The Psychology of Successful Women with Shona Rowan
Thursday 7th of June saw the latest instalment of our Get Wiser Lunchtime Series with the wonderful Shona Rowan deliver a session on ‘The Psychology of Successful Women’.
As a peak performance coach and psychologist, Shona not only has a wealth of knowledge on this topic but loads of strategies we can all use to maximise our success.
Three questions were asked to open the discussion and immediately got our minds ticking; where am I now? what are my goals? and what do I need to get there?
In order to achieve our goals, we need to focus inwards on our mindset. It makes so much sense when you consider how much our emotion affects out behaviour, and how our behaviour is instrumental in our success.
So, what is the first step? We need to focus on how we feel and strengthen self-confidence. We all know about (and many have experienced) imposter syndrome. Fear of being found out for not really knowing what we’re doing. Unsurprisingly imposter syndrome is much more common for women in male dominated fields. Some of the valuable, and incredibly easy to apply tips Shona a gave us included;
- Focus on our strengths – we need to learn back ourselves.
- Celebrate our successes.
- Say yes to opportunities – feel the fear and do it anyway.
Once we’ve addressed our self-confidence, what do we do with it? This is all about promoting ourselves. Women are notoriously bad at self-promotion, believing our hard work should speak for itself, or not wanting to be seen as arrogant (tall poppy syndrome is never far away …). Research shows however, that being able to sell yourself is key to success and that men, seem to know instinctively that self-promotion and relationship building are vital to career progression. Selling ourselves is incredibly important in a competitive environment, but it’s important to do it genuinely and find a way that feels authentic to you. It is also important to adapt your approach to different audiences.
Finally Shona talked about the big one, networking. Building strong relationships with others is one of the most fundamental ingredients to your career success.
So, we all need to be aware of our mindset and how it impacts our behaviour and our results. With negativity in our emotion, we can’t help but feed this in to our behaviour, which ultimately impacts our success. Hard work is imperative, but so is self-confidence and celebrating and promoting our success.
