A new book from Todd Palmer

Traumapreneur

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

You built the success. So why doesn't it feel the way you expected? Many founders and CEOs look accomplished on the outside while privately running on exhaustion, control, and the belief that everything depends on them. The same drive that helped build the company can quietly become the thing that limits the leader.

This is the book Todd wrote for the entrepreneur who has built something successful and is starting to wonder whether the traits that got them there are now getting in the way.

The cracked purple and gold sphere from the cover of Traumapreneur

Personal patterns become organizational patterns

The things that helped you succeed can become the things limiting you and your company.

Control: creates bottlenecks.
Hyper-independence: makes delegation difficult.
Perfectionism: slows decisions.
Reactivity: erodes trust.
Relentless drive: becomes workaholism.
Vigilance: makes it impossible to shut off.

Eventually, your company can begin to mirror the internal operating system of the person leading it. Somewhere along the way, you stop using the behavior and the behavior starts using you.

Which means the thing you keep calling an accountability problem might be partly an inability to delegate. The thing you keep calling a people problem might be partly a need for control.

This is not a diagnostic book. It is a pattern-recognition book.

You don't have to stop being ambitious.

You don't have to lose your drive. You need to understand what is driving it.

This book isn't asking you to become less driven, less successful, or less ambitious. Your intelligence is real. Your courage is real. Your creativity, resilience, work ethic, and accomplishments are real. And the same traits that built the company can, over time, become the ceiling on it.

What if your greatest strength has quietly become your greatest limitation?

The gold doesn't erase what happened.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and precious metal rather than disguising where the piece was broken. The repaired lines remain visible, becoming part of the object's history and its beauty. That is why the image belongs on the cover of Traumapreneur.

Most high achievers learn to do the opposite. We hide the cracks. We build over them. We achieve around them. Sometimes we become extraordinarily good at proving they aren't there.

But wholeness isn't pretending you have never been broken. It is being able to see what shaped you without shame, understand what you built from it, and recognize that the parts you once wanted to hide are part of the person you have become.

The gold isn't covering the flaw. The gold helps us see that the history of the piece is part of its beauty.

From Todd

I spent 25+ years as a CEO and entrepreneur. At one point, I found my company nearly $600,000 in debt and about 60 days from bankruptcy. I nearly missed payroll, hired the wrong people, lost customers I couldn't afford to lose, and made more mistakes than I care to remember.

Eventually, I rebuilt that company into a six-time Inc. 5000 business. That's the version of the story I've told from a lot of stages.

Here is the part I couldn't have told you then. I was carrying things into that office every morning that I didn't understand, and I didn't recognize how much they were influencing the way I worked, led, controlled, reacted, and defined success.

I didn't have language for it then. I'm not sure I would have used the language even if I had.

I wrote Traumapreneur for entrepreneurs who have built something successful and are beginning to wonder whether some of the very traits that helped them get there are now getting in their way.

“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

Recognition isn't enough.

Seeing the pattern is the beginning. Traumapreneur also introduces the HEAL framework, a practical way to understand the patterns you recognize, explore where they came from, and begin changing your relationship with them.

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.
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: Lead with greater awareness, accountability, and choice. Here is how I have led, here is how I am going to change, and here is how you can hold me accountable.

Cover of Traumapreneur: Why Success Won't Make You Happy (and What Will) by Todd Palmer

You spent years learning how to become successful. No one taught you how to feel successful.

You can't solve an internal problem with external success.

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?

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 struggle to delegate because deep down you believe everything ultimately depends on you.
You call it high standards, but your team experiences it as control.
You have built a company that cannot function the way you want unless you are constantly involved.
Your spouse, children, or leadership team may be feeling the cost of your patterns before you are.
You are carrying something from before the company that keeps showing up inside it.

You spent years building something that works. Maybe now the work is understanding the person who built it.

What is driving you, and is it still serving you?

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Todd Palmer's new book goes where most business books won't: into the real wreckage and rebuilding that shapes extraordinary leaders. Join the launch team and you'll get the Introduction and Chapter 1 to read right away, plus first word when the book is available.