Winning Women Entrepreneurs – My Conversation With Best-Selling Author Barbara Stanny

Remember when you first went into business for yourself?

If you’re like many entrepreneurs, your goals may have included earning more money, working fewer hours, and thriving, yes?

But the reality is that many entrepreneurs struggle with money and underearning. That cycle affects their self-confidence, the ability to earn more clients, and to charge what they’re worth.

Barbara Stanny is a best-selling author and the leading authority on women and money. We recently talked about underearning and what it takes to become a high earner as an entrepreneur.

But first, who is an underearner? According to Stanny, “An underearner is anyone who earns less than she needs or desires, despite her efforts to do otherwise. Anyone who earns less than she needs or desires. It has nothing to do with the amount of money you make.”

Becoming a high earner is how you can make your mark on the world. Plus, it’s way more fun than languishing in a state of underearning!

So how do you move in that direction toward a high earner? Here are some strategies from Barbara:

Let go. Let go of what? Only you can really answer that. It could be a tangible thing like a job, a business partnership, or a relationship. It is almost always an attitude, belief, or idea that has you stuck. The amazing thing is, when you let go, you allow room for better opportunities. The first step is simply a willingness to let go, before you take other steps to actually let go.

Remember the stretch. Those goals that are most rewarding are usually right beyond your immediate grasp, and you have to stretch to get there. And with the stretch comes discomfort. High-earning women get used to the discomfort and continue pushing forward. And in the end, won’t the discomfort be much greater if you chose not to stretch and left those most rewarding goals unaccomplished?

Go with the resistance. That anxious feeling deep inside when you know you should go in a certain direction and fear creeps in? When you know you need to be working on something bigger within your business? That’s resistance. Resistance shows up in many forms, such as focusing on mundane tasks, getting too busy, being disorganized. High-earning women pay attention to that resistance, and they go toward it. They know moving toward the resistance is what will propel them to the next level.