Junior Apprentice Training day

On Saturday, Tosin, Marcia and I went to Clapham Baptist Church to take part in a training day for Junior Apprentice.  

We were sent to Brixton Market to sell either records or cakes.  The purpose being to put ourselves in the place of the young people who participate in Junior Apprentice and experience what they do, so to speak.

My team sold cakes and Tosin and Marcia's team sold vintage vinyl records.  Before we started, I assumed our cakes would sell the best, as everyone likes cakes, whereas vintage records are a specialist item.  I thought everyone downloaded records from the internet these days and no one bought Vinyl. 

We set up our stalls side-by-side and sold cakes to passers by.  Our team did very well, giving out small tasters and selling nice large slices of delicious cakes.  It was absolutely freezing and spitting with rain, which did not help us to sell.  Nevertheless we made around £123 in about two hours, which was wonderful.

Everyone worked very hard and played a part in the selling.

This was right outside my comfort zone and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though my team lost and I got fired!  It was interesting to experience being fired for myself, which is a new experience for me.  Whilst it does not feel nice to "fail", I have learned so much participating in the process so that, should we do something similar in the future, I have much more confidence in my ability and I may even win next time! 

I have learned from this that whilst it is good to win, it is also good to fail sometimes.  By doing so we learn so much more from why we fail and hopefully how to succeed next time.  As I once said to one of the candidates, failure is the key to success!