Do you want to see your daughter thrive with confidence? Did you know that as her mom, you play an essential role in her understanding of what confidence is?

Today, we’re joined by Jill and Mary from Girls Mentorship, and we’re talking all about the important role that moms play in building up their daughters’ confidence. Girls Mentorship is a personal growth and development company for teen and tween girls, and they are on a mission to help girls understand who they are.

Jill and Mary share their perspective on how important the role of a mom is in a daughter’s confidence building. Through Girls Mentorship, Jill and Mary see firsthand how beneficial it is when a mom is curious about her daughter’s growth and gets involved in the journey.

What Confidence Means To Jill and Mary

Jill and Mary describe confidence as a realization of knowing that who you are as a person is enough. Confidence is when you love who you are, you’re strong in what you stand for, and you don’t waiver or try to fit into someone else’s “box”. Confidence is unique to the individual and it looks different for every girl. When a girl is confident, she knows who she is and she’s self-aware enough to love who she is. She’s comfortable with the fact that she’s a work in progress. She knows that she isn’t perfect, but she’s constantly evolving.

The Current Level Of Confidence Our Girls Have

Our girls are growing up in a time where everyone falsely believes that we’re more connected than ever because of social media and the way life is shared online. However, we’re not more connected than ever. We’re actually more disconnected and isolated than ever, and this has had a big effect on our girls. They’re increasingly less confident, and they lack the skills and tools they need to deal with their feelings.

In Jill and Mary’s experience, they most commonly hear from the girls they work with that they want to be confident. They desire confidence, but they struggle to know how to get there. When they’re asked to define confidence, they’re stopped in their tracks because they don’t know how.

Through the workshops that Girls Mentorship puts on, girls are encouraged to open up and share their experiences with one another. Little by little, they start to realize that they aren’t alone like they thought they were. When they open up with one another, they start to relate to other girls their age in ways they never have before. Over time, the walls start to break down and they feel less isolated and more connected. They realize that they’re not the only one who struggles with what they’re going through, and they learn how to verbalize their feelings instead of shoving them down internally or numbing them out. When they leave the workshop, they leave with tools to relate to others, open up, and process their feelings.

The Important Role That Moms Play

Jill and Mary share that the most important part of the equation of confidence growth is life at home. We can teach girls the tools they need to grow in confidence all day, but if these messages aren’t being reiterated and practiced at home then what they learn can get lost or forgotten. As her mom, we have an important role to encourage her and help her train her confidence skills.

They share that it’s important for moms to ask themselves the hard questions, too. It’s imperative for moms to take inventory of their own level of confidence. Is there growth potential for you in this area? The key to the overall confidence equation for our girls is for parents to be self-aware of their own confidence, and aware of the level of confidence or lack of confidence that they’re fostering at home. If parents aren’t willing to do their own work and change themselves, then they can’t expect their daughters to change either.

Jill and Mary talk about how encouraging it is when they see parents who are curious about the journey of confidence that their daughter is on. When parents are curious and they want to know more about what their daughter is learning through their workshops, and they ask questions and want to know how they can continue encouraging these tools and behaviors at home, this is when they see the most growth and change.

Healthy and Reasonable Expectations

Often, moms can have expectations for their daughters that are through the roof. When their daughter is constantly trying to live up to unreachable expectations, they can easily feel defeated and start to self-sabotage their confidence. As her mom, it’s important to remember that although she’s an extension of you, she is still her own person. At the end of the day, it’s important to let her live her life in her own way.

When we have reasonable expectations for our girls, it’s important that we share these expectations with our daughter rather than leaving them unspoken, and therefore, leaving our daughter guessing.

Jill and Mary want you to know that you’re doing a great job as a mom, and none of this is meant to make you feel wrong or bad about the job you’re doing! Their hope is to encourage you on your motherhood journey, to tell you that it’s not too late to turn things around and that you are capable of making a difference in the life of your daughter when you do the work, too.

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Helpful Links:

• Come hang out with Jill and Mary at Girls Mentorship on social @girlsmentorship or online at girlsmentorship.com.
• Visit our podcast website for more on this episode.

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