Every year, we honour leading female entrepreneurs in our Businesswomen’s Hall of Fame here at HerBusiness.
This year, we’ve found that there is one habit that each of these women encompass that has been vital to their success. That is the Confidence Habit.
The Confidence Habit highlights the relation between confidence and action. Because they are interrelated, it turns out that we are all creating Confidence Cycles.
In a Confidence Cycle, more confidence leads to action and action leads to confidence and so on. However, we can create downward Confidence Cycles when we experience a knockback or a failure and our belief in our ability to take action wanes.
But some of our 2015 Businesswomen’s Hall of Fame Members have a lot to say about how to handle knock backs and failure…
Kate Morris, CEO and founder of adorebeauty.com.au, knows better than many how daunting taking action can be.
As a 21-year-old starting her own dot-com business in 1999 when e-commerce was in its infancy, with no experience and no collateral, she had a daunting road ahead of her. Kate says…
“Being scared usually means you are pushing yourself outside your comfort zone and that’s always a good thing.”
And it was this philosophy that helped Kate build her Confidence Habit. As she continued to take action, she says she wasn’t put off by all the “no’s” she received… and, importantly, she wasn’t put off by failure either.
“Accept that failure is an essential part of the learning process, and particularly important if you are trying to innovate – if you’re not failing, you’re not trying anything new. Failure is only a bad thing if you beat yourself up about it, rather than taking the lessons from it.”
Louise Olsen has been at the creative helm of hand-made resin jewellery and homewares icon Dinosaur Designs for 30 years now.
And she shared with us her philosophy that in fact, the biggest risk you can take is not to take risks.
And Louise backs this philosophy up with a track record of making bold moves, including opening 7 stores throughout Australia and making the big leap internationally, opening in New York.
Or Jean Madden, whose overarching goal in the next five years is to change the face of homelessness nationally and long term to eradicate entrenched poverty in Australia through her Street Swags initiative that provides lightweight and waterproofed canvas swags to homeless people.
Or health and fitness advocate, Michelle Bridges, who’s passion for getting people fit and healthy and giving them longevity has led to her helping thousands of people lose over 1 million kilos to date on her online program 12WBT.com.au.
We were inspired to find how connected they each were to their purpose… and how that connection meant they were driven to achieve their goals… even when things got tough, or when they were faced with failure, or when others around them were saying “no”, this connection to their bigger purpose helped them to protect their confidence and “feel the fear and do it anyway.”
This is a philosophy Barb de Corti, founder and CEO of ENJO Australia, shares:
“Make sure it has a purpose. What will it achieve for yourself and others? Many ideas fail because success doesn’t just come from a passion, the purpose needs to be there.”
Find out what other 2015 Hall of Fame have to say about confidence, failure, and breaking through the challenges they faced in business to become leaders in their fields by downloading the Keepsake Booklet.
You can also access the Breaking Through Webinar to learn more about overcoming these challenges and the key habit that all of these women encompass.
