Tag: leadership

Fear has prevented me from living true to myself and from taking prudent risks. But fear is a broad catchall for other negative emotions. Fear is based on future outcomes that, in most cases, do not occur. We tend to separate emotions of anger, hate, jealousy, betrayal, resentment, sadness, hurt, and discontent from fear. Yet, all are tentacles of the same root cause: fear.

You’ve had it! You’re tired of your wishes always coming last. You’re fed up with bending over backwards to please your spouse when it seems you never get equal treatment in return. You declare to the heavens, "That's it, no more Mrs. Nice Gal for me! I'm not letting my spouse walk all over me anymore!" and off you go, riding roughshod over your mate’s desires, and chopping his head off whenever you’re displeased, until your mate is either cowering, fleeing or resenting the heck out of you.

When previous colleagues or interested clients ask me why I wrote a book on self-awareness in love instead of leadership development (my chosen profession), my "old brain" automatic reaction is to cringe internally, logically defend externally, and deflate spiritually. In conscious response, I reply that I wrote it in order to raise more attention to matters of the heart.

Somehow, even though organizations can talk a lot about love or give family-work balance lip service, many of us feel exposed if we reveal our truths about how we let work interfere with our personal relationships, or how we let our home life take priority over our professional functioning.

Sleep. All business leaders need it, most crave it, but throngs don’t get the kind of restorative and rehabilitative sleep required to optimize mental clarity, focus, ideation, awareness, productivity and overall job performance. The result is egregious opportunity loss relative to realizing one’s full leadership potential. In addition to the CDC declaring "insufficient sleep an "important public health concern," a RAND Corporation study sheds more ominous light on the issue, finding that business losses in the U.S. resulting from deficient sleep reaches a staggering $411 billion (2.28 percent of its GDP)—the highest economic loss incidence of the countries studied.

As women have taken on greater leadership roles in the business world, it’s paid off for both them and business.

A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that firms with women in the C-suite were more profitable. Meanwhile, the number of women-owned businesses grew 45 percent from 2007 to 2016 compared to just a 9 percent growth in the number of businesses overall.

Statistics show there has never been a better time to be a woman. As of 2014, there were almost 9.1 million female-owned businesses in the United States, generating more than $1.4 trillion (yes, with a “T”) in revenue. The percentage of women who are household breadwinners is rising. Young American women are 33 percent more likely than their male peers to have earned a college degree by age 27. And around the world, women hold several of the highest offices in the land.