Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

This month, March, I'm headed to NYC to give a talk on self-advocating to celebrate International Women's Month.

How cool, right? I mean, what a cool topic, what a cool month. I love the topic of self-advocacy because I think that we all know at some level that it's important, but it's not taught now. It's not taught by anybody, is it? I think it's something that we have

to learn. Maybe we have, we had great parents who really taught us to communicate our needs,

but many of us didn't. And so it's something that we have to

figure out almost later in life, especially when it comes to work, when it comes to us making a contribution with our lives, advocating ourselves,

communicating our needs matters.

Now I want to share with you today the first experience I ever had when it comes to self-advocating.

I was 12, 13 years old in a school in the southeast of England. And I was one of the children who received a free school lunch

because my parents lived on government assistance. And there is absolutely no shame in this, but at the time, you know, as a kid, the last thing that you want is to stand out or to be different from your friends.

And in my friendship group, I was the only one who had a free lunch and there

was a bit of a weird policy at this school.

What would happen if you were a free lunch person was at recess you had to go to the reception desk and get a

token a big silver token it was very visible and then at lunch when you when it came

time to pay you would give that token.

Everyone else just got to sign their name.

But the free lunch people, we stood out because of this token.

And I remember like back then I would say to my friends,

you know, at recess that I had to just step out for a second

or I hope that they wouldn't even see that I was running off somewhere

because it would have questions like like where did you go?

So I try and sneak off to get my token because I was hiding the fact that I had this free lunch.

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