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Entrepreneurship is no walk in the park. Long days (especially during transitional periods). Countless obstacles. Unfulfilled objectives. Unexpected challenges. The list goes on…

The typical entrepreneur begins alone. Everything is riding on you. That’s why we often see lists of desirable “entrepreneurial traits.” You know – dedicated, intelligent, hard-working, creative, effective, efficient, tireless, resourceful, etc. The list goes on.

But how are these folks made? Or, can they be made at all? In other words, what does it take to become an entrepreneur and how do you get there?

Entrepreneurship – Do You Qualify?
Personally, I’m split on this question: who does qualify? While I do think some individuals are “natural” entrepreneurs, I also believe that these traits and skills can be developed. In fact, I don’t think there is a single entrepreneur who couldn’t benefit from personal development.

In my view of entrepreneurship, I put personal growth first. Since you the individual are the backbone of your business, you must have your ducks all in a row. Or… you must be in the process of getting those ducks lined up.

Here’s my vision of the ideal personal-business development plan:

Begin with Self Improvement
Start with you. This should be obvious enough. If you can’t get up in the morning because of depression, anxiety, or illness, you’re not going to be ready to build a business. And you’re definitely not going to be successful.

I identify five key areas for personal growth for entrepreneurs. Look this list over carefully and identify your weakest area. Be honest. Then, get to work!

• Self Worth

No one is going to be an advocate for you. You’ve got to be your own cheerleader! It’s not uncommon for other people to criticize your efforts. There are tons of reasons for their negative outlook on your plan for success. But with a strong sense of self worth, purpose, and direction, the way other people see things will matter very little. I put this area first because it fuels the remaining four.

• Health & Fitness

The mind-body connection is a reality. Go to the gym. Start a diet. Spend less time sitting at the desk and more time walking around and meeting people. Health and fitness is a strong second here since you would be useless without it!

• Time Management

Time is your most precious resource. Entrepreneurs succeed or fail by their use of time. If you’re still working a day job, you’ll need to be especially efficient. Learning about and applying time management strategies in your personal life will also impact your business in these early stages.

• Stress & Emotions

There are tons of tools out there for handling inevitable stress and emotional turbulence. Meditation. Progressive relaxation. Entrepreneurs who are often hard-working and tireless by nature often push the envelope well beyond even their limits. But, of course, we all have limits. Some of my closest friends do a great job of reminding me to have fun and enjoy life now regardless of how much I accomplish in a day.

• Positive Frame-of-Mind

Stay focused on the best things happening. Businesses – especially new ones – have a way of creating consistent problems or challenges. Use The Law of Attraction, Intention-Manifestation, and Creative Visualization to maintain a positive, uplifted attitude regardless of what’s going on. Keep your eyes on the prize and smile through the rough spots.

Watch Your Business Grow
If you setup a plan for personal development success that focuses on even one of these key areas, you will see much greater results in your business efforts. Your purpose will become clear. Customers will come flocking. Profits will soar.

I firmly believe the number one key to success for entrepreneurs is sense of purpose. Usually, when entrepreneurs get started their highest motivator is something abstract – financial freedom, time freedom, greater happiness, independence, etc. These are excellent goals to have but too vague to bring results.

Begin with personal growth, and you’ll find greater clarity about what it is you want to do. Once you achieve clarity, it is easy to apply the necessary steps to take action and make things happen!

Entrepreneurship itself is a form of personal development. Your current day job could be a major obstacle to your future growth. The typical workplace environment can be unfulfilling, negative, and demoralizing for many of us. If the average employee spends 8 hours or more at work every weekday, he or she will be drained and dejected by the weekend with little enthusiasm left for enjoying life.

Get Started Today
If you’re already an entrepreneur, set a personal development goal. Choose one of the areas listed above and start reading books, listening to audio, and attending seminars.

If you’re considering starting a business, take time out to examine how prepared you are for the challenge. You might want to take a week – or even a month – to focus exclusively on the personal development work before moving forward. Again, this will help clarify your sense of purpose. It may seem like a loss of time upfront, but the investment will reap huge rewards later!

If you’ve never even considered entrepreneurship, consider it now. I don’t mean to suggest that owning your own business is necessary for personal growth. You can pursue self improvement outside of entrepreneurship. But owning a business could be a great carrot to motivate your personal development. Set a time-specific goal and think in terms of financial reward for improving your self. For example: I will spend one month enhancing my sense of self worth and life purpose. At the end of the month, I will begin developing my business, which will bring great financial reward.

Whatever your path, start working at this today. Set your goal and begin with something simple. I guarantee the effort will pay off!

Related Articles:

• 7 Ways to Overcome a Personal Development Slump
• Introduction to The Law of Attraction
• The Mindful Entrepreneur’s Journey – Part 1
• 7 Mindful Business Practices
• The Entrepreneur's "Declaration of Independence"
• Articles on Getting Started for Entrepreneurs
• What is a Mindful Entrepreneur?
• Time Management for Internet Entrepreneurs

This weekend, I started re-reading Napoleon Hill’s classic, Think & Grow Rich.
I read the book for the first time several months ago at a time when I was interested more in consciousness-building and less in financial matters. Many of the essential concepts resonated within me – especially the connections between thoughts and “self-creation.”

In the last few weeks, my thoughts have turned more and more towards financial issues. I began to identify an important relationship between life success & financial success through consideration of time management. As Brian Tracy puts it, “managing time is really about managing your life – it’s not just time management, it’s life management.”

My current financial picture is quite good and one I think many people would find envious. Still, I don’t feel independent enough to make decisions freely. Financial freedom, as a fellow blogger has illustrated, can enable personal and spiritual freedom. Many modern societies have a confused relationship with money. Although capitalist economic systems make it quite clear that money talks, many people are raised to believe otherwise. Some even few money as the root of evil.

The Financial Comfort Zone
While in college, I opened up to progressive viewpoints and alternative ways of seeing the world. At some point, I internalized the belief that money corrupts. I wanted to live a life of meaning and help improve the world in some way. Of course, I didn’t want to be poor. Instead, I saw myself falling somewhere in the middle. This is a typical American paradigm: the bottom and the top are horrible places to be – good people fall somewhere in the middle. We have so much cultural anxiety about this issue that most people will identify themselves as “Middle Class,” applying the qualifiers low- and upper-middle to avoid taking on the label “rich” or “poor.”

The Middle Class represents America’s comfort zone. It is an average way of living life. It is typical. And, in my view, this financial comfort zone typically includes a comfort zone of values, lifestyle, personality, and even life purpose.

To challenge this common notion that money is not important, I have put together a list of reasons I believe money is important and should be considered an important component of success….

• Enables personal freedom

There is no real security in working for someone else. Even if you’re earning a solid six-figure income as a successful leader or salesperson, your freedom is tied to a specific station (perhaps even a specific geographic location). Although I am a firm believer in the power of entrepreneurship, many people can find fulfillment in a traditional job. But freedom will only come when you have a high degree of flexibility because of an established savings and investment plan.

• Provides opportunities to give

I have heard that the magic formula for creating wealth is 10 & 10. That’s 10% for saving and another 10% for donating. Others argue for 20 & 10 or 20 & 20. Either way, giving can be a wonderful way to support positive organizations, individuals, and institutions that bring real value to the world. While anyone can give with even a small income, the more you have the easier it is to give.

• Enhances material experience

I heard once that “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience – We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.” The material world around us is vastly abundant. One of the greatest joys in life is directly experiencing the material world through the senses. With sufficient resources, you can enable far more of these experiences than would otherwise be possible.

• Expands self image

The whole point of Think & Grow Rich is to challenge your assumptions about your own identity and the identity of the rich. If you open yourself up to acquiring wealth, you open up a new window of identity. You begin to see yourself as one with abundance and prosperity, not lack and poverty. Even the act of accepting money into your life can be a transformative process. When you allow riches into your reality, you recreate your ideas about what it means to be human.

As you can see, I view wealth as an enabler for personal growth and success – not as an end in itself. Plenty of rich people are unhappy. Likewise, plenty of poor people are quite happy. There is no guarantee either way. In the end, financial security will improve your state-of-mind and happiness if created with positive intention.

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In my recent article about how to stop smoking, I identified three key areas for rising above an addiction or bad habit: focus on what you want, change your identity, and prepare for setbacks.

When developing my outline for that article, I wondered if “Prepare for Setbacks” would be an appropriate section to include. The idea that setbacks will develop along the way might suggest inevitable failure. Such an outlook contradicts the idea behind creating your world the way you want it and attracting into your life only those things that bring great satisfaction.

Even still, when we are moving towards new goals it is inevitable that obstacles will develop between Point A and Point B if we see the “obstacles” as obstacles. When a personal growth plan is unsuccessful, obstacles take on a great deal of power and control over our intentions. When we are successful, our goals and objectives have control over reality and the obstacles take a backseat.

What is Your Reality?
The ideas I have been exploring lately through some profound writers and thinkers – The Law of Attraction, Subjective Reality, Personal Creation – point right to the heart of the problems many people experience when implementing change in their lives. The fundamental principle is that change begins on the inside. Perhaps the idea is cliché and overworked, but it really is that simple.

In my view, the problem often is not that we don’t understand the idea. The concept of “personal creation” is an integral part of virtually every world religion, belief system, and personal growth paradigm. We get it! Yet really making creation happen requires more than just “getting it.” It takes real implementation.

I like Dr. Wayne Dyer’s analogy about implementing change: If you want to learn how to swim, you can’t just sit around reading books and thinking about swimming all day! You must get into the water and make it happen.

And to take Dyer’s idea a step further… as you’re learning how to swim, you may very likely struggle in the water – that is, you may have setbacks. But, to answer the overarching question here, you will create exactly the kind of world you want by responding to these setbacks (either as part of the path towards change, or as frustrating signs of your failure).

How Do You Change Your Reality?
To return to my example on quitting smoking, you alone decide what the “setbacks” are. You create your own reality. If you focus on the obstacle and give it power over you, you will continue to attract the obstacle into your reality. You will create that. If you focus on the goal and give power to it, you will attract the goal into your reality.

By preparing for setbacks, you’re disarming them. You take the lead by communicating with yourself ahead of time and during the moment when they arise about what it is you really want. The setbacks will pop up and entertain your old vision of reality. Since you are already a creator, you have to take responsibility for the things already present in your reality.

These changes that you create will generate more power with time. Think of all the time you have spent in the past creating the world you see today. If you’re new to this way of seeing, you may be beginning only now to see things consciously and embracing your control. Making the move from powerless actor and responder to powerful director and creator will take time and will require adjustment. But once you begin to embrace the change, you’ll begin to see exactly the world you want.