Unleashing Your Entrepreneurial Goddess: Part 2 Know Yourself

Last week we looked at the first step to unleashing your entrepreneurial goddess. Know Your Desires i.e., identifying your goals and clearly visualising them so that your entrepreneurial goddess can subconsciously direct you to seek out the paths to achieve them.

This week we take the process a little deeper by bench-marking where you are in terms of the gap between what you currently have and what you will need in order to awaken your multi million pound business and create the firm foundation you require to become among the most highly sought after, highly paid and highly influential people within your chosen business niche.

Knowing yourself is about taking a long hard honest look at who you are physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually and then identifying your personal development needs and your triggers so that you acquire the skills and resilience to become a successful Tycoon Woman. 

Growing a successful multimillion pound business is hard work and it takes time, i.e., it does not happen overnight. It would be wholly unrealistic to imagine that everything will always run smoothly and that there will be no really tough times. Times when, even the most motivated and committed individuals feel like giving up!

Knowing yourself and identifying in advance a programme of development to bolster your strengths and turn your weaknesses into opportunities will provide you with a solid foundation on which to build your business.

Many women resist the call of their entrepreneurial goddess because they believe they don’t have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. This is because we have all been miss educated to believe that working for yourself is way too risky, only for the mavericks amongst us and is a sure why to heart ache and poverty. The mantra we learn to live by at school is “get a good education so that you can get a good job!” In other words rather than create wealth earn a wage.

In actual fact, the reality is that we are born with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. As a young child you possessed a keen questioning and problem solving mind that was eager to discover new and better ways of doing things. You probably took things apart, made up stories, redesigned your toys and customised your clothes so that the things in your environment worked the way you needed them too in order to address your PAIN - Problems Aspirations Issues and Needs. And if you are thinking you never did any of this, think back and recall how easy it was to play in your imagination before you were given lots of rules.

Begin your process of introspection positively, by looking at your strengths. Everyone has strengths, things that they excel at. These will be the things people are always complementing you about or come to you for advice. Some helpful questions to get your mind going if you encounter a mental block about your strengths are:

• What could you talk about effortlessly for hours?
• What can you do that nobody else can do with the ease and grace that you do it?

Make a list of your strengths. Aim to list at least 30 things that you feel confident about doing or areas of expert knowledge that you have. Ask 10 people that know you for their views. Five that you think of as supporters (close friends/family) and five who are more objective I.e. Business/professional acquaintances. Again it can be a useful strategy to write down the key areas of your life and categories your strengths under each heading - you may have created this list during part 1.

Next you should look at those areas that are your weaknesses either in terms of lack of information/knowledge, skills and ability. As the list of things that we don’t know or aren't good at could potentially be endless, you will need to set the context. Do this by relating it to your desires. That is, given what you have identified as your desired future outcome what things currently prevent you from achieving it?

Ask yourself: 

• Are any things that you are particularly reluctant to do?
• What tasks do you always do last and why?
• Are you aware of anything about you that others complain about?

Remember, this is not about creating a list of negative features to beat yourself up with later! All the information you gather is feedback not failure! You will use it to create your programme of self development that will help to propel you towards your dreams.

After you have explored your weaknesses you should look at what opportunities these create for you to develop. You may find it helpful to divide your list into technical skills and personal qualities.

The final area you should look at is your triggers. Think of these as the things that are potential threats to your success. What triggers you in terms of feeling de motivated, loosing focus or prevents you from taking action. Triggers have the potential to act like dominoes – once the lead one is knocked over they set up a chain reaction that literally brings everything tumbling down.

By identifying your triggers in advance you will be able to take action or seek help to avoid things escalating. Here is a list of 10 trigger ‘states’ (i.e how you are feeling or thinking), that I have found can lead to feelings of de motivation and potentially derail you. Do you have any others to add?

1. Excessive fatigue
2. Making 1+1 = 5 in other words making one event mean something else (usually negative) e.g. someone didn't return your calls therefore you conclude that they aren’t interested, when there could be other perfectly reasonable explanations
3. Over concentrating and taking infrequent breaks
4. Allowing constant distractions to take your focus
5. Ignoring or not celebrating the little successes
6. Trying to do it all by yourself
7. Thinking the grass is greener for everyone else
8. Getting bogged down in minutia that is neither urgent or important
9. Frequently missing meals or eating at your PC
10. Procrastination

By the time you have completed your analysis of your strengths, weaknesses and triggers you should have a comprehensive profile of yourself, which will enable you to devise a personal development plan to ensure that you are able to enhance your strengths and plug any skills or knowledge gaps. See my precious Blog post on how to construct your personal development plan  (4 April 2011).

It is a good idea when carrying out self exploration to work with a business mentor or business coach as they will be able to give you objective feedback and ask you the difficult questions that you may not be prepared to ask yourself.  A business mentor/ coach can also help you set achievable goals and teach you how to track your progress and motivate you to make the very best out of your entrepreneurial goddess based on your professional and personal needs. Working in partnership with you and your entrepreneurial goddess, a business mentor/coach can add the “umph” to whatever you “tri” and ensure that you are triumphant in your quest to becoming a Tycoon Woman.

What do you feel are the benefits or otherwise of getting to know yourself? Has self explorations worked for you? - what is your experience? 

For more helpful articles and insights to help you become a successful entrepreneur and Tycoon woman checkout the Tycoon Women website and Tycoon Women Facebook page

In part 3 of this series I look at the final step in the process to unleash your entrepreneurial goddess and awaken your multimillion pound business:

#3. Know your higher purpose

Foot note:

The information in this article also applies to conscious guys who wish to discover their inner power and unleash their entrepreneurial divinity.

image Businesswoman Doing Yoga by Ambro