Emotional intelligence is one of the main factors that cause normal, educated and smart people to make all the wrong decisions. It is under emotional stress that some of the worst decision made in your life were made.
These emotions do not have to be negative at first but will cause you to make the wrong decisions and can lead to you falling from your high throne. There are three main emotions that dictate how we live our lives and the decisions we make, we will analyze all three and look at how we can overcome the common mistakes that are created by these emotions.
Anxiety is Dangerous.
It’s very common for every Entrepreneur to feel anxiety at some point or another in their life but it is also very important to learn to control it early on. The feeling of anxiety typically comes to us from the fear of the unknown and our lack of confidence in the work or process at hand. In most cases, we haven’t created a foundation strong enough to trust in its stability and ability to support our ambitions of scaling.
Should you find yourself in a situation where anxiety consumes your weekends or days off then perhaps the time has come to take a deeper look at your business in these three core areas.
1. Analyze your structure and decipher if you have all components needed to support your customers and the team working to serve them. From IT to Customer Service training and protocols.
2. Analyze the core of your team by making sure you have the right team in place, and the right people working in their best capacity. Each member should be analyzed so that their key talents are aligned with the work they do.
Finally, do you understand your destination and still hold a clear view of it. In the earlier phases of a business it is easier to know where you want to be heading but as revenue, teamwork and obstacles come your way years later, many CEOs and founders lose sight of the destination and instead focus on the immediate future and survival of their company. Fix these three things and your anxiety levels will go down.
Anger is Pathetic.
As it brings no real outcome to anything you do. Any action made in anger is automatically negative. Anger is powerful but easily controllable as time is the only factor that will make that emotion go away. Some of the worst decisions can be made in moments of anger and can easily be avoided if a 30min -1 hour window exists between the emotion and the action.
In other words 1 hour could save you from destroying your life. I call this emotion pathetic simply due to the fact that it can easily be avoided, and I would assume that if it took you ten years to progress to where you are, you wouldn’t throw that away with 1 hour. Keep in mind that anger can be especially dangerous if combined with pride and can cause destructive results.
If you are big on pride and have a large ego then know yourself and do not allow anger to dictate your actions as you will fall hard. Take more than 1 hour and reflect on the reality that caused you to get to that point and realistically come up with a positive way to turn the situation around. Do not allow the immediate emotions to hurt your feelings and cause a desire for immediate retribution.
Fear is Your Greatest Enemy.
Fear is the emotion that keeps us from taking chances or achieving more on any given day. We either fear the outcome of what we are about to do or fear the lack of an outcome. In other words, ”what if” becomes a big part of our vocabulary and dictates our life.
We fear that the business we want to start will be too difficult, or may not work.
We fear investing because of the potential loss we might take on our money.
We fear rejection, so we are afraid to approach people.
And finally, we might fear missing out on an opportunity so we rush in too quickly.
Fear is also easily manipulated through the ability to assess risk and possible outcomes. We must look at the maximum gain and loss and then determine what the proper course of action is and must accept the fact that without risk, no return can exist.
Next time you are afraid and choose to act during that emotion, take a moment and do nothing. Fear is not an emotion you should act on no matter what as the domino effect starts the minute you act and it only goes down from there. You cannot assess risk when you are emotional and therefore cannot clearly justify outcomes to yourself and so you should do nothing.
