10 Entrepreneurial skills that make you a better person

When becoming an entrepreneur, a couple of amazing things happen. Among other things, you learn about your industry, you learn about business, you work harder than you ever thought you could and you begin to see the tangible results of the work you put in.

But most importantly, you develop skills that may not be directly related to your day-to-day business operations, but that contribute hugely to your professional development. I’m going to be digging into 10 such skills over the course of the next two blog posts – five skills in this post and five in my next post.

I believe so strongly that the development of these skills creates more balanced, happier entrepreneurs who are in turn able to create thriving, successful businesses.

They are discussed below in no order of importance.

1. Patience

You need to be incredibly patient to start a business. You should be patient with your clients, patient with your potential clients, patient with technology, and patient with banks and formal institutions.

You will have gorgeous days. You know the ones: everything works impeccably well, technology does exactly what it’s supposed to do, there are no issues with the tax man, and your clients love your work. You will also have hideous days where none of the above is true.

What ties it all together is an enduring patience with yourself. A business doesn’t get started and immediately have everything organised and everything in place to get going right away. Everything from business cards to a website, from a solid client base to a brand voice all takes time.

Patience allows you to keep going at a steady pace while keeping an optimistic outlook on your life and your business.

2. Resilience

This is your ability to get back on your feet after challenges. Difficulties are an inherent part of your journey, and it’s hugely beneficial to learn to recover as quickly as possible from any bumps in the road.

Obsessing over failures, mistakes and generally unfortunate events is a big waste of time. See the mishap in context, look at it objectively and take as much learning out of the experience as possible. Then use that learning to improve yourself and your business in the longer term. You’ll get yourself back in the zone faster each time with stronger purpose.

3. Commitment

This is a big one. There are a few fundamental commitments to make when starting a business. You need to commit to the business, and you need to commit to putting in the hours of work it takes to build something of value.

Commitment to your clients or customers is also important. Commitment to solving their problems and meeting their needs allows you to make decisions that benefit both parties.

There are a few other important commitments to make as well. For example, commitment to a healthy daily routine and regular office hours helps to organise your life and positively contributes to productivity.

4. Managing disappointment

Disappointment crops up in ways annoying and saddening. It can be a sudden large occurrence or many little happenings that pile up. As much as excitement is a constant companion on the journey of entrepreneurship, so is disappointment.

Sometimes plans you make go hideously awry, and sometimes a client won’t love work that you consider to be of a high standard. You will create an amazing pitch for a potential client that you’ll never hear from again. You’ll make an awesome deal only for the client to change their mind 24 hours later.

Taking disappointment to heart and blaming yourself for its cause is the best way to feel disempowered, stuck and sometimes even creates feelings of hopelessness. No good work can come out of feeling this way. Learning to manage disappointment helps you to view mishaps as an everyday part of business and contributes to a healthy self-image.

5. Letting go of perfection

Absolutely nothing in life is perfect. The desire to create perfection in yourself, your work and your business is misguided and sets you up for failure. Instead strive for progress. Progress is easier to track and much more encouraging when you see it happening in your business and life.

Letting go of perfection relieves a lot of tension and takes some of the pressure off yourself. When you stop comparing your work to your imagined perfect version, you allow yourself to see the good in what you create.

Trying to achieve perfection is also a sneaky way of procrastinating. If you’re trying to get a project perfect, it’s not really moving the project forward to completion. Having something finished is much better for your life and sanity than having it perfect. Nobody notices minor imperfections but you, and I don’t usually go around telling people where the imperfections are in my work.

Letting go of this ideal of perfection also helps you come to terms with the imperfections in your life.

6. Communication

The value of professional communication cannot be underestimated. Speaking and writing are separate but complementary skills and a high standard of both is necessary to portray a professional image. I’m not saying that you should sound overly fancy and snob-like, but a warm, friendly tone can be created with professional language. Smiley faces and exclamation points are out of place in a business email.

Keeping an open channel of communication with your clients is also good professional conduct. Working with clients can be a delicate operation, and the more you guide them along the process of working with you, the more pleasant the experience is for both parties. You do this by outlining the steps you are taking to get a certain project completed, and informing them at each stage what is expected of them and what you are going to be doing.

Engaging in healthy debate with other people in your industry is also important. That way you are able to contribute to the improvement of your industry in the much longer term.

7. Empathy

When clients come to you, they will ordinarily have a problem to solve. Depending on the type of problem you solve, potential clients may come to you in various states of distress. Being empathetic with a potential client allows you to understand the problem from their point of view. It also helps you understand their anxieties around solving the problem.

This may sound strange, but even though we know we have a problem, the process of solving it can be quite scary. Fixing something usually involves change, which people manage with varying degrees of success.

Helping your client to navigate the problem and its solution with empathy help both parties to form a meaningful connection with each other.

8. Decisiveness

When you start a business, there will be so many things you’ll want to do. Even worse, there are so many things that grab your attention and try to convince you that whatever it is, that’s the most important thing that you need to do immediately.

There are countless decisions that need to be made when running a business: from making big decisions, like your company name, to smaller decisions (like whether to focus on Project A or Project B this week). Being indecisive about everything is the quickest way to get zero items crossed off the to-do list and nothing accomplished in a month. Indecision is also excellent at eroding your confidence and self-esteem.

Deciding on a path to follow is challenging enough, but it’s made even more difficult when indecision plagues everything you do. Being decisive helps you to make informed decisions and to do exactly what needs to be done to see the completion of the task or project.

Decisiveness is a skill that will help you to be strategic about where you invest your time and attention.

9. Imagination

Imagination is incredibly important for life in general, but especially life as an entrepreneur. When you start out, you’re building from nothing, so to have some vision of where you’d like to be takes a healthy dose of imagination. Imagination helps us to create the reality we would like to experience.

Imagination is also useful when you start collaborating with other people to find creative ways of working together. You may find that you can solve more problems and create more work than you would have been able to do alone.

If you are an entrepreneur in the creative fields, imagination is vital for your day-to-day work as well. Imagination stimulates creativity which allows you to look at situations from different points of view. This helps to come up with a few solutions to a problem.

10. Self-reflection

All the above skills are of no benefit if they are not supported by the vital skill of self-reflection. To be able to develop and improve other skills, it’s essential to look objectively and critically at current skills habits and behaviour. Self-reflection is also about putting steps in place to help you improve certain parts of your life in strategic ways.

The point of self-reflection is not to criticise yourself for where you feel you’re lacking. It’s to look at where you were a few months ago, compare that to where you are now, and to note the changes you have been able to make. It’s also then important to be proud of yourself for making those adjustments.

If done with care and kindness, self-reflection also cultivates a more gentle, forgiving nature with yourself and, by extension, with other people.