At The Well: Encouraging Girls To Be Positive and Confident

The At the Well Young Women’s Conference can be described in two words– life changing.

A few highlights of the event include actor Brian White’s speech on how young women need to nurture and share with each other. He offered tips on how to build self-esteem and how to become a more positive young woman. His tips included: making a list of your assets and talents in addition to resources and compliments that you have received. Accept that you are a desirable package instead of looking at yourself in parts. Try to find one thing you consider a challenge each month and work hard to overcome it.  Believe in your worth and make yourself a priority.  And, figure out where you have fallen short or messed up but, force yourself to come up with five things that you’ve done right.

White went on to tell the young ladies in the conference that if they tweeted, “I am a strong individual and I have the potential for greatness,” by 10pm EST he guaranteed them a follow request!

The one thing I received from his message is this: “there are black men that care.” There are people that want to help shape and nurture young women of color and minorities in general. However, we must always help ourselves as well by becoming better, by helping the younger generation of women, and by striving for greatness.

Another highlight was the eccentric and comical speech given by the lovely Harvey sisters. Karlie and Brandy Harvey are twins and you could definitely see that with their strong intuition of what each one was going to say next. Their punch lines were perfect and their delivery played out like a magic trick, as if they knew exactly what the other was thinking.

They too left the women at the conference with some advice to use on a daily basis. Their first piece of advice was “It ain’t that deep!” As a young woman you may think it is the end of the world but it is not! You have your entire life to live and grow and make mistakes and that is okay!

Respectively, their other tips of advice included:

• “Words are powerful.”
• “You are addressed by the way you dress.”
• “You are enough.”
• and a spiritual closing statement of believing “I am a living God.”

These young ladies brought the house down. They made it clear that things are not handed to them because their father happens to be Steve Harvey. They work for everything they have. They have pride in being hard workers. 

At the end of the conference every young lady was given a gift bag! These bags included little notebooks, pens, post-its and other trinkets that girls may need on their road to success. There were also information booklets on the At The Wells Leadership Academy, a two-week program also held at Princeton University in July, which I definitely will be applying to. You can find more information about that here.