As a business owner, everything’s quite conflicting. Emotional investment is vital. Never act emotionally. It is all quite confusing.
On the one hand, you’re told that you need to be passionate. You need to be emotionally invested in your business, in your work and in your clients and customers. On the other hand, you’re told that you can’t make decisions from a place of emotion, you can’t react emotionally, you can’t do anything emotionally because it skews the results.
And those two pieces of advice and information are extremely conflicting. To a certain extent, they are mutually exclusive. So how do you know when to be emotional when to invest yourself emotionally? And, when to pull back, and engage with logic?
Emotional investment of this type and intensity is a fine line to walk
There’s no real magic formula to it. But, as a rule of thumb (I really detest the term rule of thumb, but all the same) you need to be passionate about your business, about why you run your business, and about why you do the thing that you do in your business. You need to have a passion that drives all of that. But when it comes time to actually do the work, engaging with customers, reacting to situations, and so on, you need to do so from a logical standpoint.
Another way of putting that is, you need to get emotionally invested enough to get fired up to do the work but have enough control to pull back and do the work from a place of logic. A fine line to walk but required to do the work well, and thoughtfully.
Logic controlled, emotional investment is energy-intensive but can be managed
There is only so much energy that you can put into one thing, and dipping in and out of an emotional state is energy-intensive. So that’s why having checklists, frameworks and systems are so important. Having those in place comes so handy because you can engage passionately. You can emotionally invest yourself in what you’re doing, but you can use those systems, checklists and frameworks to ensure that the work you do is done logically. The service you provide and the reactions to the world around you are logical.
That way you don’t have to dip in and out of an emotional state because that’s really hard. You can use that emotional state, that passion, to drive you forwards and push you forwards. And you can do so without jeopardising the quality of your work or the potential outcomes for yourself, your business, and your customers.
Emotional investment is an essential component of any success
Nothing good comes from a state of apathy, no successful business has ever built in a state of apathy. Passion is a required component. But at the same time. Nothing good comes from existing purely in a state of emotion and reacting emotionally. So having those systems in place, having those checklists and frameworks, ensures that you get the best of both worlds. So that you can give your business the best possible chance to succeed, the best possible chance to grow and achieve what you want it to achieve.
Your customers need to feel that passion, they need to see it and feel it. If you suppress it too much they can’t and then you prevent yourself and your business from achieving the results that you want to achieve. But, that passion needs to be controlled, it needs to be tempered, and it needs to be thoughtful. And that’s where, as I keep saying, the frameworks, checklists, and systems come in and they are so useful. They also don’t have to be complicated.
The combination of passion and logic will help you focus
When you are sitting down to do your work, If you are in a state of apathy or complete indifference, it’s really hard to focus. It’s hard to get done what you need to get done. You need to get yourself fired up, you need to get yourself emotionally invested in what you’re about to do. Make sure that before you start getting fired up you have a checklist or framework in place so that you can keep yourself in check.
You can get fired up and you can use that passion, and the energy that creates, to push you to do some truly amazing work but you keep yourself in check with those frameworks and systems. Ensuring that the quality of your work never suffers.
You are not a robot, you are emotionally invested and fired up
When people talk about frameworks, systems, and checklists, normally it gives the impression that you have to be robotic in your business. And that’s not the case. What they actually allow you to do is to engage passionately without jeopardising your business and your work and your customers.
Passion is important. Passion is fuel, it is motivation, it will keep you going. Checklists, frameworks, and systems prevent you from causing yourself problems and undue harm. They prevent you from burning out and they prevent you from compromising the quality of your work.
Your passion is more often than not drawn from your ‘why’
To have some element of emotional investment in your business requires passion. That passion is derived from your ‘why.’
Identifying your “why” is a liberating experience. It is something that goes beyond the marketing bs you put out about why you do what you do. Luckily for you, I have already written about identifying your “why,” which you can find here https://mybizacademy.co.uk/what-is-your-why-why-do-you-do-what-you-do
If you would like a little more help than a blog post can provide then you are more than welcome to drop me a message on my company website and we can talk it out. You can do that here https://mikethebizguy.co.uk/Contact