Written by Gabriel N Elizondo
It’s three-thirty in the morning and you haven’t slept yet. The kids are asleep. Your partner has grown used to you not being in bed anymore; they know you’re sitting at the dinner table, laptop open, the faint glow of the screen reflecting the same reports you read hours ago on the lenses of your reading glasses.
Sometimes, when you take the kids to the park you think about the business.
You don’t mean to, it just happens.
On your drive to the mall.
To birthday parties.
To soccer practice.
To high school graduation.
Your mind is not present, it’s with the business.
And what is it that you’re trying to accomplish during these drifting, anxiety-fueled moments of introspection? You’re trying to solve what every leader is trying to solve: the unknown future.
What is next week going to look like with the orders? What about the supply chain for the warehouse? Are your leads going to actually sign on the proposal or just delay their response with a pointless email…again. How are you going to find leads in the first place?
It’s gotten worse since the economy began to tank.
You can deal with market forces, customer sentiment, even AI coming in and slowly destroying one profession after another; but, when the entire world begins to play rollercoaster because power-hungry men can’t agree on what part of the world they want for themselves…how can you possibly prepare your small business for that?
So instead of sleeping, you stay up and go back over the numbers. You pull up a theoretical scenario in your mind and imagine how it plays out.
Because somewhere you were taught that if you work hard enough, play by the rules, and follow the path, you would be able to afford your own business.
You know the truth now. Sometimes the truth is horrifying. You start to feel that tightness in your chest.
You start the theoretical scenario over again. It leads to failure. The tightness grows.
You start another theoretical scenario. It leads to more failure. You didn’t realize it but you’re holding your breath.
Let’s pause for a moment. Stop thinking. Push your business to the side for a moment and give yourself a few minutes of your own time.
Do you remember what it was like when you had the idea for your business?
The moment you decided life was too short to spend working for someone else.
The moment you decided you could come up with a better solution.
The moment you decided that taking a risk was far more important than playing it safe.
You experienced that moment and then you acted.
Like everyone else. Go back to that moment. Pull that up. I’ll wait.
It might have been a rainy sunday when you sat down and began to develop the idea further in your mind. A few paragraphs, a sketch or two.
Then, you couldn’t sleep. Not from stress or fear but excitement.
You woke up, went to the day job that served its purpose, then you got back to it. Your business.
Time passed and things changed. They always do. Then it got difficult. Then challenging.
Perhaps, at some point you don’t recall, your business became unrecognizable to you. You’re still open but the more accurate term is surviving. Day-to-day operations are lagging. You need to sell more but don’t have time to follow up with potential leads because your current clients have more questions about the deliverables. Your team is asking for what comes next and you know what they need to do but don’t have time to write it down. Another day slips by in your exhaustion.
You look out the window, contemplating why you don’t feel like you did years ago. You look at your business logo on the wall and wonder: is it worth it anymore?
Now, you can’t sleep anymore.
LinkedIn says you should advertise more on their platform. Marketing firms promise growth beyond your wildest dreams. Social media keeps screaming about sponsored ads.
All you can think about is the future.
When you should start with the past.
Find a quiet spot in the house. Reflect back on the moment you decided to start your business. Not when you got the paperwork or the location but the moment you felt compelled to do something inherently risky. Push further back, into the experience that moved you with such a profound emotion it inspired an idea that deserved your time, effort, skill, and life.
When you utilize your memory you access the emotional centers of your brain through your inner memory index. Two critical parts of your brain increase in activity bridging the gap between what happened to you eight years ago, when you started the business, and how you feel about it now.
The emotional center of your brain (and threat detection network) is located in the amygdala, a little walnut shaped mass near the center of your cerebral cortex. It is responsible for managing how your brain interprets what you remember on an emotional level. The more intense an experience, the greater depth of emotion the amygdala encodes into that memory.
The long-term memory indexing portion of your brain is located in the hippocampus. No, it’s not shaped like a hippopotamus but takes the shape of a seahorse nestled between both of your brain's hemispheres. The hippocampus is responsible for interpreting the emotional codes in each memory stored in your brain.
When you were inspired to start your business, your amygdala encoded a memory being formed in your hippocampus. The encoded message took the form of an emotion and imprinted into your mind the details that inspired you. This entire process is detailed in the journal Trends in Neurosciences in an article entitled “Mechanisms of Emotional Arousal and Lasting Declarative Memory” (Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (1998). This process is where experienced emotions shape the contextual nature of your long-term memory.
Go ahead, pull up that memory again and you’ll feel your emotions shift a bit. That’s the amygdala processing the indexed memory and reading the additional emotion encoded in it. Do you feel a slight increase in your heart rate? Perhaps a “light” feeling in your chest? That’s your body’s physiological response to the emotions encoded in that memory, see Figure 1.
Remember that physiological response, it is absolutely crucial for the future of your business.
Intense emotional experiences not only index with higher priority encoding in your brain but also impact the physiological response in your current state of mind.
The amygdala tells the hypothalamus to activate the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. This fancy hyphenated term describes the complex in your brain that releases stress hormones, mainly adrenaline and cortisol.
These hormones provide an instant response in your body and in your mind. The adrenaline creates a quick burst of energy that refines your senses. This chemical response also tells your body to release norepinephrine into the brain for heightened focus. The result is that moment of clarity, when everything goes quiet, you feel a tingling of excitement in your body as you feel an idea coming into play.
Remember when you decided to start your business? The world vanished, all the sounds around you dropped off, and you had a moment of absolute, clear, inspiration.
Eureka.
This eureka moment aligns with the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which shows that a moderate level of arousal sharpens focus and enhances cognitive performance (Joëls, M., & Baram, T. Z. (2009). You have no choice in the matter, your brain decides the emotion you are experiencing is so important, it requires a heightened sense of focus and clarity to experience it. This assigned focus tells the amygdala to encode this experience as a memory with a heightened emotional response.
Your brain and body understood how important this business is to you before you even realized it.
However, eureka moments are not always dramatic. They don’t require you to shout from your window but they might get you out of your seat to pace across the room. Every step you take, the thought refines itself, the feeling of clarity heightens, your pulse quickens, and you can actually feel the solution working its way up through your bones.
That’s no accident.
Your body can and will respond with physical movements when your mind recalls a memory laced with emotional encoding. The emotional memory may trigger your vital signs to shift. Perhaps you clench your jaw, grip the pen a bit more when writing an idea, pace the room (as mentioned before) or return to a specific place that calms your mind. This phenomenon, known as State-Dependent Memory, is a key concept within the field of Embodied Cognition, which is expertly covered in Lawrence Shapiro's book of the same name (2010). This field of neuro-physiological study asserts memory goes beyond the brain and is also served by the body’s structures and sensory-motor experiences. Your physical state can trigger a memory or your memory triggers a physical state. The two parts of this system work in concert, creating a discourse between your memory, mind, body, and your physical state of being.
In addition to State-Dependent Memory, you have the enteric nervous system at play. The enteric nervous system is composed of hundreds of millions of neurons throughout your gut that communicate with your brain via the gut-brain axis (Purves et al). This is the part of your body responsible for that “gut” feeling you get when vetting a potential partner or exploring a new market, even though your analysts told you it was a bad idea.
If you feel it in your “gut”, you feel it in your brain.
All of these systems, the amygdala-hippocampus complex, the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis, norepinephrine and cortisol fluctuations, State-Dependent Memory, and the enteric nervous system work together to orchestrate the clarity required for your brain to review why you started your business.
However, time marches forward and you’re not the same person who started your brand all those years ago. You’ve changed. You’ve had ups and downs. Sold countless products, signed several clients, delivered on contracts, and earned your years in the market.
Your life isn’t the same as it was and neither is your brain.
Your brain takes advantage of these life changes through memory reconsolidation. The process is detailed in the scientific journal Nature in the article “Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval” by Karim Nader, Glenn E. Schafe and Joseph E. Le Doux. Nader, et al provided strong evidence that highly emotional memories are restructured with new protein synthesis when recalled in the brain. These specific memories are redefined by the new perspective your mind has over time. With each recollection of a highly charged emotional memory, you reassess its value, the insights you gained, and how it's served you thus far.
Highly charged, emotional moments lead to equally charged emotional memories.
Remember the year you almost closed the business? When you felt the dread of not being able to afford your payroll? You can still feel the tightness in your chest, even the sense of failure that settled across the back of your neck. Now, take a moment to recall how you solved that dilemma in the business. The lessons you learned, the way you overcame the challenges of payroll and supplier contracts. Can you feel yourself settling back in your chair and letting go of the armrest?
Every time your brain recalls these memories and you couple the solution to it, you re-evaluate the memory and redefine those insights with more clarity.
If you write them down, your brain will recall them even faster the next time around.
This process allows you to replace the negative emotional trigger with positive lessons learned. The lessons learned lead to self-efficacy or confidence in your ability to solve such traumatic issues in your life and in your business. In addition, you retrain your brain to let go of the negative connotations associated with that memory, which helps your long-term cellular health by reducing the anxiety of the past.
With every memory you reassess, you redefine the way you perceive yourself in the context of that memory.
As stated before, you’re not the same person as you were when you started your business and you’ve learned a massive amount of information about how to run it. When you’re recalling the story of how you started the brand, how you navigated the challenges, overcame the obstacles, screwed up plenty of times along the way but managed to get yourself out of trouble, delivered on services, and are still standing after the years of ups and downs, you’re revising your personal and professional narrative.
This is known as Narrative Identity (McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013), the very essence of your own personal narrative updated and revised every time you reflect on the past. These revisions, when coupled with lessons learned, reframe the way you see yourself and the world in which you exist. You can see this process in Figure 2 (see below).
That’s right. This process of revising your Narrative Identity reshapes the way you perceive the world around you. Occasionally, you might look around your business location, observe your team at work, or revisit a client and “feel” like you're seeing a different version of the same world. That’s because you are. Your brain has changed, your inner sense of self has evolved, and you “feel” a different version of your current self.
Ok, that sounds a bit strange, so here’s another example.
Remember when you met that frazzled new business owner during that industry networking event last year? The new founder was in a panic because to them, in their world, the first time a contract got cancelled they had no point of reference to find a solution. Their perception of their world was coupled with absolute fear because they had not yet discovered a solution. From your perspective, your reality, the new founder’s problem didn’t seem like the end of the world. You had experienced something similar in your earlier years, you endured, found the solution, reconsolidated the memory, shifted the negative experience to a positive narrative, and moved on in your life and business. The new founder’s world simply does not exist in the same way your world does.
You’ve been able to reframe failures with insight and your brain and body understand this on a cellular level.
Let’s return to your sleepless nights.
It’s three in the morning and you’re sifting through theoretical scenarios in a desperate attempt to solve the unknown future.
You run these various scenarios in your mind about what could happen with your business. Different courses of action that branch off into different conclusions that host their own variations. Each variation results in a brief, even imperceptible, response from your body. Maybe your gut tightens with one variation, so your brain shifts to another set of responses. You run another variation in your head, your chest tightens again. You scrap that and move onto another variation.
Each variation is entirely in your mind, none of them are real but your brain’s amygdala and hippocampus can’t tell the difference. For all intents and purposes, your brain is utilizing emotional responses to assess simulations before your mind can analyze the logic behind it. This process encompasses a theory known as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, proposed by Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, which states your mind considers courses of action by creating a simulation that generates an emotional response. The emotional response that results from the simulation is cross-referenced with your indexed memories and based on the physiological response you have, is deemed rational or irrational.
This is the reason behind your exhaustion when mulling over different ways to solve a problem. Consciously, your brain is merely thinking but emotionally it's responding to neurochemically induced threat simulations. The process is exponentially detrimental to your cognitive efforts because with every major logical consideration, your body endures real stress, which causes fatigue, which dampens your mind’s ability to find a new solution. Your tired mind runs a slightly compromised solution, the result is a failed answer, and more anxiety.
We’ve all been in this dreaded feedback loop. Trying to solve a problem, possibly for hours, and coming up with nothing. Sometimes, we end up in a worse position than when we started. That feeling of defeat takes over and our confidence gets thrown out the window, along with all the other ideas we were working on.
Set aside your business dilemmas and return to the moment you experienced all those years ago when you were inspired to start a business.
Take your time.
Let your mind pull up all the details. All the details. Good and bad.
Recall the feeling, the emotions, you had when you realized you could do more with your life than work for someone else’s dream. The determination that settled in when you knew it was a risky decision but you’d rather be the one charting your life’s path than a corporation that doesn’t care about you. Remember that day. What did the weather feel like? Who were you with? How did they make you feel? What did you think was going to happen? How did you feel about it?
These emotions are the undercurrent for every decision you’ve made in your business.
In short, those emotions are the codex that determines the value of your decisions.
Feel your memories again but from a totally different life view. Your perspective has changed, and as your emotions shift those founding memories around, you’ll see things a little differently.
You’ll notice that your expectations require more patience.
You’ll see that your leadership style was rushed and possibly too harsh back then.
You feel better knowing you’ve made the adjustments.
Do you feel the confidence stirring? The dread drops off, you feel light again. Maybe the way you were approaching your dilemma was from the old views and that’s not you anymore. You’ve changed, matured in business, and live in a different world.
Maybe you should stop trying to solve new problems with old solutions, no matter how many times you’ve thought about them.
Because the world isn’t the only thing that’s changed over the years. So have you.
Do you feel that sense of hope returning?
That’s cognitive clarity derived from the norepinephrine flooding your brain due to the hippocampus telling your endocrine system to respond with heightened awareness due to the emotion indexed in your long-term memory. The memory you have when you decided to start your business.
That emotion serves a variety of purposes.
However, we’re going to look at one in particular.
For founders, it all comes down to a single purpose. Of course, that purpose changes with each founder and is deeply personal for a number of reasons. Every individual is driven by different experiences, different perspectives, different conclusions, different motivations. But for the individual, their purpose in business remains steadfast, no matter how many years have come and gone.
It’s true, many people go into business only to make money. That’s their main purpose. It’s also the reason they will fail.
Because if money is your motivator, there’s always someone else out there who is more motivated to take it from you. And trust me, they’ll find a way to do it.
However, if you move beyond profit-motive and discover the underlying, emotionally-derived decision that set you on a path to discover your purpose in business, you’ve come upon the foundation of your life and your brand’s future.
Your Brand Purpose.
And no matter the dilemmas, the markets, the tariffs, or the next AI technology that looms on the horizon, your Brand Purpose won’t change.
It will be there waiting for you with all the emotions required to clear your head, and make the best decision for your future, just like you did when you started your brand all those years ago.
Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (1998). Mechanisms of emotional arousal and lasting declarative memory. Trends in Neurosciences,1 21(7), 294–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0166-2236(97)01214-7
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Joëls, M., & Baram, T. Z. (2009). The neuro-symphony of stress. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 459–469. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2632
McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3),2 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622
Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & Le Doux, J. E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature, 406(6797), 722–726. https://doi.org/10.1038/35021052
Purves, D., Augustine, G. J., Fitzpatrick, D., Katz, L. C., LaMantia, A.-S., McNamara, J. O., & Williams, S. M. (Eds.). (2001). The enteric nervous system. In Neuroscience (2nd ed.). Sinauer Associates. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11097/
Shapiro, L. (2010). Embodied cognition. Routledge.
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