Our self-beliefs shape our success.
When you discover yourself, you can achieve your version of success.
This made me sad.
Yesterday I met with a woman who has owned a business for fifteen years. She’s really bright, knows her industry inside out, and provides great service. She has an exceptional opportunity to grow because she’s put a fresh spin on an old concept. I see lots of growth potential.
So why am I sad?
She’s broke. In two weeks her rent and payroll are due and she won’t have the cash to make those payments. In two weeks, it’s possible that fifteen years of work will go down the drain. Worse, twelve employees will be out of a job.
How could this happen?
She doesn’t fully understand her financials and therefore doesn’t manage cash flow well.
Don’t get me wrong, she’s great with math. She has stacks of Excel spreadsheets. But because she’s never learned how to keep her books properly, the information is not well organized and not properly tracked. Her personal finances are mixed in the business account—a big no no. So the data isn’t that useful.
She can’t really tell how – or even if – she’s making a profit.
She doesn’t use any financial software. She takes information off her bank statements and enters it into and Excel spreadsheet. This is incredibly inefficient and eats up a lot of her time that would be better spent getting more customers.
I’m sad because she’s smart. She just doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
When it comes to business, the first rule is…never, never, run out of cash. There are plenty of other problems a business can recover from. Running out of cash is fatal.
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d make sure every woman who wanted to start a business would learn how to understand her numbers. She’d learn how to track income and expenses in a way that will tell her which products or services are most profitable.
I’d make sure every women knew how to track all the right metrics and to have a clean set of books.
Every women would be able to answer this one question: How does my company make a profit?
If you don’t know the answer to that question, you can’t run your business successfully.
Not understanding your financials is one of the key factors in why women run smaller businesses than men. For other factors, get my free report.)
Business don’t fail without clues. Your numbers tell the story. You can have all the passion, talent and innovative ideas in the world, but if you don’t know how to understand the relationship between what revenue comes in and what expenses go out, your business will not achieve full potential.
It’s women like the one I met yesterday that fuel my passion to teach female entrepreneurs. With a little education, with a little help, she could be incredibly successful.
I just hope she can get through the next two weeks.
Shocked.
That was my reaction to the survey results in a new book about leadership qualities.[i] As soon as I read the first chapter, I knew I had to share this with you:
“Sixty-six percent of the people surveyed believe the world would be a better place if men thought more like women.”
Now, we women have known this for a long time, right? We just didn’t have proof.
We do now.
This rigorous survey revealed that sixty-six percent of all people across the planet believe what the world needs most right now is feminine leadership. [ii]
Why does it matter?
Since self-doubt undermines so many women’s confidence, I hope you take this a huge validation. Now you know the entire world is hungry for what women can — and want — to contribute as leaders.
Here’s how to capitalize on ten of your natural feminine traits, that will become the gold standard for the future…
Look at this list of ten feminine leadership qualities. Choose just one and really explore how you can make the most of it, to achieve your full potential.
1) Empathy: Do you understand how others feel, even if you don’t feel the same way? When you empathize with customers, you have incredible insight into their needs and how to meet them. When you empathize with employees, you gain their respect. They know you care.
2) Flexibility: In today’s changing world, being flexible allows you to transition to meet market shifts or be willing to try new things.
3) Patience: Answers and results don’t always come quickly (I hate that!). Patience includes taking the time to listen, learn, to build consensus so that decisions turn into action.
4) Expressive: Use your natural communication skills to connect. When you are open, honest, candid, and receptive you built trust.
5) Trustworthy: Establish your personal track record showing your strength of character. Your loyalty and reliability will inspire confidence in others.
6) Intuitive: Plenty of women have a sixth sense about people, situations, and solutions. The problem is, we don’t always listen to our own intuition. Now is the time to trust that internal voice.
7) Collaborative: It’s not a winner-take-all world anymore, which is great for women, because we didn’t like that style in the first place. Be inclusive. Involve employees in planning and decision-making. Get input from customers. Look for opportunities to collaborate with business contacts, like co-sponsoring an educational event.
8) Passionate: Passion is contagious (just think about how people’s passion for iPhones turned them into top sellers almost overnight). Don’t be shy about sharing your passion for your product, your service, your cause with others.
9) Selfless: Be careful with this one…being selfless doesn’t mean having no boundaries or becoming a doormat. It means being cause focused. It means being humble and sharing the credit.
10) Planning for the future: You don’t have to be a futurist with a crystal ball to be a long-term thinker. You do need to evaluate all angles of a situation and think through the consequences of decisions and actions.
Used together, these top ten feminine leadership traits can help you resolve conflicts, maximize profits and redefine success.
So take this study’s endorsement of natural feminine qualities, embrace it, wallow in it. Let it help you gain confidence in yourself, banish self-doubt and trust yourself more.
I’d love to hear your examples of how you live out these feminine qualities in your business.
Take care,
How many conversations do you think are taking place this very minute with women struggling to achieve “work and life balance?”
Plenty! In my work with women I constantly see the stress and guilt they feel because they think they haven’t achieved this idealized “norm” of the perfect balance.
Well, news flash…there’s no perfect solution. But here’s one new idea.
Balance? Forget about it.
Personally, I think it’s a myth.
Just think about how much energy it takes to balance. Picture a Cirque du Soleil acrobat walking on a tightrope.
Notice how tentative she is. See how constrained she has to be.
Even with years of practice, she has to take tiny, careful tiny steps to keep that perfect balance. She has to make sure she makes only slow, small movements.
One wrong move and she falls.
Let’s face it, balance can be constricting.
I’ve been to those workshops where the self-help leader gives each person a perfectly proportioned pie chart that is supposed to represent our lives. Each slice of the pie is labeled…Work, Family, Exercise, Community, Spirituality, and so on.
We’re asked to be honest with ourselves about how much time or energy we actually devote to these separate areas.
I always leave feeling like a failure.
Here’s the problem. In that workshop I may be sitting in between one woman who has three young children at home and another woman who runs a multi-million dollar company.
Our lives look very different.
Life has seasons. If your business is in start-up mode, it’s going to consume an enormous amount of your time, creativity and energy. If you are caring for an aging parent your heart will be shifted toward their needs. If you have active, adolescent children –too young to drive themselves to their various activities — you’ll be devoting plenty of time and energy to them.
The seasons of human life aren’t as predictable as nature. Your seasons may be short or long. The seasons will be different for each woman.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for balance.
She here’s my suggestion…think about the times in your life when you felt completely off balance.
Like falling in love. The birth of your child. Buying a new home. Weren’t those were some of the most joyful times in your life?
So instead of working and striving for this perfect, imaginary balance, go where your energy leads you. Aim for passion instead.
Give yourself permission to be perfectly imbalanced and enjoy what brings you energy. Wave your arms and make bold movements!
Try this for one week: do only what you love and love everything you do. Put the joy and passion back in your life.
Notice what you love doing and put as much of your energy into that as you can. Eliminate as much as humanly possible anything you don’t love.
“How is that possible?” you ask.
In the real world we all have certain things we do not love that we must do. As soon as I finish writing (which I love) I have to meet a repairman to take care of a certain hole it the ceiling caused by an air conditioner leak (which I do not love).
But for times like this, I can bring what I do love into the equation. I can connect with the repairman and discover something about him and his life. I can look for a metaphor in the hole-in-the-ceiling-episode, which I can turn into an interesting article for you.
I can bring what I love to nearly every situation.
So please, quit striving for perfect balance. Give yourself a little breathing room, a little more flexibility. Then balancing won’t be so constricting.
Imagine that woman on the tightrope walking on a wider surface instead of that skinny rope. What would she look like then? She’d be able to romp and turn cartwheels!
That’s what I’m talking about.
Let go of the guilt and stress and live the life that has the ingredients YOU want, in the proportion YOU want. Throw away the pie chart.
Wishing you a perfectly imbalanced day!
By Darcie Harris ©
I’m concerned about a friend of mine. She believes that work has to be hard. After all, that’s why we call it “work,” right? Work is difficult.
Her father worked with his hands, often in difficult physical labor. Admirably, she learned a great work ethic from him.
Unfortunately, his beliefs also taught her to be skeptical of people who were financially successful in professions that — by his standards — were too easy. They hadn’t really earned their money. They were lazy or privileged.
So my friend believes that work is hard. Not joyful, not innovative, not rewarding.
She toils, making her work harder than it needs to be, missing opportunities to outsource, collaborate, and capitalize on projects with high profit potential.
My friend has a story – a “work is hard” story. It’s a self-limiting belief, her own personal glass ceiling.
Every family has its own overarching “story.” It could be a rags to riches story. Or maybe it’s a fall from grace story. It could be a pull yourself up by your bootstraps story, a keeping up with the Jones’ story.
We live out our lives mostly unconscious of the stories we have about ourselves and others.
Our stories are the conclusions we’ve drawn — and often we’ve never examined the assumptions we made that brought us to those conclusions.
Sometimes our stories are positive and affirming. More often than not they include hidden self-limiting beliefs.
These self-limiting beliefs keep us from being authentic. Our stories keep us from embracing our full potential, from living the life we really want.
Human nature being what it is, we typically prefer the comfort of holding on to what’s familiar. Our stories create a safety zone.
They become our unspoken rules for playing the game of life.
Questioning our stories – our beliefs – can often feel as difficult as accepting someone telling you that the alphabet begins with Z and ends with A, when all your life you were taught that it was the other way around.
But what if…just what if, believing the alphabet began with A and ended with Z were holding you back from achieving some goal, exploring some passion?
And what if…just what if, believing that the alphabet begins with Z and ends with A would free you up to pursue your deepest desires? Wouldn’t it at least be worth exploring?
Human beings are strange creatures! Research proves we are so attached to what we already believe that we actually limit the information we take in to what validates what we already believe.
We have to be very intentional about letting new information, ideas and possibilities in.
Our stories are not the ultimate one-and-only truth how life works, about who we are and what we can or want to be. They are simply our interpretation of the facts, and what we have made those facts mean to us.
Challenging whether our interpretation is the only right conclusion means finding a freedom to discover and embrace your full potential.
My friend never questioned her father’s beliefs. She didn’t look deeply into how he developed his assumptions and his conclusions. So his beliefs operate in her unconscious mind, just below the surface.
Here’s how we challenge these false conclusions. We can question our stories and reframe what we believe, by asking ourselves two questions:
Let’s go back to my friend and her dad. What are the facts?
My friend accepted these assumptions and conclusions without even knowing it.
Hello…it doesn’t have to be this way! We can discover some of our self-limiting beliefs that keep us stuck when we question our assumptions and conclusions.
We can rewrite our own stories!
I hope you’ll look back and listen deeply to your old family stories . Listen for what you made those stories mean about you and for your life.
Challenge the old assumptions and conclusions.
Then rewrite your own story. Break your own glass ceiling!
I’d love to hear about what changes take place once that glass is shattered!
By Darcie Harris ©
Meet RussAnn Anderson.
It took nearly three years for RussAnn’s brilliant idea to become a reality. I call it brilliant because it wasn’t rocket science. Yet what seemed so obvious, practical and concrete turned into an obstacle course, calling on RussAnn’s skills of problem solving, persistence and patience.
When I asked RussAnn what other female entrepreneurs could learn from her experience she said:
Once you read her story, you’ll know why those are the very lessons every female entrepreneur needs to learn.
April 2010
RussAnn gets an idea. She and her husband have been boaters for years, spending most weekends with their children wakeboarding. Wakeboarding boats are too tall to fit into a garage or typical storage area. And most neighborhoods prohibit you (thankfully!) from parking it on the front lawn!
They stored their boat in an airplane hangar – on the other side of town for a mere $400 a month.
One day, RussAnn’s husband Michael came home and said, “Good news! After nine months on their waiting list, a space finally opened up at the boat storage place.”
That week, RussAnn & Michael met the owner of the storage unit in the parking lot, and handed over a check for $95, their new monthly storage cost.
RussAnn also owns a Kumon franchise and thought, “You know, my current customers spend about $95 a month on average, and what I do for that same dollar amount is a LOT more work than meeting someone in a parking lot and taking a check!”
Her wheels began turning. Build a boat and RV storage complex! Clearly there was a market, since they had been on a waiting list for nine months. This business required the work up front to build it, but very little work to run it. She saw the business as a way to fund an early retirement, with very little effort.
She began her research. She got online and found a company that hosted trade shows for the storage industry. She was the only female in attendance! Impressed with one of the speakers, she hired him to do a comprehensive feasibility study.
The result? “This is a gold mine,” he told RussAnn. “There is virtually no competition for boat and recreational vehicle storage here.” The few people who did offer a limited number of spaces did no marketing because they always had a waiting list.
As a boater herself, RussAnn knew the perfect location for the storage business had to be near the two major highways that boaters travel to get to the many lakes and near a gas station with an RV dump. Between internet research and driving the area, she found the perfect place – almost. It was too much property. Undaunted, she approached the bank that owned the property and convinced them to split the property into two parcels.
Now she had to decide whether to lock herself into purchasing the property, knowing she would need an estimated $1.7 million more to build the units.
August 2010
RussAnn told me what was unfolding while we were on her EWF Forum retreat outside of Boulder, CO. She’d have to get a huge loan and raise the down payment in cash. Between the land and the construction, she thought she’d need about $260,000 in cash. It would be a huge leap of faith. I said, “RussAnn, your whole Forum is here together. Why not use our time before we go to dinner to talk this over with your group and get their input?”
Her Forum agreed it was a great business plan and encouraged her to pursue the deal. “If I had not talked this through with my Forum, I wouldn’t have done this; they gave me courage,” RussAnn told me later. “It’s a big leap from idea to execution – that’s like the Grand Canyon. It was getting pretty scary, the thought of signing a huge loan and raising the cash for the down payment.” But RussAnn remembers her Forum members telling her, “You can do this and we will be here for you every step of the way.”
September 2010
RussAnn put the land under contract only to discover there were issues with the easements on the property. That would take time to resolve with the city but it gave her time to look for the financing. A former banker herself, she put together five 3-inch binders, filled with every piece of information the bankers would need: a business plan, financial pro-formas, the feasibility study, the land contract, and tax returns.
The months ticked by, with one appointment after another, each bank dragging its feet. They didn’t understand boat and RV storage. They were gun shy after the traditional storage industry problems back in the late ’80’s. They considered the storage building “temporary” because it would be steel, and didn’t want to finance it. No. No. No.
Two banks said they would take a closer look, but only after RussAnn raised the 20% down. By now, all the raw materials costs had increased and once all the construction bids came in, costs had grown from $1.7 million to $2.4 million. She’d need to bring a total of $480,000 in cash to closing. “Everyone told me I needed the cash, but no one told me how to raise it,” RussAnn said.
More conversations with her Forum led her to look to family as investors first. “I didn’t like that idea,” RussAnn said, “But I just had to get over my own pride.” Fortunate to be from a family of entrepreneurs, her family looked at her business plan and happily agreed to invest. Those commitments totaled $200,000, less than half of what she needed.
She met with a couple of private equity people, but didn’t get any takers. Someone told her that with family as investors, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission would be required. Several meeting with attorneys and several months later, that turned out to be avoidable, simply by properly structuring the legal agreements with the investors.
As the months passed, she worried that another entrepreneur – someone with lots of cash – would buy the land and build the structure before she had time to raise the money she needed.
July 2011
A family member referred RussAnn to another bank. She met with the CEO who told her about a new program that allows you to use your own retirement as part of your equity, but there could be tax consequences. He wasn’t clear on the details and referred her to yet another company.
Months went by as RussAnn researched the legal and tax implications of that possibility. In the meantime, the bank that owned the property resolved the easement issues and was now pressing her to close the deal. Though she was still trying to raise the entire down payment and her construction loan had not been approved, she and Michael decided to purchase the property.
March through December 2012
RussAnn finally had her down payment raised! Now it was up to the bank to get the loan approved, both through their bank and through the SBA. But the bank kept stalling. After months of being put off and misled by her loan officer, RussAnn had enough. She went directly to the bank president, armed with a folder of email communication between the loan officer and her.
“I had to get very factual, and all business, but it felt ugly,” RussAnn shared. “It turned out the loan officer knew nothing about how to deal with the SBA. My intent was not to get this guy fired, but the next day he lost his job.” The bank president assigned her a different loan officer.
But now, the bank said her construction estimates were more than 90 days old, so she had to get new bids for everything. And (surprise!) the lender told her there was an SBA fee of $50,000 that she had to pay in full up front, and she needed more cash for her down payment because she needed to calculate in her first year operating expenses. Once again, RussAnn went to her family to ask them for more money.
January 2013
Almost three years later, RussAnn finally closed on her loan! Her simple idea was about to become a reality.
“We encount
ered so many unexpected obstacles. Every step of the way I dealt with men who did not take me seriously. I wasn’t used to that. I just kept looking at the facts, asking myself, what are all the options? It took me driving this deal forward to get it done.”
May 2013
As of this writing, construction has finally begun, which brought new obstacles to face. Given RussAnn’s unstoppable persistence, I have no doubt she’ll resolve them and this entrepreneurial venture will be a great success!