Recognising Emotions in Business
As a business leader your emotions are infectious to those around you; including your team and your customers.
How many times have you met someone and been blown away by the energy and enthusiasm with which they talk about their business? You find yourself drawn in and wanting to know more.
Conversely, recall the times you have met people who are frustrated and complain when talking about what they do; these are not people you are inspired to work with.
Imagine you are meeting an old friend for coffee – you haven’t seen them in 6 months.
You are excited, you have been looking forward to this moment all week. It’s not just about the coffee, it’s about relaxing, having fun and catching up. You have a quick shower and get ready, rushing to get dressed you smash a glass of water.
You must stop and clean it up, this delays you and you begin to get irritated.
Moving to leave the house you realise you’ve not hung up the washing which you promised to do. Slightly more irritated you go back and spend 5 minutes hanging it up. Back downstairs you open the door and can’t find your keys, 10 minutes later you find them in the front of the door, exasperated you finally leave the house.
Now 20 minutes late meeting your friend, you finally get to the coffee shop and are feeling angry.
Then, you see your friend, embrace them, they crack a joke about never being on time. Instantly you forget about the stress of leaving home and laugh.
Are these feelings familiar?
In business we are all have desired outcomes, when obstacles are placed in our way it creates an emotional reaction. If we cannot control this reaction our negative emotions impact those around us and can even, make us ill.
Creating awareness of your emotional state is imperative for your health and that of your company. As business leaders we can feel a weakness through accepting that we are stressed, frustrated or out of control.
What can you do?
Emotional responses are perfectly normal, books like The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters helps us to understand and control these responses.
Another approach is to explore the Stages model; following interviews with over 1,000 business owners, the Stages model was developed to explain the emotional journey. This model enables you to understand why you are feeling as you do before helping you take the next steps forwards.
If we can plan our actions, we have more control over our business and life which in turn reduces the negative emotions we experience.
Every client we work with understands and utilises the Stages model. There is a free resource here (www.catandra.co.uk/stages) that enables you to explore your journey and the emotions you are feeling. It delivers a free report that outlines what steps you can implement to take control of your business and your emotions.
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