Recrear.beta is officially over. With an average of three hours of sleep per night in the last four days, I am sitting at a Cafe trying unsuccessfully to connect to the internet.
The last week has been extremely dense for me and it is hard to tell its story. Every day had an introduction, moments of reflection and climaxes; I would not have understood the lessons I learned on Tuesday without having experienced Monday fully. A week later I am still struggling to process and trace back my emotions. What I do know, is that today something inside of me feels different than it did a week ago. To explain what changed, I must talk about the APEX course we took part in from Monday to Thursday.
The APEX course is a very unique Leadership Training (for more informationhttp://www.apexcourse.org/). It is developed specifically for companies and its goals range from team building to personal achievement.
For four days, we spent our mornings in the bright studio of the Art of Living faciilities in Berlin doing Yoga, working on breathing, meeting in small groups and engaging in communication and leadership learning activities. Everything was very well planned and brought in me deep reflections about my personal needs, my weakneses and how I want to deal with them. The course was also very useful for us as a team to learn what works and what doesn’t in group dynamics and to to think about the relationship between our personal and professional life.
After each morning of course, we cooked and ate together, chatting, discussing the morning activities and sharing food and national culture with each other in a relaxed, intimate atmosphere.
The course was very powerful for me because it started in a moment where we, as a working team and as friends, were getting increasingly closer. However, as it happens in any group, we were getting to know each other at our own pace and on our own terms. Though the APEX course we were gently thrown in the position of opening up with each other in an unconventional, more meaningful way.
This, in my view, sparked a sense of deeper belonging and comfort with each other – which also renewed our excitement to build Recrear and to work together.
For me, the course was mentally and physically demanding and, at times, I felt it gave me more food for thought than I could eat. Strangely, on one hand, I felt it put me in a thoughtful and introspective state of mind, and on the other, it helped me relax and to make space in my head to simply be myself. Despite the ups and downs, I felt reinvigorated and provoked by those four days. When we stepped out of Art of Living on Thursday, we were on an entirely new gear… (more to come…)
