Leadership and Confidence
I will start with a young farmer from Malawi. She is a horticulturalist and resides in the capitol city of Lilongwe. By nature, she is very outgoing, but in her work as a young farmer she was very reserved and didn’t feel like she was deserving of success. Malawi like many African countries believes that men should be the drivers of agriculture and women should only play a supporting role. She did not believe that this was right.
One of the workshops that we did as part of the training in the first cohort which I co facilitated was on the power of “saying YES to oneself everyday” Earlier in the day we had done the exercise about “self-image “and she had some very powerful revelations. In the exercise of the power of saying YES to oneself every day, we shared that every day all of them should say the following to themselves:
I am a human being
I deserve to take up space without apology
My thoughts and my words always matter
We even them taught them the song of YES in Chichewa which they sang together.
This had a very profound effect on her. As she sang, I could see that she was visibly shaken. Between her self-discovery during the internal and external image exercise and this song of affirmation she finally believed that she was deserving of great success and that it was her role to be a leader in her field of agriculture and to be a role model for other women and young girls who had ambitions of being courageous, innovative, and transformative farmers. As I write this article since graduating from YLIP 2023 she has become a strong ambassador for women’s agriculture taking her message to various forums around Africa, the USA, and Europe. She shared with me that in her wildest dreams she had not envisioned her life taking such a dramatic turn – YLIP did this for me!