In conjunction with the International Women’s Day, TGV Cinemas hosted a free screening for all of its female customers to watch the newly released “Captain Marvel” on 8th March 2019 at all of its cinema chain across the nation.
“The idea is to help people connect to a strong female icon on the big screen. We are fortunate to have a growing number of female role models in media, as we celebrate more diversity in the world of entertainment,” said general manager of marketing and operations Kabir Ariff Sultan.
A private screening was held at TGV, 1 Utama, where 3 inspiring Malaysian ladies were invited to share their empowering stories and successful journey to the audience.
TV host and beauty pageant winner Deborah Henry was the moderator of the session with the panel of leading ladies consisting of 2017 World Diving Champion Cheong Jun Hoong, happiness ambassador and motivational speaker Xandria Ooi, and Teach For Malaysia Partnership Manager Fam Li Ying.
Here are some of the motivational advice given by the 3 powerful and successful ladies.
On success and failure
Ooi: I don’t believe that I succeeded or failed at anything because everything in life is an experiment. I believe that when you do something, there’s no success and there’s no failure because it’s only an experiment, and with experiment, there’s only result you get. You don’t judge the result. If you get an undesirable result, then you learn, and you make changes accordingly to get a result you want, so you start another experiment. “Sucess” and “failure” are human-made words. The universe doesn’t say that you are born to succeed. So I think we can define, what success means to us.
Cheong: I’ve been to a lot of competition, and I wasn’t born to win at every competition. I faced a lot of failures. But I believe that every day there’s a new meaning, it’s a new start. So even if I win a gold medal today, it doesn’t mean that I will win forever. That’s what I always tell myself. Though success is a great feeling, we have to accept failure as well, and as an athlete, I have faced many failures. What I can do is, I get back up, train harder, and learn from my mistakes. I’ll also try to be more positive and strong as I face the world.
Fam: When you’re in non-profit organisations, the hardest part is always funding. But I chose this route because I wanted to challenge myself. It’s a different ball game than going to a private sector to ask for corporate funding or government grands. Though Teach For Malaysia has been around for 10 years, we’re still not as big as WWF or UNICEF. So it’s not easy to reach out to the public, and at one point I really broke down, I felt like that maybe I’m not suited for this role, maybe it’s not fated for me. At the point, I realised that I need to take a step back, just pause, and reflect. I realised that it’s actually a fear of failure because I didn’t see the result immediately. Reflecting back, allowed me to think back and ask myself why do I join Teach For Malaysia in the first place – I want to end education inadequacy, I want to build a better future for our students, for Malaysia. Connecting back to the greater mission, always brings the most passion.
On emotion control
Ooi: I can have a meltdown and still be happy. That’s the kind of mentality that I have. I can have a bad day, but it doesn’t mean that I have a bad life. When you allow yourself to feel that way, it means that you have accept, you acknowledge your feelings. Just because you’re angry, it doesn’t mean that you have to shout because that’s a reaction. You just need to acknowledge your feelings. Happiness is a practice, there’s different stages for it like maths and science. Even as adults, it’s not too late to practice it, but it’s better if you can start earlier, because it can really benefit you as an adult.
Fam: In school, we’re focusing on educating our children with different coping mechanisms. Like when it come, how do you with it? How do you recognise the feelings that are coming to you, and how do you process them? As an educator, I am there to help the children the value and to process the information that are coming to you.
Cheong: I don’t have much childhood because I’ve been practicing since I was 9 and I had to study for school and go to tuition. So it’s quite lonely sometimes. Also, because I’m the eldest in the family, I don’t want to let my parents worry about me, so I bottled a lot of my feelings inside and kept everything to myself. So when I won a medal, I made Malaysia proud. But I can’t win forever. There’s a limit to everything, and I think I’ve done enough. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself and I’ve learned that I’m allowed to feel that way.
On female superheroes
Cheong: I hardly watch movies since I’m always busy training, so I don’t really have much to comment. But I think it’s really great that now we have more female superheroes.
Fam: We need more female superhero movies as a way to instill value models, like someone to look up to when you’re young. As a child, apart from your parents and your friends, a lot of influence also comes from media.
Ooi: I think that a lot of women are not in prominent position. However, I feel that there so many strong and prominent female role models doing their own thing every day. Sometimes role models don’t really need to be large or glamorous, it can be just somebody that you admire as a woman. Like on social media itself, there are so many women that we can follow who do amazing things.
