The Role of Self-Reflection in Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship can be regarded as the driving force of today’s world economy. Almost all critical innovations and concepts are introduced and implemented by the entrepreneurs. Thus, due to the extensive role of the entrepreneurs, they do not just achieve such milestones for their self-fulfilment, but rather they play a vital role of contributing to the economies and help in solving the many challenges affecting the societies today. One of the ways through which entrepreneurs manage to achieve enormous success in their lives is by conducting high-level self-assessments. The self-reflection plays a significant role in assisting the entrepreneurs to define the ideal size and the scope of the business they would like to venture into before it even begins. The entrepreneurs integrate their financial and other individual goals in order to establish the direction of the business that they wish to venture. Although often the entrepreneurs forget about their goals and aspirations, particularly when their business ventures take their own course, one of the key factors that contribute to such enormous success is their self-reflection and assessment.

Through self-reflection, entrepreneurs have been able to successfully take inventory of the mistakes that they have done and try to understand why they failed to accomplish their targets. The inventory plays a critical role in highlighting the inners issues affecting the venture that needs to be remedied and what warning signs were not put into consideration. In addition, through self-reflection, an entrepreneur is able to review his/her motivation and determine where it lies. Most of the established organizations and products in the world were established by one or two entrepreneurs. However, the successes of most such organizations are not always achieved with ease. The majority of entrepreneurs narrate how they have experienced setbacks and devastations. In most of these cases, the entrepreneurs are completely demoralized and they are often forced to start their ventures from the beginning. One of the factors that contribute to entrepreneurial resilience which in return enable entrepreneurs to re-enter into entrepreneurship is their emotional self-reflection. According to Corner et al. (2017), after experiencing failure, entrepreneurs are able to re-enter into their venture due to the fact that they maintain their emotional stability and regain conscious of their psychological functioning. In a bid to achieve their normal functioning, an entrepreneur deeply focuses on his/her emotion which in return plays a significant role of reducing the emotional distress which is linked to the immediate outcome of failure. Thus, by reflecting on their emotions, entrepreneurs develop resilience which in return limits the severity and the duration of the destructive emotions, thereby contributing to psychological functioning and emotional stability (Corner et al., 2017; Bullough & Renko, 2013).

As mentioned earlier, most of the entrepreneurs face many challenges which discourage them from launching or continuing with their new entrepreneurial venture. However, most of them choose to continue with their endeavour due to their perception of the risks they want to take or the beliefs of their individual abilities. Thus, through their positive reaction to the challenges that they experience, entrepreneurs are able to find opportunities and develop new concepts that they had not considered at the beginning of their venture (Bullough & Renko, 2013; Fust & Jenert, 2014). The entrepreneurial self-efficacy which is a person belief in his/her capability to effectively make his/her endeavour a success begins with self-reflection. The strong belief that the entrepreneurs have in themselves play a pivotal role in overcoming the adversities that originate from the debilitating economic downfalls and stagnation in businesses (Bullough & Renko, 2013). In addition to strong individual beliefs, entrepreneurs manage to re-enter into their ventures after failure due to the fact that they combine their various meta-cognitive and cognitive aspects of the previous experiences and apply different strategies to achieve their prior objectives. However, they achieve this by consulting various approaches such as mental imagery where they deeply reflect on what contributed to the failure of their project and reflect on their current actions to determine whether they will help them reach their goals (Fust et al., 2017; Fust & Jenert, 2014).

Conclusion

In a concluding remark, entrepreneurship is often associated with the financial status of an individual, particularly after a failure. However, the success of the entrepreneurs is solely grounded on their ability to reflect on themselves and determine what contributed to their failure. Although the notion that there are valuable lessons to be learned when an entrepreneur fails, understanding how to learn them is of more importance than recognizing them. However, in order to be able to analyse where the mistake was and try to use different strategies, an individual has to be in a position where he/she can control his/her emotions, reflect on the positives, and focus on the future success rather than the failure. Thus, when combined with their strong personal beliefs and reflection on their previous experiences, most entrepreneurs have been able to register enormous success despite the drawbacks they experience along the way.

References

Bullough, A., & Renko, M. (2013). Entrepreneurial resilience during challenging times. Business             Horizons, 56(3), 343-350.

Corner, P. D., Singh, S., & Pavlovich, K. (2017). Entrepreneurial resilience and venture     failure. International Small Business Journal, 35(6), 687-708.

Fust, A. P., Jenert, T., & Winkler, C. (2017). Experiential or Self-Regulated Learning: A Critical Reflection of Entrepreneurial Learning Processes. Entrepreneurship Research Journal, 8(2).

Fust, A., & Jenert, T. (2014). Self-Regulation and Entrepreneurial Learning.