With yesterday being International Women’s Day, I felt like it was a great opportunity to discuss how we are seeing more and more women taking CEO level positions and even discovering entrepreneurship. My very own great friend Shannon Bender even recently launched Girl Powered Network to help them out. A while back, I wrote an article about the difference between men and women in the context of entrepreneurship and why I think men are better at it. The article went viral and someone emailed me asking to break down further how women can become more entrepreneurial. While this does not apply to all women and every person is different, I am simply generalizing based on my observations as outlined in Third Circle Theory.
Based on all the women I have known and their businesses, including my very own mom, I think that every woman can become better by simply focusing on being more aware of the following three things:
#1. Staying More Focused
Being that woman are often wives, mothers, and business owners at the same time (which is very admirable), it also gives them a tendency to balance many things at once, making them believe they are able to do the same thing just as well at work than they are in real life.
Reality is that too many times I have witnessed women entrepreneurs lose traction or not be taken seriously as they try to embark on too many things either with one company or within multiple companies. Focus on one, build it, grow it, and then scale it before going into a new role.
#2. Not Allowing Adversity to Slow Them Down
From my experience, I believe women are stronger than men when it comes to business but unfortunately they take longer to recover from a fall. In other words, they cope with failure much better but when failure really hits them, it takes way too long to be stable and recover with massive velocity.
It is important to remember that being successful in entrepreneurship requires the ability to deal with failure very passively and not allow it to slow you down, even when betrayed or very hurt by the circumstance surrounding it. Learn to recover quicker and you are bound to eventually not need to recover.
#3. Stop Trying to Compare to Men Around You
Every woman I’ve ever met has always described themselves as being just as strong, if not stronger, than the men surrounding them. Even when in corporate positions of leadership, there seems to always be this need to showcase their ability to be just as good or better.
In reality, the focus shouldn’t be to prove anyone wrong but rather to use your strengths, especially the ones that naturally make you better, like your ability to understand people or your softer and more team driven approach to creating solutions to problems in order to succeed.
We know that there is inequality at work, but from my observations of many woman in leadership positions, the ones who get further are the ones who focus on the job rather than why they are a fit for it.
Look for more awesome tips for women, as well as incredible interviews in the Secret Entourage Academy of some of the most successful women entrepreneurs to date during our upcoming Women Entrepreneur Month in June.
