To survive the challenges of running a business, entrepreneurs need to develop not only technical and business skills but also strong mental and emotional skills
By Manish Behl
Bengaluru: Both emotional intelligence (EI) and mindfulness have been shown to have positive impacts on various aspects of startup performance, such as innovation, productivity, resilience, decision-making and team cohesion. To survive in midst of these challenges, entrepreneur need to develop not only technical and business skills but also strong mental and emotional skills.
Benefits of learning these skills for startups:
Managing stress and anxiety: Starting and running a startup can be incredibly stressful, as you and challenges. Mindfulness help you manage stress and stay focused on your goals.
Mental calm and physical health: Dealing with both competition and customer stressful and demanding, and entrepreneurs can face detail with these challenges and uncertainties almost on each step. Mindfulness skills can help them cope with stress and anxiety by calming their mind and body, regulating their emotions, and enhancing your mental and physical well-being.
Enhances focus and productivity: Startups require a lot of focus and productivity, and entrepreneurs can be easily distracted or overwhelmed by multiple tasks and deadlines. Mindfulness skills can help them improve your focus and productivity by clearing your mental clutter, prioritizing goals, better delegation and managing your time and energy efficiently.
Enhance creativity and innovation: Startups rely on creativity and innovation, and entrepreneurs need to come up with new ideas and solutions that can solve problems and create value for their customers. Mindfulness skills can help them enhance their creativity and innovation by stimulating their imagination, fostering their curiosity. and encouraging their experimentation.
Flexibility and adaptability: Mindfulness enhancing divergent thinking, reducing cognitive rigidity and increasing openness and acceptance to new thoughts and ideas.
Quick learning: Emotional Intelligence helps you to regulate your emotions, and ability to adapt to changing circumstances and learn from mistakes.
Out of the box thinning and open mindset: Emotional Intelligence support open mindset by enabling leaders to empathize with customers’ needs, motivate employees to pursue novel solutions to think out of the box thinking.
Improved decision making: Mindfulness can help you make better decisions by helping you stay present and focused on the task at hand, taking a pause and evaluating the choices clearly.
Promotes transparency, values and authenticity: Mindfulness improve ethical behavior by reducing fear, cognitive biases, enhancing empathy and increasing ethical awareness. Mindfulness also align you with core your values and helps you to express them clearly and authentically. Whereas El helps to leaders to balance their emotions and logic, consider multiple perspectives and greater good of people.
Increased resilience: Mindfulness helps in cultivating self- compassion, optimism and gratitude. By regular practice you develop resilience and ability to cope up and bounce back from setbacks and failures.
Strengthen communication and collaboration skills: Startups depend on communication and collaboration, and entrepreneurs need to communicate effectively and
collaborate efficiently with their team members, customers, investors, and other stakeholders. Mindfulness can enhance these skills by increasing the awareness of one’s own thoughts and emotions and the ability to empathize with others.
Psychological safety and team cohesion: Mindfulness can foster team cohesion by promoting psychological safety, collective intelligence and positive emotions. El can also foster team cohesion by helping leaders to build trust, rapport and collaboration among team members.
Build strong relationships: El involves the ability to build and maintain strong
relationships with others. Prioritize building relationships with team members, customers, and investors by being present, showing empathy, and practicing active listening.
Learning mindfulness and El practices
As you can see, mindfulness and El are awesome skills for startups that want to thrive in today’s competitive and dynamic world. By learning these skills, you can gain a competitive edge, create a positive work culture and achieve your goals more effectively.
How can you learn mindfulness and El? There are many ways to do so, such as:
> Learn Mindfulness and El from a good institute
> Look for good Mindfulness Teacher and join an online course
> Conduct workshops on mindfulness and El for your organization and teams
> Practice mindfulness practices regularly
> Read books or articles on mindfulness and El
> Find your emotional strengths and weaknesses
> Apply mindfulness and El principles in daily work situations
In conclusion, mindfulness and emotional intelligence are valuable skills if you are an entrepreneurs or a startup. It can help you cope with the challenges and risks and achieve your goals and potential.
Learning mindfulness and El is not a one-time thing, but a continuous process that requires commitment. practice and reflection. By doing so, you can reap the benefits of these skills for yourself, your team and your customers and become a unicorn and successful startup company.
This article first appeared in the May-June 2023 edition of Phygital magazine. This article has been written by Manish Behl, India’s leading mindfulness expert, spiritual thinker, motivational speaker, author and the founder of Mindful Science
Centre and Mindfulness India Summit.
