Acknowledge how you may be holding yourself back

- So, there's something I think that's important for us to address and that I think about quite a bit which I want to talk to the women out there. Or, I also want to talk any of you out there who are watching who know women as well. So, I really want to talk to all of you. Which is that I find as I engage with women on the topic of risk-taking that most folks would say that we women are more risk averse. I would say we women tend to be more risk aware and that we tend to think about risks to a greater degree than the gentlemen do. We tend to sort of plumb the risks more than the gentlemen do. And I can tell you from some of the recent research that I've done at Ellevest, which is a digital investing platform for women, that the word risk can tend to stop us pretty much in our tracks. I think part of it is that we as young girls when we were in school, I mean, you tell me, I loved to get an A. My daughter loves to get A's. Her friends love to get A's. And when we don't get A's, what the research tells us is that we take it harder than the guys do, that we tend to take failure harder than the guys do, that we tend to be more comfortable in a zone of comfort, in with our friends, in with our colleagues, in with the crowd. You know, we see it in middle school. You see it in high school. We can see it sometimes in business as well. You know, for us as women, taking that risk, we tend to think about it more. We tend to spend more time on it. As a result, sometimes we're not taking the risk that we should in order to invest in a way that will allow us to live our fullest lives, in order to take the promotion that will allow us to extend ourselves professionally, in order to start the business that will enable us to build the companies that we want to build. I have this piece of research I have heard about. It's sort of an urban myth. I haven't been able to find it. But I'm going to share it with you anyway because why not. And that is that in school that the young women, in order to raise their hand to offer up the answer on a scale of one to 10, have to be confident in a seven. And the young men, in order to do it, have to confident in a two. That's risk-taking right there. And so, I would urge all of us as women to sort of redouble our efforts here, to really think about where there's risk that we can be taking in our careers and our lives and in investing, what that upside and downside is, because oftentimes we're so busy thinking about that downside and analyzing the risk that it can paralyze us from taking action.