everybody. This is Sally F. T. And this is heating Shaw. And today on the solid, we're gonna figure out if founders know how to feel their feelings. If they're just thinking them way, like talking about more than just sales and market. We just wanna bullshit and chat about business and life. Hopefully, while we're doing that, provide a lot of value to people. The world's best business podcast shit for people trying to get shit done way. Don't want to give you feedback. That's bullshit if you want you to do your best. So he just wanted to quickly talk to you about this. Anybody that's been listening to the selection for a long time knows we have talked a lot about the inner game of being a founder like,

and we've talked a lot about the way of a good amount of episodes around managing your emotions, managing your state's managing other people's emotions because it's an emotional game and if you don't control your feelings, they might lead you astray and into, you know, problematic situations. One thing that I recently kind of discovered about myself and I wanna quickly unpacked with you for founders because I thought this might be useful to people that listen to us. Is this realization that I had about myself that, you know, I think at some point at a young age I started realizing that I can't quite fully trust my feelings. And if I just act on my emotions, I wreak havoc, you know, and I create all kinds of problems. And so I started focusing more on controlling my feelings through my mind and through thinking things through and not acting immediately and slowing it down and de intensifying my feelings, analyzing them first, uh,

over a long period of time, very subconsciously over decades. I think that I mastered like I kind of overdid this to the point where over the last many, many years, I think I thought most of my feelings, especially the negative ones, right, so I could tell you Here's a situation that I think I was hesitant and it probably was driven by some kind of a fear. But I didn't know I didn't feel fear. I didn't feel hesitant. I didn't feel nervous. I just thought I'm probably nervous in this situation, but it didn't have ah, physical sensation and for many, many reasons. I think that that's not a good idea.

It's not a good idea to just think your feelings. E think it's a much better idea to actually feel them be present for them, not let them overwhelm you, run away with you but not run away from them either, but actually being fully present for the feeling and then you can still decide to think things through a times before you act. But, you know, as I was thinking about all my friends that were CEOs and founders and entrepreneurs, I was wondering if this if this is maybe not so unique of a case and what the downside, let's just talk about that. The potential downside could be for founders who have kind of lost touch with their feelings, who have lost the ability to feel their feelings and are just so cognitively focused that all they do is all the internal experiences, always just in their head, in their mind, thinking and analyzing. So first throwing that out there,

Does this make any sense? Does this resonate? Do you think I'm crazy alone, or do you think like, yeah, most founders like that? That's only normal. That's not special at all. Like, what's your initial reaction to this? Yeah, I would say that there's a few kind of factors. So there's two factors that come to mind for me as to like how you deal with this or how this comes to be one factor, which is probably the biggest one. Is your personality and personalities kind of a longer topic, I'm sure.

But the reason I say that is like your personality has a lot to do with how you express yourself to the outside world. And over time, as you run a business, your ability to bring out your personality in every interaction gets diminished. And the reason for that is most of the time you in business, you are making decisions that involve other people and their well being, as well as trying to bring those people on board with the decisions you're trying to make, and you get really good at honestly not being yourself. If you wanna put it like that, you end up becoming good at being a business person. That's just what happened, and so, and a lot of times that bleeds into all parts of your life and you end up suppressing your emotion and your personality, not unknowingly, and this shouldn't that's really be a negative thing. But so that's one factor,

which is what happens to your personality over time. This is inevitable. I don't see anybody not hitting this, but their personality. And then their own psyche and psychology kind of points out like how this kind of manifesting them. And I think the second piece that I found with this is just this idea that when you are dealing with life, your first reaction for most human beings is emotional and it's really fast and it's visceral. Some people would call it a gut feeling. Some people would just call it a trigger. Those things are what you start suppressing is your ability to respond without emotion ends up taking over the emotion itself, and then you you don't you don't even know what an emotion really is and you start operating day to day, waking up, doing the thing, going back to sleep, waking up, doing the thing without having that feeling,

and a lot of times your work takes over. So then your whole idea of like life is really consumed by your work. And a lot of times this happens because you started the thing and you care that much about it or for some people. Some folks who are employees also get that same impact because of how much they care about the work they're doing or believe they do. And so it's not just founders. I think, that are susceptible to this. And so I don't I think the solution is just recognizing this might be happening to you and in stepping back and actually finding ways to access your emotion at times when it's safe to do so. Because I think what it really boils down to is that you don't feel safe expressing your emotions to the people around you. Yeah, because that's not you anymore. Yeah, that's deep. I think also at some point you attached to this new identity that is being created around you, and so now you don't trust yourself anymore to that identity is a rules engine because identities, the rules engine like you were saying,

and that's not emotion. Emotions aren't rules. There's no rules to emotion. There's no rules toe love. It's the rules engine, though, that you create because you're like, Well, when I'm in this situation, I need to react like this in order to get the best outcome possible. Okay, Cool. That's great. But how did you feel about it? Nothing. Why?

Nothing. Because I'm not supposed to feel anything. Why aren't you supposed to feel anything? Because we got this big to Dio. That's like the thing that plays out in your head, right? And then eventually you become that person and that's not this way, a bad thing again. It's just how you what happens. And then, you know, you kind of see this happen, and I'm not gonna like I don't want to get into this but I think it's worth mentioning like the richest man in the world got divorced. Hmm. Just think of that. And it got divorced because basically,

he didn't want to be with that that person anymore. Most people, somebody else, Or maybe maybe he e way right. Like something happened that caused that person. Thio put half his wealth e didn't want to get into because it's his personal life. I don't really care for it like it's not my kind of drama, right? But do you just think about it. You think that's not from suppressed emotion? Come on, like for riel like No, no, no, that's 100% something from suppressed emotion and said, Oh,

no eso I think that you know not to confuse, especially, you know, young founders that air just feeling like they're becoming more effective as they're learning to suppress their emotions more. They're like, Wait a second. I'm not supposed to do this, but it's fine to do it. But I think it's important to recognize and then decompress like or then trance kind off like you want to make sure that you don't do this so much, and so often that it becomes such second nature that you just don't feel any emotions anymore because then you dehumanize yourself, and then you might accomplish all kinds of incredible things and be like, Why don't I feel anything? I wanted to be excited or happy or fulfilled, and just like nothing, I look inside my body and soul is like emptiness there like what happened, and I think it's just popped up in my mind.

We had an episode that I recorded once, why I lost where I lost one of my sons at a playground, and I was like, running for 30 minutes, search around and eventually, like, 30 parents in this entire big park were running around trying to look for my son while I had the police on the phone. And then we found him right. And I remember when we recorded this episode telling you that the entire time was running around like a crazy person trying to find him, there were multiple dialogues going on. One was a very analytical like. Okay, I've searched here. I searched there. What's the next logical point? The next level of dialogue was just like disbelieve was just like,

This isn't happening. This is just not possible. Must be some rational way is not lost. It just need to figure it out. And the third dialogue that was going on was a Why am I not feeling anything right? Holy shit, I'm really cold and empty and emotionless right now, and I was telling myself, Well, it's probably because I just need to function. And then we talked and laughed about this where you're like I would have been doing. The same thing is just like you have to function like this is a new emergency situation is not the time to feel pain or afraid or break down. You have to figure it out, and then you can deal with your emotions. I think important thing for me back then. This may be a good way to wrap this up or do pack this into a metaphor was that once I found him and we went back home,

I didn't just tell myself. Well, I didn't feel anything. I found him. I managed the situation quite well. I'm a man. I'm a good dad. Whatever. Let's forget about this. Let me put on the television. I was like, All right. I brought him home, talked to his mom, and then I was like, I need to go on a walk And I went on a walk until I could figure out Where are my feelings like,

where is this? And then I did feel them, and I had to be able to, like, let go. Of all the panic and the fear and the stress that I felt during those 30 minutes, I feel like I mean, that was a very kind of crazy moment. But in many, many other small, stressful moments. I didn't do this because I didn't recognize and realize what was going on. E I think that that you can pay a big price if you don't make sure that you know, at times when you have you push away your emotions, you use the rules engine of your personality to strategically act and get the best outcome for everybody that you then don't forget that there still are emotions somewhere in your body that need to be processed. If you don't,

there's gonna be a price that you're gonna pay that you're probably not gonna like. So you know, that's the lesson learned. And 1 may be practical thing because we always love to do practical stuff, even if its philosophical or emotional one thing that I started that I could recommend to anybody that's like, I don't know if I have feelings or not. You probably don't right if you if you are, like, puzzled, if you don't know, you're probably my camp. But one thing that I did that that yielded really good results. It was really compelling. Interesting was just to start a little like simple emotional diaries, so for a couple of days. I was just like,

let me try a couple of times a day to write down how I feel. And I struggled so hard with this exercise that it kind of opened up a bunch of things that make me realize a ton of things. It was super useful to me. So just as a little pragmatic tip at the end of this crazy episode, um, if you don't know if you links, maybe try writing them down for a couple of days and see what happens. That's the best. I got nothing more. Dad was good. Feel your feelings. Feel you just at the right times. E That's it from Hospitals episode Really very smooth.