Mm-hmm.

And the client is testing you early on about things like that.

You don't have to give away the farm But are you being rigid just to show them? They don't feel like, "Oh, you're a great negotiator," when you negotiate against your client.

They actually think that it will be difficult later.

Another moment when an owner gets scared is during, and I say scared, they won't use that word, is during diligence.

So the...

Remember, the owner is used to being the person who knows everything about their business, and I guarantee you that in the diligence process, questions are going to be asked that they don't know, or they are anxious about, "Are you going to find something that I did wrong? Are you going to discover something that I was foolish about or just didn't know?" And anxiety like that triggers fear, and when fear comes in, it triggers our amygdala, the part of our brain that is always looking for danger, and it will literally flip our cognitive brain off.

Yeah.

Right

...

I might have gotten what I wanted.

Was that what I wanted?" And that experience of feeling uncertainty even after I exited my business, and it was what I wanted, the people around me could not quite understand what that was, and they would say things like, "But I thought you wanted to sell." A lot of owners feel that same experience, where they do want to sell, but then there is also, "Who will I spend my day with? Who are my friends if they're not the people from my company at work?" Since so many people are focused on the economics and the transaction of it, when these pieces of emotion start to emerge, an owner, if they don't have somewhere to process them, can feel ashamed that it's even coming up.

And the people around us often don't understand that it's a both/and.

I wanted what I wanted, and I miss it, and that's very normal.

I often use examples from other parts of our life.

Yeah.