The Mindful Founder: Why Founders Have A Duty To Practice Self-Awareness

Justin Kline is the Co-Founder of the influencer marketing firm, Markerly.

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Self-awareness and entrepreneurial success don’t always go hand in hand. The personality traits that make one successful in business often run counter to those that make one self-aware. To succeed in business, you often need tunnel vision, an unrelenting belief in the quality of your ideas, and to live entirely in service of your vision for as long as it takes to get your concept off the ground. Your life as a founder can become entirely about you, which, ironically, can cause you to lose perspective on how you show up in the world.

Particularly amid shifting expectations around work-life balance and employee experience, I believe that founders have a duty to themselves, their teams and their families to practice self-awareness. Self-awareness boils down to knowing who you are and who you are not. It’s as much about knowing your strengths and weaknesses as it is about not having your life dictated by your emotions. Above all, self-aware founders are honest with themselves—they’re able to detect their behavior’s positive and negative consequences and adjust.

This is the case for me. I founded my company in 2012, and I started making a conscious effort to be mindful in 2017. That’s five years as a founder without mindfulness and five years as a founder with it. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Why Founders Should Prioritize Self-Awareness

• It enables you to build the best team. A hallmark of self-awareness is understanding where you are and aren’t strong. Many founders often start believing that they can do it all themselves—and when they run into limitations, the self-aware ones embrace them. Very rarely can anyone scale a business entirely by themselves. Founders usually need a team around them to fill in their natural skill gaps. For example, many founders excel in creativity but struggle with more concrete matters, like finance and accounting. A non-self-aware founder might view financial matters as of secondary importance; a self-aware founder will hire someone whose superpower is financial management​​—ditto for all central business roles.

• It helps you provide an optimal employee experience. Tales of workplace toxicity have multiplied in recent years—and had some genuine consequences for those companies. There was a time when what went on behind company walls stayed there; nowadays, with no obstacles to sharing information on a global scale, employees have (rightly) come to expect better. A non-self-aware founder might get so absorbed in their vision that they lose sight of how their behavior shapes company culture—and trickles down to employee experience. On the other hand, a self-aware founder has radar for how their behavior influences the workplace atmosphere and can modulate accordingly.

• It gives you the ingredients for an optimal daily routine. Being self-aware also means understanding what it takes to develop a sense of balance in your day-to-day life. Balance is a combination of indulging your strengths and addressing your weaknesses; our routines should be a combination of both. The non-self-aware founder might only exploit their strengths—which will likely lead to them burning themselves (and probably their teams) out. The self-aware founder knows when to step away and understands that quality of life is directly related to quality of work.

How To Become More Self-Aware

Self-awareness is a spectrum—no one is 100% self-aware 100% of the time. But you can certainly be more self-aware than you were five years ago, a month ago or even an hour ago. So it’s an ongoing practice.

My self-awareness boils down to two related practices: meditation and mindfulness. Meditation helps me slow down, step out of my ego and unpack my emotions; mindfulness is the product of healthy meditation practice.

Being mindful means holding the reins of your emotions and mood at all times. It means presence—not getting lost in the weeds of the past or the shadows of the future. It means being attuned to the emotions of others.

So where do you start? Try this: Take five slow, deep breaths before you even get out of bed. Consider how your body feels—check in with yourself. Do you have negative thoughts or emotions for the day? Sit with them. Are you excited and eager to start the day? Sit with whatever you’re feeling. Before your feet have even touched the floor, you’ll become more in touch with—and hopefully calm—your internal chatter.

Keep in mind that this habit of checking in with yourself should ideally happen throughout the day. Create checkpoints to slow down and check on yourself. This could be before you enter the office for the day, before your first bite of lunch and once you turn your car off after your commute—anytime you have a moment to pause.

The more successful you get, the more you may see your ego validated and the harder it may be to remain mindful. Remember: Being self-aware is an ongoing practice, and its benefits can touch every area of life—from the most private internal moments to the most collaborative external endeavors.

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