From: http://www.bizjournals.com/

Entrepreneurial Personality Types (EPTs) don’t experience emotions like everyone else, and that can cause challenges.

If you are an EPT, you are a momentum-based being, meaning you have a mental, physical and biological response to momentum, or the sensation of moving forward.

As such, you also have negative responses to constraint or anything hindering your ability to move forward. This affects your emotional state and your understanding of where you fit in the world.

Think back to your childhood. Did you ever find yourself confused or alienated by cartoon “emotion charts” with faces for happy, sad, frustrated, angry, uncomfortable, irate, etc.?

If you are an EPT, these faces don’t make sense, and the emotions boil down to a lot of words that ultimately cover just three states of momentum:

1. Moving Forward (fulfilled, elated)

Some refer to this state as Zen, flow, or even the feeling of being alive.

In this state of momentum, we feel like we can accomplish anything; that nothing is out of reach; challenges are easy to overcome; and the path to success has been paved before us.

This is the state in which we light the world on fire, because we have removed constraint from our lives.

2. Moving Backward (frustrated, under attack)

When confronted with constraint or challenges, we can feel like we’re moving backward, like our goals are moving farther and farther away from us.

This feeling is highly frustrating. But while setbacks happen in life, they are often when we EPTs show up, bounce back and overcome adversity.

For momentum-based beings, this state can turn into a constructive period of realization and positive behavioral change.

3. Standing Still (living in constraint, wasting away)

This is the most challenging state of all because there is often no understanding of how to break free.

Standing still, hitting a plateau or being stuck drives us crazy. It drives us to drastically change our lives, make challenging decisions and even harm our businesses or ourselves.

We express this state cognitively by making poor decisions, and physically through stress and emerging body pains.

When I talk to entrepreneurs around the country about this concept, most of them instantly agree. They tell me that knowing this clarifies and explains their behaviors and reactions to the world around them. But some remain confused by the terminology.

This is understandable because for most of our lives we have thought of momentum purely from the perspective of high school physics. So what does it have to do with who we are and how we feel?

Perhaps one of these situations sounds familiar to you:

• You wanted to move forward, but couldn’t. Progress was slow and exhausting. Every step forward was chased by another step backward.
• You wanted to get unstuck, but couldn’t. Something was holding you back. You were overwhelmed and became your own biggest obstacle to moving forward.
• You wanted to achieve your goals faster, but couldn’t. You didn’t know how or what was missing. It felt like the entire universe was against you.

The good news is we’ve all been there. You are not alone.

These situations and feelings are common, especially among EPTs, and they are the signposts of momentum-based beings. Feelings of frustration, stagnation and constraint are truly the search for momentum in your life.

Understanding this will begin to clarify how you make decisions, how you react to challenges, and the reasons behind your behavior (good, bad and neutral).

It is critical to understand that whether the momentum (or lack thereof) is real or perceived, the sensations and reactions in these states will be the same. It is a fundamental outlook that can cause EPTs to have challenges in environments of constraint, like rigid classroom structures, social relationships, committees or traditional business settings.

It has also resulted in the systematic suppression of EPTs through negative reinforcement, behavioral change and even medication, as their attributes and behaviors are often mistaken as disorders.

Well-marketed conditions like anxiety, ADHD, depression and bipolar disorder are becoming so commonplace that diagnoses are growing at double-digit rates year after year. It’s a sad truth, but today, more than fifty percent of U.S. adults will be diagnosed with a clinical mental illness.

For this reason, as a momentum-based being, it is imperative for you as an EPT to find ways of not just generating, but sustaining momentum in your life. In your journey to find and build momentum, you will need to understand yourself and the core group of attributes driving your behaviors.

Focus on these attributes and they will expand into great strengths and abilities, helping you generate momentum to make your greatest contribution to the world.

Coming up next … Entrepreneurial Personality Type Attribute #1: High Sensitivity and Awareness.