Wow, I can’t believe we’ve finished week 7 of the Assist Her course. Next week, will sadly be the end of this amazing course. Let’s hope we can get more funding so we can do it again, as it has clearly impacted the women who have taken part. You can see this by some of the other blog posts that have been wonderfully written.
So, Thursday night, we had a warm welcoming from thought leader, Kudzai Pasirayi’ who opened the session with an encouraging talk about self-confidence. Kudzai is an author of several popular children’s books. In 2015, she won the Teesside Enterprise Award & in 2016 was nominated for the ZIM Achievers Award Writer of the year. She has been featured on the Northern Children’s Book Festival & is a reader at beanstalk. She has a strong presence in the creative lifestyle world, where her work expands to photography, blogging, fashion & travel. Her introduction to week 7 of the Assist Her course was very well-received.
After the great start to the lesson, we delved into, ‘Vibe & Tribe’; You may have heard the saying ‘Your Vibe attracts your Tribe’, it’s worth taking note of this when you are wanting to attract higher vibes into your life.
To deliver this session, we had the awesome Sarah Crutwell, poet & spoken word performer. Her amazing & thought-provoking work addresses & explores tentative issues, such as, mental health, sexuality, gender roles, disability, ingrained sexism and inclusive intersectional feminism. She has performed at numerous events & festivals nationwide, including a tour of her first collection Polyfiller, whilst under the mentorship of Joelle Taylor. She has facilitated many workshops for many organisations such as Mind, The TWP, Tees Youth Our Youth and various feminist and LGBTQIA events and charity groups. So, you can imagine it was a privilege to have her as a takeover coach for week 7.
Sarah got straight into the journaling exercises which had our ladies glued from the start, as she asked them to write about their own vibe & how they would like to be seen. She moved this into how our vibe is important when it comes to representing our brand. She talked about how we represent ourselves, even when we are working online, rather than face-to-face, can still attract the right vibe into our tribe.
The exercises she conducted truly gave us something to think about, as we asked ourselves if we’re putting behaviours in place that do not support what we want. Delving deeper into what we can do to recognise these barriers that we may subconsciously be putting in our own way.
Sarah was wonderfully open and honest when she gave examples of her own ways of dealing with self-doubt & how she soothes her inner critic. She explained how her own tribes truly do help her when she feels those thoughts rising that won’t serve her. This truly helped to understand, even those who we believe are truly confident have to also listen to their cheerleading coach rather than that pesky ego.
