In some of our many African cultures, confidence can be confused with boldness. It can be seen as disrespect or poor manners. This is not confidence. Confidence is something we hold within ourselves. It means we value ourselves, our talents and our potential. It means we believe that we can make a difference through our […]
Category Archives: Toolkit 4 – Developing Young Women’s Leadership Through Youth Work
Confidence is about believing that you are valuable, worthwhile, and capable and we thought about this in our African contexts in the previous section. This can empower young women to act courageously and face challenges head-on. While there are some aspects of confidence that young women don’t have any control over, a huge part of […]
In our African cultures, we can be too scared of failure to start. We worry about wasting money. We worry about what others will think or say behind our backs. It takes confidence to take a risk. Can we become confident enough to fail? Michael Jordan is one of the most famous and successful basketball […]
“It’s easy to see in hindsight” is a phrase we may be familiar with. We can look back at things that have happened and realise that we made a mistake, or tell ourselves that we would have done it differently with the knowledge we have now. This can be in response to fixing something that […]
African women and girls are often praised for our resilience, but how often is this true resilience, and how often is it a lack of choice that forces us to persevere when we really need to rest, reflect, and recuperate? Earlier we read how “resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties”. And our […]
What is resilience? Task: Tick below the phrases you believe define resilience Never tries to do anything because it is too hard Is happy to stand up in front of others and give a presentation When they fall over, they get back up again Gives up if they find something difficult Responds to challenges and […]
Procrastination burdens the young women we work with, and it’s an important topic to discuss and help your mentee find tools to address. Have you ever heard the saying: “If you eat a live frog every morning, nothing worse can happen to both of you for the rest of the day”? Well, the “eat the […]
Older generations, or those from more traditional backgrounds, may think that stress is a luxury for African women and girls. They have always worked hard and their mothers and grandmothers worked hard. Hard work is a fact of life. The fact that many of the young women and girls we work with face adversity doesn’t […]
Resilience is a positive trait that can help you to carry on when you find things difficult. However, extreme resilience can sometimes persuade a person to carry on when this will have a damaging impact on them. For example, a runner competing in a race might develop an injury. Extreme resilience would persuade them to […]
What does wellbeing mean? What is emotional wellbeing? Wellbeing refers to the condition of being content and happy in life. It refers to the quality of one’s life or lifestyle. There are many aspects of wellbeing: physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Emotional wellbeing is how we deal with both the positive emotions, such as happiness, […]