Emotions Of Business And Business Of Emotions

Business people can be some of the most emotional people on the planet. Managing these emotions is one of the core processes that leads to success.

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Building a company

If you have ever attempted to work on your own business you will have noticed how it gets pretty emotional.

As an advisor to other businesses, I've managed to give other people many valuable ideas and solutions.

But if I work on my own venture, I get entangled in my own thoughts, inner critic and emotions.

This has happened to me every time I have worked on my own venture.

It is a completely normal occurrence.

This happens because the human person is precious about their own creation.

Unbiased perspective

The ego has a tendency to want to defend everything it ever creates.

Our own ideas are the most precious to us, no matter how good or bad they are.

It's near impossible to judge an idea in an objective way if we are judging our own idea.

This is an aspect of the business which I find is almost never discussed anywhere.

Emotions influence business owners in a huge way.

It's something I have noticed with every startup I've ever worked with.

The most important thing about it is that those business owners weren't aware of this issue.

So speaking to them is much harder than it ought to be.

Many business owners want to know 'the impact' an activity will have on their business.

They will rarely measure those things that matter the most.

Impact then becomes impossible to assess after an activity, making it impossible to know what works and what doesn't.

Emotions are real

But emotions come into play to start making 'decisions' on business owner's behalf.

This 'emotional business' can lead to huge disasters.

I've met many startups that have burnt through £500K without ever delivering any kind of a product.

I've seen startups that have built up a burn rate of £500K per month on a platform business that makes no money.

I've seen startups raise £1M for ideas which have no monetisation potential of any kind.

Then they burn that cash on marketing which makes no sense and doesn't create any returns.

So emotion can play a huge part inside a business to skew decision making in directions which make no business sense.

Paradoxically enough, emotions are crucial for businesses to make money.

Customers make 95% of their purchase decisions based on subconscious signals, driven by emotions.

Business owners must learn how to manage their own emotions to be able to leverage emotions for monetary gain.

Design Thinking

This is where the whole notion of Design Thinking comes into play.

It treats emotion as 'material' for us to work with, instead of as some sort of an esoteric notion.

With Design Thinking we need to test each one of our emotional decisions and get real world 'success reading' of it.

This process helps us decouple our emotion from the reality of what it takes to succeed.

If we can learn how to enjoy this process of turning emotional decision in a rational evaluation, we are onto something big.

I've found in recent years that having chats with other people about what I'm working on is of huge benefit to me.

It doesn't matter how much they know or don't know about what I'm doing.

The conversation helps me get out of my head and observe my decision making from external perspective.

This is empathy in action, the starting point of Design Thinking process.

If we can remember that 'experience is the product' and experiences are emotional, we are onto a winner.

Utilising this in our day to day life will help us become better business people.

Keeping our emotions in check by having external parties help us observe them is also the key.

Leverage emotions

Emotions are inevitable.

They are the back bone of life's experiences.

They are the back bone of successful businesses.

They need managing just like anything else.

The sooner we learn how to manage them in effective way, the sooner we will unlock our true potential.

Emotions can make or break us.

They can drive us to work in a state of flow with focus on our goals, or they can cause us to loose focus altogether.

Manage emotions well and you are laughing your way to the bank all the way.

Published on: 29 Dec 2016