12 Jul Improving your self-awareness for business success
Improving your self-awareness is an important skill for any successful entrepreneur or small business owner. Self-awareness means knowing your strengths, weaknesses, emotional triggers, motivations and how you behave.
Strong self-awareness will help you leverage your strengths to improve your business. And conversely, know where and when to bring in skills and competencies. It guides you on where to improve and grow. Improving your self-awareness also leads to improved business performance and productivity. When you are more self-aware you become more self-assured, which can help you with sales pitches, networking and presenting. Self-awareness also helps you to be authentic, and develop a unique personal brand.
Knowing yourself, your limits, your potential and your emotions will ensure you make good business decisions and stay on the path to success.
Top 10 tips for improving your self-awareness
Becoming more self-aware takes time and effort, and is an ongoing process. Here are our top 10 tips for improving your self-awareness for business success:
- Create time and space to pause and reflect. Ideally do this daily. For example, if you gave a presentation or had an important meeting, reflect on what went well, what could be improved and what you felt and why.
- Keep a thought diary or journal. Note reflections, ideas, feelings, obstacles, wins and more.
- Write down your plans and priorities. Document what you want to achieve, how you want to grow or change, and track your progress.
- Know your values and follow them. Knowing your core values (your fundamental beliefs) is an important part of knowing yourself and being true to yourself. Write down your values (or use one of the many online activities to help you determine them) and use them to guide you to make decisions.
- Practise mindfulness. Whether it’s meditation, grounding techniques, a mindful walk or mindful listening. Make some time to pay attention to your inner state.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses. Without judging yourself make a list of your strengths and weaknesses. They can be determined through reflection, insights from others, or psychometric tests.
- Know your emotional triggers. This will help your emotional health. When triggered (reminded of a past trauma), try to ‘step back’ and understand what has happened. Be curious and give yourself space to feel the emotions. You can also create strategies to avoid being triggered.
- Gain a different perspective. Ask for feedback from friends and business peers about your strengths, weaknesses and behaviours. Quite often we don’t see ourselves as others do.
- Embrace your intuition. Find time to listen to your intuition. Trust it and foster it.
- Observe others. Watch how they tackle tasks, respond to challenges, use their strengths or develop their weaknesses. This can give you insight into yourself, as well as tips and tricks to use in your business.
By taking on some of the actions above you can improve your self-awareness and reap the benefits in your business (and personal life!).
Further info and resources
Tasha Eurich is the guru on self-awareness. We recommend her book Insight: The surprising truth about how others see us, how we see ourselves, and why the answers matter more than we think. She has also been interviewed on many great business podcasts if that’s more your thing. Just search for her in your podcast app.
Self-awareness is a key part of Beyond Business Groups. Our first module is ‘Know yourself and your why’. Find out more about what sets our small business learning program apart, and how it can help you and your business flourish. You can also follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Or to keep up-to-date with all our articles and free workshops and worksheets, sign up to our monthly newsletter (we promise we won’t spam you!).
Self-awareness is closely linked to having a growth mindset. You can read our article on the importance of a growth mindset in small business.