Join me on my ride

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

It all started last year.

My business partner and friend Anne has been working on her PhD in Teams and Change and has been researching for inspiring new material and insights as she is developing her own ideas. Whenever we work, we exchange and have discussions about how great it would be to put her new models to test and combine them with a team experience.
That is when I discovered a recruitment video of the clipper race around the world. And something hit me. I was not able to work that day or sleep at night until I applied at 4 a.m. in the morning. All that I could feel was “this is what I have to do” – it seemed to be the answer to the quest we had been looking for. The more I read that night, the more I realized it’s not about a leg or two of this race, it’s about the endurance test of the whole circumnavigation, diving deep into the team experience.

So what has let me to this point in my life?

Lucky me, I found my calling, a job I love and I seem to be good at. Building bridges among cultures and developing international teams.
I am a learning junkie and last December I finally went to the executive program of the Singularity University. Interested in future developments, that had been on my list for a long time. It was fantastic, intense and send me off to a new dimension thinking about the immense impact exponential technologies have in our near future.

It made me think. What role do I want to play? What impact do I make in the world?
One of the exercises we did especially changed my perspective on life and my purpose in it; if you statistically become 90 years old, you will have about 4000 weeks to live. They gave us a sheet with 4000 dots, representing the weeks. It enrolled a train of thought. Thinking in weeks as a unit of time made me realize that how you spend your time matters. You can have a bad day, but you don’t want to have a bad week. So it made me think of how I have spent my approximately 2.700 dots and how I want to spend just the next one, and all the ones that are left.

Because even though I am content and happy with how I’ve spent most of my dots, there has been this gut feeling that I still want to reinvent myself one more time. The Clipper race seems like the perfect opportunity to get to know me in a completely different and drastic way. And maybe I will get to know new sides of myself that I would have missed if I had stayed in my good but comfortable life.

10 days later I had my interview at the Boat fair and was accepted.

All my life I have been on the go, I know I feel most alive when I am confronted with things I do not know and when I get to meet the amazing and diverse people of this planet. I’ve always been in awe of what this world has to offer. A change had been in the air for some time and had entered my life in small steps. It was now materializing in this challenge.

What is needed in the future?

I want to think about what is important for the next years, where can I add value the best? We will go through big changes, technology and automation will change our definition of being human. I am sure that being in relationship, working in teams is part of the answer.

I need to explore who I am out on the ocean, in all weathers. What will I experience? What will I observe and think about? What will I miss? I want to be part of a team again, to gain insights from within to become even better at developing teams. I want to emerge every day to practice and learn a new skill and of course, I want to make new friends from all over the world, all walks of life, sticking with them through thick and thin.

The past weeks have been full with lots of things to do, arranging paperwork, thinking about packing up my place to rent it out, learning knots, and tons of vocabulary as I realized, I had never sailed in English. I am finding it difficult to do all of this in theory – as it has always been easier for me to learn with the connection of doing. So here we are in April 2019,  I will have my first week of training. I am a bit nervous and at the same time, I cannot wait to make this real, finally.

I would love to have your company and share my experiences with you! So follow me on my adventure. I can use all the support I can get – maybe you can even sign up?

To do that use this link: support Ina – scroll to the bottom of the page, and you get the latest news.