Being a female business founder is not about showing off and flaunting material success. Building an empire requires you to show up each and every day with a strong f*cking purpose to give back, have fun, and make the world a better place.  

It’s about doing the “dirty” work instead of just wishing to be an overnight success. This means that you will, inevitably, experience times of uncertainty and doubt. 

Here are 4 ways you can accelerate your momentum in those times:

1. Push yourself to “brag”

I used to think that I needed to wait until I had a significant win in my business before telling people about it. Until I realized that it’s almost impossible to get momentum for a new business while keeping it a secret.

Revealing what you do and who you serve can be intimidating but you need to push through it. There is no need to exaggerate or to try and impress people around you, although in the beginning, it may feel like it. Just breathe through it. It’s okay.

Declaring your accomplishments is absolutely necessary for your business to thrive.

You don’t need to start on your social media platforms. Sometimes, the best thing to do is just mention what you do and what you’ve accomplished in social settings. Pushing yourself to share your vision with friends is a wonderful start!

2. Declare your vision with confidence

There’s a lot of advice out there to grow in silence and avoid sharing your goals with others. I don’t subscribe to that message.

I strongly believe that you need to practise declaring your vision with confidence even if it makes others uncomfortable because they don’t dare to dream as big as you.

I have friends whom I absolutely adore, but they failed to see the big-picture I had for my “side-hustle”. They let their own fears and limitations affect their opinions on what is realistic for me to achieve. Though I appreciated their opinion, I chose not to own their doubts. I had different plans for myself than what they could imagine for themselves.

Give yourself permission to be assertive about the potential you see for your business and the actions you’ve taken so far. Don’t undermine your vision with self-deprecation. It’s okay to acknowledge that it will take hard work and you are just starting out, but own where you’re going and what you’ve done to get where you are today.

3. Get comfortable lagging behind your ambitions

As a founder, you have to be okay with the fact that what you’re envisioning will always be ahead of what you’re actually producing. This can be an extremely uncomfortable truth to accept, especially when you don’t want to leave yourself open to criticism.

Your posts, videos, brand, website, and products may be lagging behind your long-term plan but that is part of the process.

Though I knew I had to start somewhere as a sales coach, it was debilitating for me to launch my first program years ago as it was far from what I’d envisioned. Instead of dwelling on it and feeling embarrassed to be seen starting small, I embraced the struggle. I chose to feel the excitement from the process of progressing from where I was to where I knew I wanted to go.

Now, I absolutely love and am proud of the program, brand, and website I’ve built (with the right people in my corner) but I already have new ideas and ambitions that I’m working towards. And that hunger will never stop. I’ve just let go of feeling weird about it.

4. Forget likes, focus on substance

Your success is not correlated to the number of followers, likes, or shares you have. Those vanity metrics look fantastic on paper but have no real business value. 

I made my first $10k month as a sales coach with less than 2,000 followers on Instagram, and yet, I have met female founders who have triple the amount of followers but fail to make any money.

It’s all about substance. Instead of trying to reach more people, work with what you have. Build a community, show up consistently and start REVEALING what you do and how people can work with you.

Share what you do and who you do it for. Share how people can work with you (and make it as easy as pushing a button or messaging you). Then repeat, repeat, repeat. You will not understand the power of this advice until you actually apply it and do it consistently.