Katie Day: Top 3 Business Skills for Women
Growth, personal or professional, is one of the most fulfilling experiences of being a human. Many professionally successful men and women will tell you that continuous learning is the real game changer. An ever-increasing number of workshops, seminars, webinars, podcasts, online courses, talks, and more are testament of that. We are all keen on learning and imparting learning, to grow and facilitate growth.
Katie Day, who is a renowned business coach among other incredible roles that she fulfils, has been running a training programme called ‘Women in Business’ since the 1990s. It’s her signature programme that provides useful tools and practical advice to women in business to get to know themselves and what they want – the latter coming from a place of heightened self-knowledge, authenticity and confidence. Day shares with us the all-important top three tips for women in business.
Know Your Values
It is the birthplace of feeling truly purposeful and in power. Not knowing what your core values are can make you feel utterly directionless. It can lead to you trying to fit into an organisation/situation and worse, thinking that something is wrong with you if you’re unable to.
Whether employed or running your own business, ensure that every decision you take is congruent with your values. Not living in alignment with them can cause constant inner stress and turmoil, which transpires into your communication, behaviour and productivity – which, essentially, is you short changing yourself and those around you.
Adopt Balanced Communication for Successful Negotiation
We often approach negotiation from one of the two extreme stances – being passive or aggressive. Generally, women are far more likely than men to be passive, which is to say that we give in, succumb and allow somebody else to take over in a negotiation. We are more likely to mould and adapt ourselves to meet the needs of the opponent rather than being clear on ours. That leaves us feeling frustrated and angry because we could not present our case strongly. If, on the contrary, we adopt an aggressive negotiating style, we end up in a deadlock situation (like two stags locking horns) where we finally reach an impasse, which leaves us feeling equally distressed for not having reached a conclusion.
Change your Mindset about Weaknesses
There are no weaknesses; they are simply qualities that are temporarily out of balance. Every weakness has an underpinning quality, and your job is to identify if you are overdoing or understating that quality. For instance, if you are not very confident in yourself, pause to check if the case is that you’re actually really balanced in your opinion of yourself and because you’re determined to stay balanced, to not come off as arrogant or a show off, you’re being realistic about your ability – you might be overdoing the realism, overdoing the need to appear balanced, and therefore blocking yourself from stepping into your worth.
Once you identify the quality underpinning your “weakness”, bring it back into equilibrium so that it serves you and therefore serves everybody with whom you interact. Recognising the strengths underlying your weaknesses will help you adopt the right mindset towards challenges.
About the Expert
Katie Day is a Director at RDP International (www.rdp-int.com) a consultant, trainer, business coach, author and speaker, who conducts Women in Business, her signature training programme that has been running since the 1990s. As a consultant, business and executive coach, and business development expert with years of experience working in the UK, USA, Middle East, Africa and Asia, Day has witnessed the transformation of people and the organisations that they work with/run, and the realisation of potential they had no idea they possessed.
