Marisa Thinks Entrepreneurs Should Look at the Emotional Salary

Entrepreneurial struggles can be real but you can mentally flip the script. | Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

Marisa’s a-ha moment came when she found herself at the entrepreneurial wall. Jotting things down, she flipped her thought of that entrepreneurial struggle and started to look at her emotional wealth. And so began her journey with Emotional Salary.

Hi Marisa! Tell us a little about yourself and what you do.

Hi! Thanks for this opportunity. I am the creator of the Emotional Salary Barometer, which is an online tool that measures all the non-financial benefits that each individual gets from working. 

Through our tool each person working as an employee or as a freelancer has the opportunity to be aware of  all these benefits and gets a personal and individual action plan with specific steps and real life examples that you can implement straight away. 

We believe that the awareness of all these benefits change the perception of work, is a source of intrinsic motivation and allows the transformation of attitudes to strengthen personal and professional development.

We want to change the way people think about work.

How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I am an entrepreneur and as an entrepreneur you go through different phases. You have no financial security; you discover that the competition is brutal, that you are on your own, that sometimes the world seems to be too large for you and you are constantly filled with doubts. 

Doubts about your decision, your future, your skills, resources, and so on. So there I was on one Thursday evening lying in my bed with all those thoughts running through my head without being able to sleep. And suddenly I asked myself: Why am I doing this? Really, why am I allowing this to happen to myself? Why do I work? 

So I stood up, took my journal and started writing my answer.  And as I started writing, more things came to my mind, more and more thoughts started running. So much that I just couldn’t keep pace with my writing. 

And what started just being an exercise to have a peace of mind turned out to be a revelation. After that exercise, I felt happy, relaxed, with a feeling of fulfilment and gratitude. The funny thing about it is that I didn’t write only fun or good things. I wrote things like “my work allows me to fall down, fail and continue”, which I can tell you is no fun at all. And most importantly, I felt that this was the place where I needed to be.

I felt responsible and with a sense of ownership about my future and about my life. That night I slept like a baby. And the next day the feeling continued. Something about my attitude towards work had changed.  Something had shifted.

Every time I felt challenged, instead of complaining I said to myself, “this is part of it.” Or every time I felt I was missing something I started to seek things that I cherished, like talking to someone. Or as I felt that I was alone in my work I started visiting coworking spaces and going to more and more to networking events.

So I started to tell people that according to my “emotional salary” I was a millionaire. And as I saw people’s reactions I thought, “Why not create a tool that measures the Emotional Salary of each individual and provides an individual report?” This was the beginning of my journey.  

What is your favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur?

The learning curve that you get through the messy magic that involves creating anything

If there is any piece of advice you could share with others running a business, what would it be?

Don’t fall into the following 3 traps— I fell in all of them, so I know:

The hope trap. When you start you think that you will have an amazing impact very quick and that your product will be ready really fast. 

But then reality hits you. And when you realize that you are way behind your plans and you get really demotivated and feel short of energy. When you fall into this trap you cannot celebrate what you’ve actually achieved (which is a lot). And to celebrate all the small steps into the right direction is a must. 

The perfection trap. This is the typical thing that you don’t launch until the product is perfect. The product will never be perfect. You need to launch it and learn to iterate constantly. Tweaks and improvements are a constant. 

The creativity trap. This is a common one. There are so many ideas that you get on how to improve your product and to make it better and better that you need to stop and do it once a month. Write down all the ideas that you have in that month and select one and do it. Just don’t do all of them at the same time. 

What marketing strategies have you found to be most successful for your business?

Marketing is a big issue for us and we made so many mistakes. 

Hire someone that knows their stuff and is hands on about their business and loves your product. And always measure the impact of each action you take. If you don’t, you waste very valuable resources that as an entrepreneur we all know they are scarce.

When it comes to coworking spaces, what is something they must offer that would attract you as an entrepreneur/business owner? 

Comfortable chairs and tables. Good access through public transport. And different spaces and with different energy for you to work!