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.
‘Feelings (emotions) help with the management of life. They inform each mind - fortunate enough to be so equipped - of the state of life within the organism to which that mind belongs. Moreover, feelings give that mind an incentive to act according to the positive or negative signal of their messages.’
Antonio Damasio - Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychology, Philosophy and Neurology; Author of Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
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.
See the Wise Founder for the original version.