Last week I was at the inspiring Entrepreneurial Scotland Summit at Gleneagles.
I love the idea of Emotional Equations (see the link to various posts featuring the concept here), as coined by Chip Conley in his book of the same name.
At the event, the speakers were all amazing and inspirational in different ways, and one of them was Mark Bamforth, an engineer turned entrepreneur.
The Emotional Equation he shared was all about what it takes to change.
Though he didn’t coin it as an Emotional Equation, is surely was. His story was all about the highs and lows energetically of his entrepreneurial journey.
Human beings change through feelings (see the post Sentio Ergo Sum), and we all either change through the impetus, the desire, the need to move either away from a feeling or towards a feeling.
Both directions are powerful, and both have a time and a place. As an energetic leadership tip, change tends to be made easier when one identifies change as being towards something rather than away from something.
For example, two leadership visions, which could easily be to do the same work, simply phrased differently :
- Away from
- “we need to fight to stay ahead of the competition or they will destroy us and our business will fail”
- Towards
- “our industry is so fast moving, our superpower is to constantly innovate to always be at the forefront, to bravely step up and step out ahead of the field”
So, to the formula Mark shared. He is an engineer, and what I liked about it was the third dimension, the “Formula”. I derived the Emotional Equation from the book “Grit” as Grit = Passion x Perseverance, yet such an energetic drive is even more powerful when combined with a formula, a process, a structure, a method.
Dissatisfaction x Vision x Formula must be greater than Resistance
Thanks to Mark Bamforth for crediting David Gleicher