Founders of new businesses face breakdown?

How it used to be in my experience

In large companies it used to be that only one in 40 internal proposals for innovation would actually reach the market outside: all the other possibly bright ideas failed to overcome resistance from inside. If you opened up a business, it would take three years before you knew whether it were sustainably viable or not. If it were new in some important way, you especially expected to struggle with problems of all kinds.

To accomplish something really new in business, you need much more than a great idea, not least on the side of character, courage, determination, stamina and mental strength. All of these, and the rest, are more to do with subjective emotions, feelings, personality and heart than with objective knowledge, skills, ingenuity and head. The latter can even be fun, but the former brings stress.

Pressure is relentless for any Founder. You can easily get ground down until there's no energy left. More than three in four owners suffer from anxiety, sometimes from things outside their control. Entrepreneurs may be working for 16 hours a day, even on weekends, so home life is threatened. One certainly needs the right kind of business partner, most especially your husband or wife. In such a demanding atmosphere, it is not surprising if arguments spring up.

However, if you envision some way in which you can turn an idea into something concrete, to do something good in the world, these hazards can be avoided or at least alleviated, if only you can manage them. Why succumb, like more than one in three founders, to the temptation to give it all up, when you can recognise your problems for what they are, as well as what you fear? For the problems you have to face up to, there is always a good process, and this must embrace both emotional energies and rational disciplines. Reason is no good without feeling, a conclusion made very readily when people make decisions.

The Delphic** Advice

The first step to dealing well with other people is to know yourself. How you see the world is so different from the way they do, though we usually presume that if we are looking at something together we both see the same thing. Empathy is not a fluffy word: it is vital, not only to relieve stress by managing your own emotions but also to grasp how others see things and thus communicate well enough with them.

When you start up a business, you may be almost the only one in it, though it's interesting to notice how many are begun by a pair who share the same vision from different angles. Like comedy script writing teams, the two seem to have the knack of providing what the other one doesn’t, each making the most of the other. Especially in start-up conditions, everyone needs the others.

The combination of thought governing feelings that Effective Intelligence brings can generate results that are life-changing because:

1. People can respond more readily to your new initiatives. Even entrepreneurs can be guilty of focusing entirely on their own big idea, instead of listening to others. They could raise better questions of someone else's proposal, as well as being more adaptive and flexible.
2. You will also be willing to invest more time ensuring that people ‘get’ or twig what you're saying, in spite of the hurly-burly and pressure. At least it makes it easier to stand in their shoes, an essential for empathy. Listening with more attention is not only efficient but also encourages trust in and from those who follow your leadership. In a real team everyone, as well as the leader, is trying to help the others achieve a common goal.
3. We all make mistakes, but blaming is rarely the best response for motivating the culprits, though they should try to handle criticism with the maturity of intelligence. On the other hand, it's a must to unravel the causes of the disaster before pointing the accusing finger. “Justice is whatever renders to a man his due”***, so it is both compassionate and wise.
4. We usually assume that we can tell someone's intention by reading their body language. With most people this works, but not for a particular chunk of the population, which can be recognised only through the Effective Intelligence Thinking-Intentions Profile.
5. When disaster has occurred, or when we might be liable to mis-read someone's mind, a sound thought process may prevent flying into a rage and jumping to the wrong conclusions. It will give you the means to check out the quality of your reactions before it is too late. With Effective Intelligence you can map the different thought process you need for different kinds of problem-solving.

These are just a few aspects of what is now seen as being emotionally intelligent. This strand of intelligence can wrongly be treated as if it were opposed to “real intelligence”, whereas the idea of effective intelligence is that reasoning in theory is not enough to get something actually done, because it is people and their personal values that determine and commit to your action in practice. What binds the two forces together, to turn their competition into mutual support, is the whole or holistic set of thinking-intentions.

Finally, you probably know already that some kinds of stress are not only splendid but essential for exceptional success. Before you go in for a race, if you are not in fear or anxiety you will come only third at best and certainly not win in record time. Positive stress zaps you up, puts you on your mettle and leads to high motivation for peak performance. As Sir Roger Bannister, who ran for my College at Oxford, declared, “Just because they say it's impossible doesn't mean you can't do it.” Thinking-intentions are the interpreters of your mind, specific enough to make you more likely to act on the positive rather than the negative side of stress.

Go to it and keep going.

If you haven’t already discovered your own Thinking-Intentions, find out here.