Brand Voice Development for Values-Based Business

What does 21st century female leadership look like?

I was recently interviewed by a college woman who used to shop at my now-closed boutique {and has followed my blog since — thanks!} for a paper she’s writing on women and leadership. Her questions stirred in me long-dormant thoughts about feminism and what it really feels like to do my Entrepreneurial Thing in the U.S. as a female today. So much so that I wanted to share an excerpt of the interview with you here.

Thanks to M for allowing me the opportunity to share my point of view with her. :)

What leadership characteristics are required in your position?

My position as a self-employed writer and coach for entrepreneurs requires me to have the following leadership characteristics: a big idea that I believe is worth sharing, the courage of my convictions, a strong and clear voice, the ability to create a compelling platform that other people want to follow, the ability to help others see beyond their self-imposed limitations, terrific question-asking abilities, the ability to persuade others and an understanding of when to use those skills, and a great deal of trust in my intuition.

What type of power do you have in your position?

I have the power to influence other creative entrepreneurs, especially other female ones. I have the power to share my vision with those who are interested. I have the power to interpret information and communicate meaning. I have the power of a vehicle {my website} to disseminate my ideas out into the world. I have the power to create my own work, my own schedule, and customize my work life to my preferences.

How do you cope with stress?

Right now, not as effectively as I’d like! This is an area in which I’m still growing and coaching myself. I know that regular exercise works for me. So does taking enforced time off, unplugged from my BlackBerry. As a self-employed person, I can work 24/7 if I let myself. I get burned out if I drive myself too hard for too long. I aim to take one good vacation every year and that’s the only time I completely unplug — no blogging, no email, no Twitter, no Facebook. We easily forget what it’s like to live in a world without so much connection, and it’s important to remind our essential human selves of that! What a novelty.

Have you encountered any type of discrimination or stereotyping in your position? And if so, could you give an example?

I have encountered mild to moderate discrimination and stereotyping since entering the work force {as I suspect most women have}, but never more so than when I owned my first business, a boutique. Most notably, the stereotyping came from middle aged or older male business owners and/or middle aged or older male employees of companies with whom I was doing business.

Many times, I experienced being talked down to, scolded or chided, being hit on, feeling as if my thoughts were being “humored” rather than being taken seriously, being patronized to, being sold to on the level of “fun” and “emotions” rather than on the basis of a good business opportunity, and being told that the expectations for women were different {and less than expectations for males}.

I once hired a service provider who was a chauvinist and would characterize women in business, and his observations of them, extremely negatively along these lines: women are only “playing” business, women can’t manage money, women don’t understand the financial consequences of their actions and need their husbands, fathers, or accountants to get them out of trouble. Needless to say, I no longer do business with this individual!

Note: 95% of my interactions with men in business have been positive and free of any perceived discrimination or gender stereotyping. It’s the 5% of interactions that have been weird that cause me to think, wow, some people’s thinking needs to fast forward about 50 years into the present!

What suggestions do you have for women who are interested in leaderships roles or positions?

The rules of engagement in our world are being rewritten daily, but the majority of the world’s population still doesn’t value and accept the contributions that women can make as readily as they might value and accept a man’s. As a female leader, you are putting yourself on the cutting edge of enterprise, government, and education — yes, even today in 2011! This was a big realization for me, having come of age at a time {much like today} when girls were raised being expected to excel and to be able to attain anything that a man could. I was pretty surprised to see that although parents and schools are teaching children these things, this acceptance of a woman’s worth and her limitless ability to achieve and create change still hasn’t permeated all aspects of our society!

Nevertheless, women who want to be leaders should carry on as if these limitations don’t exist. And soon enough, they won’t! We in free nations are in a special position to inspire and influence women in other parts of the world whose homelands don’t share our freedoms yet.

What do you like best and least about your job? What’s a typical day of work like for you?

What I like best: being able to create my own work in the world, set my own hours, set my own rates, be choosy about which clients I take on, and as a self-employed person, I have limitless earning potential because I’m not capped by what a company says my skills are worth.

What I like least: not being able to fully turn the work off at the end of the day and “step away” from my business. My brain is almost always dreaming up new ideas, planning for the future, and focused on the next item on my To Do list.

Typical day right now: Wake up early and tend to personal stuff; ready to go by mid-morning; respond to client and prospect communications, catch up on blog reading; go to a coffee shop for three or four hours of client work, interspersed with social media marketing/networking time; to the gym; home to make dinner; another two or three hours of client work; an hour of professional development; hit the sack and fall asleep watching TV.

Can a woman truly “have it all” {career, family, etc.} as they say? Or do you find it difficult to balance everything in your life?

No one can have it all, male or female, in the way that “have it all” is typically talked about, without much trial and error along the way. {And the trials can really suck!} Just about no one can successfully balance a rich family life or even just a rich relationship, make six figures or more, have a gorgeous home, be fantastically fit and healthy, have a great circle of friends, travel regularly, retire early, etc., without considerable sacrifices and shake-ups along the way.

You can have more than you think, but there will be trade-offs. You can’t do it alone. Having a circle of support, even a small one, is key.

Letting go of the expectation that everything in one’s life will rock all at the same time, in perfect concert, helps! Life always comes down to choices. If you choose to pursue one area {such as a challenging career, renovating a home, or traveling extensively} full-throttle, expect to make sacrifices in other areas of your life for a while. Some stuff is going to suck for a while.

For me, it’s all about finding the ideal equilibrium, where I have enough of what I need right now in all areas, but knowing that there is no such thing as a “dream life” where everything is perfect 24/7. That’s just not how life works for anybody, despite what’s portrayed in the media or what well-constructed images your personal hero/ines are peddling!

As a female do you notice that you deal with change differently than any male colleagues? Do your emotions ever play a role in how your work gets accomplished?

I can’t say that I’ve noticed any differences between how I handle change from how my male colleagues do. I will say that I, as an individual, LOVE change and welcome it! On the This Is Me page of my website, I write, “I like to think of change — even change forced upon us — as opportunities for reinvention and life optimization.” I see change as an opportunity to evolve and get better, not just to catch up and find your status quo again.

My emotions definitely play a role in how my work gets accomplished. If I’m having a dark, down, or particularly emotional day, I don’t push myself to do deep creative work for clients. {It might be a disservice to them, and I want to serve them at my best!} I may use days like that for administrative work that doesn’t require an emotional or spiritual investment from me. I also use my emotions in a positive way, to fuel the writing I do on my blog or for client projects.

Do you feel as though you get to be yourself in all of your roles in life or do you have have multiple sides depending on the role you are in?

What a great question. What you’re asking about is exactly the personal mission I’ve been on since I entered the professional workforce after graduate school in 2002.

I want my work in the world to be a holistic reflection of me and my gifts and talents. I’m always trying to hone my work and my service offerings so that they’re a more full and apt reflection of all I’ve got to share with the world.

At the same time, I have to remember in my personal relationships to turn Business Abby off. I’m sure there’s a limit to how much my lifelong friends want to hear about the latest and greatest incarnation of my business. :)

What are your thoughts on the questions I was asked? Let’s talk about your experiences with regards to being a female leader in the 21st century, or working with female leaders.

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Photo by Miss_Katrina_Beers courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

If you’re anything like me, you have trouble sometimes identifying what your Next Great Move should be.

You might have a strong feeling of what you want in your entrepreneurial life, but you struggle with which act will be your highest leverage one {and yes — you even think in buzzphrases like “highest leverage”}.

You know that feelings generate action and action leads to feelings, but you’re not sure which one should take the lead. {It’s the old chicken-or-the-egg debate.}

Maybe, like me, you worry about losing interest in your anticipated project before it’s even off the ground.

And the thought of losing interest in the thing you really want, the thing you feel you were born to do {mm-hmm, that thing}, is so sad you can hardly stand to dwell on it.

Because you know you want this thing, but even that doesn’t guarantee you’ll do what you have to do to get it. You know yourself: there might be something even more dazzly — even more well-authorized and vouched for and propagated and recommended — that pops up in your peripheral vision before you’ve taken the second step into your first vision, and you might decide you’d rather pursue the new thing.

Like you, my entrepreneurial passion regularly wanes in the shadow of all of these concerns. There are days — weeks — when I covet the easier, more structured lifestyle of my friends who are not self-employed, receive regular paychecks, benefits, and vacation days. My friends who, yes, have to make decisions at work, but the great majority of those decisions don’t directly and immediately impact when is the next time they’ll get paid. Their minds don’t necessarily spin at night with ideas for how they can next use their creative talents in the world.

I’ve just had to face it: I’m not naturally a Point A leads to Point B person. My routes to fulfillment have always been circuitous, intuitively fueled, and perhaps to onlookers, a bit devil-may-care. My crescendos of success certainly haven’t always come through steady plotting, but rather, through what I think of as “intuitive lunging.”

And, you know, ask any trainer: lunges hurt like hell when you’re doing them right.

I count myself lucky to be someone who’s able to identify very readily and easily what I want and how I want to feel.

It’s all the other stuff that gets in the way: the systems, the order of things, the ranking of leverage-ness.

This past week, I had my first coaching session with Sinclair of Self Activator. {She was coaching me, just so we’re clear.} During just our first session, she led me through a visualization process that helped me integrate my vision of what I want with the tools to apprehend how I’m going to get there.

And what I saw, felt, and knew at the end of that session was so beautifully, clearly obvious to me. The vision was whole and complete, colorful and tangible. It was me — who I know myself to be, even though the world hasn’t seen it yet.

The most important thing I took away from our hour together was this:

I’ll get where I want to go when I start living the life of the person I know myself to be…immediately, with the very next action I take.

Today, what I’d like to tell you is this:

You know who you are. You know who you see yourself to be in the future. You know.

You don’t need peer or mentor validation, social proof, a highly trafficked blog, a big commission, a completed manuscript in your desk drawer, or five figures in your bank account to tell you who you are. Or who you are becoming.

It doesn’t matter who else observes it, touts it, or approves of who you are and who you are becoming.

You know. And that’s the only thing that matters in helping you bring Future You a little closer into the Now.

I shared this thought in a Tweet yesterday,

Sooooooo, what does that mean? It means that there is no magic from outside of you, no Deus ex machina.

But there is magic from inside of you. There’s intuition. Hunches. Stuff you love. Stuff you’re wildly good at. Stuff you hate. Stuff that drains you. Places you revel in being. Places you can’t stand being. Dreams. Fantasies. Vision. God.

There’s evidence of Future You — the you you know yourself to be — right there within you. In fact, your brain is steeping in it.

This is the year to be who you know you are. Don’t wait. See it, trust it, and take the very first action. This very hour.

In the comments, I’d love for you to feel free to share who you know yourself to be, and who you’re going to let yourself be this year.

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As this year winds down, here are my 5 wishes for you and your creative biz in the New Year:

1. I wish you’d stop doing the stuff you’re only doing to make other people happy. I’m not talking about stopping washing your dishes or picking up your dog’s droppings from the neighborhood green space. I’m talking about the goods, services, and features you offer in your biz that don’t thrill you, show you off in your best light, and make you feel like a smart, together, freakishly cool creative pro.

2. I wish you’d let your mind go way back as far as you can remember being alive and look for clues about your natural, inborn passions. What did you love doing as a child? What were your dreams and your fantasies? How can you take the oeuvre — the essence — of those and work them into your business concept or model? There’s a lot of entrepreneurial richness there in your past just waiting to be recognized.

3. I wish you’d hone in. I almost said ‘I wish you’d simplify,’ but that’s not necessarily the answer for every business concept or every creative solopreneur. {Maximalism, anyone?} But I do wish you’d hone in. Don’t think about the whole rainbow of things you could do, say, write about, teach, create for, etc. Focus on the one stripe of the rainbow that makes you mad with passion and purpose.

4. I wish you’d get giddy about what’s working well for you a little more often. And when you see something working — a blog post getting tons of comments, a Facebook update with many likes, a product flying off the shelves — examine it, ask yourself why, and think of five ways to replicate the idea behind it without copying yourself. Or go ahead and copy yourself. Why not. It worked once! Let your successes teach you and change you.

5. I wish you’d stop looking at anyone but yourself, except as a mentor or a peer. In other words, get out of the competition paradigm. Just pretend like the idea of ‘competition’ doesn’t exist. {It won’t once you start doing this.} It doesn’t even matter how fiercely your peers regard you as competition. If you let go of that idea for yourself, it’s gone. Learn from others. Befriend others. Soak in others’ good stuff. But don’t threaten your own creativity by comparing it with someone else’s success.

It’s been a really good year. A bumpy ride of a year, but a good year in ways that matter. If you’re reading this post right now, you’re a part of that goodness for me and I want to say thanks for that. Thanks for supporting me and what I’m building at Abby Kerr Ink.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and I hope our paths will cross even more often in 2011!

P.S. Have you signed up for my free 10-part e-course in Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche? It’s a deep course — no surface-y stuff. Might be a great time of year to start propelling yourself further into your entrepreneurial dream. :)

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I might’ve unsubscribed from your blog recently. You might want to think about unsubscribing from mine, too. Here’s why.

First, some context about me {and maybe about you, too}:

• I’m a creative solopreneur {for the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you’re one, too}, one whose business is mostly online and is doing this because despite what the world would tell us, we believe we can do our Thing in this world our way and create a far deeper and greater impact than we could do any other way.

• We consume a lot of information every day/week in the form of blog posts, e-books, e-courses, videos, audios, podcasts, e-newsletters.

• We deeply respect and value the contributions of others and enjoy engaging with multiple points of view, so much so that sometimes others’ voices start to encroach on our own.

• We’re thinkers and highly creative people. We value original creation, inner knowing {also called intuition}, inspiration, and infusions of new sensitivity to our next direction. Our minds spin continuously around the pinwheel of all that is hot for our consideration.

And so, this can mean that our minds can get a bit overcrowded. Our vision can get blurry. Mish-mash-y. Not so brilliantly honed, especially when we don’t protect them from too much incoming. If you identified with most of the bullet points above, I know you know what I’m talking about.

This is where I am lately. I’m always seeking to make keener entrepreneurial moves and I’ve observed that too much input, as radically awesome as that input may be, is not helpful toward that end. In short, reading too much of other people’s stuff hampers the generation of my own. Can you relate?

I’ve decided that to counteract the blur and hum and white noise of so much information consumption, I’ve got to winnow down what I take in.

So I’ve started the wave of unsubscription from many blogs, some of them ones I’ve been reading for quite a while.

A lot of what I’m stopping reading is very good stuff. Stuff I know I could learn from. Stuff from people I adore, or at least like a lot.

I’m even tempted to unsubscribe from ProBlogger right now, except that, you know, it’s ProBlogger.

And yes, I’m mightily concerned that I’m going to miss great stuff from other people, and miss out on participating in some great conversations.

But I’m even more concerned that I’ll miss my own great message. And when all’s said and done, that’s what we entrepreneurial folk are in search of, right?

The point of this post is to say that blog unsubscriptions — whether it’s me who unsubscribed or someone else — is very often not about you at all.

It might not be your content. It might not be your personality.  It might not be that your brand jumped the shark. It might not even be that the reader is not your right person.

It might be, after all, just the timing. The reader may be fatigued. The reader may feel jaded. The reader may be personal or business crisis-ing and simply wish to stop all incoming. The reader may be earlobe-deep in a hot project of his own and just not interested in much else right now.

Don’t assume that an unsubscription means your stuff isn’t up to snuff.

Timing, sometimes, is everything.

So what did I keep incoming, you may be wondering? Here’s a short list of the characteristics that are feeding me right now, right where I’m at:

more personal discovery and creative development oriented than business strategy/tactic oriented; strong, compelling voice that I’m somewhat addicted to; blogger has personal, creative, and professional qualities that I aspire to develop in myself; unexpected post topics {not the usual “7 Ways To..” and “How To…” posts we see so many of — and yes, I’ve written some myself!}.

Have you ever been so up-to-your-earlobes-in-incoming that you’ve decided to winnow down? How did you decide which blogs to unsubscribe from and which to keep savoring? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

And by the way, thanks for reading this blog. I know just how precious your time and brain space is.

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