ESYB2 028 - Your Brain and Business
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[00:00:00] Now I want to talk about how your brain affects your business and how your business actually impacts your brain and your decision making. So when we're starting a business, many things don't go right. And very often we experience emotions like fear, anger from being rejected, anger after being, after failing at some things.

Now, Those kinds of emotions, they are handled first by the part of your brain that's called the amygdala. You might have heard of this, sometimes referred to as your lizard brain, the animal brain, it has many names. That's because that's the part of our brains that evolved very early in our evolution.

And when we get impulse, the amygdala is responsible for the very fast, immediate response. So if there's a predator You really need to make a quick decision. Fear is the right response, because if you don't have fear and there's a predator, [00:01:00] well, you're not going to live long enough to pass your genes and your ancestors didn't make it here.

The ancestors who made it here have the right fast fear response. The nice thing that happened is we also evolved from that and we developed many additional tools. So when you look at brains and compare animal brains, obviously human brains are bigger, but there's a part of the brain that's disproportionately bigger, the prefrontal cortex right here in the front of your brain, it evolved a lot later.

And that part of the brain is responsible for things almost opposite of the amygdala. It's responsible for context, for thinking about things, for reasoning, for logic. So, it works kind of like this. You get, you get an impulse, the immediate first part of the brain that handles that impulse is the amygdala, which is kind of near your brain stem right here.[00:02:00] 

And then about a second later, or two seconds later, depending on the stimuli, your prefrontal cortex kicks in. So, let's say something as an example. Something bad happens, you got some bad news, you lost a lot of money, or you made a sale, and you're really, really happy, and then this customer says, I want a refund of all my money, and your business is terrible, here's a one star review.

Immediately, angry. Of course you're angry and frustrated, right? That's the natural response. That's your amygdala. If you respond immediately to this client, the nature of the response may be filled with unbridled anger, uncontrolled frustration. You might let that spill out. Don't. The first part of emotional intelligence is recognizing the emotion you're having.

Give yourself one or two seconds, because in one or two seconds, your prefrontal cortex will [00:03:00] kick in and it will start thinking, Well, maybe this client has a point, something that they didn't like, maybe, maybe they have a valid point. Or, even if they didn't have a valid point, I still have to treat my customers right.

Or, what if I just explain it to this customer how to use the product better? That might make them happy, you know, basic customer support. That might make them happy and they may not want the refund anymore. Or, if I don't give the refund and they leave a bad review, well that's going to damage my business for the long term.

That's actually going to damage me more. Like if I respond with anger, that might damage me more. So then you reason to yourself and think, Oh, the anger was the wrong response. Of course, anger isn't always the wrong response. If somebody comes to your house and tries to rob you, anger is the right response.

But you see, in business, [00:04:00] in a lot of parts of life, you want to first, now you understand how your brain works in all this, and then you want to choose. Not be controlled by the impulses, not be controlled by the anger, but you want to choose the right emotional response that's appropriate for the situation after you've had a chance to think about it.

And then after you've had a chance to think about it, you're going to make a better, more accurate decision. Now, another very important thing. These Emotions that are handled by the amygdala because they are very fast and because they are designed to Handle the immediate the short term problem like if there's a predator or there is some threat you you need to have a short and a long term solution, but you certainly need to have a short solution and the problem with removing [00:05:00] short term threats is very often when you let the amygdala decide It's going to decide with short term solutions.

The short term solutions may not always be the best solutions, especially, especially in business. In business, typically the best solutions are the ones that take into account the short and the long term. So you want to give yourself a chance to think and reason. How do I solve this that's best long term?

So the response to the customer who wants a refund may be, Please tell me more about your experience so that you can understand what they went through and the deeper you understand what they went through, you will know how to fix those things in your business. , [00:06:00] maybe some confusion, maybe some bug in the product.

You'll fix that so that the long term, you won't get customers who have that same response because you understand the thought process and the experience process of that customer. You give them the right care, you give them the right understanding, and you change your business processes so that people who come into your business with similar needs and have the similar experiences.

don't have the same results because something, you fix something along the lines that helps them. And so that would be a great way to understand, use the understanding of how your brain works. to make better business decisions. And I have had this, like, in my entrepreneur journey, this has come up time and time again.

I'll give you an example. When I was first starting out, I was making a lot of videos on YouTube. And on YouTube, you know, they pay a little money per video if you get, kind of, let's say a thousand views. [00:07:00] You don't make a lot, so you have to make a lot of videos. And so I had this. lingering financial stress very early on where like I was making videos but they weren't making money or not enough money to sustain me so I kept making more videos because I just the right response would be to hold off on the immediate pain the immediate stress and the immediate fear of you know staying poor right and making that long term decision of So, let me take some time to improve how I make my videos and make my videos the best in class.

And after I make the best in my category videos, naturally they would have 10x, 100x the views. They just have greater potential. But because I was short term focus, I wasn't able to, it was so hard to make that decision. Looking back at it, I'm like, oh, no brainer. But back then, it was really hard to get my head above [00:08:00] water, to Think reasonably like that and to give myself more time where I'm not making money, right?

So I was stuck making videos, making videos, making videos, doing the bad work that was trying to fix the short term solution while not making decisions that would fix the long term solutions and obviously if I had just earlier Decided oh, let's focus on the long term. I don't care about the short term money But let's do everything so that I can position myself for the long term, that would've been infinitely better and it would have given me dramatically different result.

And kept me struggling short, short, a shorter amount of time. So these are just ways to use emotional intelligence and understanding of how the brain works and understanding of how basic emotions are processed in our brain so that you can make not short term decisions, but ideal Decisions that take advantage of the best, [00:09:00] that consider the best of all worlds, short term, mid term, and long term and all the context and reason deeply and then make that ideal decision which will steer you, which will give you best results.

