Please check out Sierra Dator’s Wise Girl Workshops website here. Wise Girl Workshops is not therapy and is a wellness program designed for all youth and parents.
8 Core Foundations Of Wise Girl Workshops
Developing Healthy Coping Skills
Some of these feelings are quite easy to cope with. I can cope with feeling ecstatic and over joyed quite easily. It’s those tougher feelings that require some work, like overwhelm and anxious.
As a result, one of the Wise Girl Workshops Core Foundations is “Developing Healthy Coping Skills.” Girls need to learn healthy ways of coping because emotions happen everyday all day. And learning these within the context of group support offers her the opportunity to see she isn’t alone.
If we can teach them how to cope young and normalizing human emotion within a network of their peers, my hope is your child’s likelihood of developing unhealthy ways of coping diminishes. Unhealthy ways like drug and alcohol use, bad relationships, self harm, negative self talk, and other hurtful behaviors go to the way side. In contrast, healthy ways like journaling, sharing your feelings with a loved one, listening to music, positive self talk, exercise, mindfulness practice, and reading (to name a few) come to the forefront.
Who wouldn’t want that for their girl?
Increasing Self Esteem And Confidence
Because of this want for girls, Wise Girl Workshops weaves in “Self Esteem and Confidence” as one of the eight Core Foundations of the program. Low self esteem (the way you think and feel about yourself) and low confidence (the trust you have in yourself and your abilities) leads to negative thinking that spreads like wildfire. Girls are left feeling inadequate, unworthy, incapable, ugly, fat, stupid, and alone. Consequently, these feelings and thoughts can get hardwired into the brain and perpetuate into adult life.
Do a quick google search and you will find the statistics astonishing. In fact, Dove conducted 3 studies in 2004, 2010, and 2016 looking at women and girls’ body confidence. The results aren’t good. Showing 85% of women and 79% of girls will chose not to attend important life activities if they aren’t feeling good about how they look, like trying out for a team or spending time with a loved one. Also, they report only 11% of girls feel good about describing themselves as beautiful.
These are devastating statistics. Hence this is what Tina and I are aiming to change with every girl who walks through the door.
The confidence and esteem we focus on at Wise Girl Workshops isn’t just on physical appearance, although we do have a whole Core Foundation on “Body Image.” Instead, we focus on the whole girl. Her strengths, personality, cool quirks, and developing a love for her entire being.