By Nick McIvor | Posted: Friday March 31, 2017
There’s a saying around the All Black camp: ‘If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere.’[1]
In the All Black environment this refers to the importance of preparation, constant learning, and practising with intensity and accuracy. For the ‘Abs’ it’s also about training under pressure to perform under pressure, for sustainable improvement.[2] Do these things have a place away from international rugby?
In business, sport, crafts, or acquisition of any new skills, it’s believed that ‘practice makes perfect’ and practising with intensity makes learning more effective (or ‘perfect’). The same applies in schooling. If we can help boys to work with intensity in and out of class, as they pick up new knowledge or technique, they will succeed mentally and physically.
Achieving this is tough. It is not to suggest that we put in place a grim regime of constant, unrelenting intensity and pressure in everything every day. It is instead to work to develop ‘a mindset to win’[3], to achieve, and not only in a sporting sense, but putting good intensity into different types of learning. It is to practice and learn with intensity; to ‘train’ our young men to succeed in activities that challenge and extend them.
Picking up on the All Black saying again, if we are to grow personally ‘anywhere’ then we can do it by working with intensity ‘anywhere’.
The midpoint of the term has passed and we seem to be accelerating through the weeks with increasing speed. There is certainly an intensity to the way each day races by.
The boys who took part in the Relay for Life in the weekend to fundraise for Cancer research and support, were outstanding, and deserve special mention. This event is important to us every year. Few families in our school community will have not been touched by cancer at some point. In 2017, confronted with some of the grottiest weather we could have imagined in March, and mud and cold, those walking through the night showed rousing spirit, and good respect for the cause. The prefects did a tremendous job leading the rest of us in the Relay; one of their first big tests for 2017 handled well.
Nick McIvor
Scientia Potestas Est
Mā te Mātauranga te Mana
[1] Kerr, J. Legacy: What the All Blacks can Teach us about the Business of Life (Constable, London, 2013) p101.
[2] Ibid. p105-106.
[3] Ibid. p101.
