There are many women in business who have inspirational stories and lessons we can learn from. Arianna Huffington is visiting Sydney this week, so this is an opportune time to write about what we can learn from her.

Arianna Huffington is most well-known for the news and blog site ‘The Huffington Post’ that she launched in 2005. If you are on social media, you are likely to have seen an article or two from this website, which has become a “frequently cited media brand”.

Aside from Huffington’s forays into politics, book writing and even some acting, an incident in 2007 gave her another ‘platform’ to push. She suffered a facial injury when she fainted at work, because she was severely exhausted and not getting enough sleep. In many of her books and within her own workplace, she promotes a healthy balance between work and the ‘rest of life’ and the ‘power of a good night’s sleep’.

Her latest book, ‘Thrive’, is the culmination of what she has been practicing and preaching since her fainting incident. It is an attempt to ‘redefine what it means to be successful in todays’ world’.

What is success to you? Is it about the amount of money you are earning? The number of staff you have? Arianna Huffington has learnt the hard way that our traditional notions of success lead to burnout, illness and “an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers”.

Most business women I know are not getting enough sleep and operate their work and lives in a way that can have disastrous effects. As Huffington says “The essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic."

Michelle Grice writes a weekly column for business women in The Western Weekender