Trauma & Bad Decisions: What Happened to the Old Franklin?

Nathan Hastings-Spaine
4 min readMar 17, 2021

🚨 SPOILER ALERT!!! 🚨

Re-Entry, Weight, All the Way Down, and Expansion. Season 4 is off to an eventful start for the show’s protagonist Franklin Saint.

While times elapsed, the effects of Season 3 still linger. Love, life’s battlefield, has left its two participants in despair. Mel, now in Atlanta with her Aunt, still mourns the loss of her father. And Franklin, who’s making strides in his physical recovery. Has yet to heal from the emotional turmoil that accompanies a near-death experience.

The trauma of almost being killed by the woman he loves remains. The once self-assured leader is no more. Instead, the timid boy who found himself in a prison cell during Season 2 has reemerged.

Trauma, when unaddressed, isn’t stored away in our memories file cabinet. Instead, a lens that shapes the decisions we make. And as an entrepreneur, the danger of unhealed trauma is that our decisions not only shape the essence of our life but those around us.

The past four weeks, Twitter comments like “Franklin needs to tighten up” and “Get your stuff together, Franklin!” are the dominant narrative, highlighting his poor decision-making. But with every failure comes a lesson, so as entrepreneurs, we can learn much from Franklin’s journey so far. Now let’s unpack some of my entrepreneurial takeaways.

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For this article, we hold these three truths to be self-evident:

  1. Leaders with high emotional intelligence get better results.
  2. Trauma has profound and lasting effects on our emotional intelligence.
  3. Emotional intelligence = Self-Awareness and Control + Empathy + Social Expertness + Personal Influence + Mastery of Vision.

Self-Awareness and Control

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Nathan Hastings-Spaine

Built In Africa | Boss Your Life Up Campaign | Capo Agency | Just sharing the journey. https://www.nathanspaine.com/links