Even as a veteran firefighter the heat stunned him. It was roasting him through his protective gear. It was a run of the mill call, and as he burst into the raging furnace, all seemed to be contained.
As he runs through his internal checklist, everything rationally seems fine. But something tells him otherwise. He scans for obvious mistakes, but can’t shake the sense of unease. His body is screaming for him to get out of there. His mind races. His heart thumps.
Two things play in his mind: the heat and the eerie, almost deafening, quiet. But why?
The veteran tells his team to evacuate. They stare back at him, confused. Now he screams at them to retreat and they begrudgingly obey.
As the last of the firefighters exit the building, the entire floor collapses. If they had stayed in that room, they all would have been buried and burned alive.
That feeling, that unexplainable sense of dread, saved the entire team’s lives.
Stood outside and debriefing the near miss, the firefighter reflects on that strange feeling. He realises he couldn’t consciously have realised what was happening. The fire was too quiet & it burned too hot. The subtle cues were processed by his emotional mind.
This man saved his entire lives by thinking emotionally. If he had thought rationally his team would be dead. How can our emotions carry more intellect than our conscious mind?
This is the power of your emotions. When you learn to harness your emotions, they can become your greatest asset and help you fulfil your potential.
It’s not just firefighters that can benefit from trusting our gut, it’s all of us. Your emotions can accelerate your growth. Your emotions can show you what you’ve been missing all this time. Your emotions can help you create your freedom and help you make every single day count.
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” — Steve Jobs”
Today, I’ll show you exactly how to do that.
How Suppressing Emotions Can Hold Back Your Success as an Entrepreneur
My emotions carried so much pain and shame that I learned to shut them out.
I mistrusted and eventually loathed them due to the problems they created in and for me. Rationality and reason became my saviours and I sought to distance myself from my emotional life so I could gain control over my life.
Being totally frank, it worked at first. The emotional states that both made me a target for bullying, and made its happening so mentally tormenting, became a thing of the past.
I learned to see through my emotions, and happily left them behind; glad to be rid of those reality-bending nuisances. Some time in the military helped this cause.
In the long run this caused me two giant problems though: first, I felt like life was missing some of life’s depth. Existence became surface level, transactional, and a little meaningless.
Secondly, uncomfortable emotions began finding their way to the surface; most frequently a sadness of almost grief proportions that showed itself whenever I stilled my mind in my meditation practice or had a moment to myself.
Sometimes an anxiety that would eventually explode into a bout of rage simmered for weeks - rage being an emotion that I had previously been praised for lacking.
What I didn't know was how much this lack of emotion was costing me in my self-development and also my career.
These untrustworthy perception warpers weren’t warping reality after all, they were showing me a different existence altogether. A reality that contained more beauty than the sanitised perception I had cultivated; and a reality that actually was showing me exactly how to be the person I was trying to become.
Over time emotions became something to be cherished and welcomed, no longer a house of mirrors in my mind.
Today, I’m going to show you exactly how I turned my emotions from the reason for my misery, to my greatest strength. More importantly, I’ll show you the exact steps I used, and how I do this for my clients too.
How Modern Entrepreneurs Have Lost Touch with Their Emotions—and Why It Matters
Our generation is one where we’ve learned to mistrust emotion & eliminate it wherever possible.
Science and its rationality has become our religion.
Our prophets are CEOs, not poets. Our holy books are how to’s, not bibles. And our places of worship are digital, not stone.
“God is dead,” as Nietzsche duly predicted, and with His loss, we gained intellect, but lost wisdom. “We are intellectually rich, but spiritually broke,” Carl Jung summarised some years later.
Don’t worry, I’m not here to convert you to anything other than harnessing the power of your emotions. But it is worth pointing out that religion gave us access to the sublime and all its subjective beauty and turmoil; something that many of us seem to be lacking now.
Especially those I work with now - they’ve lost the connection to the wisdom and intuition provided by their emotions.
What I’ve discovered through my work is that to build the life you desire and become the person you want to be, emotions aren’t to be maligned but cherished. It’s through doing this that we can use our emotions to our advantage.
The business world’s favourite Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, wrote “my soul becomes dyed by the colour of its thoughts,” and took it as an invitation to quash emotions.
The clinical term for this is repression. We don’t want to feel an emotion, so we push it away.
Many times, in the heat of battle, this ability to think rationally is vital to our success.
Other times, repression denies the wisdom of our intuition, and actually 99.99954% of the data our body processes.
Whilst the conscious mind can process 40 to 50 bits of information per second, the nervous system as a whole can unconsciously process 11 million bits of information per second.
That’s an ungodly amount of wisdom that you cannot experience in your thinking, rational mind. You experience the wisdom of your body in your physical sensations, your emotions, and your gut feelings.
In the Iowa gambling study, the body began to sweat and record other physical sensations before participants realised which of the decks was stacked against them. Their body knew before their mind.
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell recounted the story of the firefighter I wrote about above. Gladwell wrote “It’s one of the things that makes our unconscious so dazzling. The wonder of it is that our brain has the ability to process an enormous amount of information in the blink of an eye, without us even knowing it.”
Andre Aggassi, the tennis great, developed an ability to read the patterns of his opponents not consciously, but by trusting his intuition.
This both infuriated his opponents, and led him to becoming an eight-time Grand Slam champion and Olympic gold medalist.
“I started playing tennis not just with my body but with my instinct. I could feel where the ball was going before my opponent even knew where they were hitting it,” he wrote.
This is how you make emotions your greatest weapon.
How Emotional Repression Leads to Burnout and Stagnation for Solopreneurs
When we repress emotion, it’s akin to trying to squash down jelly. It will just ooze out of any gap that’s available due to the pressure it creates. This comes out either in the form of intense emotion, physical symptoms, or self-destructive loops of behaviour.
I know a man whose almost comical levels of anger are clearly a byproduct of his inability to fully feel his emotional world.
When I was a boy, my body decided to give me heart palpitations when it knew I was unsafe before I did.
I see my clients stuck in decade-long loops of self-sabotage because they’re unable to sit with their emotions and turn them to their advantage.
They waste cumulative years on their phones, they act small in the work they’re uniquely gifted in, they shy away from their potential and can’t see a way out of it, all because they don’t know how to tap into the wisdom of their emotions.
More to the point, they haven’t trained the skill of learning to simply be, with whatever emotions arise.
Without sensitivity and respect for our emotional experience, we win in the short term by not having to deal with the discomfort of emotional pain, but we lose in the long run by blinding ourselves to the hidden wisdom of our emotions, and also the beauty of our emotional world.
Emotions are meant to be felt the full way through. They aren’t designed to be hidden from and pushed away.
We evolved an emotional mind because it gave us information that words cannot describe quickly enough. Emotions tell us what to do when words are too cumbersome.
As Gavin de Becker wrote in The Gift of Fear, “Intuition is knowing without knowing why.” The subjective world is dense with wisdom the intellectual world cannot penetrate.
That’s why our emotional brain evolved before our intellectual brain. It’s also why it’s closer to the circuitry that makes us move our bodies. Nanoseconds matter when it comes down to emotions.
Why Solopreneurs Need to Embrace Their Emotions to Unlock Greater Potential
What I invite my clients to do is develop a curiosity and wonder in the understanding of their emotions. Nieztsche wrote:
“One must learn to love [one’s emotions].— This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a …melody at all, to detect and distinguish it.
Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient …and kind hearted about its oddity.
Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.
But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty.
That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”
If you can generate just a smidgen of this kind of wonder of your emotional state, you are on your way to turning your emotions to your advantage. First, accept your emotions, then appreciating them will be so much easier.
The Second Step to Emotional Intelligence: Why Every Solopreneur Needs Emotional Literacy
The second step is to develop emotional literacy, before you develop emotional intelligence. The book, 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership explains this process exceptionally well, and a lot of my work in emotions is structured on this book.
The authors Dethmer, Klemp, and Chapman, show us there are just primary main emotions, and the rest are made up of different combinations and intensities of these primary five.
This is akin to having our primary colours which can make all others; red and blue make purple; sadness and anger make resentment or frustration.
The primary five emotions are anger, fear, sadness, joy and sexual energy.
Some of us only feel a small portion of these five. If that’s the case, we must learn to sensitise ourselves to all our emotions and learn to identify each. That is how we develop our emotional literacy.
As a note, sexual energy is not lust. Sexual energy is a creative urge - think generative energy, not clothes-ripping desire.
A stage I like to get my clients to is where they can respond to the question “which emotion are you feeling right now?” with one or more of the primary five emotions. When they do this, I know they’re ready to move onto stage 3.
Exercise: Emotional Spokes. Give each of the primary five emotions, anger, sadness, fear, sexual energy and joy a rating out of ten. A ten is where you feel this emotion frequently and readily. A one is where you rarely if ever feel this emotion.
This will give you an understanding of which emotions you have the potential to learn from, and which you may be repressing or suppressing.
Feel, Name, Act: A Solopreneur’s Guide to Using Emotions as a Business Tool
Step 3 is to watch for your emotions and become curious about its sensation.
Each emotion has a physical signature. I know for myself that fear feels like a dropping of my stomach and a dryness in my mouth. Sadness is felt in my eyes and my shoulders.
Your next stage in emotional intelligence training is to feel these emotions throughout the day and when you do, jot down a couple of notes about where and how you’re feeling these sensations.
When you can name each emotion, the goal is to get to a point where you can first feel it in the moment, then accept it, and finally do what its wisdom is encouraging you to do.
That is what you learn in step 3
Practical tip: To turbocharge this second step, meditation is the perfect tool.
Harnessing Emotional Power to Thrive as a Solo Entrepreneur
Step 4 is to turn your emotions to your unique advantage. It’s my belief that emotions point you toward your unique expression in the world. They exist to keep you safe, yes, but beyond that emotions show you how to become the person you’re meant to be.
Each emotion has a dark and light side. The dark side has one component of excess and one of scarcity. The light side is singular. You turn emotions to your advantage by discovering their wisdom and speaking their language.
Anger
Benefit: to stand up for yourself and others
What it’s telling you: “you need to set boundaries and enforce them”
Without incorporating anger into your emotional arsenal you will be walked over by people and circumstances. You will become weak.
Fear
Benefit: to let you know what you’ve missed
What it’s telling you: “you aren’t paying attention to something you should be”
Without incorporating fear into your emotional arsenal you will never learn what needs to be learned, and may deal with excess anxiety as fear increases its output.
Sadness
Benefit: to tell you it’s time to let go of something or someone, even a way of acting
What it's telling you: “it’s time to move on”
Without incorporating sadness into your emotional arsenal you will never realise how to learn from mistakes
Joy
Benefit: helps you do what’s truly good for you
What it’s telling you: “celebrate this”
Without incorporating joy into your emotional arsenal, you will never feel a sense of accomplishment
Sexual Energy
Benefit: helps you create
What it’s telling you: “let’s make something”
Without incorporating sexual energy into your emotional arsenal, you will become stuck in the monotonous.
Each emotion is trying to tell you something. It’s your job to listen to its wisdom.
The Complete Guide to Using Your Emotions for Entrepreneurial Growth
To recap, we’ve explored the power of emotions and why learning to understand them can unlock your full potential. Here’s what you can take away:
Emotions are not your enemy: They don’t warp reality; they show you a different, often deeper reality.
Emotional literacy is crucial: Learn to recognise the five core emotions—anger, fear, sadness, joy, and sexual energy—before developing emotional intelligence.
Embrace emotions as wisdom: Your emotions process information your conscious mind can’t, giving you essential insights into your life and decisions.
Harness the power of each emotion:
Anger helps you set boundaries.
Fear shows what you’re missing.
Sadness signals it’s time to let go.
Joy guides you towards what’s good for you.
Sexual energy fuels creativity.
Use emotions to your advantage: Rather than suppressing them, listen to their messages to lead a more fulfilling and empowered life.
If you want to truly harness the power of your emotions, I recommend signing up to The Adventurepreneur Clarity Course.
This self-paced program will teach you the fundamentals of gaining clarity. When combined with the Character and Calm course, you will be set up for radical personal growth. They can all be purchased as a bundle where you save £501 from the total cost.
Start welcoming your emotions and uncover the hidden wisdom they hold.
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