Scoring Goals: How Hobbies Build Confidence

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What has football got to do with your work?

Chloe Kelly celebrates after scoring England’s second goal to secure victory over Germany. Photograph: Alex Livesey/UEFA/Getty Images

Let me tell you a little story about my daughter Tallulah.

Tallulah, we call her Boo, is 10 years old and is nearing the end of an extremely arduous process: her secondary school entrance exams. Boo is relatively smart, but as it turns out, has never been challenged in her learning.

She is somewhere near the top of her class at our local primary school, and has happily sailed through, no particular academic bumps and grazes. That sounds excellent for her - and us as parents - and it has been, until she’s faced tests that contain hard concepts which boggle her mind, and time pressures that rattle her enough I’m surprised my laptop is still working: it is slammed shut on a near daily basis.

The process so far has been incredibly difficult. Not least because knowing that capable of smashing these tests out of the park, but her failing to believe it, and therefore giving up before she’s even begun, becomes a rollercoaster of epic climbs and dives. I am literally going greyer by the day.

Or at least I was. Because about 3 weeks ago, Tallulah was unexpectedly chosen for the school athletics team (last meet of the season): they won overall gold. Her joy overflowed. Then, she was picked to captain the school’s first ever netball team, and again, they cleaned up, letting just one goal in, in 7 matches. She was asked to do a speech about the team in assembly. Her joy ran over.

Then on Saturday, despite wearing football boots that are a size too small (Vinted let me down big time), and me needing to rip the insoles out on a cold bench in Regents Park, at 8.30am on a Saturday morning, no less, she went on to score 8 goals, in a crushing 9-2 defeat against an Arsenal development team that have made mincemeat out of our Brent girls in the past. At one point, after a particularly impressive volley knock in, she turned to me, held her arms out in disbelieve and mouthed, “I don’t know what is happening?!’

What was happening, I thought, was a slow motion summiting of her Everest, because, what I haven’t told you, is that since the athletics, and buoyed by the netball, not only did her football (Tallulah one true love) come together with instinctive brilliance, her test results started creeping north, too.

That was a very longwinded way of reminding you that your hobbies can positively impact work performance, confidence, and self-worth too. We know that engaging in activities outside of work fosters new skills, promotes mental well-being, and improves how we feel about ourselves, so why, I wondered, is so much of learning and development stuck in the metaphorical classroom?