5 Core Benefits of Personal Development for Startups

Embracing personal development as a startup owner gives you the edge to succeed and opens up a world of potential for your personal growth.

Given that two-thirds of all new businesses fail within the first ten years, investing in personal development can be the key to surviving and thriving in the business world and adding value to the world around you.

Here are five of the most significant benefits you’ll see from focusing on personal development.

1. Listening Is Essential

We hear lots of talk, sounds, and ideas on a moment-to-moment basis. We’re constantly bombarded with pitches and thoughts that range from terrible to groundbreaking. It’s hard to tell the difference if we only hear and never really listen.

When you listen, you can respond more accurately based on what the person you’re listening to wants. Listening can scale from the person sitting across from you all the way up to hearing from your entire market.

Listening requires extensive personal development. You must understand when your opinion matters and when it doesn’t. It can be challenging to detach your ego from a conversation and focus on the wants and needs of others, but it’s essential.

Listening will help you understand what the other members of your team want. It can also help appease your investors, executives, employees, and customers. Listening will strengthen your understanding of who you are and what you can achieve.

If your head is full of noise, you need to quiet it down to make space for listening.

2. Time Costs Money

Time management is one of the biggest hurdles for any entrepreneur. Since you’re often tasked with overlapping jobs, from marketing to CEO to project manager, it can be hard to manage your time. Some entrepreneurs even feel guilty when they’re not working during their downtime.

However, part of personal growth and development is knowing when to devote time to yourself and your family.

Without taking time off for yourself, you’ll spend more time working inefficiently. You can’t make wise decisions when you’re tired, overwhelmed, or lacking perspective on what matters to you. And if you’re thinking about work when you’re with your family, you’re not really relaxing and focusing on yourself.

You are in balance between your life as an entrepreneur and that of a community member and family member. Taking a weekend off for a personal development seminar can be the perfect escape to recalibrate your life.

3. Health is Wealth

While taking time off for your family is good for your mental health, you must also think about your physical health. A great business person needs to be in sound physical shape to be ready for the hard work of running a startup.

While you don’t need to be an athlete, if you don’t take the time to eat right and get some fresh air, you won’t be prepared to be a winner at the office.

When you’re in good shape and eating well, you are less likely to spend more time working more efficiently when you’re healthy rather than trying to complete important emails with a head cold. Being healthy will make it easier to be clearheaded when talking to important clients.

The healthier you make yourself, the easier it will be to compete in the global market.

4. Giving Back Looks Good On You

Personal development doesn’t always mean working on yourself. It means putting yourself in the context of the world around you.

When you use a percentage of your time to give back to your community, people will build a connection with you beyond the transactional. You shouldn’t give to the people in your community who need it the most to get something back from them. You should do it because you understand the interconnectedness of your startup and the society you live in.

Giving back can take on lots of forms.

You could donate a percentage of your profits to the charity of your choosing every month, and you could also donate a portion to their customers’ choosing.

Hosting a fundraising event at your office or during a trade show is an excellent way to spread the word about who you support and how you’re trying to do good. When you give back, you help contribute to your community and can make a lasting impact on the people who rely on your startup.

5. New Entrepreneurs Need Mentors

One of the most significant benefits of personal development is the example you can set for others. Every entrepreneur needs guidance at some point.

If you’ve started a successful business, you know that success isn’t necessarily permanent. Every industry deals with growth and changes; you need to keep an ear open to what’s happening to stay ahead of competitors.

However, every new business doesn’t have to compete with you. New businesses in your industry can get guidance from you, take up work you don’t have time for, and have their own place complementing your work.

If you’ve reached a comfortable level of personal development, share your thoughts with other entrepreneurs. You could inspire others to be like you, but you never know what you could learn from them.

Personal Development Takes Focus and Humility

One of the hardest aspects of personal development is determining one’s limitations. If one doesn’t understand one’s limitations, it can be challenging to determine where one needs to grow and which parts of one’s business acumen are strong. To overcome this, one must stay focused, humble, and open to always learning.

If doing good in the world is essential to your business, check out our list of companies doing just that.