As a woman in a man’s world, learning to navigate the realm of business and leadership was comparable to charting a course to a yet undiscovered planet in another solar system. Starting out as young entrepreneurs , business success was something we both yearned for, however, knowing what to do and figuring out what route to take was a guessing game. It was a guessing game until we discovered the Six Questions.
The Six Questions is for both men and women. However before we even get to the Six Questions, we have some very important issues to address in chapters one and two, particularly with women that we sometimes sabotage ourselves with. The odds are that we put ourselves last. The odds are that we believe being a woman will make it harder for us to succeed. The odds are that we feel guilty and consider it selfish to take care of ourselves at times. The odds are that we feel we need someone else to make us feel loved. The odds are that we feel unappreciated by some people in our lives and we allow this to deflate us ... We need to make the odds even, before we can properly begin.
As women, we want it all, and too often feel the need to apologize or feel guilty for that. That way of thinking has kept us caged, in our minds and in our lives, somehow feeling undeserving of putting what we want on our priority list. We need to address how wrong this is before we go anywhere ... and celebrate the beauty and the power of the X Factor. The capacity that we have as emotional creatures is a magnificence of the highest kind. Knowing this is required before we ask ourselves the Six Questions. Believing this to be true is necessary before we can find the right answers.
The Six Questions starts by asking us what we want. Each of the Six Questions must be asked and answered honestly from the heart before you move onto the next one. If you do not like the answer, learn to change it. Getting the right answers to these questions is required and it must feel right; getting them wrong carries too high of a price. You will get an entirely different set of answers to these questions if you are asking from your head rather than your heart.
Question Number One: How clear are you on what you want?
Julie Edmonds is an entrepreneur, business consultant, and mother of two. After receiving a BA in Finance from the University of SW Louisiana, she moved to Florida where she founded her first business, 17 years ago. Because of her fiercely independent and competitive nature, her organization has grown across the U.S. and produces over 8 million dollars in direct sales annually. She was featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine as one of 1998’s Fun, Fearless, Females showcasing her business success. Today she operates her consulting company, LNE Consulting, Inc ( www.lneconsultinginc.com ) founded in 2009. Julie is passionate about coaching and developing young business professionals as she has helped develop and assist thousands reach professional goals and many open their own businesses and take control of their lives.
Michell Smith is a dynamic leadership and management consultant working with one of the largest direct marketing networks across North America. Located in Toronto Canada she founded I.C.E. Inc. in September 1996 ( www.iceinctoronto.com
) and has since built a direct sales network that at its height was comprised of over 60 managers and assistant managers, 600 sales reps and over 10 million dollars in annual revenues. Michell specializes in coaching individuals and teams to reach their highest potential by helping them define their purpose and passion. Today she continues to consult and coach hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs and sales reps and students all across North America through live seminars and private coaching sessions.Through their careers, Julie Edmonds and Michell Smith have collectively coached tens of thousands of people and are well respected for their honesty and inspirational voices. They have been committed to the development of people professionally and personally and have both been consistently recognized by their peers with numerous awards for their contributions to the personal success of other entrepreneurs.
Each of them has personally conducted well over 30,000 interviews while recruiting for their sales forces and administrative teams, and between them, they have aided in opening over 200 companies in the past 17 years.