How to Be Successful Women Entrepreneurs Without Beating Ourselves Up
Today we are going to talk about the 70% rule, not to be confused with the 80/20 rule. This 70% rule is all about how to be more efficient, more effective as women entrepreneurs! Most importantly—it’s about how to stop beating yourself up and increase your personal success!
First, I want to talk about something that may seem like a tangent, but hang in, because it is closely related.
It is called human design. Human Design is a system that was developed a long time ago. Human Design experts get data about you like your date of birth, time of birth, and so forth and they put it into a system. From there they tell you all about your personality, preferences, struggles etc. so that you can have more personal success. It’s a lot like astrology except much, much deeper.
One of the things that they say about Human Design is that only 10% of the population has the ability to do the same thing every day consistently the same way; what we call self-discipline.
As women entrepreneurs we are always trying to strive for more discipline. Waking up at the same time, having a morning routine, exercising, etc.
But what I love about Human Design is that it points out that only 10% of us are even capable of this.
Now, I don’t say this to take the wind out of your sails, or to make you feel like you will never be consistent or disciplined. I say this to tell you that we need variety and we need change. We are going to feel different each day.
I know that I crave variety; I don’t want to do the same thing every day.
For example with my morning routine. Sometimes I wake up and I go on a run. Other days I do a meditation first. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I don’t do anything at all and just cuddle in bed with my cat. It isn’t about doing the same thing every day—it is about taking time for myself.
There is this expectation that if you don’t get up and do the same routine every day then you are undisciplined, not focused, not part of the successful club.
But the problem is that most of us women entrepreneurs spend our lives beating ourselves up—because we can’t follow the same routine. And it’s a never ending cycle of not-enoughness.
I want us to stop beating ourselves up. This is where my 70% rule comes into play.
Whatever actions that you are trying to do—in the beginning, aim for doing it 70% of the time.
For example, if your goal is to eat healthy. There are 7 days in a week, 3 meals a day, that is 21 meals a week. So if you are going to eat healthy 70% of the time that is 6 meals that will not be healthy.
Going from 0% to 70% is a whole lot easier then trying to go from 0-100% right away.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we won’t have 100% weeks where we hit all of our goals, but when you are going for 70% you give yourself permission to celebrate on the weeks that you hit 70%.
We can set ourselves up to be successful by giving ourselves a little bit of leeway. This allows us to stop beating ourselves up.
If we are following the health example, there are going to be moments where we slip up and eat 5 cookies instead of 1 cookie or have a little too much wine and dessert. And if you are always aiming for 100% perfection—then those slip-ups will cause you to beat yourself up.
After we’ve been beating ourselves up for a while—we have a tendency to abandon our goals altogether. It just doesn’t feel good to go after what we want, given the self-beating that goes with the process.
But, if you follow the 70% rule then you have 30% wiggle room to make mistakes. That feels so much better.
This same thing applies to entrepreneurship. Say your goal is to send out some sort of marketing every day. If you follow the 70% rule then you can miss 2 days and still be hitting your personal success goal.
When you are starting a new habit—use the 70% rule.
Don’t try to get the 100% right away. Just do the math and figure out the numbers for what 70% looks like.
If you get to a place where you are constantly exceeding the 70%—amazing! It means that that habit has become a part of your life and you don’t have to worry about applying the 70% rule any more to that area of your life.
If you never get to that point, that is OK too because I want you to remember that 70% is a whole heck of a lot better than 0%!
So this week try out the 70% rule and let me know in the comments how it is working for you. As always, go out, make tons of money, and make this world a better place!
To watch the video that this article was adapted from, head over and join the Revenue Breakthrough group.
Photo: flickr,
