Campus Calm speaker discusses women leaders, self-love

Life coach, award-winning author and speaker, and president of Campus Calm, Maria Pascucci spoke to CSC women Monday night during her Women in Leadership presentation where she focused on how perfectionism can hold women in college back from their full potential.

The presentation consisted of two parts. First, Pascucci focused on perfectionism and how women focus on being perfect and don’t allow themselves to make mistakes. The second consisted of self-love and how to accomplish that.

In the first part, Pascucci went over statistics and how unhealthy being a perfectionist is. Stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation are three issues that affect college women’s studies. Throughout the presentation, Pascucci shared personal stories of how she dealt with perfectionism and how it worsened to the extent that she would have panic attacks, along with a dwindling diet.

Pascucci developed Campus Calm, a website for women who seek support dealing with perfectionism and to know they are not alone. The website’s motto, “Healthy, resilient women lead,” focuses on helping women relieve their stress and become confident, healthy leaders.

She also gave a list of seven steps to follow in order to overcome perfectionism and enjoy life while being a confident woman in a leadership role.

After a short break, Pascucci focused the second part of the presentation on self-love and how to accomplish it, from dealing with media portrayals of women to how women view themselves.

She showed a commercial making fun of magazines and how they crop women’s bodies to look “perfect,” to further prove that images the media portrays are in fact not real women’s bodies.

Factors like women’s conscience and the feeling of not being able to have self-care or self-love if you don’t earn it, are part of women’s inside factors. Outside factors include the media, technology, and parents, but Pascucci noted parents are not normally to blame. Growing up, females pay attention to their parents on how women should be. Mothers portray their idea of how a female should be to their daughters, and how a father treats his wife or talks about women will also be an influence on a young woman and her views.

Overall, Pascucci gave pointers on how women can deal with perfectionism and pointed out the struggles, while offering the insight that many women, and occasionally men, deal with, and how they can find assistance.