Women wear bras, so why aren’t we more supportive toward each other?
For many years I had an issue with women because I felt women didn’t support me. I thought I was alone in that until I figured out that women often don’t support other women in general. And if you say otherwise, I am delighted you have women on your side! But it has not been my experience, and it is not the experience of my 24-year-old daughter who has been bullied her entire life, primarily at the hands of women.
It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I finally figured out how to make really good women friends. But let’s be honest, they are few and far between. When you are on your way to becoming a very successful woman, not many other women in the room cheer your advancement.
It is lonely at the top for women. Why? Because it is hard for a successful woman to find other women who are equally confident in their abilities and can relate to our problems. I want to talk about how to grow our companies, how to build successful teams, and how to be a really amazing leader to our teams.
We often find that the reality is that other women distrust us and want to take us down, or constantly critique us.
We ignore the dirty looks and pretend not to see eyes roll behind our backs when we have to make tough decisions or insist on deadlines, or demand a high quality work product the way we want it. Who has time for any of that internal stuff while devising a tactical strategy to convince the boys on the other side of the table about your right to sit amongst them—as a woman?
And… how can we explain to others not in our position on how hard it is on us when we have to be the Boss Lady? It is difficult to make hard decisions that affect the trajectory of our careers and businesses. And often we agonize over it during sleepless nights.
(I wrote more about this conundrum here.)
Change is progress
I am not exempt from this. It’s time to make changes. Over the past few months I had been wrestling shadows at my hard stop until I started to listen to my internal voice. Finally, clarity emerged. “Play bigger,” the voice told me. So that’s exactly what we are going to do. Over the next few weeks you will see changes on our website and you will receive an announcement of a new program I am rolling out to serve you better and in a much, much bigger way.
In addition, this fall we will be holding our first live event and I would love for you to be there.
Thank you for being a part of my journey. Please share what your voice is saying to you and how you want to play bigger over at our Facebook page. It’s a place where I hope to connect with you and form a meaningful exchange. Because we all need someone on our side.
At her lowest point, Beate Chelette was $135,000 in debt, a single mother, and forced to leave her home. Only 18 months later, she sold her image licensing business to Bill Gates in a multimillion dollar deal. Chelette is a nationally known ‘gender decoder’ who has appeared in over 60 radio shows, respected speaker, career coach, consummate creative entrepreneur, and author of Happy Woman Happy World. Beate is also the founder of The Women’s Code, a unique guide to women leadership and personal and career success that offers a new code of conduct for today’s business, private, and digital worlds. Determined to build a community of women supporting each other, she took her life-changing formula documented it all in a book Brian Tracy calls “an amazing handbook for every woman who wants health, happiness, love and success!”
Through her corporate initiative “Why Acting Like a Girl Is Good For Business” she helps companies with gender diversification training, and to develop and retain women.
If you’d like to book Beate as a speaker on New Leadership Balance or Creative Entrepreneurship for your next event please connect with me.
