5 SUBTLE WAYS WOMEN ARE SELF-SABOTAGING

I’m here for some straight talking today, folks. If I could write this whole blog post in CAPS and be sure it wouldn’t hurt your eyeballs, I would.

In all the work I’ve done with women of all ages and backgrounds over the last decade, there have been some emerging themes of self-sabotage that I have seen with my own eyes; some particular ways that I see brilliant women like you and I tripping ourselves up repeatedly over and over again.

Firstly, I want to lovingly say that this is the stuff of being human. These ways that we minimise ourselves, hand over power, get swept up and let fear lead the way – these things do not make you faulty – they make you human. The first step to being able to move beyond them into a truer sense of who you are is owning them; acknowledging that this stuff is real for you. That’s a biggie. So I want you to read this with an open mind, willing to see where it is that you might recognise yourself.

Let’s jump in. Below are five ways that I have repeatedly seen women sabotaging their own fulfilment and desires and holding back the progress of the sisterhood:

1)    Assuming there is not enough room for you.

Somewhere along the way, we have been fed the lie that when we see someone else doing something we would love to do that it automatically disqualifies us from doing it. Somewhere along the way we have picked up the message that there is not enough room for our version of the same thing. Somewhere along the way we have decided that if someone else is doing it, they now have the monopoly and they must be doing it better. In addition to that, we often fold in the double whammy lie that if we do decide to do something similar that people will think we are copying, we’ll be unlikable, talked about and thought of as a fraud or second rate. So we shut the idea down immediately, tuck in back in our safe zone, we retreat and let resentment and jealousy wash over us.

When we think like this, we are operating out of a scarcity mindset. This is the mindset that says that there is not enough space for us all to move around and be ourselves. This is the mindset that has us moving through the world believing that everything is a race, that competition is rife and that spaces for creativity, fulfilment and innovation are limited.

What we need are women who are willing to see past these lies, who give themselves permission to learn, try and grow and create environments for others to do the same. When we assume there is a limited amount of room for women to do the things that they are drawn to, we make the world smaller for ALL women when in reality, we have an unlimited amount of space to expand and stretch as we need to.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Acknowledge your own desires. Write them down and then tell a trusted friend. Do some light market research. Practice your craft or your offering. Arrange to meet up with someone who triggers jealousy or scarcity in you. Reach out to them and tell them how brilliantly they are doing.

2)    Recruiting other women to your pain.

The second way I see women self-sabotaging (and this is a biggie) is by recruiting other people to our pain. We’ve all been there on one side or the other. Wounded people tend to want to rally other people to their cause. If we have been wronged by another woman, misunderstood or failed – the temptation is to bring our people along for the ride. We want solidarity in our pain, to have an ally. Real alliance does not look like taking down the sisterhood because of our own fears or pain.

A few months ago I was faced with this. Someone I love had been hurt by another woman and they were in pain. They were so consumed with their own discomfort over it that they wanted me to join them. They really tried to get me in there in the pit with them. There was even a moment when they couldn’t see past themselves and tried to give me my own (personal) reason to join them in their annoyance, but I could see what was happening and I was able to call it out. My friend responded so bravely and quickly realised what she was doing. We talked it out so she felt understood and seen without adding more pain to the mix.

Don’t look for solidarity in bringing other women down. Stop trying to find someone to dislike the same people as you. One of the most powerful ways that patriarchy can thrive in our world today is when women turn on each other and recruit each other to sides. We can disagree, we can find fault, we can be hurt and hurt back, but let’s not try to grab each other in from the sidelines to join in our pain. This is the kind of sabotage that ripples out and breeds insecurity like a disease.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Give other women the benefit of the doubt when you hear things about them. Deal with your own pain. Redirect conversations that would tempt you to get involved in petty talk or that try to drag you into mutual disdain for someone. Challenge negative talk. Be obnoxiously supportive of other women.

 3)    We are not taking ourselves seriously.

Another subtle way I can see women self-sabotaging is by seriously underestimating themselves. I can see clearly where this comes from: if we take ourselves seriously, invest in things, put ourselves out there and it doesn’t work out – then we have egg on our face and everyone will know. If we stay in the shallow, never invest fully, never talk about our offerings with any intensity or authority then we stay safe. No one can shame us.  

The thing about not taking ourselves seriously is that we never move from that place. There is nowhere to go from here. We are stuck. And that stuck-ness will eventually spill out into resentment, frustration, grief and heartache. We will never realise our fuller potential. We will never fail and learn. We will never find the true fulfilment that comes from giving things our best shot and growing along the way.

If you are not investing in your own betterment, if you are shying away from opportunities that will bring discomfort, if you are downplaying what you do or hiding it away from the world – fulfilment is going to be a really hard reach for you. There is rarely any comfort to be found in growth. Take yourself seriously. Take your own growth and fulfilment seriously and watch how you evolve.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Invest in yourself; even something small. Take a course, join a facebook group, book into a workshop, tell people about your products or services. Eliminate minimising language from how you talk about what you do: “my little business” or “just my side-hustle”. (You can also grab my FREE 30 Days of Visibility Instagram prompts to help you talk about the things you have to offer, build community and communicate the ideas you have stored up).

4)    Making our minds up about what other people will pay for, engage with or buy.

We are SO good at assuming we know what people are thinking. We are EXCELLENT at making up whole scenarios and thought processes about how we will be perceived, what other people’s buying habits are, their budgets, their interests, aren’t we?

Some of us are so quick to write off our own ideas, sabotaging them before they get out of the gate that we have never let our ideas out into the air to breathe so they stay within us, choking us up. Let me tell you, there is a whole WORLD out there of people who need to hear what you have to say, who may need to hear things from your perspective to find healing, who may need to engage with your product to find a solution to their problems.

The ever-expanding ways that people are able to consume or connect with things in the world today means that we just cannot write off who might be interested in what we have to offer. If there is something burning in your soul that you feel drawn to put out into the world, you owe it to yourself to set it free. We cannot control who buys it or who can afford it or if it will sell – we simply have to be true to the thing that we are being called to do.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Do your research! Ask your target market about the things you are considering offering. Use social media to build community and offer value to the people in your orbit. GET SOME INFORMATION! Stay curious and open to possibilities. Stay true to your pricing. Don’t look around at what other people are charging for things (they could have major issues around this stuff as well!) – figure out what you want to offer, how much it costs you to make or produce and what you want to be paid and then ASK FOR IT!  

Finally… 

5)    Being consumed by perfectionism.

Oh my goodness, I get this one. I totally do. I am a recovering perfectionist. It is hard work. It has cost me a lot to be consumed with perfection and striving.

Let me give you a little example: Just this year I finally decided to turn my e-course ‘Down to Earth’ into a book to sell on my website. I spent ages going through the content, compiling it and converting it into a PDF. I agonised over fonts and settings and colours. Finally I let it out into the world and a bunch of people bought it! I made some money from it!

Then I went through it again recently and you know what – there’s a whole paragraph missing on one of the pages. A whole freaking paragraph, just sitting there, half written.

Two years ago this would have crippled me and kept me up at night – hopelessly obsessed that people would think I was a fraud, that I was unprofessional, that I wasn’t to be trusted (the drama of my inner critic is obscene). Two years ago me would have taken it down from my website right away and had it redone and made a big public apology to all my readers and resent it to them again.

This time, I just cringed and then laughed. Of course there was a mistake in it! It was 80 pages long and I’m not a professional editor. It’s one tiny paragraph and it doesn’t take anything away from the overall goodness of the book. It’s still on my website, still for sale, in all it’s imperfect glory.  

If you are waiting around for the perfect website, perfect branding, perfect whatever before even dipping your toe in the waters of the thing you want to do then can I please encourage you to stop and just start. This perfectionism is a guise for hiding. This need to get everything just ‘so’ before you present it to the world is wasting your precious life minutes and is just fear showing up in a different outfit.

SOME WAYS WE CAN COUNTERACT THIS:

Set yourself deadlines for doing things and STICK TO THEM! No more pushing back timings because of polishing things endlessly. If something feels too big and you’re really not ready, find a smaller way to get it out there in the time being. Go for good enough when you can. Don’t be a slave to an algorithm. Try and inject some spontaneity into your day. Look back and reflect on how far you have come. Make a point to celebrate small milestones. Remember your own humanity and the humanity of others. Give yourself a freaking break.

Do you see yourself in here anywhere? Is there a part of you that might be self-sabotaging and wants to move through it? Leave me a comment and let’s chat it out. I am SO here for women who want to move through some of these sabotaging behaviours and mindsets. I need these reminders in my life too. It is not easy to look this stuff in the eye and own it but we desperately need women in our world who know how to evolve with grace and dignity. We need women in the world who can see their own BS and decide that they are done with it and ready to shed the skin they are in and become truer versions of themselves.

ON BEING A GOOD INFLUENCE(R)

I remember as an older child having conversations with my mum about influence: what kind of influence was I on my friends? What kind of influence did they have on me? That kind of thing. Maybe she saw an early rebellious streak in me. Or maybe she knew that influence was powerful – that our actions, our movements, decisions have the weight and the power to impact others; a pretty big concept to hold onto as a child but has stood me in good stead (except for my teenage years where influence was waylaid, and I got into my fair share of teenage mischief). So the idea of influence has been a strong thread in my life and I attribute my deep sense of responsibility (holler to all my enneagram ones out there) to be a good influence to those early conversations.

And now that word seems to be pretty popular, ringing in my ears when I dive into the world of social media. Some people are using it as their job description, PR’s and Marketing Teams are including it as a significant part of their campaign plans and strategies and I’m interested in having a conversation about what it really means – what mantle we are giving this term of being ‘an influencer’…

As most thorough blog post researchers do (!), I asked my friends on Instagram what the term ‘Influencer’ meant to them and the response was compelling.

Answers ranged from:

“A synonym for leader”

“Someone with the power to sway you for good or bad in your mindset or actions”

“Someone who makes an impact – positive or negative”

“Someone who lives in such a way that others want to imitate and become more like”

“Someone who inspires me to more, who’s further along than I am”

“Someone that changes your thoughts/viewpoints and is then followed by action”

 To this:

“Smart use of our covetousness by those with something to sell/advertise”

“Instagram accounts where staged pictures are tagged with #ad or #gifted. Insincere posts”

“Someone who gets paid to tell you something is good – which makes me want to do the opposite”

“Someone with high social media numbers meaning they can get paid to promote other peoples’ goods”

“A manipulator”

“An advertiser”

“Someone who influences people to buy more shit they don’t need”

“People who will happily sell a lifestyle they won’t fund themselves”

“Often someone disingenuous”

“Someone that gets paid to encourage others to buy a product”

“Someone with a large following that is approached by brands to create ads in exchange for free products”

“*A bunch of eyeroll emojis*”

“Consumerism”

“Someone that uses social media to make money by getting people to buy things they don’t need”

“Parasites”

“Unauthentic”

“Wankers”

 (folks, tell me how you really feel though…)

“Someone trying to sell me something”

“People who get freebies on Insta”

“Desperate bids for attention”

“Someone who is famous on social media for doing very little” 

YIKES. I had almost 100 replies – 20% of them pointing towards the diplomatic, thoughtful meaning of the word and 80% of them with a pretty negative view of what this term now seems to represent in society.

 And so, I want to talk about that. I want to open up the conversation of ‘influence’ and share a little bit of my own thoughts around it, what it means for women and see if maybe we can reclaim this word back to its positive potency.

I need to caveat that this isn’t a conversation that is intended to shame anyone. That’s never my goal – shame never really produces any change, only mistrust and fear. And it’s not a conversation about whether doing sponsored or gifted content on social media is bad or good. I am super proud of being able to use my own platforms to share about brands that I believe in – that I know contribute to the good in the world. This conversation for me is about reminding myself and the women I know and love that our influence is important and worth our intentionality.

What’s interesting to me is that when it comes to this online ‘influencer’ culture, it is mostly women who are drawn in. Of course, there are men who also have large followings and engage with campaigns and ads, but by and large the influencer marketing world is a female-powered machine (women as influencers and consumers of influencer content) and lately I’ve been wondering if there are undertones of patriarchal control that contribute to it being this way...

Bear with me.

Recently I have been deep diving into the history of women’s rights and the suffrage movement and am so moved by how relentlessly women fought for a seat at the table, for their voices to be considered worthy in society. They broke rules (and windows), were imprisoned and lost pretty much everything they had to see that women coming behind them would have more autonomy, more ability to be their truest selves. When I think about the here and now, and the rise of women wanting grow followings, become influencers and be noticed by brands, I wonder if we still have some heavy mindset shifting to do around this long history of women not being seen and heard and the patriarchal hangovers that we are maybe unknowingly tethered to.

Maybe some of us are still stuck in the belief that we must clamber to be noticed, or seek the approval of others to be deemed valuable or to belong. After all, It’s only been 100 years – just two generations - since women were able to even vote on what kind of society they’d like to live in – that mindset can take a while to run out.

Maybe some of us believe that the only way for women to make money AND be caregivers is to sell other peoples’ stuff on our social media platforms. Maybe the patriarchal hangover here is that we still feel nervous about not having enough money of our own or we haven’t taken control of our own finances and think that this will do. Maybe the fact that we still aren’t getting paid equal to our male counterparts makes us feel like this outlet gives us at least some power. Maybe it’s because we are only just beginning to see a rise in women holding positions of power or women making sustainable incomes from their own ideas. Maybe because selling our own ideas, products and innovative thinking still feels icky and we’d rather hide behind someone else’s stuff even if we don’t fully believe in them.

Maybe some of us are still telling ourselves that there is some sort of holy grail of validation that will come when we have X amount of followers or Y amount of attention. Maybe we are just afraid to act like we are free at all because to be free to be who you really are is scary and vulnerable and sometimes it feels safer to not even imagine the possibility.

What I would love for us all to know, my friends, is that we are emancipated. We are more free than we have ever been to contribute to the world on our own terms and the table is long and wide and extendable so we can all fit in. All of us.

What I’d love for us to know is that our ideas, our dreams, our creativity and desires are important and worth exploring and sharing. In fact, we desperately need your amazing ideas, your innovative thinking, your empathy, your fierceness, your opinions, your entrepreneurial prowess. We need it because there are problems to solve here on this planet and you might have the answers. Yes, you.

We need it because the way things have been going isn’t really working out too well for humanity and we don’t have time for you to hide your brilliance behind ads and consumerism and the false belief that likes and follows is what makes your life influential. We need to hear the thoughts and ideas of how women are going to make the world better, more tolerant, more creative, more resilient, more beautiful.

I know that you have desires for your life and for the world that you haven’t even admitted to yourself yet because you’re scared - but we need them. We need women that are awake to their truest selves, their deepest desires. Truth be told, I’m not sure I really know anyone whose deepest desire is to share ads for Babybel on their Instagram and believe it to be a meaningful contribution.

“But MEL!” I hear you say. “What if being an ‘influencer’ allows me to stay at home with my kids and that’s what I want to do”?

To that I say – amazing. Being a mother is one of the hardest roles I’ve ever taken on – it is no easy option and the internet has opened up a wonderful community of support for mothers to feel less alone. Brands and PR companies know how much time mothers spend on the internet sharing so I understand that the lure to earn money this way is real. But please, for your own sake, don’t let it be something you hide behind. Don’t put off throwing your own hat in the ring and continue to invest more of your precious time on other peoples ideas than the ones buried deep in your own soul. Don’t believe the lie that this is the only thing you can do to make money or be influential.

Finally, we need to reclaim influence so we can have conversations with our daughters and the young women in our lives about what matters because they need to see our bravery too. They need to know that their dreams and desires and ideas and voices matter as well. They need something to aspire to that has weight to it, that brings light to dark places in the world. I want to be able to tell my daughter about the amazing women in my life that are doing things that light up their souls. I want to have endless amount of role models to point my daughter to and say – “Look what she did! You can do amazing things too!”. I want to be able to divert her attention from the influence of perceived perfection, the numbers game, the popularity contest and endless consumerism and show her a world of women propelling each other forward with their big dreams and big hearts for goodness to reign in the world. I want to be able to hand over to her a legacy of women that are relentless in their pursuit of purpose and passion.

And so we need to continue to reclaim influence; to amplify the voices of women who are putting their bravest selves into the world with their own ideas and voices – to champion their influence. Let’s shine a torch on the important ways that women are shaping the now and changing the future and channel our energy into something that lasts longer than a current trend could ever offer.

We need to do that because we need to be able to see and to show what is possible – how our influence can have impact. We need to support women who are courageous enough to put their heads and ideas above the parapet because when they get brave it should give us license to as well. Seeing someone in their stride should set us alight and fuel us to do the same – not cripple us with comparison or envy. We have work to do ladies: fears to manage, ideas to explore, problems to solve, dreams to make space for, legacies to shape and there is so much more room here for your influence than you can ever imagine.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA RAT RACE & THE POWER WE GIVE AWAY

It’s a bit of a beast, this Internet age isn’t it? The endless opportunities at our fingertips. I get so excited by it; full of ideas, about the innovation and connection potential it holds.

But it’s also exhausting, right? I can’t be the only one that finds it exhausting. I’ve sat on this blog post for approximately three months because I find the social media exhausting and I kept coming back to this piece with more to say.

I counted recently that there are no less than 15 ways that people can contact or get a hold of me online – through DM’s, tweets, emails, whatsapp, comments etc. That feels kinda crazy and a long way from waiting on letters arriving from penpals or going to the cupboard under the stairs to ring the home phone of a school mate and having to go through small talk with their mum before you got passed the phone.

A couple of months ago I had a bit of a tough conversation with a friend. She shared how she had noticed that I had responded to lots of comments on one of my Instagram posts but had waited days for a reply to her text message about lunch. That stung. It stung because it was true and pretty hard to face. A message from a dearly loved friend had got lost in the frenzy of engagement online.  

And so here is where it can turn into a bit of a beast.  How can we ever keep up with this relentless style of communication? How can we be available to so many people in this many ways and expect to have healthy relationships and boundaries? I continue to ask this of myself as I gradually loosen my grip on social media.

I want to write about this sensitively, because I am aware that how people use social media is a touchy one. We all use it or consume it for different reasons. Some people use it to promote their services, businesses and some simply to keep in touch or maybe even to feel less alone in a relentless day of stay at home parenting. Maybe a mix of all of those things. I’m not the internet police, but I do wonder if there might be room for a conversation, particularly amongst women of the blogging/’influencer’ world, about how the constant rat race of posting, polling and sharing might be burning people out and moving them away from being tuned into their own decision making and desires at a pretty fast rate.

My thinking around it these days is this: if we are continually putting out content on our social media, IG, stories, chats, blog, youtube or wherever else we like – we are inviting people to engage; which can be wonderful and supportive and will maybe open doors to meeting new people, building important business connections etc. but the offshoot to that; the payment for those things is that when we invite people to engage, we are most likely going to feel a need to respond to that engagement. After all, it is social media.

Here’s what I’m seeing happening with bloggers and those trying to build a following: we post something - we invite engagement, and then we are burnt out by having to keep up with that engagement which we now feel chained to so we can keep algorithms in our favour and likes rolling in and new followers clicking through and for what? What is the ultimate goal here? Is this really the culture we are striving for? One where we miss the messages of our friends because we need to post at certain high traffic time because the algorithm is the boss of our lives? Doesn’t it seem a bit like we are pushing or striving a bit too much? And to what end? What is the holy grail of all this posting and engagement? How do we really measure what impact our voices, our sharing, our engagement has? Surely it’s human connection?

Rob Bell did an incredible podcast series that has been so timely for me to listen to as I have been putting together (and avoiding publishing) this post. In it he talks about this film maker who made a movie that was met with less than favourable box office stats. He said about his film “our metric for success is off. There are no reliable statistics for hearts opened or wounds healed”. He had made work that he loved. He knew it was good. He felt it in his bones so he knew that statistics or likes were never going to be a true measure of its impact. 

You see, there are so many voices, images, people trying to be heard across so many platforms and I think it would be fair to say that we all hoping to be seen in some way; even if your interaction with social media is a fairly relaxed one.

And wanting to share or to be seen/heard isn’t a bad thing, absolutely not. It’s a human thing – the inner wiring we all have to connect and share. “Hey, look at this picture of how cute my kid is in the snow!” “I really love these shoes, aren’t they awesome?” "This video is so funny, I just had to share!" “This issue is so awful, will you care about it with me?” We are all searching for that ‘me too’ moment - to feel a bit more understood and known.

Lately though I’ve been finding that social media has become so noisy, and I wonder how much of that noise is actually adding value to our lives; to my life. I wonder if a lot of what is being put out there is more about the need to keep up with regular relevant posting and the fear of being forgotten about rather than wanting to add value; to really connect.

I’m also intrigued about how we talk when we haven’t been present online as much as usual. I observe amazing women (especially) come onto instagram stories and apologise for not being ‘around’ because they have been busy with sick kids/work/general life etc. I don’t think we say it because we feel so important that we need to explain our absence, but there is an underlying concern that we need to justify living our life outside of social media. How about we make a pact of no more apologising to people behind screens for not being on your screen. It’s all backwards and no one – whether you have 20 or 20 000 followers, should ever apologise for having a life. I think women could do with apologising less for unnecessary things in general too.

It’s amazing to have a community of people to connect with online, but you also don’t owe anyone anything – you know that right? You don’t owe anyone on the internet an update on your day, or really even a response to what you’ve shared. I think the more we give ourselves permission to strive less with our online lives, the more we can give that permission to others and slow this train down a little. There is no online finish line to hustle towards; no magic amount of followers to gain before life becomes easy and we are exempt from the mundane. That day isn’t coming and we need to stop apologising for being present in other areas of our lives. Don’t let the pace of others dictate your pace.  

That isn’t to say that we should share less – that’s where I want to be clear.  The internet and social media has been great for women in particular. Mothers who feel less alone because of online communities they have formed while the demands of parenting could keep them isolated; women in business who can promote their work and ideas on their own terms. It’s incredible and worth celebrating for that. What women have to say need to be heard – their space needs to be taken up. That’s not what this is about…

What I’m figuring out is that I only want to bring something to the table that adds value, not noise. It won’t add value for everyone (How remarkable! Not everyone is going to like me or what I bring to the table!), but I want to be proud of what I share, to feel good about it for myself, knowing that it aligns to my values and is either likely to serve someone else or lead to some sort of real-life moment of connection. That’s what I’m really after. That’s the legacy of social media usage I want to have.

Here’s why I think we should claim back our social media power:

1)  We are not supposed to be able to be all things in all places. We have limitations and they are healthy and important and actually freeing. Listen to your mind, your inner voice, your body. Are you feeling pressured, rushed, overwhelmed, left behind by this narrative that you should be doing/sharing more online? Your mind and body may be telling you that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Listen to it carefully.

2)  Taking your time and adding value means that you can carve out a unique space for yourself online; one that feels like it has purpose and intention and actually attracts or serves the people you need it to, particularly if you are a business owner or you offer services. Creativity is easily clouded by the idea of having to do lots of things in order to be seen and it often leads to doing nothing at all. Do something well; be intent on becoming an expert or a go-to person on something that you really love or feel passionately about. Give that your focus and watch your creativity flourish.

3)  We could all do with being a little less ‘influenced’. I wonder how many of us realise how much we have become consumers of other peoples ideas, likes, taste and style instead of really getting to know ourselves or being realistic about our own lives. What might you need to unfollow or unsubscribe from to be able to be unstuck from other people’s version of enough or of happiness? (for me, it was unfollowing a lot of beautiful but out-of-my-price-range children’s clothing accounts – heaven help us all - I cannot afford to buy cashmere onesies that will forever be stained orange by a toddler who is very wilful about her orange peeling autonomy). What do you need to do to protect this space for yourself?

4)  Finally – I’ve been realising just how much social media is muting our connection to our own true desires. I am actually starting to think that the poll feature on Instagram/Facebook is probably the work of the patriarchy. Countless times I have seen women use this poll feature to ask the opinions of perfect strangers on everything from what kind make up look they should do, what they should talk about on stories, what kind of blog posts they should write and what they should wear. No way. Women did not die fighting for us to get the vote so you could be ruled by other peoples opinions on an instagram poll. Asking opinions for things like style, writing and sharing ideas should NEVER come from anyone else but you. Nobody. For years women have been told that they need to seek advice and counsel outside of themselves, moving them away from their own inner wisdom and desires and it’s just not right. Step away from the poll feature ladies. Write what YOU want to write (your people are out there – the people who love what you write and want to connect with your ideas). Wear what YOU want to wear. Create content that YOU are proud of.

Let's claim back our power and resolve to add value. Stick it to the man and stick it to the poll feature.

Maybe that would have been a snappier title?

INTRODUCING... ASSEMBLY SESSIONS

If you've been around this space for a while you will know that for the last year and a half I have been organising a new venture: Assembly Gatherings. These gatherings have been really significant for me - a real medley of all the things I love to do (outside of my work and home life) - organise, bring ideas to life, connect amazing women, help make spaces beautiful, get creative and work with talented creative women. EAT.

Almost 100 women have been part of Assembly Gatherings in the last 18 months and I'm really grateful for how it has developed and grown. This is largely because of the women that attend. They are openhearted and warm and they truly get it. 

At the beginning of the year I asked these women for their feedback - to help me to shape the future of Assembly because I felt like it was becoming an important feature in my life and in some of theirs and I want it to serve us all well. Assembly, above all the beautiful food, styling and workshops, is about giving women essential space to meet kindred creative spirits, to collaborate and learn. And the feedback was that they wanted more of that - more opportunities to truly connect - to really dig in and share. 

I don't know about you but my creativity needs midwifery. There is not a creative process that I've been through - whether launching a blog, a charity project, an online course, or any other idea that I haven't needed the advice, support and cheering on of other women. I think a lot of us realise we need this. We aren't made to work in silos, slogging it out on our own. We are made for creativity in community - to be around women who can help us birth our ideas by listening, advising, helping and sharing.  

All of this to say that I want to tell you what's next for Assembly!

Assembly Sessions are smaller (25 people max), more intimate events for women really wanting to dig into their creative space and find supportive community. They are more frequent than our big, banquet all-day style Gatherings but give more space for sharing and getting to know other like-minded women. Sessions are where we dig in, Gatherings are where we celebrate. 

Assembly Sessions will run four times a year, will be stripped back but have the same beautiful Assembly identity of food and gathering in beautiful spaces and will be focused on both the inner work of being a creative and some of the practical skills that can see our pursuits flourish.  These are not business networks or formal forums - these are safe spaces for soulful creatives to bring out the best in each other.

I'm excited to tell you that our first Assembly Session will be happening next month! Together we are going to unpack the some of the things that hold us back in our creative lives - either in our professions, hobbies or other creative pursuits. This is such an important topic to shine a light on because every single one of us have fears and niggling voices of criticism in our heads that we allow to dictate how we show up in the world. This Session is going to help us manage this and unearth the tools we already have to be brave and wise.

Here are more details: 

SESSION 1
'FACE THE FEAR - DO IT ANYWAY' 

SATURDAY, 3RD MARCH  2pm - 6pm (late lunch included)
COST: £50

BLICK STUDIOS - MALONE ROAD, BELFAST
 

SESSION INCLUDES:

+ Lavish late lunch buffet banquet by the incredible Lorna, from Tacacucina.  

+ Breathing & body connection exercises with yoga teacher Oonagh Todd.

+ Reflective workshop led by me: Unpacking the voices that hold you back & taming the inner critic. Finding and connecting to your own true voice of wisdom. 

+ We will be led in reflection and visualisation exercises and we will have the opportunity to unpack our thoughts around these important areas of our creative lives through journalling and group discussion. Journals and other goodies provided!
 

THIS SESSION IS FOR YOU IF:

+ you want to feel more empowered in your creative journey. 

+ you are tired of letting fear and negative voices in your head hold you back from flourishing.

+ you feel stuck or unsure if your contributions are worth anything in the creative realm.

+ you want to reconnect to the calm wisdom that you have inside you.

+ you desire to make space for nourishing your body and soul.

+ you want to be inspired by & connected to other like-minded women.

If any of these things are true for you - this is your time!

I have a real feeling that this is the beginning of seeing women support and cheer each other on each other like never before - of being generous with each other, modelling a new way of being creative in community. I would so love you to be a part of this so if you have any questions, please let me know. Don't forget - spaces are limited (quite a few places have already gone!) so don't wait around - our last event sold out within 12 hours...

Can't wait to see you there!