The drive: What challenges have you overcome?
The challenges for me have all been about my own self-doubt. Inner critic stuff. Who are you to be doing this? What makes you an expert on this stuff? I have had to do a lot of work to ‘get over myself’ and share what is in my heart with the world. The other challenges are how to balance making things available and affordable for people, while being financially sustainable. This is an ongoing challenge. That’s a big reason for creating the online programme, so that it subsidises my unpaid work in classrooms. I didn’t want costs to be a barrier for a school to have me come and facilitate this programme, so I work in schools free, alongside my other beautiful facilitators who generously give their time to teach this programme.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
Pros are getting to work directly on the things I love, and making a difference in the area that I am passionate about. I love coming up with ideas of how to make complex ideas simple for kids to understand, and creating fun ways of doing that. The cons would be having to make it financially sustainable! I’d much rather I didn’t have to focus on dollars and could solely focus on people and helping them transform their lives, but you can’t do one without the other and somehow in the mix it all works out!
Hopes and dreams: What next?
Lots of hopes and dreams. That this programme will be available and funded in all year 5/6 classrooms in NZ schools, that our culture of put downs and comparison will be flipped on its head, and it would be ‘cool’ for kids to encourage and cheer one another on. That every child would know their incredible worth and value, just for being who they are, not for what they can do in this world. That the online programme blesses many families and transforms their kids into confident and resilient little people. That’s what I’ll be working on in the next 18 months!
Learn more about the iCoach4Kids programme on their website and follow them on Facebook.
