Top 5 Emotions That Sabotage Business Success

by Dr. Vesna Grubacevic

Are you lacking the motivation and confidence to start your business, to promote yourself, and to take action? When was the last time you lost your temper or regretted how you spoke to someone else in business? Would you like to know how to stop your emotions sabotaging your success and souring your professional relationships?

When it comes to personal and professional success, taking consistent action is critical to ongoing success. This is where our emotions play a key role. Our emotions can either motivate us to take action or sabotage our confidence and success.

Are Your Emotions Balanced?

There are two types of emotions: balanced emotions and out-of-proportion emotions. Our emotions are balanced when we feel an appropriate level of emotion in a particular situation. For example, if someone is rude towards us, it is appropriate to feel a little angry or annoyed.

Our emotions are out-of-proportion when our “buttons” are pushed, when we feel an overwhelming emotion or we react to a person or situation in a way that we are unhappy with. For example, road rage is out of proportion anger. Feeling afraid to do the things you really want to in business or life is a sign of out-of-proportion fear. Out-of-proportion negative emotions hold you back, and often prevent you from fully accessing positive emotions. Hence, they can sabotage your confidence, motivation and success.

Top 5 Emotional Saboteurs

There are several negative emotions which can sabotage business success. These emotions can: sour your professional and personal relationships, they can prevent you from taking action, they can sabotage you achieving your goals and vision, they can prevent you from attracting wonderful opportunities, and they can have you feel stuck, unmotivated and directionless in business and in life. From my experience in working with thousands of professionals and business owners, the top 5 negative emotions that sabotage business success are:

1. Fear

Out-of-proportion fear holds you back from taking action, and fully participating in business and in life. Fear has you being a bystander and simply observing everyone and everything else, and wishing you could do the things you want. Fear keeps you stuck, and makes it difficult to trust yourself to make the right decisions for your business and your life. Fear-based decisions are often the least successful ones, and most regretted. When you trust yourself, fear becomes obsolete.

2. Rejection

Worrying about getting a “no” or being rejected when promoting your ideas, skills, products or services can cause you to avoid or put off business activities like making phone calls, converting leads, following up, networking, interviews, writing proposals, etc. When you fully accept yourself and value what you do and the products, services, skills and ideas you offer, rejection disappears.

3. Anxiety

Because our thoughts are linked to how we feel, any time we expect something to go well, we feel positive emotions (e.g. excitement, motivation) about that event or task. In contrast, when we expect something to not go well, we feel negative emotions (e.g. anxiety, dread) about that event or task. To stop worry, dread and anxiety, have positive expectations about upcoming tasks, meetings and presentations.

4. Anger

Anger can be destructive to our communication, and can sour our personal and professional relationships. When you start to focus on how you can control what others say, think and do, you are focusing on what is beyond your control. Because this is beyond your control and if you want to control it, you may feel frustrated or angry about the situation. Instead, focus on what you can control – changing your thoughts, feelings, actions and your communication.

5. Overwhelm

Overwhelm occurs when you think about all the things that need to be done. Focusing on everything at once leads to overwhelm, which can then result in procrastination and loss of motivation. Instead, prioritise your actions, set realistic time frames, and then focus on doing one thing at a time. Focused, prioritised action eliminates overwhelm.

How to Transform your emotions for business success

If your emotions are:

demotivating you and preventing you from taking action
souring your professional and personal relationships
sabotaging your confidence, passion, goals and vision
preventing you from attracting wonderful opportunities
leaving you feeling stuck, unmotivated and directionless

you can transform your emotions for business success by following these five steps:

Notice which of the above emotions are present for you day to day
Check whether the emotions are out-of-proportion to the situation
Quickly and permanently address any out-of-proportion emotions
Learn more effective ways to communicate, and deal with people and stressful situations so you avoid future anger and frustration
Learn how to help your family, friends and clients to quickly and permanently address their emotions and much more, while growing a successful business!

You are welcome to help yourself to some free NLP resources (including a free chapter of our best-selling book) to assist you with the above, and with greater personal and business success.

Dr. Vesna Grubacevic is an author (of the Amazon best-selling book, Stop Sabotaging Your Confidence), speaker, media commentator, and the founder and Performance Transformation Expert® with multi award-winning company, Qt. She holds a PhD, a BEc and is passionate about helping professionals and business owners to improve their confidence, emotional and mental wellbeing and success. As a passionate Trainer of NLP, Hypnotherapy and Qt respect i® techniques, she also has a 100% success rate in certifying hundreds of successful practitioners and hypnotherapists, so that they too can empower more people to live fulfilling lives!