I have just returned from my business school reunion in Fontainbleau, France. What a blast and what a party. To celebrate, alumni were invited to a black tie affair at the Château de Fontainebleau, former home to Marie Antionette et al., and just down the road from the “Business School for the World,” (that’s trademarked).
That was an awesome night. The best part about going back in time to the present to my 22 year reunion, was that it was a complete affirmation of all the work we are doing at Monumental Me. Yup, I am giving myself a pat on the back for bringing my work to the masses, so to speak.
As I have mentioned before, I received my MBA from INSEAD, a top international business school based in France and Singapore. It was a transformative year and one that will remain an integral part of my life. So I will keep mentioning INSEAD in my musings as I help other people uncover their strengths and flourish. INSEAD is an over-achiever’s dream school and one that I wouldn’t have recommended to my worst enemy during my first 3 months as a student. However, once I survived the grind of “P1 & P2,” the accelerated core curriculum where we were graded on a forced curve against a majority of peers who had already been taught accounting, finance, and economics by the best consulting firms and financial institutions around, I started to let loose. I started to see the value I contributed as a “poet” amongst “quants.” I started socializing. Enjoying intriguing people from over 49 different countries. Going to the parties at the châteaux, a perfectly normal setting in the Île-de-France region just south of Paris. I also met my future husband and received several excellent job offers in Paris. In short, I started to live the fairy tale side of a year at INSEAD.
Fast forward 22 years, and I was intrigued to be sitting in “Amphi B” at the reunion with about 120 of my peers, titans of industry, entrepreneurs, and consultants, who traveled from all over the world to reconnect, from Paris, New York, London, Singapore, India, and Brazil. Some were still sitting on top of the world, and some were visibly exhausted and a little broken from the rollercoaster of life and work. We were all given a task by the reunion organizers: Answer 1 of 7 questions in front of our cohort. The 2 most popular questions were:
What was your biggest learning from the last 7 years? and
What was your fondest memory of INSEAD?
The vast majority of my peers answered the former. Oh boy, I wish I had taken notes, but that didn’t feel right. This was an intimate exchange and it was powerful. As each individual shared, the next seemed just a little more open and honest in their answers.
The common themes of these honest answers?:
What really matters is our emotional well-being, relationships, and love.
The most important course of our MBA was “OB,” Organizational Behavior aka “Crying for Credits”… the HUMAN side of business.
The Covid-19 forced lockdowns were the best months of my adult life.
When it came to my turn, I didn’t share my own hard-earned wisdom of how to start prioritizing wellbeing over work or what I learned from my journey of burnout to living my purpose. I didn’t choose the untapped question of “What was the biggest secret you’ve kept from us so far?” because I would have shared how miserable I was at the beginning of the program for a multitude of reasons, in addition to what I shared above. I just kept things moving and my light-hearted contribution was a joke about my husband that resulted in a laugh and my sharing my favorite memory of the Cabaret the students put on at the end of the program (it was quite amazing and very creative for a bunch of quants).
What I wanted to say to the room was: “YES! Our success is tied to our ability to overcome obstacles and setbacks. To develop our Emotional Intelligence and our natural strengths. Connect with others and invest in loving and being loved. Make time to do what you love and to serve those you care about, family, friends, and complete strangers in need. Yet most of us never learned the skills and tools needed to do so. They didn’t teach that outside of the required Organizational Behavior course in the year 2000 to qualify for our MBAs….”
I could have gone on and on. But I didn’t even start. I should have…. but I am living my mission now and I am still working on how to share it with others. My mission is to bring tools for well-being and success to all who need them. We can all learn to identify and leverage our strengths, use the core elements of positive psychology to really thrive, and recognize and remove the roadblocks that may get in our way.
We have created a course entitled “Removing Your Roadblocks” at Monumental Me and I can’t wait to share it with you all. Take a peek and let us know what you think. You can either jump into this engaging course or keep tapping our free content. No pressure. Just sharing what has been brewing for the past 7+ years of learning, with an emphasis on the plus.
🧡Liana