A Moment with Mérida (pt. 3)

Your questions about all things Project Fearless, answered! 

We get asked a load of questions about Project Fearless, so we thought we’d share our founder Mérida’s thoughts on topics that come up regularly. In this final post of the series, we’re talking impact. What’s our Fearless girls’ experience of the programs they’ve done? What shows our founder that Project Fearless is making a difference? And - last but by no means least - what’s the most important thing you should know about Project Fearless? These mini-interviews with Mérida took place towards the end of 2019.

Q: Have there been moments where you’ve really felt like you’ve made an impact with Project Fearless? 

A: In one of our first ever courses, we had a girl who I know was really self-conscious. In her presurvey* she would always answer a question and then add in brackets “That’s because I’m weird.” And she wasn’t proud of it. That comment came from a more negative place: “I’m weird and that’s a bad thing.” 

But then, she made a best friend on the course and her best friend was loud and proud about being weird. By the end of the course, the first girl was owning the fact that “I’m weird, I’m unique, I’m different and that’s awesome.”

I’m speculating here, but I think that the girls that joined our Mind & Movement courses did so because they felt quite safe in that option. If their parent offered them the choice of classes, based on the name of the course they chose it because it felt safe for them. Perhaps because the new girls are already coming to a place they don't know, meeting coaches they don't know, they choose a “safe” option. 

That’s a great feeling to start with, of course. Within that safe zone, our aim is to coach them out of their comfort zone, to support them to try new things. Now we’ve seen that the girls feel safe in that space by the end of the 8 weeks, my dream is that a girl will come out of their first course with us and want to try a new thing that is even more out of their comfort zone. So, the goal is to create a Venn diagram of courses where the girls might get a taste of the other courses from the “safety” of the course they’re in, and then be willing to jump into the next one next time around.

That’s where a physical space where we can all meet together would really change things. You might be doing yoga on one side of the room, say, but on the other side of the room you can see they’re doing bike engineering, or even just see photos on the walls of what the other groups are getting up to in the other courses.

I’d also love for girls and parents to suggest ideas of what else they’d want to do, or what other courses we could offer. We’re always open to that, of course! 

*note from the Project Fearless team: we fill out presurveys with all the girls who join our courses, to get to know them right at the start. More often than not, we see them take real strides in self-confidence, owning their own opinion and believing in their abilities over the course of our programs. 

Q: How does Project Fearless fit into the wider women’s empowerment movements that are gaining momentum right now?

A: It’s wonderful to see such a diverse range of empowering messages gaining ground around us. But I also think it’s important we dig down into how they’re really making girls feel and think about themselves day to day. 

Take breaking the glass ceiling, for example. I think it’s more complicated than it first appears from the hyper-positive messaging around women climbing the employment ladder. I think leaning into your passion, what drives you and what you define as success is great. But, I also think the “You have to break the glass ceiling, you have to strive for the C-Suite and have a family too” messaging can create a phenomenal amount of pressure.

That was my own personal experience, at any rate. Feeling like I needed to climb the ladder for something I realised I didn’t even want. So, I was like “Okay, hold on a sec. How do you define success?” 

Success is never going to be the same for everyone. It's going to be totally different for each person. So that understanding really feeds into what we say to our girls: you get to define leadership. You get to define success. It's up to you what you want to do. Maybe you don't know straight away, and that's absolutely okay too. 

You can define success for yourself tomorrow, in 5 years, in 20 years. You can redefine success again and again. I think that as long as you’re staying true to whatever your guiding values are, you will feel successful.

On that point, how are we even meant to know what those guiding values or core beliefs are for us? I think that comes firstly from exploration, from getting the chance to try a bunch of different things. Then, we can start recognising patterns and unwrapping which things really make us happy or fulfilled, and why. 

That's another major thing we aim to do at Project Fearless: give the girls the chance to try lots of new things without fear of failing, so those experiences can help them figure out what’s most important to them. That’s a key part of what Project Fearless stands for. It's not likely that you signed up for Mind & Movement because you want to be a yoga instructor - it could be, but it's also just about enjoying movement and trying something new.

Often, girls put a lot of pressure on themselves to have everything totally figured out, or to get things totally right first time. So even just trying to flip that on its head a little bit (and make it more about the journey than the end result) can be a really empowering experience.

We do ask the girls on our courses what they like, and pretty much all of them say teamwork, which is really interesting. Sure, teamwork might be defined differently for each of them, whether it's working in pairs or in a group, or some specific aspect of teamwork like the new ideas that come up, the trust or the mutual respect. Whatever teamwork means to each one of them, it’s a really clear, positive theme that comes up consistently.

Q: What’s the most important thing you’d like people to know about Project Fearless?

A: For the girls, it’s that being yourself is not only the bravest thing you can do - it’s also the best thing you can do for the world.

But that can come with a lot of pressure. Just being yourself can quickly bring up questions like “What is my real self?” or “What if I’m not my best self?”, “What if I'm not enough?” or “What if I think my best self is this, but it's actually something else?” 

The reality is that finding out who you are is a journey. We all go through it, and lots of us still struggle with it when we’re adults. That’s just because people aren't always the same person every single day, and that’s just part of being human!

As long as you can give yourself the permission to start working towards the values that you come to realise you truly believe in, that's all you can ever hope to do. Stay true to those values, and you’ll find people that accept and appreciate you for who you are.

For Project Fearless in general, I’d like people to know that it’s a place to share experiences and try new things, without fear, without pressure and without judgement. 

Have you got a question you’d like to ask Mérida and the Project Fearless team? Send us a message right here!

Written by Project Fearless copywriter, Abi Malins.