How feelings guide leading entrepreneurs
Part of Conscious Leadership series
Resisting and repressing feelings is standard operating procedure in most organisations. Feelings are viewed as negative and a distraction to good decision-making and leadership. Often, one of the reasons we don’t show emotion is because we’re not even aware we’re feeling it. We’re angry, frustrated, or upset and we suppress it. We’re excited, motivated, or inspired and we temper it. We do it without even realizing it. Emotional data seems less relevant in the business world where logical data reigns supreme. But it’s not only relevant, It’s usually the lynchpin to change and growth.
We’ve seen and experienced that entrepreneurs have higher highs and lower lows when it comes to business and feelings.
The business culture promotes talking primarily from the head. In fact, for a majority of leaders, the head is the go-to center for conversation. But that’s only one part of an effective decision-making process. We believe that great leaders learn to access all three centers of intelligence: the head, the heart, and the gut.
As Dan Goleman and many others have demonstrated, when it comes to sustaining leadership success, emotional intelligence (EQ) is just as important as IQ, if not more so.
Emotional Literacy
But before you can become emotionally intelligent, you must first be emotionally literate. Achieving emotional literacy involves two steps:
- Developing a clear, accurate definition of emotion
- Identifying the core emotions
Let’s begin with a definition. What is an emotion? Such a basic question seems more appropriate for kindergarten than a leadership program, but in our experience, most people struggle to define it.
The definition we read about in Conscious leadership and have adopted:
Emotion is “e-motion.” Energy in motion.
At its simplest level, emotion is energy moving in and on the body. Or said another way, feelings are physical sensations.
Stop and think about this.
Whenever you experience an emotion, you feel a sensation in your body (thoughts, pictures, and sounds are often present, but not always). Anger has a certain set of sensations, as does sadness and fear. Your feelings are these sensations — there is no difference.
From the Conscious Leadership perspective, understanding this most basic definition is critical. If an emotion is merely energy, or a sensation, moving in the body, then it is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong — it just is. That means we are not our feelings any more than we are our hunger pangs or the discomfort associated with a sprained ankle. Feelings just occur. We need to appreciate them and use them as natural signals gifted to us.
The second step to emotional literacy is being able to identify the core emotions. All colors come from three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. Every other color is a combination of these three.
Conscious Leadership suggests that there are five primary emotions — anger, fear, sadness, joy, and creativity feelings — each with a unique energy pattern or set of sensations in and on the body.
How Iratel Ventures coaches CEOs on Emotional Literacy
At the start of our Limited Partner investors meetings, we ask each attendee to choose one of the five basic feelings of anger, fear, sadness, joy, and creativity and take one or two minutes to explain where it’s coming from.
We have since collected this data and put them on what we call Feelings Graph:
This helps us in two major ways:
- It forces us to express ourselves and take steps in becoming emotionally literate
- Looking at this on a regular basis helps us achieve our personal and team’s desired productivity levels
With the launch of our open innovation centre, iLab, we are going to consistently practice emotional literacy in an entrepreneurial environment and coach our portfolio CEOs through this program.
We feel lucky to be able to share our our experience of building and investing in high performing teams with you. Feel free to comment or come along to our next Breakfast Series to discuss technology, leadership and global startups.
This is the second in a series of posts about Conscious Leadership applied to Global Entrepreneurs which was also posted on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from teams with crazy (but commercial) startups. Get in touch or attend our breakfast series. Finally, don’t forget to get your IV Score to prepare for your next VC meeting.
