The Importance of Increasing Your Self-Awareness as an Entrepreneur

Self-awareness means that you understand what inspires you, your emotions and your personality. As entrepreneurs, it is important you understand yourself, As Socrates said: “Know thyself.” What do you enjoy doing? What do you dislike doing?  What poses a challenge to you?.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you must be a good leader, and you cannot effectively lead other unless you can lead yourself. Self-awareness is the foundation for developing effective leadership skills. We all are not perfect. When you understand your strengths and weakness as an individual, you gain insight into areas of your life that may need change or improvement.

As entrepreneurs, it is important to build your self-awareness because you have a business that depends on you. If you are self-aware, you have the capacity to observe your team members and you can help them align their strengths to the benefit of the business.

Here are four ways to increase your self-awareness as an entrepreneur:

1.    Ask for Feedback: The best way to gain self-awareness is to ask for feedback. The feedback here should be honest and sincere.  You can get honest feedback from people whom you trust. It could be your spouse, best friend, coach or anyone with whom you can be completely honest with and share wins and fails.

The benefit of getting honest feedback is that it helps you know how you come across to people. It helps you understand how others perceive you and the effect that you have on people that you do not know. For instance, if you are not used to smiling at people when you meet them, the may perceive you as unfriendly.  When you understand these traits and accept them, then you can be truly empowered and use your strengths to take your business to new heights.

2.    Take Time to Reflect: To reflect means that you review information, experiences, situations and actions that have happened. You do this to understand and learn from it. You can reflect privately or in a group. As an entrepreneur, it is easy to get caught up in the activities of running your business. It is important that you set aside time each day, either at the beginning of the day or end of the day – whichever time you consider less stressful, to reflect.

Another aspect of reflection is solitude. Solitude means you are out of human contact or being alone for a period. Silence is a vital element of solitude. Solitude gives you the opportunity contemplate on who you are, your goals, your business, and relationships. Solitude builds creativity as it gives you the chance to think through your ideas before putting them forward. Find time today to reflect!

3.    Keep a Journal/Write a Blog: Keeping a journal also helps to increase your self-awareness. A journal could include aspects of your interpersonal experience. Your journal could be a collection of insightful quotations, reflections on personal events or notes from your meeting with a coach. A good journal gives you the opportunity to think on paper – it could serve as a source of ideas which could be used later in the future. You could also convert your journal to a blog. 

A blog can also be used to get feedback about yourself and your opinions from other people. You could post your journal as an online blog today and see what people think.

4.    Appraise your performance: Another way to learn about yourself is by appraising your goals and what you have been able to achieve in your personal life and your business. When you decide to make a major decision or action, write down your expectations. This gives you the opportunity of comparing the actual results you receive with your expectations. Do this activity as often as you can maybe every 3 to 4 months.

Doing this activity will reveal your strengths and your weakness. It will also reveal to you what you fail to do that is hold you back from success. It will reveal what is depriving you of the real benefits of your strengths. Self-performance appraisal will help you discover areas where you require additional knowledge to utilize your strengths.

Being self-aware helps you to develop an original personal brand. Because your business is a reflection of who you are, the success or failure of the business depends on you.