Emotional Equations: Simple Steps for Creating Happiness + Success in Business + Life - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Veteran CEO Chip Conley has created more boutique hotels than anyone in the world. Founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he grew into America’s second largest boutique hotel company, he speaks around the world on how to find meaning at the intersection of business and psychology. The author of several books, including Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, he was named the Most Innovative CEO in the San Francisco Bay Area, which he calls home. For more information, visit EmotionalEquations.com and ChipConley.com.

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Emotional Equations

1

On August 19, 2008, my heart stopped. Just minutes after my business presentation on stage, I passed out. Flatline. My memories of that day are opaque, but I can still see the image that was swirling around my brain as I came to in the emergency room: thick, sweet, fragrant oil slowly dripping down a set of dark wooden stairs. My version of “seeing the light,” this was the ultimate wake-up call for me. The doctors could find no medical explanation for my heart failure.

Over the preceding few years, a series of wake-up waves culminating in my heart failure had hit me like an emotional tsunami and tested my sense of who I thought I was: a business I had built was sinking; a family member had been wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to San Quentin State Prison; a long-term relationship had ended painfully; and I had lost five friends and colleagues to suicide.

I know I’m not alone in experiencing these tragedies and setbacks. Many people have felt either out of control or stuck in an emotional logjam. At times, our emotions are crystal clear; we know what we’re feeling and how to respond. At other times, we need guidance. And my heart failure, besides being a medical emergency, was also an emotional emergency. I felt as if I were treading water, gasping for air, my emotions acting like enemies instead of intuitive allies.

I had tried my best to put on a good “game face,” because we CEOs like to portray a strong, steady image to everyone and a lot of people were relying on me. After all, my company is called Joie de Vivre (French for “joy of life”), so dour didn’t really fit the profile. I’d started the company in 1987 and grown it to more than three thousand employees, the largest group of independent boutique hotels in the state of California, and had been adept at creating healthy “psycho-hygiene” at the company. I’d also written Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow about adapting for the workplace the theory of motivation created by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.

During the momentous days of the decade’s first economic downturn, this mixing of psychology and business had let Joie de Vivre defy the general trend and nearly triple in size. It had also led me to lecture all over the world on how to become self-actualized—to become everything we’re capable of becoming at work.

When the second economic downturn hit in 2008, however, I retreated to my home—once my sanctuary but now a place filled with beautiful things and ugly thoughts. I would take off my game face and wallow in an emotional darkroom where all my negatives were developing. I had a certain emotional awareness about what was going on inside me but little means to make sense of it, let alone find meaning in it. I felt almost paralyzed by a psychological fog.

As I was waiting for some revelation, one of my good friends, Chip Hankins, took his own life. He was my best “Chip” friend in the world and my insurance broker for more than a decade—a force of nature whom I deeply admired and, at times, emulated. We had more in common than just our names: we were both publicly extroverted but had an introverted, melancholy side as well; we both went for long periods of sobriety, even though we both owned bars. And we were both spiritual seekers who enjoyed throwing a frivolous party; we’d been planning to throw a “Chip” party someday to which we’d invite Chips from around the world to share stories of “The World According to Chip.”

Instead, there I was at Chip’s memorial service, where I listened to person after person get up and tell “Chip stories.” It was surreal. The truth is, up to this moment, my mind had occasionally veered toward images of my own demise—by car crash or cancer—something dramatic that might help me escape from the mess of emotions my life had become. Clearly, I needed to push the reset button on my mind, and my life, and make some fundamental changes. The terror and despair I felt over this profound loss gradually gave way to a renewed sense that I could remake my experience here on Earth and a budding gratitude that I would have that opportunity even though others would not.

During that time, as four other friends also chose death over life, I learned more about the nature of emotional depression and suicide. Nearly a million people try to commit suicide annually in America; about 5 percent of them “succeed.” Men are four times as likely to commit suicide as women, and suicide attempts by middle-aged people have spiked during the economic downturn (all five of my friends were men in their forties).

Shining the light on these sobering statistics gave me the incentive to look for a healthy way to make sense of my emotions.

SEARCHING FOR AN EMOTIONAL ANSWER

I was compelled to revisit a book I’d read years before, the psychologist Viktor Frankl’s landmark memoir Man’s Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl’s book was a spiritual salve for me. I figured that if this man could withstand the agony of a Nazi concentration camp, I could probably deal with the challenges in my own life. I was acutely aware that my company needed a new solution to its problems, but I was more focused on turning around my own life. Maybe if I could do that, a company turnaround would follow.

I would recount the story of Man’s Search for Meaning to friends and colleagues, yet most couldn’t understand why I was so fascinated with it. In spite of their blank stares, I kept reading Frankl’s book and began to distill its wisdom down to one simple equation:



In other words, despair is what results when suffering has no meaning. In a recession (or, in Frankl’s case, in prison), suffering is virtually a constant, so it’s best to place your attention on growing your sense of meaning in order to decrease your feeling of despair.

This little mental rule of thumb or mantra became my lighthouse. Throughout the day, especially when I was feeling particularly tested, I would quietly recite this equation to myself as a reminder not to get caught up in the suffering and instead to place my attention on what I was supposed to learn. Because the worldwide hospitality industry was hit particularly hard by the Great Recession, the leaders of Joie de Vivre (JdV) were living lives of “quiet desperation”—in some cases, not so quiet. One day, as I facilitated a leadership series for senior managers, knowing that they were suffering, I decided to discuss my own vulnerability and worries and introduced my “Meaning” equation to the group. The managers really responded to it—they started texting and tweeting it to their staff, and, next thing I knew, they’d asked me to teach a whole class on Emotional Equations. To this day, I teach employees at JdV how to use Emotional Equations to create insight and perspective as well as happiness and success. Here are a few of the most popular:



Though most people today aren’t locked in a concentration camp or acting as CEOs of companies in distress, many people are prisoners of their own minds. So in this book I ask you, “What’s your prison?” and I offer you some keys to unlock the door. Frankl’s...