Has your keeping fit instructor inspired you to set up on your own and teach yoga or how to dance? Has your creative writing tutor inspired you to finally write that novel you always felt you had in you? Teachers have a lot to answer for – they can either inspire us to reach our full potential or put us off education for life. Once our budding entrepreneur has started up a business, the desire should be there to learn more about the other important aspect of how to run it. Marketing, Advertising, Administration and many other things are involved in running a business.
Education for continuing personal development must in this case include leadership skills and team building, if our entrepreneur is to succeed. Many entrepreneurs are good at only one or possibly two things: having the business idea and selling it. Running a company requires so much more than just coming up with an idea for a good product.
There are telephone manners, people skills, knowing how to decipher the management accounts every month, keeping track of sales’ leads, understand income versus outgoings and dealing with your receptionist’s maternity leave. While you may feel that participating in a seminar when you should be out selling, wheeling and dealing, you need to continually upgrade your business skills just to stay afloat, let alone getting ahead of the competition.
Life’s Little Surprises
On a far more personal level, education can be immensely satisfying, especially for those who had little opportunity to be educated when they were young or perhaps they lacked the encouragement and confidence. Once the first step is made, the enrolment office safely negotiated, the first class went well, fellow students often ask themselves what became of that shy wallflower who sat quietly among them on that first day.
Older people often had to make sacrifices due to family commitments or because of lack of opportunity after the war. Now that they are retired, education for continuing personal development can remind them of long forgotten areas of interest. Once rekindled, this interest can develop into business ideas. It may only be small scale, a one man consultancy, but knowing that one has a purpose in life beyond digging up the allotment and looking after the grandchildren can give an older person a real boost of confidence.
Women in particular often had to give up education in favor of looking after children. Now that the children are grown and have left the nest, the woman is free to rediscover her own personality. Education is not just learning maths, literacy or geography. There are life skills, which we can learn to better our lives. Maybe a life coach will help us out of depression after bereavement, or give us back our confidence after an accident. Once we have regained our sense of self and have been inspired by our experience, we will be open again to the concept of learning and are likely to make it a lifelong experience.
Inspiring entrepreneurs through education is not just about business and future captains of industry. We can be an entrepreneur in life skills, a beacon to our family and friends, to our communities. Let education for continuing personal development inspire you to gain whatever your dreams and your aspirations may be.