5 Pieces of Advice for Aspiring Female Business Leaders Looking to Make Their Mark (Part 2)

In my last blog, I share the first two pieces of advice for aspiring female business leaders looking to make their mark. Four of these pieces of advice came from the women in my Dynamic Women Global Community while the last one is from me. 

Let’s continue! 

Advice #3

“Look for ways for others to shine in your light. At the core of success is fostering long-lasting connections, be a known collaborator and build strong community!” - Jeanette

In my Dynamic You Program, in order to unleash yourself as a dynamic woman, there are nine pillars and Jeanette actually pulls out three of them: Shine, Collaborate, and Connect. Let's look at each piece. ​

She says, “Look for ways for others to shine in your light.” That means that you yourself are shining and others can glow because of you. I speak of this shining piece as if you're the lighthouse. You're the beacon. You’re calling people in and when they see you're shining, they want to be in your presence because you're positive, uplifting, and energetic. 

I'm sure you know when you're in those moments with people. When you shine, and then you look for ways to help others to shine, to bring out the best in them and empower others. That is a great way of building group around you of great connections, where when you go up, they go up and vice versa. It's just amazing. 

It's like being on a sports team, and you support another player to do well. Rather than always taking the ball in soccer and shooting yourself, you pass to someone else. Your ability to make the pass and have them score helps them to shine. Doing this in life and business means they're going to win alongside you. They’ll be grateful you gave them a good pass. It's the same in business. If you want to make your mark, it's not just about making your mark by yourself. It's bringing a group with you. 

That comes into that next piece around long-lasting connections. At the core of success is fostering long-lasting connections. There are so many ways to connect and have connections with others, but at the heart of it, it's around vulnerability, authenticity, and being in alignment with your values and your core competencies. Then you're going to build these strong connections with people because you're being real, and hopefully, they're being real. 

The last one is collaborating. In the Dynamic You Program, we talk about 16 different ways to collaborate. You may wonder, “How do you even have 16?” If you have the book, great, you're going to be able to look it up. Working together with others on projects, or cross promotion are a couple examples.

Advice #4

“Think outside the box, ensure your creative path works with your personality, principles & goals, seek advice for your weak areas (know your weak areas), and, if something doesn’t work, try a different approach.”  - Susan 

I love that and let me unpack each piece here. 

Think outside the box. There are so many people that just repeat what others have said, or worse, all their ideas are coming from ChatGPT. It's a great research tool, but if you want to think outside the box, you’ve got to come up with something unique. When Susan says, “Try a different approach”, that's also perspective work. That's the R in SMARTER. We evaluate, and then we redo it, or we reset. It can be like, “Okay, this isn't working, no problem. Let's go and try this way.” 

One thing that I want to speak on next is she says, “Ensure your creative path works with your personality principles and goals.” That's coming back into the connection piece around being authentic to yourself and your personality principles and goals. If you can continue to be in that way, you'll be in alignment, and you'll have energy. You don't want dissonance. You want resonance. You're going to make your mark because you're going to be so passionate about what you're doing, and people are going to feel that oozing out of you positively. 

The last piece is to seek advice for your weak areas and of course, first, you need to know your weak areas. Something that I do to know my weak areas is called the 360 Feedback Survey. I have a bunch of questions that I send out to people I trust. It might be people I know really well, might be people I don't know as well, but I still trust their opinion. 

It can give you an idea of:

• Where you are strong
• Where you are weak
• What people are coming to you for
• And so much more!

I always have a question in there around the weaknesses so they can point things out to me. What I found in doing this for myself and for my clients is, there's such a cool opportunity here to learn new things about yourself. 

When I did this earlier on in business and I had some people from Toastmasters and soccer even fill this in because I didn't have a big business network. The response I got was, “Oh Diane, you have presence when you walk in a room”. I was like, “Oh, really? That's kind of cool.” 
I wonder:

• Is that confidence? 
• Is that just me and my posture and walking strong? 
• Is it my energy? 

What is it? I got to really dive into that, and it was actually part of what brought about the nine pillars of being a Dynamic Woman. This 360 Feedback Survey is something you send out to maybe 10-15 people. I like to have someone else do it on my behalf, so I do that for clients as well because then I can then filter it for them and give them the insight. Then you can use that for branding, marketing, and for product and service generation, which is really cool. 

Advice #5

“Say ‘Yes’ before you feel ready and then act.” - Diane Rolston

Now, I've had opportunities in my career where I haven't done a corporate keynote, but said, “Yes, I'll do it.” I haven't been knowledgeable about affiliates or even before I did the podcast, I said “Yes”, and then I acted and figured it out after. 

• You might be invited to be on a board. 
• You might be invited to speak or be interviewed. 
• You might be invited into a book like our Trailblazer Secrets book.

When an opportunity comes, say “Yes”. Put up your hand, as long as it is in alignment with your goals, where you want to be, who you are, your principles and all that. Just say “Yes” because those opportunities might not come again. This can be God's way of pushing you in the right direction. 

I've had opportunities that I've said no to, and I reflected and thought, “Man, like, why didn't I say Yes”, and the thing was, at the time, maybe I didn't feel ready, and I didn't have the right mindset. But I know that if I have it in alignment with my goals, if I have the right people around me, the right coaches around me, if I can collaborate with other people, and I can try a different approach if it doesn't work right away, kind of the things that Kathy, Paula, Jeanette, and Susan said, I know I'm good. 

A lot of people have asked me, “Diane how have you had success?” A lot of times it's implementation. I just implement as fast as I possibly can. In the beginning, it was always me doing it, and when I realized that I just can't stay balanced by me doing it all, and I really should be leveraging the skills and the passion of others who are better at other things than I am, and I started to have an assistant in Canada here. 

Then over the years, other assistants, and then now for the past two and a half years, Kristine and Karissa from the Philippines. It's so much easier for me to say “Yes” because I don't think about how am I going to do it. I've got people I know can support me. If you want to talk about the VA stuff, shoot me a message at [email protected]. I’m happy to talk about how that can work because I do have a team now of 15+ virtual assistants who can support you. 

Wrapping Up

Which of these five pieces of advice are you most excited about? Which of the pieces do you know already but are not actually doing it? I encourage you to just take one little piece of this blog or the last one, save it, re-read it, whatever you need to do so that once you've successfully put that one piece into play, you can pull in another piece. I say there are only five pieces of advice, but each one actually has multiple pieces of advice. A piece of advice is only worth something when you actually put it into play for yourself. Once you do, let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about it!

Read my other blogs:

1. Choose & Action Happiness
2. How to be Unapologetically Yourself
3. The Benefits of Having a Lead Magnet