she made it happen 22 inspiring stories from female entrepreneurs around the PDF
Preview she made it happen 22 inspiring stories from female entrepreneurs around the
SHE MADE IT HAPPEN 22 INSPIRING STORIES FROM FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS AROUND THE WORLD INTRODUCTION: VENESSA MOSS COPYRIGHT Copyright 2017 : Venessa Moss The moral rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the copyright owner, or in the case of the reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 DR. ANNA MAY TERRY .............................................................................. 3 GEORGINA GRAHAM .............................................................................. 13 MEL DEAGUE .......................................................................................... 23 DANIELLE CANTY ..................................................................................... 32 REBECCA LOCKWOOD ............................................................................ 42 DEBORAH HURWITZ ............................................................................... 56 LISA JOHNSON ........................................................................................ 65 EIRIAN COHEN ........................................................................................ 77 SABRINA MÜLLER ................................................................................... 89 MICHELLE CHILDS ................................................................................... 98 NADINE CRESPO .................................................................................... 108 HELEN REED .......................................................................................... 117 LINDA MORRISON ................................................................................. 129 ABIGAIL HORNE ..................................................................................... 138 EMMA STIRK ......................................................................................... 146 BUNMI ABOABA .................................................................................... 158 JENNIFER DUFFEE ................................................................................. 170 LINDSAY VAN ZUIDAM .......................................................................... 200 JENNIFER HARDIE .................................................................................. 210 MELISSA MARIE LOWNDES ................................................................... 226 DENISE MORTIMER ............................................................................... 236 HOLLY MATTHEWS ............................................................................... 248 INTRODUCTION Have you ever looked at a really successful woman, and wondered how she made it happen? Especially those women who seem to have pushed boundaries. Those women who are truly inspiring. Those women who seem to have all the secrets to being the strongest of entrepreneurs. Wouldn't it be great if you could share in the wisdom of their experiences? By carefully watching and learning from those who have achieved the things we want, we can understand more about ourselves – how we can condition ourselves to succeed, to push past limitations and grow a new business to be the very best it can be. If you've read this far, you probably already count yourself as entrepreneurial. The challenge is how to translate that hunger for change into actions which will drive real progress. In this book, we will take a detailed look at 22 women who have done just that. The women you will meet in these pages have all been exactly where you are now –which is to say, they started something. Often, they started something with nothing. You can do this too. And here's how. We are going to break down every aspect of the journey these amazing entrepreneurs have taken. From a variety of backgrounds all over the world, we will see that with the right attitude and determination, there is no circumstance that should be able to hold you back. We will learn how all it can take is one defining moment to truly change the path you take in the world, and that this moment can be hugely important or seemingly insignificant at the time. The real challenge is choosing to act, and making the right changes at the right time. 1 We'll follow our entrepreneurs through the decisions they made which set them on the path to the future they always dreamed of, and look at what they did to overcome the setbacks they faced. So this book is about 22 incredible women. These women all faced challenges. They faced the self-‐doubt that can cripple confidence, and prevent real and lasting change from happening. These women all know what it means to create something from nothing, and have experienced first-‐hand the struggles and hurdles along the way which come with this. They all went on to achieve their dreams. And the good news? You can achieve your own dreams too. We hope you feel inspired by their stories. Venessa Moss 2 DR. ANNA MAY TERRY You have to burst your own reality bubble. When I began my journey as a female entrepreneur, I was a completely different woman than I am today. Growing up I certainly never saw myself as an entrepreneur. I had been brought up to believe that the only way to reach financial success was to work extremely hard in a traditional job. My view of the world was shaped almost completely by my dad. He had a very successful career—but he paid the price. We rarely saw him while we were growing up, and I am sure that the high stress level he operated on eventually impacted his health. I was encouraged to perform at a high academic level and did very well throughout school. My parents built a strong sense of self-‐esteem within me, which was shattered at age thirteen. This event in my life meant that for a long time my life was to be dictated by painfully low self-‐esteem and crippling anxiety. It all began with a very traumatic experience at high school. A group of girlfriends decided to launch a vicious hate campaign against me. Literally in the space of a day, my whole world turned upside down, and the experience was so upsetting I was forced to change schools. That day taught me a lot of lessons, but they were not very healthy ones. I learned that I could not trust people, I learned that I was not worthy of friendship, and I learned that I was much safer on my own. Over the years, the wound of that experience began to heal. However, some hurts run very deep under the surface, coming up when anything triggers insecurities within us. After graduating with a first-‐class degree in Psychology, I experienced first-‐hand how brutal the job market was, and the only job I could find was working the late shift at a petrol station. After working so hard at university, this was understandably demoralising. I left this job as soon 3 as I could and took myself to live in Florence, Italy, for three months. It didn’t take long, however, before the pressure to go back to the UK and find a ‘proper job’ took over, and I returned to a research post at the University of Birmingham. A few more jobs later, I came to at least one conclusion: I was unemployable. In 2011, I began my PhD at the University of Manchester. I had never really planned to take on such a huge challenge but, as usual, I had no real direction in life and ended up there by sheer chance. During the first two years studying for my doctorate, I also completed a course on how to write children’s books and another on interior design. It became quite clear to me that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Then in 2013, I read a fantastic book called Free Range Humans by Marianne Cantwell. For the first time in my life, I found another person who felt the same way as I felt. Marianne refused to put herself inside a ‘career box’. It was at this point I first felt myself drawn to the entrepreneurial world. I began to realise that I was someone who had always just reacted to life. I had simply fallen into jobs and situations without having ever really asked myself what I really wanted. I made wild plans and began to dream. I tried setting up my own business writing academic essay templates, but failed miserably. Nevertheless, the thought of creating a business I loved was always at the front of my mind. It wasn’t until 2014 that I was to embark fully on my entrepreneurial journey. I was introduced to the network marketing industry and, like many people, completely rejected it as something below me. Although on the surface network marketing was a business opportunity that could offer me everything I was looking for, I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was genuine. However, the burning desire to have my own business never went away, and there was plenty I wanted to change about my world and my identity. In all honesty, I was sick of being shy. I knew that I had a lot to offer the world, but my lack of confidence and belief in myself was holding me 4 back in a big way. I knew I was destined for bigger and better things, but I didn’t know how or where to begin. I had always felt like there had to be more to life. I remember speaking to one of my closest friends about this feeling. To this day I remember so clearly what she said to me: “Unfortunately there isn’t much else. You just have to get a job you don’t mind too much and crack on.” I refused to buy into this view of life—I wanted so much more. For a long time I had felt trapped in a cage. It felt like there was another whole world out there. I was certain that it was out there, but I could never find it. This feeling of being boxed in caused me an enormous amount of anxiety and sucked a lot of the joy out of my life. I knew that there was a big world out there, and I wanted a slice of it. I also knew that I was not on the life path that I wanted to be on. I was living a life that I thought others expected of me, not one of purpose or aligned to who I truly was. I felt an enormous amount of pressure to pursue an academic career and have a job with status. I really wanted to let go of that and forge my own path. I wanted prosperity and the feeling of having ‘made it’, although I could never figure out what ‘it’ was. One of the biggest breakthroughs came when I realised that perhaps I could be in control of making ‘it’ happen for myself, that I didn’t need to rely on something like winning the lottery. Most of all I wanted freedom, and I knew that having my own business was going to be the only way I could achieve that. I dreamt of having a business I could run with just a laptop, Wi-‐Fi and a smile. I faced many struggles as I started to change as a person and as I became more successful in business. These challenges are so important to discuss and highlight, because it’s crucial for female entrepreneurs to be prepared for these challenges and to learn how to best overcome them. When I coach women these days, many of them are so surprised to find out that I too had struggles and challenges. They will often bring up common challenges, and I will have a story about having gone 5 through the exact same experience. Afterwards, they often say, “Don’t take this in a bad way, but it’s so reassuring to know that you struggled too.” We have a tendency to see successful people as superhuman. I think that if we are truly honest with ourselves, we purposely choose to ignore the fact that we know these people didn’t just wake up successful. They worked hard, overcame challenges and probably felt like quitting many times. We kid ourselves into thinking that those successful women are somehow different from us, giving ourselves a convenient ‘get out of jail free card’ for why we aren’t as successful as we would like to be. I think that female entrepreneurs tend to make up an enormous number of excuses as to why we are not successful. We do this so we don’t have to own up to our own lack of work ethic or commitment. We do this so we don’t have to look our biggest fears right in the eye. One of the biggest challenges I came across, and one that I really wasn’t expecting to affect me so much, was learning to retrain my brain for success. Mindset and personal development were concepts I had never heard of before coming across the network marketing industry. Not once in my life had someone told me, “You can change, you can become a completely different person if you want to.” The biggest gift that building my business has given me so far is not financial freedom, but rather the introduction to personal development and power. There is so much truth in the saying that success is 80% mindset and 20% skill set. I have had to work on my mindset every single day—and still do. Of course, the process of beginning to build my own business brought up that old wound from high school. I began to seriously doubt myself and found it extremely challenging to believe that I could achieve the kind of success I was seeing all around me. This is often known as the ‘imposter syndrome’, and it was something I had struggled with all throughout my graduate work. I remember literally sitting in tears on the floor of my apartment, convincing myself that success was only meant for other people—certainly not for me. 6
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