Emotions and Business: Finding Power in Breaking Down Emotional Barriers

When you visualize a roller coaster, it goes up and down and around again and again.  Your emotions related to your business can do the same thing.  It’s time to get off the emotional roller coaster by recognizing when your emotions get the best of you and learning how to get over yourself.

This article is part of Effició’s executive series. In this blog series, we share the resources, tools, advice, and infrastructure changes you need to assess, invest, and shift your business. Let’s work on getting off the emotional roller coaster to defeat our negative emotions.  Learning how to manage the emotional ties to business ownership can help you dictate where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, not someone else:

First, let’s define emotions from a business perspective:

Emotions are a combination of beliefs, thoughts, and perceptions that make up our personality.  Personality is a description of consistent emotional, thought, and behavior patterns in a person (These are variations of definitions I found in Webster’s dictionary, Wikipedia, and my old college psychology book.  You can look up emotions and personality to get the exact definitions).  The way you act and react through non-verbal and/or verbal communication, often naturally, related to feelings, perceptions, or beliefs about things, people, objects, and sometimes the relationships between them, define your reality.

It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the true reality of everyone including your target market.

Using transmogrification to get a handle on your emotions by understanding your emotional ties to your business will allow you to break through your barriers that prevent you from doing what you say you’re going to do and also doing what you want to do.

Let me put it this way, what’s the number one barrier you face?  You!

Open your mind and let’s get real about getting in our way. Remember, I don’t write about things based on theory so yes…I get in my way a lot but I’m getting better at getting over myself.

Here’s how to start:

• Be real.  Stop being someone or something you’re not. I’m permitting you to be yourself.
• Be realistic.  Stop reaching and wanting for things you know you can’t have or things you don’t want.
• Be assertive.  Being assertive means telling someone what you mean without being offensive. When someone asks you a yes or no question you are not obligated to tell them anything else except yes or no. No need to justify your answer.
• Choose to Choose.  You can choose or you can allow someone else to choose for you. Yes, when you choose; you are accountable for that choice and you are responsible for the outcome of that choice. As a business owner, you always want to choose.
• Start doing what you say you will do.  How many times have you promised yourself you would get healthier or promised your kid that you would start spending more time with them? Or, promise to do what you say you will do? Life is tough and times are hard but there will always be an excuse, so stop making them.
• Stop doing things half-a*s.  Remember, I’m direct! For example, a friend of mine asked me to help her with a marketing plan for her new business. Of course, I wanted to help so we began to discuss the steps to implement a good plan. She kept telling me, “That takes to much time,” and “That takes to much energy.”  I thought – if you’re not going to do something the way it should be done then why do it? Yes, there are shortcuts but most of the time you’ll reap better benefits if you go through a full process.

It’s amazing to see many entrepreneurs, men, and women, letting their emotions dictate their success rate vs. using them to drive their actions strategically.  I know we can’t control everything when it comes to our emotions, but in business, we have to make a conscious effort to understand our emotional triggers and act or react accordingly.

Our emotions have the potential to serve us as a sophisticated internal guidance system.  How?  Sometimes you just have to ‘get over yourself’ and live!  Get over yourself (emotions), get out of your way, do good business, and conquer your emotional barriers!

© Effició, Inc.