Breaking a pencil with only one finger: “Everybody can do it”, motivational speaker and former kick boxing champion Houda Loukili says, “but you have to be present in your body.”
The opening event of the VU Wellbeing Week was one in which the audience had to participate: starting with a boxing exercise, followed by an exercise in which one had to find eight common traits with one’s neighbor and as a climax breaking a pencil with just a finger. Houda Loukili doesn’t talk over the heads of her audience, she makes them experience things for themselves.
First to wear a hijab
Loukili was one of the first Dutch female kickboxers of Moroccan descent. And she certainly was the first kickboxer wearing a hijab. She always chose her own path and combining these two aspects of her world, kickboxing and wearing a hijab, was a logical thing for her. “I have no problem being the first”, she says.
Loukili easily weaves anecdotes of her youth into her motivational speech. She tells about her brothers watching Bruce Lee movies and her intention to be like him one day, about her father taking her to the stadium to see FC Utrecht play, about everybody’s surprise when she started wearing a headscarf, her parents, her teachers and everybody at the gym questioning her choice, but sticking with it, about having to use wig tape to glue her headscarf to her head before matches.
In 2005, Loukili became the Dutch national champion in kickboxing. Shortly thereafter, she started a bachelor’s in Sport Studies at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Again, she was the first female wearing a hijab at her study programme.
Pessimism and self-doubt
Everything was going great, until suddenly it wasn’t: Loukili got involved in a car crash and broke almost every bone in her body. Afterwards, she was tied to a wheelchair for some time. A dark period began, a period in which Loukili had to deal with pessimism and self-doubt. “I can fight anybody, but the toughest fight was with myself”’ she says, “change starts with yourself.”
But it was also during this dark period that Loukili started kickboxing lessons for kids to make them more resilient. She held motivational workshops for groups sometimes and her audience grew slowly. Loukili got invited for a talk at which a Nike employee sat in the audience. It was the start of her collaboration with Nike. Loukili modelled in the campaign Made to Play, about wearing a hijab during sports. “I hope this can motivate girls not to give up on their sports or to compromise on what they want to wear”, she says.
She ends her talk at VU with some wise words: “It doesn’t matter where you start, it matters where you finish.” That was a good starting point for the Wellbeing Week.