SHOULD professional and personal lives be kept separate?
While some people may not want to take home work, or have their private business factor too much in their careers, aligning the two may save some workers, especially women, undue stress, says Chamara Hollingsworth.
It is her goal to help women find the happy medium between the two aspects of their lives as they fulfil their dreams.
The 32-year-old is the founder of Vision 2 Reality (V2R) and believes it is important for more women to really learn about themselves and how to love themselves, particularly since, in her view, too many are not demonstrating their self-worth.
“I look at women every day and I see women in relationships that they are not happy in, and it doesn’t have to be an abusive one,” she told the MIDWEEK NATION.
“You see children behaving in ways that you may not necessarily be pleased with and I think that it has ma lot to do with self-love,” she added.
Hollingsworth explained that her organisation, V2R, was a coaching consultancy, which focused on assisting women to chart a clear path to their dreams through improved communication and relationships, all under the philosophy that “everything flows from the inside out”.
“I am also very passionate about assisting persons with achieving their goals, and over time, I started to realise that there was a linkage between the two. So when you are setting a goal, it is very unlikely for you to achieve it if you don’t take the time to first get to know yourself and then love yourself or appreciate yourself throughout the process,” she said.
Breaking down challenges
V2R was inspired when Hollingsworth observed that there were too many people who were experiencing difficulty in reaching their goals, something that the teacher within her saw as an opportunity to use her special talents of breaking down challenges into manageable and doable goals. In this light, she offered such services as training and coaching programmes as well as public speaking engagements.
“A lot of us tend to approach goals from the New Year’s resolution type of process: ‘Oh, I feel that I want to achieve these things, so let me just call a bunch of things that I would like to achieve by the end of the year’, and that’s it. I believe that sometimes it helps to really take the time to see if the goals match your values, you know, match who you really want to be in life – possibly who you are – before you actually take to putting them down on paper, so to speak.”
With a bachelor’s degree in management studies, Hollingsworth has taken both her love of helping others and training to forge a business that is about empowering women and allowing them to further empower others.
The Dynamic Diva: Hour Of Power was one such project that brought not only women but some men out bi-monthly to an event during which they learnt more about a topic of choice.
“It is a forum where even though you have people speaking, it is open enough for everyone to put in what they felt about the situation,” she said. “You start to learn from the other people you are surrounded by. So it ended up also being an event where women could really come together and share in some of the experiences that they would have had in their lives and so on.”
The Dynamic Diva has expanded to become the face of the organisation, she noted. It has also given rise to another project, Diva Discussions, which is a bi-weekly event that provides a more open space for hashing out various topics, such as fear, accounts, fitness and even breast cancer.
“If I can teach the women who are the nurturers of society, so to speak, to love themselves, then they may in turn be able to teach the children to do the same, and it would eventually create a shift in the mindset of the island and eventually the world,” Hollingsworth said.
“That would be great. I would love to see that sort of shift start to happen, a more positive mindset overall.”
