The Heart to Start: Three Kinds of Emotional Work Required for Sustainable Entrepreneurship

‘I can’t deal with this anymore’, my friend Tracy told me. ‘I work my butt off all day, chasing a dream. I’m living off my credit card – I can barely cover the rent. I feel like I’m getting nowhere. I don’t sleep at nights and it’s starting to affect my health.

‘The other day I was at a wedding at North Head. Someone made a joke about how being an entrepreneur is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. I looked at the cliff and thought: “If I jumped off, would anyone care?”’

Sound familiar? If you are an entrepreneur, you’ll know all about it. Plenty of young entrepreneurs start a business for the freedom and autonomy. They are not prepared for the long hours, intense workload, challenges, uncertainty, and risk. The pressure can be devastating. Many young entrepreneurs wind up burned out and dispirited – or worse.

Successful entrepreneurs know how to take care of themselves. Working 12 hour days and checking in at evening events will sap the life out of the fittest individual. Healthy living is vital.

It is also important to know how to deal with your emotional states. Entrepreneurship is a business activity, but the uncertainty and risk that entrepreneurs have to deal with makes it more like an extreme sport. Mindset is everything. Panic and freak out and you could do your business (and yourself) irreparable damage.

This is why emotional work is essential to sustaining a career as an entrepreneur. Phil Morle, CEO of Sydney startup incubator, Pollenizer, reckons that startups stand or fall on emotional labour.

‘Entrepreneurs driven by emotional labour do unreasonable things because they love it or they are frikken scared’, Morle told me. ‘Jeopardy matters. It drives people to succeed’. But to deal with the pressure, people need to do a whole lot of emotional work.

There are three kinds of emotional work required for sustainable entrepreneurship. First, we must learn to manage our anxiety. Second, we must learn to convert our fear into creative energy. Third, we must learn to feed off social sparks in the community.

Manage anxiety

Anxiety and fear two different things. Fear is always about something in particular. Anxiety is vague, pervasive, and diffuse. The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that anxiety is our awareness of possibility. Anxiety is a valuable emotion for entrepreneurs, since it keeps us attuned to everything that could possibly happen and everything that could possibly go wrong.

For the average entrepreneur, this is a lot of everything. No wonder people burn out!

To deal with anxiety, you need to get clear on what is and is not under your control. What is not under your control is not really worth getting stressed about. The ancient Stoic philosophers would say that all of this is in the hands of fate. Instead of expending emotional energy on what is out of your control, focus instead on what you can control and do something about that. Your excess energy should go into controlling your anxiety and reducing it.

To go back to the cliff analogy, there is no sense stressing about the force of gravity while you are plummeting toward the earth. Manage your anxiety and focus on building that plane.

Turn fear into creative energy

What if you fail? Something like 95% of start-ups never make any money at all. Most entrepreneurs who are ‘making a living’ are just scraping by. They may have planes in the air, but they’re struggling to maintain altitude. The threat of failure is very real.

Knowing how to deal with fear is essential for sustainable entrepreneurship. As Morle suggests, fear can be a motivator. People who know how to handle the fear of failure can use it as a springboard to success. When everything is falling to pieces around them, they keep their cool, go into the office at 3am and try something different to turn things around.

US Air Force trainers talk about ‘hugging the monster’. When people freeze up in a combat zone, lives get lost. Cadets are taught to embrace their fear and use it as a spur to action. Similarly, entrepreneurs need to learn to convert their fear of failure into creative energy. Instead of trying to bury their fear, they should confront it head on, turn it around, and use it.

Feed off social sparks

The third kind of emotional work is social in nature. Social engagement is a vital part of building a business. Whether you are engaging with customers, negotiating with clients, or networking with your community, you are doing emotional work. Successful entrepreneurs are energised by this kind of work. If it drains you, you are doing it wrong.

The right way to engage with people is to lead from the heart. Don’t be afraid to be yourself. Tap into the real you and work it. Pay attention, at the same time, to things that genuinely excite the people that you are talking to. Tap into that energy. Feed off its spark.

The startup community is buzzing with passion and energy. You can tap into that energy by feeding off social sparks. The key is to cultivate a beginner’s’ mindset. Treat every conversation as an opportunity to learn something new. A social relationship can be like a chemical catalyst, triggering new thoughts and insights and feelings. Successful entrepreneurs know how to open themselves to inspiration and use it.

My friend Tracy took some good advice and started working on developing her resilience. Next time I saw her, she had things under control. She was using yoga and meditation to help manage her anxiety. She had turned her fear and frustration into positive energy. She had just come back from a startup bootcamp and her laugh was full of sparks.

‘I guess I didn’t realise how burned-out I was’, she told me. Most entrepreneurs are flat out taking care of business. They sometimes forget that they need to take care of themselves.