At Gallagher School Midrand we realise the importance of teaching our learners how to deal with emotional situations on a daily basis. Plenty of schools, public and private, focus on education and sport alone, but we have come to realise that this is not enough. As educators we must also teach our learners to be mentally strong in order for them to grow up to be succesful adults one day. I would like to share one of those emotional situations with you today – turning crises and failures into success…

Did you ever look back on the crises in your life and realise that they turned into blessings? When I look back I see that they sent me in a new direction that I would not have otherwise taken. They forced me to take a hard look at where I was at and where I was heading and it is because of them that I am where I am now.

This is how I see it. We do not know what our lifespan will be, but we do know that we’re going to die, so let’s say you were born at A and die of natural causes at D. As you progress through life, you’ll probably get into a rut, doing the same old thing, and your quality of life will deteriorate, slowly at first, but then at an accelerated rate, until you die.

But then something dreadful happens. You hit a crisis. You are unable to continue on the same path. You adapt. You make changes. Your life changes.

And then, just when you thought you were settled back into a normal life (rut?), along comes another one!

Now, we can’t choose, so we don’t have to say do I want to be like the person in the first diagram or the one in the third. But what you can choose is to make dramatic changes in your life without the need for a crisis. I’m a bit of a change freak myself. Yes, I can clearly identify the two big crises in the third diagram of my life and yes, they did what the diagram shows, but in between B and C, I changed my life by deciding, at age 50, to become a CA(SA), and between C and D, at age 72, to start Gallagher Combined School. Then in 2018 at age 75, my wife and I decided to sell our house, give away all of our furniture and appliances, plus most of our other “stuff”, rent a furnished penthouse in Rosebank and live like rock stars!

You see. You don’t have to let life beat you. You can beat life!