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One of the things that I find with people who have recently started to run their own businesses is that they're always trying to find ways to win all the time.

While this might sound obvious and even ridiculous, it really is a false quest, and so, setting that straight at this stage, if you're just starting to run a business or even if you've been running a business for a considerable period of time, is important to avoid the inevitable burnout, sadness, stress and anxiety that comes with the emotional aspect of not winning (losing).

I recently read an article related to this by the founders of WHOOP, one where they were encouraging everyone who was reading the article to emotionally divest themselves from the financial performance of the business that they founded.

This seems like an extraordinary thing to suggest, something that would say that you are actually irresponsible, not paying enough attention to the money, not being enough involved in what people see as the most important part of your organisation, but I completely understand this, I completely get the rationale behind trying to remove yourself from the huge emotional stress ball of weekly or monthly reporting.

Recently, I've had reason to go back through the whole of the process of building our facility through 2017 to 2020 and to see how emotionally tied up I was in the numbers and, how often I had to see the numbers and how much that made me stressed and sad. 

During that phase, I had Tuesday KPI reports, so I had a set of KPIs that I had devised and delivered to me every Tuesday in my inbox. 

On reflection, this was complete madness; there simply wasn't enough time for anything that I would have done from the previous Tuesday to have had any effect on the following Tuesday's KPIs, and this is the huge part of understanding that sometimes you're winning, and sometimes you're losing, and the most important thing is that you're growing and just moving forward step by step.

Another thing that business owners have real difficulty dealing with is losing when it relates to team staff or people who are associated with the business. 

You can pigeonhole this into the area of 'cost of business', but if you are lucky enough to have a bigger business, there will be times when it is necessary to settle with someone who has to leave the business for the greater benefit of everyone else. You will have to write a check, give that to the person, smile (metaphorically), turn away and get on with your work. Founders of businesses have extreme difficulty in doing this again because they're so emotionally tied up with the business and with 'their' money. 

This is another example of understanding that you will be winning somewhere and losing as you hand the check over, and what you should do is compartmentalise both of these in different directions, not celebrating too much with the winning, not commiserating too much with the losing.

In Ancient Persia, they developed the phrase, "This too will pass". It means that the great thing that you have at the moment will not be there in a minute, and neither will the terrible thing.

It took me many years to understand this and to start to develop a muscle of compartmentalisation, but we must develop that muscle in business if we are to survive.

The last thing your organisation needs is a reactive leader; a reactive leader is not the same as an agile leader; a reactive leader responds to bad news badly, creates catastrophe, creates stress, and creates movement in different directions.

An agile leader can see problems and act accordingly and calmly with the available resources to help take the organisation away and out of the problem.

One of the best solutions to these problems is to find someone who is better than you at the things that you find that you're too emotionally attached to.

One of the things that I was privileged enough to do was to start to work with our managing director, Hayley Brown.

Nowadays, I see the numbers every month, never at any other time and we can talk about the trends forwards and backwards where we are now.

If I need to, I can get instant access to where the business is financially today, but I have to be careful because that would be reactive.

I'm busy off over here trying to be agile. At the same time, the negative part of the numbers, the negative part of the finances, and the negative part of the human resources are being dealt with by people who are less emotionally attached than I am.