Dear Media,
This Electronic Press Kit contains resources that you and fellow members of the press can utilise to know more about what we do and support in telling the youth in Africa the opportunities we have for them!
Girls are born with power. Every girl has within her possibilities that should flourish as she moves into adulthood, shaping her future and, with it, the world. Are African women able to stand in their uniqueness without conforming to those around them? In this episode, we chat with Dr. Esperance Luvindao from Namibia is breaking the norm as a Medical Doctor and a Public Speaking Coach and Poet. She advocates for quality health for all irrespective of social background and empowers women to be authentic.
We champion the digital generation! Statistics show that the coverage of the digital space across the globe is only 43% hindered by structural barriers limiting access to the phone. Are there opportunities for the girl child to thrive in the digital space? As we mark the International Day of the Girl Child, we hear from Cindy Beyene, a Digital Media Strategist from Kenya, who says “Yes!” and challenges those in the creative, digital space to know that this is the most rewarding sector right now.
We are young, grown and wiser and tryna fall in love out on these streets, but the struggle is real! In this episode, Odinaka Kingsley, a Biomedical Scientist, Youth Advocate and Public Speaker from Nigeria, shares his lessons in dating through the years. He shares how stepping out of one’s comfort zone and learning new exciting skills outside the serious office set-up is a magic move.
What makes a young man a good leader? Kenneth Woanyah from Ghana, Founder of Tune Audit and SEEK International, shares how he consistently upholds a standard of constant learning and packing away habits that hinder his growth and his businesses. He dives into the power of community and how a good leader in entrepreneurship includes having your community as your loudest advertisement.
Happy International Women’s Day! The transformative imprint of incredible women – those whose potential was fulfilled – is visible everywhere, from legislation to life-saving vaccines to the frontiers of technology. How can young women in Africa overcome fear and conquer it all? Amandine Siita, a phenomenal Life Coach And Youth Advocate from Cameroon, shares how young people, more so women, in Africa can beat their fears by embracing them and taking control through positive affirmation.
#BreakTheBias
I am a big believer in femininity in all its glory! The place of a woman is an irreplaceable gem on earth. This International Women's Day, we featured young African women shining and soaring in different spheres of life. They shared lessons to guide us into enlightenment.
Whitney Mwangi
Founder, The Story Book
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Author's Bio
"Writing for me is like the air that I breathe. It is sawn into my jeans and has become an aspect of my everyday life. I have been writing for over seven years now, and I never grow tired of it no matter what. I hope one day my work will be recognised for its beauty, and I will be given the chance to live out my dreams as a renowned author and inspire those like me. Before the age of eighteen, I had already written my first two novels, an achievement I am beyond proud of. I want the world to know that anything is possible if you believe in yourself and put in the hard work despite the poverty life you were born in. I’m living proof that anything is possible."
Fiona Mwangala
Cape Town, South Africa
When I was younger, I never knew the meaning of true happiness, and even at present, I still wonder if I will have that happiness that everyone speaks of.
I wish someone would’ve told me what the world was truly capable of instead of filling me up with false hope of a world full of cupcakes and rainbows. I mean, surely you would think I would’ve learned my lesson for the true horrors of the world after having an encounter with the devil, yet I still held on to that thread of silver lining. Foolishly hoping that things would get better and that after a storm comes a rainbow, I desperately desired to see that bright multi coloured arc.
I didn’t have the best upbringing, considering I was born in a poor family, my morals were twisted, and the only thing I cared about was the love I had for my cousin, whom I considered a brother. I didn’t have access to the rest of the world, so I knew what I was told and saw on TV in shops. Life was not easy for me, food was scarce, and with reality so far away, I figured this was all my life was going to be like.
I was broken, uneducated, and possibly having kids at an early age, but I was taken away from that destructive path and set onto a brighter future with God’s grace. Things got better than worse than better, and a deafening calm passed before things went downhill before my very eyes, and I finally lost faith in humanity as I discovered the horrors of what we are capable of. I was so used to having a rich life that I wasn’t prepared when it was ripped away from me, and I ended up stumbling over my own feet and falling face first.
I was truly desperate for things to get better. When the clock struck 11:11, I would close my eyes tightly and make a wish I knew would never come true. However, now all I wish for is someone to have told me that wishes don’t come true unless you make them come true. In the end, no one can rescue you except yourself, which is something I came to later to understand the term, where there is a will, there’s a way.
One might think that their world is crumbling around them for a good reason, but what one oversees is the true strength of the mind. It is not easy to fight your demons when you’re fighting yourself in the process, so as I think back to when I was younger, I wish I never fought so hard with myself. If only I had accepted myself sooner, then many bad situations could have been avoided. If only I had begun loving myself sooner, then I would have achieved many things.
For one, I know if i convinced myself that i was worth it, I would have fought more for my own future and not left it in someone else’s hands to do as they please with it. The mind is indeed a powerful organ and one we take for granted every day. People tend to scroll past motivational pictures or images, not realising that change begins with the mind.
You can’t simply change overnight, it takes time, and it all starts in your head by changing the way you think. Once you believe you are worthy, you wouldn’t believe what miracles you will achieve with that mindset, and the world will be your oyster. I didn’t have anyone to tell me that I was enough to achieve whatever I put my mind to, so I’m saying it now for whoever needs to hear it, YOU ARE ENOUGH, YOU ARE WORTHY.
I don’t know how many people need to hear that, but it never hurts to hear it because it reminds us that there are people out there who still care for your well being and want what’s best for you.
So to the youth of tomorrow, don’t be so hard on yourself and remember that your mind is your greatest weapon and if used correctly and with the proper nourishment, you can reach the stars and beyond. Imagine if you woke up and told yourself that you are smart, gorgeous, talented or wanted every morning, your mind will automatically engrave that in your head, and before you know it, you will be those things you told yourself that you are.
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What do we mean when we talk about self-love? Of course, the definition will vary from one person to another and shift through seasons of life. I’m on the journey of learning how to love myself well and have learnt quite a lot.
Today, I want to share five dimensions of love that I recently learned from Apostle Joshua Selman, the Founder and Senior Pastor of the Eternity Network International , which I agree that you’ll win at self-love if satisfied. I’ve found them to be foundational and essential. I’ll also give examples of how you can fulfil each dimension based on my experience.
1. Passion - eager & willing to know and understand you
Let us all agree that to know how to love you well, you have to know what and who you are trying to love in the first place. We get to know ourselves by spending time with ourselves. We understand ourselves by paying attention to our responses and reactions.
Most times, we don’t know ourselves, so we work off the blueprints of how others have loved us, how they treat us, or how we see others loving themselves.
Life in itself is evolutionary, so we are ever-adapting to one change or another. In the adaptation, our willingness to know and understand ourselves is genuinely tested to see if when seasons change, you will remain enthusiastic about how you are changing too.
Sometimes, there is too much to keep up with, and I want to lie on the floor and let the day go by. You too? I totally understand. *High-five!
I used to set up my day to end with some me-time, but I only got fatigue and cravings for cookies at the end of the day. I decided to switch things up and start my day with me-time. In that way, I am excited to do the things I enjoy – like writing this blog post at 5 am—uninterrupted, tranquil me-time.
I was inconsistent initially because, after all, it’s just me: I’m always with myself doing ME. During one of my morning devotions and meditations, I realised that I wasn’t willing to commit to getting to know and understand myself because I did not think I mattered. So I started to change this narrative from within, understanding how I came about the notion that I don’t matter and why I matter based on whom God says I am.
So if you’re jogging by my house at 4am and hear someone yelling: I AM WORTHY I AM CHOSEN…Calm down. It’s not Tej (Ethiopian wine). It’s just Pursue-Whitney o’clock.
2. Pursuit - consistently seeking to find & keep you in good & bad times
Pursuit is more about going deeper, to educate yourself about why you respond and react as you do. It is about acknowledging the good and the sketchy of you. The more willing you are to pursue yourself, the more passion you gain to know, understand and embrace who you are.
The major battle of pursuit is standing tall during bad days when people’s judgements, opinions and careless actions trample all over our confidence. It is even harder when you’re on the receiving end of hurt and disappointment because of a mistake you made or a door you opened.
This one time, I was committed to keeping my peace in the presence of an annoying individual at work. The moment I got to work, they were the first person I saw, and the first words that came out of their mouth immediately ruined my mood. It was something about the email they sent me the previous night at 10 pm. I was sharp and quick with my sarcastic response. When I thought about it later, I wanted to pack myself in a carton and mail a one-way shipment to Afghanistan because I had stooped to their level of pettiness and gone against my commitment.
I assure you that the moment you find yourself, your knowledge will be tested ALL THE DAMN TIME. Therefore, it is a crucial part of self-love not just to understand who you are and who you are not but to STAND FIRM. For example, after my little altercation with my colleague (yes, the annoying one), I realised that self-judgment and trying to ship myself to Afghanistan was only keeping me from seeing what the situation was communicating about what peace is to me, what it isn’t and why it is essential to have it. It also extended an example for me to see how triggers emanate and how I can navigate better through response and boundaries, not reaction aaand…attempted murder. Hahaha okay. It wasn’t that bad.
I am happy to inform you that the former colleague is alive and neither on the HR’s watchlist nor in jail.
3. Commitment - Dedication to remain your priority even in the face of competing priorities
Here you are, looking all kinds of happy, healthy and whole. You are self-aware and pursuing yourself with passion. Good job, mate! *claps
Then here comes your boyfriend Tod, who wants 10 kids but no marriage. Your boss, John, is a night owl with an affinity for late-night emails, and you’re a morning person who loves a good night’s rest. Your pastor, dripping with anointed oil, Bishop Godwill, needs you to join the choir and lead the youth ministry. Don’t forget that the government needs you to file taxes and renew your insurance. Your plate is overflowing! My friend, your commitment to me-time is in danger.
What I have found helpful is the funnelling of priorities beginning with the most critical asks and responsibilities. I take it a step further and schedule them on my phone. This has been especially useful for keeping tabs on recurring self-love activities such as meditation, body therapy. I add the details such as location, phone numbers. Are we going with a charcoal mask this time or a clay mask? Etc. I don’t need to keep thinking about what I need to be doing. My mentor, Dr. Dharius Daniel, says: Use your brain for creativity and not information storage.
Planning has allowed me to be intentional about rest and who/what I am giving energy/time to. I previously wrote about how scarcity mindset tendencies make me stubborn when transitioning from work to play. Don’t worry if you missed the great read: I got you>> Out Here Waiting for Thieves to Come. I learnt about the Pomodoro technique called which breaks your time into chunks of work and rest time. I got the app ASAP, which has been super-efficient as an aid to recondition what was familiar to me (Work! Work! Work!). Let me add that it yells: “Fantastic job! You have completed your concentration session. Take a break!”
Commitment is all about discipline, strategy and intentionality. It will not come by chance!
4. Pleasure - Simply happy with the kind of person that you are & enjoy your own company
Pleasure is a by-product of a commitment to pursue yourself with passion and consistency. In my context, I realised that I had rejected myself in so many ways because I had accepted societal constructs of introverts to be weird, strange, people who hate others and more.
The journey to knowing and loving myself has taught me how I am purposefully and perfectly different. It made me see why everyone has their unique role in life, which are all important. The issue is that many people push the narrative that who they are is the beginning and the end of being. We are either alike or we cannot be in line. This is only creating copy-pasted versions of people. I had to break out of this!
I took time out to read about introverts which led me to embrace how introversion comes with a strong intuitive nature and creativity and what amazing things I can do with that. It also made me appreciate how other types of personalities bring uniqueness into my space. My personal favourite is Psch2Go. They provide understandable and straightforward psychology-based explainers on day-day matters.
The more you take pleasure in who you are, the less you loathe your flaws, scars and mistakes. The less you care about people’s opinions over you too.
5. Sacrifice – Accepting what’s best for you and what isn’t and embracing/letting go accordingly even if it hurts
Situations come up needing us to shift gears which means sacrificing our plans to attend to the situation. Sacrifice takes place throughout the process of self-love, mainly due to pruning or re-shuffling of priorities. Pruning is all about planting and uprooting. Let’s think of our lives as gardens that need weeding so that we have healthy produce and grounds for future planting. All weeds have to go. I have found that the more pruning, the faster the growth process.
2020 was a pruning and healing year for me. I learnt the hard way that I was right where my decisions and relationships had qualified me to be. I always considered myself quick to change things around me. In 2020, I realised that I was in a cycle of eliminating and accommodating the same patterns because the problem was within me. I was the farmer who knew all the suitable pesticides for different weeds but did not take care of their soil. I did a lot of soul-searching, self-reflection and self-cleansing. Soon enough, the patterns changed.
During the change and growth process, I would still try to force former situations into the person I was becoming. A good example is when God instructed me to go on secular music fast for 21 days. The beginning was soothing to the soul as my heart grew fonder of worship music. Right about day 10, I missed my Friday night turns up in my house with Davido and Burna Boy. It was lit! Don’t even get me started with the karaoke with late Whitney Houston. I started to sneak in a few secular songs into my fast.
I didn’t know that God was drawing my attention to the wells from which I draw pleasure, inspiration, and comfort. By the end of the 21 days, I accepted that I tasted both worlds, and it was time for a change. It was time to love and take care of myself better. It got to a point where all I wanted was worship music because I felt at home, at peace and more connected with God. So I quit secular music.
I sought understanding from God why worship music now hit different and just right. God said to me that a person who has just come out of surgery could not continue to eat what they used to or go about life as they used to. They must rest and take time to heal. This revelation translated to me as the place you’re in life will determine the sources from which you feed your spiritual, emotional, physical and psychological hunger and thirst.
In Conclusion:
- Passion - Who are you? Who are you not?
- Pursuit – What do you stand for? Why do you stand for it?
- Commitment – What is on your daily priority list, and are you prioritised?
- Pleasure – What makes you unique? How can you embrace your uniqueness ferociously?
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Sacrifice – Who and what do you need to let go of?
I hope you enjoyed reading this and learnt a lot. Share with a friend so they too can learn. Keep loving you right because it is the only way you can love anyone or anything else right.
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Dear Diary,
Today I realised that in many ways, I am still that little Whitney who feared that good things never stay. I was catching up on Tony Gaskins’ videos, and one of them got me curious about how scarcity manifests in more ways than the financial areas of our lives. So I read a bit of literature on the psychology of poverty online.
You should have seen my face when I was reading some of this stuff. One article totally felt like an honest review of my money life written by a stranger and left me wondering if I am being followed around!
It now made sense why after I made my first million, I waited for thieves to find me and all the witches from my village to arise and torment me. Eventually, the only thing that showed up was anxiety and her cousins, uninformed spending, and self-appointed financial managers.
While I am doing much better with money management now, I still exhibit some signs of the scarcity mentality that I read about. Yees, I knooow I have been re-sharing all these profound quotes about being healthy and wealthy on my IG *rolls eyes.
The thing is, I did not think I had a scarcity mindset because I grew up with enough. We were not rich but not poor either. Yet here we are, Diary! Here is where the oblivion ends, though, because I will intentionally do better going forward.
For beginners, I reflected and identified the areas in my life where scarcity mindset manifests. My findings:
The Process
Remember when I was working three jobs, pursuing my bachelor’s degree, and breathing in 2013? Well, things haven’t changed much. I am constantly balancing one act after another, flipping out of one hat into another. I am grateful for my desire for excellence and extensive concentration bandwidth, but I have to stop believing that this means that resting is living beneath my potential.
My relentless grind has come with bountiful earnings and opportunities. However, because I have been like the farmer who keeps all their harvest locked up in the store, fearing a supposed upcoming famine, the abundance comes with anxiety and paranoia of vulture friends and fraudulent investors. So I hold on tight to what I have. Only to look at gigantic mansions in high-end areas back home and realise that I cannot afford any of them. This brings in a new worry of not having enough, and we are back to square one. Abeg!
I am used to a life on the grind. So instead of looking for progressive solutions to multiply what I have, including investment or ways of working smart and making more with less, I’d revert to what was familiar – working my $%&$ off.
I am more mindful of rest now, but not too long ago, I was in shock whenever I had free time! God forbid I turned Netflix on; I felt like the whole world was watching me be lazy.
The Outcomes
- I compare my growth to where I have come from and those I grew up around instead of those living in the kind of abundance I am currently in and aspiring to dwell in.
- Panicking that I have less time for personal growth, and everyone will smarten up and pass me. Basically, competing with ghosts and strangers.
- Conditioning my body to be an excellent tool that can make more outputs and require less input.
- Overstaying in environments and seasons, justifying it as endurance and patience.
- Viewing rest as derailment that needs to be minimised at all costs.
Action Plan
Here I come abundance!
Love,
