Photo by Klaus Webler, used under Creative Commons licence.

Can you walk through a wall?

No… but if I really want to get through it, bit by bit, it will weaken under my attack. Eventually bits will start to fall off that wall and cracks will appear. In the end, if I want to, I will punch it until I break through.

We demonstrate this in Panther Taekwondo classes with pieces of wood, by challenging the children to break the wood. We always set small, attainable goals, so to start with, the pieces of wood are small too. But while the children are working on breaking their first small piece, they see others students around them who can break larger ones.

When they see other children breaking the wood, they know that they will – and this shows in the questions they ask. “When will it be my turn to break the wood?’  they say.

They believe that success will come, so success will be a given.

A long time ago, when i was a young boy, my mother and I attended an interview with a careers adviser. He asked me what sort of work I would like to do when I was grown up. At that time I was interested in architecture and in design, (and later on I did work in graphic design). I told the careers adviser that right now, what I was interested in was becoming an architect.

HIs response was to advise me to get a job in the post office.

My mother decided that she’d heard enough. She ended the trip to the careers adviser right then and there. She recognised racism in his response, and also the placing on a limit on a young black boy’s

sense of possibility. Whether he was conscious of it or not, that careers adviser wanted to take away my belief that I could become an architect and replace it with something smaller.

That experience has stayed with me. To this day, it always makes me always respond – yes, I can.