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Women Leaders: Finding Your Strong and Powerful Voice

Before we get started, let’s ask some questions.

When you speak, do people stop and take notice?
Do they listen to you?
Do you have the ability to command the attention of a room?

If your answer is yes, then you understand what it means to have an executive presence. If not, then it’s time to find your powerful voice.

Executive Presence

The Center for Talent Innovation, a non-profit organization in New York that specializes in research, completed a study on leadership. The study determined that the perception of being leadership material is an essential aspect of gaining a promotion to a leadership position.

According to the 268 senior executives that took part in the survey, having an executive presence accounts for 26% of what it truly takes to get that coveted promotion.

Executive presence was defined as the ability to project confidence, to be poised under pressure, and display your decisiveness and gravitas. Those were seen as the core characteristics of executive presence to 66% of the senior executives who were surveyed.

Communication and appearance can also contribute to the perception of executive presence. When it comes to communication, this includes assertiveness, speaking skills, and the ability to read a situation and an audience.

Women who can communicate with a strong and powerful voice exude a magnetism, an X factor, a wow factor, and have the ability to influence others easily.

People who have an executive presence speak up, using clear and strong language, learning to communicate with energy and passion. Part of this is using a tone of authority, as well as displaying positive body language.

The Struggle

We hear all the time that there is still a gap in the percentage of women vs. men in the boardroom. Women (and racial minorities) struggle to get into the upper echelons of companies, theoretically because the corporate culture has historically been the stronghold of white men. According to Forbes, 81% of women in business cite that feedback is confusing and contradictory, making it difficult to determine appropriate action.

Harvard Business Review found that many high-powered women who are extremely effective in their positions stumble when it comes to meetings and the boardroom. These women are admired by their colleagues, and inspirational, yet they struggle when it comes to meetings because they don’t consistently use their voices to assert their opinion.

They often become defensive when challenged, which leads to the failure to effectively communicate. They are hard working women who arrive on time and leave when the meeting is done – sometimes to go home to take care of their family, sometimes to go back to their desk to work on those time-sensitive work projects – while the men arrive early to network, and hang back to finish off chats. Part of finding your voice is using your voice to network and become more comfortable with the colleagues you work with.

Find Your Voice

You can learn to enhance your executive presence. A large part of that is finding your strong and powerful voice. If you are willing to deal with situations that are unpredictable that are typical of the leadership responsibilities at an executive level, and at your baseline you are self-confident, then you can learn new behaviors.

You should start by asking people you trust to provide you with honest feedback. Don’t ask people that will softball you – you want to hear the down and dirty. You want to know how others perceive your presentation skills, because how can you hone that without knowing where you’re going wrong?

Public speaking is an important part of any business job, and if you want to grow within a company you need to be able to communicate effectively and powerfully.

To find your strong and powerful voice you must identify your personal communication assets, such as speaking and thinking on your feet, listening, and maintaining composure under pressure.

Final Thoughts

Yes, I’m a woman in business. I retired from a great career where I managed people and carried great responsibility. Now I’m responsible for myself, and I’m always concerned about the message I send out and the ‘voice’ I use to spread the word. I mentored women (and men) throughout my career, and I’m doing it now in this fantastic business we call holistic healing.

If you’re afraid to find or use your voice, there’s probably some emotional baggage you’ve been carrying around with you from your past. When you get tired enough and are ready to let it go, we can explore just what it will take for your body to release it so you can feel confident in yourself and SPEAK UP.

You have a story. Don’t be afraid to use your strong and powerful voice to tell the world.

10 Tips to Focus on Success

Courage. Heart. Acumen. Accountability. All incredibly valuable traits, and all necessary for the success mindset.

Whether you want to experience serious changes or you’re looking to fine tune your reality, here are 10 tips to focus on success.

1.Redefine Accountability

Life, and business, will often place us into circumstances that are beyond our control. Your success doesn’t rest in the hands of others. It depends on you taking responsibility for your actions, your plan, and your follow-through. Yes, sometimes you have outside constraints, but in those situations YOU decide what is possible, and what is right for you. Take charge of your circumstances, whatever those may be. And don’t hold yourself to a standard that is impossible to meet. You shouldn’t feel that being true to your goals, and yourself, is impossible. If that feels true for you, it might be time to make some changes in your life. You are human. Cut yourself some slack.

Accountability is your gift to yourself. It is a mindset that you create and accept voluntarily – and it’s a way to help ensure your success.

2. Plan Your Success

You need to actually sit down regularly and work out the strategy you will require to achieve that success. Consider every detail, every step that will lead you to success.

Those plans may need to change from time to time, or be altered to adjust to current realities. Course correction is a necessary part of any journey, and being prepared by reviewing your project often can be a smart strategy to reach your goals.

With every dream, must come a plan. If you desire success, understand that it won’t just happen.

3. Believe in Your Success

If you don’t believe that you can attain success, how will you stay motivated?

Having giant dreams is tremendous, and your dream of success may seem as though it is beyond what you are capable of, but you must believe in the dream. Heart is key for true success.

4. Set Realistic Dreams

The goals of success and working towards a dream must be set in some basis of reality. Ask yourself, is the success truly achievable? Can it be done? This goes beyond believing, it goes to reality. If your dream is to prove that the sky is green and that grass is blue, how realistic is that?

Here’s an excellent example – A person without any education beyond high school has a dream that he can build a multi-million-dollar company. That’s a huge dream, but it’s believable – it’s happened before.

Now, here’s a terrible example – A 95-year-old man who suffers from arthritis and asthma decides to run a marathon tomorrow without his walker – and he hasn’t run in 25 years. That’s an immense dream, but also an impossible one!

5. Be Patient

Instant gratification is rarely an element of real success. Real success takes time, effort, and patience. When a seed is planted in the ground it needs water, sunlight, and the right environment to sprout, flourish, and bear fruit.

Yes, someone wins the lottery every day. But how many people bought a ticket? Winning is a slight possibility, but buying a ticket isn’t really a plan with a high chance of success.

6. Don’t Allow Circumstances to Control You

Life can throw all sorts of circumstances at us. We can sometimes fall victim to being left powerless, believing we don’t have the strength to change our reality without someone swooping in to fix things for us. Taking on the victim mindset leads to blaming the world for all our failures and our current circumstances. It can also lead to people living below their potential.

We look to others for help when we need a hand, but to let our circumstances define us – what we do, or who we are – is to willingly give away our own personal power. And then we are stuck living a life of weakness. Don’t fall into the trap. Take responsibility for your actions (and lack of action). It’s amazing what taking that first step can do for your self-esteem.

7. Ask for and Accept Feedback

Asking for the advice (and criticism) of others is a wonderful way to create and instill accountability. An important aspect of feedback is convincing people that you need honest feedback. Whether you’re asking your friend, significant other, mentor, or a colleague, give them the space to be honest in their opinion.

Anonymous feedback is better, because people are more inclined to be honest when they don’t have to worry about hurting your feelings. You’ll eventually learn what type of feedback is helpful and what you should disregard. No matter what you hear, process it non-judgmentally and decide how best to apply it.

8. Courage

Taking risks requires courage, and courage is needed to achieve success. Be brave, be bold, and reach for success as if your life depended on it.

9. Work for It

Those who achieve success work for it, and they work towards that success every single day. Are you working for your success? Do you focus on taking at least one single action every day no matter what?

You’re certainly not going to succeed by sitting on the couch watching Netflix, so the only way you’re going to succeed is by taking action. Now you have to decide what action to take next.

10. Perfect Your Decision Making Skills

The ability to make quality decisions is key to success. You are the master of your own life and your dreams, and the decisions you make move you toward your goals, successes, and dreams.

Spend some time regularly evaluating your decisions. Are they moving you toward your goal, or away? Maybe you need to make some new decisions. Set yourself up for success.