Descubre más de lo que hicimos juntas y de quien es Laura pinchando en la imagen!
La #1 entrevista del proyecto "Trip to the personal world of THINKING-BIG's clients" es con Laura Agüera, una profesional enérgica, optimista y de risa contagiante, que vale mucho la pena conocer!
Descubre más de lo que hicimos juntas y de quien es Laura pinchando en la imagen!
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Last June'14 I spent a month working in a Swedish restaurant, Tryne till knorr*, in Malmö.
I was searching for inspiration and a pause in my entrepreneur life, so washing dishes in the restaurant of a Swedish friend, Robin E., seemed the perfect thing to do! Therefore, for one month, I divided my day in two: managing THINKING-BIG from my kitchen's wooden table by the window, or in a cosy, well decorated coffee shop in the morning, and washing dishes, mopping floors, setting tables and preparing coffee in the afternoon and evening!
Mentioning all I learnt by doing this wouldn't be possible in only one post, so I decided to mention the most powerful and lasting aspects of the experience:
- Different culture - being a "hugging-touching-looking into-the-eyes" Portuguese, merging for one month in a Swedish "don't-stay-so-close" culture was a good challenge and a wonderful way to put things in perspective. All the contents taught in my "non-verbal communication" workshops were really being applied (and updated).
- Finding my niche - Not having any proper experience of working in a restaurant, it wasn't always easy to find where I could fit, what I could do well or how I could be really helpful.
So, besides learning a lot about brewing coffee, using the super-fast and cool dishwasher and setting fancy tables, I found out that Creativity, Communication and Perspective were some of the strengths I still could apply here! And I started adding some more things to my usual tasks: suddenly I was managing the FB page of Tryne till Knorr, creating mind maps of Wines& Spirits and debating business ideas for the restaurant. It seems that we can, almost everywhere, find a way to apply our strengths and make them useful! And that definitely increases the feeling of "fitting in".
- Learning about Leadership - Being with such a young team and a young business I wasn't expecting to see such an involved posture in such a young Chef.
Day by day I started appreciating his intrinsic skills as an Inspirational Leader.The way his attitude was influencing the team and the work, to the extent that other young chefs were coming to voluntarily work in the restaurant, just to learn and share with him, truly called my attention. So I started systematizing what I was seeing and experiencing (after all, he was also MY boss!). At that time I was preparing the Workshop to be presented in the European Conference of Positive Psychology on the theme "Inspiring Leadership - the leader from within", and what I learned in the restaurant's atmosphere with Robin inspired me to use him as an example.
After one month, not only had I gained new skills, perspectives, friends and life experience, but I had also contributed, in a very powerful way, to my professional growth.
Unconsciously, I was using my strengths, learning from close examples, learning how to deal with extreme difficulties (I was even robbed while sleeping alone at home!) and systematizing theories through daily practice. Getting out of my usual context and role made me learn a little bit more about being myself from another point of view. One more point of view, to add to all those "points" that make us who we are. Thank you Robin, Agnes and the Team for a complete experience, from nose to tail! Edite Amorim *"From nose to tail", a kitchen expression used to explain that, when eating a Pig, we can use all of its parts. (Text originally written in English) 14 a 21 de Setembro'14 THINKING-BIG keeps participative learning as a priority. To learn from different people, experiences, other ways of working, attitude or approach. Examples such as the 2 days working with Toyno, in Lisbon, in which the team goes away for a short period to become part of a new team and learn with it new concepts and new processes. As Gijs van Wulfen highlights: "Observe and learn - If you don't get new insights, you don't have new ideas". And this was exactly what we did with "5 días para bailar en Rivas", a Community Dance project, that brings together 60 people from 6 to 60 years, old learning through dance. We heard about this project in April’14 from the trailer of the documentary “Five days to dance”. We immediately felt there was a lot to learn from the presented perspectives: in fact from our perspective, it is about applying the subjects of Positive Psychology (to reach and develop the best in each one of us) through Dance-Theatre. (“We have to be prepared for the best of each of us. For the maximum of each one!” – was one of the choreographer’s most repeated sentences throughout the process). From this process we could apply the things we would learn to Education, to Community life and to Citizenship in itself, as well as to Creativity. Impossible to resist the possibility of learning so much in just one experience. Therefore, we contacted the choreographers, Wilfried van Poppel and Amaya Lubeigt and proposed our presence in the replication of the project in Rivas, Madrid, as participative observers. And that is how we ended up among the 60 participants of this 8 days’ initiative, registering every step in a blog we created to systematize the experience and what we had learned: http://5diasparabailarenrivas.blogspot.pt. From every tool, idea, perspective and concept we learned about by participating and observing. We leave here some of the key-ideas_ - “IF PEOPLE CAN DANCE TOGETHER, PEOPLE CAN LIVE TOGETHER!” - Dance-theatre takes us to stages of other lives, makes us participants of this protected form that art gives us, makes us aware of other realities. To dance like this, in a group, gives us a power with responsibility for our part and for the whole. - “Let’s create beauty. Share it. If you give something beautiful, you’ll get back something beautiful.” It is no longer about just dancing. It is about dancing in “Being more”! - “Every time you’re on stage you have to shine. Because every one of you has something beautiful and precious to give. And that is what we want to see. Thus, every time we scream out a correction during a rehearsal, its for you to shine more, so that everyone can see all your potential to shine. You matter.” - "Don’t forget to keep focus. As in the saying “I’m here. And I’m precious." And you're more precious every day.” - “This is not a choreography in which there is one or two that shine. It’s a choreography where you need to feel everyone around you and make it TOGETHER.” Give the “I” a main role to be the best he can be, putting the group first. - As Annette, one of the other german helpers, said at the end of one of the sessions: “It is to be connected. To understand our environment, our social environment, through the senses. Like different birds in a flock, that go for the same movement, for a single and unique flight, learning with its own body, through its own body.” An experience in which the THINKING-BIG team was driven by the steps of Dance-Theatre and with which it became stronger. There is an even more amplified notion that the concepts we work on are applied, in fact, to every context.
(The result of the 35 minutes’ performance created in this week of group work can be seen in the following link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1-DaG2FZHk&feature=youtu.be) With creativity and innovation as two of the major areas of intervention at THINKING-BIG, it is essential to keep gaining knowledge and inspiration from the best in these fields.
Therefore, the 6th and 7th of May, 2014 were spent in ESAD Porto with a group of other professionals listening and developing the concepts inherent to the FORTH model, at the hands of Gijs can Wulfen. Two intense days full of insights, contents, techniques, individual work, big- and small-group activities. Techniques to generate and select ideas (using tools that allow to open and then quickly close the creative process), critical analysis of assumptions related with the creative process, employment of specific models for the production of new business ideas… Several activities that allowed for knowledge enrichment, improvement of techniques, and enabled work with a very diverse and rich group of people, following a really interesting model, at the hands of a great professional. |
AuthorEdite Amorim - Curious, traveller, entrepreneur, THINKING-BIG's coordinator. Archives
November 2020
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