Self Knowledge is an Essential Business Tool & Life Hack

By Bruce Firestone | Uncategorized

Jul 03

Stephen Covey argues in Principle
Centered Leadership
(1990) that deep self-knowledge leads to genuine
self-respect, which aids and abets building solid relationships with others around
you thereby creating win-win opportunities for all…

“Some people say that you have to like yourself before you
can like others. Okay, but if you don’t know yourself, it’s very hard to like
yourself, except in some superficial way. Real self-respect comes from dominion
over self, from true independence and win-win interdependence.”

He also affirms that you need to expect others to be better
than they ever thought they could be, which leads them to actually be better
than they ever thought they could be. If you reinforce people’s negatives,
they’ll never change, Covey argues:

“To affirm a person’s worth or potential, you may have to
look at him with the eye of faith and treat him in terms of his potential, not
his behavior. Goethe put it this way: ‘Treat a man as he is, and he will remain
as he is; treat a man as he can and should be, and he will become as he can and
should be.’”

According to Michel E Gerber’s the E-Myth Revisited (1995), to run a successful organization, you
need three types of people—at least one entrepreneur leader, some technicians
who actually know how to do the work, and managers who administer the workflow
and keep everyone else on schedule.    

If you are the entrepreneur leader, your main job is to create
new opportunities for your organization—new business models, new products, new
services, or as Steve Jobs would have put it, “Insanely great products.”

But it certainly helps if you also know how to get the best
out of everyone by putting the round pegs in round holes, square pegs in square
holes, and then inspiring them all through principle-centered leadership to
achieve insanely great things.

I have found that most people don’t really know themselves very well at all. As a result, they are always in search of… something and they recognize that something is missing in themselves.

“Believe in yourself, and the rest will fall into place. Have faith in your own abilities, work hard, and there is nothing you cannot accomplish,” Brad Henry

The problem is that other people see that too and so they don’t put their full faith and trust in you. If you are a leader in your organization, this can be fatal. 

Why? Because your clients won’t fully trust you to do what you say you will do; they’ll sense your self-doubt.

So too will your colleagues, and your suppliers, your board of directors, your lenders, and shareholders.

It’ll poison the well and crimp your organization’s prospects, and, by the way, yours as well…

Prof Bruce

Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD, ROYAL LePAGE Performance Realty broker, Ottawa Senators founder, Real Estate Investment and Business coach 1-613-762-8884 bruce.firestone@century21.ca twitter.com/ProfBruce profbruce.tumblr.com/archive brucemfirestone.com

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About the Author

Bruce is an entrepreneur/real estate broker/developer/coach/urban guru/keynote speaker/Sens founder/novelist/columnist/peerless husband/dad.

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