Growing or scaling a business isn’t easy, especially if you’re experiencing growing pains – not having enough money, needing qualified employees, increasing production without driving costs up – there’s a lot things to consider. But, one of the few things that few business owners consider when growing their business is personal growth. It’s difficult to create the change you want – the change you need – if you are not growing personally, especially if you’re hitting a wall with your business’ growth. Personal growth is not only helpful to you and your business, it’s necessary for the growth of your business.

You’re probably saying, “Jeff, I don’t have time for personal growth. I’m trying to run a business here.” Understood and point taken. However, what if I told you that instead of watching television or a movie, you could have time for personal growth? Personal growth is ongoing; it’s not something you can just spend a couple of hours on and then forget about. And, the funny thing is that once you start a personal growth journey, you’ll make time for it. You know, the time you didn’t have before? You’ll be making time for personal growth once you start.

Ok, but how?

This last year, I decided that I wanted to learn more – to grow my knowledge and myself, personally. I didn’t take any fancy courses or pay lots of money to someone to help me grow personally. What did I do? I read. I read a bunch of different things, mostly on website design and content marketing. But, in so doing, I found other books, like The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, who demonstrated that small, simple changes can produce extraordinary results.

As I read, I found that I became more interested in personal growth books than the industry specific stuff I had started with. While the industry specific books, like Content Rules by Anne Hadley and C. C. Chapman, gave me great ideas on things to do to help boost my business, it was books like The One Thing and Start With Why by Simon Sinek that really prompted me to think about how to put those ideas into practice and why I needed to boost my business to begin with. Reading brought me a lot of personal growth and highly recommend it to anyone looking to grow their business.

What else can you do?

As many people in successful businesses will tell you, business growth hardly ever happens in a vacuum. That is, you shouldn’t expect to be solely responsible for the growth of your business. Confide in others – colleagues, employees, family, friends – people who aren’t directly related to your business (and even some that are) can have some great insight into how you can grow or scale your business. You can learn a lot from talking with other business owners and entrepreneurs. Find a business nextworking group or even a chamber and attend social events geared for connecting people.

Journaling

Another practice that is often forgotten about when people are looking for personal growth is the power and practice of journaling. Journaling is a great way to think out ideas before putting them into practice – you can let it sit, go back to it, add to it and always have it as a reference. Additionally, the act of putting pen to paper, or I suppose, doing a digital facsimile of journaling on paper, actually helps you remember ideas while your brain creates relationships between your ideas and what you’ve written. Journaling is a form of personal growth that can provide the same benefits as reading, only you’re writing instead of reading.

Meditation/Visualization

Meditation has always been an activity people use to gain clarity and to relax, however, you can meditate on an idea, a thought or anything you can think of, really. It’s about focusing – focusing on whatever it is you want to meditate on – in this case, growing your business. Through that meditation, try visualizing – visualize the goal – where you want your business to be. Visualize everything about it – what it looks like, how it operates, the people involved and then try thinking backwards – how can you get from that visualized goal to where you are now. Visualizing where you want to be can often the key to getting you there.

In addition to the books I’ve mentioned in this post, I also recommend The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Many of the tactics I’ve mentioned above come from that book – what Elrod calls his “Life S.A.V.E.R.S.” – Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading and Scribing. Ideally this practice is supposed to be done in the morning, about an hour before you would otherwise wake up. The Miracle Morning is a great book that will help give you perspective and demonstrate why these tactics work.

Aside from scaling your business from personal growth, you’ll might have other tasks that become a product of your personal growth such as gaining more education, learning software, creating (if you haven’t already) a personal mission or vision statement or one for your business, etc. Personal growth helps you see the areas that you do and don’t need improvement as well as giving you valuable insight to solve some bigger issues, like scaling your business.

I hope you consider some of the suggestions above to help find a way to scale or grow your business. My own personal growth in the past year has helped me develop some new programs and revenue streams, consider starting a podcast (which still is in the process of getting underway), and given me some direction for the future. I highly recommend any of the books mentioned above as well as the activities to grow personally.

Do you have any personal growth tactics that have helped you? Should I add any to my list? Let me know!