1. Have Confidence
No matter what your trajectory may be, having confidence in yourself and your goals is hands-down the top quality you will need for success. This confidence will fuel the ultimate edge in any profession: perseverance.
“(Perseverance) requires an unwavering sense of self-belief about yourself, your product, your mission,” said Maseena Ziegler, author of a No. 1 best-selling book in Hong Kong, "Ladies Who Launch in Hong Kong." Perseverance is the characteristic common to the 12 female entrepreneurs about whom Ziegler wrote. “It’s the ability to keep going despite all the challenges and hurdles,” she said.
While men tend to be overly confident, women are taught to be humble and demure. In order to overcome that in the workplace, it is important to identify your best traits and highlight them. One trait that women possess in spades is intuition. “Most women can walk into a room, read the room, and be fairly accurate about it,” said Lisa Johnson Mandell, author of the best-selling book "Career Comeback." She encourages women to trust and pay attention to those feelings, and — before communicating them — critically analyze and understand why they feel a certain way about a situation. If you can translate those feelings into objective business-speak, you’ll blow the men-folk out of the water.
Kimberly Roussel, a successful entrepreneur who opened the Los Angeles restaurant Kitchen 24, the Hollywood club Cinespace, and a catering service, said she feels lucky that her parents instilled confidence in her. She feels that it is critical to have a level of conviction that enables you to take risks and let go of the fear of failing. Once you defeat those anxieties, the world can open up in surprising ways.