Important Skills for a Female Leader to Develop From a Young Age

What are the skills we can teach our children now that will help them later? Listen to Nanon de Gaspe Beaubien-Mattrick describe what she believes are key leadership skills.

So I wish I could go back and start all over again, because now I know what I would do differently. First of all, being a mom, I think one of the most important things is to teach your children grit. What I mean by grit is the ability to persevere and push through difficult situations. I sometimes think that the generation coming up, things have come easily, and we’re a little spoiled. The ones that are really moving through, pushing through are the ones that are used to going through tough times, and I think that’s something that, starting all the way back to a child, that’s something that I think would be really important. I think the ability to communicate is really important, that can start as a teenager, the ability, you know my husband always says, 2 ears, 1 mouth, the ability to listen to people and to learn how to feedback what their saying, and communication is 2 ways, so that would be something else that would be really important to me to teach for leadership skills. The ability to listen to everyone, we’re moving more and more towards a team, and so on a team you’ll have people from all different cultures, men and women speak different languages they think differently, they have different cultural norms, and the ability to be in the moment and really listen to what their saying, I think that’s a very important skill, more and more as we go forth. Those would be the key ones I would share. There was one last on that I shared that I think is really important, for me anyway, the ability to continually learn and grow. I think that’s something, because you never know it all, you learn and grow all throughout your life and sometimes, one of the things I look for in entrepreneurs, we have to look for a win-win. Someone who says to me I pretty much know this business, I know it all, I know I can’t work with, because none of us know it all, we’re there to continually learn and grow, personally, as well as in business. So that’s something that I think is very important for any kind of leadership, the ability to continually learn and grow.