As you know, good leaders are self-aware. When something isn’t working in your business, you don’t just blame the market or your team. You take a good look at yourself, too. Are you the bottleneck? Is your thinking getting in the way? Are you the one who needs to change? This kind of self-awareness in leadership is vital for sustainably growing your business.
So when you recognize your business isn’t working the way you want, you look at everything. When you can pinpoint the issue, you can come up with something to fix it.
Some of the more common issues business owners identify are in the business. Pricing, service, prospecting, culture, you know the drill. Putting together the best solution for the team requires leadership and self-awareness.
However, sometimes, everything appears to be just fine with the business. This is when the owner needs to look at themselves to identify what’s going on with them that’s impacting the business.
The most common places we look at when we’re diagnosing ourselves as owners and leaders are our mindset, discipline, and work ethic. The challenge with this is that our mindset can cover a lot of territory. And sometimes our mindset can actually be a health problem dressed up as a business issue.
This is a particularly difficult thing to detect because it’s intrinsic. It colors your entire life. It can also be part of why you’re the business owner you are today. Who you are and what your business becomes are more tightly linked than most owners realize, which is why your business can’t outgrow you.
Yet there are warning signs easily dismissed because business owners are used to fighting through to get what they want. That’s just what it takes to be a business owner. So, you tell yourself that things will get better after the next launch, the next hire, or the next quarter. In other words, you stop listening to yourself.
A Story You Already Know
Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics is probably the most recognizable example. At the time, she was the most decorated gymnast alive and at the top of her sport, and she stepped back from some of her events.
She said her mind and body were “not in sync”. She needed a different kind of attention than her trainers could provide. And she had the self-awareness to see it and the courage to act on it in front of everyone.
And everyone was initially confused because she was obviously talented, trying really hard, and winning. This is the whole point. The thing in her way had nothing to do with her ability, and no amount of pushing through would have fixed it.
If it can reach the best gymnast in the world at the peak of her career, it can reach a business owner.
What If the Business Is Fine but You’re Not?
Sometimes the numbers show the business is running great while the owner feels like they’re hardly living. Brad Feld, a well-known venture capitalist and a co-founder of Techstars and Foundry Group, was also one of the first people in the startup world to talk openly about his depression, and he wrote about it in Inc. back in 2013.
What’s most important about his story is that his business was going great. He was doing everything he needed to do to hit his performance marks. From the outside, everything looked fine.
What he lost was the joy of doing it all. He was diagnosed with high-functioning depression.
Yes, he got help from a therapist and the people closest to him. He also recognized that the pace he was operating at wasn’t sustainable. The depression came back over the years, so it wasn’t a “fix it and move on” thing.
What he learned was to lead well while managing it, and he’s been at the top of his field the entire time. Getting the help he needed is what allowed him to remain the titan he is.
But it doesn’t always show up like this.
Many people call this drive or simply being responsible. It looks exactly like what a good business owner should be doing, which is why nobody questions it at all, especially the person doing it.
Others can experience it as an alternating pattern of flatness and stress, where one week they’ve got a stretch of brilliant output followed by a stretch of nothing getting done.
This is where self-awareness in leadership matters most. It can help you recognize that you might be looking at something more than needing to get motivated or shift your mindset.
When an Outreach Problem Wasn’t an Outreach Problem
This person wanted to grow their business, as all of my clients do. After we examined what was happening, we agreed that the place they needed to start was with messaging and then outreach.
They worked on the messaging until it was ready to be tested with outreach. This client already had their revenue goals, so we used estimates to back-calculate how much outreach they’d need to achieve their goals.
We created a spreadsheet so they could track their efforts. We would see how well our estimates worked and then make adjustments based on actual results.
It took them a bit to get started. Then they did, and we got some great data, for just a couple of weeks. Then it stopped. “Life” got in the way.
Then they got some more data, and “life” happened again.
This pattern went on for about a year.
Each time “life” happened, I’d try another angle to help get things moving again. They’d nod and agree, Yes, I’ll be able to do this.
We always went back to the numbers.
We used the data to show us where to focus efforts, but after a year, the numbers were undeniable. The efforts were only occurring in fits and starts instead of the consistency required for business growth, despite my client’s professed determination to make things happen.
That’s when I knew I had to ask a much harder question. Why does a capable person who needs this, and says they want it, keep starting and stopping for a whole year?
This isn’t a business question. Neither of us could continue to see it as one. And, fortunately, they decided to talk to someone in the mental health field to get the specialized support they needed.
Why Do Self-Aware Owners Still Miss It?
Mental health is one of those things that, despite being openly spoken about by the best gymnast in the world and a well-known investor, still carries a bit of a stigma, which makes looking at the business so much easier. And yes, this is even true for self-aware leaders like my client.
If you’ve recognized yourself in the lived texture of any of these stories, please know you’re not alone. The bravest, most capable owners and investors I know are the ones who stopped just pushing and asked for help. Please reach out to someone you trust for an outside perspective or contact a mental health professional who works with business owners and entrepreneurs.
About the Author
Karen Finn, PhD, is an author and business growth strategist. Download a copy of her book, The Business Growth Plan, to get insight into the low-cost and no-cost strategies she uses with her clients to 2x-3x their revenues.
