Why Fight Or Flight Mode Can Break Your Business

Whether you’re launching, running or scaling a business, you’ll have great days and terrible days. The life of a business owner is tough. Truly successful business owners are masters of their own emotions though. Because when you aren’t, things will quickly start to derail.

- Yoke Van Dam

HAVE YOU EVER been in a situation where a client started shouting at the staff? It could have been at a restaurant, at a car dealership or even at a doctor’s office. When people ‘lose’ it in the real world, we label them as unprofessional. We are less willing to do business with them, work for them, or invest in their business.

When your buttons get pushed for too long, it might trigger you to start fighting. The moment we feel ‘attacked’ most people tend to go into ‘Fight or Flight mode’. The Amygdala (Reptilian) brain has been accessed, and the resulting behaviour is actually beyond their control. What’s scary about this place is that you feel in the same amount of danger as someone who is about to be attacked by a predator.

This is incredibly dangerous territory for your business to be in. This is the place where staff resign, contracts get cancelled, and money gets lost.

Maya Angelou explained it well: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

How you make them feel will impact your staff’s customer service, their productivity and ultimately your bottom line.