I had the pleasure of attending the Women In Focus 4th annual conference last week. I was one of 140 in attendance, 5 of which were men. The theme of the conference was Conversations & Creative Disruption and the speakers certainly epitomised this theme.

The energy in the conference room was electric from the moment you walked in for the first session till the very end.

Claudia Batten, our first speaker was a complete rock star with an amazing story. She sold Massive her first business to Microsoft and then went onto launch Victors & Spoils; the world’s first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principles.

Claudia spoke passionately about the squiggly line of our careers and business growth being a lot more felt than known and discussed the topic of chunking, a phenomenon whereby individuals group responses based on prior knowledge. She believes you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room; you just have to have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

I was nodding my head through her entire presentation and laughed out load when she introduced us to ‘vomit moments’, those big oh sh** moments that are part and parcel of life as an entrepreneur.

Here are a few other tips for entrepreneurs from Claudia Batten:

1. When gaining momentum – anticipate the brick wall
   * Are you going to go smash it down, blow thru it, go over it, around it or simply turn around and go back where you came from?
2. Avoid the busy trap; it will get you stuck!
3. If you do get stuck and just don’t have the answers, which does happen -then own it, acknowledge and accept it, this will allow you to move through it.
4. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable!
5. When you are creating, you are building the possible from impossible and magical things happen.

Most importantly there is no formula, if it was easy then everyone would and could do it and according to Claudia, ‘everyone’ is close to average.

Claudia finished with a quote of her own, which I loved....
“Believe in the impossible and be the biggest, bravest and boldest person you can be with a touch of badass”.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I have many more speakers and insights to share with you so watch this space.