How Personal Development Can Make You a Better Business Owner

I recently blogged about the importance of Continuing Professional Development for small business owners and how it can help you keep up to date with trends, skills, and expertise to be able to offer more to your clients and protect your business.

In this blog, I want to get personal and talk about you. Yes, you the individual behind the business, who has hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties but ultimately wants to make your vision a reality for you, your family, and your business too.

And I want to talk about personal development and how it can get you there.

Self-growth, understanding, and acceptance are all important factors for being comfortable and confident with ourselves, but they’re not taught in school, and as we’re all individual what works for one of us might be the opposite of another’s particular needs. With that in mind, I’m going to talk quite generally about personal development and why it’s so important with the hope that you’ll investigate further and find the ways that work best for you.

Personal development can help you be a happier and healthier you

Understanding what motivates you, what your goals actually are and how to improve them can help you relieve the stress and anxiety that’s affecting your body’s ability to be healthy.  Not having understanding and acceptance of yourself, and not knowing where you need to be and how to there can create issues for your mind to tackle, too many and your mental health struggles.

Trying to support your mental health can mean important resources are diverted away from your physical health and it’s a vicious circle where you can really begin to feel unwell mentally, physically and even develop burnout or chronic illness.

Self-understanding and acceptance can put your mind at ease, help you build resilience and find new ways of thinking and feeling about things, which will support your mental health and give your immune system a boost too. A healthier you means you can invest more time and energy into your business, making you a better business owner too.

If you are struggling with your mental health you should always consult your doctor or seek out a mental health professional to help you get to the root of the issue and explore treatment options available to you. Trying to understand yourself when you’re already struggling can lead you down the wrong path and you should be cautious, it’s best to explore things with the guidance of a trained professional.

Self-growth can be achieved through learning

Learning a new skill or simply finding out more about a subject that interests you can help you grow as an individual. There are many skills required for learning like time-management, critical thinking, memory and recall, analysing and interpreting information to improved communication skills. All of these skills can be used elsewhere in your personal life and in your role as a business owner too.

Learning something that’s directly relevant to your business can bring even more benefits. What about psychology to help you understand consumer behaviour? Or even business management? Whatever it is that interests you and motivated you to start your business can be learned to a high level, so why not investigate the courses that are open to you right now?

Taking on a new hobby can help your personal development too

Let’s say you’ve always fancied medieval re-enactment as a hobby (I know, it’s an odd one, just bear with me!). The opportunity to dress up, maybe swing a sword around or fire a bow, and relax with a tankard of Mead on a warm summer’s evening. It sounds like a great way to de-stress, learn new knowledge and skills and have a great time too!

But it can also benefit your business. All those new people you’ll socialise with are a great way to find new clients and opportunities. The skills you’ll learn are transferable – able to teach about the medieval longbow to a family? You’ll be able to share your business expertise with ease too.

That’s possibly a more extreme example of a hobby but anything from taking on marathon running to writing a novel will help you learn new things about yourself along with the skills required to be successful. All things that your business can benefit from.

I hope these examples have given you an idea of how your personal development can directly benefit your business and make you a better business owner. What that personal development looks like for you is completely your choice so why not think big, go wild and really challenge yourself this year!