There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love. You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath.
– William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)
By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics….. all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.
via What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology // ben’s blog.
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‘What is the emotion the potential customers want to feel or what is the emotion they have right now? Take that and play with it. Find a way to make that emotion motivate them or find out how they could learn from it. For example, if you have business owners in your list or your funnel, one of their biggest issues right now is the economy. That is an emotion—it is fear. You can turn fear into motivation by reassuring them that it can be okay, that they can make it through troubled economic times. Because it can be.’
Scott Stratten in UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. is discussing the use of emotion to engage and then make something go viral. It immediately made me think that he’s describing the core lever for human psychology. Leveraging our attention by triggering our emotion via our limbic system. Dr Boeree describes the limbic system as ‘primarily responsible for our emotional life, and has a lot to do with the formation of memories’
‘We are feeling creatures that think’
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