( ENSPIRE She Did That ) Cheryl Sutherland Promotes Mental Wellness Through Positive Affirmations, Gratitude, and Journaling
ENSPIRE Contributor: Anastasia Hanna
Cheryl Sutherland is a transformation strategist, speaker, and entrepreneur who is committed to assisting people in being their best selves. By concentrating on distilling a person’s passion, she is able to help them reconnect and extract their own personal strength. Sutherland developed a business that encourages women to move into their own agency by building confidence, clarity, and creativity after she spent over 1400 hours studying and encouraging personal growth, coaching, and reigniting her inner creativity.
As a women’s empowerment specialist and entrepreneur, Cheryl Sutherland and PleaseNotes have been featured in InStyle, Huffington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, American Express OPEN Forum, Thrive Global, Hello Giggles, Brit + CO, Travel Noire, and on podcasts such as The Creative Empire, I Love Success, No Philter with Phil Pallen, and more. ENSPIRE magazine spoke with Sutherland on the importance of affirmations, the impact PleaseNotes has made during COVID-19, and why affirmations are especially important for women’s empowerment.
What makes affirmations so important? How do they work exactly? Are they used alongside other practices? How has it changed your life?
Affirmations are important because they are an opportunity to consciously create your reality. In reiterating what you want to be true, stepping into the feeling of it, and making it feel natural, you are able to allow it to show up in your physical experience ASAP. Affirmations alone are not able to do anything if you don’t believe them to be true and if you aren’t amplifying them with another mindfulness practice such as journaling or meditation.
Practicing with affirmations has been such an amazing process for me because it gave me the opportunity to decide who I really wanted to be and bring that into practice. One of the first affirmations that I ever started working with was “I am a worthy, courageous, beautiful woman committed to loving and trusting myself and others.”
At the time, it was given to me at the beginning of an intense leadership program I did not believe that was true. However, I was able to invoke it if I felt unsure on the way to and when I achieved my goals. This allowed me to create tangible evidence that this affirmation was becoming my truth. Now I live by affirmations and I’m very conscious of the things that I’m saying as I understand that with enough emotion and repetition, the things that I’m saying will come to life.
What kind of impact has PleaseNotes made so far? Is the reception mostly positive or negative? Have you had any skeptics?
It’s tricky to say the tangibles in regards to an impact, however, one thing that I will say is that thousands of my products have been shipped all over the world, that I have clients who always buy my goods for themselves and the people they care about, and my clientele list keeps growing.
The reception is definitely positive, especially during the pandemic, as more people are looking for ways to support themselves with mental health and also with figuring out what they actually want in their life instead of continuing to do the same habits all the time. When I first started it, there definitely were some skeptics, however, the majority of those people didn’t do the research that I had done and were not involved in the personal growth world the way that I was.
When you look at the statistics around the growth of the personal development industry, it makes no sense not to be in this business, especially when you have a passion for it. Those skeptics were used to investing in tech versus in a product-based business, so I just needed to find my people.
I see your website advertises a free online community. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What can members expect when they sign up?
Especially with everything that happened in 2020, I transitioned my online community from Facebook onto a private network. I feel like it’s so important to create a community of like-minded people that are also positive, especially since we’re not able to network and see our friends and family the way that we used to. In this community, we do trainings, ask questions, and share our goals and dreams, and the geographic area of the members is quite wide. There are people from the UK, France, Canada, and America, and it’s expanding daily.
How do you think PleaseNotes is benefiting others during COVID-19? Has your business seen a rise or fall in success during this time?
The business is benefiting from the pandemic in a couple of different ways. First of all, the habits of doing things that we are used to have been gravely distracted, leaving space for people to take a look at the things they do, if it’s serving them, and what they actually want to do. Some people are starting businesses, some people are leaving their jobs, some people are going back to school, and this is the perfect time to do any of those things.
Another way that people are shifting is understanding the benefits of introspective work and taking care of one’s mental health. We don’t know when this pandemic is going to be over with and making sure that we feel good right now is a huge support for people struggling with burnout, the effects of isolation, and anxiety around the future. Creating consistent practices of gratitude and/or journaling is super important to make sure that you’re not bottling up negative emotions and that you can focus on the good things that are happening now.
As a result of the pandemic, I have had a large uptick in sales of my journals and also of my workshops and focused on helping people learn how to practice gratitude and how to practice with journaling.
Why is women empowerment a focus for PleaseNotes? Why do you think affirmations are essential for women specifically?
Women’s empowerment is so important to me because I’ve seen the difference that having self-confidence and utilizing your intuition makes in the lives of womxn. My products are actually gender neutral, however, the majority of people that purchase my goods and come to my workshops are womxn.
I’ve seen that more womxn struggle with confidence, putting themselves first, and saying yes to the things they want than men ever do. I’ve seen firsthand the clear correlation of how people run and grow their businesses when they have been working with personal growth tools and affirmations, and feeling worthy, confident, and capable makes a huge difference when you’re making decisions, asking for more and setting boundaries, which is where a lot of businesses stagnate and die.
Finally, how is PleaseNotes celebrating Black History Month? Are there any special promotions or discounts?
By not discounting anything for Black History Month. We have the opportunity to communicate how much we are worth; I feel giving people the opportunity to support us at full price makes the most sense.
Sutherland is currently residing between Los Angeles and Toronto, Ontario. To learn more about PleaseNotes, you can visit the official website. You can also follow Cheryl Sutherland on her Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest pages.
