I am currently in Tampere starting my MBA in Educational Leadership with an intensive week. It has been a while (in fact I don’t remember ever experiencing this before …) since I spent hours in conversation with people who are interested in learning and are in the same room with me talking about it because they want to and not because they have to.
I arrived in Tampere quite nervous. With 24 years having passed since completing my university studies and my struggling so much through the couple of certifications I obtained in the meantime, going back to real school, with real teachers and people,truly got my heart pumping. I could not explain what made me that nervous though, I mean apart from feeling one hundred years old walking into a university campus surrounded by giggling twenty year olds. Three full days in and I can definitely tell that this programme is going to kick my behind. But not in the ways I anticipated. Of course, why should it be predictable when it could be fun? 😉
As an introvert, grown more and more uncomfortable in crowds as years have gone by, I was already freaked out by two words: group work. Within the first half day I understood that the cornerstone of this programme is collaboration. It is not only that we get to spend the three intensive weeks of the one and a half years as a group, we will depend on each other’s work in a way that I have never done before – and I led a team of individuals for nine years. Another nugget for reflection, I guess.
Listening to the professors explaining the group work expected of us, the way we will be graded, I heard two phrases that discombobulated me completely. So much so that I needed breathing to bring me back to the room I was in, in Finland, back from that school at the end of Ciucea street in Bucharest in the 1980s. Grades are apparently not that important (!!!) and, to my absolut horror, the grade we get will be the group’s grade, regardless of the individual’s work. Even as I write this right now, after having made some peace with it, my arms go numb with anxiety.
What do they actually mean? How will I prove that I am worth talking to if I am not the very best, all the time, at everything? So I might work my booty off for days and nights and deserve a 5 and only get a 3 because someone in my group was too busy or too lazy or not traumatized by the Romanian education system and the regular question we were asked “what grades did so and so get?” How can these be something that people around me, in a classroom are talking about in such a relaxed manner? It got to a point when I considered quitting – that is how loud the gremlins of the past were yelling in my head.
Once I got my breathing back and came back to Finland from Ciucea, I remembered something I read in a self help book a while ago: when I enter experiences that seem very difficult to endure to ask myself what is this hear to teach me? And I did. Sometimes the Universe has their answers prepared to deliver on the spot. It told me that it is time to peel off that layer of perfectionist prison held together by the lie that grades matter and to realize that real knowledge is what matters as well as real connections. And because apparently the Universe considers me right for the heavy lifting these days, I get two lessons in one: I get to be in a group with other individuals who are at least equally smart, passionate, interested, all the things. And the prison break this time will be out of the cell with this door sign: if I don’t talk the most, come up with the most ideas, make the best points and am not always, always, always on, people will think I am not really that big of a deal. With its twin prison: I need to always be a big deal to be seen.
Because we have gathered here in a professional capacity to know each other and work together, there has been a lot of introducing ourselves. And so I have uttered this at least five times in three days: I am currently unemployed. I am searching for a new path. Not to minimize the grief of losing someone but … that moment when you finally gather the courage to say … they died, on a smaller scale, that was what I was pushed to do. And yesterday, dipping in and out of a surprisingly lovely Finnish hot sauna and cold lake, I heard myself tell another fellow Romanian student: I am so scared about what is happening to me professionally right now. And at the same time, there is some excitement bubbling on the outskirts of that fear for something I know not what. Learning is making me come alive with every single idea that I am jotting down and I am realizing that it has been more than a decade that I have not been fully alive. Now, that’s an interesting realization.
Now, back to group work, I might as well have been given 10 kilo weights to pull on during a level 10 aerobic workout. I am so scared of this and I understand that this is a milestone that needs to be crossed if I am to change anything about me. Well, nothing new here, there have been so many times in my life when I have understood that I need to change in ways I never did end up changing. And somehow, right now, in the scided (scared+excited) shape I find myself in, I understand that only real knowledge, real connection and real work will carry me forward, if anything ever will.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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