Experts in Empowerment
I am so excited to welcome our special guests today: Jill and Mary from Girls Mentorship! Jill and Mary are mentoring girls to thrive as bold leaders, confident friends, and connected community members. We discussed why mentorship is so important, what messages they focus on in their programs, and the transformations they’ve seen when girls feel empowered.
Meet Jill + Mary
MARY: Hey, Steph. It’s an honor. It’s a privilege. You’re one of our favorite people, so podcasts with our friends are just like having a cup of coffee.
JILL: Really though. And we know you have incredible listeners, so we have to say what’s up to everybody tuning in as well.
Oh, you gals, you’re amazing. And the feeling is so mutual. So for girls who may not be familiar with you, could you please share what Girls Mentorship is and what it does?
MARY: Girls Mentorship. Honestly, we like to say it’s exactly what we needed when we were teens and tweens. So the really integral ages, right? We start to really get a feel for who we are around. And I would say. 10–9, 10, we start to form our identity, what we like, what we don’t like outside of who we’re learning from, usually mom and dad, close friends, aunties, uncles, all of that. But what we recall is no one really talked about things like values, or boundaries, or conflict resolution, or if I’m not feeling confident, how do I boost my confidence? If I’m having a fight with a friend. How do I solve that fight, move on from it, fix it? How do I just deal with problems head on? So at Girls Mentorship, Jill and I are the girls, the women that are reaching our hands back and teaching girls sooner.
Why Mentorship Matters
Oh my gosh, that’s so great. Why do you feel it’s so important for girls To have mentors, not just professional mentors, which is really important, but also for dealing with life.
MARY: I feel like having mentors really is just a playbook. It’s your own personal playbook because they say there’s three ways to learn, right? There’s the DIY method, the method where you stick your hand on the stove and you’re like, oh, that was hot! Oops,I fell down. How do I get up? Right. And we generally go through those lessons more than once. The next way to learn is like books and podcasts, right? It’s the absorption of information. You want to know something specific, so you seek out that information. I think learning in 2025 is really cool because it’s not necessarily just sitting in a classroom, as much as we don’t like cell phones because how they’ve taken over and are front and center in everything we do, if we use them appropriately, they can be such a powerful learning tool. Right? So we can plug into podcasts, no pun intended! You can watch YouTube tutorials. We can really learn anything that we want to learn. The only caveat to that is the time, right? It’s going to take you time to absorb the information. The third way to learn and one that we have found to be most effective is to find a mentor, whether that’s in business, whether that’s in life, whether that’s in relationships, whatever it is. It’s literally having someone in your life that has done the thing that you want to do that can tell you how to do it in less time. If we want to save the time and not necessarily experience all the heartache for the DIY method, then mentorship is the way to go because you’re literally asking someone who has the wisdom. And the difference between wisdom and knowledge is the application, right? I can know something, but if I’ve never experienced it then I actually don’t have the wisdom to get through it, which the wisdom piece is integral for us. Because what we tell girls is we’ve done it. Nothing that you say or have done will ever surprise us because between the two of us, we’ve probably done it, like I said, that DIY method, several times. And with the failure, with the success comes the feelings, comes the thought process, comes the question of how would we do it different the next time around. So mentorship is a tool. It’s another tool for you to use to become the best version of yourself in less time.
JILL: I was just going to say, we grow up looking at one another as competition or that they’re going to steal our idea. Or like, I can’t ask for help because that makes me look weak. Or whatever those limiting beliefs are, those thoughts. And it’s because in school it’s like, focus on your work. Don’t use anybody else’s brain. I feel like if we don’t come in and disrupt that thought pattern, you’re gonna grow up and look at everybody else like they are competition or that I can’t ask the question because I’m not good enough. So we want to come in and say like, stop that. Stop should-ing yourself: I should do this, I should have done that. I would’ve coulda shoulda. And we want to say, using your voice and asking for what you need is actually one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. So it’s knowing that at a very young age, that’s how we’re taught and we just need to unlearn that pattern.
Safe Adults
You have people that you feel safe enough to ask questions, to be vulnerable, to be like, I don’t know how to handle this, but you as my mentor can listen, can support, can give me ideas so that I can keep moving forward.
MARY: Well, and I think you said it perfectly there. It’s safe adults, right? Because I also think that all of us have encountered an adult that doesn’t make us feel like we can use our voice. It’s easy to put everyone in that same box of, well they’re not going to care how I feel. They’re not going to care what I think. They’re not going to care what I have to say. One of our favorite books is “Permission to Feel” by Mark Brackett. The first chapter, he details a character in his life named Uncle Melvin. And Uncle Melvin for Mark was that safe spot. And I think he ends the book by saying either be the uncle Melvin or find the Uncle Melvin’s. That’s who we want to be, right? Mr. Rogers put it as find the safe adults. And that’s who we want to be for kids because we do have all this wisdom. We do have all this knowledge and we don’t want it just to die with us. We want it to be passed on to the next generation for good, because that’s everybody’s hope is that they surpass what we were able to do but with our help.
Girls Mentorship Messages
For sure, we want the rising generation to do better than we are doing and we did. So with the different offerings that you have with Girls Mentorship, what messages are the core focus that you have?
JILL: We are developing girls’ self awareness, so how they see the world, how they also see themselves is really important. That is foundational for us. So if we can really hone in on that as number one, we are setting them up for massive success. So self awareness, self esteem, and self confidence. Those are the three pillars that anything that we do in our summer camps and our afterschool programs and any other coaching offerings that we do, but that encompasses a lot. So it’s like, Oh, those are fun. Three words. That’s it. But I mean, if you really boil it down, it is how do you navigate friendships? How do you learn about your communication styles? How do you effectively communicate? How do you apologize sincerely? How do you think for yourself and not group think? Because it’s like at this age, whatever my friend does is what I’m gonna do. So there’s so much that goes into it. And another one is social media. So it’s that digital footprint, and how you show up online, and how you engage in certain group chats, and how you show up in real life, and how you show up online is important. Essentially, it’s teaching kids how to people better. And really loving on them to know their worth, that they were born inherently worthy of all good things. And as we grow up, we just start adopting other people’s expectations or opinions or what society tells us. And it just kind of reshapes our personality, how we see ourselves, how we see the world. So we act as a mirror to say we understand what you’re going through, but we also want to gift you with some terminology and language and skills to help you when you are faced with these challenges. Because at some point in your life–it’s not an if, it’s a when–yeah, when these things happen to you, you will be better equipped to deal with them powerfully versus what it did to Mary and I, and it kept us down, made us feel small or have us put on a mask, um, to show up differently than who we were designed to actually be.
MARY: So the opposite of empowered right is obviously disempowered. And I think it’s really important to point out that when you feel disempowered, you make decisions that are in alignment with that feeling. And those can be really unhealthy decisions. And that is definitely what Jill and I experienced, was making decisions from a place of feeling disempowered, and that led to some really negative consequences in our life. So it really is being able to gift girls with the perspective of making decisions from their most empowered self, because that’s going to be in alignment with who, again, they want to be in their future. I feel like all of us have this ideal of who we want to be. It’s like our prospective self. However, we can only make those decisions that are in alignment with that person if we’re doing it from a place of feeling our best.
Tween + Teen Transformations
My goodness, you gals, you’re doing incredible work. You are doing THE work, right? You are. I mean, you mentioned earlier how you have after school workshops, you have a summer camp (that we’re going to come back to), you do coaching. What transformations have you seen with the girls that you’ve worked with?
MARY: Our biggest thing with girls is that, for example, we do a temperature check with girls the minute we see them, to the minute that we leave them. So it’s a check in and it’s a check out on a scale of one to five. How are you feeling? One is obviously blah, five is amazing. I don’t need a girl to go from one to five for me to feel like we satisfied the box. I need a girl to go from one to 1.5 because society has this thing where it loves to really highlight overnight successes. Like we went from nothing to everything overnight and that paints a really unrealistic picture. So the transformations just simply by seeing, hearing and valuing something a girl has to say is huge. That makes me feel wildly successful because you can tell in her eyes, you can tell in her body language, right? She’s more engaged in the conversation. A lot of girls that walk into our summer camp on day one Monday have their arms crossed their shoulders down and their head looking at the floor, rye contact is difficult. They don’t want to be there because they don’t know what it is. Their parents made them come. They think it’s like a boot camp. They think it’s therapy. And when we think therapy, we think something is wrong with us. So they’re like, nothing’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me? By Friday, simply by giving them the space to talk about things that are going on in their head, that they are experiencing, that they are feeling that they don’t feel like they can talk with a lot of people about. It’s a world of, it’s literally 180 degrees different. You see their shoulders start to roll back, their head is up. They are smiling, their arms are no longer crossed and they are asking to come back for another week because it is probably the first time that they feel like they’ve had a safe space to relate to others and to get out what’s been weighing them down. So I think the blanket transformation that we get to see is simply the girl believing not only in herself and her abilities, but believing that she has a space to be exactly who she is–whether she identifies as the weird one, the artsy one, the athletic one. None of that matters because all of us are that, and that is what is really special about getting to do this work in that form.
JILL: One other transformation that we both love is around friendships. I feel like girls, tweens and teens struggle with friends, friends that talk about them, the friends that stabbed them in the back, and then they have their besties, and they don’t kind of know, where do I fit in? Where do I belong? What will people like me? And it’s being able to have these conversations with the girls for them to come back and be able to share like, I ditched this friend because we didn’t share similar values. Or I learned from being around you guys that I need to be celebrated, not just tolerated. and so I left her behind. Or it’s like our girls who have just desperately fought to find their place. And making sure that she has a solid foundation of calling in those friends. For her to come back and be like, I had a sleepover last weekend and now I get to go to the mall with her! Like those are the things that might seem just silly to mom and dad because it’s like, oh honey, yeah, whatever, you know, like we’re just going to kind of push that off to the side. But Mary and I know that for them in that moment, it is massive, it’s monumental. And we need to call that out so that she can continue to call those things in for herself.
MARY: Well and as adults, we forget the feelings of first: the first time we had a friendship fight and how that made us feel, the first time we had a crush and how that made us feel. Right? So it’s easy for us to brush it off and be like, just do it because we’ve done it a million times now. And when you start to do something and you get comfortable with it, it builds confidence. So we have the confidence to say, just do it, but that isn’t what girls are experiencing because they haven’t been able to put in the reps. So when we call it out, because they did something that they were scared of, that builds confidence for them to be able to do it again. And soon enough, they’ll get past–we joke that it’s like Mario, right–they’ll get past level one, they’ll get past the monster at the end of level one, and then there will be a new monster for them to face, but they’ll have more strategies to face it this time around than they did the first time around.
Pursue More Summer Camp
You gals, you really are doing incredible work. And so are the girls that you work with. Like you are empowering them to do that work, to do the transformations. And I feel very lucky that I have seen this, like. I am a witness for sure. Last summer, I had the incredible privilege to spend a week with you gals and with my daughter at your Pursue More Summer Camps. And you’ve been doing them for a few years. And I am I’m so excited that Pursue More Summer Camp is coming back, coming back to 2025! Can you tell us about your camp, about what you do, about what girls can, can expect?
MARY: We have flipped the word camp and the experience of what camp is on its head. The music is going to be pumping. We’ll have a theme because we talk about, like I said, positivity and friendships. and conflict resolution, all the things that we’re lagging in or lacking. And it’s just, it’s fun. It’s colorful. We do play games, but the games we play have a purpose. We bring in phenomenal guest speakers who girls can see themselves in. I mean, we’ve had everyone from. news anchors, to wardrobe stylists, to jewelry makers. We want to make sure girls know that there are other vocations for them to follow big dreams that maybe they didn’t know existed, that they get to see in one of our guest speakers that lights a fire underneath them. It’s a week that goes by too fast. It really is one of the coolest things that we have had the privilege of concocting and creating, and it’s only getting better because we’re only learning more of what girls need. You brought up the fact that we’re in afterschool programs. So we’re literally with girls this age range, every single day. Everyone is struggling with the same problems, regardless of the walk of life. And so our space is welcoming to all wherever you’re coming from, however, you’re feeling in this moment. It is a huge goal of ours and one of our company values to meet girls exactly where they’re at, and bring them up that temperature scale that I was talking about. Right? If we can get them from a one on Monday to a three on Friday, we succeeded.
JILL: We make sure every girl is seen, heard, and valued. And we have just wonderful experiences throughout the week to support the girl who is exuberant and outgoing, or the girl who is a little more to herself. We do traditions and we have this amazing secret buddy program that girls write love notes to one another. It just teaches girls to be thoughtful, to be kind, to acknowledge one another, to be empathetic. And then as the week progresses, we have this amazing talent show on Thursday where, it’s like when we first announced it, eye roll, nobody wants to do it. And then come Thursday, because we’ve been so connected and we’ve developed these skills, we’ve gotten outside of our comfort zone, everyone participates in some way, shape, or form. And it’s just a way to champion one another and to give girls a space to show up for herself and then to be celebrated. So it is without a doubt our favorite thing. And Steph, I’m not even kidding when we say this, you were the bright spot of coming to camp as a facilitator. She helped us just elevate our experience, and your daughter and her friend, I mean, it was just so touching. So you are always welcome back.
MARY: Oh, she’s coming back. She already agreed, 2025. Steph is going to make a reappearance.
Yeah, I am. And to that point, I live in Las Vegas, but I was like, Oh, I’m coming to Arizona. It was absolutely worth the trip, worth the time. My daughter and her friend, they just could not stop talking about it. They’re just so excited, they told all of their friends. And so I can’t say enough good things because of what I got to see, what I got to experience. It’s. Jill and Mary pouring into these girls, and also them pouring into each other. I highly recommend, you know, five stars, it’s not an if, it’s a for sure. I’m so excited. Mark your calendars!
JILL: And we have a lot of things coming. I mean, we are, we are just ideating. Oh man, we have all the ideas, man. It’s going to be so good.
MARY: It just, it does. It keeps getting better with the intentionality to make it better. So if any of you girls that are listening happen to live in Arizona or Nevada, tell your parents about this camp because you would also potentially get to meet your favorite podcaster.
Oh my gosh. That would be amazing. When are your camps? Because they’re coming up in the summer, so can you tell more about those details?
MARY: So this year we have camp in June. So it’s going to be June 2nd through the 7th, June 9th through whatever that Friday is, June 16th, and then June 23rd. So there are four different weeks. We often get the question of like, so do I come for all four weeks? No, it is a week at a time. However, we have had several girls come back for multiple weeks simply because of how much they enjoyed it. It’s also different week to week. So though we talk about the same thing and have the same foundational curriculum, different campers coming in, create different experiences, we also have different guests each week, which creates a difference as well. We get to partner with an incredible school district that’s local here to the Phoenix/Scottsdale area, called Rancho Solano. They are in alignment with the work that we do. And open arms said, come on in. We can’t wait to host something like this. It’s going to be incredible. So www.girlsmentorship.com/camp, all the details will be there as well.
Closing Thoughts
Oh, fantastic. I am so excited for this to launch. I cannot wait. I cannot wait to spread the word. Before we wrap up, I would like to ask you, what is the most important thing you want girls listening to know?
MARY: I want girls to know that they’re just as important as me. I feel like there’s a disconnect between Like people in authority positions, like your elders, right? If you think of teachers or coaches, girls don’t feel like their voice is as important as mine or their thoughts or are as important as mine, how they feel are as important as how I feel. And that’s simply not true. I simply am in 36th grade, whereas these girls are between sixth and twelfth grade, which gives me a few more grades of experience. And that experience matters in these conversations that we’re having. But just because I have more experience doesn’t mean they are any less important than I am, as an adolescent to me being an adult.
JILL: For me, I want girls to know that you’re not going to just wake up one day and, and have your life all figured out. Our purpose, you hear that a lot, or you ask yourself the question, like, what am I going to be when I grow up? And who am I going to be? And what is my life going to look like? And I think being in a position of someone who has found her purpose, how I’ve found that. is by being myself and knowing that what makes me unique is my superpower. So it’s my energy, it’s my enthusiasm, it’s the way that I’m able to talk to people. And as much as those are qualities that make me unique and special, they also are in other girls. So some of the things that make us who we think are unique and special. We’re like, oh, that’s nothing. I need to look for more. I need to be more. And I just want girls to just get to know themselves on such a personal level because that is what’s going to help guide you in making those decisions for what’s next. It’s like, I’m going to say yes to this opportunity because I get to be around really powerful people or I get to learn from a business that I admire. Yes, I’m going to do that. I’m going to pick up things along the way, or I’m going to leave things behind and then continue to follow those breadcrumbs until you’re like, wow. I’m doing it. I feel really good. This is so cool. I love it. That’s how you do it.
You guys, you’re so full of such genuine and like wisdom and warmth. Every time I interact with you, any moment I spend with you, I feel lifted, I feel filled. It’s not just been a pleasure having you on the podcast, but having you in my life and connection with our businesses, I’m truly grateful for this, like it’s sisterhood, it really is.
MARY: Sisterhood of the traveling microphones.
Connect with Jill + Mary
So before we go, can you please share where people can find you, connect with you? You mentioned your website earlier. You can say it again and also socials and where to find you.
MARY: We are Girls Mentorship everywhere. So spelled it’s G I R L S and then mentorship. So on Instagram, that is where you’ll find us, on the .com that is where you’ll find us. We’re big on those two platforms and we would love to see you drop into our DMs, say hi. Get your parents on our email list so they can learn more about summer camp, if that sounds good to you. If you’re a parent, get on our email list, we send out phenomenal weekly emails with tips and tricks and tools and strategies for you to help your girl directly. but get involved. We would love to welcome you in our atmosphere.
Fantastic. Jill Mary has been a pleasure again, so wonderful to see you. Thank you so much for being on the show.
JILL: Love you Steph. We love your listeners. Thank you for doing literally the most important work. We couldn’t and wouldn’t want to do it with anybody else. So keep it up girl.
