Sophia A. Nelson Visits UNT

by Elizabeth Lemuz

On Cloud Zen

Today in class we had the privilege to have Sophia A. Nelson speak in our class. Sophia Nelson is the award-winning author of the book The Woman Code. She goes around the country and talks about the importance of women and how they value themselves. We were able to have speak to our RGM class before she went ahead and was presented to a different audience on our campus at UNT.

Nelson gave many good points to our class about the importance of being successful in life. She emphasized mostly on the importance of knowing our own value and by standing firm on that. It’s sad to hear that people in this world, especially women, don’t know their value. I have been raised differently than the world. I know the value that I have, but it’s also because of the way that I choose to live my life. She repeated that it is important to know that everything that you need to win in life is inside of you, which goes along with the idea of knowing our value.

I think as a woman in this world, it is difficult to stand out from the world that is mostly run by men. The way that the media portrays women is also very negative. The media more recently has been doing a disservice to many things like gender differences, race, and class. All of these things we discuss in class and the discussions get pretty heated. Women, tend to be portrayed as violent, immature, and crazy in the media. The media doesn’t tend to focus on the high-educated and successful women that there are in this world. Why does the media do this? There may be many different answers. All I know is, women are much more than what is represented on the reality tv shows and Nelson believes this too.

I believe that Sophia Nelson is a perfect example of what a successful woman looks like. She is trying to encourage other women to be successful by staying true to who they are and by encouraging that women put an end to being manipulated by the world.

There were three tips that she made sure that we understood before she left.

1. Know your value. Everything that you need to succeed in life is already in you. This is defined by the way that you love yourself.
2. Teach people how to treat you.
3. Live authentically. Be you.

I know in this world it is hard to go against what the world sees as “normal” but before Nelson came to speak to our class, I knew that weird and different is normal and should be the normal. Sophia Nelson encourages that relationships with each other is key and that we need to help each other especially as women. I live by these standards every day. Competition is good, but the healthy type of competition. The competition that causes you to lose friends or relationships in order to be in a “better” position isn’t worth it in my opinion.

Thanks to Nelson, I was able to think deeply about the importance of loving oneself and promoting that, helping each other achieve goals, and the importance of knowing that all we need in order to win and succeed is within us.