Having created change in my own life and with a history of successfully creating change in the lives of children at Brisbane Primary schools as a teacher and as a step-parent of fourteen years, I became aware of the ways in which traditional approaches to education and communicating with children fall short of what children need and modern workplaces expect. In full class settings I set about taking the principles and approaches that had so empowered me on my journey and communicating them to children in ways to which they could easily relate. I have developed the capacity to relate to children in a way that is productive as well as engaging. I ask children for what I want. I treat children that deserve respect with real respect. I dont use extrinsic inducements. I have very few behaviour management problems and those I do have tend to be easily solved. I believe that children are people too and have the same motivations and inclinations. I have turned the experience of being in my classroom into one that is inherently engaging because we speak to every persons fundamental drives. School is a tool to help you become what you want to become and get what you want to get. This creates a climate of internal questioning and an innate drive to explore the possibilities of life to find ones own passions. Instead of being a place that promotes passive acceptance of authority with a 'do as I say not as I do" culture. I have created classroom environments based on a deep rapport of our shared journey of self understanding, self control, empowerment and ultimate life fulfillment. However in the small time available to me in any classroom environment and with any one child it quickly became evident to me how much good work was being left undone. In schools underfunded, rigidly dogmatic and with an overcrowded curriculum hamstrung by the public discourse on education standards in national newspapers any argument about the value of this approach was likely to fall on deaf ears. However, kids noticed what I was doing. Parents noticed because kids noticed. I attained a profile at schools even as a supply teacher that defied understanding. It was time to take action. Subject area specific tutoring has been around for a long time but it treats learning and children in the same way traditional education does by simply seeing learning as a matter of time and individual attention and sure to a certain degree that' is right but its not the whole picture. Learning is also enhanced or impaired by the way we talk and think about it, by what we associate learning with. Personal success coaching has been around for a long time. The idea of educating people in peak performance is one that't hard to argue with. We want to be successful so it makes sense that we do what successful people do. Successful people are usually happy and manage to pay their bills. But we tell ourselves this is too big a hill to climb for children. We tell ourselves that vision, aspiration and idealism are beyond children. We convinced ourselves that we needed to protect this thing called childhood and children should be doing what children had always done...wait to be an adult/ However there are problems with that idea. Some kids seem to get it naturally. Some parents are great and might have been successful themselves but many parents tell me of the aimlessness of their child or teen. They tell me of their frustration in getting their child to take school seriously or of the aimlessness of a late teen lacking direction and drive in their life. We take our ideas as parents from our parents. We tell children what to do. As they get older they tend to be resistant to direction. I find a lot of this hardly surprising. We also live in an age where tertiary graduates have ever more education and student debt but no job to go with it. The intangibles are ever more becoming the difference between success and failure in modern life and workplaces. Some may indeed get it naturally but what if they have never had the experience of losing it? What of those children with university degrees but lacking an understanding of themselves and how to get the best out of themselves? I can take any child and make them powerful. I can start them on a journey of personal exploration and understanding. I can connect them to their unique talents and passions and I can help them better than any parent design a life that will not only pay the bills but will also make them genuinely happy. I can also take parents worried about their children's futures and put them on a beach worrying more about their suntans. Once your child understands who they are what they want and where they're going you wont have to do it for them. I hope to earn your trust and the opportunity to help your children reach their potential.
