Pick yourself up and dust yourself down ...

... and start all over again.  𝄞🎶🎶  That's what the song says isn't it?

There's a quality that we do our best to encourage at the school in which I work.  It has nothing to do with qualifications or talent.  You can have bucket-loads of those but without this missing quality you won't necessarily reach your optimum performance.  It's a huge part of our school ethos 

Resilience

The capacity to recover from difficulties.  Because no one ever floated through life on a series of wonderful things happening and things just falling into place.  Contrary to youthful popular belief, life is not just what you see on Instagram.  For every up there is a down.  It's how we deal with things when the carpet has been pulled from under our feet that is important.  We have many inspirational quotes around the school from the likes of Einstein and Nelson Mandela like 'do not judge me by success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got up again' - 'If plans a & b didn't work, there are still another 24 letters in the alphabet' and 'if you ever judged a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid' or 'a person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new'.  

It's such an important thing to have.  To teach someone that 'yes that did happen, but we can't turn back the clock, we can't change what happened, we've got to draw a line under it, learn from it and find out how to move on'.

And a prime example of this happened on Saturday night.  I'm not a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest but my friend's daughter was the UK representative so of course I had to watch.  I could not believe my eyes when mid way through her performance, a guy jumped on stage, ripped the microphone out of her hand and shouted protests before security marched him away.  Now, Susanna (Surie) is an alumni of our school and she obviously listened to all that resilience talk in lessons as she demonstrated the most amazing resilience.  She barely missed a beat, she turned away, drew a deep breath, took the replacement microphone that was handed to her and got right back into the song.  She must have been shaken and shocked but talk about 'Keep calm and carry on' - she fiercely sang out as loud and proud as ever.  

Of course we didn't win, the voting is a bit too political for the best song or singer to come first nowadays, but there's no doubt who was the most resilient person out there on that stage.  She may not have won the contest, but she sure won the admiration of thousands of people by the way she reacted.