Dottie DeHart published a fascinating article in TidewaterWomen.com in which she lists several reasons why women succeed. We all know that women have advantages over their male counterparts, but I hadn’t seen them so clearly enumerated before. With colleges and universities full of women preparing for careers at higher and higher levels of the arts, sciences and management, it’s exciting to think of the world that these women will create for all of us.

DeHart quotes Vickie Milazzo’s 2011 book, Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman, “Inside every woman are the skills and forces necessary for being successful today.” So what are those skills and forces?

• Women aren’t afraid to take action. Today, with the social media networks that so many women use, taking action is getting easier and easier. Women are also driven by family responsibilities to be proactive.
• Women aren’t afraid to ask for help. Why is it that guys won’t do this? A classic complaint is about men, though lost on a car trip, who refuse to stop and ask for directions. That’s probably why they invented GPS. Or was it a woman who invented it? I don’t know.
• Women know how to trust their intuition. This is a big one!  Guys trust statistics and “the way we’ve always done it.” Did you know that women have more connections between the right and left hemispheres of their brains? Women can work holistically whereas men are stuck in logic-mode or feelings-mode a bit more.
• Women are natural multi-taskers. Maybe it comes from thousands of years of taking care of children while cleaning and preparing food. If women were unable to multitask, the human race would have gone extinct. Men—at least most men—go from one task to the next with good concentration but with never more than two actions at the same time.
• Women are relationship-builders and collaborators. While men like to be heroes, knights in shining armor who solve problems on their own to the applause of their coworkers, women relate and cooperate, looking at a problem with several eyes. They are more likely to find better solutions.
• Women recognize the importance of mutual support. Success for a woman is not so often dependent on her achieving her goals alone. She likes being in a group in which everyone is achieving their goals with the support of the group.
• Women understand the power of giving. Women give of their time. They have an instinctual desire to help others have a nicer day. It may be just sending a card or a text to tell someone that they are appreciated. A group of women working in a business, if they act like women and not like men, will get more done and feel better about their day.

Love to all,

Ron