Many articles are being written about women and their chances for success. While women are growing in their success as professionals and business owners, researchers ponder why more women aren’t more successful.
There is much speculation on this question though the one that is clear to me has to do with lifestyle choices. Many women I work with are more than capable of creating a successful business or career but don’t know how to do that and have a life.
Three of my newest clients are women starting businesses, are young and trying to get pregnant. Their concerns are obvious. How do I create a successful business and a family at the same time? Professional women wanting to advance within their company have the same question.
Using my three newest clients as an example, they work in very typical female ways in their companies. For the most part it has worked, they each grew their business to $1.5 mil. the first year. They worked hard, put in long hours and did a lot of the work themselves. The first year of success was satisfying and overwhelming. They cannot imagine continuing in this way and creating a family.
They are now at the point of making decisions. My experience has been; the most difficult aspect of being a business owner is to become a leader in the business and less a doer. Learning spend less time doing the work of the business is harder for women than for men because of our creative energy.
Women often say that others cannot do the work of the business the way they do. They have so much creative energy that they jump in to do the work themselves. It seems easier than getting someone else to do it and do it the way they do.
For women to be successful and create a family, we have to learn how to use our enormous reservoir of creative energy as a leader, not so much as a doer. Female creative energy is real. It is powerful. We can feel it in our body. It pushes us, excites us, makes us impatient and causes us act before thinking. So there are both good and bad aspects to our creative energy.
The key is to become aware of this enormous creative energy within us, to harness it and direct it in ways that support our success. For a growing company, this means controlling the impulse to do and focus the creative energy on developing a team of competent, loyal, dedicated staff that can run our business in the way we imagine and consistent with the brand we are developing.
Being a leader means to take control of our energy, focus on our vision and plan carefully for our vision to manifest..
I was working with a long time client, Sarah, this past week. In her impatience with staff not completing important tasks, she started doing the work herself. Her creative energy was flowing at a high level, and she was running into blocks where things were not happening, energy was not moving. To a female this is painful in the body. How many of us have had this experience? We will do anything to relieve our creative energy and get energy moving that we feel is in the way. Sarah felt she was solving a problem but in reality was creating a larger one around staff development.
To grow a larger business or grow professionally takes focus on how we can use our creative energy differently. Without focus or intention, our creative energy makes us doers when we need to be strategic and use our energy in a new way so that we can be successful and create a life.
Best wishes on your success,
Kay