Brought to you by Momenti Pizza from Dr. Oetker

Well that was great craic altogether.

Last Thursday, we hosted our very first Zoom Girls With Goals event - the lockdown special, if you will. Our own Niamh Maher hosted and was joined by Joanne McNally and Mary-Kate Slattery as well as a whole bunch of you out there. If you weren't one of the lucky 80 to get a spot in the Zoom event, there's no need to despair because the whole event is currently available to listen to on Soundcloud. We'll be posting a link for it below so go and listen to all the chats and shenanigans of the evening - it was highly enjoyable. But, sure, we might as well give you a little taster of what you're in for. A teaser, shall we say. So the night was centred around answering your guys' questions and, of course, a WHOLE lot them were Covid or lockdown-related, so it was really interesting to see how each of the ladies dealt with the isolation. And things were particularly bad for Joanne McNally for a while because it turns out that her entire household had Covid-19. Not fun. Joanne herself talked about her difficulty adjust to the lockdown state. She described herself as someone who found it hard to relax at all, even to enjoy a spa day.

"I always felt before that if I wasn't doing something, I was being lazy and that I was not progressing my career in some way, so I always felt I had to be doing something. And I was stressed out of my mind, like."

So she found all the sudden extra free time during lockdown difficult to deal with at first. Eventually, though, she let herself take a break and chill out but now she doesn't know how she'll be able to snap out of that. Sure look, that's a problem for another day, ladies. Mary-Kate also found it difficult adjusting to the shift in rhythm.

"I think it was understanding that my identity was really wrapped up in being busy and being productive and having a lot of outputs. And understanding that, like, actually now I need to get to know myself a little bit more from a, like, being still and taking time to just switch off. Because I had no choice. I mean, there was no jobs coming in, there was nothing really. I wasn't doing anything."

It's true that, while this turned all of our lives pretty upside down, one of the positives that we can take from it is learning more about ourselves. We've taken the time to find out what we enjoy, find new hobbies, and just let ourselves relax with our own selves. And it has honestly been a lot more pleasant than we'd initially anticipated. It was really great hearing from these ladies about the difficulties they had and how they adjusted to lockdown living - it's always nice hearing that you're not alone in your feelings. Of course, lockdown wasn't all we talked about - there was LOADS more chat and questions answered but you'll just have to take a listen for yourself to find out what else we discussed. We also enjoyed ourselves some Momenti Pizza from Dr. Oetker during the discussion, so we highly suggest you pick up some of that to munch on while you listen (they're so good). To check out the event, just click on the Soundcloud link below. Until next time, ladies! And thanks for the wonderful time. https://soundcloud.com/user-845776759/ep137-take-a-moment-joanne-mcnally-mk-slattery-are-live-in-lockdown Brought to you by Momenti Pizza from Dr. Oetker Dr. Oetker's new Momenti Pizza is a small, great-tasting frozen pizza. The two flavours - Tomato, Mozzarella & Pesto and Salami Calabrase - contain up to 450 calories. They are just the right size for a quick lunch or tasty dinner for one. Available in Tesco, Dunnes Stores, Supervalu and BWG. For information, visit the Dr. Oetker website.