As the owner of a flourishing business, you need to cultivate three essential skills. While emphasis is often given to skills like reading and analyzing financial statements and how to sell with conviction, the following three skills are less spoken about and yet ultimately mark the difference between someone who is self-employed and a true visionary leader. All great business people must know how to discern a good deal from a bad deal and act on that decision, when to listen to their gut and how to set priorities. This boils down to the ability to think, feel and act. These three skills are not often addressed in a business class or even in most MBA programs thus cultivating them will truly put you among the business elite. We'll briefly explore why each of these is important and how to apply each skill to making your business flourish.

How to think through critical decision making:
You must know how to analyze a situation, whether it is real or imagined, with past numbers or projected figures and see the business sense of it, or the lack thereof. This is critical thinking. You must be able to do this despite knowing little about a situation. The ability to make good decisions, given often limited information, is a skill to cultivate in order to become a master CEO. You also need to be the strategic thinker, the marketing mastermind and the visionary. Ultimately your plan should be to stop doing the minutia that runs the business and delegate those tasks to competent employees that you can trust. Then you can turn your role into what it should be: Chief Decision Maker. Your mind should be focused on thinking about paving the future for your company. Making critical decisions includes what to add or take away from the produce or service mix, how industry trends will affect your market and how to take advantage of them. Being able to look at a market opportunity and decide what will generate more revenue for your business, how to supply an underserved niche, cultivate more loyalty and competitive advantage is your job as CEO.

Boldness and decisiveness are rare and thus valuable skills. Many companies fail not by making the wrong decisions but by not making decisions at all. Those who make decisions and move forward are always in the power position compared to those who wait and see. This is the contrast between a victim mentality and a victor mentality. Fear of being wrong stops many people from doing anything, but being wrong is just an illusion. There is no wrong, there are only decisions and lessons learned and new decisions. There are people who make things happen and people who let things happen, and history shows the winners are the ones who make decisions.

How to feel using your intuition:
If you are not pleased with how things are going in your business, you need learn to trust your feelings and intuitions more. Some say that a finely tuned intuition can make great improvement in one's decision making effectiveness. Our bodies sometimes know things that our minds don't. If you get too caught up in your head you could be keeping yourself from capitalizing on the inner wisdom that lies within your body. In order to improve how you make decisions, make sure that you add in a gut check to your process. You brought the business this far, so your gut instincts have a lot of validity. Making a decision in your business inherently includes making a guess or prediction about the future, which no data can predict accurately. If we were able to predict the future 100% accurately using just data from the past, Las Vegas and Wall Street would be very different places. As it is, we are always uncertain about the future, and just relying on facts is often not enough. You must learn to tap into your inner powers. To do this try meditating on a problem or issue that you are trying to solve. Go to a quite place with no distractions and allow yourself to just sit quietly for 30 minutes. Clear your mind of all your worries and concerns and just sit peacefully. You will find that the answer or solution will come into your mind at after about 20-30 minutes of meditation. It will be as if it came from above. The more you do on a regular basis you will become more in tune with your own inner wisdom and will be able to leverage this sixth sense as a powerful advantage in business and in life. If your gut instinct is that you don't understand a problem or a realm of your business and you need outside help, trust that instinct and ask for help either from within your company or from the outside. You know more that you think you do and this will become apparent after you practice developing your intuition. Remember to use your feelings as well as your head when making decisions.

How to act by setting priorities and delegating:
This skill is really two skills but in order for you to perfect them they should be looked at as a coordinated effort. As a business owner, you've got a lot on your plate, and you always will, so learning to prioritize is essential. You will quickly see that you cannot handle everything on your list. So, you have a choice; you can either not do the things on the bottom of your list, or you can find others to do them for you, and that is a lot of what running a business and creating an entity of business value is all about. You must know the value of everything you do and take care of your high value activities first. The activities deemed lower in value are not necessarily activities that are not worth doing, they are just not worth you doing them. If these activities can be performed effectively by someone else and still net out more value for the business in return and they are a strategic fit for your focused strategy of the business, then they should be delegated. To delegate effectively you must learn how to explain for understanding. For higher level activities, you must also be able let go, explaining the current and desired state and then trusting the intellect of the other person(s) to build the bridge that will fill in the middle. The more you learn to let go, the more you will be able to grow your business. If you do not learn to do this, you will put a ceiling on your own results. Sure it is true that your employees might let you down or drop the ball on a task, but the same is true of you if you are trying to do everything for the business. Put time and effort into finding smart, hard-working employees and empower them to do what they do best. The possibility that your employee will make a mistake is the same as the possibility that you will make a mistake. Therefore it will be more lucrative for the business in the long run to allow your employees to do these essential tasks while you focus on running the business.

By employing these three essential skills everyday when running your business you are bound to see dramatic and exciting results that will allow your business to flourish and that is what being an entrepreneur is all about. For more information on you how you can improve your business, visit www.flourishingbusiness.com.