Unless you’re a total sociopath, you can probably relate to this. It’s far too easy to get caught up in the emotions of the people around you, and for those of you who are more sensitive to the mood of the room, it can be terribly difficult to overcome. Before we can answer Anon’s question, though, we’re going to have to dive into some of the basics of how our brain responds to emotion first.
Everyone has a specific frame through which they view the world. Depending on how much work you’ve done trying to get to know yourself, this can be anywhere from a fairly loose set of feelings about how the world works to a defined and ordered idea of who you are and what your place is in the world. However, even if you know yourself very well, we can still have hidden or obscured motivations and expectations behind our actions and feelings.
For example, if you’re the type of person like myself who puts a great deal of importance on self-control, it can be easy to become angry when someone around you displays a lack of restraint. As people, we like to think the world follows rules, and we shape our behavior around these rules. “Violence is bad, so I don’t start fights,” is a general idea of this. The catch here is that because we think these rules are universal, we end up holding others to this same standard. If you’re a problem solver, you’ll feel compelled to solve other people’s problems because that’s the rule your behavior is based on.
This is where empathy comes into the picture. Empathy, in my opinion, seems to arise from two big things. The first is a natural tendency towards being observant, conscious or not- if you can watch the actions, behaviors, and expressions of those around you, you’re much more likely to be capable of empathy than someone who isn’t very observant. In that sense, it’s likely a trait of more intelligent individuals, but that may be a bit of a generalization.
The second component of empathy is the capacity for us to identify with the emotions of those around us. This comes second because it’d be pretty hard for you to identify with someone else if you can’t tell what they’re feeling. One of the interesting biological features of our brain is the presence of what are called mirror neurons. Basically, these are nerve cells that simulate the experience of something we watch another person act out- monkey see, monkey do. To the brain, there is not any difference between watching something and doing it (this is partially why visualization exercises are helpful).
When an observant person watches someone else experience a strong emotion, these mirror neurons are firing in an attempt to simulate the observed behavior. If you’re particularly emotional, the end result is going to be your brain telling itself that it’s feeling the same emotion.
This is the root of your problem, Anon, but don’t worry- empathy is actually a very powerful tool when you get the hang of it. I’m sure you know this is true from your experience as a conflict manager. Your ability to get into the shoes of the people you’re working with is exactly the reason you’re suited to the job. That can be a lot to take in, though, so let’s move on to some ways to cope with the side effects of your strong empathic sense.
The first and most important thing you’re going to have to accept to gain some distance is this:
Everyone, at the end of the day, is responsible for their own problems.
This might seem obvious, but we’re going to go deeper. If I had to take a guess, I’d say that you’re the type of person that likes to solve their own problems, and I bet you give good advice because of the time you’ve spent doing that. Sometimes, when we are used to fixing our own issues, we feel like it’s our job to help others do the same. (I know how it is, I run a self-improvement site, after all.) When this is coupled with the direct emotional experience of the people involved, your natural desire to solve problems becomes a strong internal drive to react.
As an empathetic person, you can feel the energy in the room like a pool of water. If someone disturbs the pool, you’ll feel it and it will bother you more and more until you’ve restored the calm. While it may sometimes be easy to slow things down, sometimes there are issues that aren’t so easily fixed. This is where it’s important to have the ability to center yourself. The first step is reminding yourself that those around you are responsible for their own issues, and you can only do so much- you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
You’re probably going to feel compelled to do something anyway, which isn’t a bad thing. Give it a shot and see if you can de-escalate the situation, but you have to have a line where you wash your hands of their problems and move on- healthy boundaries are important, even if it’s just for the sake of your own mental health.
If you’re still affected after leaving the situation, that’s where some meditative exercises could come in handy. One thing that I really find to be helpful is a deep breathing exercise that I read about several years ago:
First, take a deep breath down into the bottom of your stomach for four seconds. Hold it in for four seconds, then exhale the air up from the base of your spine for another four seconds. After exhaling, hold for four more seconds and start over. If at some point you get distracted and think of anything other than your breath, start again. Do this until you’ve calmed yourself down- the trick is that because the activity requires really specific actions and slow breaths on your part, it tricks your brain into thinking you’re relaxed and sends signals to your parasympathetic nervous system to counteract the stress response. If you can manage to do this for a short while, you’ll be good to go. It does take a bit of practice, however, so stick with it.
Just to reiterate, I understand the drive to be helpful, but you have to be able to keep a bit of distance between yourself and the people you’re trying to help. If you’re too emotionally involved, you’ll lose objectivity and won’t be as helpful as a result. It helps to remember that when you start getting overwhelmed- if you’re going to be the best you can be, you have to stay calm.
Let me know if any of that helps, Anon, and best of luck to you!
How a Failed Business Taught Me Everything
Not too long ago, MasterSelf celebrated its one year anniversary. The site originally came about during a phone call between Arda Cole and myself. At the time, I was living in a hotel room somewhere between Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Arda had mentioned he was looking to start a fitness blog (he’s a record holding powerlifter) and I was looking to start writing about philosophy, the mind, and that sort of thing. The reason why I mention this all is that it’s about the time of the year where I start looking at where I was last year and how far I’ve come since then- and I’m sure I’m not the only one in that regard. I don’t really have a clever way to sum this one up, so here’s the story of how a failed business taught me everything.
I think this first part is funny. Whether you do or not is definitely going to depend on your sense of humor, but I digress. Anyway, when I dropped out of school about two and a half years ago, I joined two of my friends in the attempt to start a door to door trash service for apartment complexes (valet waste, if you’re familiar.) We lost one of the team members close to immediately, so it was down to myself and the other person to run Freedom Way Waste Valet. Over the course of the next year, we constantly redefined the business plan, did tons of research, created a kickass brand and killer marketing materials (if I do say so myself), and even joined a bunch of local business organizations to network.
However, there was a huge amount of internal industry knowledge that we could never have anticipated. To put it simply, our business model wasn’t even competitive until probably 9 months in. This was simply due to the fact that the only way we learned anything in the industry was by networking and meeting people who ran complexes and had dealt with our competitors in the past. There was one particular person who we had been trying to get a meeting with for the entirety of the year- she was the head of a property management company that serviced all the best complexes in town. If we had been able to sell her on one complex, we would have likely had sustained business for the rest of our l
ives.
Unfortunately, by the end of the year, nothing had happened, and we decided to move to Colorado. If you’ve been paying attention, you may have guessed that this is how I ended up living in that hotel room. I ended up getting a job at a microchip factory in the Springs, and the guy that trained me is the guy who suggested I apply to Tesla. Weird how things work out, right?
Now, I know this sounds like a bit of a lame story, right? All that hard work on the business and nothing to show for it.
Here’s the funny part.
After a few months at Tesla, I realized I wanted to get promoted at some point. As a result, I had to update my resume, and I ended up logging into LinkedIn for the first time since I moved to CO. There was a message from that exact person we had been trying to meet with that read
“Hi Garrett, we are considering valet trash. When are you available to discuss?”
Needless to say, this sucked to receive. Should I have responded to it? Maybe, but after the abundance of emails, messages left to secretaries, and even the custom miniature trash can full of Christmas candy that we left without response, I didn’t really feel like it. For the record, the smallest complex that her organization was responsible for would have been upwards of a $200k/yr contract for us. But here I was, on the other side of the country and no longer in contact with my former partner.
There are a few important things that I’ve taken away from this experience. The first, and probably the most obvious one, is a deep sense of validation. We had spent many, many months filled with long nights of research, scheming, and re-re-redeveloping our business model with absolutely no positive reinforcement whatsoever. The closest thing we got was the occasional inconclusive meeting with a property manager here or there, and they were inevitably not the person capable of actually negotiating a contract with us.
This is lesson one:
You MUST be prepared to operate at the highest level of commitment that you are capable of without any desire for external validation. To rephrase, strive for excellence in action for the sake of excellence itself. I don’t believe in regret, and I do not wish that our business had ended up differently because of how much I learned from the experience. That being said, it is very nice to know that we were actually doing the right thing the whole time.
The second thing I learned from this experience is that if you are committed to a goal and willing to adapt accordingly, you will succeed inevitably. Our business did not fail because of lack of input, it failed because we gave up, and this is evidence that had we held out for another year, there was a very good chance we would have been making mucho bank-o.
This is lesson two:
If you are going to do something, commit wholeheartedly. Had we continued the business as we were doing it, we would have gotten the chance to pitch directly to the person we most wanted to. You may have heard these statistics-
20% of small businesses fail in their first year,
30% of small business fail in their second year,
50% of small businesses fail after five years in business.
Finally, 30% of small business owners fail in their 10th year in business.
Now, I don’t know what the specific reason for these statistics is, whether the businesses ran out of money, served a dying market, or whatever. What I am sure of, however, is that there is a sizable percentage of these that failed due to someone deciding to give up.
Imagine this- you decide to start writing a blog about some obscure topic, like vintage toasters or homemade parakeet cosplay. At first, you’re just going to writing for friends and family, and even they probably don’t give a genuine shit about it Who could blame them? This is the first stage you have to get through, and this is the stage that Freedom Way did not survive. You have to be able to operate without any kind of external validation. After a long enough time, though, you’ll literally have spent more time on the subject than anyone else, and you’ll be the authority on antique toasting devices.
The trick to doing this is to ensure that what you’re doing is something you genuinely enjoy and would do simply because you like doing it. Unfortunately for Freedom Way, I did not have a genuine interest in the sanitary arts, so it became increasingly difficult to maintain morale in the face of silence from the complexes we were harassing marketing to. This is where things started to turn around, though.
When I got to Colorado, I realized something- if I was going to have any kind of success in my life, it was going to have to be the result of my own ass-busting. After all, here I was, 2000 miles from home with no job, no degree, and a shit ton of debt accumulated from questionable life choices.
This is where MasterSelf came about.
As I was sitting in a god-awful hotel room at a dusty truck stop watching basic cable, I got the urge to call Arda out of nowhere. Within the next hour, we had a plan, and within the next week, we had a site.
Around that time, I wrote the first article, and I had planned on writing one a day until the site became successful. That lasted two and a half days, and I actually just managed to burn myself out until I started lifestyle camping. (Note to reader: don’t jump into insane challenges, work up to them.)
What was the difference between me trying to write in the hotel and me writing after I moved to Reno? I certainly had an abundance of free time and nothing to do in the hotel, so that wasn’t it. If you’ve ever binge-watched a terrible show on Netflix out of boredom, you’ll know this feeling. The difference turned out to be something that I was forced to do out of necessity, and continue to do today because it works.
See, something you don’t think about when you decide to live in a tent is the fact that there is not wifi in the desert. Well, maybe you do, I certainly didn’t. As a result, I started going to Starbucks every morning on the weekends, because A: there is nothing to do in the desert except sleep, and B, C, and D: wifi, coffee, and shelter. This gave me plenty of time to write, and because there is little else to do at Starbucks, I got in the habit of writing every time I showed up. I’ve actually honed this skill as a means to avoid writer’s block, because I have trained myself that being at Starbucks=writing.
The takeaway here: if you have something that you want to start doing, figure out a way to incorporate it into your routine. Unless I have something unusual going on, I go to either write or work on the technical aspect of the site every day of my weekends. As a result, I’ve managed to average 2 original articles a week for the better part of the year, and I believe that when this is published, it will be my 80th article. I hope to hit 100 before year’s end.
One thing I’d like to make note of is the growth of the site.
In October of last year, we had exactly 105 view in the entire month. Honestly, most of those were probably us looking at the site ourselves.
As I write this, it is October 2nd, and we’ve managed to get almost seven times that number of views in two days. There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from SEO, better marketing, an increasing number of articles that get hits months after being published, continuous research and site refinements, and the simple fact that I’ve gotten better at writing articles. I would certainly hope so after 80 of them, anyway.
In the past year, we’ve gone from the original team of five to a peak of (I think) eleven, all the way back down to four: Arda, who now runs the server, Tia, who runs our Instagram, Will, who is an occasional contributor, and yours truly. Ironically, the site didn’t really start growing until most of the team left in May (for various reasons) and I retooled my approach to the site. That small bump in the graph in April was due to us advertising, but June and onward is all natural and all driven from the improvements I mentioned earlier.
What’s the moral of this story? Probably the biggest takeaway from this whole experience for me is the fact that you almost certainly cannot predict what the right way of doing something is until you’re already in the process. Freedom Way completely changed its model at least five times over the course of the year (a
t one point offering valet dry cleaning, of all things), and MasterSelf’s internal organization and general approach has nothing in common with the way it was when we started it. You cannot plan for the unknown, but you can plan on being ready to improvise when the time comes.
In short: whatever it is you want to be doing, whether it’s running a trash company, starting a blog about vintage toasters, or some other bizarre idea, stop thinking about it and start doing it. Don’t overthink that statement- I don’t give a shit how good you think your plan is or how you think you need to wait for the right time. No one is ever ready, there is no perfect time, your plan will fall apart multiple times in the process, and you will not know what you’re doing until you start doing it and fuck it up repeatedly.
Get started now.
When you’re sitting around at the end of next year, do you want to be thinking about what New Year’s resolution you’re going to be abandoning, or do you want to be looking at how far you’ve managed to come? Start playing that instrument, start writing your novel, start something and run with it. The things that you think are impossible now will be effortless if you practice them every day.
MasterSelf Year One Page 22