Equanimity and Emotional Resilience are Power
"Do something that makes you uncomfortable" was one of the first instructions we got for Founder.University.
Lucky for me, I do stuff that makes me uncomfortable all the time!
I was talking to a friend about a disappointing experience.
"It doesn't matter what you said," he told me, "they'd already made up their mind."
"Yeah, but if..." I started in.
"Doesn't matter," he cut me off. "Nothing would have changed it. Let go. Move on."
We want to think our words mean something. That we have something meaningful to say. That we can move people. But often, nothing we can say is going to move someone. They know what they want.
And that's fine. You just can't care.
Let it go, like a balloon in the wind.
The Fine Art of Stoicism
If we can't change other people's minds — most of the time — why do we let other people change the way we feel?
I've long said "the only one allowed to affect my feelings is me." What I mean by that is I decide how I feel. Not others. Not the things people do, or the words they say.
I control my emotions, so they don't control me.
When we practice this form of emotional management — and it takes practice — we find a place of equanimity.
Equanimity is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by the experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind.
That means I work hard — it's not easy, it'll never be easy — to ensure that what people say to me or how people treat me doesn't (usually) change how I feel.
I used to let myself get riled up or beaten down. One time I let myself get caught in one of those loops, and I spoke out of turn to a friend I loved dearly.
Before we ever spoke again, they passed away.
I never got to apologize, to say I was sorry for how I spoke, sorry for how my words hurt them. To say I was wrong, how much I cared about them, I didn't really mean it.
And I never will get that chance.
I quit social media, deciding that I wasn't going to let it control my emotions. It took a while to admit that social media wasn't controlling my emotions, I was.
And I was the one who was letting things take me off center.
How Do You Quit Doing Something?
How do you quit drinking? You stop drinking.
How do you quit smoking? You stop smoking.
How do you quit letting people affect your emotions?
You stop letting them effect your emotions.
It's just that easy, and just that hard.
Actions speak louder than words. To know doesn't mean to understand — to grok. That means you have to feel the knowledge and live the knowledge. You have to act on it.
The only apology that matters is changed behavior. If words are wind and only actions matter, if I could never say that I'm sorry, instead I would live my apology to my dear departed friend every day.
So I changed my behavior to take control back over my emotions.
I'm the only one who can. And for you, you're the only one who can.
I Am Not Naturally a People Person
I love people. I love to serve people, take care of them, help them, do stuff for them. I love to make them laugh most of all.
That doesn't mean being personable comes naturally to me. I find people enigmatic. Frustrating. Obscure and inexplicable. Frankly, people often exhaust me. They can be mean, rude, and dismissive for reasons I will never understand.
But I'm tired of living through media (he said without a hint of irony in a blog post while quoting memes) and the only real lived experience is interpersonal.
As you get older, you know fewer people. To counter that, I started to make a practice of going out and intentionally meeting people. At first I was anxious. It had been years since I'd met a lot of new people. College, then entrepreneurship networking events.
What if they don't like me, they don't want to talk to me? What if they tell me to go away?
I tried to be nice, friendly, make them feel good, make them laugh.
Some people didn't like me. Some people didn't want to talk to me. Some people did ask me to go away. But most didn't.
About 20% of people aren't interested. About 40% of people don't care one way or another. And the remaining 40% of people enjoy meeting someone new.
Instead of feeling anxious meeting new people and starting a conversation, now I feel anxious when I don't go out and meet new people.
Emotional resiliency and social skills are like a muscle, when you don't exercise them, you don't want to exercise them, but when you get in the practice of exercising them, it feels weird when you don't exercise them.
The Answer to the Cold is Warmth
Right now, I have to roust up clients for PaynPoint. For now, that means cold calling.
I don't particularly like it. To be honest, it's a real chore.
The results are about the same as when I approach strangers for a brief, hopefully enjoyable, conversation. About 20% want nothing to do with me — cool, no problem, goodbye! About 40% are neutral and it goes nowhere. And about 40% are totally into it and want to learn more.
How do I do it?
Same as it ever was. I try to be warm, friendly, polite, respectful. I make dumb jokes. I'm authentic, admitting to weaknesses, failures, mistakes. Did I do that? Oh yeah, I definitely did. Ha! What a dork!
People want to tell you about themselves, so ask questions. Be genuinely curious. Listen to their answers and follow up. They'll say something interesting, tell them it's interesting. Yeah, I like that too! I do that too! I have one of those too! How do you do that? Tell me more! People want to be cool, they want to be interesting. Let them.
One lady wanted to talk about her passion for homemade tortillas, so we talked about that instead of robots.nxt. Why not? I love tortillas! I bet hers are delicious.
And when they're mean, or rude, or dismissive? Laugh. People are funny, so let it be funny. Negative responses can be very funny. When they get mad, just laugh, shrug it off, wish them the best, and move on.
You can't win 'em all, and you don't need to. You don't know why someone responds the way they do and never will. You can't let their emotions change your emotions.
Brush it off, keep smiling, keep being friendly, keep being kind, and keep moving.
Stay in control, and always move forward.
Cold Calling is Not a Solution, It's a Step
That aside, unrequested contact isn't an end-point, its a discovery step. It's a phase you have to go through, but it's only a phase.
Warmth is always better. A warm lead, a warm intro from someone you both know, inbound interest who is already searching for what you have.
Warm intros take a lot of time to turn up. And getting to productive inbound leads can take a lot of marketing and advertising to get right.
You'll move towards inbound and warmth once you get the engine started, but in the beginning you have to do the hard, slow slog of figuring out what works, who likes it, how to talk about it, and who to talk to.
Life is a series of ebbs and flows. You can start with some warm intros between people you know, but those will run out, unless you're super connected or super targeted. And once those run out, then what? You take what you learned and use it on cold outreach.
That cold outreach improves what you know, how you target.
As your targeting improves and you find people who warm up to you, ask them for more intros. And you keep doing that until you know how to generate that warmth and keep it flowing inwards to your business. Then you can market and advertise. And use that inbound to get more warm leads.
Cold engines can be hard to start, but once the engine is running, it makes its own warmth.
Use the ebb and flow, understand it, embrace it.
Claim your power, center it, build it, and project it out into the universe.
And like all else in life, when the time is right, let go of what has been, and move on.