Being a woman in the business world is an incredibly stressful and taxing experience. If you allow it, it will undermine your work-life balance, undermine your personal relationships and make you burn out quite quickly. Sure, you have a lot of things to prove and even more of them to achieve, however, it is exactly for this reason that you can’t allow yourself to go in head-first. With that in mind and without further ado, here are the top five tips that every woman in the business world needs to hear.
1. Achieving a life-work balance is worth it
The first major misconception in the business world is that you can’t achieve a great work-life balance as a female entrepreneur. Of course you can, there are so many amazing women who have managed it. It’s just incredibly hard. Still, it’s definitely more than worth it. Success in the business world is a great motivator but, for the majority of people, it’s just not enough. By having a family or a close circle of friends, you’ll be able to not just recharge your batteries but also figure out how your success makes life better for them. Other than this, you need this nucleus in order to recharge batteries after a long day/week at work.
Sure, getting married, having a kid and buying your own home cost a lot of money and require a lot of effort, however, this is not something that will change in time. First of all, when getting married to the right person, you’re not getting one more responsibility, what you’re getting is an invaluable ally in your struggle. Buying a home saves money in the long run and resolves one major lifestyle question that would otherwise bother you and stress you out. Finally, having kids is both a motivator and a great experience. There’s nothing that can help make you more caring, more responsible and appreciate life more than this.
2. You need to get up an hour earlier
Just because you’re much busier all of a sudden, this doesn’t mean that you have to neglect self-growth and self-care. Instead, you need to manage your time much better. Therefore, you might want to start getting up earlier in the morning. You see, humans are diurnal creatures and there’s an ancient Chinese saying that one hour of sleep before midnight makes a greater difference than two hours of sleep after midnight. Moreover, at 4 am there’s no one around to bother you on social media or ring on your doorbell.
One great early morning routine that you should try out is the 20-20-20 rule for productivity. What this means is that you get one hour earlier than you’ve intended and separate this first hour into three parts of 20 minutes each. So, you start with 20 minutes of exercise (a physical exercise is an amazing tool for productivity). Then, you proceed to visualize your goals for 20 minutes, just in order to maintain perspective on things. Finally, you spend the last 20 minutes learning a new skill. Here, the concept of microlearning is quite effective.
One last thing you need to understand here is the fact that there are some serious scientific studies that prove that the first two hours in the morning are the most productive ones. Therefore, we can’t stress enough just how important an efficient morning routine is.
3. Focus on your core tasks
Sometimes, you’ll feel the need to micromanage everything, however, this is A) inefficient and B) a massive loss of your time, effort and resources. As an entrepreneur and an administrator, you’ll have people around you. Feel free to delegate some of these tasks to those whom you believe can complete them with the greatest effect.
Also, bear in mind that when it comes to specialized tasks, you might find outsourcing to be the best option. For instance, instead of doing your taxes on your own, you can hire experts, like veteran accountants behind Pherrus to help you out. The quickest way for you to get respect is to be good at what you do. There’s no simpler way of achieving this than just focusing on what you do best while outsourcing and delegating all the rest.
4. Don’t be afraid of failure
The next thing that you need to hear is the fact that you shouldn’t be afraid of failure. This is something that happens all the time. In fact, this is the exact same reason why so many traders set a stop-loss at 1-2 percent and a stop gain at 5-6 percent. This allows them to make a profit with as little as 25-30 percent of successful trades. Moreover, even the titans of industry like Henry Ford and Walt Disney went bankrupt at one point in their career. In other words, failure is never fatal. It’s nothing that you can’t recover from.
5. Learn how to accept critique
Finally, in order to succeed in the business world, you need to have a fresh supply of self-confidence, which usually pumps up your ego quite a bit. All of this is more than acceptable, however, sometimes this ego will prevent you from accepting constructive criticism. Most commonly, any kind of criticism will be subconsciously interpreted as hostile, seeing as how it will flesh out your own insecurities and doubts. Don’t accept this to be the case. Every time someone speaks up, thank them and reflect on what they’ve said. This way you’ll grow and learn as an entrepreneur.
Conclusion
As you can see, the above-listed tips are more lifestyle-related. They’re the means to allow you to maintain your balance and composure in the business world. Moreover, these habits are there to help you endure in the long run, which is definitely something you’ll need if you aim for success.
