Ep 208 Are you Messing up Your Daughter with guest Girls Mentorship
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Sara: [00:00:00] Welcome to the bold goal crusher podcast for anyone looking to stop letting life get in the way and start crushing bold goals. I'm your host, Sara Mayer, and I'm thrilled to navigate this journey with you because it's time to start boldly achieving without working double time. So let's dive in.
Sara: Hey, bold goal crushers. I'm super excited today because we have repeat guests. We don't do that very often, but I know that you all loved the first episode with Jill and Mary from girls mentorship. And so we're bringing them back. If you didn't listen to the first episode, I encourage you to take a listen.
Sara: I think that was almost a year ago. Is that right?
Mary: Yeah. Maybe even a little
over.
Sara: Wow. All right. Jill Peterson and Mary Francis are the dynamic duo behind [00:01:00] Girls Mentorship, a personal growth and development company whose mission is to empower and uplift the next generation of young women with their vibrant personalities and extensive experience they have set out to create a lasting impact.
Sara: In August of 2020. Which is, I think, when we met. They were driven by their unwavering commitment to give back to their younger selves in a way they wished for, but never saw, and they created Girls Mentorship. Over the past three years, they've been able to encourage, engage with over 2, 400 girls. And their families having hosted over 40 workshops and two years worth of successful summer cat camps, their experience has been sought after for several keynote speeches, training sessions, and development opportunities for parents, coaches, and teachers alike.
Sara: I think you're going to love that. Jill and Mary [00:02:00] are. Lighting the way inspiring and empowering the next generation to embrace their potential and create lasting change. This is the breath of fresh air that you needed when you were a child, but also today, welcome Jill and Mary back to the show.
Sara: We're
Mary: excited to be here. Love being in your presence. You are such a stand for helping people. Not only just through the mud, the muck, but when they fall down, you are someone who reaches your hand back. So it's only fitting that we're in your presence and love being in and around your energy and what you're creating as well.
Mary: So
Jill: it's an honor to be a repeat guest. Thank you. Any chance for us to spend time with you.
Sara: Oh, and I have one of the coolest titles. I am Jill and Mary's biggest fan.
Mary: Hundred percent. You are. Just the confetti, the claps, the requests to be in reels, the ideas. You really are. And we [00:03:00] don't, we, we could not appreciate your fervor for what we're doing anymore because it's also personal to you.
Mary: You have a reason. And a lot of people have a reason why they support this work. But. You have been such a stand for us and a lot of people have a lot of lip service and you put your money where your mouth is on several different occasions. So we just, we love
Sara: you. Oh the feeling is mutual, but you did bring this up.
Sara: So I'm going to bring it up because we are recording. So Jill and Mary have this series where they have Mary pretend to be a downright rude teenager. So And I always thought that there should be an addition audition for Jill and Mary's family, because sometimes they're like pretending to be rude to an uncle.
Sara: So that never did happen. There was supposed to be a casting call and all these things. And I was going to [00:04:00] apply to be an aunt.
Mary: And
Jill: you know what, Sarah? We're now that you're bringing this back up. I feel like Mary and I recently said we need to go back to those fun tick tock days when we didn't know really what we were doing at the beginning to show up online.
Jill: We had so much fun doing that. Hey, we're never say never because we might be holding that casting call or we might just give you the gig. Oh,
Sara: that'd be great. Anyway, they're a hoot. If you don't follow Jill Mary on social media, you certainly should. But I want to talk today there. We are just, around the holidays, there's a lot going on and you.
Sara: are great fun, but you also are tackling a really serious topic. So I'd like to go back to your roots. Like how did you to connect and decide that this is what you wanted to do with girls mentorship? How did this all come about?
Mary: It's pretty crazy to, to [00:05:00] look back over the last three years of what we've been able to create, but realistically it's a lifetime worth of.
Mary: Of a mission I say it's for me 35 years in the making. And I just needed to find the right time in history to make it come to life and the right person in my life to help with that because Jill and I have very different stories and very different reasons as to why this mission is important. And on one fateful day, those reasons collided.
Mary: And it really did feel like fate because so many of us have been through something, right? We do something, we do work, we do things in our life because we've personally experienced or had grievances and then benefits of implementation, right? My story is. Littered with family trauma and domestic violence and drug abuse and alcohol abuse and having to work my way through the system [00:06:00] in terms of CPS and caseworkers and I won't get too far into that side of it.
Mary: But when you're. So deep in a situation for years and years of your life of dealing with that in terms of your family, you don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. You don't have a light bulb moment. That's I can see a business opportunity coming out of this. It really is
Sara: this will be useful later.
Mary: No. The question why it's you're constantly questioning why me, why this, is this ever going to end? Is this ever going to have a happy ending? And I don't want to paint a false picture that it's had a happy ending in any way, shape or form. I still have a lot of family trauma going on and unmended relationships and things that have been broken.
Mary: But at a certain point, yeah. The light came out, the sun came out from behind the clouds, and I was able to take the things that I've been through and work on myself. And Jill, in some alternate universe, was also [00:07:00] working on herself. So by the time that the two of us met, we had a good amount of personal growth and development underneath our belts.
Mary: And everyone around us was seemingly working with women in business, which did not light us up in any way, shape, or form. That fateful day came over, 2020 where we were sitting together and it was like, man, what would we have really done with this, the skills and tools that we've accumulated over the years when we were younger, when we were 10, even into our twenties, right?
Mary: And instead of just asking the question and letting it hang in the balance, we said, let's find out. And we put a program out there was the perfect time over COVID for girls to come together and learn about their leadership and how to communicate and not how to not follow or, fall down in the face of adversity.
Mary: And it was 4 weeks after 4 weeks, the amount of change that we saw in the group of girls that we had [00:08:00] was evident and there was no way we could logically not move on. Without taking this experience with us and really fleshing it out to see what it could be. And here we are three and a half years later, having worked with over, I think it's probably 25, 2600 girls at this point and their families in personal growth and development in self confidence and self awareness and self esteem.
Mary: And it's just been the ride of a lifetime. I just love it.
Sara: And I also think one of the things that I love about you too, is that you. You really are creating what you needed, but you're doing it in such a fun and light spirited way, I think about the demographic that you're working with and there's a cool factor there.
Sara: So how do you do that?
Jill: tHanks for calling us cool because we think we're cool too. But honestly, we know what it feels like. [00:09:00] to be a teen girl. All of the changes and how what we were inspired by and what we liked when we were younger. And as much as things have changed, they really do stay the same.
Jill: And there are incredible organizations out there, the Boys and Girls Club, Girl Scouts, but both Mary and I, coming together, we have our own unique experiences, both personally and professionally, and we've collected all sorts of things along the way to make us say, how do we stand out amongst these other brands and organizations?
Jill: And how do
Mary: we
Jill: stay true to who we are? Because really, at the core of the two of us, There are some foundational values that we have to live our life by. One of them being fun. The second one is we know that we've had a successful [00:10:00] day when we've laughed so hard that we cry. So how do we weave that into us being now adults leading the next generation to say, you can still have a good time.
Jill: You can still enjoy. Learning in a different way, but we're going to do it in a different way. And we're going to invite you in to say, if we only knew the things that we're teaching you, we would have been further faster. And now we get to be we get to reach our hands back and be the women that we once needed.
Jill: So in order for us to stand out, we have to stay true to ourselves. And that truly is authentic to the two of us and. We want it to be worth. Girls time and show the value in it. We don't want it to be another Charlie Brown experience where you come into a classroom, we're talking at you.
Jill: We want to be down in the [00:11:00] trenches with these kids. So what are the cool activities and experiences and pop culture that we're weaving into learning? Not tricking them around Hey, we're actually teaching you a lesson, but that it feels different enough for them to be like, that was really special.
Jill: I feel different. And I want to keep coming
Mary: back for more. It's a connection piece. It really is important for us because if you can recall being a teenager, those walls were up high, they were made of the strongest material building material, this side of the Mississippi. And kids don't BS. They can look straight in your eye and know if you're for them or against them.
Mary: And if you, if they have an inclination that you are against them, those walls are going to go even higher. And our whole point is to connect as quickly as possible because when we can connect, then we can earn trust. And when we have trust, then it's easier to teach these lessons and [00:12:00] have them understood.
Mary: Stand that we're teaching them because we want to see them succeed, not for any other reason.
Sara: And trust really is the foundation. I think back to, as I raised two foster girls or girls experiencing foster care and. They, like you said, they had walls up, but once they came down and once that trust was there, woo I had some real conversations and, one of my daughters had a lot of different things that she was exposed to.
Sara: And sometimes she'd tell me things and I was like, what? That really, that's, that really happened. But those would, those things would not have been shared without that trust. And so it's easier said than done sometimes. 100%. How do you get in the room and build that trust? By going
Mary: first. Yeah, by being really honest and super vulnerable the funny factor helps, the [00:13:00] fact that we're not super stuffy, the fact that we don't dress in a way that would indicate to them that we're of an authority figure because obviously when you're older than somebody or in a position of teaching them, they automatically think authority figure, so they're gonna be buttoned up, they're gonna be Cautious, they're going to be, a little bit more timely with the things that they say or watching what comes out of their mouth, we really do a good job of making sure they understand that they have a safe space with us to express themselves to say the things that are on their mind without feeling like they're going to get berated or be given a lecture and in that right away is just freeing for them in order to Freeing for them and freeing for us because we want, we don't want to work too hard to get it, but we do want to get it right away.
Mary: And we've, we just have a magic about us that allows us to do that, which is cool.
Sara: aNd also they [00:14:00] probably don't want to think that whatever they say to you is going back to their teacher or their parent or their, whoever their
Jill: No, absolutely. Yeah. It's it's letting them know that we are for them Unless their safety is, um, it's important for us to then share that their safety is or their their well being needs to also be looped in with their parents or teachers or whomever else.
Jill: But at the end of the day, we want to show them to that. They can trust us because maybe they've never been shown that. So if we can keep our word and really honor that, oh man, we crack them wide open.
Sara: And that I think is so important because many times teens and even adults have tried to trust somebody and then that trust was broken.
Sara: That becomes a whole different [00:15:00] ball of wax, but that causes issues with relationships with authority figures. And so you're, when you're working in a group, you're dealing with all the stuff that they've brought to the table from their lives, from their school lives. And. That has to be hard. Is that difficult?
Mary: It certainly can be. But I think it's also about setting the expectation right away. So level setting with them what our expectations are of them while also giving them that space to dump and relate. Because realistically, yes, everyone has their own individual circumstances, things they've been through.
Mary: But what we've noticed, what we've derived from working with as many girls as we've had, we have over the last three years is it's all under the guise of certain pillars. So girls are struggling majorly with confidence and maybe that shows up in different individual ways in their life. We never want to negate their personal experiences [00:16:00] or tell them that their personal experiences don't matter because they absolutely do.
Mary: We do a good job of then giving them like pillars to stand underneath. So that's a self confidence issue. That's an integrity issue. That's an empathy issue. And then they can start to see themselves in the girl across the circle from them. So different scenario, different type of whatever she went through, but she can understand that the feelings and emotions that the girl opposite from her are experiencing are the same.
Mary: So they don't necessarily need to come in with their baggage and their story to be able to relate to the girl right next to them if we set them up appropriately with the appropriate expectations.
Sara: Yeah, I think that's very well said. I don't know if it was a Tik Tok or a video, whatever I was watching, but you did an activity with the girls where they wrote something on a piece of paper and then put them in a [00:17:00] pile and then read.
Sara: Not knowing who they were, reading somebody else's statement. And that was really powerful in that video where the girls all realized that they had a lot more in common than they initially thought, but also I think it was them saying mean things to themselves. Was that what it was? Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that activity.
Jill: We do a lot of these activities, and this is again, teaching these girls. emotional literacy. So we need to teach them the vocabulary in order for them to start becoming their own science experiment on themselves. They need to be their best own science experiment. That's what we say. But it's also really important to Allow them to practice empathy and these other strengths that they might not be super strong in because they've never [00:18:00] got to experience it or no one's ever taught them or shown them something.
Jill: So being able to walk in someone else's shoes truly is. One of the most powerful things that we can give them in an experience so that it connects them, that no one sees that I'm better because my family lives in this house and drives this car, while you over there can't even order DoorDash at lunch, or whatever that is.
Jill: It really is taking Whatever labels or identities that we've walked in wearing and we, it just level sets us to say we really are the same. And if no one's ever shown you that we can go further faster, we're going to do that here, because you all are important. You all matter. No matter who's the loudest, no matter who's the quietest we all can rise together, but we got to do it by doing Or by, by [00:19:00] doing exercises and activities like this, but having conversations like this to show like, Oh my gosh, I didn't know that you also felt like this.
Jill: It was a different experience, but you felt the same thing that I felt. And we don't ever want another girl to feel like that. So we're going to be better for one another for ourselves so that, we can be the example for who's coming up behind
Mary: us.
Sara: Yeah, that was a really powerful video.
Sara: I, I don't remember how it all went down, but I remember thinking, wow, like they just shared, a very vulnerable part of them and put it in the pile. I don't remember how you divvied them out, but some of the things that they were saying to themselves were heartbreaking. Oh,
Mary: and we. We preface that there's also another game that we do around that in terms of write down all the things that you would say to yourself and it's easy.
Mary: Girls will fill [00:20:00] up a whole page, right? And then we have them turn to a partner and we say, would you say that to your partner? So the things you wrote about yourself, would you say that to someone else if it was about them? And that's when they get these wide eyes and these squeals of Oh my God, no, I can't do this.
Mary: That is so mean. But we get to turn the mirror back on them and say, but you're your own best friend. And you're saying these things about yourself and you don't find it mean? And it's a light bulb moment for them, and we fully realize that they're going to go on and say mean things about themselves. We know that.
Mary: I'm 35 years old, and I still say mean things about myself. But what we're doing is planting the seed for empathy. So it's empathy for self, and then that turns into empathy for others. Because, especially in 2023, we're so quick to judge. We're so quick to write a mean comment. We're so quick to see 10 seconds of somebody's 24 [00:21:00] hours.
Mary: and make a snap judgment without taking a step back and saying, I wonder what else they've been through. I wonder if they feel like I do. I wonder if they're just putting on a brave face and they really don't feel that confident on the inside. So by planting the seed for them to ask themselves those questions, it's gonna germinate and it's gonna grow and it's going to allow them to become a more empathetic person.
Mary: Over time, we're not looking for instant transformation. We realize that the work we do is more delayed gratification than anything else, but we'd so rather be the masonaries that are working on building the foundation and laying the cornerstone for these girls than to have them work on the, here's three quick fixes because we know that change doesn't last.
Sara: And it's so much easier when you start the work when you're younger. I think it's an ongoing thing. I've been, as adults, confidence is not an easy thing, building [00:22:00] confidence, showing empathy and hiding behind social media. So starting it early is the key lane that foundation and the awareness and opening that up as something that's okay.
Sara: I think you know this, but. Maybe not. I used to do one of my master's programs was counseling based, and I had to do counseling for military officers, and they did not want to be in counseling. That was before that was even common, and they would come in and be like, everything's great. But wait, you're getting a divorce.
Sara: How great is that?
Mary: What's going on? I don't want to
Jill: talk about my feelings. It's like a
Sara: veil. Yeah.
Mary: It's the meme where the dog's sitting at the table and everything is on fire around him and he says, this is fine. It's all fine. Yeah. How was
Sara: your day? Great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. How come you're in [00:23:00] detention tomorrow?
Sara: Oh. Teacher hates me. Somebody else's
Mary: fault. Yeah. And you raised such a great point because the older we get, the more concrete we get. So it's the saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You can. I highly refute that saying, but that dog needs to be willing to learn new tricks and open to changing.
Mary: Programs that have been installed on the hard drive of their brain for years and years. And when people don't want to change, you're not going to change them. So when we get them as kids, their brain is still developing. They can still have those moments where there's a twinkle in their eye and they're like, Oh my God.
Mary: That what you just said is gold and I can't believe I've never thought of it that way. It's been difficult in late twenties, early thirties to question everything as to why I respond the way I do, why I have certain reactions, why certain things piss me off. And Not only [00:24:00] has it been super confronting and difficult on the back end of that, it's been super confronting and difficult to undo those things and really actively work on installing new programming and new ways to respond and new ways to react and letting certain things go that I should not let bother me.
Mary: And I just question whether, again, it comes back to what would we have done with this work when we were 10, 11, 12? We would have been set up for success much earlier in life, and it's not to say that we wouldn't fail or we wouldn't have these scenarios where we feel bad or talk shit about ourselves.
Mary: We'd be able to pick ourselves up a lot faster, we'd be able to problem solve a lot easier, we'd be able to have better communication skills and ask for help a lot sooner. There's just some pitfalls we would have been able to avoid had we been in these conversations at that age.
Sara: I love that you bring up communication.
Sara: I think that this is a [00:25:00] huge problem, even today in companies where we spend a lot of time talking about people rather than talking to people. Like companies do this all the time. They'll talk about somebody's performance and how they're not doing great and blah, blah, blah. And yet nobody has ever had a conversation with that.
Sara: person. And I watched this a lot with my girls growing up. They would talk about all the people in their class. And I'd say did you ask her why she did that? Oh, you're in the headlights. Why would I do that? Yeah. And then one of them got brave enough to actually ask the bully, like, why do you do that?
Sara: And the bully's I don't know. I was just teasing. I thought it was funny. And that was the response from the
Mary: bully. And it probably
Jill: stopped the story that she was probably telling herself about the situation. It's incredible what can happen when you just ask the source.
Sara: Yeah. [00:26:00] And of course, my daughter was like, no, I don't think it's funny.
Sara: And she's but you laugh. And every time I thought we were. Joking. Yeah. She's no. Yeah. I would go home and cry over that. Oh, and then that changed their whole relationship, but it was so many conversations about her rather than just to her now that turned out well, it doesn't always turn out when you do confront the person or not even confront when you have a conversation with the person.
Sara: It doesn't always turn out like that, but sometimes a lot of things are. Misunderstandings or not intentional
Jill: 100 percent well, and that's what we like to teach our girls and really for the parents who are also tuning in. This is a great, this is a great conversation for you to lean in because you can start catching the way that she communicates at home and just course, correct.
Jill: Because sometimes we're not even aware [00:27:00] of what she's saying because we just want to be the space for her to get it off her chest. But when she's talking in we we all think this and we all felt this. It's just, it's catching it in the moment to say, I want you to speak from a place of I. How do you feel?
Jill: Tell me what it meant for you because we as just it's human nature like what someone says you're like Oh, yeah, I'm gonna catch on to that thing And then now we have this like invisible army that we all feel the same way and people can really Feel differently. We all have our own feelings.
Jill: So it's being able to Just catch the smallest of language to then have her really look within to say what does that mean to you? Because, great, your friends think that, and we don't want to group think. What do you individually think? And have her explain it [00:28:00] that way, and then for you as the parent, you can listen, you can ask more questions, you can empathize, or you can ask her, hey, are you willing for me to give you advice?
Jill: Because If she's not willing for you to give advice, she's going to get pissed and totally shut down. You also have to use your nonverbal cues in knowing how to support her in communicating effectively. But that's one of the biggest things that we hear all the time from our girls Is the we versus me and we have to teach them that it really comes from
Mary: you first parents.
Mary: You also need to check yourself and what you're doing because what we're also experiencing is Not to throw anybody under the bus, but there has been a huge rise in helicopter parents and snowplow parents. So there's also the instance where the girl comes home crying because the girl at school made a joke that she thought was funny and [00:29:00] there's a miscommunication and it gets labeled as bullying.
Mary: And that is not necessarily the case. Now, I don't want to take away anybody's experience again if you have been bullied, but there are clear indicators. As to what bullying is versus what conflict is, and they are two totally separate things. And when parents step in to then help their daughters navigate this situation, and I say help very loosely there, because a lot of it is when parents step in and try to they're robbing their girls of valuable opportunities to communicate and to conflict resolve in a healthy way.
Mary: Kids need to experience conflict so they can experience how to work through that conflict. And what we're seeing a lot of is opportunities getting taken from them to practice those skills because parents want to jump in and save the day. And that is not your place. It is not your [00:30:00] place. It is not your place.
Mary: It is not your place. And you might be thinking I'm the parent. Of course, it's my place. You're not raising kids. You're raising adults. And when you take those opportunities away from your kids, they're going to turn into adults that have conversations around the water cooler, about the person, not to the person, or they're going to be the person that gets talked about and not to, and they're not going to know how to advocate for themselves.
Mary: So you're doing them a ginormous. What's disservice when you jump into quote unquote, save the day.
Sara: Somebody once told me to always think about it like a work situation with your children. And I thought that was really interesting. If a coworker is having a problem, do you go above them to their boss and say, Hey, Bob is having a problem over here.
Sara: No, you wouldn't do that in a work situation. So it's not appropriate in a parent situation, obviously, unless. Somebody's in danger. One of the [00:31:00] other really cool things that you just reminded me of from my counseling days, both of you they told us to look for the we language and the other one was never to have Kleenex, never have Kleenex.
Sara: Available. What? Oh, tell us more. Have it somewhere else. And the reason is, if I were to start crying right now and be upset and you both reach for a Kleenex to hand me a Kleenex, you are telling me it's not okay to cry and I need to clean myself up. And maybe you're not comfortable with what I'm talking about.
Sara: So I got to get, suck it up and move on. And so in a counseling situation, which you guys aren't doing counseling, but when you hand somebody a Kleenex, you're telling them that. That road feeling, that feeling needs to be bottled up and put away. And when you let them ask for a Kleenex, then that's different.
Sara: You give them a Kleenex, [00:32:00] obviously, but letting them feel those feelings is so important. And I think that's so important with our children too. When we say things like get over it, suck it up. We got to go into the assembly now. And you don't look. Presentable. So straighten yourself up. We're not allowing them to have, to communicate how they're truly feeling, but we're also not allowing, we're not telling them that it's okay
Mary: to feel that way.
Mary: Gosh, and you raised such a great point because we don't know we're doing this either. We don't know that's what we're conveying. So quick little example. We do a lot of trend reports on our social media and we do a lot of pop culture references, just. Put it under the microscope, what could have been done different in this situation and we did something on the WNBA the other day and the Las Vegas Aces won their second championship.
Mary: The first time back to back champions have been made in 21 years. We understand. The NBA makes more money than the WNBA. There's a [00:33:00] constant push pull between that, but in the comments were vile, and it was just really tearing women down. Who cares? What are those guys doing on the court?
Mary: Isn't there something better to watch? Was anybody even there? And so I made this reel about it and I made those comments pop up through them. They're winning shot. So it was just this juxtaposition between this really happy moment and then these people tearing them down and someone commented on the reel and they were like, it said something about.
Mary: I'm sure they, there were paid actors in the seats. And so I clicked on this person's profile, and sure enough, he's a dad, and he's got a daughter. So my comment back was, man, your daughter sure is beautiful. I hope she doesn't want to play basketball when she grows up. And he said why would we hope that just because she wants to play basketball doesn't mean that the applause is going to be any less or more when she wants to play.
Mary: And I said, exactly. Your undertone is going to [00:34:00] impact her because girls in particular have a leg up on being able to read body language and. Facial expressions. So if she decides that she wants to play basketball and you keep your undertone, she's going to a feel like her decision is wrong and that she's not enough and that she doesn't measure up based on just the small snippet of a caption that you wrote underneath this video.
Mary: I can tell that's how you view women's sports. And if. You're viewing it that way. She's going to pick up on that and she's going to feel that way. So it no longer becomes about the sport. She's going to take those emotions on as an individual and feel like she doesn't measure up to you as her father, which leads into a whole other plethora of
Jill: problems.
Jill: A whole other
Sara: podcast. Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting because I think a lot of times we don't know what we're doing or the impact that we're creating. And I just love what you [00:35:00] ladies are doing, but it's not easy as a parent raising children and future adults. There, there is a lot to that. So I know that you are working on creating something to help parents in this space.
Sara: So can you tell me a little bit about that?
Jill: Yes, I I'm sorry. I was looking at Mary. We're excited because what we've done over the last three years has really been us being in person. We've coached, we've consulted, we've done all of these incredible things and we've yielded. These great results in Arizona.
Jill: That's where we're based. And what we know is that there's girls everywhere that need this message as well as the people that love them. So what we're doing now is taking our curriculum That we've tested that we know is effective and we're building out an online [00:36:00] program, not only for girls, but also for the people who love them, their parents, because Sarah, to your point, parents need help.
Jill: I'm a parent and I know that raising my kiddos, I can't do it alone. I need other people who have resources and who are experts that I can link arms with and raise these children right. So that's who Mary and I want to be for parents is to say that parents, your job is hard. And if we can lighten the load in some way, shape, or form for you to raise confident, resilient.
Jill: leaders and daughters in this world, in this day and age, we got you. Let's do it together. And we're really excited for what this will look like. So we're actively creating it right now behind the scenes and more to come come December and January of [00:37:00] 2024.
Mary: And really the more to come is. What we have taken, so Jill said very beautifully, we've really done a great job of coaching and gathering feedback over the last three years.
Mary: And something that I'll tie to this that I mentioned earlier is girls have their own unique issues and problems. But what we started to realize in our one to one model was that a lot of the problems fell under the same sort of topics. The self awareness, being able to empathize. being able to understand what integrity was or establish values for yourself.
Mary: So we're taking what we've done in a one to one model and turning it into our group coaching program. So we're going to be taking girls through a 12 week course of just baseline knowledge on how to equip them with these integral skills and tools that they are going to use for the rest of their life.
Mary: We want to establish them now. So they understand when they [00:38:00] can draw on their empathy muscle, when they can draw on their ability to speak up versus Maybe pull back a little bit draw on their ability to infuse their personality in a room a little bit more or to read the room. And we're also pairing that with a parent course, so parents can learn what we're teaching their girls alongside them, while not necessarily having to do it together if they don't want to, because some girls want it to be their own.
Mary: A lot of girls, especially in the 10 to 13 year old age range, are really just starting to learn who they are and what they like. And that identity comes with wanting to separate from mom and dad just a little bit. So there will be the opportunity to do it together if they want, but also separately. So mom then can support the work that her daughter is doing at home.
Mary: Because it has to be a united front, just like Jill said, [00:39:00] we need help as parents and we need to be able to speak the same language so the work and the money that we're putting towards it doesn't go down the drain if we're not actively practicing it at home
Sara: as well. And I think that's so important. I think, there's so many times where kids are learning something or experiencing something and parents aren't in the loop or the message that the parents are giving is different or not the same.
Sara: And so I love that you're doing it both for parents and for the girls and also sometimes. The girls just don't want to participate or the parent doesn't want to participate. So there's an opportunity there
Jill: as well. Yeah. We're excited. We're really excited to, to put it out there and see what magic can come from this because we know it's really special.
Sara: Yeah. So if somebody's listening today and they're like, okay, I need your help because I have no idea what's going on with [00:40:00] my child. How would they get in touch with you to learn more
Mary: about this? We. Love Instagram, Sarah indicated this earlier with some of the funny content that we put out there, but in being really mindful in terms of wanting to assist people and give as much free resources as we can, as much as our expertise away as we can, we have put out a ton of Information around these character strengths that we're really working on developing in the girls, so I would say first and foremost, head over to our website and download our free resource.
Mary: It's an incredible guide, if you will helping you derive these character strengths out of your daughter in certain situations. And being that we live in such a digital world, a lot of it is focused on how you would respond to things happening in online situations. So Snapchat is a really big pain point for a lot of parents.
Mary: TikTok is a really big pain point for [00:41:00] a lot of parents. In terms of how much time is spent on these devices and in these apps, yes. But also what's coming out of them contextually. Girls are feeling more left out, more shamed, more like they are getting cut from friendship groups more than ever. And this free resource that we have on our website right now is really just a baseline guide for you to be able to help her through these situations with certain character strengths.
Mary: So how does she practice being more empathetic if a friend has gotten left out of a group chat. How does she practice more self awareness if she's sat on her TikTok and scrolled for seven hours? So it's just it's not super complex. It's really an introduction to the work that we get to do under the guise of what we find the most important in terms of developing these particular character strengths.
Sara: I love it. So everyone jump over to their website. What's your website [00:42:00] address again?
Mary: We are at www. girlsmentorship. com. Perfect. Easy
Sara: peasy. Easy peasy. I like a straightforward link. We do too. No hidden messages there. You don't need to decipher the teen code to figure out where to go. That's a great thing.
Sara: Oh, Jill and Mary, I could talk to you all day, but I know that you are very busy and so I will let you go, but everyone should head on over to their Instagram and grab that freebie, especially now because you have something cool coming out. That's right,
Mary: baby. We do. And thank you, Sara, for always giving us just a platform to introduce what we're up to your audience because we know how many people are out there struggling with being a mom, with being a teen, and I fully believe that Jill and I were put on this planet to lead this work and to help people through what they're going through and it's just, it's such a pleasure that other people are [00:43:00] along for this ride to support the mission and vision of Girls Mentorship.
Mary: Girls Mentorship.
Sara: I love it. And I am your biggest fan, as you all know
Sara: Now.
Jill: You sure are. And we are yours. So thank you. We love doing this work alongside women like yourself. So thank you. Oh,
Sara: thanks. All right. Bold goal crushers. It's time to crush your goals and everything that gets in the way. So let's get to it.
Sara: Thank you for tuning into the bold goal crusher podcast where we crush goals and everything that gets in the way. I always love to support my community.
Sara: I look forward to seeing you crush your goals this year.
