Recognising your emotions about your target market changes your sales strategy

One of the toughest things that I realised while trying to decipher the human mind was how tough it was for us to identify causation and effect effectively. Most people seem to believe that thoughts come before emotions; I had people who told me “because I think the guy is a jerk, therefore I felt unsafe around him.”

However, I had discovered that thoughts tend to be an explanation, rationalisation or expansion for emotions rather than the source or cause of emotions.

This greatly affects my work as an entrepreneur (I’m now on my 5th entrepreneurial run) and learning this has helped me cope with the immense stress of being one. We need to understand the value of emotions in our work to have more efficient and effective decision-making processes.

Neurological Pathway

From neurological research, the sensory input always goes through the emotional centres of the brain before it reaches the frontal cortex – the place for our rational thought. With that understanding, one must realise it is physically impossible for thought to come before emotions.

Our subconscious mind would often take our sensory input and sends it to the unconscious, where the unconscious will match it with similar previous memories to pull up the emotions associated with the input. Like how certain scents remind you of your mother/wife/girlfriend etc., or a photo triggers a memory of an event, these are all pulled out from your memories. Psychologists call these emotion-linked memories flashbulb memories.

Emotions are the memory system’s way of organising information. When memories get solidified and saved into our unconscious, it is stored with the memories and patterns that we observed from those experiences. That is why it is easier to remember associated events when we feel a particular emotion.

Also read: Win people over with these 5 simple psychology-based tricks

What Are Emotions?

We’ve been talking about emotions for a while and haven’t defined it, which would further confuse you if we don’t address it now. Allow me to define emotions as a group of reactions that our unconscious mind creates and uses to try to communicate with the rest of the mind about what it notices. These could come in the form of an activation of your happiness, love, fear or anger neurological pathways. Emotions could come in the form of a physical feeling in your body; it could come in the form of a visualisation or audiation of what you can foresee.

Our commonplace definition of emotions is often that of “feelings” which we would portray physically or verbally. However, if we redefine unconscious reactions as “instinct”, of which “feelings” are a subset, it’ll open up a lot more aspects of emotions.

Emotions are often paired with instinctive reactions. For example, if a ball were to fly right at you, your emotional reaction of fear would make you dodge or run away, while an emotional reaction of excitement would help you predict the flight path of the ball so that you could catch it.

Of course, these are overly simple ways of looking at it, but your unconscious, which creates these emotions, is simply trying to communicate with the subconscious and conscious to warn, predict and deal with whatever it deems to be happening.

Emotions vs. Thought

When we talk about “gut instinct”, “business acumen” or “artistic vision”, these are all messages from our unconscious that should be labelled “emotions”. On the highest level, we call these messages “vision”, because they function as predictions and perspectives that enable us to deal with the situation with our available skillsets. It is borne out of experiences we have of different scenarios.

Rational thought, on the other hand, is something that uses biases of the emotions to put words to an experience. I had a friend that once asked me why he had different thoughts about himself when he was feeling down, as opposed to when he’s feeling happy. The thoughts went from “you are useless” to “you are amazing”, even though it’s the same person in the mirror.

When he felt trashy, his thoughts were an extension of how his unconscious assessed the situation; his unconscious pulled out memories of failure, judgement and disgust towards himself, informing the rest of his mind how he should believe he would fail in life. While he was feeling bad, his unconscious pulled out memories of success, achievement, value and meaning. Naturally the deduction by the conscious part of the mind – the portion in charge of rational thoughts and putting words to them – would drastically change his opinion about himself.

This is also why when a person is in the midst of an argument, everything sounds bad, and things escalate no matter how small the issue is. Wait for them to calm down, and they invariably have a completely different set of responses.

Rational Thought To Change Emotions

There is a different side of this, as well. When we deal with situations we feel fearful about; we can change the way we feel by using rational thought to help create new memories for a different future reaction. For example, when we see a person with tattoos that seems scary to us, we might think the person is probably a thug or a gangster and worth avoiding. If we continue to allow the emotion to take place and avoid him, we would continue to believe that such people are worth fearing.

However, by going up to the person and asking him about the tattoo and probably even understanding the story behind it, we might gain new insights on people with tattoos, and therefore create a new unconscious reaction to people with tattoos using the new information gained from this experience.

When people say they support or hate Trump and refuse to listen to reason, it’s because the unconscious is at play, and only through creating new positive memories and experiences of the other side can they be more open to look at the situation rationally. People can also train themselves to instinctively look for the opposite viewpoint to challenge one’s negative emotional reaction to other people’s opinions or situations. So, as much as thoughts do not necessarily change current emotions, they definitely have the power to change future emotions, if we channel them in the right direction.

How To Use This Knowledge

This is why practice in life is so essential – it trains the unconscious to run on its own to assess each situation in the manner you deem fit; with love, positivity and understanding. This allows one to be truly rational and accepting towards reality, and is the most important reason why one has to recognise that emotions come before thoughts.

Also read: You need a better understanding of buyer psychology to succeed in business

And being an entrepreneur is all about making effective, quick decisions as adversity and problems roll in. You’re functioning not only as the business owner, you’re also the HR manager, accountant, salesperson and marketing person.

So with the knowledge above, here are 3 tips for making use of emotions in your decision-making process:

1. When a crisis arises, rather than ignoring your emotions and pushing past the issues, stop and recognise why you feel this way, then make a decision from there

When people ignore their emotions in the process of managing a crisis, they often end up turning into a different person in front of their partners and colleagues, causing confusion and more stress for yourself and others. This has deep effects on the whole team moving forward.

It’s not about what you do that matters the most, but how you do it. You might be a great person who knows how to take everyone’s opinions in to make better decisions, but if you are barking orders and stressing out everyone else, it just makes things worse. Instead, by sharing your emotional state like, “I’m very troubled by how this has happened, could I have your thoughts on this?” is more likely to get better and clearer responses from your colleagues and partners.

This changes the game because it would soothe your emotions as you express it, allowing you to think straighter. Your partners and colleagues would also be happier to contribute and would use more of their creative juices on the situation, as fear emotions often cloud the ability to do so. Not everyone enjoys a good challenge like you do. This avails you more perspective and sometimes even better understanding of the stakeholders to make more effective decisions.

2. Recognising your emotions and expressing it allows you to vocalise your biases to allow you to let go of the difficult things

One of the toughest decisions an entrepreneur goes through is pivoting. It is very hard to let go of the baby you created for the last few years of your life. By recognising the pain you went through to create such a product and acknowledging that having to let go of it seems difficult, this allows you address the issues directly and objectively.

How do you know when to cut loss? How do you know what are the non-essential parts of your product/company/system? How do you know if you’re actually a visionary rather than being a deluded person?

The most important point is to entertain all the ideas about what your emotions on the situation are. “Yes, I could be holding on” is a great first step to seeing objectively whether you’re making unnecessary moves because your bias stopped you from it. By interjecting it with new rational thought, it allows you to improve your business acumen and decision-making frameworks through new experiences of success and failures in decision-making.

3. Recognising your emotions about your target market changes your sales strategy

One of the hardest thing about monetisation is about finding your ideal target market. Many of us spend too long trying to prove what we think our market is rather than actually adjusting to how the market moves.

What if you already have a ready pool of clients that you never recognised before? If you spent too long and too much energy on another pool of non-responsive clients, it would be hard for you to make a willing switch. This means time and money, and fundamentally, the survival of your business because it means sales.

It is okay to be close to the clients that you have. It is also okay to be misguided about what is your market. There might be an ocean waiting for you while you’re fishing in a pond, but until you created the system for the pond, you never knew you could take the ocean. It is part of the process and coming to terms with the emotions is critical in changing the way you look at this process.

Appreciate your current clients and the headway you made, and by addressing these emotions and creating a new process of understanding your clients, you might just be able to straddle both sides if you allow yourself to straddle it well. It allows you to come up with clearer plans of monetisation while creating the impact you desire.

Conclusion

This is why it is critical for everyone to understand how emotions, not thoughts, come first. Especially as an entrepreneur where every decision you make and every thought you have affects your whole business which is larger than yourself, it is important to recognise the importance of emotions.

May this help you achieve the impact you’ve been seeking!

—-

The post How to leverage emotion in establishing sound business strategies appeared first on e27.