As a female entrepreneur, you’ve probably learned a lot in 2020 that you plan on growing in the New Year. This year has been a crazy one for everybody. Small and big corporations, entrepreneurs came to phase the biggest challenge, how to survive and keep their businesses alive in a pandemic chaos. Unfortunately, the pandemic situation has not come to an end yet, but let’s be positive and see the New Year from a different perspective.

It’s always good to be aware of the lessons we have phased and turn them into our resolutions. These might include a set of purposes that will inspire other women going into the business or personal goals to reach a higher level of self-peace in 2021. In any case they are bound to hold you accountable and to serve as a blueprint as you work towards finding your success and helping others find theirs.

With the New Year coming up soon we encourage you to challenge the status quo. Go outside your comfort zone. Speak up and don’t be afraid. Be the change you want to see in the world. The change you have been waiting to see. Following what you believe will lead to unexpected opportunities with significant impact on yourself and for your business

We have listed a few New Year’s Resolutions that will help you kick off 2021 with success and determination:

1. Be Authentic. If you have ever experienced a situation where you felt like a ‘try-hand’, then you know this is a prominent resolution. Next year, try and be true to yourself. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not in order to fit in with a certain crowd and don’t hide your talents in fear of intimidating others. Remember to embrace all that encompasses being a female entrepreneur. If you feel that a feminine touch needs to be added then do it without any hesitation! This is what makes you unique and ultimately, stand our in a saturated business.
2. Value Your Potential.  Whatever negative thoughts you have in 2020 you need to leave them behind. The new year will be your year to outshine the shadows you’ve been lucking in. Understand that throughout all the internal and external doubts you pushed through and triumphed some of your biggest fears. Practice self love and appreciation in the new year. You are a certified lady boss and no one can take that from you.
3. Learn Something New. Don’t become comfortable with the things you already know or getting too used to the flow of things as they are. This is one of the factors that it’s holding you back or stops you from growing personally and within your business. Everyday you need to find ways of improvement, ways of learning new things. Push yourself to constantly learn new things. Whether you’re finally going to learn a new language or taking a cake decorating class, find something that pushes you to grow and expand and take it on.
4. Set Long Term and Short Term Goals. The first half of this is wat we all do but how often do you set goals and be consistent with achieving them? Make a plan of your goals every day, a timeline to show you the progress of achieving your goals. Set realistic objectives and goals but ones that make you push yourself. Remember to celebrate your victories because you deserve to be proud of yourself.
5. Support Other Women. Everyday you have the option of choosing who you work and collaborate within every business decision that you make. Among those options are the choice of female -owned businesses. Think of how this collaboration might help your services across audiences, but you learn and grow from each other.
6. Remember Why You Started. If there are any resolutions you take away from this, it’s this one. Anytime you feel overwhelmed or as if it might not be worth it, remember why you did it. Reignite that passion, the enthusiasm you had from the start and keep going. Being an entrepreneur is a tough, but rewarding career path. It can be time consuming and overwhelming, but at the end of the day it’s living your dream. Never forget that! Embrace it!

As the new year is approaching soon, it is time to make a fresh start to you and your business great. Remember our resolutions and create some of your own. You are on the right tract of success, just stay focused, humble and determined.

Biz in Heels is here to support and guide you through the whole process of becoming a successful entrepreneur and a successful business woman.

When we face challenging and busy times at work, eating well, exercising in a way that we love and looking after our emotional wellbeing are even more important. But we also need to attend to the health of the soul, the body and mind.

We live in a world that is speeding up at exponential proportions. Whirling and swirling, racing on the hamster wheel, and continual multi-tasking are not the state human beings were meant to be in. On many levels our hormones respond to this lifestyle by continually being in an over-stimulated state, creating many levels of imbalances and toxicity in our lives. Connecting with what truly matters to us is very difficult, if not impossible, when living your life this way.

Wellbeing for body and mind are always the focus, and rightly so, but don’t neglect the soul, especially in a busy working environment – Chryso Iasonos

 

The word soul can refer to the spiritual part of us, but also to the emotional or intellectual energy and intensity behind our daily creations or our life’s work.  Whatever our lifestyle and beliefs, our soul can be looked at as our energetic driver; the essence deep inside us that we can use to weigh what’s right for us at any moment.

To feed our soul during a busy schedule, we can try to take heart and find a place beyond fear and panic; to practice gratitude instead of succumbing to worry, look for joy in the small things, use any newfound time to rest and renew and look after one another.

Biz in Heels lists below 10 tips for keeping your body, mind and soul nourished when life is busy

1. Meditate for 20mins at 5:30am every morning. What does that mean to me? You sit up, you close your eyes and you become aware of every breath. Meditation is proven to enhance your wellbeing. It increases mental focus and clarity, enhances positivity and joy, promotes mindfulness, and reduces inflammation.
2. No phone use between 9pm – 8am. This has taken time to become a habit but it impacts on my focus, productivity and concentration during the day.
3. Adhere to the “ 1 minute rule”: Any task that takes less than 1 minute to do, do it straight away. No waiting! For example: Put the washing in the machine, put the recycling in the bin, wash up a plate, file some papers…All those little tasks left unattended until the end of the day accumulate and take much longer to complete. So if it takes less than 1 minute I do it as soon as it needs to be done, rather than spend ½ hour at the end of my day doing mundane tasks.
4. Read 10 pages of a book everyday. A short daily commitment to reading enhances your retention, interest, and increases the number of books you can read in a year. Why bother? Reading is mentally stimulating, increases knowledge, reduces stress, improves memory and concentration, and it’s better than trashy TV!
5. Schedule and prioritise time. Every Sunday look at what you need to do for the week ahead and schedule it in. Every night write a list of your top 6 things to be done the following day. You don’t go to the next task until the one above it is crossed off. If something doesn’t get done, it goes to the top of the list for the next day. Simple!
6. Write a list of the things that you love that nourish your body and schedule them in. For example: Day spa, lunch date with friends, attending the Rest & Reset Retreat, go for a bush walk.
7. Keep active – yoga, riding, walking, HIIT, lifting weights, tai chi…whatever your body loves, do it 3-4 times a week. Your body and brain will love you for it.
8. Book a holiday months in advance – It gives you something to look forward to it and enhances your ability to save.
9. Create a vision board and set your intentions for all the goodness you want in your life. Then set achievable, measurable SMART goals and work towards the things that bring you joy. Scheduling time to work on these is important.
10. Sleep, hydrate and nourish your body well. 8 hours sleep per night, drink 2-3L water per day, and eat wholesome foods that limit refined sugars and processed foods.

For all of you who are career go getters, have you ever considered what makes you valuable in the workplace? What skill set is necessary to progress in the fast growing business world? What about the skills we weren’t taught in a traditional classroom setting?

Throughout our academic years, we learn a lot and we gain a lot from being inside the classroom, the skills you are taught during school are totally different from the skills gained outside of it.

I’m sure by now you have heard the phrase what ‘soft skills’ and ‘interpersonal skills’ you have to offer to my company right? These skills are heavily sought after by employers these days. This kind of skills you don’t developed them during your academic years, but through the experiences and opportunities outside the classroom.

The main most valuable soft skills you  will gain throughout the years not sitting in a classroom are listed below.

• Managing conflict and collaboration

In any position, you will come across working with people in a productive yet collaborative manner and manage conflict with others. This is an invaluable asset.

In any position you will come across different opinion, attitudes and conflicts that you will have to face them, manage them and resolve them. As you progress in your business career you will see different roles of being a supportive member, an executive, a leader. These kind of roles you get to work with everyone in the team in order to provide the best experience and service to the client. You will have to collaborate and manage conflict within the team, communicate with client and manage conflicts. Working with others to achieve a common goal is a productive collaboration. Being part of a team you will come across different conflicts, managing these conflicts, and have a fruitful collaboration with the rest of the team,  have patience, open mindedness and adaptability are always the key.

• Networking

In a fast pace business world, where everybody is busy with their career progress,  networking is very important to nurture relationships and creating meaningful connections with people professionally.

This is a skill you don’t develop in a classroom and its sure thing it won’t take you to places if you don’t learn this. I know it’s sounds terrifying starting conversation with people you don’t know, branding and market yourselves, but pushing yourself out of your comfort zone to become more familiar with the unfamiliar is a great benefit and skill for your career. Practice makes perfect, practicing this, getting yourselves out there, it will become more physically nature.

• Creativity

Have you ever felt  that you are not creative enough? That your ideas are not creative? This can happen to anyone, the positive out of this is that creativity lies within everyone, it just be in hiding. There are always ways that we can find our inner creativity.

A lot of our creativeness comes during our free time, when you are not to focus on other things, when your mind is calm. Take advantage of your free time, spent your energy on reading books that can trigger your creativeness, write, watch TED talks and most importantly teach yourself new skills.

Find something that inspires you and makes you happy. Give yourself the freedom and space to allow it. Surround yourself with things and people that inspire you and you give yourself permission to consider the thoughts you usually push away as unimportant. Set your self free from limitations, this way you will find your creativity.

• Leadership

When you are assigned to lead a group of people, don’t get scared, take this opportunity and make it a strength of yours. Leading a team, consider each member’s strengths, weaknesses and interests so you can delegate the tasks accordingly. Gaining leadership skills will open new doors for your career development, run for leadership positions in an organization you are in or ask your manager for more responsibilities where you will be leading. Try and find opportunities to develop and grow your leadership skills, either by being part of a non profit organization or working on your own project, learn to delegate and manage a team.

• Project Management

Most companies talk about time management, but I don’t think project management gets enough attention. Project management has been defined in multiple ways, but to me, it encompasses the acts of organizing, managing, monitoring a project with a certain goal in mind, and typically also includes managing a team. This is a skill that requires a detail-oriented eye to check for quality and an understanding of time and budget constraints while also being able to see the big picture.

I doubt if we ever learned this type of skill during our academic years, and if we did it might have been very little. For example, I learned from taking on opportunities where I got  to take the lead on projects and had to implement the tactics that make up project management such as creating my own website, creating content and PR plans for clients, or my projects making videos. These experiences have taught me how to boost team morale, best use our skills, and how to communicate with clients to meet their wants and needs, as well as providing them work on schedule.

If you don’t have much project management experience yet, or your company doesn’t provide you the opportunity to be part of a project management, you could start small by running your own projects. See how much time and money you could save in a project for work or on a personal project and figure out the best way to achieve efficiency and quality.

• Public Speaking

Have you ever been into that situation where you had to do a public speaking? Have you felt your legs shaking, losing your words, sweating?

Public speaking is a skill that requires lots of practice and exposure, and something I found to be incredibly helpful is recording a video of yourself presenting something, and then critiquing it. You could set up your phone and give a little presentation by yourself, or if you have a friend or family member do it. Doing this is a way to improve your presentation style. Its amazing how many filler words we humans use when we are nervous and not paying attention to it. Every presentation is a story, and every story requires a beginning, middle and end to help guide the audience. With public speaking, practice is key and its never too late to learn it.

• Communication skills

Last but not least communication skills, is another valuable asset that is not teachable during the academic years, not in such a depth at least. Communication is a skill that can always be improved. If you are a shy and nervous person, remember that people love talking about themselves. If you don’t know what to say, then ask them about themselves. The simplest act can go such a long way.

Another skill I think people don’t practice enough in conversation is active listening. Have you ever found yourself in conversations half listening to someone? Rather than listening to respond, you should listen to understand, while paying attention to others body languages as well. By understanding the conversation your responses will likely be much more thoughtful and this will really help in communicating with others.

The above is some of the soft and interpersonal skills that you will not be taught in a classroom. These are the skills that an employer will ask you in an interview, in an evaluation. Practice your soft skills and get ready to nail every assignment that comes in your way.