Nineteen-year-old Alan Casillas watched the program for some time. After all, the student at Bramalea Secondary School in Brampton, Ont. who moved to Canada from Mexico two years earlier, had some experience already cutting hair. So he watched his school’s CUTS program, an extra-curricular in-school hair-cutting club that operated during the school’s lunch hours. Finally, six months ago, he decided to try it. Under the supervision of Kevin Khanija, the professional barber overseeing the student barbers, he began trimming and clipping the hair of students weekly.
“It made me feel good that I could do this,” says Casillas. “It feels good when someone recognizes that you can do it and you’re good,” he says.
Casillas’s confidence in his skills thanks to CUTS doesn’t surprise Joseph Khargie, founder of the program, which stands for Cutting You To Success. After all, he knows that helping students build hard skills helps boost their confidence and self-esteem. “I’m always looking for a new experience to give to students. It’s about developing transferrable skills and a talent so they can build on their own strengths,” says Khargie. He knows what many parenting experts espouse: that building a skill, in this case cutting hair, can help an adolescent build their self-confidence.
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What is CUTS?
The program began three years ago at the secondary school because Khargie was looking for different ways for students to build skills. This was something he learned after founding other clubs. “We’ve had a dance program. And that led to a basketball program and that led to CUTS and also one of our biggest programs to date, a DJ program,” says Khargie.
The CUTS concept is simple: a professional barber comes in every Thursday at lunch to supervise students he’s trained in the club to cut and braid the hair of fellow students. It’s up to the student barbers to find potential clients, which includes teachers and caretaking staff. Maximizing that student skill concept, Khargie also has someone from the DJ program in the room playing music – to in turn develop their skill as well. “Even though the students are novices, through CUTS they are building their customer service skills and developing a trust amongst their peers,” says Khargie.
Why does it work?
Whether it’s developing a skill to dribble a basketball or create the perfect fade haircut for a client, Khargie understands the connection between skill and self-esteem. “Our barber Kevin empowers the students and guides them as they go,” says Khargie. “It’s up to the students to develop the skills to find their own clients and bring them in. They’re learning how to do that and how to build relationships.”
The connection between skill building and confidence is a solid one. In 2016, a study from Queen’s University Belfast concluded that young adolescents who learned cooking skills at an early age developed more confidence as a by-product of gaining that skill. Another study from 2011 in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences found that students who were trained in life skills had a greater increase in self-esteem compared to students who didn’t have that training.
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How to boost confidence
What else can help boost an adolescent’s confidence? Success in school helps — after all, doing well academically is another skill that’s being developed in a teen. A 2019 study from the Journal of Adolescence notes that success in school helped teens feel more confident —so confident, in fact, that academic success could help overcome some of the damage caused by family problems.
And programs such as Joseph’s are right on track for building a teen’s self-esteem. Encouraging children to develop their passions and talents is one step towards greater confidence, reports the American Academy of Pediatrics. And it’s really about what the adolescent is interested in. This summer, teens who participated in a welding camp — welding isn’t a skill that the average teen possesses — at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops reported they felt more confident because of the skills they gained there.
For Casillas, his interest in haircutting not only helped him feel good but in the end, he gained more than skills and confidence via CUTS. He earned himself a job cutting hair with Khanija’s barber shop, Elevate Grooming Studio in Brampton. He’s currently working full time at the salon cutting hair and this fall, on top of completing his final semester of high school, he’ll continue to work part-time at Elevate using the very skills he developed in CUTS.
WAHL Canada, who supports The Cuts Program by donating tools, knows that a well-groomed beard and cut can also help boost confidence. Head to WAHL Canada to find out more on how you can “Trim like a Pro”.