Confidence
Our Inspirations
March 8, 2020
Happy International Women’s Day!
Women in Work is all about empowerment!
What a perfect day to talk about our personal inspirations and the women who continue
to encourage us to be the best we can. There
are so many individuals who deserve recognition today, but these are some of the main ones that inspire us!
Elena Cossar (President); Emma Watson
‘If you want to run
for prime minister, you can. If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your
armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats done day, heels the next. These things
are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people
wouldn’t get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what
they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.
Women should feel free. ‘’- Emma Watson
I find Emma Watson incredibly
inspiring, she was appointed as a UN Women Goodwill ambassador
in 2014, working hard for a campaign initiated by the UN called HeForShe
calling for the advancement of gender equality, encouraging both genders to
partake as agents of change and take action against negative stereotypes and
behaviors. What I love about Emma Watson is that she actively stands up for
her beliefs and is pushing for a change that is so important for feminism and
men and women as a whole! She highlights that it is not about superficial issues
and about empowerment and equality.
Lucie Davies (vice president); Princess Diana is my inspiration purely down to
her charity work- she helped so many- I saw a website that said that she did charity
work for sick children, the banning of landmines and for raising awareness
about those affected by cancer, HIV/AIDS and mental illness, and I really want
a career in the future that will enable me to help people grow and develop and I
think her work breaking barriers by shaking hands with people with aids without
gloves just broke down so many barriers and worried around the idea of
spreading aids at the time and I think that was amazing!
A good quote of hers is ‘’Everyone
needs to be valued. Everyone has the potential to give something back.’’ Which I
really value because I think society would be much better if we all looked out
for each other and did more acts of kindness!
Kerry Wilson (Events Manager); Katherine Johnson
“We needed to be assertive as
women in those days - assertive and aggressive - and the degree to which we had
to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.” -Katherine Johnson
Katherine
Johnson is an inspirational woman. In 1953, Katherine joined NASA as what was
then called a human computer. She was part of the National Advisory Committee
for Aeronautics.
Katherine’s
career had such in impact in history. In 1961 Kathrine’s calculations mapped
the trajectory of the first American in space. Also in 1970, the Apollo 13 era,
Katherine worked on emergency procedures that were vital when part of the main
spacecraft exploded. The astronauts had to use the lunar module as a lifeboat to
return to Earth. Katherine’s Math skills also came into action on the space
shuttle plans for Mars missions.
Katherine
Johnson accomplished so much in her career in-spite of discrimination her and
her colleges faced. The release of the movie “Hidden Figures” educated many on
the important action she implicated to sexism and racism in science and
engineering at NASA.
Katherine recently passed but will always stay a celebration
in the hearts of millions.
Lily Mckenna (Treasurer); Grace Beverly-
A woman who started her career
through Youtube whilst undertaking a degree at Oxford, to achieving a first-class degree whilst simultaneously being the CEO and founder of Two multimillion-pound businesses; Tala, which is thought to be worth £6.7billion within the
next 5 years; and B_nd. Grace has a passion for making her products ethically
sources, with everything being made vegan, cruelty-free and sustainable. Her
hard work and commitment inspires me to believe if you put your mind to it,
you can achieve anything.
We hope you all feel empowered today and continue working towards your goals and dreams!
The Women in Work Committee. x
The Confidence Code
October 21, 2019
Hi Ladies,
As you all probably know our aim at ‘Women in Work’ is to encourage strong,
confident women to learn the skills to reach their career goals and stride
above any limitations they may face while doing so. While our conferences and
events allow convocations and networking opportunities to take place, we also
want a strong social media presence to keep empowering you all every day during
this academic year. One segment of this is our blog, each month, along with
other posts, we aim to produce a book review for books aimed at all the great
things we stand for as a society. We hope these reviews will inspire you to
take a look at these books and others to motivate you to achieve all your goals
whether they be academic or not.
So this academic year we are kicking things off with a review of ‘The
Confidence Code’ by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.[1]
I’ve decided to start with this book as it tries to explore the science behind
confidence and uses examples of successful woman and science experiments to try
and get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding confidence and have we can
fully achieve it. Spoiler alert: it seems to be all down to our perceptions of
ourselves rather than science, however, like confidence, self-esteem is also
rather hard to just achieve. For this reason, I really liked all the background
research and personal antidotes throughout the book as I feel reading real
examples motivates us and shows us that anyone can achieve a strong self-esteem
and therefore grasp the elusive skill of confidence.
The book starts out by saying, ‘Life on confidence can be a remarkable
thing’.[2] This
introduction highlights how worthwhile working on confidence can be in the long
term and all the amazing things having a bit of confidence can achieve. They
support these claims by giving examples of strong women such as Malala
Yousafzai, who had the confidence to keep fighting for her rights for her
education.
The book then goes on to look at a different aspect of confidence. First
by analysing current science experiments on the topic of brain activity and
confidence and comparing these to strong influential women to come to
conclusions on how confidence can be achieved and developed.
Quite a lot of the points made throughout the book compare female brains
and personalities to that of men. Personally, I did not enjoy all these
comparison as it seemed to play into conventional stereotypes of women.
Furthermore, I feel that both women and men struggle with confidence so
these simple and general comparisons aren’t needed to motivate the women
reading this book. However, the book does allow a glimpse into society and the
intergradient ideas about the genders which a lot of industries and careers
have and this gives the reader a lot more motivation to fight these
stereotypes.
Overall, I feel it is important to recognise how society is conditioned
to believe these between men and women so we can fight it and break glass
ceilings. However, this book spends a whole chapter comparing men and women
with included stats and figures, and personally I feel this is not needed, I
feel that as a society self-motivation without comparison is much better for
confidence and that when trying to better yourself and your future the only
person you should compare yourself to is yourself.
Later on, the book moves away from these comparisons, thankfully, and
focuses on the building blocks to build confidence ‘the confidence cousins’.[3] These
are… ‘self-esteem, optimism, self-compassion and self-efficacy’.[4] I
liked this section of the book as the authors go into details about each
‘confidence cousin’ and how having a grasps on all of these aspects can build
your own confidence easily and successfully.[5] They
concluded this chapter with the quite ‘Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts
into actions’.[6]
I loved this quote as it is exactly why we are such confidence campaigners here
at Women in Work – we don’t just want you to have dreams we want to be able to
support you in gaining the skills and confidence to go out and achieve them.
Another significant chapter, which builds on this, is Chapter Six, this
chapter focuses on how to ‘make your thoughts an ally’.[7] It
enforces the importance of positive thinking and goes into detail on how
confidence is more than just working on yourself but also learning how to
included others in your confidence so they too can build theirs. [8] The
chapter focuses on skills such as ‘being grateful, thinking small and the
balance of power in a convocation’ to make you seem effortlessly confident and
help others feel comfortable and secure around you.[9]
In conclusion I feel this this book is more factual then it is
motivating but there are elements within that do give women, looking to build
their confidence, a point in the right direction and the building blocks to do
so. So if you are looking for a starting point in developing your confidence
yourself this book summarises the context of confidence perfectly and gives a
lot of real world examples to how their methods and tips work within different
industries. This book has a focus on women working within the STEM and business
industry too so it is helpful for researching breaking glass ceilings in those
areas.
Anyway ladies, I hope you all enjoyed this first book review – if any of
you do read the book feel free to message us and tell us what you think, cannot
wait for all the exciting things we have coming up this year!
XOXO
[1] Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, ‘The Confidence Code’, Harper
Collins Publishers, (New York, 2014).
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