2023 SPORTS AND CULTURAL AWARDS

Our Sports and Cultural evening was held on Tuesday 24th October. It was great evening celebrating some fantastic achievements of our students. We were treated to Liam Messam as our Guest Speaker. He certainly gave plenty for everyone to take away and think about. 

He spoke about growing up and being adopted at 6 weeks old and being part of a large family that didn't have it easy growing up. His parents had children of their own and adopted 3 children into their family and had hundreds of foster children. He spoke of the importance of the fact that they had strong values and worked hard. The backbone values for him were Resilience, Hard Work and being a Positive Influence. He used his time in the NZ 7's as an example about where he learnt the importance of hardwork and that without this you won't reach what your aiming for, whether it is in sport or other goal pursuits. Value of influence he spoke to was around always ensuring what you do and how you carry yourself provides a positive influence to others. He related this to his time in the All Blacks where it is about how you add value and contribute to leaving something better than it was before. He also spoke about the expectation of being a positive influence at home, to be good role models for the foster children. 

He talked about the path to success being different for everyone and no matter the goal it is about building repeated small habits, breaking a target down into manageable chunks and smaller goals and building them up. 

He talked about the value of Resilience being essential for success and how people ensure they are positively contributing even in the face of adversity or setbacks. 

He challenged everyone to always be better people and  kinder humans, that the world and communities don't have enough of this and it isn't a hard thing to do.