Feel Empowered, Always

Speaker 1: hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in hi Sheil it family I am thrilled to introduce Mari canel Mari is the founder of girls empowerment experience there was once a little girl who was afraid to be herself her loud raspy voice sounded different her Big Dreams and wild imagination made her think differently a high achiever and perfectionist by default her greatest fear with was failing she starved herself so she could change her body she grew up in a family of lawyers and doctors followed their prescriptions for success but soon found that the traditional path to security wasn't bringing her any security at all a little girl once terrified of even having her picture taken voluntarily became a fitness model for female owned and operated Brands based on self-love and enjoyed it she even shared her story on national TV as an athlete on million dooll mile that little girl grew up and created a unique workshop and classes to teach other little girls how to find their voice how to have the courage to be themselves and how to celebrate their strength and power inside and out thank you so much for joining me today Mari hi Mari so happy you are joining us today and excited for our conversation tell us your story and about who you are thanks so much for having me Melanie I'm so so stoked to be here I grew up in the South Bay and I I always felt very different based on how I looked and how I felt had these really big feelings and definitely struggled with perfectionism I had kind of a tough time at home with my family and that influenced a lot of my emotions the language that I got growing up was toughen up or snap out a it or being dramatic or it's not that bad and so what I discovered from a really young age was that my feeling were bad and wrong and I discovered people pleasing as a way to cope with that too I could just be good enough then maybe everyone would like me maybe I could keep the peace that sort of led me into a series of struggles with my body image and eating disorders and addiction and codependency and just insert your numbing agent in there as I went through college I thought I was going to be a therapist I wanted to help other people like me who had these sort of struggles with their feelings and with perfectionism and with body image and achievement people pleasing but I of course I didn't know all of that at the time right because I just had this idea of what success meant and my parents came from a very traditional doctor and lawyer lots of doctors and lawyers in my family and so that was my idea of what success was so I thought oh okay well if I want to help people then I've got to be a therapist or a psychiatrist and I was was actually teaching karate at the time as a part-time job because growing up I I wouldn't play team sports because I was so afraid of failure and so afraid of what other people thought of me so I did martial arts because it was just an individual based sport that you know if I messed up it was just on me it wouldn't affect the team and it was kind of like dance in a way I found a flow in martial arts that felt almost performance like and I loved dance I also had messages early on that I didn't have the right body typ for dance so that was kind of marred for me early on I was teaching kids karate and uh after college they offered me a full-time job and teaching and running the Redondo Beach school three minutes from where I grew up I was like no absolutely not uh you know I'm going to graduate school and I just had this little voice on my shoulder that said no you're gonna do this go this way and I was like no little voice I can't do this but I say this because this would be a theme in my life the little voice inside of us and our inner voice that often times doesn't make sense and doesn't make sense to anybody else doesn't even make sense to you but you just have this feeling and knowing inside of you that this is the path that you're meant to go down and that more will be revealed you just keep doing the next right thing and the making sense sort of happens along the way so I didn't know that yet either but I was learning it as I went and so I followed the little voice and what I discovered was that I was not meant to be a therapist and sitting across a couch from somebody or kid or teenager but really in the trenches with people and giving hugs telling them they that I love them going to their birthday parties um but what I was also doing was so therapeutic I was staying after classes and working with families I was working with children who had been labeled autistic I worked at Children's hospital with children with leukemia and cckl cell I worked with all kinds of different learning capacities and different abilities and and a lot of young girls like me who were just afraid to be themselves and after a really big heartbreak and my parents divorce and kind of going through this early identity crisis it was what I would call my second Rock botom and that sort of led me into face to face with myself and being sick and tired of being sick and tired and I realized that I had been on this what I call the hamster wheel where it's just this Loop where you're playing out the same patterns in your life over and over again and I was finally ready to take responsibility instead of blaming my parents or blaming the situation or blaming other people I was finally ready to look at myself I don't really know where that willingness came from except from the immense pain that I was in and I realized that I was so uncomfortable that I was going to be uncomfortable either way I was going to be uncomfortable staying the same or I was going to be uncomfortable doing something different so it was a series of one steps at a time I ended up reaching out and hiring my own therapist instead of the people that my parents had put me in um she helped me with my version of sobriety which was at the time cleansing my body of all of the prescription drugs that I became addicted to and used to numb out and then I started getting into CrossFit and I started learning how to work out in a way where I loved what my body could do instead of just working out to change the way my body looked and up until then all I had ever done was the elliptical or running or I had kind of dabbled with bodybuilding and lifting weights but I didn't really know what I was doing and this was the first time where I had a community and the first time where I felt this competitive spirit in me that I always wanted to unleash but was afraid to it was still an individual sport so I you know as scary as it was for me to go to a new gym and meet other people it was still something that I could do myself and I ended up being pretty good at it we can replace addictions with healthy addictions right and we can replace habits with new habits that start to inform our identity and so all of a sudden because I found something where I could move my body in this way that was very empowering I wanted to fuel my body to do the movement right so now I start healing my relationship with nutrition I start learning about the science of nutrition I had been doing yoga for a long time but I had always been doing yoga for the yoga body now I was doing yoga to feel my feelings for the first time in my life I was learning how to feel it to heal it instead of running away and escaping or distracting so I share all of this because all of these different things that I discovered through this this shift in my life through movement through mindfulness nutrition I was getting outside and hiking and spending time in the mountains by myself talking to my version of God and getting to know myself better um listening to podcasts reading I was learning from other women who were like me and who I admired and wanted to be more like I started teaching workshops in community centers and the beach and yoga studios because I originally wanted to have my own karate school um with my now husband but at the time we thought we would have our own karate program and so I started we started with Fitness and karate but then I started evolving into sharing all these things that I had learned about self- Lov and was continuing to learn about self-love because I knew that I wanted to incorporate more than just one thing I wanted to give young women and girls an opportunity to see different ways to move their bodies and different ways to explore their selves and their feelings so these were kind of the origins of girls empowerment experience and as workshops continue to be popular with Girl Scout Troops and different friend groups and private groups there was more of a demand for ongoing group classes which led into people asking me if I would work oneon-one with them so girls empowerment experience really did evolve kind of naturally from my experiences and is born out of my experiences as a very very young girl but also my experiences as a teenager and a young adult learning how to be myself and I make it sound really fancy and beautiful and sparkly but in that time it was really really hard and I was working in a restaurant to pay my rent um I was very ashamed of that I was very embarrassed about that because I thought people weren't going to take me seriously if ever families came into the restaurant this was one of the most wonderful restaurants in the South Bay that is an amazing culture and I learned so much about business and culture and just Humanity in this experience but to me my perfectionism came out as well that's not good enough and I can't be starting my own business and taken seriously if I'm a quote waitress right even though now in retrospect I see it and I'm like wow that's so badass I didn't take out any loans I didn't take out any Investments I didn't have any Partners I didn't ask for any help from my parents I did it with the skin on my back and working every single day all day long I was living in this cool little beach house two blocks from the beach in Redondo I was 25 and stoked stoked on life in any case it was hard and I wanted to give up so many times there were so many times where I said oh well maybe I'll just go back to school and be a teacher and that'll be close enough I'll be a PE teacher and then at least I'll have benefits which my mom would be so thrilled about at least I'll have health insurance there are so many great things about everything that you just said and I love how you just kept moving forward to find the life that you were craving you went forward and you did the hard work it's hard it really is hard and I think about this a lot now that I have kids myself our parents parents don't mean to influence us in a certain way but we really can't be what we can't see and not everyone fits into that cookie cutter mold we have to do the inner work to find out what life We crave and it doesn't matter about anybody else and it also is really hard to think that not everyone knows everything like you mentioned working in the restaurant having your side hustle Parker has taken your workshops and you are incredible at what you do and I think think about when I was a little girl and I had positive impact or someone said something to me that resonated with me that made me want to go out and better my life or do something better you're helping hundreds of girls start out their life in that positive way and Parker now is going through these situations where she'll come home and I said this recently on a podcast she'll say Mom do girls have more friend problems or boys and I said uh sorry Parker probably girls but she comes home and doesn't know how to handle certain situations and you you can just try to guide them and I try to look at them and think who are they what do they want to do when they get older and how can I help them do that to bring out their strengths and the things that they do best and how can I teach them it doesn't matter what age you are I hope anyone listening follows the life that they crave and does the work that brings them Joy I mean we all have bad days right but if we're doing something that brings us joy the bad days are so much more enjoyable if we're doing something where the joy outweighs the harder times yes absolutely and you're such a good Mama now that we are new parents we always say one of the best ways that we could be parents is to get out of the way and that doesn't mean don't be involved don't have influence and impact but meaning take ourselves out of it and ask these beings or at least to try to see these beings as their individual selves and who does this person want to be and how can I nurture that and help them Thrive as who they want to be not who I want to be and not who I want them to be but who they want to be so great job as a mom Melanie that's amazing that you're able to give that to her I don't think that's easy either and I don't think that our parents do that on purpose my parents both really did the best that they possibly could and it took me a very long time to find forgiveness and acceptance for who they are I was very angry um for a lot of my life and I know that a lot of people a thing can probably relate to that where you just feel this uh resentment and anger and especially if you do go on this path of doing the inner work when you become self-aware and understand where your trauma comes from the first part is anger and grief and shame and resentment and all those feelings have a place and we need to have them I think we need to have the burnoff to get to the forgiveness and acceptance and I think a lot of people myself included struggle with getting past that step of anger uh because it's very hard to then look at ourselves and say okay wait a minute but I'm choosing to carry this I always talk about it as a backpack right like the backpack isn't swn to you you can take the backpack off any time but it's hard to put that backpack down when we've been carrying it for a long time that's such a good way to look at it growing up my mom would say like with sports she'd say you have to try it once I mean I remember crying on the way to places cuz I didn't want to try it and now I do that in my life today I think as scary as this might be I'm going to try it once doesn't mean I have to continue doing it but maybe I try it and I think oh that's not for me or maybe I try it and I love it and I try to try to do that with the twins as well too I you know I tell them just try it once not going to make you do it if it's not for you but maybe you try it and it's something that you love and with karate I was a dancer and that brought structure to my life in a way that I needed it brought the structure did that did that happen for you with karate in a sense yeah I think I did thrive on structure my mom is definitely a very structured person and I think that had an influence on me my dad is the opposite he's no structure the fun kind of wild guy there wasn't a lot of balance in my house but it's kind of nice to see both sides I think totally definitely as humans we do thrive on structure see that I have a newborn and I already see that in her life we don't want to be rigid we don't want to be confined to these boxes and strict rules I've heard this analogy of having the sandbox to play in right like put a kid in a sandbox they'll create a whole world so they've got the binds of the sandbox but then they have unlimited opportunities within it uh so yeah I do think that the structure of karate was so helpful for me but when I started healing my eating disorders and you know I started struggling with eating disorders very very young I was 12 years old and then my what I would call my first Rock Bottom was 13 I was hospitalized that was extreme structure right that was rigidity and perfectionism and obsessive compulsive behavior and often times in my life I would notice this kind of theme of extreme where it would either be All or Nothing black or white and so structure for me now I notice sometimes I have fear around structure because I'm afraid of that extreme again so for me now my work is finding discipline and finding Grace and and love with myself in the middle um and I think I'm especially now as a new parent relearning that I've really been struggling with that of feeling not productive enough feeling like I'm not doing enough feeling like I'm not structured enough but then also not necessarily having the motivation or the energy or the bandwidth to give myself more structure and productivity and it's this very strange in between that I'm experiencing right now I so understand it thank you because all of a sudden you're you're used to being a very productive person whatever that might mean to you and then you have children and you have to get you have to help these beings into the world so it's so hard to not look around and think oh other people are doing these things all I can say is be patient with yourself and I joke that the twins took my multitasking skills to an entirely new level because I never understood the nap time I would think why are they so rigid with the nap time well I learned with two babies that I was not going to have any time to myself if I didn't have them asleep at the same time because that was really the only time that I would get to myself during the day and having two babies at once you know my life totally changed and I thought okay how can I bring I needed structure with two babies I thought how can I bring a little structure into the world but I love your analogy of the sandbox because that makes them feel comfortable and loved but yet have the space to be creative and to be who they are and as you were talking I think I'm a very structured person but I also and I've had to learn this I BL out time for creativity where I think okay between this hour I'm just going to dream right I am just going to let my mind do what it wants I'm going to think about what it is I want to achieve and think about anything I want to think about but I think that's how I have learned to bring the creativity into my very structured life because with twins it's like they play sports and we have to be here we have to be there then they have to go to bed so they have a productive day at school the next day but I think I bring in that creative ity to myself by planning the time to let myself dream I love that I think that is so important and visualization and dreaming has been such a huge part of my story and part of my life I could not support that more I think giving yourself time and I mean I'm not super into astrology but I'm Pisces and they're notorious for being dreamers and in their heads all the time and in Dreamland so I can defin say that that is me um but there's something really magical that happens and I do this in my workshops and in my group and oneon-one sessions for girls empowerment experience something very powerful that happens when we start to visualize what we want and who we want to be because I don't think that it's magic I don't think the law of attraction is oh just think positively and positive things will happen I think what happens when we think about these things or visualize or think positively is we to take action that's in alignment with it and the more we connect with that visualization the more we are going to take action that's aligned with those images in our mind so giving yourself time to practice that is kind of like doing a workout for your mind it's kind of like going to the gym for your mind and as a result you're probably going to see yourself taking more and more steps that are in the direction of those things that you want and this again does require a little bit of discipline and especially on those days where we have self-doubt or feel like giving up or feel like this other path could possibly be easier for us and I certainly experienced that early on in my business but also even now I don't think that that work is ever finished I think that is it's always a a a cycle it's not a straight line and so really important to remember that I love the discipline dreaming I'm going to try that with Parker tonight at bedtime I'm going to do it myself we read books and then we she always wants me to tell her a story that it'd be interesting to ask her to dream about her future self and what she wants to be and I mean I can do that myself too I think when you're growing a business and you're an entrepreneur and you build something from nothing you're always thinking about what's next and it's really hard to not be hard on yourself for not being farther but we really are where we need to be and as long as we keep making that progress feels good PR feels so good and I think as long as we keep making progress and as a new mom be extra patient with yourself because you will hit those milestones and those things that you want to achieve it might not happen as quickly as you want when they're little but you'll start to get more time they'll get older they'll want to spend time with their friends and then you'll have more time to put back into your business yeah I think I I couldn't agree more with you about progress and I think even this the smallest step forward is so important what if we got 1% better every single day how would that add up in a year and giving oursel Grace to just do one thing let that be more than enough let your being be more than enough let rest be productive right but also knowing that even the smallest steps take us into the right direction and when I look at my life so far and I'm certainly not I'm only 31 so my life is I haven't had a a very long life in time but I've lived many lives in my 31 years and I can see how every tiny step that felt seemingly insignificant at the time led me to hear and that's something that I talk a a lot with my older gals my teenagers and young adults who I work with one-on-one who really struggle to acknowledge their progress if they are struggling with eating disorders or body image or perfectionism in school or Sports I noticed that especially because they're so young right all things considered when you're 17 or 18 and you've been struggling with something for a year and you feel like you don't you're not seeing progress a year out of 18 years is a much bigger fraction than a year out of 31 years or a year out of 41 years right so it does feel very big and it's really challenging for them to see how those tiny little steps continue to add up until one day you're in a situation where you would have reacted differently and you respond and you're like oh wow I would have acted totally different in the past six months ago I would have reacted completely differently than I did today and those are the moments where we can acknowledge our growth too it doesn't always have to be material or uh it doesn't always have to be Financial in business but it can also just be our way of being and our feeling and our response and noticing how we're growing allowing yourself to feel success on your terms maybe success was what you think someone on the outside might think but maybe your success today is having an amazing day with your child and maybe your success tomorrow is going back to girls empowerment experience and helping other girls start or live an incredible life yes I think defining success for oursel is a really important step to take and one that I'm really to be perfectly honest with I'm really struggling right now with that because I often feel like it's War inside of me between what I grew up believing success is and what I want to define success as but what I'm currently living in how I define success for myself right now is not the way that I want to define success for myself right now and I think that creates this self- bullying I bully myself and I beat myself up because I don't feel successful because my definition is one that is kind of old and as a new mom I feel pressure now for this other being that I need to take care of and and so old voices start trickling back in and it's it's a struggle you're in the toughest moment because I felt this the most in my life when the Twins were just born thank you I think women feel this the most if they're moms when this happens because they have to stop and think kind of who am I now I know who I was before but who am I now because all of a sudden you're caring for this being and you're exhausted maybe you got 2 hours of sleep and you're not thinking straight I don't think I slept a full night for like the first 3 years that the twins were born so give yourself Grace because honestly this time was the most challenging when they were young like birth to three was probably the most challenging for me as it relates to feeling successful and wanting to grow something and wanting to grow it at a faster pace and looking back it was more me thinking about what other people were thinking than what I really had and what I was really doing thank you for sharing that be proud in your moments because the small moments can make huge wave and ripple effects definitely I believe that and and I think just having the awareness of it is so important too because I think about what kind of success do I want to model for her because she's going to be and there's no doubt that this girl is going to be her own person she is a big feeling wild opinion ated already but I do want to give a model of success that was different than what was modeled to me because when we talk about structure and rigidity the model that was shown to me was very rigid and there was no flexibility for what success was or is and and I want to be able to give Ka the space to dream and the space to be different and the space to follow like you said to follow her heart and follow her calling whatever that is and to define success however she wants to Define it so many of the girls that I work with now struggle with this so deeply when it comes to school and grades and college and the pressure a lot of pressure oh my goodness when I was growing up there was a lot of pressure and you know I remember having panic attacks and I I always tell this story but I was in Middle School and it was actually a typing class and the assignment was to type your future resume okay so it wasn't even about the resume but I absolutely lost my mind because how could I possibly create this resume that I wanted to change the world and be Uber successful and make all this money and have this job and change all these people's lives and I just couldn't as an 11 or 12y old figure out how was I supposed to put this onto a piece of paper and articulate it into future resume and I was so overwhelmed I remember stepping out of the class I think I had a panic attack so I definitely felt pressure to succeed I definitely felt pressure with grades and college but now the selfworth that is tied to it and the way that I think parents also contribute to the pressure of achievement and how that relates to selfworth at least with the people that I work with and and granted I probably work with a specific demographic of people because they come to me because they're like me right they are perfectionist by nature and they relate to me so that's why they work with me but I do just see this enormous amount of pressure that the girls put on themselves and how tied they are to grades with you know being a good person and being worthy and being worthy of love and worthy of life and it's so challenging for them to see an alternative and I really want to be able to give Girls the space to realize that in the grand scheme of things these grades are not we're never going to remember what we got on this paper or this test such good advice it really my mom used to say do your best and forget about the rest my mom was a teacher with the Masters in Education so she cared if I did well in school but she would say do your best because she knew I studied and she knew I was worried about it and she'd say just do your best and forget about the rest and when you talk about eating disorders I was thinking back as you were talking I was on my dance team in college I had an athletic scholarship for dance and they would weigh Us in they probably couldn't do that today but looking back I struggled with it a little bit about that time cuz they would bench us for a game and I would think I don't want to be benched for a game and when I tried out for the dance team I my high school was an hour away from the college my high school didn't have a dance team but I danced from when I was young we just had cheerleaders and I thought I'm going to try out for the college dance team and I think my parents were even surprised and so I went and I auditioned there were probably about 500 girls there I made the cut to 50 and then I made the cut to 25 and then I wasn't one of the 20 chosen they cut five and I was one of the five and I went home and I was so devastated my dance instructor called my mom and said they're auditioning at this notot Berry Farm type theme park where I would have to say dance and act and I thought oh I just went through this rejection I laid on the couch for a week my mom says you never sat that still in your entire life and she was so worried I wouldn't get up and my mom said I think you should audition I said Mom I just went through all of this rejection and she said to me if you don't try in the future looking back will you always regret it and the answer was yes and so I went and I auditioned I had to sing sing dance and act in a show six times a day and they hired me and I made great money all summer doing something that I loved I learned to do things that I loved well I got to college my freshman year and my roommate had made the dance team and I was struggling with those feelings of how am I going to watch her go and do all of the things that I really wanted to do and a friend called me and said that one of the girls on the dance team broke their leg and they were having auditions for one person and again I went to my mother for a lot of these conversations at that age you know 17 18 19 and I said how do I go audition in front of all these girls that know I didn't make it the first time I went through this huge rejection what if I go through that all over again and what are people going to think of me right like what are these girls going to think yes I was so consumed with that and my mom said if you don't try will you always regret it and the answer was yes and thankfully I had Danced All Summer Long and was actually in better shape than when I auditioned originally and I auditioned and I was the one person that they picked and so that was the biggest life lesson because I would I got to do two things I got to be on the dance team and then I also got to dance on the show all summer long where if I made it the first time I wouldn't have been able to do that another lesson it taught me is after my sophomore year of college and we won national dance competition and I was on ESPN and that was a big deal but then I thought to myself I'm probably not going to dance after college I think I want something new now I quit school I mean I ended up finishing college at Loyola Mary mount in LA but I came home and quit school and told my parents I'm moving to Los Angeles and they you know looked at me like you have this you know you have an athletic scholarship and you have friends and you know things are going well for you but I wanted to make a change so I think it's so important to let girls know that if they're on a path cuz everyone thought I should stay on this path and stay on the dance team for four years and that's just what I should do but that's not what I wanted sometimes we work so hard to get something and looking back I'm glad that I appreciated the fact that it happened and that I felt good about it and that I just decided okay I'm not going to go into musical theater after college dancing is not going to be a career for me after college so I'm going to go do something else but I think it's important because sometimes we get on this path and we think we can't get off of it even though maybe we want to yes it takes so much courage to follow your own path especially when you don't know what your path is and as a young person sometimes we we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there and so sometimes just taking that next indicated step is all we ever have to do and in your case if that next indicated step was not doing something right like not doing dance then that's your next indicated step even when it doesn't make sense even when other people are telling you that you're crazy even when other people are trying to make you go down their path because it makes them feel more comfortable about their lives right and their choices and so it takes so much courage to follow your own path especially when you don't know what that looks like and I think our fear of the unknown as humans we all face this fear of uncertainty and it for some of us can feel M really extreme and really terrifying especially if you're like me and you know I'll say this with love our control freak and love control and love predictability because it makes you feel safe a growing up didn't have a lot of certainty and certainly didn't have a lot of control I didn't have predictability in my household growing up and so as an alternative I developed the need for certainty and control because then I could feel safe so when we're following our own path there's not a lot of that there's not a lot of predictability and that's very scary I also heard something in your story that I think is such a great tool that that I often use and the tool is how do I want to tell this story and I actually learned it from Dr Mike dery who is a sports psychologist he has some really amazing work out there if you check him out on Instagram um but he says you know ask yourself how do I want to tell this story and this might even be something that you do with Parker at nighttime when you're talking about dreaming and visualization ask her to tell you a story Parker tell me the story of what happens when you're 17 tell me the story of what happens when you're 30 tell me the story of what happens when you're a mommy tell me the story of what happens at your job right and so when we startop start talking these dreams out loud or writing them down and we we can start to write our own story we can own our story of who we were but we can start to write our story of who we want to become and sometimes having that future perspective looking down at ourself or looking back at oursel can help motivate us to take that next step because if you know how do I want to tell this story doesn't have to be perfect either how do I want to tell the story can be oh my gosh I was up against my Ed it was really scary I was so afraid of being rejected I was so afraid of what these other girls were going to think of me I was afraid that I was going to fail again and have to face that pain again of laying on the couch for a week because it was so uncomfortable and so painful I was so afraid that people would judge me and think I was stupid for trying again and I decided that I was going to face those fears and I got up on the stage I took a deep breath I visualized how I was going to dance before I was going to do it and then I just I listened to the music I followed my instinct I felt so good and so proud of myself and I made the team right and so that's something that you could say to yourself before you go into the audition right if you want to create the success of making the team well let's write that story if you want to create the success of a relationship if you want to create the success of a business if you want to create the success of your body image tell yourself that story write that story before it even happens in fact have gratitude for it before it even happens that's a wild one right like can we feel grateful for something that hasn't happened yet I can't wait to do this with Parker and with Elliot too because boys I think boys need this just as much as girls and Parker often will will ask me as we're going to sleep tell me the story about this because I try to be very open with her about my failures and and how sometimes I failed and that was the best thing that could happen cuz not making the team the first time the first week it didn't feel like that but later I look back I got to do two things instead of one so failing and it also made me more resilient so I have gratitude now for that failure yeah a lot of people say fail forward right there's that great quote Renee Brown talks about this all the time where uh if you're not failing you're not even in the arena right if we fail then we know we're in the game we know we got skin in the game and it's also about redefining what failure is I think it's a must we have to fail if we're not failing we're not trying exactly exactly so in that case you could actually look at failure as a success you could look at it as a you know part of your success if you're quote failing I think the the the only true failure is it's not trying at all I love it and I have loved our conversation so much I feel like I could talk to you all day thank you thank you so much for joining me and for joining us today can you please tell tell our listeners how and where they can find you yes I SP most of my time on Instagram so that little corner of the internet is Mari Helena which is m a r i h l n a and then girls empowerment experience.com and girls empowerment experience is where you can find all the things about my mentorship and coaching program for movement mindfulness mindset and mental health and we work with kids young adults and grown-ups boys and girls so you can find out all about it there and you are so good at what you do and you are helping so hundreds of women and young people start their lives so it's incredible so thank you for doing what you do thank you for letting me share it and thank you for being a part of it and being a part of my story and being such a great cheerleader for so many people to help them follow their hearts and believe in themselves if you are new to she built it we'd love for you to join us we offer Community memberships masterminds Innovative virtual events and meaningful connections to entrepreneurs and corporate leaders please also check out our sheb built it shop curated products from women-owned businesses who put their heart and soul into their beautiful and Innovative products we offer Sheil tip business Consulting and the Sheil tip blog thank you to everyone around the world who joined today thank you to my editor Rich stalino please downlo download And subscribe wherever you get your podcast and until next time together let's let nothing stop us from experiencing the life that We crave