Guard Your Heart: The Emotional Toll of Building Something That Matters
Why launching your dream can leave you feeling exposed — and how to endure when it doesn’t take off.
Starting your own thing can be an emotional rollercoaster. Your online store, a restaurant, a book, a blog, your signing career. It is so personal. It is some of the best work you’ll ever do. You will feel alive and more engaged in the work than anything else you’ve ever pursued. When the crowds respond with glowing reviews, it proves you’ve found your place on this good earth.
About a year ago, I helped a new restaurant get off the ground. We did a lot of marketing for it and held a big kickoff. We posted several times on social media to build anticipation for the event. It was so rewarding to see the reviews start to filter in. While people loved the atmosphere and vibe of the restaurant, they raved about the food! The team was in 7th heaven.
Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin. You can put every fiber of your being into a project, something you feel God calls you to do, and get nothing. Total crickets. No great reviews, no throngs of adoring fans, no visitors to your store, and no sales.
This is gut-wrenching stuff. The rejections feel so…personal. As if you are being shunned by the general public. It feels like they are all in on it and have agreed to boycott your entire life. This is how I felt in one of my early ventures. I put my heart into it — felt called by God, in fact — only to fall on my face.
A few years later, I noticed the strangest thing. I left the failed venture and pivoted over to financial planning. I experienced tons of rejection here, but this was different. People weren’t rejecting me, per se. They just had no use for a financial planner. They were rejecting a company, not me. I didn’t come up with any of the products they would purchase. All that work was done at the home office. My job was simple — to sell.
In this new role, any rejections I received were not an indictment of my identity. In fact, it had little to do with me at all. This made it easier for me to do the job. It was almost like being bulletproof. To my great surprise, I did well enough to qualify for several sales awards and a trip! I could hardly believe it. Only 3 years earlier, I could barely pull myself out of bed to face another day of rejection. Now my wife and I are sitting on a plane bound for an all-expense paid vacation with great entertainment.
What lesson are we to take away from this? When you are doing it for yourself, things are going to feel so much more personal. You will have a lot of your identity wrapped into it. The highs will be higher and the lows will be lower. You have to know this going in, or it will be too hard to process in the moment.
The key takeaway is this: guard your heart.
This goes for church planters, entrepreneurs, crafters, store owners, musicians, and anyone who wears their heart on their sleeve.
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