When I was 21, I started setting the intentions of self–love and balance before and after each yoga practice. Yoga was my drug of choice when coping with the demand of a finance career, hours of Los Angeles traffic and countless moves between apartments. Seven years later, I found my career taking precedence over my personal life, even with these intentions. So I decided to reject what my life had become. I decided to move across the world to IMD for what an American MBA could not offer, a truly international experience.
Although we are only six months deep, my time at IMD has provided the opportunity to re-visit the intentions I have been repeating for a decade. There have been moments of joy, love, despair, and tears thus far in the program, but my intentions have never been clearer. This is the year to push pause on my career and to focus on my journey. More specifically, I want to focus on people and leadership. While the program content takes you far, the cohort dares you farther than you could have ever imagined.
The world looks different once you embark on the IMD journey. Days, weeks, and months morph into what feels like years of friendship. Bonds that have been made stronger as they have been tested by unbelievable forces. If you are open to vulnerability, you will find the people that you want to remain in your life forever. I have spent a lifetime looking for the brilliant minds that I have met at IMD. I am enjoying the journey and am preparing myself for what comes next.
I’m bracing myself to ring in my 30th birthday in a matter of days. I imagined this would be so much different. Pre-IMD, I would have been dancing until dawn at my favorite music festival in Belgium. Reality is that I have a ticket to Italy, a backpack, and the plan to meet up with my IMD classmates along the way. Just as many of us feel that we don’t always know where we are going on this journey, we know that we are in this together as the Centum Fortes.
All the best and cheers to the best decade yet!
