John Packham
There’s a lot of talk about self-discovery, self-help, and self-development these days. This is especially true in the business world. It seems that you can’t walk into any book store or read any blog about there being an element of self-improvement advice right in front of you.
The trouble with all of this advice, however, is that it assumes that you know enough about yourself to make improvements in the first place. What’s missing for a lot of people, especially people who are feeling lost in business, is that they don’t know enough about themselves to make changes. In order to succeed in business, you have to learn to be authentic and get to know yourself in a real way.
Look Yourself in the Mirror
Really understanding yourself means identifying the good, the bad, and the ugly things you think, say, and do. If it sounds terrible, it is, and it’s precisely the reason people start businesses they actually hate, why businesses fail, and why more people end up working for other companies faster than ever before.
You Need to Know More
We make the assumption that we know all we need to know about ourselves to run our own businesses when we first start out. After all, it’s our business! Who knows it better than us? If we knew ourselves in an authentic way, this might not be such a big problem. But the problem continues to persist. People start up businesses too fast, too soon, and with too little consideration for who they are as people, not just the skills the have and the problems they can solve.
You’ll Grow Whether You Like it or Not
In getting to know yourself, it’s important that you realize that the person you are today is not the person you’ll be tomorrow. The person who started your business is not the person who will grow it. The person who took on your first client is not the person who will take on your tenth client. Everything changes as you change. But if you don’t change and adapt your business as you go along, you’ll run the risk of losing steam, ground, or worse, yourself.
Face the Music
Discovering things about yourself is not always an enlightening process. Many business owners start up a business only to find that entrepreneurship is not all it’s cracked up to be and that they don’t have what it takes to run a company. Others, who might try business ownership on a whim, come to learn that they do have what it takes to be successful in their own right. But if people turn away from any one of these thoughts, business is put at risk. It’s not just the bad stuff that keeps people from learning about themselves in an authentic way: the good stuff scares people, too.
Success is Scary Too
What if you are wildly successful at your business venture? What if people don’t like you when you have a lot of money? What if you have to choose between your business and your relationships? It happens to people all the time. We are as afraid of success as we are of failure, but failure is easy to explain away when we realize we are becoming someone we are not. Success on the other hand, is not as easy to explain when we admit we had to become someone else other than who we were to begin with, in order to achieve our goals.
Change with Purpose
Change for the sake of change is not a good thing, but it can be if you are interested in learning more about yourself as a way of growing your business. If you’ve never spent $10,000 on a business coach or invested in finding a coworking space, you might have to become someone who does those things in order to move forward. And that can be scary for a lot of people. What if you wake up tomorrow and don’t recognize yourself?
Prepare for the New You in Business
Running a business is tough work and you need to become someone who can not only hack it in business, but also be prepared for how you’ll change as a person. If you aren’t prepared to come out of this experience as a different person, you aren’t being honest with yourself and you aren’t being authentic. Authenticity is about more than honesty though; it’s about exploration, openness, and a willingness to uncover things you don’t like. Running a business might be all you ever think about, but in action, that dream might not translate so well. If you want to be authentic in business, you need to be willing to find out if that is the case and then confront what you discover so that you can make the best of what you’ve got.
