The 2015 winner of Miss Texas International and Miss International taught three mental health exercises to the TCU Panhellenic community in the Brown-Lupton University Union Grand Ballroom on Oct. 16. 

Elise Banks-Lovely, a native Houstonian, is a national ambassador for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the owner and executive director of the Miss Houston Pageant. She works as a clinical psychotherapist for The Conative Group in Houston. 

Banks-Lovely graduated from Baylor University in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She then attended graduate school at the University of Houston to earn her master’s degree in counseling. 

After winning the Miss Texas International Pageant in 2015, she was crowned Miss International with her platform, “Healthy Mind, Successful Life.”

Through her platform, she traveled the world to help others understand the importance of mental health and break the stigma surrounding it. When she spoke at TCU, she did exactly that.

More than 800 Panhellenic women attended the event 

The event was organized by Sterling Soto, a senior speech pathology major and the TCU Panhellenic vice president of Membership Development. 

About 400 women signed up to attend during the week before the event. The sign-up list doubled in size on the day of the event, reaching more than 800 attendees, Soto said.

Banks-Lovely is a family friend of Soto–she is a resourceful contact to inspire collegiate women, she said.

Since Banks-Lovely was once in the audience’s shoes — a young collegiate woman trying to navigate her place in the world, she can easily relate to the college demographic with her mental health background.

As the attendees walked into the Grand Ballroom, they were given journals that would later be used to practice mental health exercises.

Once everyone was seated, Banks-Lovely asked the audience if they spent at least five minutes a day alone without any distractions — no phone, no TV. 

Only a few people raised their hands. 

She said that the audience members who did not raise their hands were too busy and needed to practice setting aside time for themselves. 

“Whether it’s right when you wake up, maybe it’s your lunch break or maybe it’s before you go to bed, you need at least five minutes to check in with yourself and say, ‘How am I doing?’” she said. 

Banks-Lovely facilitates three interactive mental health exercises 

Banks-Lovely said that she practices different written exercises with her patients who range from middle schoolers to young adults.

“My job is to enter their world and help them navigate and relay that they have positive resources in their life,” she said.

She shared three of her exercises with the audience and urged them to use their journals. She said that she wanted audience members to have the framework to practice these exercises on their own time.

During the first exercise, she walked the audience through writing a two-to-three-sentence mission statement that speaks to their identity and what they strive to be in the world.

She asked the audience to reflect on the question, “Am I doing what my mission statement says?” and stressed the importance of accountability. 

The second exercise focused on managing anxiety. Banks-Lovely said that the main commonality she notices when working with anxious patients is that they feel like there is a part of their world that feels out of control. 

To combat this feeling, she prompted participants to create a T-chart — one column saying “in control” and the other saying “out of control.” The participants wrote what they felt was either in control or out of control in their lives in the respective column.  

The third exercise revolved around the audience’s inner circle, where participants drew a horizontal line across their paper.

Banks-Lovely asked participants to write important people, places and things below the line. Above the line, she asked them to write people, places and things that are distractions.

She said that this exercise helps build stronger connections because the audience can differentiate between what is important and what is not.  

Positively impacting the TCU Panhellenic community

Banks-Lovely left the audience with an important piece of advice at the end of her talk. 

“Enjoy this time in your life,” she said. “Being an adult, I will admit, is so much fun. I do enjoy being an adult, but I really enjoyed my college years and they went by like this,” and snapped her fingers.  

After the event, Soto said she thought that the audience was receptive to hearing what Banks-Lovely had to say. 

“She was super interactive with her activities, so I think that really kept people engaged,” she said. 

An audience member, Novalie Flores, a sophomore double-majoring in child development and psychology and a member of Kappa Delta, said that she enjoyed the visual aspect of the exercises and learned new techniques on how to cope and overcome difficulties in her personal life. 

“I really liked how interactive the event was and how it encouraged us to interact with those around us,” Flores said. “It was a great opportunity to meet and connect with women from different sororities on campus.”