Aleutum founded and now operates a small design studio in Kitale and jokes that her business plan has only two paragraphs. Her business principles revolve around building things that people love and then survive long enough as a business to see the trends catch on in wider society.
On good days she filters potential client inquiries, plans designs and her small team supports her. But on difficult days, the team experiences harsh messages from buyers about design displeasure or a late payment, which sinks Aleutum’s mood and the whole team feels down.
Despite the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, the design spreadsheets on her laptop look the same in both types of weeks. What changes between good and bad moments is the founder’s energy, patience, and courage. If any Business Daily reader has ever built up a business, then they probably know that entrepreneurial rollercoaster feeling deep in their soul.
The everyday journey faced by entrepreneurs is the focus of Florencio Portocarrero, Scott Newbert, Maia Young and Lily Zhu’s new research on the affective revolution in entrepreneurship.
The prestigious analysis reviews hundreds of studies and shows that entrepreneurial feelings are not merely background noise on the map of one’s journey.
Ranging from quick bursts of euphoric emotion to longer down moods to enduring perseverance traits, feelings shape how business founders judge opportunities, make tough decisions, and act across their whole venture journey.
Entrepreneurs face distinct emotions that show up differently depending on the venture stage. Emotions during the initial entrepreneurial discovery differ from during evaluative stages where reality sets in or during exploration stages where the entrepreneur searches for client and investor opportunities.
The research notes that what entrepreneurs feel internally and what they display externally can sway investor decisions. In short, building a venture is not only a cognitive mental exercise of executing tasks in a smart strategic way, but rather it is also an emotional journey that takes real work to harness and control emotions from start to finish.
The research makes a rather obvious but previously not articulated powerful point. We entrepreneurs often bundle passion, positivity, and general moods all together and then we expect one tidy effect on our own performance in our businesses.
However, that entrepreneurial habit of pushing on and burying emotions hides useful details to our success. When we feel various emotions, then we can pair it with certain tasks that we can do better depending on the emotion at play.
As an example, when we feel a surge of joy or happiness, then this may help with our business idea generation. Meanwhile, during our times of anxiety then we are better at sharpening our risk checks before product, advertisement, or location launch.
The plethora of research argues for matching specific emotions to specific moments and make ourselves more productive as entrepreneurs rather than just lumping every feeling into one basket and not paying attention to it.
Another interesting gap came out of the recent research. Everywhere we turn, people tend to talk about teams, teams, teams, teams all the time.
However, most entrepreneurship research regarding emotions and feelings in the entrepreneurial journey still treats the lone founder as the basis for analysis and neglects how emotions are spread from one team member to another.
Ventures are usually built by groups of friends or co-founders and also many new ideas emerge while inside existing companies that then branch out to form new breakaway entities. Entrepreneurs must be aware of their founding team’s up and down emotions that impacts interpersonal dynamics.
So what next for entrepreneurs? In summary, first, match feelings to the tasks needed at hand. During early discovery, protect time for lightness and curiosity so new ideas surface. Second, design meetings around states of mind.
Start a customer pipeline review meeting by asking each task owner to state one feeling and one fact about their project. You will be surprised how quickly stalled issues move when both pieces are on the table. Third, train investors and bosses to separate genuine enthusiasm forward.
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