Say it Sister...
Lucy and Karen, two 40-somethings, are always chatting about life, and all that it has to throw at them, and now want to share their raw, honest conversations with you. Their journey of finding their own voices, self-discovery and healing is something many of us can relate to. We all possess a unique power within us, but life’s trials often knock us off course. They have the tools, the courage to speak up and simply say it as it is, so you might feel seen, and understood and gain practical tools and techniques for self-discovery and personal growth during the changes we experience.
Say it Sister...
Helen Parker: Brain surgery gave me the confidence I never knew I needed
Helen Parker shares her transformative journey from corporate workaholic to confidence coach after surviving brain surgery and discovering the power of embodied confidence through Brazilian carnival culture.
• From corporate success to burnout – Helen's 20-year career including 14 years at O2 where she ran social impact programs while working 70-80 hour weeks
• The turning point came in 2014 when she unexpectedly lost movement on her right side, leading to emergency brain surgery
• During her seven-month recovery, she experienced profound shifts in consciousness and began her healing journey
• After retraining as a clinical hypnotherapist, she identified confidence as the golden thread in all her client work
• Her experiences in Rio Carnival led to insights about embodied confidence through the Brazilian "queens" who conduct energy for thousands
• Nearly 70% of women report never feeling true confidence, which Helen believes stems from disconnection from our bodies
• Confidence work not only heals individuals but future generations, as children often inherit their mothers' anxieties
• Helen's advice: "Have the courage to take that little next step" and "The greatest purpose in this life is just to be yourself"
Find Helen on LinkedIn and Instagram @helenmaryparkerco. She's recruiting women for a transformative experience at the 2026 Rio Carnival – join her confidence program and "the biggest, most badass retreat of your life."
https://www.linkedin.com/company/experience-carnival-rio/
https://www.instagram.com/helenmaryparker.co/
Hello and welcome to the Say it Sister podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm Lucy and I'm Karen, and we're thrilled to have you here. Our paths crossed years ago on a shared journey of self-discovery, and what we found was an unshakable bond and a mutual desire to help others heal and live their very best lives.
Speaker 1:For years, we've had open, honest and courageous conversations, discussions that challenged us, lifted us and sometimes even brought us to tears. We want to share those conversations with you. We believe that by letting you into our world, you might find the courage to use your voice and say what really needs to be said in your own life.
Speaker 2:Whether you're a woman seeking empowerment, a self-improvement enthusiast or someone who craves thought-provoking dialogue, join us, as we promise to bring you real, unfiltered conversations that encourage self-reflection and growth.
Speaker 1:So join us as we explore, question and grow together. It's time to say say it, sister, hey, sisters, welcome back today. We are focusing on confidence again now. We've spoken about confidence before with the brilliant Jules von Hepp, and today we bring you another amazing woman sister expert. She is truly incredible, helen Parker, and her mission is to connect to and live in complete confidence.
Speaker 1:Now, as we all know, confidence comes and goes with age, life cycles, hormonal changes and just general life. And yes, we know this, and overwhelmingly, women do struggle with confidence. And it's no surprise when we are bombarded with videos and images and doctored images that are telling us how to look and what the latest styles and fashions are. And then we get all those videos telling us how to live our best life and the hustle culture and how to smash it. It's exhausting and you know, perfection is in the eye of the beholder, really, and that's where that inner confidence comes from. And remembering that the joy thief of comparison is always knocking on your door. So we all need a little bit Helen in our lives and, karen, I bet you're so excited to welcome Helen.
Speaker 2:I'm beaming from ear to ear and I'm so happy that Helen's here, because she's one of my best friends. We've been through so much together. I don't even know how long we've been friends for now I've kind of lost count of the years and we've done some wild things together as well, from taking trips to Mexico and having a shamanic experience in what's called, like we called it, the womb. So we go back to the womb and we have our memories of, like, feminine time, but it basically a sweat lodge and just the joy of having her as a friend. She's been my ride or die for a long, long time and also I watched her recover from brain surgery and I'm getting emotional now.
Speaker 2:But watching somebody who you love go through something that is so incredibly humbling is I can't even. I can't give it a word, but let's just say that Helen conquered it like a tiger and, you know, really learned how to walk again, and it was just this amazing experience to see somebody who's so powerful, so strong, go through an experience that is immensely physical, emotional, spiritual, and then come out the other side, as she always will and she always does spiritual, and then come out the other side, as she always will and she always does so. Yeah, she's a true embodiment of resilience for me and grace and feminine power, and I'm so happy that you're here with us today and kind of can't wait to hear what you've got to say and share with you and hear your wisdom. Thanks for coming on, helen well.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having me. Ladies, it's an it's an absolute joy to be here with you, and congratulations on bringing this podcast into the world and sharing so much of your wisdom and bringing on these amazing guests. So it really is an honour.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about yourself, because you were in the corporate world. Then you became a founder of two businesses. So what made you pull the plug and transition?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was. I was in the corporate world for about I guess when I had all of the jobs it was probably near enough. Knocking on 20 years. I've just always been a worker bee, you know. I think I'm a queen bee now, but I was always a worker bee, you know. I had like four paper rounds growing up and then like endless different other jobs.
Speaker 3:I started really working when I was 11 and I just always wanted to be like contributing and doing something, um and it, and I was just always driven to working with people really. So I ended up really in the corporate sector, kind of by accident in a way. I didn't really have a master plan when I left school or university. I did a public relations degree. I just wanted to work in business. I think it was just the idea of kind of this ambition and being successful and I didn't really know what that was. I think it was like this sort of notion of getting to the top and I just always had that drive. So I ended up working in business drive. So I ended up working in um, working in business.
Speaker 3:I was spent the majority of my career in the mobile sector 14 years working for O2, who was then bought by the Spanish company Telefonica, and I have to say I love my job. I loved it. I did different jobs there, but the last eight years plus I was running social impact programs for that business and I was really given like blank sheets of paper to create programs, massive programs from scratch. So I think it was called intrapreneurship at the time, but I really was given a lot of freedom to do that. So I kind of honed what was already natural in me to create things from scratch inside the comfort of a business, and I've used to build social impact programs. The biggest one was called Think Big and it's still happening in different guises across many different countries, but the whole premise of it was to give young people a platform, an outlet to access support and funding to make their ideas come to fruition and to become better people with more skills and more confidence, more resilience in the process. And it was amazing.
Speaker 3:But the kind of the shadow side to that sort of time was the fact my internal, I guess, metrics were off and I was constantly driving for self-worth. That really wasn't there because I just didn't love myself at all, and so it was very much all outward and I would work, and work, and work and work. And I was beyond a workaholic Like I don't even know how many hours a week I used to work 70, 80 plus. How many hours a week he used to work 70, 80 plus and because we were on the cusp of this, this explosion in mobile technology, I had the Blackberry in one hand, I had the iPhone in the other and I was totally addicted to um work basically, and because my job had a social purpose that aligned to my values, that was even more of this kind of thing.
Speaker 3:That couldn't stop Because it was like, oh, it's all, I've got to help other people, we've got to build more, we've got to get more young people in the program. And it just went on like that and effectively, looking back, I burnt out probably three times, I would say, where my body just stopped, and that used to show up for me predominantly in depression. But nobody would have known it really. Maybe some people would have had a sense, but I was very good at um masking up, you know, like in what I wore, like four inch heels, completely, perfectly presented every day, just this sort of this ball of energy. But I'd go, yeah.
Speaker 1:Karen and I have talked about wearing the the right clothes to make us feel more powerful and more confident. So totally understand how we can, you know, just put that war war paint on, put those heels on and, yeah, get that mindset fixed. And then come home and just crash and think who the hell am I? And then so did you choose to leave yeah, I did.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what happened? I mean it kind of I got, I kept getting promoted because I was good at what I did and that kind of spouted a big depression in 2013 because I just wasn't near the cause anymore, I wasn't near the people that was impacting. I was just dealing with all of the politics and big legal contracts and finance, and traveling a lot to Madrid like three or four times a month was the start of 2014 and I was basically due to go to Brazil because of a girl that I met on the same holiday, which Karen's referring to in Mexico. She lived in Rio and she got me a place to perform in the carnival in in in January of February, the carnival of 2014. So I was just coming out of that depression myself and I felt really good.
Speaker 3:I was training a lot because I wanted the Brazilian body to get onto the float and out of nowhere it was a Wednesday. I thought I'd overdone it in the gym and by Monday I'd had emergency brain surgery. So basically, within the space of three or four days, I lost the entire movement to the right hand side of my body, um, and Friday I was admitted to hospital and Monday I had an emergency craniotomy. So that was, that was the, the, the rebirth, basically, and I had seven months off work. Um, it completely changed the course of my life. It was the biggest gift apart from my daughter of my life, um, and it set everything off in a completely different direction. So I did go back to my job. They were absolutely amazing looking after me, the company. I couldn't have wished for anything else, the love that they poured into me. But I just used the time to heal and for the first time in my life, I I put myself first.
Speaker 2:I remember coming in to the hospital to see you and giving you Louise Hayes, you can heal your life and being like just just read this, you know, and and it's obviously right space, right time, because you were in bed, you couldn't walk, you had to do the work in a way, but you'd already been doing bits of work as well before that, hadn't you? So you were like dipping in and out of what I remember of your story. And then this happened and it was like a cosmic opening in a way, and you know and just remember you there and you had all your crystals. I think I brought some crystals in and you know it was just all around you, but you were actually in an amazing place. Considering what you went through, I feel like something shifted in you that was so major that actually was hard to define, um, but now I see it much more strongly.
Speaker 2:You know, you're a few years down the line and I think, as you're talking, what what's coming up for me is also that idea of when we're in our, when we're kind of pseudo-fueled, you know, we get the recognition, um, we have the lifestyle.
Speaker 2:It can feel really amazing, and so we get caught up in that feeling of amazingness. You know, it's like I'm doing it, I'm, you know, look at me, I'm, I'm there, I'm traveling, I'm having this life and I'm doing amazing work and I'm purposeful. But actually we can also get very lost in that and I certainly have experienced that as well, you know, in my career, and I have to keep an eye on myself even now to not lose myself in the journey of, you know, purpose and creating and feel good, because it's a void. Basically, we fall into a void and actually to get out of that void can be really, really hard because we've got to almost unpick things. So that's sort of what was coming. I've been quite quiet and listening and feeling into it and yeah, I just wanted to sort of throw that back to you really, because I'm guessing that when you're in hospital, you were in the void and you started to do the unpicking yeah, I mean, it was just it was.
Speaker 3:I knew it was going to happen to me. It was just this really profound sense of that. It wasn't a surprise and I've always been like that. Anyway, I've always known things about people and been able to predict things that were happening, even as a kid, and so it was upsetting my mum because I was like I know it's meant to happen to me, I know this is meant to happen to me. And she was like well, how can you say that? Like you're literally lying in a hospital bed, you can't move, and I felt the happiest I'd ever felt in my life and I was just like this, the sea of gratitude, and all I could see and feel was love and everything was connected and because I'd have this brain, it was firing up different parts of my brain. So I became like fully telepathic, like I was. I was able to sort of read things I knew when people were coming in the hospital door before they came in and people were like, oh my God, what's happened to her? You know, they were quite concerned, apart from sort of the people who know what you know a bit more open, because they they just think, oh, you know, she's just typed it's the steroids or it's the drugs, but it wasn't, and so it.
Speaker 3:It also sent me on this huge like exploratory journey around my own healing at first and trying to connect the dots and and and work things out, cause in the initial stage, in the in the eye of the storm, like I'm good in crisis anyway, I was great. It was more like when I'd, when I was at home, because you know you go from somebody who's constantly worked and then you're not working and it was just this kind of thing and what do I do you know like and what you know. So it sent me in me in a path of kind of personal discovery which led to so many beautiful things happening with my own journey. You know, discovering coaching. I did work with you when you were doing all of the work with women and sort of those initial steps, these things with tribes. I did lots of different modalities of healing for myself, went and discovered about NDEs and met people from all over the world in near-death experiences, because I was searching for answers and that's what came and brought me to hypnotherapy and that's why I retrained when I went back to work.
Speaker 3:I retrained on the side of my job because I wanted to understand what was going on in the subconscious, because when I was physically unable to move, I was accessing these kind of technicolor worlds within my own imagination and some was deep memory that sat in normal context of life. You wouldn't be able to access very, very, very early childhood memories and they were so vivid. But then I was able to create them myself with intention, in order to to connect my brain and body back together. So I was like thinking there's something in this, because normally we're just using this tiny bit of our brain because we're in this hamster wheel of what have I got to do today? And you know, it's just this tiny little bit and I was like there's so much more there. So that's what led me into uh, to hypnotherapy.
Speaker 3:And then I decided to take voluntary redundancy in 2016 and I found out I was pregnant while I was in consultation. So my daughter was the biggest. So my daughter was the biggest manifestation that came out of me being ill and this whole spiritual awakening, because for the first time in my life, I literally had no filter, but I also had no fear. I was just literally saying exactly what my dreams were out loud to anybody who would listen and I was kind of setting this chain reaction off energetically for them then for me to be a match, you know, like I was doing the works. So I was in the space that anything that was coming would come to me. So it was incredible. I mean, money was flying at me, that abundant success opportunity. I was traveling, I met, had my daughter, so it was this, yeah, this, um, this real kind of hotbed, really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like a before and after, like yeah, or an after scenario, look, which is very rebirth, if I think about it, like we almost have to let the old self die so the new can come through. Um, you know, I remember a lot of the time we would talk a lot about love and that those were, our conversations were around love and you know all of that. But actually what you did through your experience would manifest the greatest love, which was your daughter. Yeah, that connection is so incredibly strong and it feels like you stepped into that almost at that power of love, and then let the universe, you know, let it work out in a different way, you know, and that feels like the greatest transition, if that's what I'm picking up from what you're saying right now yeah, exactly yeah, just yeah, just to be just yeah.
Speaker 3:It was just all of it, was love really at the core of it and um, and you know, it hasn't stayed like that. It was in that initial space space because life's happened and again, like it does right, and I've had to go through a lot more in the last well, it's 11 years now, um, but yeah it, it. It was a, it was a. It was a significant moment in my life and one that I'm very grateful for so you are here to talk confidence, so I'm taking it.
Speaker 1:That was part of the journey that you went on, so tell me a little bit about um, how you. From this experience, you are now working in the confidence space and and I guess the message that you want to give us- uh, yeah, so it.
Speaker 3:It was a really a kind of a a journey from leaving my job, having my daughter, I retrained and qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist and then I merged coaching into it and I've worked nine years with people in that space and in 2018, I co-founded a business in Rio de Janeiro because of me coming off the float in 2015. So obviously I couldn't do it in 2014 because I basically couldn't walk and I rang my friend now business partner from hospital and said I've only got one operational ass cheek, you're going to have to get someone to fill my spot, can't get up there, I can't shake it, um. So, but a year to the day that I um, I hobbled out of hospital, it was Valentine's Day in 2014. Valentine's Day, 2015, I was on a float in the Rio Carnival, which was was this unbelievable life affirming experience and off the back of that, and then also my business partner story, which is also incredibly inspirational we decided to launch this business together. So I was doing mainly one on one really in clinical hypnotherapy, working with people, with a lot of coming to me, probably presenting issue, being anxiety, um, and other things, but the golden thread that was always running through was confidence, every single person done to in excess of 2000 clinical hours. So work with a lot of people, and this golden thread that we're always working on confidence. Confidence to change right, the confidence to believe in yourself, the confidence to move forward, the confidence to let go of the things. Even if they're painful. They become a comfort, even though you don't want them. So it was always this, it was always confidence.
Speaker 3:And then, through the Rio business, I got submerged into this culture of confidence and there it was really about the body you know like, because dance is such a movement, is such a fundamental part of their culture. And then the carnival being the height and time for it, when it's happening all throughout the year, it was like what, what's going on? And you know, I've always been obsessed with women, like women are the greatest love of my life. And I, when I went there, I was just, I was like, oh my god, they're goddesses, they're literally the goddess, like how I would have imagined, like people adorning, like the Greek goddesses, you know, and I was just, I was just absolutely enamored by the whole thing.
Speaker 3:And then you meet them, and then their work, we work with these. They're called their queens, right, they're called the queens of the drumming section and you're meeting these women and that the energy and their presence and the way that they hold themselves, but there's such humility humility there's not. It's not showing off, it's, it's. It's. I'm going to empower you through my body and through my presence and I'm going to give it to you. And so these women are conductors of energy and they do it at a mass scale. You know, 90,000 people. They're conducting the energy in front of 300 drummers behind them, and it was fascinating to me.
Speaker 3:So I was like looking for something. I was like thinking, well, what is it? Why do I do what I do? I've got this amazing business in Brazil. I love to work with people. I love to like help them and enable change in them so they, they become more of themselves and they come home to themselves. So what's this thread that brings it all together? So I was asking the universe. I was saying give me the sign.
Speaker 3:And a few different things happened. Um, but the the main one was I was sat in a, a class in a, with one of our clients, a, a parade preparation class, with one of these queens that we work with called a gilly, and she was talking about being on the avenida, being being at the Samba Drome. She's going down parading and she was saying you know, I can get any man to look at me. She wasn't being arrogant, she was just. She was talking about, like the power of dance, really, and what really dance is about. She said it doesn't interest me. She said the thing that I'm interested in is the woman who's got her eyes on the ground and she won't look up. And if I can get the person next to her to touch her so she can look at me, then I can basically set her free.
Speaker 2:You know, I can say I've got you wow, that's blown my, just blown my mind and my heart open, I think. At the same time, I am um, that's it, isn't it? It's that when we see another woman and we can see where they're at because we know it as women we sense it to then go after her and say come with me, like it is the most profound and powerful thing that we can do for each other. Um, so thanks for sharing that, because I really want everyone to listen to this and say, yeah, there are women out there that I see and we can make such a difference to each other's lives, and we see this all the time in our work as well. So for Lucy and you know it's it brings you to your knees a little bit, but in the most beautiful way, because when a woman succeeds and she gets rid of that self-doubt and steps back into who she already is and starts to just open herself up, it's the most beautiful thing in the world.
Speaker 3:Um, so I'm really moved by that yeah, I always get emotional telling the story because I was just, I was just like covered in goosebumps and I was like this has been my entire life, just really just seeing people, you know, and um, and then it just became this kind of then thing in my brain and my heart and my soul of how do I bring this to life? And so complete confidence, which is what is it? It's a brand, it's a programme, it's a movement and it's for women that are really ready to stop kind of performing and really remember who they are. And it combines lots of elements, lots of pieces of the puzzle from the work with the mind, which has obviously been such a huge part of my own journey, from brain surgery and then spending nine years working predominantly going through the this, the, the brain and the subconscious.
Speaker 3:So I call that kind of being in the chrysalis really, you know, like as, as de-layering and and really working on the patterns and understanding our beliefs and what's holding us back and creating new or actually just chipping away, because I think it's already there. You see, I believe you're born into the world with confidence, as you wouldn't decide to come to this life and have another go. So I think it is this sort of de-layering, but there is this mind element, and then just really using the body as the main lever for, for, for feminine based confidence, right, and that comes from the emotional body, right, so you know, as really accepting and loving our emotions and not not suppressing them, allowing them to breathe and move and using movement as the best way to to flow and keep those emotions flowing and dance being just a just a such a beautiful modality for, I think, especially for women and it's the release, isn't it?
Speaker 2:it's the the point of release that allows things to break free from us. That is so vitally important for women, because we hold so much and we are the carriers, with the birth givers. Um, we also soak in people's energies with the harmonizers. That's the idea, um, all of that. But actually we're also human and we have to find ways to release some of this stuff out the back end, otherwise we're overburdened, we're overloaded.
Speaker 2:High anxiety, self-doubt, extremely high, and we, I think for me it's like that fear sometimes, like I can't actually cope with any more, like I'm full and my plate is full and I can't cope with anymore, so don't give me any more. But what that is doing is closing down, um, everything doesn't just close down the things I don't want, it closes down the things that I do want. And it's such a negative space to go into and for sure for me, like when I get into my body, my body knows how to release, my body knows what to do, it's instinctual and if I just trust it and go into it, things will start leaving. And I mean it can be all sorts of things will leave my body. You know, like I've done many things where I've almost like I could be a bear, I could be a tiger, where I've literally almost.
Speaker 2:I felt like I was running into something, you know, and as I was running, like something takes over and it's like this pure sense of freedom for me. I can't describe it. You know I've done lots of different things, like shaking medicine and anger dances, and you know it's always it feels quite primitive and primal in a way, but it's the basic essence of a woman releasing all the crap that she doesn't need to hold anymore and all the things that you don't even need to know what it is that you don't even need to know what it is. You just need to allow things to leave and to just be like done with that. Got off, you go off, you go. So that's what's opening up in me.
Speaker 1:It's just this sense of like yes, please, and more yeah, I have to say that, um, because I you know, like, when you do like those feedback sessions where you're like what's the one word that you would use to describe Lucy? And time and time again the word confidence comes up. And I look back on my life and there's never been a day in my life that I haven't been confident, and so I am the worst coach to come to as a confidence coach, because I've never had to do the work. I've never. Yeah, I see my, my children. They really struggle with confidence and anxiety and second guessing everything and anxiety and second guessing everything. And I can absolutely nurture them, but I'm really aware that I can.
Speaker 1:My gifts are different. I can't teach somebody confidence because it's just something that is so innate in me. So I'm so thankful for people like you, karen, and people like you, helen, who have got this gift to be able to get people into that state to like shake it off, to dance it out, because my kitchen is my dance it out place. It's just a ritual that me and my girls do all the time and a song comes on and we're shaking it off and we're singing and and stuff, like it's just always been there and so, but there have been moments when my confidence has waned, of course, and I like question everything, but I think I've got again those tools and techniques that I bring.
Speaker 1:You know, it brings me through, and so it's one of the things that I see most with women and a lot with men, but it's just something even more pervasive with women that they do question themselves. They do question, question everything, like you know my hair, my eyebrows, what lipstick should I wear? How should I show up today? Should I speak? Should I say something? And it really makes me sad because, like you say, helen, they're born with this beautiful light, this inner confidence, and just bit by bit, it gets eroded, and I think it's one of the biggest tragedies that we do to our, our daughters, our granddaughters, our sisters, our colleagues.
Speaker 3:Um, yeah, that's my thought yeah, I know, and it and all of the stats back it up. You know, with the research that's been out in the last few years with imposter syndrome and you know it's a, it was a really. I totally concur with what you're saying. It's so sad. I think it was about nearly 70 percent of women in this study in the last couple of years said they'd never felt true confidence. So there's something there and you know, when they look, when you look at it from a like a biological perspective, that women are born into the, born to their bodies, with less confidence than men.
Speaker 3:But then most of it is just really about um, the, the perception game that's. That's very heavily influenced basically by what we see and what we experience and and what we pick up on and, like you, open the conversation, the, the, the digital age, which I was part of with mobile. You know we did. We did the iphone deal the first um deal with the iphone to bring it into the uk market in 2007. Nobody had a clue what was going to happen. Right, it was just like everybody wanted the device, but nobody really. Well, somebody may be new, but the dangers of putting so much information in somebody's hand.
Speaker 2:I think as well. I think women, girls are taught to go into their heads and use and use their brains. Boys are taught to be physical and I feel like this happens very, very, very, very early on. The physicality of boys is like go off, you go be physical, and then you know, I see it with my daughter and her friends and they're sort of there in their heads trying to work things out, um, you know, so that they can do it through their brains, and I'm like this is not like, come back into the body. I want her to be more in her body. She was in her body, but the school system, things are changing there and I see it in her and I just think, oh, my god, it starts so young, it really, really does.
Speaker 2:And so that's, for me, is a problem that we need to talk about and face, because the worst place we can be spend too much time in our heads. What we need to learn to drop that down into our bodies and learn to listen to the wisdom that's inside our bodies. So, you know, young children are learning it very, very early, and that's why it's so difficult for us, because we've been trained from a very early age to do that and to ignore our emotions and not to get emotional. So, you know, then we get to midlife and we're like, if we are brave and wise enough to listen because it does take courage to go hold on my body is telling me something, I'm going to listen, but often what we hear means let go of something, you know.
Speaker 2:Say telling me something, I'm going to listen, but often what we hear means let go of something, you know. Say yes to something. Oh, I'm scared, I don't know, I don't know if I can do that, you know. And all of that questioning starts to seep in. But we're older. So when we step in, and we step in with experts and guides, it just becomes easier because we're not alone in it, whereas when we alone in it, in a way unless we've got parents who have kind of seen what's going on and can hold space for that, um, one thing I just wanted to add um, when you talk about the children elements.
Speaker 1:I work with children, um, you know, right from the age of four up to 18, and um, I've just been on a couple of weekend camps with them, and most of the children, their anxieties, their confidence and this is girls and boys comes from what's been passed on by their mum's anxieties. And you hear them like, well, mum said da, da, or mum said don't do this and don't do that, because she's trying to keep them safe, because that's her most precious thing. But then it gets passed on to the children so don't climb that tree, don't go running around, don't lose your stuff. So they're constantly worrying have I lost my spoon, have I lost my cup? And so I think the work that you do, actually, helen, doesn't just heal today, it heals generations, and I think that is so important. But we are coming to the end, so I'm going to ask you what I suppose is your biggest message or, um, your biggest gift or wisdom that you could offer our listeners as a takeaway.
Speaker 3:Oh, what a question. I think it's like. When I look back at my life and really all the things that have happened, I think it's to just have the courage to take that little next step. Just have the courage to take that little next step. And when you do that, life opens up for you and things start to happen beyond what you would ever thought was possible. And when we get stuck in our head and we start to second guess and the doubt comes in, we become further and further away from our true selves.
Speaker 3:And that really, for me, is the definition of anxiety, though the biggest reason for anxiety is simply not being yourself. So, just like a teen, a teaspoon of courage every day to just do the thing or have the conversation, or stop and look after yourself, it just it. It connect, keeps you connected to who you are, and that that's happiness, that's fulfillment. There's no purpose, isn't something that you have to go around the world looking for. The greatest purpose in this life is just to be yourself, and you get there just by every day, just having that, that love and that that bit of courage and confidence flows, because it's always there anyway. Yeah, thank you for sharing that how can people get?
Speaker 3:hold of you and find you. Well, they can find me on linkedin. I'm on linkedin, I'm on instagram. So, um, it's just helen mary parkerco on instagram, or helen parker coach, I think it is on linkedin you'll find me.
Speaker 1:We'll put the links on the show, all of my links are on there for the website and experience carnival.
Speaker 3:I'm just about to start recruiting, so, um, I'm going to be taking women to brazil next year, in in 2026. My vision, my dream, is to fill an entire float with with women, um, who are just celebrating themselves from the inside out and reclaiming how, just how amazing they are and powerful they are in the great celebration on earth, and we're going to be recruiting for that. There's a program that leads up to it, that works on your confidence for six months, or you can just come to brazil and and come on a on the biggest, most badass retreat of your life, like. So, yeah, I'd love to hear from anybody who's interested in what I'm doing and and your own stories and and your own and your own tales with confidence oh, thank you.
Speaker 2:I hope to get on a float one day with you. I don't know what year it'll be, but oh you're, you're coming definitely shaking our things up there with you. She would absolutely die for that. She's already asked if she can come, so I said yeah, one day we'll make it yeah, well, they have the, they have the mini version.
Speaker 3:So you, from eight years old, you can put them into the to the, the mini version, which is amazing well, this is another conversation completed.
Speaker 2:I want to say please check in on your sisters. Check in on the most confident one in your group, because she may be the one that is suffering or dealing with some kind of confidence issues, and also check in on the quiet sisters as well. Hopefully, this will inspire you to go out there to get some support and to take that next step. Don't forget that you can follow us so that you never miss an episode, and thank you so much for being here today, helen.
Speaker 1:It's been an absolute dream thank you so much for having me so thanks for listening and we can't wait to welcome you next time.
Speaker 2:Until then use your voice, journal, speak or sing out. However you do it, we hope you join us in saying it's a star.