week 74: do you lead with facts or feelings?

whatever it is, first be clear

thank you to over 11,000 of you who read this weekly and share with your friends and family for behind the scenes on building a million dollar business from scratch and beyond.

i also include a personal note in the end so i am grateful that you let me do that without judgement.

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whoever said the it’s business and not personal is wrong.

everything is personal. 

try hiring someone and then letting them go.

try selling someone and getting a no.

try renewing a customer just to find out we are not even close.

i think i just made up a poem :)

and it’s extremely hard to not to take it personally.

someone once told me, the worst part of being a leader/CEO is that no one tells you good news… partially true in my case but still true.

everyone comes to you with problems and not always solutions.

but recently i learned to differentiate between facts and feelings.

feeling convos: some conversations are simply an opportunity to listen and not react. 

i fail at this often and want to offer solutions even before the other person is done sharing their feelings. all i had to do was listen.

but as the author of the book of James reminds us that the tongue is the most unruly among all parts of our body and no one can tame it. 

our words have the power of life and death.

fact convos: these are conversations when you have to engage at the fact level which requires asking tough questions like these:

• what problem are you trying to solve? 

• what is the end game here?

• what would you recommend needs to happen and then what’s stopping you from taking the lead on this?

the fact conversations when heard well, can make people leaders on the team.

i am learning the difference between feeling and fact conversations and it’s hard when you want to create great culture at the speed of startup.

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on a personal note, my son and i were having a conversation about his new tennis coach and i could see a visible shift in his mood and the way he plays.

at this new place, Krish told me that he:

• doesn’t feel judged

• can be himself

• learning something new that is hurting his brain

what’s amazing is when i asked him what does he miss about the other place, he said, just that there are more high performance kids he gets to rally with.

we talked about what’s the end game here - he said, to be the best player in the world.

well then i told him, he has to do things that others don’t.

you don’t go to the same academy that everyone goes to because they are all learning the same thing.

instead, we created a new routine.

2 days, he will learn with this new coach and do match play so he can guide him.

1 day a week play with really high level kid to increase his aptitude for the game and know how far he needs to go so i have him playing with a 27 year old kid who got scholarship to do tennis and now just started to do coaching. 

i have Krish play matches with him, not to win but to dream.

each weekend, he will text high level kids and create his own mini tournament to try to win a game and then a set and then, hopefully, matches.

he has been doing that for last month, and the kid that routinely beats him is now struggling the win. actually Krish won for the first time last week.

you should have seen the joy on his face of climbing this mountain of a task.

the feelings Krish had about the academy was needed to be heard.

the fact that he needed a new environment and a new set of game plan is something he needed to see for himself.

the feeling to fact journey is hard but is rewarding.

i wonder what next few months would look like for him. Curious how you work with feelings and facts.

leader point: feelings and facts are two sides of the same coin but can never be accomplished in the same conversation. be clear on what the conversations is about first and then dive into it.