SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Emotion is a superpower: how I leveraged mine to drive $5m in revenue
23 Jun 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Good morning, everybody. How are you doing? Thanks to everybody showing up.
Chapter 2: How did the speaker's journey with emotions begin?
I see some familiar faces. This is awesome. All right. My name is Calvin Corelli. I'm the founder of Simplero. We're an awesome, simple platform for coaches, course creators to run their entire business, make their lives simpler through that. And that's not what I'm here to talk about today. I'm here to talk about feelings. So emotion is a superpower.
Chapter 3: What pivotal moment changed the speaker's relationship with feelings?
How I leverage mine to drive 20 million in revenue. Let's go. Actually, before we do that, I'm going to stay on the screen. So let me tell you guys a story. This happened to me in the late 1990s, so in the last century. I was young. I had just met this incredible woman, fallen in love, and we decided that we were going to go to Mexico and spend a month just traveling around in Mexico.
It was amazing. And at one moment we were lying in a hammock as one does in Mexico. And I, for the first time in my life, I felt safe and loved enough that I dared kind of look inside to some of that darkness that I felt was inside. So I grew up living from my neck up, completely mental. I was good at programming. I was terrified of human beings. I was terrified of my feelings.
I had no relationship with any feelings at all. So this was a big deal for me. I was like, God, I feel so loved and safe. Let me just smidge it, open up a little bit. I felt like it was so dark and dirty that if I let anybody see, they would immediately reject me.
Chapter 4: How can feelings buried alive affect personal growth?
But I opened up, felt amazing. Now, for whatever reason, my girlfriend, the woman at the time, she wanted to spend a month working as a waitress at a fancy seafood restaurant in Denmark and where we both are from and lived. And I wanted to go scuba diving with a friend all over Central America, so we did that. So a month apart, came back home.
She had prepared this incredible meal for me, which, of course, she had all these, you know, amazing recipes from the seafood restaurant. And I just remember how remarkable it was. It was incredible. And then at the end of the lunch, she said, listen up. This thing that happened in that hammock in Mexico can never happen again. My father died when I was 18.
If I had let myself feel any of the feelings, I wouldn't be alive today. You've got to shut that shit down right now. And I was shocked. I was like, this is weird. So I went to my best friend, and I said, hey, this woman, she said this, and what should I do? And he's like, dude, this is the biggest declaration of love that anybody could ever give you. Those feelings are dangerous.
You've got to shut it down. That's the way.
Chapter 5: What strategies can help in processing emotions effectively?
I'm like, okay. The girl I love, my best friend, my entire upbringing all agree it felt amazing, but they must be right. So I shut it down for another seven, eight years until I couldn't anymore. And that's when I started to get, um, you know, started therapy and coaching and spiritual teacher. And it was what led me to by far the biggest breakthrough in my life.
And I'm going to talk to you today about how you can do something similar. I'm going to share something that happened actually quite recently. So I'm going to talk about feelings, how they work, how to turn them into, your biggest fucking breakthrough, and then what the opportunity is in that. And let me say this.
So my talk, obviously, is very different from what Ray just talked about up here and for most of the talks at this event. Because what I have found is that you can have all the best strategies and tactics and metrics in the world, but if you don't do this, you're still going to be limiting yourself. And a lot of these things are not going to mean anything to you. You're not going to be able to
use them because your unconscious mind, where all of this emotional stuff lives, is literally a million times more powerful than your conscious mind. And this is not like, this is like your conscious mind can process 40, inputs per second, whereas your unconscious mind processes 40 million per second. It wins, right?
So we've got to get the unconscious mind on board or none of this other stuff really matters.
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Chapter 6: How does sharing feelings with others create opportunities?
So that's what we're going to talk about today. So just very recently, actually this new year, so it's December 30th, and my my accountant, he calls me and he says, look, we got to run this, my CPA, we got to run this tax, pay this tax bill of $100,000. And I was like, dude, that, I would have loved if you had told me that like a month ago, maybe like two months ago.
Because at that point, it was the end of the year and I had intentionally run my cash flow very tightly, made some big investments right there. So I was like, fuck. The people who are doing my payroll and accounting and that kind of stuff, they're over in the Philippines. I couldn't reach them. So I was like, all right, screw it. Just run the damn thing, and we'll figure it out.
Come early January, Philippines come back online. I'm like, OK, extend this cash flow. I want to see how bad the situation is. Take it out three months, four months. So they come back to me, and they're like, great. By late March, we're going to be negative $125,000. How about that? I'm like, fuck. Like, 125K, that's more than just me not taking my salary for a couple months and fixing it.
Like, I don't pay myself that much.
Chapter 7: What lessons can be learned from triggers and breakthroughs?
So I was like, shit. And then two days later, they come back, and they're like, actually, it's not 125. It's looking more like 165 right now. I was like, fuck, this is going the wrong way really fucking fast. So I felt like, shit, I'm out of control here. And so I had five mornings in a row where I woke up at 4.30 just in a panic. I was like, What's going on? And I know enough now.
A, I don't normally wake up at 4.30. B, I know enough not to try to solve the problem there. In the olden days, I would crawl up into my head and be like, we're going to try to solve the problem right there. 4.30 in bed is not the time to solve this. It's the time to feel. So the thing is that I've learned is that feelings buried alive never die. Feelings buried alive never die.
What does that mean? It means those feelings that we felt at any point in our lives, growing up or whatever, that we weren't able to feel in the moment, we kind of shut them off, suppress, we contract, we try not to feel them, they're still inside of us.
They're still in there, they're buried alive, and they will be stored in your body as tension, as different personas, limiting beliefs, and they will hinder you in being who you could be, who you're here to become.
Chapter 8: How can embracing emotions lead to business success?
And what happens is that some situation will trigger something. We all have this feeling sometimes we get triggered, right, by a spouse or a child or if someone has a boss, the boss or an employee, some employee or, a cash scare or whatever, like that thing triggers us. Well, that feeling is not really when it's, if it's just a transitory feeling, we feel it's gone, we're fine, then that's cool.
But if it's one of those like more persistent, it's not about the thing right now. It's because it triggered an old feeling that's still sitting inside of us. And so the invitation, when that happens, is that you go inside and you feel it. So you let go of the resistance to the feeling, because that's what we normally do. We contract and we hold our breath and we try not to feel it.
One of my favorite sayings is from the father of cognitive psychology is, fear is excitement with the breath held. Fear is excitement with the breath held. Fear and excitement is the same damn feeling. It's just a matter of, do we breathe into it, or do we try to contract and hold it away? People pay money to go on a roller coaster, and they scream. Why? Because they feel excitement.
But it's really fear. It's just that they're not actually scared for their lives. But the moment that that roller coaster goes off the rails, you can see that excitement turn into fear really fast. So what we want to do is we want to let go of that resistance to it and just open up and breathe and invite the feeling in and allow it to expand. And that could be hella scary.
Because if you're not used to this, you might think, oh shit, this is never going to go away. It's going to just go on forever. And where is this going to lead? And it might feel like you're free falling and out of control. And that's just another feeling. So you just keep riding it. You just keep going. For me, what happened was, and sometimes it takes a while.
So for me, it was like five mornings in a row where I woke up like this at 4.30. And I was like, all right, I'm just going to breathe into it and feel as best as I can. And then finally, on the fifth morning, I was able to feel it and then go underneath the feeling. And so underneath that layer of panic and fear, I discover this grief and rage, like really intense grief and rage feeling.
I was like, and I could feel it. I was like, oh God, this is amazing. Like now it's moving. I feel it shifting. And I kept digging. I was like, fuck, this is great. Kept digging. And then under that, I found this victim persona. So have you, we've all, I bet you all have given advice to someone where they're like, ah, I can't solve this. And you're like, well, why don't you do this?
And then they're like, no, I can't because no. And then you're like, OK, then what about this? And they're like, no, I really can't. I can't. It's hard. They won't hear because they're stuck in their victim mindset. And I'm sure none of you have ever done that, but I'm sure you know someone who has. And when you're stuck in victim, what you're committed to is having unsolvable problems.
So fuck anybody try to fucking solve that problem for you, because you're hooked into this idea that this problem is intractable. It's really hard. And so I realized, fuck, that's what I'm doing. And Ben will realize, but we've worked together. So I've been stuck in growth and trying to acquire customers for a long time.
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