The origin of my theory: Chia, the Farm Dog, and the Kicked Dog Theory: I was nine or 10 when my dad brought home Chia, a black, long‑haired Chihuahua who thought she was a ranch hand. She weighed maybe three pounds, but she herded cows, tangled with skunks, guarded the homestead, and followed me around the farm in Idaho like a shadow. She put up with a lot, from my sisters dressing her in doll clothes to my dad accidentally knocking her out once with a dropped shovel.
Chia also had a quirk. If you walked toward her standing up, she’d bolt sideways, tiny legs blurring, eyes locked on you the whole time. The only way to pet her was to crouch down; then she’d approach you head‑on, like a normal dog. When I asked my dad why she did that, he told me whoever owned her before us had probably kicked her often enough that she learned to avoid upright humans.
Therapists call this “displaced aggression.” Most people call it “kicking the dog:” dumping your anger and frustration on someone or something that didn’t cause it. In business, there are a lot of dog kickers—and, just as importantly, a lot of kicked dogs. Over the years, I’ve come to think of this as more than just a sad story from my childhood. It’s a working theory about leadership, culture, and mental health.
Why Your Mental Health Is a Business Asset
As a small business owner, it’s easy to treat your mental health as optional—a nice-to-have you’ll get to when revenue is higher, and chaos dies down. When I started my first company, I did exactly that. Young, broke, and convinced the only way to win was to white‑knuckle my way through every day.
What I eventually learned is that my mental state wasn’t separate from the business; it was one of its most important assets. When I was exhausted or overwhelmed, I made worse decisions, snapped at people I cared about, and missed opportunities I would’ve seen clearly if I’d been in a healthier headspace. If Chia was proof that cruelty leaves marks, my companies were proof that neglecting my own well‑being left marks, too—on my team, my customers, and my bottom line.
The Kicked Dog in the Office
I see versions of Chia’s sideways scamper at work all the time. Picture a marketer on my team—we’ll call him Chris—who shares an idea he’s excited about. I pause for a second, thinking. Before I can respond, he’s already backpedaling, apologizing, and trying to stuff the idea back into his mouth.
That deer‑in‑the‑headlights reaction usually doesn’t start with me. It typically comes from a previous boss or culture that rewarded fear and punished initiative. When you’ve been kicked enough times—criticized harshly, humiliated in meetings, ignored, gossiped about—you start to assume every shadow is a boot. You carry that conditioning into the next job, and the next.
Almost everyone has been the kicked dog at some point in their career. The danger is that we drag that baggage into new environments and judge current leaders and coworkers through the lens of past abusers. Unlike Chia, we have self‑awareness. We can notice that sideways flinch, question it, and decide whether it still fits the reality we’re living in now.
10 Mental Health Takeaways for Owners and Leaders
Over time, combining what I’ve lived and what I’ve watched, a handful of lessons keep surfacing. Think of these as practical ways to stop kicking the dog—inside your own head, inside your company, and across your culture.
1. Your mindset is infrastructure
Your state of mind belongs on the same list as cash flow, talent, and product quality. When you’re fried, you become reactive, short‑sighted, and more likely to misread people’s intentions. That doesn’t just hurt you; it shapes how safe or unsafe your workplace feels.
2. Small habits compound
You don’t fix years of stress with one vacation, just like you don’t build wealth with one big deposit. Five minutes of quiet before the day starts, a walk without your phone, a real lunch instead of inhaling something at your desk—these look trivial in isolation. Over months and years, they become the difference between a leader who slowly unravels and one who can actually go the distance.
3. Boundaries are self‑respect, not selfishness
When you’re the boss, work will happily eat every hour you offer it. Answering messages at midnight and never shutting off may feel noble, but it teaches everyone—including you—that you don’t matter as much as the business. Setting reasonable limits on your availability doesn’t mean you’re less committed; it means you plan to still be standing five years from now.
4. Customers can feel your pain
Frazzled, resentful, or emotionally checked‑out leaders leak that energy into customer experience. Slower responses, less empathy, a sharper tone—it all lands somewhere. Just as you’d never knowingly send out defective products, you shouldn’t accept a version of yourself that’s permanently running on fumes as the face of your brand.
5. Stress and fear are signals
Anxiety and stress are not always enemies to crush; they are often dashboards. Sometimes they’re telling you to delegate. Sometimes they’re pointing out a broken process or a toxic relationship. Ignoring them is like ignoring a check‑engine light: you can, but the repair bill is coming.
6. Isolation is a choice, support is a strategy
Entrepreneurship can feel lonely, but being the owner doesn’t mean you have to handle everything inside your own skull. Mentors, peer groups, therapists, trusted friends—these aren’t luxuries. They’re pressure valves. Even low‑cost options, like online communities or local meetups, can keep you from turning into a loaded spring.
7. You model the culture
If you glorify burnout, your team will burn out. If you brag about never taking time off, no one else will feel safe doing it either. On the other hand, if you protect your own boundaries, ask for help when you need it, and treat your mental health as non‑negotiable, you normalize that for everyone else.
8. Burnout is more expensive than prevention
It always feels like you can’t afford to slow down. Then you hit a wall and discover how costly it is to rebuild trust, replace key people, or claw your way back from a full shutdown. A little time and money invested in keeping yourself and your team healthy beats the price tag of cleaning up after a crash.
9. Vulnerability builds trust
For years, many leaders—including me—felt pressure to be bulletproof. What changed everything was admitting, out loud, “I’m struggling with this,” or “I don’t have all the answers.” Instead of eroding trust, it deepened it. People are far more willing to give you their best when they know you’re human.
10. Aim for progress, not perfection
You won’t nail this every day. Some weeks, survival is the win. But if you can look back and say, “I handled that hard conversation better than last year,” or “I actually unplugged for a weekend,” that’s the point. The goal isn’t to become some flawless Zen founder; it’s to move the needle in a healthier direction over time.
The Space Between Stimulus and Response
There’s a quote by Viktor Frankl that changed how I think about all of this: between what happens to us and how we respond, there is a space. In that space, we choose. That choice is where growth and freedom live.
If you’ve been kicked enough times, your reflex will always be to duck, flinch, assume the worst, or lash out. That reflex may never completely go away, but the space is still there. In that space, you can decide to give a coworker the benefit of the doubt. You can decide to ask a clarifying question instead of stewing. You can decide to go for a walk instead of unloading on your team.
We can’t go back and un‑kick the dog. But we can refuse to make our current coworkers and employees pay for the sins of past bosses, and we can refuse to pass our own pain further down the line.
From Kicked Dogs to Cohesive Teams
My favorite picture from our farm in Idaho is from my mom’s memory, not a camera. She watched, laughing, as a rooster, a cat, three rabbits, Chia, her Pekingese sidekick Peekey, and the neighbor’s goose marched past our big picture window toward an old turkey pan full of odds and ends of feed. Different species, different temperaments, one shared destination.
That little parade is what a healthy company can look like: diverse but united, tolerant but practical, moving forward together and still hungry. Getting there doesn’t mean no one has ever been kicked. It means enough of us are willing to use that space between stimulus and response to choose something better—for ourselves, for our teams, and for the people who trust us with their business.
We’ve all been the kicked dog. The question is whether we stay there or use that experience to become better leaders, better colleagues, and, ultimately, better human beings.
Levi King is CEO, co-founder, and Chairman of Nav. A lifelong entrepreneur and small business advocate, Levi has dedicated over 10 years of his professional career to increasing business credit transparency for small businesses. After starting and selling several successful companies, he founded Nav both to help small business owners build their credit health and to provide them with powerful tools to make their financing dreams a reality.
Photo courtesy fauxels via pexels
