AGAWAM — Women can usually really feel overwhelmed and burned out due to all of the obligations they tackle at house and at work. An upcoming girls’s well being convention will supply methods to assist girls “reset and refresh” to allow them to take management of their psychological well being, cut back stress, discover a steadiness of their lives, and grow to be extra empowered to realize their objectives.
Dr. Simone Phillips, a licensed psychologist and psychological well being counselor with a personal apply in East Longmeadow, and a college psychologist for Agawam colleges for 15 years, is organizing the Oct. 1 convention. She’s additionally the founder and CEO of Beautiful! Bold! Brave!, a girls’s well being and wellness advocacy community.
She continuously collaborates together with her community {of professional} girls although interactions on her Facebook group, on her web site, and at her annual convention.
Her first girls’s convention was performed on-line final 12 months due to the coronavirus pandemic, however this 12 months’s occasion shall be in-person on the Castle of Knights in Chicopee. Phillips stated the convention will carry collectively girls of all ages, from 18 to 99, for day devoted to self-care and self-improvement.
The theme of the 2022 convention is “The Best Version of Me.”
“We will provide attendees with health awareness, education, information, resources, and on-site health screenings that will empower them to create a life they love,” stated Phillips.
She created the Beautiful! Bold! Brave! advocacy community to offer girls instruments and sources they’ll use to enhance their well being and general wellness via higher self-care and wholesome dwelling.
“Teachers, clinicians, parents are all — or mostly — women who also have husbands, children and other responsibilities outside of their homes that cause them a lot of stress,” defined Phillips. “Very often they forget the importance of ‘stopping to refuel,’ which can lead to burnout.”
Phillips stated all too usually she sees the consequences of stress and its affect on her colleagues, in addition to mother and father. “We’re all waiting [and] anticipating the next ‘school vacation’ so we can wind down.”
The thought of “teaching women how to stop and take better care of themselves” led to Phillips to create Beautiful! Bold! Brave!
“It was important for me to be a role model of practicing healthy living and ensuring that I was taking good care of myself. I began posting about my daily runs and the healthy things that I ate. Eventually, I created [Beautiful! Bold! Brave!] as a platform to share all these healthy practices so women knew they didn’t have to do it alone.”
Phillips stated there’ll at all times be a necessity for this sort of convention as a result of girls are pulled in so many instructions and are continually responding to the calls for of others.
“When we’re working full-time, running businesses and taking care of our families, we don’t stop and think about the toll these demands of life take on us — we end up getting burned out.”
She stated that the “unfortunate reality” is that many ladies don’t know what self-care actually means.
“Our ultimate goal is to ensure they have some strategies to use when they become overwhelmed and need to take a break away from their busy lives.”
The Saturday convention, which runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oct. 1, prices $35 per particular person or $60 for 2 individuals; lunch is included. Clinicians and therapists who attend can earn persevering with training credit.
Advance registration might be made at www.beautifulboldbrave.com/bbbconference. However, Phillips stated there isn’t any registration deadline — attendees can buy tickets on the door on the day of the occasion; “We want to make it easy for women who may have to make last-minute decisions to attend.”
Phillips stated girls will depart the occasion with a “breadth of knowledge” about their very own well being and wellness. The aim is for ladies to stroll away with tangible tips to “create a life they love” and really feel empowered of their journeys.
“They also will leave feeling confident they can conquer their biggest goals, despite life’s circumstances. I’m also trying to make the achievement of ‘optimal health’ make sense to them without them having to spend thousands of dollars to get there.”
The keynote speaker shall be Cindy Kennedy, a nurse practitioner and founding father of Pursue Wellness Health Center in East Longmeadow, who has greater than 20 years of expertise in girls’s well being. She additionally will lead a workshop, “Finding Your Authentic Self,” to assist girls to comprehend who they’re and who they wish to grow to be.
In addition to Kennedy and Phillips, different audio system on the convention will embrace Kathy Picard, a sexual abuse survivor, coach and advocate; Michele Lyman, a yoga trainer; Candice Berube, writer of “City Lifestyle” magazines in Westfield and Northampton; Pamela Vatrano, who helps girls faucet into their non secular essence; Stacey Duquette, a licensed therapeutic massage therapist and yoga trainer.
Participants may have the chance to participate in seven 60-minute workshop and breakout classes They will deal with serving to contributors notice their very own internal strengths and use them to develop higher relationships with themselves, whereas turning into higher variations of who they’re.
Plenty of interactive actions designed to “recharge their bodies and souls” additionally shall be accessible. These classes embrace blood stress screenings, vitamin remedy boosters, purposeful motion assessments, artistic expression via artwork, and extra.
A consultant from Baystate Medical Center shall be readily available to introduce a girls’s well being and wellness publication and web site, “Baystate Every Woman,” that provides free and discounted instructional seminars on girls’s well being. Quite a lot of distributors that supply companies and merchandise geared toward girls may also be on the convention.
