There are both hard skills and soft skills for entrepreneurs, but here are 8 entrepreneurial skills no one is talking about, but that you do NOT want to forget.

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Everybody wants to talk about the sexy entrepreneurial skills, things like copywriting and social media, but those are not the things that trip us up the most.

If we’re really trying to grow a business, I want to introduce you to eight entrepreneurial skills that I find most people don’t realize are actually skills. And don’t realize you really, truly need them if you want to be successful in business. 

Now, these entrepreneurial skills are in no particular order, except maybe this first one. 

Skill #1 – Decision-Making Skills

The very first skill that we need to develop as entrepreneurs is our decision-making skills. And yes, this is a skill.

Meaning it has actual tactics and techniques and things that you can learn to develop and make it better. This isn’t just about eeny, meeny, miny, moe, although sometimes that does come into play, let’s be honest. 

This is really about learning how to face that crossroads, filter and process through the things that you’re looking at, the things that you’re considering, and make hard calls on things that maybe you don’t want to have to choose between. The number of decisions you’re going to be making as an entrepreneur is staggering. And it is going to melt your brain if you don’t develop decision-making as an actual skill. 

Skill #2 – Sharpening Our Own Intuition

Following closely on the heels of decision-making though is sharpening our own intuition.

And yes, again, this is a skill. This is something that with practice, you can get really dang good at. We get to learn how to discern, how to trust our gut. Especially when we’re at a crossroads, we filtered, we’ve processed, we’ve gone through our decision-making skills and we still can’t make the decisions.

Sometimes you just gotta know how to go with your gut. This is going to come up again and again as business owners.  And if you don’t know how to trust that intuition, it’s going to trip you up again and again. 

Skill #3 – Sales

The third of these entrepreneurial skills is sales.

Yes, hard sales skills. I can’t tell you the number of people that I’ve talked to entrepreneurs, small business owners, who will say “I hate sales”, “I’m just not good at sales”, I’m just not going to do that.”. You’re in business. Business is sales. Everything that you’re going to be doing is selling. And if we don’t develop this, both the mindset around sales so that we can change the way that it feels, we can change the way that we’re approaching it. It’s no longer this yucky slimy thing that happens in a back lot of like, you know, some used car salesman. 

This is something that can actually feel good, can make a positive impact, and is so crucial in your business even if you’re not doing sales conversations, you are doing sales in every single thing that you do.

You’re selling concepts, you’re selling ideas. You’re selling people on doing things. You’re selling employees. You’re selling your family on supporting you. You’re in sales in every single way, shape, or form that one can possibly imagine. 

And if you struggle with this, there’s a book that I recommend, To Sell is Human. Make sure you read that book because you definitely need to start changing your perception of sales and then increasing those skills so that you can really grow your business. 

I swear I didn’t put these in any particular order, but they do seem to be falling in order.

Skill #4 – Communication Skills

So the next one on this list is communication skills.

And yes, this can be in terms of sales. We need to know how to use communication in a way that can inspire and influence other people to take action. But we also need to know how to avoid conflict by how we say things, why we’re saying things, what we’re saying, and how to handle conflict when it arises, because you’re going to have clients or customers who get frustrated with you.

You’re going to meet people on a bad day and it has nothing to do with you, but you got to know how to show up as a good person anyway so that you can leave a positive impression. 

You’re going to have conflicts with employees or JV partners or people you’re networking with, or just yourself, and having those communication skills (yes, being able to communicate with yourself too) is so crucial because you’re in business and business is really about relationships and relationships are really about communication, understanding your needs and emotions and thoughts, understanding where they’re coming from, and finding a way to come together. 

This probably is the most used skill that I have in my business.

And it is the most underutilized, under-focused-on skill that I see from other people. They don’t realize just how crucial communication skills are to our success, to our happiness, to emotional freedom, and to just things being peaceful and good and going the way that we want them to go. It all comes down to how we communicate with others. 

Skill #5 – Being Impervious To Stress

Entrepreneurial skill, number five. This is developing the ability to become impervious to stress, which is really developing your mindset. The way that you focus on stress, the stories that you tell yourself about stress, how you actually experience stress. 

A lot of people think that stress is an external thing and we don’t have any control over it. And yeah, we don’t have any control over everything that’s happening around us, but we do have control over how we perceive it and how we respond versus react to it. This is tricky. It takes a lot of time, but as a business owner, it’s going to be stressful. You’re juggling big things. You’ve got family and life and personal things. And this business that is pretty much all of those wrapped into one. 

Learning how to develop yourself, learning how to manage stress in healthy, productive ways so that it doesn’t impact you, so it doesn’t slow you down. You’re not feeling overwhelmed. You’re not wanting to bite people’s heads off. You’re not wanting to throw your computer against the wall. Trust me when I say that this is kind of an important skill to have.

Speaking of trust, that’s really the next skill.

Skill #6 – Trust

You get to develop learning how to trust yourself, learning how to trust others, working through any trust issues that you might have.

And potentially most important of all learning how to trust the mother-loving process, because it’s going to be at times in your business when you’re putting in a lot and you’re not seeing stuff yet. And you gotta be able to trust that you’re making the right decisions, that you’re doing the right things at the right time. And that things are unfolding, even if you’re not seeing it yet, the level of patience, maybe it should be trust/patience that it requires for you to be in business and not be a hot mess.

Trust me when I say “you get to develop a lot of trust”, especially trusting the process, trusting your skills, trusting yourself, and your ability to move things forward. Even when it doesn’t seem possible. 

Skill #7 – Focus

Entrepreneurial skill number seven is so hard. This is developing your ability to focus.

And yes, this is something you can develop. And it’s something that you must develop because we live in this crazy, loud, overwhelming, sometimes super obnoxious world with everybody’s opinions, everybody’s input coming at you, so much noise, so many distractions. And if you don’t learn how to put blinders on, how to eliminate distractions, how to minimize things that are going to pull you away from your focus, this is going to be a serious problem. You can start to feel like a serious, hot mess because your brain is not designed to be able to focus on all of these things at once. 

If this is something you struggle with, make sure you check out the videos I’ve done on how to focus, I’ll link them up above. This is going to help you to develop this as a skill and really protect yourself, protect your ability to focus so that you can make sure you’re making progress on the right things and not being distracted by the wrong ones. 

Skill #8 – prioritization

And then skill number eight. You could call this prioritization. You could call this filtering.

This is simply the ability to know what’s actually important versus what’s not. And what are the first things first that you need to be focusing on versus what’s something that needs to be put off because it’s merely a distraction. This is also just about keeping ideas organized so that your brain again, is not going in all these different directions. 

As a business owner, if you’re trying to go in every direction, we all know you’re going absolutely nowhere, right? So we really need to make sure that we know how to take our tasks, our projects, our ideas, even the distractions in our life, maybe the people in our lives, and prioritize things accordingly so that we’re keeping the most important things at the top of our list. And the unimportant things are just nice to-do’s that happen when they happen. And they’re not actually taking over those important things. 

This is hard, but it is a skill and there are tools and tactics and techniques that can help you to develop it.

And I want you to make sure that you catch my next video on that because I’m going to show you one of the best tools to just help get your brain into that place of knowing how to prioritize first things first and last things last. 

Let’s get the ball rolling…

And if you struggle with things like prioritization, planning, even marketing and sales, and you need to increase these skills, I highly encourage you to check out my Healthy Hustle Roadmap. 

My free class, How To Use a Holistic Approach to Create a Profitable Business Without Burning Yourself Out will teach you the three mistakes small business owners are making and introduce you to the approach and the strategies that I use to help you create a six-figure business in under 40 hours a week. If that sounds like your jam or something that would support you, be sure to grab a seat in the class by clicking the button below. 

What about you, boss lady?

I would love to hear from you on these 8 skills, which ones do you think are the strongest for you? And which ones do you think are the wobbliest, which ones need the most support or attention from you right now? 

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