As featured in current BayBuzz magazine article, Twenty.

Every hour a small alarm goes off on Kristyl Neho’s phone reminding her to repeat, to herself, a small mantra: “I am beautiful and I am enough.”

“It builds self-worth and reminds me to stop and celebrate the moment,”  she says. “It’s been a tricky year and a half for a lot of people. A small positive statement you say to yourself regularly can really help.”

Kristyl, of Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahungunu descent, is an actor, playwright and founder of Confident Me – a unique programme equipping school students with tools and strategies for dealing with whatever life throws at them.

Confident Me focuses on three areas: tikanga Māori, performing arts and personal development. Since it started, more than 5,500 students have gained increased resilience, confidence and self-assurance from the programme. Now Kristyl is launching an online version called Confident Mini Me. 

“It’s for mothers, preferably solo mothers, to help build their own self-confidence and then learn how to build that for their children.” What’s more, it will come with an interactive Confident Mini Me journal.  

The new year also sees Kristyl, a graduate of Toi Whakaari NZ Drama School, take her solo show “A Thousand Thoughts A Minute” to the Aoteroa International Festival of Arts in Wellington. It is part of a bigger show Stories within Stories from Te Mataua-Māui, Hawke’s Bay community, directed by Puti Lancaster. 

Asked if she has found it hard to forge her career as a woman, Kristyl says, “I get knocked back by men and women. 

“A lot of women have inspired me,“ she adds. “My biggest inspiration by far is my seven-year-old daughter Numia.

“And sometimes people have inspired me because they haven’t believed in me and I have thought: ‘I am going to do it anyway’.

“I don’t hear ‘no’ anymore.”

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