by Melissa McCreery PhD,ACC

Overeating and difficulties maintaining healthy routines are common pitfalls for high achieving busy women with a lot going on.Stress, the multiple activities we juggle, the standards we set for ourselves, even our hardworking independent attitudes can sometimes get in our way. Do strong emotions or stress impact your eating? Do you reach for a snack when you are stressed or bored, tired, or anxious? Do you nibble mindlessly at your desk? If so, it’s a signal that emotional eating is a part of your weight battle. Overeating and emotional eating often occur when you have “too much to do and too little time.”

The pressure to accomplish all that you do can actually contribute to the problem. Food is easy to turn to for comfort, stress relief or a quick reward. When time is at a premium and your schedule is demanding, making healthy choices can be a serious challenge, and “me” time can feel like an impossible dream. Struggles with weight are painful, they affect self esteem, and they can also affect the way you show up in your business.

Frankly, when we are struggling with anything, when we are feeling less than confident, we simply don’t shine. And when we aren’t feeling our best, we tend to make different choices than we do when we’re running at one hundred percent. It’s not about hitting a magic number on the scale. It’s about finding a way out of the struggle, and creating a sense of personal effectiveness with food and weight that make the difference. Are you struggling with weight and does it keep you from shining?

In the last week, three business owners have told me about business-building activities that they are avoiding because they feel uncomfortable with their current size and weight. These women are smart, dynamic, and vibrant, but the way they feel about themselves leaves them limiting their visibility. Can you imagine the toll this is taking in their business?

The women I talked to are:

• Avoiding opportunities to be front and center (public speaking, presentations, having their picture taken)

• Spending a lot of time hoping no one will notice them because they feel self conscious. That’s a VERY difficult place from which to nurture a thriving business.

• Feeling far less confident and self-assured than they should. Despite their impressive talents and accomplishments, what stands out for each of them is that they haven’t lost the weight they want to.

• Putting off networking activities “until they lose the weight.”

• Not dressing in a way that expresses the vitality each of them absolutely sizzles with. Read More→

by Denise Willms

For many work at home moms, deciding what to charge for their products or services is a common problem. Setting my rates was one of the hardest parts of starting my virtual assistant business. I didn’t want to charge too much and miss out on a potential customer who couldn’t afford me. At the same time, I didn’t want to charge too little and not be taken seriously by someone I wanted to work with.

Do you ever struggle with this? For a lot of us, it can be tempting to set our prices on the lower end of the spectrum. Sometimes we’re not sure of our worth. Sometimes it just seems like less of a hassle to charge less. That way we don’t have to work so hard at convincing others of our value.

But if you’re not charging what you deserve, you can lose out on a lot more than potential earnings. Here are some of the problems I encountered because I wasn’t charging enough, or because I wasn’t sure what to charge:

- I wasted many hours on work I wasn’t properly paid for. That is time I can never get back, which would have been better spent playing with the kids or looking for clients who were able to pay what I was worth. Read More→