Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

What follows are a few ideas I have advocated over the past decade (based on personal successes I have achieved as a parent and mentor), regarding use of specific extracurricular activities to empower young people – especially those still undergoing schooling.

1. Team Working/Building Activities:

To help students learn how to work with others towards mutually agreed goals.

They learn the essence of cooperating to get things done effectively as a group. Major competence to acquire: Interpersonal Effectiveness. Students would be required to read the book “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie, and apply it in their daily activities.

Business and other partnerships are notoriously impossible to sustain in an environment where there is a lack of trust.

Someone defined TEAM as Together Everyone Achieves More. If we can teach students to adopt this philosophy in their lives, they will grow up more willing to work together for success over time.

2. Creative Thinking and Problem-Solving Activities:

To help student learn how to go about investigating the root cause of problems, be they process or people-related. They will be taught to understand why it is important to champion progressive change and how.

They will learn how to constructively challenge existing ways of doing things. They will be made to realise that it is important to have questioning minds – always constantly wanting to know why things are the way they are, and what can be done to improve.

3. Self-Development Activities (SD):

I have noticed that many people readily claim that they practice SD. That may be true. But the way I have conceived of SD and its practice, I refer to something that could be called a “culture”. Something that is not only systemic, but has actually become a way of life for a person or a group of people. There are many sides to practicing SD some of which are:

a. Vocational Skills Acquisition:

A person can decide to attend a seminar to learn how to make money from soap production. That would be Self-Development. The problem is that many times, there is no continuity in such efforts. What happens is the person then launches into the business having no idea of other areas of knowledge and skill necessary to run a business successfully.

Getting the technical skills or know how is one thing. Knowing how to effectively market and manage yourself to use your skills to make PROFITABLE INCOME is another thing entirely. That’s why some people hire a manager to help them.

b. Mental Stamina:

This is the most neglected aspect of SD. Some people do not even know it exists. Yet, many times, it makes the difference between the man who wins and the one who comes second in a 1,500m race photo finish.

When a long race is coming to an end, the muscles are aching, the legs are tiring, the lungs are screaming for air and each runner desperately wants to stop so he/she can take a little rest. The runner who has enough mental stamina to ENDURE and MANAGE all the pain/discomfort well enough to keep going, instead of slowing down, often wins.

Michael Jordan – before he retired – was renowned for what his NBA colleagues called his “tough mental game” – that made him repeatedly score game-winning points, hundredths of a second to the end of a game!

It is well known that a person’s state of mind is as crucial to his/her success as is his/her physical condition.

This rule applies across all spheres of endeavour. (Try going to the market to do elaborate shopping while worrying about the whereabouts of your 8-month old child who went missing over 2 days ago, and see how well you fare!).

People’s mental attitudes often determine, many times, how successful they become.

If you do not understand how to deal with difficulty, disappointments and adversity in your life, and how these unpleasant experiences actually offer you unparalleled opportunities to develop into a stronger person emotionally, you might be unable to achieve noteworthy success.

I say this based on my personal achievements in paid employment, and since…

Summary: Our youth need to be made to understand the need to develop themselves in the manner described above.

This will equip them to have good self-perception/healthy self-esteem, and an ability to carry on in the face of discouragement.

If we want to turn out youths who will make a difference in society, we must help them develop to become self-confident and emotionally stable. That is not read in books or taught in schools and universities. But it can be deliberately passed on through coaching and/or mentoring by competent persons. If we neglect this aspect of their development, many of our young people are likely to fare badly when they leave school and enter the real world (of hard knocks).

Let’s all begin to think of ways we can use extracurricular activities to better prepare our young people to become competent and productive adults in the future.