Separate Emotion From Intellect

 

I’m sure you’ve seen far too many business owners who will just fly off the deep end in a rage, for things that really aren’t all that worth it.  They lose days or sometimes weeks of productivity because they’re so wrapped up in the emotions of what’s going on in their business, instead of taking a step back and handling the situation logically and from a more success-oriented perspective.

 

There’s a concept of feelings vs. principles.  This comes from a popular speaker named Eric Thomas, from his book “ The Secret to Success” and he talks about how he never listens to his feelings because his feelings will alter and change on a day-by-day or hour-by-hour or even minute-by-minute basis, and sometimes he’ll forget what his true principles are if he just responds and reacts to the world around him, based on how he’s feeling in the situation.

 

What this means is whenever he’s involved in something going on, especially if it’s an emotional situation, he takes a pause, he steps back and evaluates what his true principles are and makes his decisions, how to react to situations, based on what his principles dictate he does, versus how he’s feeling in the moment.

 

How well do you handle this in your business? 

 

How well do you handle a surge of negative emotion?

Do you allow that to throw you off course and become less productive and maybe lash out at people, causing even further damage in your business?

Or are you able to weather the storm and make educated, intellectual, productive decisions, despite the fact you may be angry or upset or insulted or whatever else is going on with you?

 

Family, friends, you name it, there are many times where we bump up against other people, and our ability to examine and understand what’s happening in the world and what other people are doing and what their intentions are, looking at that intelligently and separating what our emotions are telling us about that situation.

 

Sometimes by the nature of how our world works and how we work as humans, our emotional reactions to situations may cloud our ability to actually effectively deal with what’s going on and effectively examine what’s really happening, so we can make an appropriate response.

 

I think this is best summed up in a book by Robert Green, called The 50th Law, which is all about the rapper, 50 Cent, and how he obtained his power. 

 

But there’s a quote in that book that I often have been looking at recently, and it says,

 

“When you look at people through the lens of your emotions, this will cloud what you see and make you misunderstand everything.”

 

I really want you to think about that for a second.  How true is that?  How often have you been in a situation where somebody may have been forceful or aggressive or accusing when they shouldn’t be, and you immediately want to be defensive and explain yourself?  They’re trying to pull you into a situation,that you really don’t even want to get into.

 

If you immediately go with the emotional reaction, you will lose that situation.

 

Whereas if you intelligently learn how to step back and almost interrupt that natural reaction where emotion takes over and you take a moment to examine where they’re coming from and what is causing that person to behave in this way, usually it’s some kind of fear, some kind of personal issue that’s going on in their life and it’s manifesting in their interaction with you.

 

If you’re able to take a pause, I’m talking a half of a second pause, to just interrupt your emotional reaction and give it a second and then examine what exactly is happening here, you might change the way you react and respond to a situations.

 

In some cases it’s going to be totally natural, but you can refuse to emotional respond but instead respond intellectually, get to the heart of the matter and address the real issue of what’s going on here.

 

For example, in our engineering business, it is very stressful as customers always want their work to be done to their timeline.  There is no awareness that there are several projects we work on and there is a process to which job gets done first …ie first in, first out…so of course, the timeline for the work is always longer than what the customer expects.

Well, when we are busy, the progress is slower and customers get irritated because there is always an optimistic promise as to when the work will get done.  Sometimes, when work gets behind enough there will be customers who get fed up and demand a return of their deposit.  If a promise of a quicker turnaround on their work doesn’t appease them, it is time to give them a refund.

 

We didn’t try to right the situation.  We didn’t try to explain what went wrong or why it happened.  We realized there was no changing his mind and all we could do was wash our hands clean of that situation and move on.

 

Now, if that had been my first interaction with a negative customer or a customer, period, I probably would not have had the wherewithal to do that.  I probably would have been sucked right down into that rat hole of defensiveness or arguing or getting into a heated battle.

But it would have ended poorly for me.

 

Again, luckily I had been exposed to enough of these types of situations to know emotion is absolutely the losing game here, and so I separated from it.

 

I did not examine this person through a clouded emotional lens; I separated the two.

 

Here’s the thing.  This is the important part of all this.  I’m not saying you will not feel the emotion, and in fact that’s a big hiccup for a lot of people.  You’re still going to feel the emotions of defensiveness or of upset or anger or hurt, when people are attacking you and coming at you in a way you don’t think is justified.

 

I want you to remember that feeling,  the emotions is not wrong, and in fact you should come to expect it.

 

But what you should also come to expect is your ability to interrupt the need to react emotionally and just react out of intelligence, even if you feel the emotional hurt or offensiveness.  You can still act in spite of that and act in a way that’s more appropriate to winning in the situation.

 

So that’s the key thing here, is to not react to the emotions, but also don’t judge yourself if you have the emotions.

 

Even if you’ve dealt with this situation 100 times, you still may not be able to turn those emotions off of feeling upset or angry or defensive, because it’s human nature.  We want to make sure people understand us and we can explain ourselves.

 

But it doesn’t mean you have to physically do it.  You can make a more intellectual decision, while feeling those emotions.

 

What do you do in such a situation? 

 

Maybe, it is time to learn to “count to 10” before saying anything so that the emotion is tampered down and you deal with it professionally as an entrepreneur.

Maybe, it is time to recognize that sometimes, you can’t make everyone happy and sometimes you just have to be not so hard on yourself and feel that you failed because you lost 1 customer out of a thousand.