Success can look incredibly polished from the outside.
You see the thriving business, growing network, exciting opportunities, impressive clients, and confident entrepreneur who seems to know exactly what she is doing. You may look at another woman thriving in business and assume that she has reached some magical stage where uncertainty, fear, stress, and self-doubt no longer exist.
No! Stress has a way of making one closed door look like the entire building has disappeared. However, changing your mindset and following the advice shared on the Women Thriving in Business podcast can allow you to achieve your goals.
Successful women are not successful because they have eliminated difficult circumstances. They have learned how to lead themselves through them.
After listening to several episodes of the Women Thriving in Business podcast, three ideas kept coming up: know yourself, trust yourself, and move yourself forward.
Know Yourself: Self-Care Is a Leadership Practice
When was the last time you asked yourself, “How can I honor me today?”
Not your business, clients, employees with urgent needs. How can you honor YOU today?
Jan Hice-Smith defined self-care as tending to your whole being. You do not need self-care because you are going through a difficult season. You need self-care because you are alive.
We hear a lot about how self-care means taking a hot bubble bath or going on vacation. Maybe putting your phone on do not disturb. However, as a woman thriving in business, you need to know self-care isn’t how you recover from an emergency. That is a reaction. Self-care is a practice.
Women thriving in business must become comfortable identifying and communicating their own needs, which requires self-awareness.
Jan continues to share how you are your own best advocate, which means you need to know what is happening with you.
You need to recognize when you feel different, exhausted, overwhelmed, disconnected, or simply off. Then you need to be willing to act on your own behalf.
Consider how easily we do this for other people.
If your friend told you she had worked every weekend for two months, barely slept, stopped exercising, and felt miserable, would you tell her to add another networking event to her calendar? Probably not.
Yet somehow, when we are the exhausted business owner, another networking event suddenly sounds like an excellent idea.
Thrivers, give yourself some of the compassion you so readily extend to everyone else.
Self-care also doesn’t mean every uncomfortable situation requires a dramatic response. Quitting your job, closing the business, firing the client, or leaving an environment may be options, but they aren’t always the only ones.
Sometimes the first step is asking yourself what you actually need and honoring that need.
Maybe you need to change a boundary. Maybe you need to create a boundary (no judgment). Do you need to delegate more? Gain more knowledge or experience? Maybe you need to sleep.
It takes a village to keep female entrepreneurs in business because we are interdependent. Knowing yourself means recognizing your limitations without treating them as failures. It means noticing your patterns. It means understanding what restores you, what drains you, and when you need support.
And your capacity can grow. Learn more about expanding your capacity to grow by listening to YOU Matter and Thriving Through Your Personal Greatness.
Trust Yourself: Remember That You Have Choices
Now that we are checking in with ourselves, Thrivers, we need to talk about power.
Becca Powers and Women Thriving in Business host Nikk Rogers shared a lot of great information about how to trust yourself. However, Becca summarized the idea of trusting yourself when she said that she is the “CEO of her own life.
Think about that for a moment.
- CEOs make decisions. They gather information. They evaluate resources. They consult people. They change strategies. And, importantly, they understand that circumstances can affect the options available to them without assuming that they have no options at all.
The same is true in your life and business. What can I control and influence from here?
Choice is an important part of self-trust because you will have to get uncomfortable. When Becca Powers started her business, she had to create a dual life. A few examples of a dual life are:
You may be growing a business while maintaining a career. You may be changing industries while everyone around you still identifies you with your previous role. You may be building something new while fulfilling responsibilities in the life you already created.
Life can get awkward when you are pulled in so many different directions.
You might stop receiving the same validation. You may get excluded from certain opportunities or social circles. Someone may question why you are changing when what you were doing seemed perfectly fine to them.
You have to be willing to be uncomfortable for a while, in pursuit of your dream and allowing your business and goals to survive. You didn’t make all these changes in your life to stay the same, correct?
Being the CEO of your own life does not mean becoming the CEO, CFO, general counsel, receptionist, therapist, strategist, and entire board of directors.
Successful women build networks, like a CEO, with others offering suggestions and information on how your life and business can improve and scale.
Nikki Rogers explains that you may need to reach out to your confidence posse, ask for the occasional late-night therapy session, get introduced to someone in a friend-of-a-friend’s network, and be reminded of what you are capable of.
Trusting yourself doesn’t mean doing everything alone; it means acknowledging that you have a network. You are a reliable person with a valuable business and surrounded by women thriving in business. Find more details about how to trust yourself in these episodes: Achieving Success Without Sacrificing Yourself, Thriving Through Resilience, and The Gift of Fear.
Self-trust sounds more like: I know when I need help, and I know whom to call.
Move Yourself: Courage and Resilience Are Built Through Action
Although every woman thriving in business will have different goals or definitions of success, we must admit that our lives will change as we become more self-aware.
You can identify your needs. You can call your confident posse, make a list of your options, journal about those options, color-code the options, and create a beautiful spreadsheet about the options. At some point, you still have to choose one thing over the other. This or that. Those or these.
Making a choice requires courage.
In an episode called “Thriving Through Resilience,” Nikki Rogers explains that courage isn’t about being fearless, but about having resilience. She shares her favorite definition of resilience, which is acknowledging that something is hard and deciding how you will move forward.
- That distinction matters in business because entrepreneurship requires you to make decisions without knowing every step.
- You may launch the service without knowing whether customers will buy it.
- You may attend the conference without knowing whom you will meet.
- You may introduce yourself to someone without knowing whether the conversation will lead anywhere.
- You may raise your prices without knowing how your clients will respond.
- You may pursue an opportunity without knowing whether you will get it.
- Waiting until you know exactly how everything will happen can become another form of resistance.
Instead, learn to examine your fear by asking yourself, ‘What am I afraid will happen?’ Then ask, What is the likelihood that this fear will actually be realized?
Fear, exhaustion, stress, and life have ways of convincing us that the worst possible outcome is also the most likely outcome. That’s false and explains why you need to ask yourself the third question:
What’s the best thing that could happen?
Give the wonderful possibilities a few minutes of your imagination too. What if the person responds to your email? What if the customer says yes? What if the event introduces you to your next collaborator? What if people happily pay the new price? What if the opportunity is even better than you imagined?
I know this feels like a lot, but women thriving in business know how to prepare for the worst and expect the best. But it takes the same energy to consider the best possible outcomes and internalize them, too.
Which is why you will ask the final question:
What would my life look like if I did not do this? Unspeakable joy? Crushing disappointment? Knowing that someone could not benefit from your service? Hurt because your impact on the world will be smaller? Grateful to become a carefree employee again.
Courage pushes you to answer this question and move towards our goals. Every time you create something that you wish existed, you collect evidence that this action can be done.
You learn that you can send the email. You can have the difficult conversation. You can survive the no. You can recover when the strategy fails. You can ask for help. You can adjust your plan.
That is how resilience grows. Repeatedly showing yourself evidence of your effort is how confidence is built from acting while you were still afraid.
So trust yourself and prepare for the opportunities you believe are coming.
Build the relationships now. Develop the skill now. Create the process now. Learn about the opportunity now.
Being ready is another way to believe something good could happen. Stay ready by learning more from these Women Thriving in Business podcast episodes: Do You Trust Yourself?, YOU Matter, and How To Be Courageous.
Successful Women Learn to Lead Themselves
The mindset of a successful woman in business is not: I know exactly what I’m doing.
Thriving does not require constant confidence, perfect circumstances, endless productivity, or a life without fear.
Instead, remember three things:
Know yourself: Understand your needs. Pay attention to your well-being. Advocate for yourself and practice compassion instead of waiting until you are exhausted to decide that you deserve care.
Trust yourself: Recognize the realities of your environment while remembering that you still have choices. Stop automatically prioritizing everyone else’s expectations. Build relationships with people who can advise, challenge, support, and remind you of your options.
Move yourself: Courage does not require certainty. Take the next step despite discomfort. Challenge your assumptions about what could go wrong and give yourself permission to imagine what could go right.
Self-leadership is a practice.
Every time you advocate for yourself, ask for help, recognize an option, challenge a fear, make an intentional choice, or move forward despite uncertainty, you strengthen it.
You do not have to become fearless to become successful.
You have to keep learning how to lead the woman who is building the business.
Keep thriving!