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Top 10 Rules for Women in Business
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What makes women successful in business? What can we learn from the high profile success stories that are out there? I have tried to codify the lessons learned by women like Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon Products, Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson Publishing, and Meg Whitman, former President & CEO of eBay, the advice of high-profile female entrepreneurs like Barbara Corcoran, Bobbi Brown, and Muriel Siebert, along with my own experience gleaned from 20 years of coaching female talent.

Rule #1: Trust Your Instincts

“Women often don't trust their instincts—and spend way too much time trying to provide endless analysis for why,” says Geraldine Laybourne, creator of the Oxygen network. “A good idea takes fewer pages.”

One of our best assets as women business leaders is our instinct. Listen to your gut. You don’t need to present 100 pages of analysis, charts and graphs to explain why you know it is “the right thing” to do. The masculine way of working often belittles or de-values decisions made based on intuition. But what the business world calls “intuition” or “gut instinct” is really simply a way of describing how a feminine mind works. Whether your conscious mind is aware of it or not, we are constantly seeing things, analyzing, interpreting data.

Women, in particular, are adept at integrating all the data perceived by our subconscious mind, processing it quickly and often times non-linearly and spotting the trends, relationships and connections. A woman is good at putting her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Leverage this ability!

Rule #2: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway!

 Ina Garten, "The Barefoot Contessa," offers her best advice to women. “Be willing to jump off the cliff and figure out how to fly on the way down.” I was once told by a mentor that if I didn’t feel in over my head when I started a new job, I hadn’t made the right career move.

Men and women have inherited some evolved traits. In prehistoric days, the men that were risk-takers (those that lived) would have brought home more food and defended their families better. Women were expected to “play it safe” by staying close to home and watching over the children. Over time, we have evolved. The world currently demands that both sexes display "feminine" and "masculine” behaviors.

Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, “Normal fear protects us; abnormal fear paralyses us.” The best advice I can give women in business is to learn how to manage their self-talk so it doesn’t paralyze them and keep them from taking calculated risks. Self-talk is that ongoing, internal dialogue that either supports or sabotages. Leading behavioral researchers have stated that up to 77 percent of everything we think is negative. Women, in particular, need to reprogram the voice so it realistically supports them and allows them to choose to take action even in the face of fear.