Working with Children and Youth is definitely one of the things in my life that I absolutely love. I naturally fell into it with encouragement from others and my commitment to serve the community probably came from my grandparents who raised me in a household that values service to others. As I grew up, I became more passionate about the cause of uplifting other people's confidence and until now, my mahi revolves solely around it.
Fast forward to present day.
Privileged to be a small part of their journey.
As a single mother to a beautiful daughter, I can't think of anything more important than my child's well-being. I would love to her to become confident, in tune with her emotions, know genuine camaraderie, be able to stand up for herself and be able to explore and maximise her capabilities. For this reason, I feel very fortunate that schools and parents trust my company, Maia Dreams, to deliver our Confident Me Program. I feel privileged to have been given a rare opportunity to help mould our futurel leaders through sessions that build harmoniously upon the next, eventually helping them develop a complete, holistic understanding of how they can build their own self confidence.
Seeing their confidence grow.
Nothing is more rewarding than nurturing a child and seeing them bloom in confidence. This is the main reason why I keep doing what I do, why my team continues to roll with the punches and why the vision of establishing Maia Dreams came into fruition. Every child that comes to us is given the tools and practical strategies to empower them into becoming the best versions of themselves. And we have seen amazing results that manifest in both big and small things. We have witnessed a few very shy students come up on stage to take the microphone, we receive heaps of grateful remarks from parents, there are schools that continue to trust us to this day and we get to see big and small transformations everyday that stem from the programs we deliver under the Confident Me umbrella. This, more than anything else, is the best motivation for me to continue serving
Offering a platform
With a staggering amount of children and youth committing suicide and suffering from mental health issues in New Zealand, I thought it was imperative to put up a platform that would be more of a preventative measure than a cure. After all, prevention is much better than cure or at least, I believe it is. I am a huge advocate of preventative measures because it is best to nip things in the bud before they escalate. That's why Maia Dreams was born. It is my lifelong dream to empower our children and youth to become more confident, to learn how to stand up for themselves, to learn how to monitor their emotions, to know how it feels like to have healthy friendships and a whole lot more.
It takes more than our program to help them to transform
The most important part of my mahi with children and youth is to make Confident Me Program work even after the students finish their sessions. We only have them for a certain amount of time and the opportunity for us to teach them tools and practical strategies is very limited. Therefore, we continue to ask our students' families to implement what the children have learned, even at home. Especially at home. We hope that the parents key takeaway from our Confident Me Program is to have clarity on how to help and support their child/ren in the implementation of all the tools and principles we taught them. We strongly feel that they will be helpful in building long lasting habits and will allow them to feel more confident in becoming the best parent, mentor or caregiver that they can be.
Above all, I'm very adamant about spreading our mantra to everyone we come across - building confidence is not an overnight process but an on-going one. We cannot emphasise this enough. And someday, after our students have grown out of our programs, we hope to see our future leaders living their life fully, bravely and confidently.
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