What’s In Your Toolbox?

Cadre. Hey, fam. It is Tuesday, which means it is time for another toolbox talk with your girls. If you don't know me, my name is Mary. This is my best friend and business partner, Jill. Hi, everyone. And we are your local resident social emotional learning experts. What does that mean? It means your people skills, your emotional intelligence. We have this amazing thing called your book smarts, but we also have this other amazing part of us called your street smarts. And that's who we get to develop.

That's where we get to come in and help you develop that side of your smart. You know, if you need any of our credentials, there's no letters behind our names, necessarily, besides our last name, but we own a company called girls mentorship. So we mentor. We teach life and personal development skills to teen and tween girls. But in order to teach teen and tween girls, we also work with parents, coaches, teachers, anyone, basically, who is an adult in their life that needs to hone in on these particular set of skills as well.

So that is us. That's us. And today, I was gonna say we take over Tuesdays. Oh, hello. We take over. We take over Tuesdays with our toolbox talks. Let's do it. So many teas. And as we were talking about what we wanted to bring to you all, as we were talking about the tea we wanted to spill, we were thinking, okay, let's pull in real life conversations that we have with our girls to our audience on Cadre. And one of the things that's been coming up a lot, not just recently, but over the course of this work, and you could guess, why is self image your self image?

What is your self image? How do you view yourself? Tangent. Which will obviously bring it back. I have curly hair. My dad has curly hair. My mom does not. So I was born with, like, a mixture of in between hair. But I grew up in the nineties, so no one really ever taught me how to take care of my curly hair. Fast forward to today. I have TikTok, I have Google, I have YouTube. I have all these incredible resources to now teach me how to get my hair to actually curl and keep a curl. I tried a new method about three days ago, so we're looking a little limp in our curls, but it ties back to my self image.

How do I want to present myself to the world? And it really is an equation. What is the equation that leads me to self image? The formula. The equation. Okay, here we go, everybody. It's a little math equation. So it's your self esteem plus your self confidence equals your self image. And a lot of times, we blend self esteem and self confidence together to mean the same thing. To mean the same thing. So let's break it down. Okay? And before we break it down, self image has a lot of different connotations to a lot of different people as well.

There's a lot of opinions that can go into your self image. It is how you feel other people view you. It is like I just talked about my curls. How do I want to present myself? How do I want to come across in a room? So, there's a lot of different viewpoints on what self image could be as well. But realistically, the equation is self esteem plus self confidence equals self image. And like Jill just pointed out, a lot of people like to mix what self esteem is along with what self confidence is and put them together as if they are the same thing, but they are not.

And that is the breakdown of the equation today. So, self esteem. What is self esteem? Self esteem is how you view yourself, the belief that you have in yourself. So, if I were to look at myself in the mirror and I didn't have a good self image, I would be tearing myself down. All of those negatives, that negative self talk, the limiting beliefs, the self doubt, that is how. That's your self esteem, is how you speak to yourself, how you view yourself. And then on the flip side of that, what is self confidence?

Self confidence are the things that you have done to prove it to yourself. So, that can be a negative connotation or a positive connotation. You could have a healthy self confidence or a not healthy self confidence, but it's the actions that you've taken, the actual physical things that you've done or mental hurdles that you've overcome to get to a place of confidence. 2 miles, I did that. I have evidence in my toolbox to know that I can do hard things in the future. On the other side of that coin, let's say I shied away from doing something because of the fear of that thing.

I have evidence that I am not capable of completing a hard task because I have not completed a similar hard task in my past. So my self confidence, if I've completed a marathon, is like, heck, yeah, I put myself through some grueling a** pain to get to the point where my confidence is pretty high in knowing that I could achieve that thing. Whereas if I didn't go for the marathon because I didn't have confidence in myself, then I'm constantly going to then be thinking of that thing that I didn't do and be rating myself over it, which, if I already don't have a positive self esteem, let's say.

God, these curls, they're not curls. That's wavy hair. That looks so stupid on you. You look awful. With that hairstyle mixed with self confidence that's also in the toilet. You can't do hard things. You've never stuck to a goal. You always quit on yourself. Then my self image, my overall self image is going to be pretty poor. Oh, I love these examples. See yourself in, in these examples. Here's the crazy part. So we work with tween and teen girls and we have these conversations with them because you all remember what it was like to be a tween and a teen in your middle school as you're transitioning into high school.

And if you don't pause, I'll let you finish just 1 second. Challenge yourself to remember what it was like. You did things for the first time. Your hormones were racing in a way that you didn't understand. You were growing. Your brain was doing things that you didn't recognize. So take yourself back, take a pause and put yourself back in your middle school shoes. 100%. So we teach our girls these type of conversations, and what's wild is last week we were a part, we are a part of a women's networking group, and we had a very similar conversation to this women who were in their thirties, their forties, their fifties, still struggling with their self image.

So what Mary just said, remember who you were back in middle school, in high school. And those feelings of angst and uneasiness, they still creep up as, as adults every day, every single day. And if we're not careful, if we don't have the skills, the confidence to work and chip away at our doubts, at our, at our limiting beliefs, whatever that is, the negative self talk. The negative self talk. We're never going, we're never going to walk into a room and believe that we belong in that room or go after our goals and achieve them, because we're going to constantly feel like how we felt when we were younger, when we didn't have the tools.

So it matters now more than ever for you to practice this work, first and foremost, so that you can then be an example for the younger generation to look at you as the role model. And this is whether you have kids or don't have kids. Absolutely. Because you have kids in and around your social circle or you're working with somebody who has kids who could glean this information from you and give it to their kids at home. So you being the best, brightest, most confident version of yourself, like Jill just said, not only matters for you, so you have a healthy self esteem, a healthy amount of self confidence, which leads to a healthy self image.

You have all these things then to be able to gift to other people in your life who will absolutely benefit from your way of being. And that's where the street smarts comes back in, because the way you show up in a room impacts and affects other people. So you need to know how you're showing up in other rooms in order to positively impact and affect other people, because that positive impact makes the entire world go round. And sometimes when we show up. Cause we woke up on the wrong side of the bed, we forget that we're impacting other people with our toxic waste.

So how do we work through that? How do we work through that in a healthy way while also showing up in a way that exudes healthy confidence? So, obviously, there's a key word there, and it's healthy. And so much of us are, so many of us are walking around this world with our blinders on and our head down, not knowing what we're putting out into the world and what other people are receiving. And that is our responsibility to control. And how do you control it? You're doing it right now because you're a part of this live.

You're watching us. You're gleaning this information from us, but you're a part of other conversations on this app as well. So it is about pouring back into you first, because when your cup is full, it overflows with goodness, hopefully. Goodness, hopefully, it's not full of that toxic waste that we were just talking about as well. If it is, then you get to be in choice around making a change. You do, because we don't want anybody sitting on the other side watching us thinking that they're less than or they're not enough.

You are so capable of doing incredible things, and we're here to champion you, to say, here is a very simple formula to go put into action. So what's one thing, one area, or one thing that you can think of where you can look at this equation and put it into practice? Because the more that you can put it into practice, the more you're going to yield different results. And then reflect, and then reflect and continue to do the work. Keep practicing this one easy thing to implement today, to help your self esteem are positive affirmations.

They might seem, as the kids are saying, cheugy nowadays. It might seem like a fever dream. Like, oh, sure, if I say this thing to myself over and over, it's gonna. It's gonna matter. It matters. Power of the tongue is huge. What you say to yourself absolutely matters, especially if it's done consistently over time. So positive affirmations, what are they? They are personal to you. I don't care. I have a thousand post it notes on my mirror. My new one is I would like to have thick and healthy hair, a thick and healthy bank account, thick and healthy friendships.

Like, that is my new body. That's my new affirmation. I have thick and health. I live a thick and healthy lifestyle, honey. Okay, so what are they come up with a few that are personal to you. No mistakes. Only lessons. Yep. Or only lessons. We love that one. Secondly, how do you help your self confidence? You keep the promises you make to yourself, so don't go by and far above what you think you can do. Make bite sized promises to yourself that you can tick off the list to prove to yourself that you can do it.

And if you can, start putting those two things in action and together, your self image is going to improve 100%. So think of yourself as a light. So what you say to yourself and how you say it, is it going to turn on a light? Because trust me, when you walk into a room full of dark, you can't see anything. But if one person turns on the light, then the whole room lights up. That is you. That is your self image. So go be the light, because we know you are. But I know. I get it. There's darkness sometimes.

And us three girls, we believe in you. Absolutely. We absolutely believe in you. This one's Delilah. She wanted to pop on. She wanted to be a part of the self image conversation. That's right. She wanted to show how cute her self image was. We'll put this equation in the community feed. We'd love to hear your feedback if you need help developing these things. We are totally your girls for this. A, because we struggle with it, but b, because we actively work on it and help other people work on it every single day.

Just look at that curl. There's just one hanging out there right on her. We're just working for it. Right on her chest hair. My chest hair. All right, everyone. Great. We'll see you all on the next episode of Toolbox talks next week. Same time. Tuesday, same place. Bye, everyone.