A new book from Todd Palmer

Traumapreneur

Why Success Won't Make You Happy(and What Will)

You built the thing. From the outside it worked, and most days you can point at the proof. The revenue. The team. The thing you own outright. And there is still a version of you that nobody in the company has ever met, the one awake at two in the morning turning something over that you have never said out loud to anyone.

This is the book Todd wrote for that version of you.

Register for the PresaleLaunch date coming soon
The cracked purple and gold sphere from the cover of Traumapreneur

The gold is in the cracks

Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold, so the repair becomes part of the piece instead of something to hide. Most of us were taught to do the opposite. You get through the hard years, you patch it quietly, and you make sure the seams do not show at work. This book is about what happens when you stop hiding them.

From Todd

I spent 24 years in the CEO seat. I went $600,000 into debt, missed payroll, hired the wrong people, lost customers I could not afford to lose, and eventually built the company back and sold it. That is the version of the story I have told from a lot of stages.

Here is the part I could not have told you at the time. I was carrying something into that office every morning, and most days it was making decisions before I did. I did not have language for it. I am not sure I would have used the language if I had it, because naming the thing felt more dangerous than carrying it.

I wrote this book for the entrepreneurs who are succeeding on the outside and suffering quietly on the inside. I was one of them for a long time.

“Adversity can fuel growth—if you choose to make it so. Todd Palmer lives this belief, and in Traumapreneur, he shows the rest of us how to do the same.”

Brian Scudamore
Founder & CEO, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? · Dragon on CBC's Dragons' Den

What are you supposed to do with what you are carrying?

Sometimes you already know exactly what it is and you have simply never been willing to say it out loud. Other times you are too close to it to see it at all, and it shows up as a hiring problem, a partner problem, or a strategy problem you keep solving and never fix.

HEAL is the path Todd walks with founders in both cases.

Hurt
What are you carrying, and how is it driving you? It starts with recognizing that you bring your crap to work, and that it is in the room whether you name it or not.
Explore
See the pattern underneath the behavior. Notice the story you tell yourself when somebody disappoints you, and consider that by and large people believe they are doing the right thing for the right reasons. They are not doing it to get to you.
Adapt
Build new habits and new rules of engagement. Here is how I am going to show up, and here is a safe way to call me out when I don't.
Lead
Stand up as a wholehearted leader. Here is how I have led, here is how I am going to change, and here is how you can hold me accountable.
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Cover of Traumapreneur: Why Success Won't Make You Happy (and What Will) by Todd Palmer

You can have a full calendar and still be alone with it.

You have a leadership team. Maybe a board, a Forum, a spouse who asks how it went. On paper you are not isolated at all. But think about the last genuinely hard thing you decided. By the time you told anyone, had you already cleaned it up? Organized the facts, cut the embarrassing parts, and arrived with a version you could defend?

That is the isolation nobody names, and it is the one this book is about. It is not that there is no one to call. It is that nobody gets access to you before the story is presentable.

This book is probably for you if:

  • You hit the number and felt almost nothing, and there was nobody you could say that to.
  • You have normalized the exhaustion and stopped noticing what it costs you.
  • You are carrying something from before the company that keeps showing up inside it.

And underneath all of it is the question the book is actually about. You spent years building something that works. Now that it does, what do you want your life to be about?

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Cover of Traumapreneur by Todd Palmer

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