How Emotions Negatively Affect Your Business

Our international community of salon owners is a divine space. It is where questions, hopes, dreams and vision are all shared.

You could call it both a space for inspiration and problem solving. After all, as entrepreneurs, we have and require an abundance of each.

Personally, I believe our community is yet to reach it’s potential. It is rare that we deal with negativity. However, we are all human and there are times when issues must be sorted out.

I love to think that we, as responsible women, not only in our community but in the beauty industry as whole, can continue to inspire each other and offer each other a safe and peaceful place to explore ideas, even conflicting ones, without creating division. Of course this can happen, but we also need to learn and grow together.

Why am I sharing this with you today? Well, if women are to discover how to grow exceptional businesses and teams, I feel what I am to share today is paramount.

How often have our partners, husbands or male friends thought of us as out of control or just having lost the plot? Why are women’s forums and groups often filled with arguments and with conflict? There are only two words here that are the cause… unresolved emotion.

I don’t want to sweep this under the carpet. Why should we when we can solve this eternal challenge? There is always an answer, we just may not have heard it as yet!

As women, we have a completely different life experience to men. Our feelings and our emotions are so much more accessible. We feel more and when we haven’t understood and embraced our emotional inner world, we either act out or we suppress. Either way, we damage our well-being and often our relationships. It need not be this way.

It’s time to share my experience with you. Why? Because no doubt you deserve it. You deserve to live an intimate and fulfilling life and you need ongoing growth to run a successful and strong business.

Growth is my daily practice, you could say, even though I don’t see it as a practice, but more a way of living that I love. I often watch the miracles, the love and the healthy resolutions that blossom from this way of living. Aren’t you excited?

Not so long ago, following our Emotional Freedom Webinar Series, one of my students asked me if I could share 10 steps on how I began my inner journey and how I came to develop the perspective that I live from. It has taken me a long time to reflect on this, only because of how important it is to share it honestly. So let’s give it a go and at least share a few.

Even as a small child, I threw tantrums just like most young children and often got what I wanted. I learnt that throwing around my emotions worked. Of course it didn’t and when it came to developing deep and intimate relationships, even building strong teams in my business, I was always challenged and left facing the same old issues and blaming others for them. I did this for a very long time, over and over.

At the age of 32, my life wasn’t working. I wanted more and had no idea how to get it.

I wanted more intimacy, more love, more productivity, more life and I was stuck, stuck in my old ways and suddenly it dawned on me that I had no real idea on how to live a meaningful life. None! Zero!

It was my first realization and somewhere deep within me, I was jumping up and down with glee.

The words, ‘I don’t know how’ kept coming up. I felt this incredible sense of relief and happiness.

I wasn’t a bad person or a stupid person. I wasn’t a misfit. I just didn’t know and with all of my heart and soul, I wanted to learn. I wanted to discover how to live my life in a way that was true, deeply meaningful and loving. I wanted to teach my children what I hadn’t learned and I wanted to hand them a legacy, a legacy of love.

More than anything I wanted to show them how to open their hearts and be in their lives without fear.

Huge call? Yes, it was.

As I began to realize that so many of my decisions were being made from fear, protection and lack, I knew there was another way and my determination became unfaltering. Every time I blamed someone else, pointed the finger outwardly, I began to realize something wasn’t quite right and I was failing to see where the real problem resided.

Now to get to today’s takeaway… my second realization came as a big blow… my emotions had no value!

In fact, every time I took action, wrote something, said something, decided anything from this space, I was wrong.

That’s right, even when I thought I was right, I wasn’t. This emotional way of being caused conflict. It created havoc and often attracted people to me who loved drama and had no other way of effectively dealing with life. I wanted out.

It didn’t mean that I judged those who behaved this way or that I felt more evolved or better than them. In fact, because of my own history I had far greater empathy for them. However, I just wanted out.

So, what am I saying?

I realized that my emotions were totally without value and I had to change. The journey was tough, relentless and took years to stabilize. I cannot tell you how many times and for how many years I struggled to undo this way of being. My emotions, or so I felt had a hold on me and there was, or so it seemed so often, nothing I could do about it.

Until one day, everything changed.

Had I accrued enough brownie points for all of my efforts over the years or had I just had enough and decided no more? I don’t know.

My entire life transformed. I was more peaceful, happier, extremely productive and my relationship with my husband, Toby, entered new realms of love and connection. And it was all because I stopped valuing my emotions and my fearful beliefs.

So what is the solution how can you begin? How can we as women share our thoughts, our fears, our disappointments without entering the world of conflict?

Think about it for a moment. We have had revolutions; we have fought for equality, equal pay and freedom, but look at our world. Has anything really changed? So we can vote. Have you seen the news lately? Have you read a newspaper recently? We honestly believe fighting for things get’s the job done, but ask yourself, has it really accomplished this over the centuries or are we now living in a more conflicted, more fearful and divided world than ever before?

As women we hold the key to so much resolution in our world. We have a mystery within us that has so much power to create change and the only requirement is for us to choose love over fear.

Does this mean that you have to bow down and not speak out, be trodden on and become a doormat? Certainly not. What it actually means is that when you speak, you will be heard, you will be trusted and loved.

I can teach you how to do the most beautiful brows in the world, but if I don’t teach you this and support your growth as a woman in your life, I will have failed to fulfill a deeper purpose.

Until next time…

Love

Elle