Centred for Success: 7 key messages we share with rural women

Twice a year, my sister (high performance coach Patrice Douglas ) and I host sessions - online and in person - for women involved in the agricultural show movement. It’s become a rewarding tradition where we get to meet extraordinary ladies who volunteer, lead, and represent their communities.?

Our sessions are primarily tailored towards navigating competitions in the show movement (showgirl, young woman, rural ambassadors et al) but are also useful for committee members and volunteers, and professional women.???

These sessions ultimately become a forum for life skills and sharing common impediments to self-belief (nerves, imposter syndrome, comparison, fear of public speaking et al). In two hours together we undertake internal work (breathing, writing, visualisations, branding exercises) and external work (storytelling, conversation techniques, presence, and style). It’s split into two core pillars: the narratives we share with ourselves and then the narratives we share with others.?

We started hosting these in Queensland with the support of innovative show leader (and legendary Sydney Royal Showgirl winner) Ellie O'Hara , and now also hold one in New South Wales each year. It’s one of the most illuminating things we do - and it’s such fun to work alongside my sister.?

Here are some of the conversations we cover in these sessions.?

1. If you’re in these sessions, you’re already a leader. Leadership starts with self-leadership, stepping outside your comfort zone, and stepping up in your community and career. Most people don’t do this. You did. You’re a leader.
2. A great gift you can give yourself for any challenge in life is to find a habitual path to being calm, clear and centred. We work on how to achieve this with your inner expression (how you talk to yourself) and outer expression (how you talk to others).?
3. There are simple everyday tactics that help centre you and strengthen your presence: lower and slower voice, downward inflections on sentences, and dumping diminishing words such as “just”.?
4. Polish up responses to predictable questions you will get asked in professional and social situations so that the answer you give is connected, anecdote-driven, authentic, unique, and memorable.?
5. ‘Take the nudges’ life gives you. Make sure you’re connected with yourself enough to hear your own intuition, and when you hear it, act. Say yes emphatically when an opportunity arises that feels right but terrifies you; and practise the art of saying no politely and with pace (and without torturing yourself for letting people down) when an opportunity doesn’t light your fire. The latter is a common struggle - including for yours truly.?
6. We talk about navigating your thoughts - accepting that thoughts are not facts. And, conversely, the power of verbalising some thoughts, like compliments to other women.
7. Tactics for effective mingling include leaving a conversation on a high (not an awkward, slow death to an interaction), and entering a room with purpose and personality. It helps to develop a mental list of great questions to ask new acquaintances, and devise tricks for remembering names when you're introduced.

For women in agshow competitions, we reinforce that you're part of an invisible alumni that is utterly spectacular. Women drive regional and rural communities, and shows are some of the longest running events in Australia. If part of the NSW Show Young Woman or Queensland Showgirl program, you’re part of 60+ and 40+ year tradition respectively? in which hundreds of women who shape their shows, communities, professions have gone before. We talk about the ‘wins’ that exist in the journey through shows - given only one person gets the big state sash at the end. We look for all the little nuggets of gold in the competition that are personal to you. I tend to believe that the biggest prize you all leave with from the entire showgirl/young woman experience is confidence to be unashamedly you with a more steadfast view of who you will be.?

We had 150 women at our first one for the year in January. There were lots of laughs, and inevitably tears in a safe and? special community bonded by their leadership potential, their community-mindedness, and their womanhood, coming together despite the tyranny of distance and being total strangers.

Anyhow, by popular demand, we're not launching our 12-week intensive version with fortnightly live sessions where 50pc of the workshop will be about 'the conversations you have with yourself' and the other half will be about the conversations you have with the world.

Learn more here.