Blindspots common to business owners and how to spot them
Blindspots and lack of self-awareness are real issues business owners (and everyone else too) face today. Self-awareness is a not a skill we’re deliberately taught and just because we might consider ourselves introspective, doesn’t mean that we’re actually any good at introspection! Thus, when it comes to our blindspots just trying to be more self-reflecting doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll correctly identify our own blindspots or help improve our self-awareness. In this blog we’ll discuss the blindspots most common to business owners and give you ideas on how you can spot them. Were you aware that we had this free resource? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! Drum roll please, a list of common blindspots business owners have… Emotional Attachment Emotional attachment is a common blindspot we deal with as business owners. Whether it’s becoming attached to a specific project or an idea, emotional attachment can lead to going down the wrong path or refusing to acknowledge market realities. It’s an easy way for our judgement to be clouded and can be difficult to deal with if we are even able to identify it. Action Bias If we wanted to distill down how people behave we could make the argument that some people have an action default and some people have an inaction default. Yet, it’s likely that many owners have a default towards action. It’s awfully difficult to get a business up and running without having a lean into taking action. Action bias is a blindspot that is common in owners because of this. Action bias means owners will often take action before carefully considering all options – after all, any movement in a direction is better than no movement at all, right? Well, maybe, maybe not. When action bias becomes an issue it can show up in the form of impulsiveness, rash decisions or emotional decisions all of which can cause or contribute to serious business problems. Unfortunately, many owners are unaware of this blindspot and consistently react instead of being more deliberate and responsive. Work-Life Imbalance Business owners commonly struggle with work-life imbalance and yet many times they are unaware of it as a problem. Imbalance can show up in relationships, in our physical, mental and spiritual health and it can show up in the health of our business as well. We don’t believe balance needs to be 50/50 and balance for you may mean something different than balance for me. It’s equally important to understand what balance works for you and when to identify when you’re out of balance. While there are many other common blindspots owners struggle with, you should be able to get a sense of these blindspots and maybe even identify when you have fallen victim to one or more of these. Ultimately, the onus is on us as owners to be able to develop better self-awareness and gird ourselves against the dangers of blindspots. How do we do it then? We suggest not trying to do it on your own. There are many instances where working on our own and independently can lead to amazing results, typically, this is not one of those instances. Self-reflection is incredibly difficult to do on our own and we’re just as likely to exacerbate the problem as we are to mitigate it. For addressing blindspots we strongly recommend working with others and here are our top choices. Feedback Team: Getting honest and transparent feedback is difficult. Those closest to us will always deal with their own biases and those too far removed from us can’t offer truly insightful feedback. Building a team of objectively honest peers or colleagues that can offer feedback is one highly effective way to combat blindspots. Owner Advisory Boards: Blindspots can show up in many different ways, one of the most effective ways to disrupt blindspots is to gain a number of different perspectives. This can help illuminate the unknown and bring more self-awareness to us. If you’re looking for a group of peers to help you with your blindspots we encourage you to check out IVOLVE + THRIVE. We have new boards launching in January of 2024! Find out more information about our Owner Advisory Boards here. owner advisory boards IVOLVE + THRIVE CLARITY + WORTH + FREEDOM Learn more How do you deal with blindspots? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Signs that isolation is impacting your business
Isolation for business owners means constantly carrying the weight of making the most important decisions for your business. It means decision making without outside perspective and input and it means often dealing with feelings of loneliness. Isolation can have serious consequences on business owners and is an important challenge many owners need to overcome. Here are some signs that you may be dealing with the impact of isolation on your business. Concerned about your business? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! Isolation: the most common signs One of the most common signs of isolation will be difficulty in decision making. Knowing that the decisions we make as owners can have enormous consequences on our businesses, our lives and our employees makes many decisions feel critical. If you begin to struggle with making decisions you may be feeling the impact of isolation. Overthinking and ruminating are two clear indications that you may be dealing with isolation. Another common sign of isolation is burnout and emotional exhaustion. Chances are you started your business with some level of excitement and engagement. If you feel like that has eroded or disappeared entirely it may be due to emotional exhaustion. When we don’t feel we have a support system and are constantly dealing with stress and pressure we can see a serious drop in enthusiasm for our business. Feeling emotionally drained where you used to be excited is a symptom of emotional exhaustion. The last sign of isolation to keep an eye out for is increased stress and anxiety. Although this can be difficult to identify and may be symptoms of many different challenges it’s important to stay self-aware as business owners. Chronic stress and anxiety are signs that isolation may be wreaking havoc on your business and elevating the challenges of an already difficult situation. If isolation is a challenge you’re dealing with today check out our owner advisory boards! You can learn more here! owner advisory boards IVOLVE + THRIVE CLARITY + WORTH + FREEDOM Learn more How do you deal with isolation? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Help I’m self-sabotaging! Tips to eliminate self sabotage
Whether we admit it or not self sabotage is real and happens more frequently than we might estimate. What’s worse is the impact of self sabotage may be much greater than we can imagine. Self sabotage happens to the best of us whether it shows up as imposter syndrome or poor goal setting or any other ways (check our weekly newsletter). In this blog we’ll discuss how you can eliminate self sabotage if you’re aware that you’re doing it! Concerned about self sabotage? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! Practice Self Care If you haven’t heard the Doc mention it before you should revisit any number of our podcasts in which the Doc discusses in detail the challenges most of us face around self-care. The truth is bleak, 90% of all hospital visits are stress related and easily avoidable if we simply practiced better self care. In today’s hustle culture it can be difficult to step back and take care of yourself but the health benefits both physically and mentally are enormous. Step one to help eliminate self sabotage? Take care of yourself! Meditate While there are many different types of meditation and a number of benefits that are derived from mindfulness, perhaps the greatest benefit we can receive today is being more present. Being present is something that we are becoming worse at, culturally, and while it’s impact is yet to be felt you can see it in the dynamics between people. Meditation can help improve our ability to be present and also help us identify when we’re being hyper-critical or getting stuck in self-defeating loops (yes these exist). Step two to help eliminate self sabotage? Get better at being present! Emphasize Self Compassion Empathy is a topic that has rapidly become popularized because of its importance in leadership, working in teams and in overall communication. Much of our empathy emphasis is on other people and yet we often fail to have empathy for ourselves. Self compassion isn’t nearly as popularized as empathy but it might be equally as important for many of us that are most critical of ourselves. If you wouldn’t critique a partner, friend, co-worker or employee as heavily as you critique yourself you might benefit from a little more self compassion. Step 3 to overcoming self sabotage? Give yourself a break! How do you deal with self sabotage? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Cultivating Executive Presence – A Guide for Executives and Professionals
Leadership is a skill set requiring us to constantly sharpen the ax. Developing and refining the skills of leadership has a serious return on how our team, and we, perform. Within the sphere of leadership, executive presence plays an important role of how we handle challenges and how people perceive us. In our blog we’ll explore how we can cultivate a stronger executive presence to enhance your leadership skills. We spend a lot of time cultivating the information in our guide for entrepreneurs and we’re offering it as a gift for you. We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! Executive presence can feel intangible and yet it is made up of very tangible components such as gravitas, decision making, appearance, confidence, awareness, and communication. The benefits of executive presence extend to inspiring confidence in your team, projecting authority and engage others. We’ll outline some tools you can use to develop your executive presence to the next level. 1. Appearance Although executive presence requires much more than a ‘good’ appearance, we often make impressions within half a second and appearance counts. For executive presence it’s less about defining what ‘good’ means and more about making sure we are well groomed, conscientious, and diligent in our appearance. This means that the initial driver of executive presence means preparing how we want others to view us before we ever set foot in a room (virtual or real) with them. Dress well and with intention Maintain excellent personal hygiene and grooming Display strong posture and body language 2. Confidence Confidence is the foundation of executive presence. Confidence can be established physically, vocally, and mentally. It provides your team with inspiration and security and helps you cement loyalty. Have faith in your decisions regardless of results Accept responsibility for your actions and your teams Be willing to take risks Also read: How to find and grow your confidence Tips To Build Confidence Quickly 3. Awareness If confidence is the foundation of executive presence, then awareness is the cornerstone. Understanding our own skill set, how we react and respond and how others perceive us is essential if we want to better develop our executive presence. Create a feedback loop and receive feedback from transparent and trustworthy people Understand your triggers and the red flags that identify when you are reacting instead of responding Review and assess your own skills and repeat the behaviors that are beneficial Also read: Self-Awareness: Do You Have It? Self Awareness And How You Self-Sabotage Yourself Every DayTips To Build Confidence Quickly How do you develop your executive presence? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Self-Awareness: Do You Have It?
We’d all like to believe we have a tremendous amount of self-awareness. It’s hard to find someone that believes they aren’t self-aware. Yet it’s also hard to find individuals that can honestly say they have spent any time being trained on how to develop self-awareness or who have dedicated extensive time into the practice of self-awareness. What’s worse research has shown, introspection doesn’t necessarily lead to better self-awareness at all and it can actually hurt us! When it comes to self-awareness, the real question is, do you have it? Are you aware that we have a free gift that you may be interested in! We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you. Access it here! 95% of us believe we are self-aware. Yet, studies suggest only 15% of us actually are! Chances are we are completely unaware of just how unaware we are (yes we understand the irony in this)! More than that, we tend to lie to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves. In other words, we don’t want to admit that we aren’t aware even though we kind of understand that we’re not all that aware in the first place. Self-awareness is a skill that can be taught and developed. For some of us, a small percentage, we naturally have a high level of self-awareness. Like professional athletes, a very small percentage of us have exceptional self-awareness. The difference is, many of us grow up learning about sports, practicing and devoting substantial time to developing physical athleticism. Rarely do we find that people spend any sort of time developing their awareness to the same extend they might develop skills such as throwing a baseball or shooting a basketball. Somebody who never spent time throwing a baseball very obviously can see that they aren’t very good at throwing a ball. People who never spent time developing self-awareness, unfortunately, have no idea that they aren’t good at it. They’re blind to it, typically. It’s why we consider awareness one of the most under emphasized skills for professionals today and one of our core skills we believe every professional and entrepreneur should focus on! Also read: Self Awareness And How You Self-Sabotage Yourself Every Day Do you still believe you’re in the small group of truly self-aware people? Let us know at info@jbandthedoctor.com Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.