Self-awareness is the most important skill an entrepreneur can develop.

Unfortunately, it’s a skill often left out of the conversation in entrepreneurship.

A self-aware entrepreneur makes better decisions, is easier to work with and has a higher chance of enjoying the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial roller coaster.

I have enough self-awareness to know that I’m not qualified to teach others the steps to self-awareness. I’ve spent the last eight years untangling some internal knots and learning to grow in self-awareness. The one thing that I can be confident in saying is that it is about progress and not perfection. It’s a state of becoming, not necessarily a state of being.

Raising two teenage sons has me thinking about how to help them grow in self-awareness. Based on my initial progress, this could be the greatest challenge in my life. I’m attempting to distill it down to a few core elements, hoping they begin the process much earlier in life than I did.

As of now, these are the three things that I think will help my sons, and any entrepreneur, grow in self-awareness:

Reflection - Writing down your thoughts and feelings can make the abstract more concrete. Getting it out of our brain and onto paper provides enough of a perspective change to reflect on what we’re thinking and how we’re thinking about things.
External processing - Talking to a coach, therapist or close mentor lets us tell someone else what we think and feel. Sometimes it’s simply the act of saying things out loud that brings clarity to our thoughts. It also allows us to have our blind spots and biases revealed to us by someone we trust.
Meditation - Nothing will show you how scattered your mind is than trying to meditate. We think we can control our lives when, in reality, we can’t even control our thoughts. The 30-day intro course on the Waking Up app is a great way to get started. Ten minutes per day for 30 days and I felt like I had maybe 30 seconds of cumulative time in there when I was actually meditating. It helps reinforce that it’s about small steps in progress because perfection doesn’t exist.

I’m sure that there is more to it than these three things, but these seem to me to be the core elements of growing in self-awareness.

It’s probably worth repeating - it’s about progress and not perfection.