Guest Post – 4 Common Misconceptions about Successful Women

Snooze, Snacks and Soap Operas Are the Real Recipe for Success

Type into Google ‘what is the recipe for success’ and you’ll receive over eighty-two million hits. That’s a lot of ideas about what it takes to be successful.

Of course, success can mean different things to different people. Whether it’s earning enough money to take your family on two or three holidays a year, or working hard enough so you are able to afford a deposit for a house without the help of the bank of mum and dad, the definition of success is as equally hard to define as the recipe for it.

The pathway to our own version of success is bound to be different from the person sitting next to us. Does obtaining success mean having to get up at 6am for morning yoga, stick to a macrobiotic diet or survive on just five hours sleep a night? Surely there must be an easier, more enjoyable way?

What Successful Women Do

A study by Eventa has revealed that far from early morning routines and strict diets, successful women are much more likely to indulge in guilty pleasures than you might think.

The study looked at sixteen highly successful women and split their day into five different coloured sections: small pleasures (purple), getting ready (red), at work (blue), down time (yellow) and sleep (green). The at-a-glance bar gives an aesthetically pleasing indicator of how each of them spend their time. And you might be surprised at some of the results.

Image courtesy of Eventa

Anastasia Emmanuel, Director of UK Hardware, Technology and Design at crowd-funding platform, Indiegogo describes herself as not a morning person, sleeping until the last minute before hitting snooze, not once but twice! The long green bar indicates an extended sleeping session followed by getting ready (red section) and then starting her work (blue). But it’s not all work and no play, as you can see. The blue bar is split with short spurts of downtime (yellow) and small pleasures (purple), demonstrating you can work hard and have time for the fun stuff too.

Other purple-time activities from fellow successful women included watching Family Guy, munching on waffles and having drinks.

What Successful Women Don’t Do

Successful women don’t spend every waking minute working. They don’t spend all their free time looking after children or partners and they don’t pound the treadmill at the gym.

Successful women don’t give up their ‘me-time’. Whether that’s flipping opening their laptops and catching up with friends on Facebook, or signing into Netflix to catch up with Orange is the New Black, they all make time for downtime and a little self indulgence.

Successful women don’t apologise for their routines either. Whether it’s slapping snooze one last time or ordering a Chinese take away on a Friday night, if they want to do it, they will. And like other successful women around the world, they make no apologies for it.

So next time you’re feeling guilty for swapping that spin class for a strawberry cheesecake, don’t! The real recipe for success lays in the way we care about ourselves. Make sure you include some purple-time in your day. If you fancy a cheesecake, then go right ahead. And don’t be sorry about it either.