Last week we finally got to meet the 'I Can & I Am' team along with their amazing double-decker bus, which was visiting Hayesfield Girls' School.
The team have been inspiring young people across many local schools through making pizza on board the bus, wellbeing workshops and providing tips for inflating balloons of self-belief!
If you're an organisation or community group that works with young people and would like a free visit from the I Can & I Am bus, then please get in touch with Rebecca at rebecca@icanandiam.com
Find out more about this amazing charity by heading to their website: www.icanandiam.com
You can also read and follow their blog here. We've put below their latest blog, written by James Shone who founded the charity after 16 years of teaching and then being diagnosed with a brain tumour. This led to him losing the majority of his sight which you'll read more about below...
Our attitude is our choice:
I am so struck by this reality as we journey towards the end of the pandemic. It seems to me that many people carry a determined bleakness whilst others carry a similarly determined attitude of positivity. This has been very much a lesson that has been ‘punched’ in to me in the past. I am going to repeat a story that I shared a number of years ago. It was at an annual MRI scan, a few years after my surgery, when I received a dig in the ribs from my wife because she had seen that my surgeon was in the MRI reception area – I braced myself. He came up to me, and despite it being 4 or 5 years since he’d operated on me, he seemed to remember not only who I was but what I was hoping to do. When he asked me if I had taken the job as a headmaster, I said no, and fell in to the posture of ‘poor old me’. This is one of the most lethal mental attitudes for us as human beings. He quickly followed up by telling me how close I was to being deemed inoperable because I had so much tumour wrapped around my brain stem. He said that to see me being able to walk and talk was a MIRACLE. The killer line was telling me that we must always dwell on what we do have and can do rather than lamenting and dwelling in the space of I can’t and I don’t have.
This powerful message still remains with me. I think the title of this blog is so true – if we can teach our children to be thankful for what they do have and can do it will go a long way towards clearing up many of the challenges of mental ill-health.
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