I am a Teacher.
I teach at a kindergarten in the morning and at night I am an aerial yoga instructor. With both my jobs, my biggest challenge is to teach my students (kids and grown ups) is self confidence. To be able to try new things without having the voices in your head telling you everything you cannot do.
“Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.” - Les Brown
We from a young age have been bombarded by all these unrealistic images and ideas of what life should be like. Especially now with social media being a HUGE part in almost everyone's lives. We are aiming for the most likes, comparing our lifestyles to one another, trying to fit into this "perfect" mould of what is socially acceptable, or whether that makes me look like a loser/weak.
Humbleness, self love,and self confidence it a very hard thing to master nowadays. It seems like many a times people just go for the extremes:
- To be an arrogant, spoilt I-deserve-everything type
- I can't do it, I am not good enough type
- The world owes me, it's never my fault type
- What will people think of me type.
These types of people are destructive, whether to themselves or others around them. They stop themselves from growing and reaching their potential. We are now living in a world that programs up to believing that be need to strive for perfection.
“Perfection does not exist -- you can always do better and you can always grow.” - Les Brown
The word perfection is a horrible word. Perfection is something that can never be achieve as we are human we have flaws....there will always be something you can improve, grow or change. The word perfection makes be either easily satisfied once they think they have achieve it and stop pushing themselves. Or they quit because they have programmed their minds to thinking they can never achieve, that they are not good enough.
This is why I find it super important to teach kids and educate adults about being able to self reflect and to be able to grow, how everyone has an effect of one another. Sometimes adults do things to make kids feel better but it is actually very harmful. For Example:
When I was a kid, I HAAAAAATED one of my youngest cousins. He was spoilt little S*** and thought he deserved everything.
He was the way he was because of they way his mom and our grandmother.
One time when he was a kid, he decided to ride his tricycle around on the ground floor (which was a small family restaurant back then) he was going really fast and he hit his head on one of the table...and of course as a 6 year old kid he started crying. What my grandmother would do is go over, and comfort him, and then whilst holding him, she would slap the table and say "bad table, you hurt little Ching Ching, bad table, bad." so it wasn't the fact that he was charging around the area on a tricycle where tables and chairs and other potentially dangerous objects were around...NO...the TABLE got in his way.
Whenever he did get punished his mother would forgive him the very next second, she was always a bit guilty because she was a single parent and her son was being teased at school about him not having a father.
We need to be able to reflect on ourselves and teach our children correctly and have our past experience cloud our vision about what is the right thing to do. We need to teach our children to be able to reflect and love themselves. Not be swayed by what people might say to them in life....There will always be people out to put you down, there will always be people that are just waiting for you to fail, there will be people that you might not get along with, there will be toxic people that don't want to see you do better in life and wants to just keep you at the same level that they are and most importantly there will be people that will tell us you can't do that.
Other people are not you, they don't know what potential you have, they don't how much strength/determination/knowledge you have. Their past experiences and negative emotions/motives make them try to stop your potential. However, facing these people (though annoy) helps you grow, helps you learn how to stand your ground. Strangely enough sometimes they also help you find your flaws, your weaknesses. Therefore have by you a strong group of people. People that will support you, people that will help you grow and change for the better that aren't afraid to tell you the truth. Positive people!