Business Can Be Hard: It’s Not Just Business—It’s Personal Too
We say it all the time, “It’s not just business—it’s personal too.” But when tough decisions have to be made or there are difficult challenges ahead, leaning into this is going to help. Here are three steps to better get through hard times.
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Announcer:
Welcome to the Overly Human Podcast, where we discuss all things human in the workplace. Because it's not just business—it's personal too.
Rob:
If you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard either Traci or I say on several occasions, "It's not just business—it's personal too." And we say that all the time, and I think we really do believe it. And for a whole lot of reasons, business is really hard. This thing of running a business and being able to be sustainable and to do this for any amount of time through different conditions is really difficult. And it really does become personal. And even when things are hard, those failures are not personal. They're not something you've caused.
What happens is both business and personal become so intertwined over time and almost to the point where you can't always separate them. So let's spend a little bit of time today talking about what we mean and why we are convinced that it's not just business, it's all personal.
Hey, Traci.
Traci:
Hey, Rob. I'm excited to talk about this one because I feel like as someone who coaches a lot of business owners and talks to a lot of business executives and companies that are small and companies that are really, really big, it's pretty universal. We experience hardships. We have people literally break our hearts in business.
And oftentimes because we have heard that phrase for so long, “it's not personal, it's business.” “Compartmentalize.” “You just got to put it on a shelf.” “You got to walk away.” “You got to not think about it.” And we're, we hear that over and over and we're conditioned to believe that when we do feel pain, and we do have people that we've done life with through business and things go awry, or we have to make hard decisions or business pivots or whatever happens that's difficult, we can sometimes beat ourselves up for feeling emotional or feeling sad or feeling whatever that is.
And I think it's such a good reminder for us, and I think it's one of the reasons why we came together on this podcast is to say, "No, we're all human beings. We feel emotion. We feel hurt.” And we're spending so many hours of our day in business and doing business and interacting with people and connecting.
And we often talk about how trust, building trust means we have to get to know each other and we have to let go, and we have to give, let other people have the reigns and all those things. And when hardship happens, we can go a little off the rails and it can be really hard for people, especially business owners.
I see this all the time in my conversations myself personally, and you and I talk about it a lot. It's you're carrying the weight of the business on your shoulders. At the same time you're experiencing all these emotions and it's hard to compartmentalize.
Rob:
And it's not even just the stuff that's happening in business, it's the stuff that happens in life that impacts business. It goes back and forth. There was always the kind of old saying of, "Hey, I leave the office at the office and I leave home at home," and I don't know about you, but I have yet to meet the human that is able to do that sustainably long-term. And it's one of those things that even people who will say that, they're just ignoring the crossover that exists. Those things impact each other in real ways because we don't have just one bucket of energy and emotion to pull from. Things cross over.
We live one total life and we have to recognize how those things impact each other, or they're going to influence us in ways that we don't even recognize. And that's a real danger, I think, when we talk about this stuff.
Traci:
Yeah. Recognizing our emotions, recognizing how we've been hurt or how a situation has been really tough to get through, I think is really, really important. I talk to so many owners and it's universal. People will be like, "I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and I'm reliving that conversation." Or, "I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and I'm dreading what I have to do the next day." Or just those moments of conflicts or decisions that have to be made and where you don't want to make them because they're going to be hard. And we postpone, postpone, and kick the can down the road. And then finally, when we experience a painful thing in business, how do we get through it? How do we reconcile?
And I have seen some leaders sit in it for a really long time. Like it's really, really hard for them to get through, especially if they've been hurt. And that could be in a million different ways. Somebody that they've trusted has done something wrong to them. Somebody who they thought they were going to promote to take their place leaves. Somebody they thought they could, a business partner, gosh, I've seen so many business partnerships where really hard things happen, and it started out with all the best intentions, and then things evolve and life happens, and all of a sudden partnerships break up and it's really hard.
We've seen that in so many of the events that we've gone to where we see people trying to heal from really tough things that have happened in business. And some people, we've noticed, can push through it better than others.
And I think that's hopefully what is going to be the takeaway here as we talk about it is we've experienced pain—you and I in our own businesses—and we've watched so many of our friends and fellow leaders and fellow owners experience pain. And so how do you get through it?
And I think we've talked about the first step, which is it's okay to feel, it's okay to be human. And so don't beat yourself up for feeling awful, for feeling like this totally sucks. I feel pain. That's okay, that's normal. Don't feel bad because you can't be the person that can say, "Oh, it's just business. It's not personal," and walk away.
Rob:
Yeah, we named that one, Let Go Of Self-Blame. And I think that that gets back to something that we talk about a lot even in the world of business, which is we call it the prime directive for retros, which is, I'll just say it again, “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available and the situation at hand. This means you.” I added that last part. If you did the best you could and you truly did that with the context you're in, then what are you doing? What utility is that self-blame giving you?
Traci:
Yeah, and it's because the whole Monday morning quarterbacking thing, you're doing that with all new information, not with the information you had at the time. And so that's a really difficult thing is you can beat yourself up because you think you should have made the decision based on everything now, but you didn't know back then, or there's only so much one person can do, whether that's in a business relationship or on a project or with a client or with a business partner or with an employee, there's only so much you can do. And being able to let go of that self-blame of just beating yourself up, that's the three o'clock in the morning thing. Where you're waking up and you're like, "Damn, why didn't this happen or that happen?" Or, "How could this be?" And it's a hard thing to let go of.
But psychologically speaking, if you allow yourself to keep waking up at three o'clock in the morning and you think about the same thing and you've done that, it only takes seven times, I think, it's like between six and eight times of doing that where it becomes a habit. So if you don't end that cycle, you will sit in that cycle. Your brain will automatically wake up at three o'clock and have that conversation in your head.
And when I learned that, it was one of the most powerful little bits of information that was ever given to me because it made me determined, with myself and with my clients, to stress the importance of reframing your brain. So when you wake up at three o'clock in the morning and you're wrestling and you're doing the self-blame and you're beating yourself up, why didn't you know? And why, blah? And all the things. You have to think of something else.
You have to train your brain to think of something else, whether that's counting sheep or planning your next vacation or thinking about the next thing you want, book you want to buy, or whatever it is. You have to change your thought pattern. And whether you're doing this awake or in the middle of the night, the middle of the day or the middle of the night, you have to recognize the patterns you're creating when it comes to self-blame or beating yourself up over anything in your life. And then stop and reframe.
Traci:
Hi, Overly Human Friends, it's Traci. And if you haven't heard, I wrote a book, it's called “What If There's More? Finding Significance Beyond Success” and it's out right now. If you're thinking about a career pivot, wanting to follow your dream, or just want to fall back in love with what you do, then I think this book is for you. And if you like what you read, please feel free to head on over and leave me a review. You can learn more at tracischubertbarrett.com and you can find “What If There's More” wherever you buy books. Thanks.
Rob:
I like that. I like whole ability to retrain our brain. So the second thing that we're going to talk about is naming what we've learned. That's this next step here. So we've let go of self-blame, but we still want to make sure we take the lessons forward with us so that we can make sure that we both named it and taken the good lessons away from it so that we can hopefully do better or do different. Maybe different is a better word than better.
Traci:
And this is the best exercise to go through with people who've experienced pain in business, but also failure of any sort. We want to always learn from these hard, tough moments, and that helps us move through it, get to the other side.
And so we can start to say, "Okay, well what's the silver lining? What have we learned? What is the good piece of information we can take out of this and move forward?" And I've seen that really help people get to a place where they can look at this moment with, again, less self-blame. We want to get to a place where it's like, for anything I've been through it's like, okay, what was it that kept you from making the hard decision? And you and I have talked about this quite a bit, about really being in touch with your gut, really knowing instead of denying, instead of pushing away, instead of thinking, "Oh, it'll just get better."
When you see things happening, it's kind of the Maya Angelou quote, "When people show you who they are, believe them." And it's the same thing with anything in business. We've talked about not having good clients. Sometimes people will keep them forever to keep the lights on. You know in your gut, at some point this person's—and we've heard these stories when we've gone to events too, where people will say, "I knew I should have let them go. I knew." And then all of a sudden it implodes and blows up.
We see that with employees, we see that with partnerships. It's denying your gut, I think for me, has been a big lesson in business to just keep the comfort level going. You don't want to do the hard thing. You're not sure how you'll even untangle it all, so you'll just hope for the best, even though you're seeing really bad patterns or this isn't the best thing for the company, or even your clients or employees.
We've seen so many people who've kept clients that have really beaten up their employees, and then we lose rock stars and all sorts of things. So I can say that's one learning I've seen claimed pretty often in these situations is like, "Okay, how am I going to get stronger and more bold and trust my gut and make clean decisions and really be the leader I need to be?"
And I think sometimes when it's really personal and you're hurt and the trust is broken, that's one of the hardest things to restore is getting that PTSD of like, "Oh gosh, can I trust another? Can I trust again?" And I think learning what erodes trust and what builds trust and kind of leaning into that as well. What are some of the learnings you've seen and hardships and business?
Rob:
Oh, well, I think that you hit one right on top of the head and we'll do a quick and formal survey of just the two of us. Have you ever had a hard thing that got better by ignoring it in business? Because I have yet to see one.
Traci:
No.
Rob:
Yet to experience one, yet to see one with anybody that I've worked with that has been, this has gotten better by ignoring it.
Traci:
And I can speak that that's the same no matter what size the company.
Rob:
Yeah. I think that's a big one is if you know something has to be done, I think there's a lot to be said by intelligently timing and picking your spots and all of that, but ignoring it won't make it better. It just won't. I have yet to see it.
The other thing that I think is really interesting here on those lessons that I think is worth talking about is making sure we don't over-index on them. Because context is important for lessons, and one of the things that I've seen is the shadow side of this is people thinking they've learned a universal lesson and applying it everywhere. And I think that's as almost as dangerous as not learning it is over application because it's not a golden hammer you get to walk around and smack everything with. Sometimes we don't understand or see all the context for which that lesson was learned or which that situation has happened.
So we have to be careful. That's the part that we talk about learning lessons and indexing those and understanding that, but application of past lessons requires wisdom and understanding how all the things come together and why it's different or could it be different? And I think that's a huge part of learning the right lessons at the right time.
Traci:
So what would be a good example of that?
Rob:
I think that, you kind of mentioned trusting people. If you take the lesson away that you can never trust somebody or you can't trust somebody in these situations, and you try to apply that all over the place, you are in deep doo doo as a human. Our systems run on trust.
I think one of the biggest skills a leader can have is understanding what activities build trust, what activities erode trust, and being able to make decisions that are going to build trust and format activities that will do that, because that's one of the fuels of our businesses is trust. And even in the small stuff, we've talked before about intent versus impact. Your intentions are great and we don't ever want to undermine what you intended to do because that gets the character and all of that, but your impact really matters.
And how we go about making some of these decisions and some of these things we have to do, if they're hard things or easy things, the way in which they're communicated and the way in which they're rolled out can almost always build trust or erode trust for the exact same decision.
So let's make sure that we're staying in the building trust lane. Even if it's hard, if there's trust and you approach it the right way, people will respond and trust you more, even if it's hard.
Traci:
Yeah. And sometimes the harder the thing you go through, the harder it is to apply what you're saying.
Rob:
Yeah.
Traci:
Because somebody is stealing from you or lying to you over and over again, and you find that out, it's really hard. The PTSD is real and you start to look at everybody like that. You start to look like, "Oh, my gosh, is everybody going to do that to me? Or should we...?" It's really, really difficult.
And like you said, we can over-index and make bad decisions off the bad thing that happened and forget that there are good things happening. There are good things happening, there are good people, there are good clients, there are great employees, there are great bosses, there are great leadership teams, there are good things happening. And so that's part of naming what we learned too, is okay, this was just a learning. And what do I need to do differently? Because clearly I did something wrong and I need to figure out what I need to learn and do differently next time.
That's what life's about. Every day is a learning experience. So I can't beat myself up because I've been given a learning experience. I'm not a perfect person, I'm not a perfect leader. I'm not a perfect, all the things that we have to say to ourselves to remind ourselves, life is always going to serve up ups and downs.
Rob:
It will.
Traci:
And so how do we learn from those? How do we push through and how do we see them as instead of soul-crushing and like you were saying, sitting in that mess forever and not moving on? How do we push through? And I think the naming the learning, embracing the learning, and then feeling grateful for it. I know that sounds weird, but I think feeling grateful for the things we learn through hardship is so helpful for our mindset moving forward and really helpful to get out of the downward spiral and to start looking forward.
Rob:
And just remember that I think the other piece of all of that that you just said was that having trust in humans relationships that are actually deep requires vulnerability. And if you're going to be vulnerable, you're going to be open for people to hurt you or to do things to you. And that comes part and parcel with that. You can't have deep, meaningful connections and relationships without vulnerability, and some people are going to take advantage of that vulnerability and hurt you. That doesn't mean that you stop being vulnerable because that is a path towards unfulfilling, untrustworthy relationships where you are always looking for the next person that's going to hurt you, and that'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Traci:
That is so important that you brought that up because I've had so many clients who I coach to be vulnerable. This is the type of leader you need, you the vulnerability-based trust, and then they do it, and then they get hurt and they say, "See, I should have kept my armor on. I should have, you told me to do the..." And you have to come back to, but look at everything else you've built.
Rob:
That's it.
Traci:
Like off of that trust, there's so much good from that. So this one painful thing, it's like, yes, does it sting? Yes. Are you going to go to your quick, I want to put my armor back on. I want to be this strong, dominant leader and not let anybody penetrate the armor so I don't get hurt again. Of course, you want to do that because you want to protect your heart, but then you're going to miss out on all the good and the good outweighs the bad. And you need that vulnerability-based trust.
Rob:
Humans are wired to avoid the pain more than they are to see the joy and the good in things. And vulnerability is the biggest way that shows up in my opinion.
Rob:
Well, it's that time again where we thank our sponsor, the Bureau of Digital, a community of digital makers that all get together and share and support each other. And today we have a special treat. Carl, the head of the bureau, is here with us. Hey, Carl.
Carl:
Hey, everybody. Thank you for having me be on the show. We don't sponsor any other podcasts, and when I listened to what y'all were doing, I was like, "We need to support them. We need to find a way that we can help." So I was like, "Ah, we'll be a sponsor."
Rob:
And we really do appreciate it. And if you have any questions, check out bureauofdigital.com. The 2023 event schedule is up and live. And a big change for this year is if you join and become a member, all of the online events are included and there's some really good ones you don't want to miss out. So don't wait. Visit bureauofdigital.com.
Rob:
Okay, step three, the third thing you have to do. So we let go of self-blame. We've named what we've learned and not over-indexed on it. The third thing is choosing to move forward. One foot in front of another.
And I think that the most important word in that whole thing is choose. You have to make a choice to move on. You have to decide that that's what you want and that's what you need to do and put the work in to do that because that whole word choose isn't just a one point in time, it's a verb that'll show up, usually for days and weeks and even months depending on what the kind of self-blame and what we've learned that you have to continue choosing to move on.
Traci:
I love the word choose. I think it is one of the most powerful words that I use in coaching. It's one of the things I use with myself every day is that, otherwise we're going to fall into autopilot, otherwise we are going to really think things are going to get better and they won't. Whether that's mentally, physically, intellectually, we have to make a choice. And usually, it's daily. Usually, it's every day when we sit down at our desk saying, "What is the choice that I'm going to make today? What am I choosing today to believe, to do, to achieve?" And literally starting your day like that can be a very powerful way to operate.
And so I think that's a new philosophy for a lot of people because they'll just plop down and start doing. And so I just encourage people who are, whether they're going through hardship or not, to spend each morning choosing your day.
Rob:
Yeah, I think that's it. And one of the phrases that we had said in our notes when we were preparing to do this was time heals all wounds. And we went back and forth about this for several minutes, and I think the word we had to add was time can heal all wounds, is that choice. You have to be an active participant in that if you choose it. Because to your point earlier was what time does is lessen the pain. It gives perspective.
Traci:
Yeah, it does. And I think having patience in this process is key, that time will give you distance from painful events. And in that time, in that distance, the sting starts to lessen. The healing is a whole other thing, but the distance away really, really lessens the pain. But we have to be patient for that. We want the pain to go away right away. Give me the pill. Where's the aspirin? Where's the shot? Whatever. I want the pain to go away. Well, when it comes to mental issues or emotion, there is no pill. It's just time. And it's doing the good work that we've talked about so far. But it's also just being patient. It will get better. This too shall pass is even almost a better phrase because it reminds you that it will get better. Just be patient in the process.
Rob:
Yeah. All right. Traci, what final words you got for people today?
Traci:
Oh, my goodness. Well, I think the premise of this podcast has always been to remember we're all human and we're navigating this world together. We're walking this planet together, and it's okay to be human in business and to feel all the things and to see each other as humans. And man, I wish more people were doing that because I do think there'd be less pain if we were really looking at each other as human beings instead of tools to get to achieve.
And I talk so much about this, even in my book, about when you get fixated on success metrics that are around money or power or title or fame, you will hurt people. And so focus on the right things and see each other as human and do the right thing. And if you are doing those things and you're getting hurt, just push through, learn from it, and keep going. Keep going. Don't give up on your business. Don't give up on being a leader. Just don't give up. Just push through.
Rob:
Yeah. You being a human is not a liability. It's an asset.
Traci:
Yes.
Rob:
So I wrote down something before we started, which was two kinds of business owners, people who have done hard things and people who will have to do hard things. And I actually want to amend it here at the end, is I actually think there's two kinds of humans. Humans that have done hard things, period.
Traci:
That sounds great.
Rob:
As always, Traci, appreciate you.
Traci:
You too. Thanks.
Announcer:
The Overly Human Podcast is brought to you by Navigate the Journey and Sparkbox. For more information on this podcast, or to get in touch with Traci or Rob, go to overlyhuman.com. If you like what you've heard, subscribe and tell your friends to listen. Thanks.
