Powerful and Prepared, Not Pretty and Perfect

When it comes to thinking big about our businesses, although we had the drive and will to create a business from nothing (no small feat), we may still be playing small in ways we haven’t yet realised.

My friend’s ten-year-old daughter, Meredith, brought this home to me on a recent weekend getaway when we were playing Boggle.

Boggle is a popular game in which you and several other players look for words in a jumble of letter cubes and write them down for points,

trying to come up with as many words as you can before the three-minute timer is up. Then you compare your list with the other players’ and cross off the ones you both have. You only get points only for words that are on your list and no one else’s.

Meredith learned quickly; she is precocious and very verbal.

After just a few rounds, she was coming up with high-scoring words and generally acing it. I pointed out her Boggle prowess to her parents and could tell she was feeling good that an adult was evangelising about her smarts. We played over and over and had a great time as she found increasingly higher—scoring and more complex words.

The next day her brother, who was twelve, and my son, who was nine, decided they wanted to play with us too. They had both played Boggle before but weren’t particularly strong players. They immediately started playing the game very differently from Meredith.

They were guessing wildly at words — writing down words they had completely made up, in the hopes they were right, whereas Meredith wrote down words only when she was completely sure of them. When the boys got a word wrong, they didn’t really care; in fact they thought it was funny to push the limits. ‘Is ‘nayvre’ a word?’ they would ask. ‘Why not? Let’s look it up!’ And so on.

On the first round, Meredith held her own. But in the second round, the boys had all the words Meredith did, so she got no points. As she sat next to me on the couch I saw her little face darken. She pulled her knees up into her chest.

‘I am so bad at this!’ she said loudly, without a trace of sarcasm.

‘You are not’, I countered. ‘Remember you found the word “provoke" yesterday for five points and you beat me two times? This was just a tough round.’

But she didn’t seem able to hear me and continued scowling. By contrast, when the boys’ words were crossed off at the end of a round, they pumped their fists in the air, high—fived each other, and whooped, laughing, ‘Oh yeah, another zero!’ After one more round in which she got only two points, Meredith took her pen and angrily crossed out every word on her page, declared, ‘I am never playing this again!’, and walked away. I was unable to help her through her frustration, and no amount of reasoning could get her to return to the game.

Meredith’s response, in a nutshell, is what happens to many women when we go up against challenge and failure. We would rather not play if we can’t get it right. And this creates a situation in which, all too often, women are sitting on the sidelines while men are in the game — not because we are not strong players, but because we find the prospect of failure intolerable.

This attitude is the very antithesis of what makes entrepreneurs able to succeed. My favourite definition of an entrepreneur is this:‘Someone who fails and gets up and keeps going’. Entrepreneurs are not smarter, more ambitious or more talented than anyone else. What we have is the ability to take knocks and get back up again quickly — and then find another way forward. We either have, or develop, a kind of Teflon coating that protects us from the sticky gunk that comes our way.

One of the reasons women sometimes sit on the sidelines is that, like Meredith, we like to be 99 per cent sure we have the right answer before we respond to a question. It is part of what I call our ‘pretty and perfect’ socialisation. Despite a very positive shift toward praising girls for their actions, not their looks, these old stereotypes are still with us. Twenty- and thirty—somethings who are running businesses today were likely raised at a time when most boys were encouraged to play sports and learned to contend with repeated failure, while most girls were praised for knowing the right answer, pleasing grown—ups and teachers and being cooperative.

By:Julia Pimsleur

From the book ‘Million Dollar Women – the essential guide to taking business further, faster’ published by Hachette