This may not come as a surprise to some people - especially the teachers that I tortured every single day at high school, and my beautiful old nan who tried her best to make me study diligently - but I hated school, every minute of it - well not exactly every minute - the minutes spent playing footy were pretty good 😁😁😁
When I finished Year 12 with the worlds worst HSC score 👨🏼🏫🥵 but also the lifetime memory of captaining a winning grand final 🏈🎉(turns out that’s not that impressive on a CV!!) - I wasn’t sure what I would do, but I knew I never wanted to study again, never, never, never ever ☠️☠️☠️
I worked as a Gardener, a timber mill labourer and a concretor and loved all of those jobs as they were outside but the drought and lack of ongoing opportunity in the bush during the early 2000’s made me think a little wider and in 2003 I started working with kids in a local school that were struggling.
Fast forward 19 years and I have managed to get by in my career with a short course here and there, a lot of “on the job” learning and a hell of a lot of faith from my bosses that I could do the job I had been employed to do 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽 and all through this time I never really understood the importance of the credibility that a qualification can bring - I had a tonne of life experience but no paper to back it up.
Mid way through last years lockdown as I set about building “Rolling With The Punches” - I thought - I am going to need that piece of paper to be able to make my services credible - I already had a good reputation but I needed something that legitimised what I wanted to do - help people that needed help the most.
So with this in mind - I jumped into a Diploma of Counselling and after 18 months of late nights and early mornings I now have a real qualification, something to go with the life experience and also something that looks pretty good next to that dusty old footy trophy from 2000 👊🏽🖤🤙🏽
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