The Internal Thermostat That Decides How Successful You Let Yourself Be

I once met a founder who had just sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars.

In his new role at the company that acquired them, he had a lot of free time and less responsibility.

Instead of basking in the glow of the sale, he started worrying about the safety of his kids. To him, it felt like a real problem he needed to solve.

Nothing in their life had changed, but his mind was finding ways to bring his joy back down to its familiar set point of worry.

Gay Hendricks calls this the upper limit problem. Once you can see it, you can start to raise your upper limit, and with it, how good your life and your company are allowed to get.

How the Upper Limit Pulls You Back Down

In The Big Leap, Hendricks calls the upper limit problem "the one problem that holds you back." He says he hasn't met a person yet who didn't suffer at least a little bit from it.

The name can be misleading. When I told my friend and longtime client Jesse Pujji he had this problem, he said: "Dude, I don't have an upper limit problem. I am the most ambitious. I have no ceiling."

I told him, "No, you have it, and everyone has it."

Jesse heard it as a limit on his ambition and how far he could go. But ambition doesn't raise your upper limit. The upper limit caps the results you allow yourself to have, and just as importantly, how good you allow yourself to feel. From my experience, those two are pretty closely correlated.

It works like the thermostat in your house. Set it to seventy degrees, and the moment the room gets warmer, the air conditioning kicks on and cools it back down.

Somewhere along the way, we learned that feeling good is safe only up to a point. And the moment life starts to go better than that, our system will find a way to bring us back down.

Hendricks first caught it in himself. He'd just come back from a good lunch, his work was going well, and he felt great.

A few seconds later, he was picturing his daughter alone and miserable at the summer program she'd been so excited to attend. Worried something was wrong, he called her dorm. Her supervisor could see her out the window, playing soccer with some other girls.

Then it dawned on him: "I manufactured the stream of painful images because I was feeling good!"

He had reached his upper limit of how much positive feeling he could handle, so his mind created a series of unpleasant thoughts to deflate him. And because the thoughts looked like a real concern about his daughter, he believed them. That's what makes the upper limit so easy to miss.

Worry is the most common way our system brings us back down. Hendricks found a few others, including criticism and blame, deflecting, and squabbling.

Some of those land on the people closest to you. Hendricks noticed he would enjoy a period of relationship harmony, then "stop the flow of connection by criticizing or starting an argument." For a founder, those people include your co-founder and your team.

So where does your upper limit come from? Hendricks says it usually gets programmed in early childhood, before we can think for ourselves. And he names four hidden barriers that hold it in place:

1. Feeling fundamentally flawed, and therefore undeserving of great success and happiness.
2. Disloyalty and abandonment: more success would leave you all alone, or leave behind the people you came from.
3. Believing you're a burden: if you succeed more, you'll only be a bigger burden on the people around you.
4. The crime of outshining: if you shine too much, you'll make others feel bad or look bad.

Because how good you feel and what you achieve move together, raising your upper limit changes both.

When people hear about a founder who is thriving, they tend to interpret it as: you're experiencing that joy because you're at this level of success. As opposed to: you're at this level of success because you're experiencing this level of joy.

As you raise your upper limit, lo and behold, life gets better and better.

How to Raise Your Upper Limit

1. Name it as it happens.

The next time things are going well and you feel the pull to worry, criticize, or pick a fight, catch yourself in the act. Name it: "Oh, I'm just upper limiting."

Once you label it, it takes away the power of it.

Not every concern is upper limiting. Hendricks offers a simple test: worry is useful only if it concerns a topic you can actually do something about, and if it leads you to take positive action right away.

If it passes, act on it. If it doesn't, it's upper limit noise.

2. Stop indulging the symptom.

Once you've named it, you don't have to solve what it's telling you.

I've caught my mind telling me something was wrong with my coaching practice when things were going really well. None of it was a real problem. My system was just finding a way to bring me down a little bit.

Seeing that gives me enough distance to not get hooked by the thoughts. I can come back to presence and sort of laugh at my mind doing what it's doing.

It's like a symptom looking for a cause. The uneasy feeling comes first, and your mind goes looking for something to blame it on.

These thoughts are merely rationalizations of the mind, trying to explain a feeling that was already there. Arguing with them or trying to solve them only breeds more of them.

When you stop indulging the symptom, there is no need to find a cause, and the feeling tends to pass.

3. Find your barrier.

As you get better at catching it, look underneath the pattern. Which one (or two) of Hendricks' four hidden barriers most describe the source of your upper limit?

By identifying the belief, you can begin to notice how it shows up, revise it, and raise your upper limit.

4. Let yourself feel good.

When the pull comes, try asking: Can I just allow myself to feel this good?

Over time, presence does the deeper work. One of the byproducts of learning to be present more of the time seems to be that you naturally raise your upper limit, because you're expanding what you can be present with.

That includes all the joy and freedom and aliveness, as well as sadness and fear and anger.

When You Let It Stay Good

The founder who sold his company never needed to solve the concern he had about his kids. Once we identified that he was having an upper limit problem, he could see through the stories his mind was making up.

The fact that your mind is attempting to bring you back down from joy is not a problem. It's a sign that you're starting to expand beyond your upper limit.

It also shapes what's possible for your company. As a founder, the edges of your personal comfort zone create an upper boundary for your company's potential.

So here's the question I'll leave you with: How good are you willing to let your life and your company get?

Raising your upper limit is exactly what the Sun Valley Founders Retreat is designed for.

Over four days in Sun Valley, January 20 to 24, 2027, you'll shift the beliefs that have held your upper limit in place, so you can go from being stuck in a local maximum to having a quantum leap in performance and success.

​Click Here To Learn More And Apply>>​

With love,

Dave Kashen