High Performance Without Burnout: Somatic Leadership for Web3 Founders with Emily Rose Dallara

Handle this industry's greatest challenges and make the impact you've always dreamed of.

And, you know, when we talk about leadership, most of the advice you'll find out there is for a sort of process oriented, outcome oriented things, how to do, you know, how to do go to market, how to do product, how to do engineering. there's very little focus on what we call soft skills, which I think is a misnomer for what they actually are, how to actually be an effective person.

Which then enables everything else. So I'm really excited to talk about that with Emily today. Emily, welcome.

And then Kajabi, which is the tool I use, has an automation now that literally does the landing page, it does the nurture series, it does the, social media posts. I was like, wow, this is crazy. Like I, I wasn't gonna use them because I'd already done my own, but if you don't know how to do that, that's incredible.

So they would do the editing, they would do the clips, they would draft up the show notes and the newsletter and things like that. And, you know, I had some creative input into that. But they did most of the work. And now, I realize we could use a series of AI powered tools to do all this ourselves.

my colleague now edits the podcast. she's not a video expert. she's our rev ops person. but Nicole edits the podcast, uses tools to come up with the show notes and a newsletter, et cetera. I'd say if you were really casting a discerning eye over it, you'd probably say, the work the agency doing was a little bit better than what we're doing with the AI tools, but it was maybe

I'd say it's 90% as good as it was, and costs almost nothing by comparison. it just makes sense. And I think where people go wrong with AI is they try to use it to be lazy in ways that you can't be lazy. Like, oh, I'll just use AI to write all my LinkedIn posts for me. I mean, you can spot 'em a mile away.

Oh, go away. so you need to go through and change it. I think everyone's gonna have a different perspective or calculus in this. I think that's an efficiency worth taking, even if it hits the quality a little bit because no one cares that the show notes are exactly perfect.

in those days you needed a large headcount because productivity came from, just physical output. you can even look if you want to get philosophical about it. the whole middle class thing you could argue is an anomaly of the industrial age because productivity was generated by people working production machinery or, physical assets of some kind on at mass scale, which were all in a particular place.

But in an information age economy, there's much more leverage than an individual person can have. there's much less need for this sort of middle layer of people who just work the system. all that's done by tools now or ai it's just unnecessary. So, if you look at a defi protocol versus a bank defi protocol, might have seven employees do the same thing that a bank needs a thousand employees for.

And why is that? Well, it's because the brand does most of the work. You know, there's only three or four companies you can buy this particular product from. there's not gonna be any more competitors just randomly pop up because you need billions of dollars to get into the business. a lot of those people will buy simply because of the brand, because one product is better for their needs than another.

There's limited influence a salesperson can have. Then the territory in which they can sell is finite. there's no untapped ground there. There's the four companies battling it out. If someone else comes and SA territory, maybe they can squeeze out a few gains here or there, but they're not gonna drive an exponential growth.

Whereas today you could take your average defi protocol, you could hire, put 10 engineers into that team. it would actually just create friction.

And it's a very different model.

I actually don't have anything to add there. I think I was trying to think of something smart to put, but No, you're exactly right.

So that's what I did. And, it was a colossal mistake for so many reasons. what I did is I created this role where. If you're familiar with the, tech sales world, you could think of it like an SDR sales development rep. But for recruiting, so he would do the initial outreach to candidates.

so, you know, we called outreach candidates. We'd advertise jobs where we're headhunters. So his job was to run the email campaigns, make the phone calls, link to message, get 'em on that initial call. You get that sort of discovery process done. And if he thinks there's a fit, hand it over to me and I take it the rest of the way.

And so actually when you look at the numbers, my stats at the time were for every four point something, recruiting calls that I had, I would recruit one person. His numbers were 17 to one. So he needed to do over four times more work than I did to produce the same result. Uh, and then on top of that, the efficiency savings ended up being quite questionable anyway.

'cause even he'd had that initial conversation, we then needed to add another step when I need to talk to the person again. So added an additional step to the process and, and then it was costing me quite a lot of money at the same time, you know, not honorary salary, but tools and so on. And then on top of that, so we were talking about tools earlier.

I then discovered things like, uh, uh, I'm hesitant to give away the alpha on this, but there's this, there's this thing called a parallel dialer, which I think a lot of people in tech sales would know about now. But in crypto, not so much. Essentially enables you to dial multiple people at a time.

Um, but let's say you have a list where people aren't picking up because you've already dialed it a few times or you're just chuck it on 10 line parallel dialing. I can dial through a hundred people in five minutes.

Uh, the pickup rate is so low, but if you use tools like this, you can, it's actually worth doing. Again, I'm very effective, but, so I can, I can now do in an hour, you know, if we, we've got a fresh search, I can have, you know, 10 conversations in an hour, um, which is almost the work he was doing in two or three days.

But now I'm looking, I'm, I'm thinking about expanding again more carefully this time, but the, the role definition would be very different and much more senior this time and using a lot more leverage.

Right. or if you use a tool, then you wouldn't have to worry at all. But I've made the same mistake a million times. Like I've hired multiple SDRs and it's been shit and not work because I'm not a salesperson, so I'm not able to give them the

I.

brief most of the time. It's like when people hire agencies, like marketing agencies, well, if you can't give them the right brief, you're not gonna get the right stuff out.

It's like GBT. Um, I also, I now use an SDR tool I've, I've nailed, I think it call it, is working really

They can't figure it out because they're a mid-level person and it's. it's not their responsibility for like one out of, one out of 20 times that might work. And you get lucky and they manage to figure it out. The rest of the time you're just burning your money and then, then they end up blaming the marketing person for not being any good.

But it's your responsibility as the founder to figure out the process and get it to work and then delegate it. Um, and that's a lesson I've had to personally learn as well.

I think that's smart.

it was absurd. And people just. I think in crypto as well. You know, most people who work seriously or run companies in crypto also invest in crypto. It is easy to lose track of the value of money when you can, you know, oh, I just turned my $10,000 into 300,000. Yeah, easy come, easy go.

I'm 35 now. Um, don't tell anyone, but I was 23 and I was working for a tech company, data cloud software, data centers, satellites really like hardware stuff. Um, and I was taught how to manage a team, like they hired me as a marketing. Assistant and then they trained me to be a marketing manager.

It's like, you've got this skillset, so we trust you to do this. so that's what I did. I led teams. I, um, put ideas out there. They got accepted by the big bosses, and I was given a lot of freedom. And so it gave me a lot of confidence. And so I worked my way up the ladder, I guess you could call it that very quickly.

And it really started to chip away me. But because I worked with people with low emotional IQ that happened every day constantly, and there was no emotional iq and there was no communication structures, there was no compassion in a lot of the companies because it was all just very efficient. Sorry to say it, men. technical roles. So they didn't care about your emotions, they didn't care about how you feel. They didn't care about building a team and a culture. All they cared about was building the product making money. Fair enough, right? That's what a business does. But I found it really difficult.

It was like, I didn't notice, my partner at the time noticed, I couldn't even hold a conversation properly. I was working until 2:00 AM getting up at 6:00 AM going for massive runs, not eating enough, losing loads of weight. But I was obsessed with proving to them that I was good enough. So all this stuff, I didn't know that at the time.

But I dunno what it is now that industry is mainly, you know, the things people normally talk about there are robotics, IO ot. there's kind of a little kind of connection with deep in there, a little bit on the Web3 side. But back when I was working in it. At least in the uk the average age of an employee in industrial automation was 54.

which was a, a that's why I say, I dunno what's happening. This is 15 ish years ago now. So all those people were gonna be retiring. There was no one new coming into the industry, which is not interesting to people anymore. So I dunno what became of it, but at the time you could see that play out in how the industry operated.

And that would just never happen in an industry where the average age was 54. But if you're not the average Democrat of the industry, maybe you have to figure out a different way of working as well. Because I know when I was 27, I look back at that, I think, wow, how did, I did not appreciate what I had when I had it.

I used to get up at six in the morning. I'd go to spin class for an hour, just get outta bed and go, I'd come back, get in a shower, get ready for work, then I'd go to work. Back when we used to have an office, I'd walk to work because for 20 minutes walk away. I would sit there and this, you know, this is the days when recruiting was just a, you know, make lots of phone calls

I would just sit there relentlessly making phone calls all day long without a break, apart from, you know, grabbing a bit of lunch, just completely focused on point all day. Then, you know, come five, six o'clock maybe I'd go down to the gym or jujitsu or whatever else I was doing. Then we'd go out and drink sometimes till one, two in the morning.

Then I'd go to sleep and do it all again the next day. on the weekends I used to, you know, go out on 12 hour motorcycle rides 'cause I felt like it, and I get home and go to the gym straight away.

And so if you're not acting on them like quickly, you start to lose ability to regulate and the capacity to deal with everything else. And I think that we do a lot of damage in our twenties to our nervous system of these kind of things. Like we're out until like 6:00 AM taking drugs, drinking, smoking, doing whatever. we looking after our nervous system? No. Like we've do, we do a lot of damage in our earlier years that we kind of get to our age, like mid thirties, I would say. we are kind of repairing it now. been my experience. It's like it is time to repair, time to reconnect because it's the only way we can move forward and live the life we want next.

This particular gym had no air conditioning. It was on the second floor. It was a really busy gym. This was mid summer, like July. So it was what. 33, 34 Celsius, 90% humidity, indoor stuffy room. So I was, I was the, I noticed by that time of year, I was basically the only gringo in the gym everyone else had, you know, they couldn't handle it anymore.

Uh, but I had to change gyms in the end. I was getting through like two bottles of water in 15 minutes. 'cause I was just sweating so much. the first time this happened, I was, I was there at the gym and I just got this, I don't even really know how to describe it, but it was like this kind of lightheaded feeling, but it wasn't like a lightheaded, like, I'm gonna faint sort of feeling.

It was like a nervous system reaction. And, and it, and I, and it sort of, I felt kind of weird in a chest and it would pass and I'd feel normal again. And that would happen again. And so I was like, that's weird. And then it started happening more and more. I'd just be out walking or something. I could be walking along.

Now she's, well have kid and everything else, it's great. Um, but she got me to do things like, use the infrared sauna, meditate, you know, within a week or two doing those things, it went away and it's never come back, thankfully. Uh, but I think there's probably some combination of like the things you want, the heat, the stress, and so on.

And you know, that pool is getting gradually decreased every year that I get older. Um, and sometimes I'm think, man, I need to get to a point where I can just take three months off and focus on all this stuff and get it to a sort of equilibrium again. 'cause like, when you're 20, you can do all these things, but if you see some people's description of optimal life paths, well you, in your twenties, you should work 80 to 100 hours a week.

So, so you can get to a place where you can do this. By the time you're 40, you really shouldn't be working much more than 40 hours a week 'cause it's not sustainable for you anymore. Um, unless you are sort of, you are abnormal in the amount of energy and, and so on that you have,

Mm-hmm.

believe the marketers helped her to build a leadership business, I'm also on top of this, a somatic practitioner and that's. More the majority of the work I do now. So I bring somatics and just to quickly explain, what is sematic?

So lots of people find themselves in this state, especially women who are mothers who have got so many things to do that the easiest way to do it is to do it and not feel so they just get through the day, they go through the motions, but they're absolutely exhausted. So if any of you listening to that and you're in that category, some men get it too.

Well, anyone can get it. Anyone can be in that state. It's not a disease. They're in state. Um, so if any of you're listening to that now and you feel like you're just going through the motions, you could be in functional freeze On the other side, you've got high functioning anxiety, which is where you wake up. You actually probably enjoy doing what you do, but you've got this like feeling of anxiety all the time. But you're not anxious and you're not stressed, so you dunno what's going on. That was me all the time. I was like, there's nothing to be stressed about. everything's fine. Everything's going okay.

Generation, generation, generation, and you're in a hot gym and you feel overwhelmed and you are doing your workout and then you get the same kind of response. So, so many things can happen. it is not just easy as diagnosing it as a disorder.

And if you're in Europe, that impacts you now, especially if you've lost someone in their family and they've gone through incredible grief that's impacting you now. so being aware of that and being able to notice your nervous system states and process the emotions, process the trauma, and learn about your ancestry is really important to help you live your best life now.

It's like it really takes a toll because they don't know that it's okay not to do these things. Like that's how they've seen successful people succeed. That's what success is to them. So they don't literally don't know another way. In this industry specifically, they've been told that you need to hustle, you need to work hard, you need to do all this.

Like they just don't know that it's just not the case.

They didn't exist yet.

You had to make that decision. Do we want to check the voicemail or do we want to go down to the pub? 'cause if we check the voicemail, we might have some drama to deal with and then see you later. Um, and then we, you know, we even had a, a physical server in the office and whoever left the office for the day had to take the tape back up.

Drive home with them.

What do I have on Twitter or the crypto people. So I'm looking at, I'm looking at work, then I'm doing work. Then it it, and you can never switch it off 'cause it's always there.

Maybe they do have to be on at a certain level, but they have to be able to build routines and rituals that, support them in that. Then, so I'll give you one example. So actually, oh, no, no. I won't name him, but, um, yeah, 'cause quite

He's got two big, really successful companies in this space. And when he came to me, he was just overwhelmed. He had really grown his company really quickly. Been through two rounds, uh, yeah, two rounds. He had investors, like all this stuff was happening on the external, and he felt now this huge responsibility to do his best, to make sure everything worked.

It was a lot easier naturally to focus before social media was something you had to do for work.

but there are other people who would have a, you know, they would start work at 2:00 PM and make calls into the night and that would sit them great. Um, I thought it was an interesting switch.

I know other people couldn't stand that sort of working arrangement.

I'm not gonna be available this week. If IE email her outside of that I won't get a reply. She's very efficient when she's working, but I find that she's stated, I re I respect that. Whereas other people, you kind of, they train you to expect an immediate answer. You email them at 11 and 30 seconds later they're emailing you back and you expect to get that from them.

and then you're disappointed when it isn't there.

They like, they're sending messages at bloody 2:00 AM in the morning, expecting replies. They've been replying. Now what do I do if I stop? How do I communicate that they're scared that they'll, it'll be bad and it'll backfire. That's another hurdle to come over because the end of the day, setting boundaries or not setting boundaries is to do with fawning. And fawning is a blended nervous system state between fight, flight, and freeze. It's you trying, it's like your last ditch attempt to save yourself before you like collapse and die. But it's like when someone's coming to fight you or someone's like, yeah, let's use that, that metaphor, if someone's coming to fight you and you're trying to talk them out of punching you in the face, that's what, not setting a boundary is like. Like, it's okay. I'll just reply. I'll, it's like people pleasing.

And, you know, none of these things didn't tend to have much wider impacts. Um, now. Everyone can see you online. People can leave reviews for you. People talk about you publicly. and now, which is where I'm really going with this, is, you know, it's normal if not expected. Now, for founders of companies in crypto to be many celebrities online, or in person.

You know, given speak founders, 20 years ago did go and give speaking engagements, but it wasn't common or needed. Now, you know, it's, Hey, I need to be posting online all the time and I need to be presenting these events. I need to be speaking at this. Speaking at that, do you find that creates its own set of unique pressures being a public figure?

It's the same thing. We are building smaller, leaner companies. And so you need to know that they're legit and you need to know that you can trust them and you can trust the people who you're giving money to. Does that make sense? And so that's why

And to get okay with that, you have to learn how to regulate, like I say all the time, nervous system regulation, emotional regulation, being able to see different perspectives, being able to get support external and internal. That's what happens when you become visible. Like you can't just be visible and expect to be okay.

I do agree with that, but it's not true that cold calling doesn't work.

It's like a real thing that you need to get on top of. Um, they need to keep up their energy. What else is in the, in the, in the, in the bubble? Um, physical health. So keeping on top of your, like we talked about before, infrared saunas. Um, body brushing, like stimulation, like taking care of your skin. We call it tactile, input.

So we run her few through an identity framework and helped her really imagine and get clarity on who she wanted to be. We did lots of visualization around it and helped her to step into that role. What would that kind of person look like? What would they be doing? All these kind of things. So that's your outer bubble.

Like, am I working on me? am I working on how I'm integrating the rest of the world with me too?

at the end of the day, I think so much of success is actually just staying in the game. it is no use. Making every effort to capitalize on something and destroying everything else in the process.

If you burn out then you're sidelined for the next three years anyway. I'm mentioning that as much for myself as anybody else. So I think there's a lot of wisdom here to be learned.

That is the key. And, um, sometimes it doesn't happen. sometimes I'm very productive. Other days not, but I'm sure this is common. Some days the morning will go by, what did I actually do? But I was supposed to do this thing and none of it got done.

It will get done somehow. But I could have done it weeks ago.

Um, I tried to start up six or seven different businesses before I relented and started a recruitment company. Why? Because I thought. I thought there would be more. The, these other businesses that I was trying to work on, I thought would offer more sort of potential for scale with less hostile, you know, less of me being chained to a desk all the time.

recruiting is a very difficult business to scale. That's why most recruitment companies are small. You know, that's 90 something percent of recruitment companies has less than 10 stuff. Um, and that's always been the case. but in the end I run, you know, this is the thing that I'm good at. I'm just gonna, I think the world is telling me to start a recruitment business.

It's very difficult to get leverage. So, you know, it just ends up in long hours. no escape. And then, you know, in crypto, you add to that, and I didn't fully appreciate this when I started a company. In the bull market, everything's crazy because you're gonna miss out if you don't work all the time.

And in a bear market, you've gotta work all the time just to survive until the bull market comes back. 'cause hardly anyone's hiring. And if they are, they don't, you know, um, they don't need recruiters as much as they do in a bull market, which is the same cycle that everyone else working in crypto deals with one form or another.

But where was I going with this? where I was going with this is that there's that context. I used to work with someone years ago. she was a mom. She had two young kids. She worked four hours a day, four days a week. And she didn't perform any less well than anyone else in the company.

She came in, she was exactly focused for that entire four hours. She knew who she was calling. She sat there, she made those calls, she did what needed to be done. She went home

And it makes you think, well, maybe there's another way to do things here. you know, I'll see regularly see people in crypto say, oh, you have to be on all the time. I've seen the sentiment that comes up sometimes where, hey, I judge people by.

I send them a telegram dm, do they respond in 30 seconds? And there's this other trip that goes around. Actually, I found this to be true, where people will point out that the more senior someone is, the quicker they'll tend to respond contrary to what people and I do. I do find that it's often true, but I also think it's a false dichotomy.

You know, personally, I get dms and messages all the time, but if I'm on a meeting or something, I'm not gonna sit there replying to telegram messages. personally, I'm just of the mindset that, you know, I get, whether it's for work or personal stuff on WhatsApp or what have you, I don't wanna sit here replying to, there's a time and a place where I feel like I wanna, oh, okay, I wanna get into these messages now, but I might ignore them all day unless it's something urgent.