Emotional regulation as a bootstrapped founder

Every day as a founder is maximum extremes. Something works and you’re filled with elation. A threat to the business comes in and you’re filled with dread. Rarely if ever does it sit in the middle. If you’re building a business I’m sure you’ll relate. You sign the client, elation. Something breaks, overwhelming fear. It’s constant, and after 13 years of building my company, I am a firm believer it never changes.

Let me step into the cliche and bring in a martial arts analogy I think about all the time. When I was practicing Muay Thai, I thought all the movements were fast and it was just about how quickly you could move. But my coach loved to yell at me and tell me to relax, drop my shoulders, and sit back. When you are tense, it actually takes you longer to strike because you first have to relax your muscle to gather your energy, then you can strike. But if you are relaxed to start with you can go straight into the strike. The difference between starting tense and starting relaxes is win or lose in a competitive fight.

I think about that minimum once a day. Because it’s so applicable to business building. If you are tense all the time, you’re not ready when something does come up that needs to be dealt with. You first have to drop your tense-ness, then think about the problem, then solve it. Versus if you’re already calm, you can just solve the problem straight away. You move faster. And those little speed improvements compound over time, so much so that you’ll end up massively ahead of everyone else if you stay calm to begin with.

At this point, I think the best way to handle emotions is to work with them. Sometimes they are really helpful. When you create content or do PR, emotions are what draws in the audience and makes your talk interesting. But when you’re dealing with an angry customer or a product problem, emotions are not your friend.

It’s like the meditation people like to say, if you can observe yourself as an outsider, and choose how to use yourself in each situation, then you’ll get way more out of every scenario. Versus if you are just a single player and riding the rollercoaster of every interaction, you’ll get so tired so fast.