Embrace emotions in decision making
Welcome entrepreneurs, to 2024. I’m so glad you’re here.
Tis the season for resolutions. And while I’m all in favor of people doing the work to live the life they want to live, the reality is that most of us have no idea why we want the things we’re resolving to get. So we spend our lives chasing things that, if we really did the work to know ourselves, we might realize we don’t even want.
I see this most acutely among CEOs, leaders, and other high achievers who are excellent at identifying a target, locking in, ignoring or disregarding pesky emotions, and getting shit done.
And are, more often than not, completely oblivious to the cost.
Why those with the most capacity often don’t know where to use it
We’re trained to handle shit. From childhood, we know we need to just toughen up. Don’t have time for feelings, gotta manage.
And this is useful in some situations. We do get a lot done.
But the problem is that our emotions are what tell us what we want out of life. It’s not logic that tells us we want to be a painter. Or that we want to work less and spend more time with our families. It’s emotion. So when we push down our emotions, we need to expect that we will make more and more logical decisions, over and over again.
And this works, for most people, for a long time. Until it doesn’t.
Until a loved one gets sick. Or a kid goes off to college. Or until we finally realize that we wanted a life very different from the one we have. Not because it was logical, but because we WANTED it. We loved something and never tried. Or we loved and lost. Or we realize that we might die without ever having written that book.
The importance of embracing emotions in your decision making
These insights are painful, but they are gifts because, even if only for a moment, they get past our practiced defenses and give us a glimpse of the potential depth of our experience. And with that, an opportunity to open, finally and for the first time, to our life. Not our logical, robotic, do-the-best-thing life, but our real one. Our messy, ecstatic, devastated, joyful, amazing, miserable, strange, wonderful life. The one in which we followed our dreams not because it was logical or optimal, but because they were ours.
We may still resist our emotions even then. Emotions can be scary because they are unpredictable. What happens if we open Pandora’s box and we can’t control it? What if I all of a sudden have to leave my job? My relationship? Or worse?
All that is possible, so if you can still be fulfilled by the prospect of stuffing your emotions down, making logical decisions, and optimizing for some well known future, by all means continue to do so. Either you are right, and you’ll be happy when you achieve what you’re optimizing for (a worthwhile inquiry being “how did I learn to want this thing?”), or you’re wrong, and you’ll eventually recognize that stuffing your emotions is an elevator that only goes down. If they’re not strong enough to get you to wake up now, they’ll just keep coming back stronger until you do.
Succeeding at someone else’s life is the most expensive form of failure. You have a choice. Either get closer and closer to a robotic, logical machine, chasing the things the people around you think are valuable, or open up to your own life.
If not now, when?
Who are you waiting for?
Want to dive deeper?
If you liked this, check out this list of my top posts, read and shared by thousands of entrepreneurs.
Here are a few of my favorites:
The secret to leadership (why authentic leadership is simply more effective)
How to pitch a big vision to investors without setting yourself up to let people down
Executive Coaching for Entrepreneurs
There’s a reason every elite athlete in the world works with a coach. You need more than one perspective to see your best work.
I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency that supports entrepreneurs to step fully into their lives, and transform their companies into their masterpieces.
Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO, along with deep training in mindfulness, psychology, Neurolinguistic Programming, psychedelic integration and more, I have helped leaders from some of the fastest growing companies and VC funds in the world design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction.
I coach leaders how I want to be coached:
Focused on the person, not the role.
Focused on results, without the fluff.
To learn more about working with me, click here.