On Growth: Akousa Dardaine Edwards

Personal Growth
Akousa Dardaine Edwards

There is really no magic formula for anyone’s path to personal growth and success.

Personal growth is a product of pursuing your dreams: your dreams are achieved by personal growth and it occurs when you become who you are, when you move towards gaining more autonomy; when you are moving towards your authentic self, when you are becoming genuinely who you are. Although our dreams are important and give us hope it is only through personal growth we find true happiness and inner peace.

Personal growth means that you are in the process of looking at your life, how you are feeling at the present moment, what is missing and what can be improved and working actively on improvement through education, new knowledge, increased awareness and specific changes.

The key is to strive for balance in your journey to personal growth, the balance between careers, potential relationships and financial independence. You are looking at your belief system and making changes to it. 

So how does personal growth link in with entrepreneurship? Someone once said entrepreneurship is the highest form of personal growth. Being an entrepreneur can sometimes be a lonely journey where achieving your goals and dreams becomes a driving force. As an entrepreneur you have to constantly improve not only your business but also yourself. You will constantly be tested! New twists, turns, and surprises surface with exhausting frequency.

You’re going to develop character. If you choose to pay the price for success, you’ll find that it’s actually much harder than most accounts of business success would suggest. But through that hardship, great rewards are available including tremendous personal growth. Personal growth starts with you--when you make the decision to pursue it, to understand yourself, to improve your awareness, to work on your attitude and to believe in yourself and your potential.

People who have been through extreme hardships are those who are most beautiful. They have learned to take risks and turn those risks into opportunities. They have learned to compromise their present leisure in exchange for future growth. They have learned to welcome failures and prove other people’s doubts wrong. They have learned through their everyday business battles that it is always too late for giving up.

So when we grow through experience, are we not better, more confident and happier people by the progress we make? You see, obstacles we meet and overcome are necessary to our progress and vital to keeping our dreams alive.

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Akosua Dardaine Edwards is the founder of the Enabling Enterprise Project, which aims to assist women to start and grow businesses in Trinidad and Tobago. Akosua is a qualified management accountant (ACMA) and a Fellow of the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (FCCA). She possesses an MBA from London South Bank University specialising in entrepreneurship and small business development.