Phew, I made it. The other day I received my certificate in the post for my BSc in Applied Psychology and what felt like a mountain fell off my shoulders.
There is no way my younger “if I’m going to do this, I need to do it now” me would have believed that I would go back to study, after having started work and then stick with it for more than 8 years. I am still not known for my patience, but I dare say it has improved over this. The determination is still there though. 😊
When I started on this journey, I didn’t think about where it would take me exactly: studying, having two kids, getting my coach and trainer qualifications & certifications, founding my own business, running and growing that for 5 years….
….meeting amazing people along the whole way, and re-discovering again and again how much I love empowering others.
I won’t say it was always easy, because that just wouldn’t be true. A customer I have been working over the years recently asked me what I would do with my degree, now that I was done. You know, now that I have it, I won’t do any more with it than what I have already done throughout my work while I was still working on it: I will use it to the benefit of the leaders, teams and organisations I support.
This qualification was initially, and mainly, for me. Because I wanted to unlock more of what I had learned in my other qualifications and because I wanted to learn again.
Because I wanted to be able to provide support and knowledge authentically to my customers.
There were times in my life before this, when I was so busy that I didn’t think I had the capacity to learn anymore, even though that was something I have always enjoyed. Despite the fact that raising kids, setting up and running my own business and studying has kept me good and busy, I have enjoyed the learning immensely.
I have enjoyed re-discovering my love for quantitative research and going over papers, trying to understand what was done and deduced from the results, looking at every point from all kinds of angles.
My goal was a good, theoretical foundation for what I do everyday, to combine with my practical experience in leadership and with teams, and it has proven useful throughout my work in coaching and training.
I have been able to give my coachees and participants insights into how the human mind develops, works and, sometimes, doesn’t work as we expect; and how we can care for ourselves and it.
The insights I have gained range from developmental psychology, how childhood experiences can affect humans, neural development and how the human brain develops, social psychology and how groups interact, to how group dynamics develop and affect humans, cross-cultural psychology, psychological disorders and last, but by no means least organizational psychology, where I did my research on the breadth and variation of benefits and drawbacks of home office.
These insights are the foundations of my work with my customers and enable me to give them more well-founded support.
It has given a scientific basis to what I know through experience to be good leadership, mindfulness, resilience and empowerment of teams.
It has strengthened my belief in positivity, every human being’s potential, as well as increased my knowledge of where some human behaviours and instincts can run counter to what we want to achieve.
And while I definitely enjoyed it, I am also immensely relieved it is done. Not sure what to do with my weekends now. 😊 Where were those books I wanted to read again?
What are you currently learning?
If you interested in more, drop me a line. Looking forward to hearing from you!
