Confidently Me is keenly primed to host women for an afternoon of empowerment, impact and one on one mentorship. Founder Faith Mazibuko says, “the number one goal is to empower and impact the lives of the women attending the Summit. We’ve tried to include mentors from as many industries and disciplines as possible to give them a wholesome experience. These are people who are thriving in their chosen industries, and I think it’s so valuable for our guests to get that guidance from people who have tangible experience.”
The Summit is the first ever Confidently Me seminar. “We held our launch in May this year. I was so stressed, planning these things is really stressful but it was a vital learning curve. I think I am better prepared now to host an entire summit. But ever so often I’ll still stop and be like Faith, girl, what are you doing? Are you sure?”
YOU CAN GET YOUR CONFIDENTLY ME SUMMIT TICKETS HERE AND FOLLOW THEM ON IG @CONFIDENTLYMESA TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SPEAKERS AT THE EVENT AND WHAT TO EXPECT AT THE SUMMIT.
Mentorship is something Faith values and hopes to tap into through Confidently Me. “We brought in mentors I know many women would really want to get that one on one time with but usually can’t because these queens are busy.” As with a lot of the things Faith does, she is very keen to learn from this event. She hopes that after the Summit, her ideas about mentoring will be clearer and she’ll know exactly how to proceed with making it a solid offering that they can deliver seamlessly.
WHAT STARTED AS A PHOTO SERIES: This is Faith’s founding journey
A career choice was an ever-evolving and sometimes jumbled up mess for Faith. But she’s known one thing to be true – she’d be working somewhere in health sciences. “When I was in primary school, I wanted to be a medical doctor. Towards the end of my primary school career, I had drilled it up to pediatrics. By the time I got to high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do anymore. I just knew it had to be in the health faculty. My problem is I’m multitalented, so I struggled to choose just one thing. In high school I conducted a choir, I was a care counsellor; I was doing a lot and I was good at it all,” she explains.
After matriculating in 2019, Faith’s career choice woes continued, much to her parents’ frustration. She switched from Nursing, to Business Management and even Graphic Design. Despite her confusion, her father was adamant that he wouldn’t accept a decision to take a gap year. “My dad told me he’d rather I do a one year course instead of taking a gap year. So I enrolled at Unisa and did a higher certificate in life and environmental sciences and that gave me a feel for the modules I’m doing now. I knew I could lean towards either life sciences or environmental sciences. I ended up choosing Life Sciences, I’ve always loved Life Sciences even in school.” Faith is currently an undergraduate student at University of Johannesburg.
I’VE BEEN CONFIDENT ALMOST ALL MY LIFE, but I was curious about other people’s journeys
“Never did I think in my life that this is what I’d be doing. Life picked its own terms and things happened.” The Confidently Me idea came to Faith as she started her new journey as a varsity student. She tells us, “my mom instilled confidence in me from a young age, she sternly advised me not be shy. In my family being shy was an [abomination]. I remember in Gr11 I was selected to represent my school in Canada. I was randomly thinking about how I’ve been a confident person almost all my life. I found myself curious about how other people’s journey’s of confidence looked like. So I asked my friends to share their journeys of confidence. It all started as an Instagram photo series.”
The series was warmly received with great feedback from those who had the pleasure of following it on her Instagram. “People felt there was a need for a project like that because we always hear we should be confident but we’re never shown the hows. There are so many lessons to be learnt in learning how other people went about a certain thing.” Faith knew she had to exploit that market opportunity and spent some time thinking about how she can turn it into something bigger.
“When I started Confidently Me, I had no idea what I was doing,” she laughs. “Sometimes you only have an idea but beyond that you don’t know how to proceed. We did two installations of the photo series, one in December 2020 and the other in January 2021. Immediately after that, from January until September, Confidently Me lay dormant. I hadn’t registered it and I didn’t know what to do with it. I was camped at the drawing board thinking about what I could do. So I had an idea to start a YouTube channel. To this day, Confidently Me doesn’t have a YouTube channel! I had to scratch the idea because things just weren’t coming together, I was almost panicking trying to figure out what to do,” she recounts.
CONFIDENCE AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
Faith describes herself as an English enthusiast. “I am fascinated by English. My dad is an author and I though you know what, I’ve always known I had the gift of writing too. So I had the idea to write a journal that I could then sell,” she says. The journal was meant to be a tool to help people achieve confidence, but then she was confronted with the fact that she hadn’t registered Confidently Me and wondered how she could sell not having done that.
“I registered Confidently Me as a charitable for profit entity in October 2021. I worked on my journal and before long we started selling it and the plan after that was to move to hosting seminars and mentorship. Now I had my ducks in a row and I knew where I wanted Confidently Me to go. If all goes well, I eventually want to have an academy dedicated to confidence. I consider confidence in the same breath as I do love – they’re both universal languages. You can relate to anyone who is struggling with confidence no matter where you are in the world.”
Although it has been a somewhat glittering path for Faith since she introduced her journal, launched the company and is now preparing for Confidently Me’s first ever Summit, breaking into the space is going to be a marathon more than a sprint. “When I think of an idea, I always want to see if I can find someone already implementing a similar idea so I can learn from them, but I couldn’t find anyone. It was and is still frustrating for me as I’m still trying to break into the space. I wish there were more people teaching confidence to those who weren’t born with it, confidence can be taught,” she says.
