Steph Claire Smith

For me to be able to recite that comment and to know that a teacher looking after kids can say something like that to a young girl, for me, I think back to that and I'm like, I have a lot of issues with that.

And I just, yeah, it's just for some reason it's been one of those ones that's just stuck with me.

How long do you think it took you?

Do you think you have let it go?

I've let it go now, but I think it was probably like,

I don't know, to be honest.

Like I think it was, I was still insecure about like side photos or whatever and I was still like conscious of it.

And as we all have spoken about so many times, like girls innately, like we're brought up to suck in and to, you know, brace our bellies or whatever.

So I think for a long time I was conscious of it.

But I'm not like I don't care about it anymore.

And I do know that like it's just like I just that's just the way it's going to be unless my stomach was literally concaved.

Did you say it in front of other kids?

Um, no, I remember I was kind of, like, off the side.

I remember it was an indoor basketball court and I was, like, off the side.

We were, like, doing an activity and I was standing there, I think, waiting to go in and she'd said it.

So, like, maybe someone else had heard it.

Like, I wasn't alone with her, but it wasn't... It wasn't something I ever spoken about or, like, as in said to my friends, like, oh, I can't believe she said that or whatever because I was so, like, taken back by it and felt so insecure about it.

And then the other one from like that era of my life that really stuck with me and really made a difference, I think, to my confidence, particularly as a businesswoman and taking myself seriously and all of that sort of stuff because I think it's where my internal dialogue of not being very smart or intelligent honestly probably started was I remember talking to a friend through VCE and she was really nervous about the exams.

She had picked a lot of,

very challenging subjects and some that she like outwardly say, like, I'm never going to use this in my life, but it gets marked up basically.