Holistic Business Alignment: Using the 12 Archetypes to keep on track with Your Vision
As a solopreneur, creative entrepreneur, or startup founder, balancing your vision with daily business demands can be tough. But what if unconscious beliefs or habits were holding you back? Understanding what drives your business decisions can help align your goals with action more effectively. Using simple self-awareness tools and reflections combined with some drilling down on what is the core of your business, can unlock blockages to growth or challenges you are facing.
What’s Driving Your Business Decisions?
Every decision—from managing clients to pricing your services—is influenced by both conscious and unconscious factors. Hidden motivations, like fear of failure or perfectionism, often affect creatives, entrepreneurs, startup founders. These unconscious drivers can create roadblocks, preventing you from reaching your business potential. Reflecting on these drivers helps you regain control and align your vision with your daily practices.
Bringing the Shadows into Light: Practical Self-Awareness
Understanding these unconscious drivers doesn't require deep psychological exploration. Here's how:
Self-Reflection: Regularly assess your business challenges. Do you notice recurring patterns in how you approach problem-solving, especially in creative projects or new ventures?
Journaling: Writing down your thoughts after making key decisions can help bring clarity. Are certain emotions or triggers impacting your business growth?
Consulting a Mentor: External guidance from a coach or business consultant can provide valuable insight into blind spots and help align your creative or startup strategy.
Personality Patterns and Archetypes for Creative Entrepreneurs and Founders
Understanding personality patterns is essential for clearer decision-making. Leaning into the world of archetypes as identified by Jung, can illuminate things that you may not be aware of on a personal and business level. Here are a few of the 12 archetypes:
The Creator: Full of ideas but may struggle with perfectionism, constantly refining without sharing.
The Caregiver: Focused on helping others but may neglect their own business, risking burnout.
The Sage: Loves learning and strategy but may overthink and delay action.
The Hero: Thrives in challenge and pushes forward but may struggle with delegation, feeling the need to do it all alone
Recognising these patterns can help entrepreneurs and founders play to their strengths while being mindful of their weaknesses.
Why This Matters for Your Business
By understanding your unconscious drivers, you bring to light aspects of your personality and thought patterns that may be prone to self-sabotage, increase clarity, and start looking at daily actions to address this, and on the path to your vision. This leads to better decision-making, stronger business relationships, and sustainable business growth for creative businesses and startups alike.
Simple Starter Exercise: Reflect and Refocus
Take 15 minutes to reflect on a recent business decision or challenge:
Identify the Decision: Choose a recent decision that troubled you, or project challenge.
Analyse Your Motivations: Write down the reasons behind that choice. Were you aiming to meet client expectations, manage risk, or stay innovative? Note any emotional drivers (e.g., stress, excitement).
Link to Strategy: Ask yourself how this decision supports or detracts from your long-term business goals. Did it align with your overall strategy, or were you reacting out of habit or emotion?
Adjust for the Future: Based on your findings, think about how you might approach similar decisions going forward to ensure better alignment with your business vision.
Final Thought: Shift Your Mindset for Strategic Growth
It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind, but true growth happens when you take a step back. By understanding the unconscious motivations behind your decisions, you unlock a new level of strategic thinking. This reflection not only helps you align your actions with your business vision but also reveals areas where you’ve been holding yourself back without realising it.
What if one small shift in how you approach decisions could lead to bigger opportunities? Take that 15 minutes today—who knows what insights you might uncover that could reshape your entire business approach.
