As Calgary’s entrepreneurial ecosystem grows, supporting the people behind the businesses matters just as much as supporting the businesses themselves.
Entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty, difficult decisions, financial pressure, and competing demands on their time. They’re expected to be resilient and resourceful, often while supporting a team, securing funding, and managing responsibilities outside work. But where do they turn when they need support themselves?
For many founders, taking time to address their own well-being can feel secondary to building the business. Yet mental health is not separate from the experience of entrepreneurship. It can influence how founders lead, make decisions, manage relationships, and navigate uncertainty.
What’s weighing on founders?
According to the Business Development Bank of Canada’s 2025 survey, 36% of Canadian business owners say mental health challenges interfere with their ability to work at least once a week. Among entrepreneurs under 40, that figure rises to 60%. The survey also found that 35% sought professional help for a mental health concern in the previous year.
The pressures behind these numbers are familiar to many founders: financial uncertainty, burnout, anxiety, decision fatigue, relationship challenges, parenting, and the difficulty of balancing business growth with personal life.
These pressures can extend beyond the individual. Stress and exhaustion may affect decision-making, while unresolved tension can influence co-founder relationships and team dynamics. Recognizing these connections doesn’t mean every business challenge is a mental health issue. It means the person making the decisions is part of the system, and their well-being matters.
What does therapy with entrepreneurs actually look like?
Therapy can offer a structured space to work through the personal and professional challenges that come with building a business. Depending on a founder’s needs, this might involve:
- Recognizing patterns that influence decision-making.
- Navigating leadership challenges, co-founder tension, and team dynamics.
- Developing tools to manage stress and regulate emotions.
- Establishing boundaries that support work and personal life.
- Challenging assumptions or expectations that are no longer helpful.
- Building more sustainable approaches to leadership.
Therapy doesn’t need to be open-ended or disconnected from the realities of running a business. Goals can be practical and responsive to what a founder is experiencing now.
Coaching, mentorship, and therapy each serve different purposes. Coaches and mentors can help founders navigate business strategy and professional development, while therapy provides a confidential space to explore emotional, behavioural, and relational challenges. These forms of support can complement one another.
What are entrepreneurs taking away from therapy?
According to Calgary-founded Collectively Tangled, after attending therapy, entrepreneurs are reporting progress in stress management, self-awareness, leadership confidence, emotional regulation, communication, and work-life alignment.
One entrepreneur described their experience this way:
“I have gained practical tools to manage stress, challenge unhelpful thought patterns, approach difficult decisions with greater clarity, and become more intentional about balancing my responsibilities as a founder with my personal life.”
These outcomes aren’t about eliminating stress or becoming immune to uncertainty. They’re about recognizing how we respond to pressure and developing more options for responding differently.
Therapy cannot remove the uncertainty inherent in entrepreneurship. It can, however, provide an opportunity to understand what is within our control, identify unhelpful patterns, and
approach difficult situations with greater awareness.
Signs You Might Be Struggling
Changes in how you think, work, and relate to others can be worth paying attention to. For example:
- Having less patience with your team or family.
- Finding everyday decisions more difficult.
- Struggling to concentrate or access your creativity.
- Feeling guilty when you’re not working.
- Losing interest in things that used to feel rewarding.
- Constantly pushing through, waiting for the next milestone to feel better.
These signs don’t automatically mean you’re experiencing burnout, but they may be worth exploring. Ask yourself: What about the way I’m currently working isn’t sustainable?
Making support part of the conversation
Entrepreneurship will always involve pressure, uncertainty, and difficult decisions. The goal isn’t to eliminate every challenge, but to make it easier for founders to access support before those challenges become overwhelming.
For entrepreneurs, that might mean addressing something they’ve been putting off or recognizing a pattern that is no longer serving them. For the organizations that support them, it means asking not only what founders need to build successful businesses, but what they need to sustain themselves along the way.
A stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem invests in more than ideas, capital, and business growth. It recognizes the people behind those businesses—and makes their well-being part of the conversation.
Jenn MacDonald is a Partner at Collectively Tangled.
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