Academy of Life with Antonia Rados

One of the things I started to miss during work was a bit of academic learning. Not really formal courses at some university, but the opportunity to learn something not work related, learn something out of the box to develop further.

I found it at "Siemens Academy of Life", a place where young so called high potentials from different sectors are learning from the successes of others. For me it's a perfect concept: successful people (and success here is defined in a very broad way since success for one person doesn't necessarily mean success for the other one) are invited for an interview. On the next day we have workshops in 6 different departments (art of life, philosophy, psychology, communication, ethics and law and business) trying to view the life of this person from this special perspective. The goal is then to find out what made these people successful and what could we learn for our own life.

So I applied, got selected an already attended two workshops. One with Johanna Maier, an Austrian cook, and the other one with Antonia Rados, a famous war and crisis reporter. I was in the group of "art of life" and really enjoyed the workshop. The two characters were quite different as for example Johanna Maier takes out her energy of spiritual things, being someone who believes in god, doing yoga at least 3 times a week and using as well nature to recharge her batteries. Antonia Rados on the other hand does not believe in god, or as she said - she just believes in god in case she needs it.

I took one thing especially from Antonia since we had to choose at least one characteristic of this person that we think we could use in our current life situation: mine was "walking through closed doors". She told us that a lot of doors in her life seemed to be closed and locked at the beginning but she never gave up to open them. So in my case I believe that I am usually not afraid of walking through doors but sometimes walk to quickly through them, forgetting that there would have been other - maybe closed - doors as well that were interesting.

Besides that we even did a movie in the "art of life department", simulating one of the interviews Antonia does and at the same time applying her "strengths".