Bold is best: Time to be brave!

They say confidence comes from within! Education Executive’s Laura Williams shares the tale of a vivacious supermarket karaoke enthusiast – serving as a delightful reminder of the power of fearlessness and self-expression

Recently, we were in Tesco doing our weekly shop on a Friday night – very rock and roll!

As we stood, having the same discussion we always have about what we were going to have for tea for the rest of the week, we heard what sounded like shouting and it was getting louder.

Peering out from the end of the milk aisle, it soon became obvious that it wasn’t shouting we could hear but singing. Really, really bad and really, really loud singing. A woman appeared with her earphones on, gliding past us with her trolley – at full speed – singing what I eventually deciphered to be JLo’s ‘Jenny from the Block’.

The noise carried from one end of the store to the other as she moved from aisle to aisle, treating us to an enthusiastic performance of an Eminem classic and other loud yet totally undecipherable songs. I don’t know if she realised how loud she was singing, whether she didn’t care or whether she was drunk (!) but this one-woman flash mob was going for it!

Seeing someone act so completely unfiltered and uninhibited was amusing and quite odd but at the same time, I couldn’t help but want to give her a clap. Fair play to her, because she looked as happy as happy could be and she did not give a single flying fig about what anybody in that shop was thinking!

Now, I’m not saying I’m going to be belting out Taylor Swift in the freezer aisle this Friday or that you should rock out to Ricky Martin in your corridors…but imagine what you could do, how you would feel and what you could achieve if you stopped worrying about what other people think and were unashamedly your SBL superhero self?

If you’ve found yourself subconsciously dimming your light or trying to blend into the background instead of standing tall and proud in your unique wisdom, then this is your wake-up call. Turn up that light, turn up those tunes and belt them out. Be bold. Be you.