Understanding your capabilities: Motivations, Traits and Skills
Your capabilities are defined by your specific motivations, traits and skills. Understanding the inventory of your own motivations, traits and skills helps you understand how you act and make decisions under the extreme pressures you encounter as an entrepreneur.
Understanding motivations, traits, and skills enables you to be a better decision maker under stress by giving you confidence in what you can do on your own and when and how to ask for help when you need it … which may not always be when you want it. This skill set of knowing what you are capable of also helps you understand what your teammates are capable of and how and when to help them make better decisions.
By understanding motivations, traits and skills you can understand how to act and share decision making in more complimentary and less stressful ways (our sprint 8 on Relationship Building will further expand on this).
What are motivations?
Motivations are the inner drives and reasons that compel a person to act. Simply, they are your desires and fears. They stem from basic needs (like hunger), values (like loyalty or religious devotion), aspirations (like desire for wealth or to be loved), or need for achievement (like to discover or make new things). Also recognition (like to be famous), or security (like to never have to worry about being hungry), or having a need to be needed. Your selfish motivations for starting a business provide direction and energy, shaping what goals you choose to pursue and how persistently you work toward them.
What are traits?
Traits are relatively stable and testable patterns of personality and physiology that develop early in your life and influence how you think and respond to situations. These include qualities such as resilience, openness, empathy, extroversion, and conscientiousness, or being tall, having perfect pitch and being left-handed. Traits are enduring tendencies that guide behavior across different contexts and effect how you are most comfortable navigating challenges and opportunities. Traits are VERY hard to change … but you can learn skills to mask aspects of your traits that you find trip you up or lead to poor decisions.
Myers-Brigg’s M-B-T-I classification of your traits give relevant information on how you specifically and fundamentally process information and make decisions. A related classification method used by academics is known as the “Big 5.” We suggest that the MBTI is most useful because of its wide adoption in the business world. Here is a reference for free material you can access to find and learn your Myers-Brigg’s classification: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/OJTS/ .
What are skills?
Skills are the learned abilities and competencies that enable a person to perform prescribed tasks. You are not born with skills, you learn them. They can be technical (like coding or accounting), cognitive (like problem-solving or critical thinking), social (like negotiation or teamwork), or physical (like throwing a baseball accurately at over 100 mph) or a combination of the above (like cooking a soufflé).
Unlike traits, skills can be intentionally developed through practice, education, experience, and coaching, which directly shape and improve your capacity to do things.
The important questions to ask yourself to create an inventory of your motivations, traits and skills and how they can help—or not—speed you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Your capabilities are defined by your specific motivations, traits and skills. Here are interrelated questions to think about and start creating an inventory of your capabilities most relevant to making startup decisions. We ask you to reflect on why you think you have the specific motivations, traits or skills that you do. We also ask you to think of examples of how the motivation, trait or skill has already played a role in shaping your life.
We suggest you show your answers to some people that you feel know you well and care about you. They may add things you have missed or give you additional context about the importance of your answers and realizations.
Questions to help you define your entrepreneurial motivations:
We ask you to fill out this table with three columns, where we prompt you with a question for each entry. For each row we ask you to describe some aspect of your motivations as you know them. In the middle column we ask you, “Why do you think this or how do you know this?” In the right-most column we ask you to please give an example how this motivation has driven you to make changes in your life, large or small.
In this table with five rows, we specifically ask you to rank order what you think are your 5 top motivations for wanting to be an entrepreneur. If you did sprint 1, Why do you want to be an entrepreneur, remember that some motivations are much more important for driving successful entrepreneurial actions than others. Some motivations can actually be counter-productive.
It is hard to know your real motivations, which is why we are asking the question five different times in this table. Use the materials from sprint 1 to reassess your motivations for wanting to be an entrepreneur.
| Describe your motivations | How do you know? | Example(s) |
|---|---|---|
| What might be your most important motivation for wanting to be an entrepreneur? | Why do you think this? | Give an example how this motivation has driven you to make changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be your next most important motivation for wanting to be an entrepreneur | Why do you think this? | Give an example how this motivation has driven you to make changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be your next most important motivation for wanting to be an entrepreneur | Why do you think this? | Give an example how this motivation has driven you to make changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| ... | ... | ... |
Questions to help you realize traits important to your entrepreneurial decision-making:
In this three column table we ask you about various standard categories of traits that we all share. As with the previous table, the middle column asks you why you know this and the right-most column asks you for an example of how this trait has helped or hindered you in making changes in your life.
The six rows ask for your traits associated with: 1) Myers-Briggs, 2) how you learn, 3) how you feel being judged, 4) your stamina for focusing on a difficult problem, 5) how you feel when a person of authority asks you to do something you think is annoying, and 6) what other traits you think could help or hinder you making good decisions under pressure.
Again, we suggest you show your answers to some people that you feel know you well and care about you. They may add things you have missed or give you additional context about the importance of your answers and realizations.
| Describe your traits | How do you know? | Example(s) |
|---|---|---|
| What is your Myers-Brigg inventory or what are your “Big 5” personality traits? | Why do you think this? | Please give an example how your “personality” traits have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be your most important traits associated with how you learn or how fast you learn. | Why do you think this? | Please give an example how these traits have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be your most important traits associated with how you feel being judged by other people. | Why do you think this? | Please give an example how these traits have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe how deeply and for how long you can focus on analyzing a difficult problem. | Why do you think this? | Please give an example how these traits have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe how you feel when a parent or person of authority asks you to do something for them that you find annoying or unpleasant. | Why do you think this? | Please give an example how these traits have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be other important traits that could help you from being a successful entrepreneur. | Why do you think this? | Please give an example how these traits have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
Things to think about in compiling your list of related skills:
We again ask you to fill out a table with 3 columns. Each row asks you how you assess your skill level in a specific area. The middle column asks, how do you know how skilled you are in the area. The right-most column asks you for an example how your proficiency in the specific skill has helped or hindered you in making changes in your life.
The table has six rows, each asking about a specific skill set: 1) writing and language skills, 2) math and computer skills, 3) creative skills, 4) skills that could make customers, businesses or donors happy, 5) other skills you think will help you be a successful entrepreneur, and 6) other skills you are proud of that may not relate to being a good entrepreneur.
As always, we suggest you show your answers to some people that you feel know you well and care about you. They may add things you have missed or give you additional context about the importance of your answers and realizations.
| Describe your skills | How do you know? | Example(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Describe your writing and language skills. | How do you know how good you are at writing and describing things and where and how much do you get to practice your writing skills? | Please give an example how your writing skills have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe your math and computer skills. | Why do you know how good your math and computer skills are and where and how much do you get to practice these skills? | Please give an example how your math and computer skills have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe your creativity. (Creativity is a skill and not a trait.) | Who taught you how to be creative and where and how much do you get to practice your creativity? | Please give an example how creativity has helped you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe your skills that you think directly relate to how you could make other people (or businesses or donors) happy enough to gladly give you money in return. | Why do you think this or how do you know this? | Please give an example how these skills have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be other important skills that could help you being a successful entrepreneur. | Why do you think this or how do you know this? | Please give an example how these skills have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
| Describe what might be other skills that you are proud of that may or may not help you being a successful entrepreneur. | Why do you think this or how do you know this? | Please give an example how these skills have helped or hindered you in making changes in your life (perhaps just small ones) in the past. |
How do you use this knowledge to make better decisions?
If you have mastered a skill, which means you are at the level where you can perform the skill or skills under pressure, and you understand how to control your traits to not get in the way (like getting nervous under pressure, or being afraid of confrontation), and you are motivated to continue to practice the skill, then you can feel confident in making decisions that require that skill set.
If you can make delicious soufflés under almost any conditions, even for people you do not like, you can feel confident you can make decisions directly related to making soufflés that you can feature at your restaurant. But that doesn’t mean that you are skilled enough in the methods of providing hospitality. And it doesn’t mean that you have empathic traits that make it easy to acquire hospitality skills sets. So, you are well advised to not make decisions about how to design the seating areas of your restaurant, at least not without the help of someone that is skilled in that area or is an empathetic person who is motivated and willing to dedicate the time to quickly acquire restaurant seating design skills.
Making better decisions is about knowing your capabilities and the capabilities of those around you and when you need help and how to ask for it.
How we suggest you get better
There are four important startup leadership skills you probably did not list: Relationship Building, Motivating Others, Leading Change and Startup Basics. Sprints 8 through 17 help you understand and start to acquire these important skills that in turn will help you:
meet strangers,
help teammates that don’t get along to get along,
inspire people to be excited about your vision,
lead people to look forward to change and not resist it, and
becoming skilled in how to create value in a startup and lead it to the point where it is fully mature and self-sustaining.
As a sidenote, these sessions can generally help you and people you care about to lead more successful lives. As you learn and use these skills you can practice them beyond their relevance to entrepreneurship to other aspects of your life.