There is a light that shines in every person - you just have to find it. This has always been my deepest belief and my strongest motivation - to find the light within another person. This light is the one special thing that makes a person glow from inside. It is where the heart is. The moment you speak about something or do something you truly enjoy. It is where your power and your strength are rooted. When the heart and the soul are in total harmony, you can see this light and feel this power. Like a switch you touch and turn and all of a sudden something amazing happens.
I have experienced this light in people many times and it is still a wonder to me every time I see it. The thing is to bring it out and to help people understand that this is their light and their true power. They have to let it shine to be able to truly feel their heart and soul and bring it into everything they do. And they can bring it in every little thing they do.
I have given lessons to children and teenagers for over 15 years. Many of them have come to me because of bad marks at school or things they didn’t understand or gaps they wanted to close in one subject or another. They often came and still come believing they are not good at it, not worth it, not able to cope with a lot of things. What they need is more than help with a certain subject. They need understanding, appreciation, encouragement. Most of all they need to be seen. The mission is to raise them up to where they can be: feeling great as they are, feeling proud of what they are. The challenge is to find the light in every child and every teenager and to make them become aware of its power. Sometimes it is a challenge to find the light and let it shine, but the moment you see it, the person in front of you is somehow transformed. You see the real person.
Why is it so important to find this light, this power within a person, a child, a teenager?
A lot of times it is quite difficult for a student to ‚create‘ enthusiasm for a subject they are absolutely not interested in or absolutely not good at. The problem is, if you are not - in some way - enthusiastic about learning, the brain will just block the information. So how can you help the brain to let the information in and keep it there and memorize it? As crazy as it might sound, it is the light in a person that helps. If you are able to put up a link between the feeling you have when you are engaged with your heart and soul and the feeling you have when you learn, you are enabled to learn in a completely different way. You start to learn your way.
One of my students had some difficulties with an English grammar exercise. In order to help him and to find a moment of total focus in his life, I started to talk about the things he enjoyed doing. We talked about this and that and finally came across basketball. Suddenly the boy’s attitude, his whole position on the chair opposite me changed. It was his favourite sport. He played a lot of basketball and was very good at it. He talked about it in a very professional manner. So I asked him to explain to me what he would do before a match. How he would prepare himself and what his thoughts were. He said, his only thought was to win. He would stand at the side of the court before the match and he would focus on the match. I asked him, how that felt. He said it was good and strong feeling because he was sure of what he was doing.
Next, I told him to close his eyes and imagine himself ready to enter the court, just before a basketball match. I told him to blend away any other thought. And so he did. When he opened his eyes again, I asked him to look at the exercise again and to tell me the answers. He did it nearly without any fault. He was a little surprised at first, but then understood and he told me that he would try and focus like this every time he had difficulties doing something. Of course it is not as easy as that and it needs a lot of practice to do this but you can do it and it is absolutely helpful.
Of course this is not the reason for me to find the light in a person, whether it is a child, a teenager or an adult. My motivation is and always has been to truly get in contact with the person in front of me, to see and feel the heart and soul, and the emotions linked to these. My motivation is to really see the person and give room to be oneself. To have a true interest for another person’s interests, means showing compassion and has a high potential of forming a bond. Most of all, this interest and total acceptance gives the other person ‚room to be‘.
This ‚room to be‘ is very important when working with children. Each child has its own learning speed and its individual needs. To help a child learn, it is vital to create an atmosphere of trust and understanding. It is vital to open up a room for each child to be accepted just the way it is. This means to help him understand what its strengths and weaknesses are, to accept them and to learn how to use them both most effectively. At the same time, this ‚room to be‘ helps to strengthen the child’s belief in its own capacities, to support it in every possible way and to demand and encourage it to rise to its best performance.