Jasmine – Auckland
“What I’d say to my 11 year old self – I’d say, be confident.
Growing up I was never overly confident. I had some learning difficulties and what-not, so it’s just kind of believing in myself and knowing that other people are able to believe in you and just kind of go with it. Don’t second-guess yourself.
I’m 23 and born and bred here. I’ve done a bit of travel in my time. I studied in Auckland at AUT doing event management, so it’s what I’m doing now. As a kid I had, still do, have dyslexia. It’s not that bad. It’s definitely something that I’ve struggled with – just a lack in confidence doing school work or at work or whatever. That’s kind of affected my psyche a little bit – not in a bad way.
It’s made me second-guess and not feel confident. I guess growing up and what-not it’s kind of taught me about perseverance, and getting to where I want to be. I don’t know if that makes sense, but yeah. For me I get my letters all kind of jumbled around. So I’ve always had a few difficulties with spelling or random things. So, I still kind of use the techniques that I learned in primary school, which is kind of insane. I guess for me it was during essay writing and all that kind of stuff; for me I’d put down in words or write out my essay and I’d always get my mum to double-check it because what makes sense to me doesn’t necessarily come out on paper. So, yeah even now I still get my mum to proofread. I didn’t like to speak about it at school or anything, because I kind of felt like there was a bit of a stigma attached to it.
I don’t really like to reach out that much. Through confidence I guess I’ve reached out to psychologists even and they’ve told me that my way of thinking or learning is not necessarily a bad thing and it’s just a different perspective. So through them and then through teachers, through my parents, friends, family – they’ve all kind of been real supportive and keep me going. So yeah, I’m doing what I love now, so I’m pretty happy.
At the moment I’m day three of a new job. I’m event managing the World Press Photo Exhibit which is going to be held in Smith & Caughey on 1-30 July. So that’s pretty amazing, just being able to do that. But goals for the future; I mean all event managers want to be able to host like the Olympics or Oscars, so dream big, yeah.”
