Defining Your Personal Aspirations

To fulfill your personal aspirations you must first define them. To define your personal aspirations, you need to answer questions like:

• • Why am I a business owner?
  • What are my personal strengths and weaknesses?
  • What are my personal values?
  • What is my personal mission statement?
  • What are my personal objectives and goals?
  • How will I achieve my objectives?
  • How will I review my progress?

 

There are many reasons why business owners go into business for themselves. For you, maybe it was to achieve a personal dream. Or maybe you had a hobby you loved and turned it into a business. Or perhaps you were out of work and needed a way to make money. Or maybe you inherited a family business. Starting your own business is hard work. You’re constantly faced with difficult decisions, long hours, and little room for error. The challenge of owning your own business requires a compelling personal motivation. Integrating your personal goals into the planning process is important to maintain your motivation. Defining your personal aspirations re-inspires you by reminding you of why you went into business in the first place. Your desires motivated you to start a new business, and they can motivate you to push through the difficult work ahead.

The rewards of owning your own business are great once you have the systems in place to run your business successfully. You won’t be spending time and energy reacting to every issues that arises. You’ll be able to focus your creativity and drive on reaching your goals. That’s when you’ll see your business achieve the aims you originally envisioned it would achieve for you. Think back to the reasons you went into business for yourself. Try to remember the force behind your decision. People start their own businesses for many different reasons. What were your reasons?

• To be your own boss?
• To be free from the 9-to-5 daily work routine?
• To improving your standard of living?
• To escape the boredom of your old job?
• To provide a product or service you saw a need for?
• To control your own destiny?
• To achieve financial independence?
• To create an asset you can pass on to your heirs?

If you didn’t make a conscious, planned choice to go into business but instead just found yourself there, what do you find appealing about the idea of owning your own business? Why would you prefer to remain a business owner rather than go to work for someone else? If you inherited a family business, what’s your motivation for continuing the family tradition?

Identifying Your Personal Strengths and Weaknesses .com

 

Running a successful business requires dozens of different talents and abilities. It’s rare to find a person who has all of the abilities needed to do the job. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary that you possess all of the skills. What is necessary is that you have a thorough understanding of your own strengths and limitations. You can then capitalize on your strengths and compensate for your limitations. Are you a good leader? Can you motivate others? Do you have good organizational skills? Are you good at producing a product, but have difficulty managing others who must do the production? Do you have a hard time “letting go” and instead try to do everything yourself? Are you a perfectionist and expect too much out of people? These are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself — both about your personal life and as a business owner. Your personal strengths and weaknesses have a significant impact on the success of your business and it’s important that you understand what that impact is. There are four skill categories that people possess in differing quantities.

Technical skills refer to the knowledge of methods, processes, procedures, and techniques needed to do a specific job. Nonmanagerial employees usually possess mostly technical skills.

Human skills refer to the ability to work with people, to lead, to motivate, to win cooperation and encourage teamwork. As an employee takes on supervisory responsibility, human skills become more important. A first level supervisor requires an equal mix of human skills and technical skills, as well as a smaller amount of conceptual and design skills.

Conceptual skills refer to the ability to see the big picture, to recognize significant elements in a situation and understand how they relate to other elements. Conceptual skills become more important for higher level managers and business owners.

Design skills refer to the ability to solve problems, to design practical and workable solutions.

These skills are critical to business owners. As your business grows, technical skills become less and less important for you personally. Your success becomes based on your ability to lead and motivate, to see the big picture, to make sound decisions, to solve problems, and to develop the systems you need for the long-term success of your business. You also must know about finances, sales, advertising, hiring, training, purchasing, and a host of other things you probably didn’t have to deal with before you became a business owner. This is a difficult transition for many business owners to make. Most businesses are started by “functional specialists” ¾ people with technical expertise in a particular area. But once their business starts to grow, they find they must let other people do the functional work while they learn how to be a businessperson and manage a company. Think about your personal skills and attributes, your strengths and limitations, what you excel at and what you have difficulty with. Write them down and add to your list as you go through your daily routine.

The U.S. Small Business Administration identified several qualities an entrepreneur needs to develop to be successful:

Initiative: Resourceful, actively seeks new opportunities.

Attitude: Positive attitude toward others,.co possesses a friendly interest in people.

Leadership: Inspires confidence and loyalty.

Responsibility: Welcomes responsibility, does not try to place blame on others.

Organizing ability: Highly capable of logical approach to organizing.

Decisiveness: Able to make quick and accurate decisions.

Perseverance: Highly steadfast in purpose, not easily discouraged.

 

Once you have identified your strengths and limitations, you can compensate for your limitations in several ways. This module will help you develop some of the conceptual and design skills that you need to lead your business to success. Other modules will focus on helping you develop and implement specific systems in areas such as personnel, advertising, sales, finance, and leadership that can compensate for your lack of experience or knowledge in those areas. Another way you will compensate for your limitations is by hiring others who possess expertise and skills you lack. You don’t have to be able to do everything, but you do need to know enough about each responsibility to be able to work with those you hire to create effective systems and processes in their areas of expertise. You want your business to run smoothly, but not be dependent on your constant presence. You want a team of experts who work together to fulfill your goals for success. Your role, then, requires you to know enough to be able to judge whether your experts really do know what they are doing so you don’t end up with a bigger problem than you started with.

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Identifying Your Personal Strengths and Weaknesses

Identifying Your Personal Values

 

Personal values refer to the standards of ethics and behavior that are important to you. They set the boundaries by which you live your life. They help set priorities in your life and draw lines of what you will and will not do to reach your goals. They influence every decision you make. Values are not practices, they are guiding principles that affect every part of your life: physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual, financial, and business. They are principles like integrity, honesty, quality, service, excellence, and fairness. One way to help you identify your personal values is to think of how you would like to be remembered if you died today. What would you want to be written on your tombstone? For example, “Here lies an honest, hardworking father who loved his wife and children,” reflects several personal values ¾ honesty, hard work, fatherhood, and love for family. These principles give meaning to your life and a reason for being. When your business is aligned with your personal values your work gains purpose. Another way to identify your values is to ask yourself what you think others would say about you if you died. More specifically, what would you want the important people in your life to say about you? What would you want your spouse to say? Your children and family? Your friends? Your business associates? Your God? Your community? How you want to be remembered by each of your key relationships can help you understand what your core values are and what’s really important to you. Winston Churchill said, “You make a living by what you receive; you make a life by what you give back.” Identify the values that are important to you. Don’t confuse them with values you feel you should have. Your core values are not what others think you should believe in or what you think others think you should believe in. Trying to live up to values that are not your own will only lead to resentment. For a business owner, work is more than just a paycheck. Your work is a part of you — you made it happen and you are responsible for the success or failure of your business. Integrating your core values and goals into your business is one of the rewarding aspects of owning a business. When you align your business values with your personal values, it’s a powerful motivating force. Your work gains purpose. It will instill passion and energy in you. And, if done in a participative manner, it will also instill passion and energy for your business in your employees, customers, vendors, and anyone else you work with.

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Identifying Your Personal Values