Akumu and Claire thought they were pretty positive people. Then they tried being positive on purpose. All day, every day, for a week.

For this Yes Challenge, the girls say yes to being more positive not just when things are going well, but through all the ordinary little things that can somehow ruin an entire day.

It sounds simple enough, right? It wasn't!

Claire discovers that being positive doesn't necessarily mean avoiding the first negative reaction. Akumu has a very different week. Her experiment becomes "Akumu versus brain". But they both notice just how quickly small things can turn into negative thought spirals.

But trying to think positively raises a bigger question:

When does positivity actually help, and when does it become toxic positivity?

With Sophorn Ban (@sophornban), a spiritual medium originally from Cambodia, Akumu and Claire explore the difference between reframing a difficult moment and pretending it isn't difficult at all. They talk about emotional validation, self-talk, gratitude, triggers, meditation, supportive relationships and the wonderfully ridiculous power of trying to say "bubbles" while angry.

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Timestamps for Specific Segments

(00:00) Intro

(03:00) Can You Actually Make Yourself More Positive?

(04:03) Why Being Positive Is Harder Than It Sounds

(06:08) What Are the Benefits of Positive Thinking?

(07:06) Positive Thinking vs Toxic Positivity

(09:38) 8 Habits for Practising More Positive Thinking

(11:24) The Yes Challenge: Being Positive for an Entire Week

(12:08) Claire vs Spaghetti: Interrupting a Negative Reaction

(16:00) Can Other People Help You Practise Positivity?

(20:25) Sometimes Being Positive Isn't the Answer

(22:01) How to Support Someone Without Toxic Positivity

(24:20) Can You Really Score How Positive You Were?

(27:02) Akumu vs Brain: When Positive Thinking Gets Difficult

(28:28) How One Bad Morning Becomes a Negative Thought Spiral

(31:37) Mood or Motivation? Knowing What You Actually Need

(33:55) When Social Media Triggers Negative Thoughts

(35:54) Overthinking, Old Rejections & Negative Thought Patterns

(38:36) Why Awareness Might Matter More Than Being Positive

(41:03) Positivity Is Practice, Not a Perfect Score

(42:09) Sophorn Ban on Healthy Positivity, Balance & Self-Awareness

(43:54) What to Do When You Notice a Negative Reaction

(46:35) Why Your Problems Don't Have to Look Big to Feel Big

(48:33) BUBBLES: Sophorn's Interesting Trick for Interrupting a Trigger

(51:43) HALT: Are You Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired?

(56:09) Outro

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The Yes Girls also discover HALT: a simple check for whether you might be hungry, angry, lonely or tired before deciding everything is terrible.

By the end of the week, the challenge has become much less about staying positive every waking moment.

Why? Because perhaps being a positive person isn't about never having the negative thought. It's about what you do after you notice it.

Useful Resources:  

https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-think-positive#tips

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/positive-thinking/art-20043950 

https://unitedgmh.org/mental-health-support 

https://buddho.org/meditation-for-beginners/

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We had one week to learn mixology. Then we made actual people drink the results.

For this Yes Challenge, Akumu and Claire say yes to making cocktails and mocktails from scratch - despite knowing almost nothing about mixology beyond occasionally ordering a drink at a bar.

With advice from Patrick Wilson, a passionate home mixologist, they have one week to learn the basics: balancing flavours, measuring ingredients, shaking, stirring, substituting what they can't find and discovering that you don't actually need a professional bar setup to make a decent drink.

Then they take very different approaches.

Claire works her way through classic cocktail recipes, five base spirits and approximately too many gin cocktails in one evening. Akumu, who isn't drinking alcohol during the challenge, takes on mocktails - improvising around impossible-to-find ingredients, inventing increasingly ridiculous drink names and trying to prove that the alcohol-free side of the bar can hold its own.

The final test? A garden party where their friends order the drinks, drink them and score them.

The judges are alarmingly serious. The average score is 6.3/10. And yet people keep coming back to the bar for more.

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Timestamps for Specific Segments

(00:00) Intro

(00:36) What Are We Saying Yes to This Time?

(02:20) Can We Learn Mixology in One Week?

(03:59) Mixology for Beginners: Where Do You Start?

(07:54) What Actually Makes a Good Cocktail or Mocktail?

(10:33) Cocktail Basics: Shaking, Stirring, Measuring & Straining

(14:37) Learning to Make Mocktails From Scratch

(18:44) What Do You Do When You Can't Find the Ingredients?

(23:14) How Do You Make Cocktails Without the Alcohol?

(26:42) The Secret to a Balanced Mocktail

(32:17) Learning to Make Classic Cocktails at Home

(38:20) Five Spirits, Too Many Cocktails & a Homemade Shaker

(44:22) How Making Cocktails Introduced Claire to Her Neighbours

(48:37) How Good Were We After One Week of Mixology?

(49:44) The Real Test: Serving Our Drinks to Actual People

(50:44) Our Friends Take Cocktail Judging Far Too Seriously

(51:50) Cocktails vs Mocktails: The Orders Start Coming In

(52:10) Inventing the Yes Girls Mocktail

(54:28) Can Beginners Actually Make Good Cocktails?

(55:21) The Verdict: 6.3/10... But They Kept Ordering

(56:09) What We Learned From Making Drinks for Other People

(57:04) Why We're Not Giving Up Mixology Yet

(58:35) What Should the Yes Girls Say Yes to Next?

(59:06) Behind the Scenes of the Mixology Challenge

(59:48) The People Who Made This Yes Challenge Possible

(01:00:54) Outro

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Along the way, what starts as a challenge about how to make cocktails and mocktails at home becomes something bigger: a lesson in experimentation, resourcefulness, and the strange social magic of making something specifically for another person.

Perhaps the best measure of a drink isn't the score someone writes in a notebook. It's whether they order another one, and what happens after that.

Sources & Things Mentioned:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mixology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBA_official_cocktails

https://www.diffordsguide.com

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mixology-lab-cocktails-and-friends/id1473051458

https://www.budget101.com/frugal-living/4985-alcohol-substitutes-for-recipes/

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Can you actually teach yourself a new language in three weeks?

Akumu and Claire decide to find out by saying yes to learning Greek, from scratch, by themselves, using whatever they can get their hands on.

For three weeks, they experiment with Duolingo, podcasts, YouTube, music, Google Translate, repetition, mnemonics and more. But they quickly discover that recognising Greek words is very different from being able to construct a sentence, pronounce it correctly and say it when another human being is listening.

So they give themselves a final test: each must pitch the Yes Girls Podcast entirely in Greek to Tage Krarup, a polyglot and fluent Greek speaker who knows nothing about the show.

Could he actually understand them?

Along the way, Tage reveals that it took him three years to learn Greek despite already speaking six languages, and that some of his most useful learning happened not through formal lessons but through ordinary conversations at his local kiosk.

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Timestamps to Specific Segments:

(00:00) Intro

(00:40) Can We Learn Greek in Three Weeks?

(02:47) Why Is Learning a New Language So Hard?

(04:45) How Do We Actually Learn Languages?

(07:20) Greek for Beginners: Our Three-Week Challenge

(12:20) Learning Greek With Duolingo & Podcasts

(17:54) Google Translate Meets Greek Pronunciation

(21:29) Teaching Yourself Greek: Akumu's Strategy

(27:40) Do Language Learning Apps Actually Work?

(35:23) How Much Greek Did We Actually Learn?

(36:54) The Test: Pitching Our Podcast in Greek

(39:02) Could a Fluent Greek Speaker Understand Us?

(43:24) What We Learned From Teaching Ourselves Greek

(44:58) The Language-Learning Method That Worked for Tage

(47:32) What Greek Taught Us About Learning Any Language

(50:46) Learning Swahili in Kenya: Practice vs Perfection

(52:15) Outro

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This Yespisode explores how to learn a language by yourself, Greek for beginners, language-learning apps, pronunciation, repetition, immersion and the difference between knowing more words and actually being able to communicate.

After three weeks, the real question wasn't whether the Yes Girls could speak Greek. It was whether they could make themselves understandable.

Sources & Things Mentioned

https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-environment/language/a/theories-of-the-early-stages-of-language-acquisition

https://blog.cognifit.com/language-acquisition-theory/

https://www.rosettastone.com/languages/learn-greek/

https://www.duolingo.com/course/el/en/Learn-Greek

https://www.greekpod101.com/ 

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Going vegan sounds relatively straightforward. Then you start reading the ingredients on everything.

For the very first Yes Girls challenge, Akumu and Claire say yes to eating 100% vegan for an entire week - which accidentally becomes eight days - to find out what living on a completely plant-based diet actually feels like in everyday life in Nairobi.

The two have very different weeks.

Claire cooks, experiments with vegan substitutes, goes camping, keeps running, and discovers that apparently innocent foods can contain surprisingly non-vegan ingredients. Akumu begins full of optimism before rapidly running out of things to eat, improvising with Nairobi street food and, on one particularly unsuccessful evening, having two carrots and hibiscus tea for dinner.

Joining them is Amanda Scoville (@two_dubba_yous_mama), a vegan runner, animal lover, and self-described #NoMeatAthlete who has followed a plant-based diet since 2018.

Together, they unpack some of the questions that only become complicated once you actually try veganism: Is honey vegan? What happens when animal products are hidden in ingredients? Can you be 100% vegan? Is plant-based eating expensive? And do you really have to change everything at once?

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Timestamps to Specific Segments:

(0:00) Intro

(3:00) What does it mean to say yes to veganism?

(6:45) The rules of the vegan challenge

(10:20) Expert insights from Amanda Scoville

(15:00) The highs and lows of the vegan week

(25:30) Cooking challenges and creative meal ideas

(35:00) The social aspect of being vegan

(45:00) Reflections on the experience and future intentions

(55:00) Conclusion and next episode teaser

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What begins as a one-week food experiment becomes a much more practical conversation about veganism in real life, plant-based eating, food labels, exercise, cost, convenience and progress over perfection.

Because perhaps the most useful lesson isn't whether everyone should become vegan.

It's how much you can learn about the way you eat when you deliberately change it for a week.

__

Important resources

Some quick resources about veganism:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasyu/2020/01/19/plant-based-foods-are-hot-now-they-just-got-hotter/ 

https://healthcareers.co/vegan-statistics/ 

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vegan-diet-studies 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200122-are-there-health-benefits-to-going-vegan 

Related episode:

Episode 73: Saying yes to a raw plant-based lifestyle w/ Leah Nduati

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If you enjoy the podcast, we love you so much! And we'd like to ask you to rate us on Spotify - it will only take a couple of seconds, we promise! 

If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please take a moment to leave a short review. We promise it will take less than a minute unless, of course, you have more to say.

In any case, we appreciate you!

Thanks in advance!

_____________________

Visit our website at www.yesgirls.media

For video logs, visit https://www.youtube.com/@yesgirlspodcast 

Feel free to follow us across these platforms:

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TIKTOK