Today, I wanted to cry, but I had no reason to. Does that sound totally barking mad?
I was just feeling so frustrated and cross, and I had a short fuse. It made me laugh in a way, as a friend told me about a Michael McIntyre sketch, where he talked about his wife and why she never tells him when she is ‘getting on her tether’, he only learns when she is at the end of it. He said it would be so useful for him to know when she was climbing onto it, or at least halfway along it, but to know about it only when she is at the end of it makes his life tough. I was at the end of my tether!
I think business can be like that, one day we are loving it, feeling like all the work we have done for many years is now falling into place, and then another day, we feel low and feel the need to push, rather than flow with the day. Business is a real balance of our personal life and our business life. Hence my book and Community, ‘Business Is Personal’. Our mood can be impacted by a variety of factors and sometimes our performance is impacted by personal, emotional thoughts.
So this week I am pondering how to balance what we all deliver in our business that supports both the business and the personal needs of our clients. I wonder if this is something you consider.
Thankfully, we are not robots yet, we all have a heart, and it is pretty joined up to our brains.
I asked Google, ‘how is our heart and brain connected?’, because today my heart is hurting, and it is impacting my performance and made it hard to get my brain to work as well as I wanted it to today.
Google says:
“It turns out the connection between the heart and the mind is a two-way street. When we’re stressed or anxious, it can mess with our heart and increase the chance of heart disease. On the other hand, a healthy heart contributes to a healthy brain and emotional well-being”.
From a scientific point of view, ‘one part of the autonomic nervous system is a pair of nerves called the vagus nerves, which run up either side of the neck. These nerves connect the brain with some of our internal organs, including the heart’.
We have a great BIPPer called Paula Petry, and studying the Vagus Nerve has been her life’s work, helping people know how to calm it, and respect it.
I strongly believe that our personal life impacts our business life, and our business life impacts our personal. I am not saying that we don’t use our brains in our personal life, nor that we don’t use our hearts in our business life. Of course we do, however, how intentional are we about the crossover of this?
How much do we use our hearts in business?
How much do we use our brains in our personal life?
Being at the end of our tether, usually means that the two are not working in unison. Today my emotions were because I was working with a supplier in our personal life, it was personal to me, but clearly only business to them. They didn’t care at all about the service they were giving us.
I wanted to feel I mattered and that they cared about me. As a client it seemed that they didn’t care, while I was trying hard to be pragmatic about the issue, emotionally, I felt deeply let down. If they cared, showed empathy and understanding, I would have trusted them and would have believed in their service far more. Their life would have been easier now, than the journey I have decided to embark on with them.
I hope this is making sense. I am typing it to find the clarity myself and to find a way off my ‘tether’!
Finding the balance in a single relationship is what matters to me. It matters deeply to Thomas and I that our BIPPers (members of BIP100) know that we care about their whole self, they really matter to us, whether their challenge is a personal one or a business one. We know ourselves how lonely it can be when we are disconnected from people who speak deeply, sharing their truth, and how powerful it is when people normalise the human experience in business and share their ups and downs and empathise with life experiences. This is friendship in business.
We are all in the age of emotional disconnection, despite being more technically connected than ever before. We all rely on technology, and mostly use it with our brains, bringing our heart into our interactions certainly makes everything much better, however, we all know that as customers, we rarely feel the positive emotions that would make a critical impact to our business relationship.
So this week, maybe you can think about your client relationships, and how close you are to them, how do they know they matter to you? How much do you know about their ups and downs?
How personal is your business?
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