Don’t stop looking for the thing which you were meant to find - Christa Ackroyd

At school, with our glorious music teacher Mrs Telford, with mum playing the piano and alone in my bedroom, until in my eyes they were perfect. Nothing could go wrong.

But I had yet to learn about nerves. Yes I had sung in the choir. Yes I had performed plays and poems and pieces on the piano for doting grandparents.

But I was totally unprepared for the pressure of performance in front of the experts. It was all very formal.

A panel of judges at the prestigious Wharfedale Music Festival were seated beneath the stage in the King’s Hall in Ilkley.

The two pieces of music we were to perform I can still recall, with some trepidation, Silver and Gold and Five Eyes. I still remember every word and could probably do it right now better than I did then.

As we were called to the stage I remember feeling a little queasy. It must have been obvious, maybe I went a little green, as the head judge asked kindly if I was alright.

Then the piano started playing and it was simply all too much. As Heather started to sing nothing would come out and I fled in tears of absolute total fear.

My parents were horrified, they had never seen me like this before.

Mrs Telford was horrified because she had thought I could do it and it would be good for me. I though was mortified. I felt I had let myself and others who had faith in me down.

Heather stood on the stage not knowing what to do. No one could comprehend what had just happened. Me, the show off. Me, the class clown, and too frightened to perform.

Reluctantly I was persuaded to go back on stage and to sing. And I did. But I was mortified. My performance was at best average. I just wanted the ground to swallow me up and for it all to be over.

When it was, the head judge spoke. What he told me is with me still. “It is not about being the best. It is about trying your best. And coming back when you feel you can’t and trying again.”

I recounted that story this week to my ten year old granddaughter. For days she had been word perfect for two pieces of dramatic prose that were complex and lengthy.

She performed them for me over and over with confidence and gusto. What could go wrong? Nerves of course at almost precisely the same age as mine.

When the big day came for her LAMDA exam she could hardly get out of the car and when she did she was in floods of tears.

But instead of running away she did it, forgetting one line as she struggled between knowing she could and fearing she couldn’t.

And so I told her my story. “But you were on TV every night Nonna,” she said. “I was,” came my reply. “But when I asked the person I had the privilege of sitting next to for my first ever live show if he still got nervous his answer surprised me.

“Of course I do,” he said. “I still get sweaty palms every night because it is important we get it right. In fact I get nervous if I don’t feel nervous until I do. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”

God bless Richard Whiteley. He like Harry (Gration) made it look so so easy. When actually it wasn’t. They talked to their audience as though they were friends, because that is how they viewed them.

To them it mattered. Local news was not second best it was, in both their eyes, the most important news of the day.

Because they were speaking to people they had been raised amongst, still live amongst and wanted it to be right because they knew they would bump into them in the pub or down the shops if it wasn’t.

And that’s why they both always were nervous as the countdown began. And I was too.

I told Matilda I still feel like that often. I still find it hard to walk into a room full of people I don’t know. I still overthink what I said and what I should have said instead, not just in work but in life too, which is a pretty pointless exercise.

But then so does everyone if something matters unless they are so over confident they are delusional about their own abilities or have an over inflated opinion of their self worth.

Confidence comes from years of practice. Whether it is sitting that exam, meeting new people or doing the hard work and just doing whatever it is that triggers your fears.

But and it’s a big but we are often so hard on ourselves if it doesn’t work out. Or others don’t agree with our ‘performance.’ No matter. Not everyone will like us. Not everyone will agree with our thoughts or values.

This week the former head of a posh school lectured parents and teachers alike about how important it was for children taking exams this summer to spend Easter holidays as if they were at school and work up to eight hours a day.

And that is great, if you measure success on paper by what you achieved in moments of pressure. But my goodness all work and no play makes Jack or Jill a dull boy or girl.

There is so much more to life than being top of the class. We test and test and test again our children’s resilience and abilities until they don’t know whether they are coming or going.

They have to be good at maths, good at science, good at languages, good at English, good at everything.

If you are then you will probably never discover what it is that makes you tick, what it is that is your special gift to offer and that is not about competition or being judged by others to be number one.

Life is not about coming first. It is about achieving your potential and that often means failing, kicking yourself for doing so and getting back up to try again.

But more importantly it is about finding out what makes you happy, what you are prepared to work at until you get it right because you want to do it well, not because someone tells you you should, but because it proves to you that you can. You can’t be good at everything, mum said often.

And that’s true. The rest is finding out what you are good at and honing that skill until it looks easy or at least natural, something Richard and Harry had in bucket loads.

I actually think my granddaughter is pretty good at drama. The exciting part for her is yet to come. It is not about being persuaded that this or that will make her shine.

The advice I gave her is that which I would give everything else. Try everything once, within reason, but don’t allow yourself to be judged by an exam result or one single performance.

At least you tried and sometimes that is enough, not because it’s character building, it often isn’t, but because if you have tried your best and you discover your best isn’t quite good enough, that’s not a failure.

It just means you haven’t found the thing which you were meant to find. And that as I told Matilda is what life is all about.

Whatever your age, whatever your talents, the fun is finding out exactly what that is.