Graeme De Bruyn, organisational development manager of the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation visited Academia on the 20th April, 2011 to present a motivational session for this year matrics.

Graeme is a former teacher, trade unionist and facilitator / consultant, who worked for COSATU and the Careways Group amonst others. He is passionate about helping young people and organisations move beyond their comfort zones to live their purposes and achieve great results.  He strives to teach and design models and tools in ways that encourage people to try new behaviours and engage in authentic conversations. His experience, coupled with his passion about principle based training solutions, makes him effective in relating to people at all levels, from executives to the front line.

Below are some of the important points of the workshop.

Being a teenager is not a picnic anymore. For the most part of a teenager life journey and future maturity depends on the quality of decisions they need to make. As someone says: The choices you make determine your life. At the heart of choices or decisions is personal leadership. Being leader then is an outflow of the quality of choices you make.

The core challenges faced by young people are

• how to deal with peer pressure
• making smart decisions about their friends, relationships, drugs and substances, parents, school
• what they will focus their lives on.

The workshop was focused on the key of our future success:

• the habits you form
• the choices you make
• the principles/values you will use to live your lives.

One of the continued issues is personal insecurities and anxiety about what you believe your worth as a teenager is. Personal stories, videos and music was used to bring the message of inspiration and choices across. Key to personal success is examining the lens through which you look at yourselves, others and your world. How you see yourself and how you see the world determines what you believe as real to yourself and that is called a paradigm.

The movie The Pursuit of Happyness,  starring Will Smith and based on a true story about a man named Christopher Gardner who lost everything and then became a stockbroker to survive was screened. In the movie some of the memorable dialogue sum up your need to always invest in yourselves, pay the price (endure) and continueing to have a dream or vision of yourself:

(1) Christopher Gardner: Hey. Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something. Not even me. All right?

Christopher: All right.

Christopher Gardner: You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.

(2) Christopher: Hey dad, you wanna hear something funny? There was a man who was drowning, and a boat came, and the man on the boat said “Do you need help?” and the man said “God will save me”.

Then another boat came and he tried to help him, but he said “God will save me”, then he drowned and went to Heaven.

Then the man told God, “God, why didn’t you save me?” and God said “I  sent you two boats, you dummy!”

The students were reminded of their personal gifts:

• being able to personal initiative
• live a life of significance (personal contribution-doing some great for others daily)
• achieving personal excellence and using their imagination (their ability to dream up a future informed by their destiny and purpose and not their circumstances).

Everything the learners go through in life is just that – life, it was orchestrated for their growth and it can be the greatest teacher for personal development.

In summation, your lives are defined by your personal choices, decisions about what you regard as your worth, embracing pain, challenge and obstacles as part of the journey and constantly being grateful.