What activity did you really enjoy as a child?

This was the question I used as an ice breaker for the kids when delivering a career talk at a local secondary school a couple of months ago (you can read more about the talk´s content here and here).

One by one, they all told me about their activities: sports of all kinds, musical instruments... Some of them still kept those hobbies alive, while other had already given them up.

I also answered the question, by showing them this picture (it´s a bit blurry, apologies):

There I am with my friend Araceli, at our ballet class, back when we were ten years old. Such good memories...

My parents signed me up for ballet at Sbelta school of dance, in Cáceres, only a short walk away from my house, when I was four years old, and I stayed there learning classical and contemporary dance for another fifteen years! Until I turned nineteen. I was never any good at sports, but I did love dancing, so dancing became a huge part of my life during my childhood and teenage years.

I remember those times with great fondness and excitement: spending our evenings in "the school", being in class with my friends, preparing our exams with the Royal Academy of Dance (with an examiner coming from England to evaluate us), rehearsing, rehearsing and rehearsing before a performance... And above all, performing.

Overcoming my nerves, setting aside my lack of confidence and getting on stage. Showing myself to the world.

Two years ago I was lucky enough to bump into Cristina, my former teacher, and briefly get to walk along the school´s corridors once again. I realized how much I had learned from the world of dance, despite the fact that I left once I reached a certain age and never considered it "seriously" as a career option:

• An appreciation for music and performing arts.
• Discipline and consistency to keep at it, even on days when I didn't feel like it.
• Patience and tolerance to frustration when things didn't go smoothly first time round (or sometimes second, or third...).
• The ability to quickly recover after slipping or messing up (= stop beating myself up over the mistake, and keep going).
• Comradery and fellowship - while it wasn´t exactly the same as a team sport, rehearsing and performing together created a similar bond.

And then of course, it helped me to lose a bit of that fear to expose myself, and acquire "tablas", which the Spanish RAE dictionary defines as "experience and easiness when performing in public or developing an activity".

All of this goes to illustrate the idea that I wanted to convey to those boys and girls at the secondary school: you can learn lots of things through hobbies, interests and extra-curricular activities; those things are often different from the ones you get to learn in school, and most of those skills and learnings are transferrable to other personal and professional areas. Which means that, even at the very beginning of our working career, chances are we´re not starting from scratch, there are probably a few resources alrady in our backpack.

This is the "useful" or "practical" benefit of having a hobby; then there are other less tangible benefits, like the excitement and satisfaction we get out of practicing that activity. For me in particular, as I have a tendency to think (or overthik?) and I´m rather sedentary in nature, I find it hugely beneficial to get in contact with my body and express myself through movement. And that´s exactly why I recently signed up for an adults ballet class! I started last Thursday, and leaving aside the initial shock at my complete lack of balance, strength and stamina, the truth is I´m delighted 🙂

Thinking about all this I remembered Billy Elliot , the musical (which I loved and I totally recommend) where they ask the main character how it feels when he's dancing. Here are two videos with the lyrics.

The original song, in English:

A translation into Spanish (with occasional spelling mistakes, please disregard those)

Now, back to the question: What activity did you really enjoy as a child? How did you use to feel? And what did you learn from it?