“I’m terrified of taking time off! I’m scared I’ll lose my traction!” A writer friend needed a break. She’d been hitting it hard. In our Slack group, the typical messages came flooding in: “Take care of yourself!” people said. “We all need to take time off from time to time!” Though well-meaning, the words didn’t really help my friend. That is, until the group’s voice of reason Niklas Göke chimed in.

My kids and I were walking down the street. “If you run after your brother one more time and push him down near the road, we’re going home!” As if I’d just given my oldest kid a green light instead of a stop sign, in seconds flat, he went after his younger brother, and just like before, cries ensued. Despite what some people say, being a parent isn’t all bad.

The moment I heard the words “Let’s go!” — I froze. It was my second day at my first sales job. The place was Baltimore. The year was 2002. The corporate trainer had instructed us to break off into small groups to do the typical role-plays most sane people dread to get more comfortable on the phone. “Mike!” I heard my name being shouted from across the room. “Mike!” After figuring out how to use my legs again, I walked over to my manager in a state of pure panic.

You’re worth getting to know When asked by Larry King what skill people should most focus on to be successful, serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk replied without hesitation — “Self-awareness.” Yet, when Larry dug in for ways people can better develop or teach this skill, Gary again replied quickly — “I don’t know. But I know it’s important.” At first, I was taken aback. If Gary thought honing this skill was such a crucial ingredient for success, how come he couldn’t provide any practical tips for improvement?

As a career coach and mentor at various accelerators and educational institutions, I speak with a lot of recent college grads about their future plans. Instead of being excited about starting their careers, most of them are stressed out. They look at their friends and convince themselves they’re the only person in the world who doesn’t know who they are and what they want to do with their lives. The reality, however, couldn’t be more different.

When speaking on self-awareness, self-made billionaire, Warren Rustand, said the average person doesn’t discover who they are until they’re 45 years old. Then according to Warren, most people don’t begin to do something about it until they’ve had their first heart attack. This may sound depressing. But if you take the steps to raise your self-awareness, and begin to bet on yourself before the time you retire, you’re ahead of the curve.

When it comes to our turn-offs, most people have a lot in common Growing up with a severe speech impediment and social anxiety, I wasn’t only terrified of meeting new people, I also wasn’t very good at it. At the age of 23, however, I realized I’d never make anything of myself if this didn’t change. To improve my ability to interact with others, I did the one thing that scared me the most: I took a sales job.

I asked Kristina Howard, managing director at Tusk Ventures, for her best piece of career advice. “No matter how book smart you are, if you don’t learn how to play well with others, you will hit a ceiling,” replied Kristina. She went on to add, “The difference between a good career and a great career comes down to how socially intelligent you choose to become.” Kristina isn’t alone in her views.

When I started my first job my dad gave me an extremely valuable gift: the leadership notes he had logged over the course of his 50-year military career, during which time he managed organizations and trained today’s leaders. These notes served him and his students well. Years later, they’ve done the same for me and my clients. The circumstances differ from my dad’s. However, the leadership lessons laid out in his notes transcend the military and are just as relevant to entrepreneurs, and anyone who leads, as to military personnel.

When I was growing up, my dad told me that the fastest way to get what you want is to get to know the people who already have it. But I didn’t really understand his advice until my wife and I moved to rural Spain to start a family. Cut off geographically from the centers of my industry, I had to create my own online networks from scratch. Since I couldn’t go into the city every day to make connections in the coaching and writing worlds, I decided to take just one hour a week to reach out online to people whose work I enjoyed.

“Being good with people is an art, and the person who provides it, is an artist.” — Seth Godin I can’t remember one time growing up where I felt confident around other people. Combine a severe speech impediment, moving every two years for my dad’s job, and living in a world where most people expected some form of verbal communication and on a daily basis I experienced some form of social anxiety.

Confidence: taking care of your own and giving them the power to one day take care of others Growing up with a speech impediment, I was constantly in awe of confident people. Not only the way they talked, but the way they moved and made me feel when I was around them. But it didn’t occur to me until much later that the one quality all my friends seemed to share was great confidence.