Food to enjoy, skincare to try, places to visit and things to experience – here’s a quick round-up of everything the focus team loved recently.
Brené Brown – courage, vulnerability and shame
Collins: Recently I was asked if I had heard of Brené Brown. No, I hadn’t. I started following her on Instagram but wasn’t blown away. Then, a few nights ago, I listened to her TEDx talk on vulnerability and shame (45 million views and listed in the Top 5 most-watched TED talks) and was so inspired that I jumped onto Netflix and watched The Call to Courage, a one-hour talk about being vulnerable and choosing courage over comfort.
Brené is funny, warm and her personal stories are easy to relate to. Her TEDx talk drew in the inevitable online haters – something that would floor most of us – but she was inspired by a quote from Theodore Roosevelt and doesn’t let the feedback from the cheap seats – the people who aren’t doing anything – stop her from putting her work out into the world.
“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…”
Theodore Roosevelt
Each day Brené wants us to choose courage over comfort – do the best we can, be vulnerable and show up even when we can’t control the outcome. Sometimes winning isn’t about coming in first but rather doing a really brave thing – choosing to have an uncomfortable conversation with your boss or taking part in an event even though you know you are going to come in last (she relates a beautiful story about a swimming race her daughter had to enter and highlights the courage this took). Sometimes just showing up is all that’s needed.
Gourmet Night Markets
One of the best ways to spend a Friday evening in Tauranga has to be chilling out with friends, listening to music and enjoying dinner from one of the 20 or so food trucks at the Gourmet Night Markets. No cooking to be done, everyone gets what they want, and with Mauao as the backdrop, it’s the perfect way to spend a summer evening.
There’s a great variety of food on offer – both healthy and delectably unhealthy – Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, Mexican, burgers, smoothies, raw food, mocktails…
The markets are on at Coronation Park every Friday night from 5.00-9.00pm until the end of February. See you there.
Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
Goosebumps and chills. That’s the kind of emotions you’d be experiencing while immersing yourself into a slow, lingering, yet extremely powerful debut novel by American writer, Julia Phillips.
Set in the wild, remote Kamchatka, this book depicts the daily lives of many different characters over the span of a year. They are all somehow affected by a previously unseen, unfathomable crime – the kidnapping of two little girls. Kamchatka isn’t widely populated which creates a tightly woven community of strangers who aren’t even aware of how closely they’re all really bonded. Each chapter is a new short story with a woman at the , struggling to hold her life together. At first, these chapters seem to have no connection to each other and just jump from one character to another and from one location to another. But step by step, Julia connects the lives of her heroines in one tangle of thoughts, dreams and life-changing decisions, skillfully leading readers to the pure explosion of emotions and events of the last few pages. And she does that in the most , intelligent and flawless style. We can’t wait to read more books by this Brooklyn author.