The Gift of Confidence
If you could give your child any gift, what would it be? Your immediate response might be to leave them with a house or savings that might ‘set them up for life’ but we all know deep down that these things aren’t going to actually ‘set them up’ for life. In fact, these things won’t necessarily set them up at all because they didn’t achieve it – you did.
I’ve thought about this a lot and my belief is that above all else I want to know that my children are confident. Confident to bring their best self to everything they do. Because for me, I know that will be enough to guarantee their happiness and success, whatever that means to them.
What does that look like? Well, it doesn’t mean loud, or arrogant or conceited or self obsessed children. It means someone who is comfortable in their own skin. They feel so confident that they can fearlessly bring their best self forward without a care for potential failure or judgement. It means that they are willing to back themselves, that they are able to integrate things that don’t work into learnings that propel them forward instead of holding them back.
That’s what I want for my kids. That’s what I want for myself. And that’s what I want for every young person who joins Goat Track Theatre. And I bet that’s what you want for your child too.
Sadly, a great many children find themselves in negative, unsupportive spaces. What do I mean by negative? Settings where it’s cool to hold back because it’s uncool to look like you’re actually trying, places where it’s acceptable to take someone else down to elevate yourself, places where you are told to compare yourself with others instead of who you were yesterday, places where you are taught to focus on the result at the expense of the process, places where you are labelled with a label that you begin to live up to, places where the fear of getting something wrong trumps the risk of doing something extraordinary, places where kids focus on their weaknesses more then their strengths, places where it’s better to follow the well worn path of others instead of making your own path.
Is it any wonder that our young people choose to hide their best selves in such places when it simply feels unsafe? If you know a child or young person, who is hiding their best self we’d like to invite them to join our tribe of young people at Goat Track Theatre.
But before you say that sounds great – you need to know a few things about us. Goat Track Theatre provides more than just drama classes. We are not just committed to building our young people’s skills in performance. We are equally committed to building them as people. We are committed to helping them to build their confidence, their creativity, their connection with others and their care for themselves.
And this means an environment where it’s cool to try, it’s okay to struggle, it’s expected that you elevate and celebrate your teammates, where you track your own progress without comparing that progress to the person next to you, where you are free to take a risk without fear of failure and you are expected to create the best version of you. It’s an environment where we don’t want you to be someone else because that would mean leaving your best self outside the room.
These are just a couple of the things that makes Goat Track more than drama classes. We have been working with children and young people for ten years. In that time, we have created some amazing theatre with and for young people. But there has been no prouder achievement for us then seeing children and young people transformed by the power of theatre.
Goat Track Theatre has not just been a space to grow theatre but to grow thousands of young people into full, confident expressions of what makes them uniquely great. If you have a child or young person who lacks confidence I invite you to reach out. Because a lack of confidence does not hold young people back in one area of their life. It holds them back in every area of their life. And that’s why the gift of confidence is the gift that just keeps giving.