Potential and a Jar of Peanut Butter – Part 1

I was recently asked to do an assembly in a Primary school to talk about my sport and using a concept that came up during a discussion with one of my Twitter contacts, Lisa Rossetti, I came up with the title ‘Potential and a Jar of Peanut Butter’.

It went a little something like this…

My name is Karen Harewood and I live locally in Oadby.  I work from home as a consultant helping people save money on their bills at home and in their businesses.  But what I’m here to talk to you about today is my sport which is athletics.  I train as an 800m runner at Corby Athletics Club which I joined about 8 years ago.

What I’m going to talk to you about today will hopefully inspire at least one of you to think about being an athlete, but whatever each of you decides to be, the main message about this assembly is to be the best that YOU can be, at whatever you decide that is.

We then watched this video and had a little chit chat about what they got from it:

London 2012 Inspiration

I  think the important thing is that to have one winner, you have to have lots and lots of people trying their best, working hard to fulfill their potential.

We’ll come back to that word ‘potential’ in a few minutes but let me just take you back to when I was your age:

At school I really enjoyed writing stories and running!  I liked running everywhere.  I did some schools competitions but when I got invited to my first schools county championships I wasn’t able to go because it was on a Saturday and my parents religion meant that I wasn’t able to compete on a Saturday.  I decided that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on athletics anymore as competitions would always be on a Saturday, and then, when I moved on to a new school, they didn’t really do athletics there so I just forgot about running for nearly 15 years!

Then I began running again whilst I lived in America, just for fun carried on with that for a few years.  Then when I moved to Corby, we lived near to a running track and I thought, “I’m going to see what my potential would be if I really committed myself to training properly with a coach”.  At this point I was 28 years old which is quite an unusual age for someone to start training in athletics.

So I joined a training group run by the man who is still my coach, Charley McConnell and started training!

My training schedule is running 6 times a week, twice a week on the track and 4 times a week on the roads or grass, circuit training and weight lifting twice a week.

Now the important thing was I wanted to see what my potential was:  What do you think potential is?

The kids came up with some great responses including “trying your hardest’ and “trying to be your best”.  I then possibly overcomplicated it (!) by continuing:

Potential is all the possibilities that exist that you cannot see yet.  So each of you has possibilities of things you can be or do or have, but you have to decide what you want those things to be be, and then do the things you need to do to make them happen.  Potential is about getting the best or the most out of yourself.

…and that’s why I called this assembly Potential and a Jar of Peanut Butter.

Now one of the differences between athletes and other people is their ability to push themselves mentally in training sessions and races so that you can get more out of yourself, physically, than the average person.  Pushing yourself mentally means being able to use your mind to force your body to keep going even when your body is telling  you that you are too tired.

Getting more out of yourself or getting the most you possibly can out of yourself, so that you fulfill your potential requires you to think a certain way.  And this is where the jar of peanut butter comes in…ok who likes peanut butter?

Now there was to follow a demonstration which would have involved a volunteer scraping clean a nearly finished jar of peanut butter…my favourite breakfast topping, however having pre-checked with the head, I was informed that unfortunately one of the pupils was so severely allergic to peanuts that just being in the room with an option jar could prove fatal for him…so I thought it best to skip that bit!  But I would have said…

Now, who thinks this jar of peanut butter is finished?

Most people would say that this jar of peanut butter is finished and throw it away (or recycle it!)

But (Jake) if I give you this little teaspoon, I want you to try and scrape out the peanut butter that’s left in the jar and you can have that as your morning snack!  Right Jake we’re going to come back to you in a few minutes and see how you get on.

OK, while (Jake) is doing that I’m going to tell you a little bit about what pushing my self has helped me to achieve…

Part 2 to follow…