That was a real desire for us to bring that level of transparency to the business world to reduce some of the sense of secrecy and some of the sense that this is a fight and make it a little more collaborative. 

Matt: Tell me about the why there. Why were you distributed if you started in the same place? And then why the transparency? And are they related at all?

Leo: I think that the distributed part — we were in San Francisco and the team was growing and I’m sure you know that as the team grows in San Francisco, your office space needs to grow. And we were in the middle of — should we expand and get a new office? And I remember even meeting with some brokers, and the prices, they seemed incredible. And we were like, huh… And some of us were barely even coming to the office. 

And I think that was a moment where we all thought, “Well why don’t we try not being in the same office.” And we had tried that before because of visa problems. So at first that was totally not a choice, we just had to be all over the world because we couldn’t stay in the U.S. My partner, Joel, he was from England, and we had a third cofounder, he was also from England. I was from Austria. So it was really hard for us to actually be in the country, so we had to be distributed.

But eventually it was a question of cost and a question of joy and ease too, right? Like, “Oh, why don’t we get to work from wherever we want to?”

Matt: Great. And when was this?

Leo: It must have been 2013, over six years ago, that we decided — before it was unclear, more like an unwritten rule, because we were so small. But then we decided, no, I think we will allow people to be wherever they want to be and then make that a more official commitment, so to speak. And that was also the time when we did start to be more transparent because we wrote down our values, we were very inspired by a company called Zappos at the time.

Matt: Yeah, of course.

Leo: Right? Tony Hsieh is a real mentor in that space of really defining your values and having your purpose. And that was also one of the things that came out of that. So committing to working remotely and committing to being transparent as a way to share with the world what we are learning and to foster a sense of collaboration and openness.

Matt: What was your biggest lesson from being distributed like that?

Leo: At first it was so wonderful. We were traveling around the world, we got to really live a life as well as we were working. So we weren’t deferring enjoying life, so to speak. But over time for me personally what started to creep in a little more was this sense of loneliness, this sense that I feel not as connected. I don’t need to have a base so I’m not committing to a base, that untethered-ness, the longer it went on, the less enjoyable it became, the more almost-painful it became, I would say.

Matt: When you left Buffer, what was next for you?

Leo: I started to feel like I was hitting a wall. This thing that I always dreamt of, to have a profitable company, to be financially secure, to have a team, like a lot of things that I started to aspire to when I got in touch with this idea of startups early on — I felt that having that success, having some of that financial security — it left me unfulfilled in a lot of other areas. In the sense of deep lasting connection and also just a lack of emotional resilience to deal with the ups and downs that startup life comes with. 

So I felt exhausted and we weren’t quite fully in agreement anymore with my cofounder. And I took that as a sign and said “Maybe this is just no longer the right thing for me.” And I took my hat and I left and it started this really interesting journey from outwardly doing stuff and accomplishing stuff — which was the only thing I knew at the time — to go inward. And I started to go and live in Buddhist monasteries and do some therapy training and really start to understand — “Okay, there is so much I was externally striving for but what’s actually here? What’s this foundation, this house that is my body and my psyche?”

Matt: Wow, that’s a big step. Tell us about this Buddhist monastery.

Leo: It’s a big step and a lot of people at the time, they looked at me and they said, “Oh, you’re crazy.”

Matt: I’m so curious, is there an Uber for monasteries? How do you find where you go? Where did you end up? Just walk me through the whole thing if you don’t mind.

Leo: [laughs] Right, for sure. I started to become very interested and soothed by the writing of a Buddhist monk called Thích Nhất Hạnh, and that is really the person that I think brought me into this world. And he wrote this book called Peace Is Every Step. That was the first book I read. It really touched me. It set something off in me. 

He talked about a sense of living in the world and being in the world without that constant striving. And here I was finding myself striving so much, trying so hard to make something successful, to be successful, and he was challenging that idea. And so I saw him speak in 2013. That was when that was more on the sidelines. I was just learning about this stuff. 

And I was living in New York and there is a monastery called Blue Cliff Monastery in upstate New York that I wanted to check out. And I went there for a few retreats, to see what is this life like that seems the exact opposite from the rapid fire startup life, where these Buddhist monks and nuns were living, going so slowly, barely any agenda on the day, every day. And so it was this very different life, very slow. There was very little content, other than what was bubbling up from within me, right? So it was really making a lot of space.

Matt: So you went from startup founder to — I don’t know if you’d call it a monk but you were at a monastery for several years.

Leo: Right.

Matt: And now you’re like a coach. So you work with clients.

Leo: Yup. I call it emotional resilience training, that’s the tagline I have.

Matt: So assuming that you can’t tell your clients to also go away for two years…

Leo: [laughs] Right.

Matt: What’s a middle ground?

Leo: Yeah, you don’t need to go off for two years. But there needs to be some sense of regularity to coming inward, to coming internal. And that is what allows us to build t