A deeper dive

Are your emotions bad for business?

There’s a strategy I see a lot amongst Founders - stuffing their emotions deep down and/or doing all they can to ignore them. Some frame it as a journey towards optimal decision-making that strips their emotions out of the equation allowing rationality to prevail. Others might think of it as a coping strategy. But either way I’m not convinced the strategy truly makes sense, for a Founder or for their startup. It’s a strategy built on the premise that emotions are bad for business, but is that really true?

In order to answer that question, I think we need to start with a clear definition of emotion - something that’s surprisingly hard to come by. Most definitions align on a combination of mental and physical state associated with heightened subjective feeling, but there is much debate around whether emotions are hardwired into each of us with some sort of neurological fingerprint (the classical view) vs. a sort of mental model that each of us constructs to interpret our internal world based on past experience, culture etc. (the constructed view).

In either case, there’s an interesting question to pose about what role emotions actually serve? And evolution seems to hold at least some of the answers. In an evolutionary context, emotions emerged as a sort of rich form of internal data that guided decision-making in favour of survival through an interplay of physical responses within the body, and our mental interpretation of those responses.

Through that lens, we can start to understand our emotions in the context of what they’ve done for us over the course of history - steer decision-making in favour of survival. But of course survival is not the only end goal for a Founder. Can the same tools that helped our cave-dwelling forebears outrun a sabre-toothed tiger, really help a Founder make better decisions?

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what would happen if our emotions were truly out of the picture - there is some evidence to suggest decision-making would get worse, primarily from studies of patients with brain injuries to parts of the brain associated with emotional control, who had impaired decision-making capabilities, even when their intellectual abilities as a whole were unchanged - but the evidence is not particularly comprehensive.

And really it’s a moot point. Whether we like it or not, our emotions are present and having an influence. Burying them doesn’t somehow make them go away, it simply moves them out of our conscious line of sight. It’s kinda the adult equivalent of the kid who covers their eyes to hide based on the reasoning that if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.

Based on my experience, I firmly believe that a Founder pushing their emotions out of sight is a bad strategy. It might work on occasion, in a short-term bid to simply grit through it when things are getting tough; but as a long-term strategy it sucks. It lowers resilience, it increases the chances of burnout, it strains relationships, and it often, inadvertently, makes decision-making more ‘emotional’ as a result of the inner thrash going on beneath the surface and the inevitable moments when things boil over.

So from where I’m sitting it seems hard to truly answer the question ‘are your emotions bad for business?’ but altogether easier to answer the question ‘is burying your emotions bad for business?’ To the latter, it’s a clear yes.

So what’s the alternative? I see it as simply embracing your emotions as a Founder - deliberately developing the self-awareness to understand what’s going on for you internally; not underestimating your capacity to sit and be with difficult emotions as they arise without being overwhelmed; and importantly, leaning into the positives that come with your emotions - whether that’s the curiosity to ask ‘what does this data tell me?’ in relation to an important decision; or the greater sense of connectedness to yourself and others that can prevail.

Having been a bit of a laggard so far on certain aspects of AI, I’m trying to embrace it in a more playful way. You can listen to the above AI-generated podcast which I used Notebook LLM to create based on the essay I wrote below. It kinda blows my tiny mind!

An experiment to try

This week’s experiment is one in free-writing.

• Take 10 minutes to sit somewhere quiet where you won’t be undisturbed.

• I’d recommend using a pen and paper as opposed to laptop but dealer’s choice.

• Write continuously without worrying about form, structure, grammar or even making sense.

• Your prompt - what’s going on with my emotions right now?

See what spills out.

🤔 A question to noodle on

What are my emotions trying to tell me?

📚️ A resource to explore

Antonio Damasio is a Neuroscientist; a Professor of Psychology, Philosophy and Neurology; and an author of a number of highly influential books related to this topic.

I’d highly recommend reading some of his work in full but it you’re short on time and want to get a summary then here’s a ChatGPT link to give you some highlights.

If you’d like to learn more about how I might support you and/or your team as a Coach then simply hit reply to this email with something as simple as ‘Would like to learn more,’ and I’ll be in touch to set up a conversation.