November 9-11 - in Belgium

This weekend I went to Belgium. Katya met me in Brussels on Friday evening and we went to Leuven for some intern’s party at a club/pub. I was a bit shocked with the pubs/clubs they have in Belgium – extremely small and crowded, plus everyone smokes inside! (which is banned in the UK, so I started to take it for granted :)). But I really liked the music they were playing, so we danced till 1 or 2 a.m. and I even got motivated to go to a club somewhere here in London.

Next morning we started off to go to a place somewhere near Antwerp to take part in interns’ track of an AIESEC conference. The good thing was that for almost all of the sessions we had external facis, which was the reason for success I would say.

For the first workshop, it was Priya Kumar, who flew from India to Belgium just for this conference. She is a motivational speaker and a trainer in such topics as leadership, team-building, motivation, personal effectiveness and etc.

For me the main idea of the workshop we had with her was that if you want to be successful you need get rid of your internal fears and not to list to what other people say – just to do the things you dream about and to be focus on them and then you will be successful.

At the beginning she split the life in 3 stages:
0-21 years – the age of DREAMERS, when impossible is nothing
22-45 years – the age period called REALITY BITES, when you compromise on your dreams
>50+ years – IF ONLY time, when you regret about all the things you haven’t and about all the compromises you have done.

It’s only 5% of people who go on living as DREAMERs and do not compromise and who achieve incredible success.

She also mentioned 3 things you need to have achieve success:
Vision in your eyes
Passion in your heart
Action in your hands

And with this action
1) you need to be FOCUSED on what you do all the time (nor matter what other people say – if they have time for bla-bla it means they are not occupied with something important, most probably because they are not brave enough, so there is no any sense in listening to them)
2) you need to practice this action EVERYDAY without any excuses

So after all these talks and some more stories about broken glass and how you can cut when you deal with a broken glass and how long it may take to heal, she offered us to walk on broken glass: they broke beer bottles from last night parties, and we were supposed to walk on it.
I was the first :) then almost all the people did this too and none of us got cut.

So usually the fear we have comes from the things we learnt (either through our personal experience, or experience of other people, or so called ‘hear say’), and out mind is an autoresponsive system – when it learnt something, it will reproduce/provoke the same emotions connected with the fact leant. (e.g. we heard that someone got cut with a broken glass, and there was blood and etc., etc. so our mind will always give us the same images when we start talking about broken glass).

Most of these fears existing in our heads (very often they are not even based on our personal experience) prevent us from ACTIONS, and without ACTING we do not achieve success :)

Then she also had one more workshop, this time for all the people at the conference. This time we walked on fire. This is how it looked:

And here is Katya and Sasha walking on fire (you can see almost nothing, but still…) :

Before we walked, she also talked for a bit and showed us several movies. There were several more ideas.

The first one was about almost unlimited opportunities of human potential. (She showed us a movie about a guy who got crashed in a plane and his spinal cord was damaged, so his whole body was paralyzed, but he put a goal of walking out of the hospital in 7 months and he did that).

The second one was about YOU being responsible for EVERYTHING that has happened to you. (She told a story of one of her training participants who got his face burnt in a car accident. She kept on asking his the question about the REASON for his face to have been burnt, and in the end it came to himself)

For sure, all these ideas are the ones that we have already heard and discussed in AIESEC or read in Covey’s and Sharma’s books, but it was really useful to refresh these attitudes and realize that you forget about them as soon as start living in ‘real’ life.

And these sessions also provoked more questions :) If you do not have passion for what you do, does it mean that what you do is not the right thing for you, or is it you who is not cable of being passionate and successful? How to be passionate and focuses EVERY day? how not to get tired or lazy? Or you do not get tired and lazy?

These 2 workshops were the main highlights for me. Being Belgium was also quite interesting (I learnt quite a lot about Belgium), all the rest was just as usual - talking, networking, drinking :) Here are all the pictures.

On Sunday afternoon we went to Brussels. Met Shasha, ate Belgium waffles, visited Manneken-pis (i'm not sure how it spelled:)) and the central square, drank some beer in a pub where you can find more than 2004 different brands, bought chocolate for presents and it was time to check-in for the train….

We agreed with Katya that I will come once again somewhere in spring, so that we can travel to different cities and see a bit more :) My next (and looks like the last trip) will be to Paris!!! One more dream that will become true :)