If you’ve ever felt undervalued in the workplace as a woman, you shouldn’t. Women are becoming more prominent in work environments and even have special skills that can help them succeed even in a male-dominated career. Recognizing the natural self-empowerment tools for women that women already possess can be very powerful.
Women have natural talents, but they may feel that those talents are not relevant to a place of business. This is incorrect. It’s true that women, just like men, still need to master technical and practical business skills to succeed, but when it comes to moving up the corporate ladder, they have unique skills that organizations value. By simply harnessing these skills, women can empower themselves to get anything and everything they want.
Let’s start with communication, a skill that is vital to success. Women are natural communicators. Have you ever noticed how a mother “just knows” how important it is to talk and interact with her children, using appropriate language and sentence structure that a child can understand? This same skill, slightly tweaked, works perfectly in a business setting. For example, a woman who is managing other people must know how to communicate with each person individually in a way that each person can understand.
Helen Fisher, author of The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, refers to this as a gift for language. Fisher describes the growing need for the ability to communicate with written and spoken words. To quote her, “When speaking, women have an advantage.” Fisher describes how the female gender, even at very young ages, “excelles in…verbal fluency: quickly finding appropriate words, phrases, or sentences.” Fisher writes, “Women are, on average, more eloquent in saying what they say.” Women who embrace this knowledge and rely on their natural linguistic talents in communication will find their confidence strengthened.
In terms of teaching or training, women also have an advantage. Parenting characteristics that come more easily to women make it possible for women to help children learn and develop. The right mix of encouragement, discipline, freedom, and boundaries will lead to a child whose confidence and abilities are very mature and continue to outperform other children. When this type of situation is applied to the business world, a woman can do the same for employees.
Again, Helen Fisher’s research, as presented in The First Sex, states: “Women, on average, are more interested in cooperation, harmony, and connections: a network of support.” She further writes, “Women characteristically believe that anyone can be successful in business; they adopt a win-win attitude in the office world.”
Many women are also skilled at multi-tasking or multi-focusing. Juggling people, reports, deadlines and all the necessary resources becomes critical to the success of team results.
Helen Fisher refers to the fact that human evolution, even from ancient times, shows that a woman had to raise helpless and dependent babies for a long time in highly dangerous conditions, which demonstrates the need to multitask even then. I love her description: “To raise helpless babies, ancestral mothers had to do many things at once. Watch for snakes. Listen for thunder. Know poison. Rock the sleepy. Distract the cranky. Instruct the curious. “Soothing the fearful. Inspiring the latecomers. Feeding the hungry. Mothers had countless daily chores to do as they stoked the fire, cooked food, and chatted with friends.”
Of course, not all women have parenting skills and not all women are the same, but all women have the ability to identify the skills they possess and use them for personal and professional empowerment. Women can be just as effective in business leadership as men. If you are interested in discovering what makes you a successful woman, why not make a list of all your personal attributes, those natural talents and empower yourself to reach new heights of success?