← Build with Leila Hormozi
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Or you could say something like, I get why this is so stressful for you, but what outcome do you actually want here? What do you want to have happen? I love asking people when they are in an emotional state, what do you want to have happen? Because oftentimes what they realize is that the thing that they want to have happen will not happen if they act emotional. What's up, guys? Welcome back to Build. And today, I want to talk about a concept that has been top of mind for me all week, something I talked to my team about, something that I wrote about in our weekly newsletter, and that topic is that all feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not okay. About three years ago, I was in Cabo, Mexico, and we were walking somebody through a $25 million deal. And that deal that that person that would have changed their entire life fell apart. Not because of something that someone did, not because of some external force, but because that person wasn't able to manage their feelings. It was not the market. There was no competition that came in. Like, there was no external force. It wasn't like the firm suddenly changed their mind. It was like, literally one person's inability to separate what they felt from how they acted. Right? And I would even say how they felt from the values that they explained to me that they had when I met that person. And so before you think, okay, this whole episode's about somebody else and this deal that Leila did. No, this episode is about you. It's about me. It's about the fact that we often let feelings get in the way of the things that we really want in life, because they can be so enticing in the moment. And so I wanted to talk about this because I think this is something that it can break your business, it can break your relationships, and it can honestly break your entire life if you don't understand the difference between people who are able to build the life of their dreams and the people who burn them down simultaneously. And it comes down to one simple rule, which is that your feelings are always welcome, but all behaviors are not always welcome. And so I would like you guys to stick with me to the end of this episode, because I really want to put together a framework that hopefully will save you. 25 million in a lost deal, a lot of broken relationships, and a lot of wasted energy. Because at the end of the day, I think this stuff is what sucks us dry. It's what makes us feel bad about ourselves. It's what makes us not want to get out of bed in the morning if we aren't able to. To work towards our values rather than work against our feelings. So the reason this is top of mind for me is I was with a couple friends a few weeks ago, and one of them told me this fable. And I. It really got me thinking, and it really just centered around this entire concept of the fact that all feelings are welcome, but all behaviors are not. So there's a story, and it's about a monk. And the monk is walking through village, and he's with his student, right? He has a student that he's training. And when this woman that's around somewhere in the village, right, she just loses her freaking mind on them for no reason. She's screaming, she's attacking them. She's completely unhinged. They're not provoking her. She's just got pure irrational rage, right? And so the monk is with the student. The student immediately fires back. He gets defensive, he escalates the whole thing. You know that feeling when somebody comes at you and it's like every cell in your body is like, fuck. You fight back, like, defend. That was him, right? His adrenaline spikes. His face is red. He's yelling back at the stranger on the street. And so as he's doing this, you look at the monk. The monk, he doesn't even break stride. He just smiles and keeps walking as if nothing has happened. Later, the student is losing his mind. He's like, how could you just take that? How could you leave her treat you that way? She completely disrespected us. She was so out of line. And the monk says something that really resonated with me. And when I heard it, I was like, this is. This is very good. If someone offers you a gift and you refuse it, who does it belong to? It gives me chills. The student thinks about it, and he says, well, I guess the person offering it, he said, exactly. Her anger was a gift. It didn't accept it, so it stayed with her. Ugh. I don't know about you guys, but that gives me so many chills in my body. And. And it hit me so hard because most of us are walking around with bags full of other people's emotional garbage. Their rage, their insecurity, their chaos, their projections. And then we wonder, why are we so exhausted all the time? We're carrying stuff, emotions that were never ours to begin with. And so I'd say it's like, think about last week for you, or maybe even just yesterday. How many times did someone else's bad mood. Did someone else's feelings become your Bad mood or your feelings? How many times did you absorb somebody's stress and carry it around for hours or days? I'm coining this term. That is emotional gift giving. Right? And it kills our peace, it kills our productivity, it kills our relationships, it kills our progress in our business. So I will tell you guys a personal story of how I made a. Oh, gosh, I'm gonna put $10 million mistake on the line. I mean, it could have been more for sure, but I'm gonna make myself feel a little bit better and say it's a 10 million dollar mistake that I made earlier this year. And it will perfectly illustrate what happens when you get this wrong. So I had this team member, let's call him Jake, he was a, you know, great guy, talented. But, you know, he was going through a lot in his life. And like, I knew that and I knew it was affecting the business in some way. But instead of addressing his behaviors at work, of neglecting things, of getting things wrong, of making like, quite large errors, of just lack of oversight, I kept making his excuses for his feelings. I kept making excuses for his feelings. I was just like, okay, well, Jake's stressed. You know, I think he's dealing with a lot. I think he's got a lot on his plate. Look at how the company's grown. I think he just needs some more time to work through this. You know, I'm just trying to be understanding. And, you know, what happened is that his behavior got worse. He started missing deadlines. He would snap at people, and he started being rude to people on calls. He started not responding to requests from people on the team. He started telling me he couldn't make very important meetings. And then anytime I tried to address any of it, he got insanely defensive. And he would bring up all his personal situations. He would tell me, I just don't understand because I don't have the same skills as him. Meanwhile, the rest of the team started walking on eggshells around him. People started bringing up legitimate concerns because they didn't want to deal with his reactions. And then all the teams that worked with him, their productivity started to tank. And then as productivity tank, morale dropped. And I was like, fuck, I need to jump in here and take over these departments. And so eventually what ended up happening is that I had people come to me and they essentially said, if this is the standard that we accept, then I'm out. And I was like, yep, can't do that. And so, of course, before that happened, I had Jake make a very important decision, which was the wrong decision, which has now cost me easily 10 million in lost opportunity, plus probably 5 million in incorrect decision making. And so if I look at all the things that happened, for me, just being empathetic to Jake's feelings and the way that he let them dictate his actions, it's like, okay, the rehiring costs, the disruption of the team, the knowledge that walked out the door when he left, like, all those things. But here's the main thing, is that it didn't even fucking help Jake, right? By enabling his behavior, I actually made the situation worse because he never learned to separate his personal struggles from professional responsibilities. He never developed the emotional regulation skills that he actually needed. And there's a name for this that I learned when I was in Children of Alcoholics Anonymous, which we can talk about that another day. It's called emotional enabling. Okay? That is when you allow. When you let someone's internal state justify external damage to others. How many times have you done that? How many times have you let somebody else's internal state, how they feel justify how they damage others externally? The truth that I had to face in that moment and that I have, I have felt. I've carried guilt for sure from that. I feel like it was the biggest mistake I made this year is that your feelings are always valid, but your behavior is still a choice. Your behavior is not controlled by your feelings. Your behavior is not controlled by your thoughts. They are separate mechanisms. Jake's pain, his dismay, his worry, his anxiety, all those things, it was legitimate. But taking it out on his team, taking it out on his job, not showing up, that was a choice. And by not addressing it, I also taught him that his emotions were other people's responsibility. If I think back to a moment in my life where everything changed for me, right? It was actually when I downloaded, gosh, this is going to show my age. It was like 10 years ago, we first got apps on the iPhone. And I remember downloading an app that was helping with meditation. And I learned about this concept. And it completely shifted how I saw emotions. And I think that once you understand this and you think this way about them, you will not see conflict and you will not see feelings the same way. It was literally just this visual imagine. Your thoughts and feelings are like leaves floating in a pond. Okay? They float different ways. Some are clustered, some are moving fast, some are moving slow. Sometimes they look like they're going down the drain. Sometimes they're helpful. Sometimes they're completely irrational and floating in some weird way. Cause the wind is Driving it, or a fish is jumping up to it. But the key is, is that you're just watching, right? You don't grab the leaves out of the pond just because they're going the wrong way. And they don't get to decide what you do. They can float whatever way that they decide to float. They can swirl, they can move fast, they can move slow. But ultimately you decide what kind of attention you put on them. I think it's that most people think that the goal is to have all the leaves always floating in this nice, pretty direction. So they spend all their energy trying to control the water, AKA trying to control their emotions, trying to suppress their feelings, trying to eliminate stress from their lives. But that is fucking impossible. And that's not even the point of living. The goal, right, is to acknowledge the beliefs because they have important information at times, right? But keeping that in mind, which is that they do not control you. You are just there to watch them. So what does that mean in terms of, let's say, business? Okay, you can feel overwhelmed and still show up professionally. You can feel frustrated and still treat people with respect. You can feel scared and still make hard decisions. The feeling does not excuse the behavior ever. And so I see this confusion everywhere where people say things like, well, I'm just really stressed right now, as if that explains why they're so fucking rude to people. Or, you know, I'm just going through a lot, as if that justifies missing commitments to people. Stress doesn't make you rude. Going through stuff doesn't make you unreliable. Those are choices that you're making about how to handle your internal experience. People who succeed, they feel the same things everybody else does, but they don't let those feelings drive the fucking buzz. And that's just the truth of it, guys. The amount of days that I wake up and I don't want to do this, I don't want to do what I'm doing. It's more than not because there's something going on. There's some huge fire I'm putting out. There's some turmoil. Maybe it's my health that's going on. Like, there's so many things that I've dealt with even just in this year. Lawsuits, health, personal things, family stuff. Like, there's so many things that make business hard. But I'm not going to let those feelings justify what I do with my business, how I treat people, how I talk to people. So I want to give you guys the framework that I think through when I think through my own emotions and how they dictate the outcomes of my life. And it's the same one that I teach people within our team when they're dealing with people who are dealing with their emotions, too. Okay, the first step is that we want to acknowledge without shame. This is crucial if somebody is emotional. If somebody is stressed, do not say, calm down, don't be emotional. You're overreacting. Those phrases literally just escalate somebody because now they feel like you're gaslighting them. Instead of. Instead, say something like, I can see you're clearly frustrated right now. This situation is clearly stressing you out, understandably. So you're not agreeing with their interpretation. You're not taking responsibility for their feelings. You're just acknowledging that they're having experience. You're validating it. This alone can help deescalate the emotions that someone's feeling and get them thinking more clearly. So that's the first step I want to acknowledge without shame. Now I will also say, acknowledge your own feelings without shame. There's nothing wrong with feeling scared or feeling angry or feeling like people who hide the fact that they feel these things. I feel bad for them because that means they're just suppressing or ignoring or distracting themselves with other things. We are meant to feel emotions. We are just not meant to let our emotions dictate our lives. The second step is we want to redirect to what actually matters. Okay. Once you acknowledge the feeling, you redirect to the outcomes, your frustration makes complete sense. I completely understand. Totally reasonable, and let's make it figure out a way to move forward professionally despite this. Or you could say something like, I get why this is so stressful for you, but what outcome do you actually want here? What do you want to have happen? I love asking people when they are in an emotional state, what do you want to have happen? Because oftentimes what they realize is that the thing that they want to have happen will not happen if they act emotional. So notice one thing I said, and I get this is stressful. And I'm really curious, what do you want to have happen? I'm not saying, but I'm not saying stop. I'm not saying, oh, what you said doesn't matter. I am just redirecting them towards, what are we going to do next? To get what you want. That's it. It's like what they don't think in the moment, or what you don't think in the moment is the fact that acting out of your emotions probably won't get you what you want. It'll actually probably take you further away. Which brings us to the last step, which is maintain standards. Okay. This is where most people fail, because they think being empathetic means lowering your standards, and it doesn't. You can acknowledge somebody's emotional experience while still maintaining behavioral expectations. What does that sound like? Listen, I understand that you're going through a difficult time and I want to support you. But what I can't do, what I can't allow, is allow this situation to impact our team or our deliverables. So let's figure out what support looks like within our standards. At acquisition. Com, I literally have said that twice in the last week. Like, this is a real example. So I'll give you another real example. So I had an employee recently who had a lot of things happen in their personal life, and they were really upset over a decision that we made on the team because they felt like it changed direction. And after working on some of this, you know, this project, they felt like their efforts were wasted. And so the old me might have been like, that's business, get over it. Or the really old me might have said, I understand, take all the time you need. I'm wrong, I suck. I'm gonna, you know, I would go one way or the other. The really old me, it's like I go way too empathetic and take responsibility for something that was the right decision for the business. And then the I would say, you know, four year old me would've been like, it's business, get over it. Like, or get off the POC type of thing. And instead I said this. I said, listen, I understand that you're really angry about this change. And honestly, I would be frustrated too. I totally get it. It represents a ton of work you did. And we still need to deliver excellence to this. We still need to come through on this project. So let's take five minutes for you to process and then let's just talk about what we're gonna do next. Then what'd he do? He took five minutes and then he came back to me and he said, okay, I'm still annoyed, but here's what I think we should do. That is emotional intelligence. And what I did is leadership. I'm leading them toward a solution. They're not leading them towards their feelings. Right? And so he felt fully how he was feeling. He didn't suppress it or pretend it wasn't there. But he also didn't let it hijack his entire professional relationship with me or his team. And so what this framework does is it allows us to honor and respect their feelings, their experience, while maintaining operational excellence. I think a lot of the times people think it's either or. It's not. It is both. And so what's the cost of getting this wrong? Okay, here's what happens when you don't master this distinction in business. They'll obviously lose deals. I have seen so many negotiations fall apart because someone took a comment personally. They made a personal comment, you know, instead of focusing on outcome. And I've watched partnerships that people have been in business together for years dissolve because people could not separate their egos from their business decisions in relationships, right? Because it's not just in business. You create drama cycles. Someone gets upset, you absorb their emotion. Now you're both upset. Nothing gets resolved. You just fucking yell at each other and you end up fighting about feelings. Instead of solving any problems in leadership, you lose credibility. Your team watches how you handle difficult emotions, both your own and others. And if you're reactive, they become reactive. If you're inconsistent with standards, they will push boundaries constantly with you. Here's the hidden cost that nobody talks about, that really resonates with me. You lose respect for yourself when you constantly absorb other people's emotional states. You stop knowing where you start and where you end. You stop and you start being this reactive vehicle to everybody else's feelings rather than being a purpose driven leader or person, whatever you want to call it. The most successful people that I know, billionaires, athletes, incredible leaders, they have one thing in common. They feel everything and they let it drive nothing. I really want that to sink in for you guys. I feel everything deeply, but I do not let it drive me. We have all emotional experiences. We don't suppress or deny, but we train ourselves to observe our emotions and not be controlled by them. So here's what I want you to try this week and this one shift, I think will change a lot for you guys, okay? When somebody comes to you with their chaos, their anger, their drama, panic, their whatever it may be, their stress, I want you to picture them holding out a box. In fact, I want you to picture them holding a gift for you. You have two choices. You can take the box and carry their stuff around, or you can smile and say, no, thank you, that's yours. That's it. No, thank you, that's yours. I would not like that right now. I'm good. I'll pass. Their emergency, their really panicked emotions, it doesn't need to automatically become your anxiety or your stress. Their anger doesn't need to be Your anger, their inability to regulate their emotions doesn't need to be your problem to solve. And so here's what nobody tells you. Every time you accept someone else's emotional gift, you're also teaching them that their feelings are your responsibility. That is how you end up with a team or a marriage or a list of people who never learn how to handle their own stuff, that always rely on you, which then, by consequence, you end up resenting them, and then it ruins the relationship anyways. And I had to learn that the hard way of my own family. I used to think that being a good daughter meant I absorbed my mother's stress, that being a good wife meant I absorbed my husband's pressure, and that being a good leader meant that I carried my team's stress. But all I was doing is crazy, is I was enabling everybody else around me to stay emotionally immature while then feeling like shit myself. And so the day I started saying to people, like, I can see you're stressed and I love you, and let's talk about what to do moving forward, everything changed for me. Cause I stopped taking it on. I stopped absorbing all the emotional blows. So my challenge for you this week, today, tomorrow, whatever it is, first notice when you're about to accept somebody's emotional gift, there's usually a physical sensation you get, tense your stomach, you feel that urge to, like, get out of the situation. That is probably your cue. The second is that you want to ask yourself, is this mind to carry? Most of the time, the answer is no. And then third is practice this phrase, all feelings are welcome. All behaviors are not. Say it to yourself. Tell your team about it, talk to them, say it to your family, feel whatever you feel, own whatever you do, and then stop carrying this baggage that doesn't belong to you. People who understand this and actually implement into their lives, they are the people who build amazing companies, build amazing relationships, and build lives that they're actually proud of because they have energy for what matters. They're not wasting on other people's emotions. So remember, you cannot always control the gifts people offer you, but you can control which ones you accept. Guys, if you know somebody who is carrying emotional baggage for others, if you see someone on your team doing it for other people on the team, if you see someone doing it in their personal life, please send this to them. Everyone needs to hear this. My life was so heavy before I understood this concept. And I can just say, this has changed my life for the better 10 times over. So enjoy the rest of your day, Walk, week, workout, and I will catch you on the next one.