Trending Tuesdays

Hello, everyone. Hello. Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday. We missed you last week. We had a jam packed schedule full of summer camp planning affairs. I know. And for those of you who don't know us, who are dropping in, maybe this is your first time. Maybe this is your several time being with us. My name is Jill. This is Mary, my best friend and business partner. And we own a girl company, a girl empowerment company called Girls Mentorship. And we empower girls to be their best, their brightest, and their most confident selves through summer camps and workshops.

If you are not a teenage girl, but you're like, I would like to show up as my best, brightest, and most confident self. Stick around. Stay tuned. The message is not just for girls. We happen to be two females who were once teenage girls. Who am I kidding? We're really still teenage girls. But what we teach is applicable to everyone, regardless of how old they are, regardless of how young they are. We all need a little bit more personal growth and development. We all need to do a little bit of this.

I've got my blinders on. I've got my blinders on. Wow. There's a whole big world out there for me to look around and see and have opportunity in. And one of the biggest things that we like to say, too, is it's all about perspective. Sometimes we think our way is always the way. And when you tune in to an app like Cadre or you listen to these creators on a daily or when you need it, because we meet you on your journey, this is a moment for you to be open, to receive and to figure out what feels good for you in what you need today.

Right? Because all of this is lived experience. We like to joke that we came from the school of hard knocks. We went to college. We both have our bachelor's degree. We're not necessarily using what that degree is within what we're doing now, but our life experience is really what shines within what we're doing now. You're tuning into trending Tuesdays. We like to talk about what's going on in the world currently. So y'all can be right alongside with us in terms of having a pulse on what's going on, not just in our world, not just in our state, but in our local communities.

What are our kiddos focused on at their ear? Basically, we love understanding what is influencing our kids so we can have an equal opportunity to have a positive influence on them. And what currently happening. What happened this weekend, and it happened right here in our little hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, was the sweet 16, the final eight, the final four, and then the final championship. Two championship. Yeah. Actually, the girls was in Ohio, though. It was. We just hosted the final four here.

The boys. The boys were here. So we like to take trending current events and have them extract lessons. What are we noticing in society? Because all of us are very influenced by media and music and you name it, anything that and people in our lives, anything that pops on a screen, anything that pops on a screen, we tune in. And last night and on Sunday was the championship game for the men's and women's basketball. NCAA college championship. That was a mouthful. I was like, where am I, where am I going here?

And if you don't know anything about basketball, Caitlin Clark has been one of the standout players for the last couple of years. Her whole college career, honestly, her whole high school career has been incredible. But she took the Iowa Hawkeyes to the championship for the second year in a row. Unfortunately, they fell short to the Gamecock South Carolina. Dawn Staley, that coach there, incredible. She deserved her flowers. Absolutely. However, what Caitlin Clark has done for the game, not only of women's college basketball, but for basketball in its entirety, has been absolutely incredible.

Incredible to watch, not just this season, but really, the buzz around who she was and what she was doing in the sport started last year. If you were not a college basketball fan, if you didn't give any hoot, holler, nothing about college basketball, I guarantee you've heard Caitlin Clark's name mentioned somewhere in someone's sentence about her being the most accoladed, decorated, incredible college basketball players to come out of the game. And why we're talking about her is because when you put a target on your back, people are going to shoot at that target.

And we. I think we're sensitive to this because we work with girls and we see what cattiness and talking behind someone's back can do to the female Persona, and we're seeing it play out in front of us on just one of the largest scales. So it's important for us to want to talk about the pitfalls that can happen and the setbacks that can happen in terms of taking shots at that target. And our goal today in this conversation is to bring a current event and talk about it in a way that we all can walk away being in the practice of doing better.

Because, again, like Mary was saying, we see it every single day with the girls that we work with, that they don't have friends or their friends backstab them, or how do they be an upstander, meaning that they stick and advocate for what is right and what is just in their lives. And it's hard for them to do that because we, what we like to do as a society is to quiet our voices and to really highlight only a couple people's perspectives to say this is the way. So what we noticed over the last couple of days is, are these incredible anchors or these commentators or even WNBA players are saying some things about Caitlin Clark's performance and just kind of keeping it very small, not celebrating what she has done for women's basketball and for their sport.

To get more viewership, to get more people to watch and tune in, to get more butts in seats. To get more butts in seats. What we're watching, the angle that we're watching it from, is having people really talk her down, talk poorly about her and tear her down and make her feel like she's not as good as what she actually is. Morgan and you guys, her. Like Jill said, her accolades are through the roof. She broke the all time scoring record, not just for women's basketball. She broke the all time scoring record for men's basketball as well.

Took the Iowa Hawkeyes to the national championship two years in a row with a team that was good, but not as great as the teams that they ran through in, in the brackets. It's a mile long. The things that she's done within her career that are incredible. And a lot of people are saying that she cannot be considered the greatest of all time. If she didn't win a championship, they're not going to give her those flowers. They're picking her apart in areas where she doesn't need to be picked apart. And it's really sad because what they're failing to recognize or what they're glossing over is the fact that if she wins, they win.

If she wins. I mean, 12 million people tuned into the final four game between her and I think it was LSU. I won LSU. Maybe that was the fantastic eight. I don't recall. Anyways, fact check me on that. 12 million people tuned into that, which was more than the last three World Series, which was more than the last two, I think hockey championships, Stanley Cups. It was more than the baseball playoffs. I already said that. Basketball playoffs. 12 million people tuned in to watch Caitlin Clark because of the name that she's made for herself.

So what we like to say is we're always here to raise the group average. We want to be as good as we possibly can be in order to make those around us as good as they can be, because if she's bringing her best game, it's going to force the players around her to play their best, as well. But instead, you've got women in the WNBA who are anticipating her coming. She declared for the draft. That was her last year at Iowa. They're anticipating her arrival by saying things like, oh, that's cute. She played that good in college.

She's never played against grown a** women in the WNBA. Like a threat, she is presenting herself. She's gonna have to prove herself to earn their respect. And that's all well and good, but you don't hear men doing that. I've never seen a draft class of men coming into the NBA or the NFL where older veteran players are like, he better watch his back. No, because they understand that the game being elevated by a singular player is good for absolutely everybody. And again, this is on such a big scale, so we're getting to see it play out in real life.

But what we fail to recognize is this happens every single day on our level. We see girls going through this every single day. We're hosting summer camp in t minus a month and a half, and we'll have 30 to 50 girls a session. 99% of those girls have had an experience or are currently going through an experience where somebody else is trying to tear them down, where somebody else is pointing out their flaws, trying to make them smaller than they actually are, and they're not actually supporting them or championing them.

And why? Why? Well, and it kills their dreams. So if we continue to do this for ourselves, for girls, for young girls everywhere, we're never going to see the next Caitlin Clark, because they're going to feel so. They're going to feel so riddled with fear around trying to look good for other people, when, most importantly, it's building their own self belief, their own self trust that, like, I am the best player, and I do work hard, and I. And I'm going to work until I get to that next level. And that's what we want to champion, that those are the conversations that we want to extract and pull out from girls so that they can literally go after their dreams, their goals, and change the trajectory of the future of these sports.

Because these women who are in the WNBA, I'm like, man, didn't they do all of this work to allow these newcomers to experience this joy and this newness of elevating their sport? So what we see is there's a divide. There's this rift, there's conflict and we have to be better. We, as in individuals, have to be better with how we're showing up and most importantly, how we're communicating with one another. It's not because no one ever walks away being like, man, that felt really good that I just gave it to them.

We sit and we stew on that, and that doesn't make anybody in the collective better. So our to just notice, notice where.