Let’s be honest.
Most people are not very good at this.
At first, it almost sounds dumb, like some cliche you hear from motivational speakers on a regular basis. Far from that, it is an extremely astute articulation of a decision one as an entrepreneur and a business owner has to consciously make on a daily basis.
On a daily basis, we must choose to put our priorities over our feelings. Again, not a difficult concept to grasp. However, it is a much more difficult concept to truthfully embrace whole-heartedly because let’s face it: humans are not very good at controlling emotion.
So here we are. Relegated to the endless tug-of-war.
Or are we? After serious reflection I realized that there is absolutely no reason to be or stay a slave to your emotions like this.
I recently had an extremely difficult client. My company prides itself on providing excellent customer service, going so far as to even provide our regular clients slack channels where they have unfettered access to us pretty much 24⁄7.
I found myself nearly having a stroke and moreover negatively impacting my relationship with my client (who luckily also happens to be a friend, or he probably would have fired me already) on a daily basis. Every day I was allowing my feelings to get in the way of my priorities.
This doesn’t mean that it is going to be easy. As a matter of fact, I had to take some rather drastic measures but in the end it has worked out for the best. We’ve reached the end of the week–neither one of us (my client or I) wants to kill each other and he has gotten better customer service this week than he has in several weeks.
You might be wondering, what changed? I put my PRIORITIES over my FEELINGS. Thanks to the wonders of technology: I shut down the Slack channel and deactivated my friend’s slack account. He no longer has the ability to distract us while we’re working or frustrate me with questions that I must impulsively answer. Impulsive in that I tended to overreact, so I had to change the dynamic of communication.
Our relationship has never been better.