“Do You Have a Self-development Plan?”

Does your business feel like it has stalled? Has it plateaued? Or flatlined?

Reason # 10

Very few are blessed (or cursed) with the courage and determination that is going to make it work. So count yourself in that very small, very special minority. It is probably less than one percent of the population. And if that is the route you have chosen you will probably be aware that there is an extraordinarily high level of attrition. Yours is really the road less travelled and it is also the road less completed. Not all of those who start will finish. Lots will fall by the wayside. Either the business will fail or the person will give up. The drop out rate is brutal.

Uncharted Waters

One of the reasons for this is the fact that on this journey, after a very short time, whoever you are, whatever your background, you are going to be in uncharted waters, for you. Typically, someone may decide to start a business because they have a set of core skills. They are a great engineer, a programmer, a baker or a builder. Whatever the skills that they bring to the game in the beginning, sooner or later they will reach the rev limiter on those skills and the experience they have gathered thus far and find themselves in unknown territory. In my ‘wiggly line theory’ video our hero the tiler has to recruit and work alongside his first employee. The fact that he studied for seven years how to be a great tiler, hasn’t prepared him for recruiting or managing another human being and yet the decisions he makes about who to hire and how to manage him will have a much greater impact on the firm’s well being than his knowledge of adhesives and grout.

Technical Skills

In fact, by definition, as you grow a business you are going to have to go places that you have never been before. The decisions you make and the actions you take will have far more influence on the prosperity and longevity of the business than any of the technical skills you have gathered before. But the stuff you need to know and the skills you need to develop aren’t those that are typically taught anywhere but these are precisely the things that you must learn and the skills you must develop if you want to grow and to succeed. Jim Rohn said to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. When you decide to go into business, you are placing a big bet, a massive bet, on yourself. Although your skills and experience will quickly be out run by the growth of your business. There is something you can do. You can work hard on yourself. And you must. One of my coaches said that what you don’t know is more important than what you do know, because its what you don’t know that costs you. In fact, it is what you don’t know that will frustrate you. It’s what you don’t know that will get you stuck and it’s what you don’t know that is likely to hole your business below the waterline.

Take Action

You need to be better than that. It was Einstein who said that we can’t solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that we had when we created them. We have to constantly learn how to think at a higher level. And not only to think at a higher level but also to behave and to take actions at a higher level. Sooner or later we all become stuck. We try to solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. It feels as though we are locked in a hall of mirrors. We just get reflected back into more of what we know about what we know about what we know.

Self-Development

The frustration builds. We can never know what we don’t know. No matter how bright we may think we are we will never find that which would never occur to us, on our own. This only ever happens as part of an interaction with another human being. So selecting and interacting with that, or those, other human beings is vitally important to your self development. That is why Jim Rohn also said “your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development”. Pay attention to it. Your future depends upon it as does the future of your enterprise.