During the PASSHE conference, I attended the 1 o’clock keynote, Tish Norman. She held a powerful presentation called “BeYOUtiful it’s Ridiculous!” This speech was about becoming resilient, fixing broken pieces in your life, and unifying yourself with others. She starts off talking about internal beauty being better than external beauty, which was a deep cut for me because I was raised with this mindset. Some key takeaways I gathered from this keynote were that it is okay to let go of things when they are no longer working for you. Making sure that you take the time you need to recover from things that have happened, but are also surrounded by people and things that help speed up this process. During the presentation, we were asked to write down what is going well in our lives. It was required to do 2 or 3, but I really sat there and thought about things out of the box, like she had recommended, and was able to add an extra thing that is going well. She had also asked us to write stuff we are saying hello and goodbye too and I am now really trying to stick to this. For example, in my goodbye, I wrote “repeating myself” only because it really gets to me. I feel as though I have no reason to repeat myself the person I am speaking to should have been listening in the first place and it is just tedious to always repeat what you have just said. This allows for me to always remember that everyone is allowed ot have boundaries and certain things they want to do and not do.

The conference session I went to was called “Healing the Healers: A Wellness Workshop for Campus Women,” which was part of the PASSHE Women’s Consortium. The focus of this particular workshop was to engage participants and push us to consider our overall well-being and how different areas of life are interlinked. Instead of just talking about “self-care” in a vague way, the workshop emphasized how the stress of work, school, relationships, and life in general can quickly catch up with you. The speaker also explained how wellness is made up of multiple areas, including but not limited to emotional, physical, social, intellectual, financial, environmental, occupational, and spiritual health. I think many of us, myself included, often forget to nurture every aspect of our well-being. At the beginning of the session, we were asked to fill out a wellness wheel assessment and then reflect on the areas where we personally felt the most depleted. This was a great way to kick off the session, because it gave us the opportunity to dive into the activity with a concrete idea of what we wanted to focus on. One of the main ideas of the workshop was that wellness is interconnected, meaning that if one area of your life is struggling, it can start to leak into other areas as well. After completing my assessment, I noted that my strongest areas were intellectual and social wellness, while some of my lower areas were emotional and financial wellness. Seeing the results visually on the chart actually made me realize how certain stressors, (especially things like thinking about future careers or responsibilities after college,) can affect how I feel in my life overall. I enjoyed that it wasn’t just someone standing and lecturing the whole time. Instead, we were actively filling out worksheets and traveling around the room to different “stations.” It was very interactive and wholesome, which made it feel even more engaging and personal. The wellness wheel was especially helpful because it made it easier to visualize how balanced (or unbalanced) different areas of life might be.

The session that I went to was during Breakout Session 1 called “Healing the healers: A Creative Wellness Workshop for Caregiving Professionals,” by Jill Krahwinkel-Bower. The session’s main topic was to break down the different parts of a wellness wheel and to figure out which domain you should focus on when it comes to self-care. The purpose of the session was to determine which domains you should focus on for self-care and reflection. A key takeaway for me was, “Honor what you need, not what you think you should work on.” My most depleted domains were emotional, occupational, financial, and spiritual. With that information, I can focus on how to improve myself.

Tish Norman enlightened the crowd on the idea of “purse of life” which are the essentials of life. She challenges the lack of consistent selfcare throughout the day in peoples’ lives. She did this by mentioning how so many people have a bag, or a purse, that holds the necessities and the things people cannot go without, and they keep this on them wherever they go. Having a purse ready allows a person to be ready for the day, so if one is capable of putting in the effort of a purse and being ready, why not put in the effort for oneself to be ready? Having a purse of life is to have the essentials that will help you be ready for all of life’s obstacles. Norman gave the crowd three tools to wield, they are: "radically love yourself”, “build resilience”, and “find your edge.” A wicked sense of self-love, being able to mentally bounce back after adversity, and shifting mindset from victim to visionary are the practices that allow for resilience. She included the bonus, which is to, “harness personal narrative and cultural references”. Tish Norman was incredible and had a significant impact on my life. She had stirred my thoughts; now it is my time to take responsibility and apply it to my life.

For the PASSHE Women’s Conference, I attended the talk about “Restorative Practices for Women in a Rapidly Changing World” with speakers Tiffany Stasiunas, Lesley Huff & Andrea Marcolla. They discussed imposter syndrome and how it is to suffer from it as a woman. Some statistics they shared were that 70% of women in their workspace have experienced imposter syndrome, 97.5% of women in STEM graduate programs feel as though they don't belong there & that 85% of women don't talk to anyone about their imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome harms women so much in so many ways; it makes them feel like they can't apply to jobs unless they meet all the criteria, when men will just apply if they fit one expectation. Imposter syndrome causes us women to take fewer risks, it causes us to be less likely to apply for jobs, and it causes women to not get promoted in the jobs they do have as much. One of the speakers said something that really stuck with me, which was, “If we don't think we are good enough, why would other people value us?” Imposter syndrome is something I very much struggle with as a art major going into graphic design. I am constantly contemplating my worth and importance compared to my peers, even if I'm not thinking in my head “this is just imposter syndrome,” it's something that is very much there, and I know lots of other women struggle with this as well, no matter what field they are going into. Speaker Andrea Marcolla then talks about grounding strategies to help with our nervous system, with lots of very helpful information on it. We did calm practices and learned ways to think through our stress and measure it on a scale of how severe the stress is through the polyvagal theory. My takeaway from that was that you must be able to understand where you are because, from knowing where you are on the scale, you can ask yourself what you need? I think that the discussion about Impostor syndrome ties back to the concept of women not being treated equally to men in workplaces, which can cause their impostor syndrome or be the reason why a woman develops impostor syndrome. There have been many different ways of calming yourself down that have been explained to me throughout my years of being a very anxious person but I truly really enjoyed the way they talked about it in this panel, treating yourself with kindness and knowing yourself and what you need when you are feeling different levels of stress or sadness is something that can be so beneficial to a person and I have never thought of it in this scale way before.

I attended the Molly Jong-Fast’s talk and it was a very thought-provoking talk. She is a political journalist and author. One of her key concepts she repeatedly brought up during her talk was that, even though progress is slow, it’s still happening, and not to lose hope. Molly Jong-Fast then said that they reason that they seem to be invading is because “Progress was moving quickly and they were scared.” And she brings up the idea of how progress is still being made cause there needs to be movement from one side to get push back from the other. She was then asked about the role writing and social media plays in “moving the needle.” Molly Jong-Fast mentioned that there is no transparency with technology because there is no legislation for it. Her talk really spoke to me especially because I have recently been extremely anxious about the state of our country. Hearing her talk about that even though it’s more hidden, good things are still happening and progress towards a better country is still being made.

The keynote presentation session at the Women’s Consortium PASSHE ’26 conference was about self-love, resilience, and empowerment. The presentation highlighted that beauty and worth are about oneself and not about how one looks. One of the major takeaways from the presentation was that unless you are confident and positive about yourself from within, you won’t be able to focus on your outer appearance. The presenter used stories from her own life to explain these concepts, which made them easier to understand. The presentation provided some really insightful information about how to change your mindset to be positive, which I suggest everyone take into consideration.