12: Raising Confident Girls: Modeling Self-Love & Empowerment for the Next Generation

How can we, as women, become powerful role models for the girls in our lives? 

In this episode of the Build Strong Women podcast, we dive deep into the crucial role we play in shaping the self-image and confidence of the next generation. We explore how modeling self-love, embracing imperfections, and demonstrating resilience can empower girls to navigate the complexities of life with unwavering self-assurance. 

Learn how to cultivate a positive mindset, foster open communication, and prioritize self-acceptance to raise confident, empowered young women. 

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Transcript

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Hi, I'm Laura Orlando and welcome to the Build Strong Women podcast. I believe as women that we are the role models for the next generation of girls. So how do we become the best role models for these young girls? We work hard to become the best version of ourselves, whatever that means to you. It's not easy. It takes work. It takes learning, trying new things, falling down and getting back up again. But that's what we do on the show. We dive deep into how we can grow on the inside. We will learn from women that are on the same journey as us. Just trying to become the best version of themselves. Let's learn together, build our confidence, learn to love who we are so that we can teach the next generation of girls to grow up to be strong and confident women. Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Build Strong Women podcast. Thank you so much for being here and tuning in to this week's episode. I am really excited about this one because this is really the heart and soul of why I created this podcast. And I'm super excited to dive into this episode. But I want to remind you to head over to the show notes and make sure that you are on my email list so that you are not missing anything. I share some insights and different things over on my email list every Tuesday. So I hope that you will head over to the show notes and and make sure that you are on my email list. I would absolutely love that. And we can kind of talk and communicate through that which is really cool. And also don't forget about the feature on my show notes that you can send me a text through your phone asking me to answer a question or if there's a topic that you want to hear about you can click the link and it's completely anonymous which is really cool. You can send me a message and let me know a topic that you could be struggling with or just something that you would love to hear on the podcast. So head over to the show notes and click that link. Okay so let's get started on this week's topic. So I really wanted to do an episode about how we as women are such amazing role models for the next generation of girls and how we can start teaching them and showing them and modeling for them what self-love really is and what confidence really looks like. When I look back at my life, working on yourself was not a thing that women talked about ever. I don't know if I ever heard the word self-love growing up. I don't think I heard that word until I was in my 30s. I know I didn't grow up with a lot of confidence and I never felt like I was good enough or capable to do things or to even try things. I honestly thought that I wasn't born with those abilities and I never knew that you could grow or you could learn new things and that really put a hindrance on my self-worth and my self-esteem and as I became a mother I'm not going to say as soon as I had my daughter or when she was born because let me just be honest with you having a baby is so overwhelming and that is the last thing you're thinking about is how you feel about yourself in that moment and showing her what confidence and self-love looks like but I have to say as she started to grow up in her her tween and teen years, I started to feel that pressure that she was always watching me. And sometimes the things that would come out of my mouth would almost freak me out. I'm like, oh my gosh, she is listening to what I'm saying. And I really have to start watching what I'm saying about myself and start taking care of myself and really start to look deep inside myself if I want to help her. Because I knew that she was always watching me. Our children, our nieces, nephews, even if you don't have any children, anyone that are around you, They're always watching you. They're watching your behaviors, your attitudes, how you talk to yourself, how you talk to other people, how we look at ourselves. And they are learning from us every single day. And maybe they're not going to catch everything we say or what we do, but we really have to focus on how we're treating ourselves, how we're taking care of ourselves, how we're speaking about ourselves, because there are people watching us, especially little people that want to know how to grow up to be an amazing adult and how to thrive and how to take care of them and how to really learn to love themselves. I'm a very observant and empathetic person, so I really like to people watch. And I like to see the mood in the room. I really like to see how people are acting and interacting with each other. I don't know. It's fun for me. I just really like to do that. My husband always says that you're always people watching. I'm like, I know. I really like to do that. I don't know why. So I'm really in tune with those types of things and really looking back I'm always very super conscious of how people are talking to themselves and to other people or even their children for sure. And sometimes I was around people as I was raising my own children and I was listening to them how they were talking about themselves, how they look, about their weight, what they were eating, what they weren't eating, anything in general, about money, just all certain types of things in their life and just how they were treating themselves and their kids were right there. They were listening to every word that they said and it almost made me feel uncomfortable Because my child was sitting right there as well, and I did not want them to hear those types of things, but I knew that I don't have control over every situation they're ever going to be in. But I knew that these children and these girls especially were absorbing everything. that this person was saying or people were saying. It wasn't just one person. It was different times in my life. I could hear these things coming out of especially women's mouths and they weren't talking kindly to themselves. They were talking poorly about themselves, talking down upon themselves and their daughter was right there. Their kids were watching them do this. And it just takes, when I think of that, it just takes me back and it makes me feel really sad. I remember thinking like, oh my gosh, what is my daughter thinking about this person's comment? How is she perceiving it? How is she internalizing it? And to be honest, it kind of freaked me out. So I really started being conscious of how I was talking about myself, what I was saying to other people, because I knew my daughter was listening. And honestly, this is why this podcast has been on my heart for so long. I really want to help women focus on themselves so they can first learn to love who they are, love their life, and really create a life that they're proud of. And also, I know that if a woman feels good inside themselves, they can teach their children this as well. It's an amazing thing. And I don't think we give ourselves enough credit that we are such a strong role model in our children's lives or our nieces, our nephews, any child that we are around. We are a role model for them. I'm not saying you have to Sit them down and teach them a lesson like they would in school. But just showing them by your behaviors, the way you talk to yourself, the way you treat yourself is how your child is going to grow up. And our girls are watching us as women. Everyone struggles with things in their lives. I know that I still do every single day. But I believe that if we really focus on becoming a positive role model and really being intentional about how we act and how we show up and how we treat ourselves as women and as mothers, we can demonstrate competence and resilience and self-acceptance And we can be an amazing role model for our daughters, for our children, for all the kids that we're around and that know us. And they can carry that on for generations to come. But it starts with us. And this is the exact reason why I started this podcast. Because we have such a huge role. We have such a huge responsibility. And I don't take that lightly. And I want to be someone that helps you do this for yourself, for you, for yourself, and also for these little children that are watching you every single day. So the first thing I want to talk about to help you take on this role, and I don't want you to feel like, oh my gosh, I have so much pressure on myself to be a certain way, talk a certain way, and everything else. Absolutely not. You have to give yourself grace. You're not going to be perfect. But as soon as you choose, I'm going to be intentional about how I show up and how I treat myself, everything changes. And that's exactly what happened for me. Everything changed when I started being intentional. It wasn't about being perfect. It was just about being intentional about how I talk, how I look at myself, how I treat myself, how I work on myself. And that's what I want for you. So first I want to talk about modeling confidence. And I know this is really hard, especially when you don't have a lot of confidence within yourself or you just grew up not thinking that you have confidence. I don't have confidence. Trust me, I have been there and I'm still working on my confidence every single day. But I really wanted to take a deep dive into what confidence is, what it looks like, what it feels like, so that we can start showing up with even just a smidge more confidence within ourselves and really modeling that confident behaviors to the girls that are around us. And the thing that I never knew about confidence, which I think is so cool and that I definitely have taught my children, is that confidence is something that you can grow. You can always grow more confidence. So if you're sitting there thinking, I have zero confidence within myself. I do not like myself at all. I don't feel confident. I'm just not that person. That is absolutely wrong. If you are at rock bottom zero with your confidence and self-esteem or self-worth, you can always grow in this area of your life. And that is something I never understood. And I always just thought, well, that popular girl is confident, not me. That woman over there is confident. I am not. That is such an important lesson that you need to teach your kids right now, that you can always grow your confidence no matter who you are, where you came from. It doesn't matter. Another thing about confidence is that you can be really confident in just one area of your life and not so confident in another area of your life. So I'm not saying that you have to be Miss Confidence Pants in every area of your life. Absolutely not. No one is. No one is confident in every area of your life. But you can really be confident in the way you look and your body, but you're not confident in other things that you're doing. Maybe where you work, you're not confident in those abilities yet. You have to build them up. So if you think about yourself, I really want you to think about, okay, what are the areas that you're confident in right now? What are the areas that you're good at and you believe in your abilities? And think about the things you're not confident in and that will help you to really start to focus on that area that you want to be more confident in. What is an area that you want to work on? Write it down. Put it on a post-it and really focus maybe for the next couple weeks on being intentional about growing your confidence in that area. There are so many ways that you can model self-confidence for your kids and your daughter especially. Some of those ways are through the way you talk to yourself or how you talk to her and can you communicate with her. Another way is through your body language and how you show up every day. So I really want you to be intentional about how you're talking to yourself. If you are always talking bad about yourself and saying, oh, these pants don't fit, these bulge on the side of my stomach or things like that, don't talk like that in front of her. She is watching everything that you're saying. Say something nice about yourself. Even it's about, oh, I just love how my nails look today. Say something about yourself that that is positive and kind and she will start picking up on those things and then maybe down the road ask her something about herself so that she can tell you something positive about herself and something that she loves about herself also be really aware of how you're communicating with her and how you're talking to her are you really listening to her are you listening to her insecurities and trying to help her through those times because we all can go back to those middle school high school even in our 20s years and think of the things that we were in And maybe you can be a guide for her. Maybe you can give her some advice. And if she's willing to listen, show her the way. And the best way to show her the way is through your actions, through your behaviors, and the way you talk about yourself. And always remember to really monitor your body language too and just how you show up every day. If you're like always down in the dumps and talking negative about yourself and just the way your whole body language is, how you feel about yourself, really be aware of that and maybe that's an area that you really need to work on. And I want to remind you that you're not going to be perfect. This is absolutely not something that you have to be perfect on. Absolutely not. Perfection is something that I don't Never strive for, I tell my kids it's not even a word, I hate that word actually, because it's not achievable. And you have to really be aware of that and do not be hard on yourself when you make a mistake. Sometimes, yeah, we're going to say something about ourselves. It's okay. Move on and be intentional with the next statement that you say about yourself. It's okay. The next thing I want you to really focus on is embracing your imperfections. One of the most important things that I want you to know is is that when we're trying to model confidence is showing them the journey along the way and the little pieces and the way that you show up for yourself. I don't want you to be perfect. Let her see you make mistakes. Let her see you fall down and show her how you get back up again and you're not going to stay down. You're going to keep fighting. You're going to keep pushing through. Perfection is not the goal. I wanted her to see you struggle because she is learning those skills from you too. She's going to struggle at some point. We all do. We all struggle. We all fall down. We all make mistakes. And that's a learning experience. And if you're trying to be so perfect all the time and so confident all the time, that's not going to help her or teach her anything either. I want her to see you working on yourself and growing and learning and failing sometimes and getting back up again and She needs to see you through all of that. I'm not saying she needs to see all the ups and downs in every angle and part of your life, but I do want her to see the journey and the process so that she can learn from you. Because if you're trying to be perfect all the time, she's going to try to be perfect all the time and she's going to think that that's normal. She has to see you fall down and get back up. I've shared with my daughter how I grew up with not a lot of confidence within myself many times and how I really cared about what people thought and how I was scared to do anything and how it was actually debilitating at times. Honestly, it was a little hard to share these stories with her but also I think it's teaching her or taught her along the way that no one is perfect and that no one has it easy all the time and no one just wakes up and is super confident in all areas of their life. That's not true. She sees me doing this podcast and interviewing people on this podcast and being absolutely terrified to try new things. And even though I am terrified, I'm showing up and I'm doing it anyway. I push through the uncomfortable. I really want to teach them to push through that uncomfortable feeling. I want them to see me struggle, both my son and my daughter. They have watched me do this and I'm doing it anyway, even when I'm scared. Because I used to think that When it was hard or when I was uncomfortable, that meant not to do it. To end, quit, it's over, don't do anything, stay back, go back to your safe zone. She's going to make mistakes too. And you have to, obviously, I'm not teaching you how to be a parent here. I just really want to remind you that sometimes it's okay for them to make a mistake because they're going to hopefully learn from that mistake. And celebrate those mistakes immediately. If you can, if they make a mistake, it's okay. Move on. We're going to try again and teach them not to be scared to make a mistake because they won't come and tell you things and she will just be afraid to even fail. I don't want my kids to ever be afraid to fail or to tell me something that they failed at ever. I also want you to remind you to celebrate any achievements and accomplishments that you have in your own life. I want her to see you celebrating yourself and being proud of yourself. We want her to learn to have pride in herself and to recognize the amazing things that she has accomplished in her life or has done. It doesn't mean that you're bragging. It doesn't mean that you're trying to be better than anyone else. No, you're just demonstrating those little ways, big or small, how proud you are of who you are, how you showed up through hard times, how you got back up again if you failed and what you accomplished. She needs to see that too. She needs to see you celebrating yourself. It's so important. so that she can celebrate herself as well as she grows up. So depending where you are in your confidence journey, I really want you to focus in on the areas that you want to grow in and really start working on those areas. Just pick one for now. I don't want this to be overwhelming. And start like reading books, listening to podcasts, just like the one you're listening to right now. Just work on becoming more confident in that area that you want to be more confident in and start showing up. Get uncomfortable. You have to get uncomfortable to grow your confidence because every Every time you do something that really scares you or gets you outside of your comfort zone, you're going to grow that confidence. Confidence is like a muscle. Every time you do something in that area, you're going to grow a little bit more confident in it. There is no end game in growing your confidence. You have to keep working on it. You have to keep building that muscle because the more that you do that thing, the more you do the thing that you're afraid of, you're going to grow your confidence. Okay, so let's move on to another area of being the best version of yourself and really being a role model for your kids and especially your daughter or any girl in your life. Another area is self-acceptance. I know this can be a hard one from all of us because we're always struggling with little things that we don't like about ourselves, trying to improve on different areas of our life. And that's the thing about personal development is because you want to work on that area of your life doesn't mean that you're not accepting who you are. So we constantly are talking about let's work on ourselves, let's grow in these different areas, it doesn't mean that you're not accepting who you are now. And that's what I love about personal development. I know it seems like, well, how can I love myself and still be working on myself? You want to work on yourself because you do love who you are and you want to be better in all the areas of your life. You want to improve. You want to feel better and you want to love who you are. So you're working on yourself because you love yourself. You want to grow your confidence. You want to be the best version of yourself because you love yourself. There are so many different areas of your life that we can model the self-acceptance. And one of the biggest ones I feel for women and for girls is body positivity. And I have a whole episode on body positivity about learning to be more accepting of your body and just growing that mindset of positivity when it comes to your body. So you can listen to that episode. It is a great one. I'll put that episode in the show notes. It's a good one. I want you to just always be very intentional about how you're talking about your body because we need to really teach our daughters about body positivity and learning to accept who they are. You're not going to love every area of yourself and your body and just your appearance and that's okay. Share with your daughter all your unique qualities and really dive deep into them. Make sure that you're having conversation about things that you love about your body, things that you love about other women's bodies and how beautiful they are and promote this acceptance of others and who they are. Self-acceptance is not all about our outside appearance and what we look at on the outside. Talk about things from the inside too. Things you love about yourself, your personality, or the way you laugh, or the things that you love about yourself. And really talk about what you love about other women themselves. around you too because I think it's so important for girls to really honor and respect other girls and women in their life they really need to grow up seeing women celebrating other women and loving other women and you know what not being jealous of other women saying oh my gosh they are so beautiful I love their hair I love their personality I love their laugh I love their smile not think oh my gosh saying negative things about that person because she's listening to you do that you do not want to be someone that tears women down you want to build that And yes, we're going to have moments where we have that little bit of jealousy and insecurity. We all do. That's about being human. Just try not to project that onto your daughter because she is listening to you. I think it's really important that we have conversations with our daughters and the girls that we are around about how they feel about their self. Ask them questions. Talk about what they love about themselves on the inside, on the outside. And this can be a hard conversation to have because they might not want to open up. But you know what? I feel like found when I'm driving in the car with my daughter that we have the best conversations we're both facing forward we're not looking eye to eye and we just kind of talk and it's not a vulnerable moment we're just kind of chatting the music is on and it's a great time to bring up conversations about things especially about themselves and the people that they're around and how they're feeling I just think it kind of just breaks down walls for some reason driving in the car not looking at each other facing forward you're on a mission going somewhere I just think it's a great place to break down those walls to have those conversations with her. Another topic I really think that you need to focus on and talk about is social media because social media projects so much body negativity online and I really think that that is something that you have to have a conversation about. We can't monitor every little thing that they see online so we really have to have these good conversations about what society deems is beautiful on the inside and on the outside. It's just so important and making sure that you are modeling acceptance and appreciation for other women and their differences and their unique abilities and really encourage your daughter to do the same thing. So as moms, aunts, and whoever you are or whoever you have surrounding you, we really just want to create an environment that is honest and open. And sometimes that's really hard. You really want her to be able to come to you and express her feelings, to trust you. And it's hard as moms to open up that communication with our daughters, but you have to start somewhere. It's such a hard balance to open up that communication with her and really want to talk about these important things, but at the same time, creating a safe space that she feels comfortable coming to you. I think it takes time. I think it takes her learning to trust you, and I think it takes us falling down as moms. I've done that a million, billion times and just getting back up again. My daughter is 17 now, and we have had our ups and downs for sure, but we keep Continuing to work on our relationship and our communication. And it keeps getting stronger. And I really feel that we have a strong and beautiful relationship. And I'm so proud of it. And I'm willing to say I'm sorry. She's willing to say I'm sorry too. And it's just something that we have grown and kept working on. And my daughter, I feel, is really competent. And I don't think she is confident in every area of her life because no one is. Like I said, she really has to work on it. But I have to say one of the best compliments I ever had in my entire life is I asked her a question. I asked her, where did she learn to be confident? Where did she learn about confidence? And she told me that I taught her this. And maybe it's because I've done so much work on myself or I talk about it constantly and that's what I focus on in my business, in my podcast. And it's just the work that I'm doing right now. But honestly, I'm so proud of myself, first of all, for doing this work to feel better inside myself and for showing her the way too. I'm so proud myself. Thank you so much. And I just want to continue to focus on building that relationship with them, showing them the way and really modeling for them confidence and good habits and things that I want them to have in their life. And it's not going to be perfect. Of course, I'm going to have stories of mom, you did this when I was younger and all these other kinds of things that maybe they're going to grow up and Not like some of the things that I did or showed them, but I feel really proud as a parent to be raising two kids that I feel really know how to work on themselves. And that's what I want for you as well. I want you to keep continuing to grow and to love yourself and just work on one area of your life that you want to grow more confident in. Just pick one area. That's all it takes. And just do those little things to keep continuing to grow. It's not going to happen overnight. There's no end game. You don't just arrive there one morning. You got to keep working on yourself and growing. And I am here for you, cheering you on. I always want to encourage you and empower you with little ideas and ways that you can grow on the inside. So I hope this episode was helpful. And if it was, I would be so grateful if you could just share it with just one friend. You can take a screenshot and send it to them through text you can share it on your social media I don't care which way you do it just share it with one friend that would mean the world to me if this is helping you and helping you grow inside and helping you feel good I would be so grateful for you to share it with just one person so thank you so much for being here and I want to end this with a great affirmation to help you through your week and through your day and I hope that it's helpful I am a strong and confident woman ready to empower the next generation of girls I hope this affirmation was helpful and I will see you on next week's episode.