#11 Creating a better education, following your purpose with passion, the power of wounds.
Andreia Mitrea is an edupreneur. She is the Founder and CEO of Colina Learning Centre, a new type of school that blends together child education and adult development.
To finally implement her vision of education, it’s been a long and winded journey. She started what looked like a high-power, successful career at Coca Cola. There she wondered why she was the only one to not care about her job. She left to become a stewardess. She then joined her sister’s brand new private school in Romania. Over the course of 10 years they made it a very successful venture, in particular growing enrollment from 6 pupils to 600.
She had to leave and she took a break. She clarified her purpose, her vision for education and confronted her fears of failure and not being good enough to found Colina Learning Centre.
You can learn about her on Linkedin here and about the Colina Learning Centre here.
Listen to her story here or on your usual podcast player.
Show notes
2’26 - It's almost as easy to solve big problems as it is to sort small problems. We're just afraid of big problems.
2’33 - Her vision: a school teaching children and parents, turning every family into a learning culture and teaching intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual lessons as early as possible.
5’31 - Our wounds are our most precious gifts: the things we long for the most in our lives emerge from wounds in our childhood.
6’09 - As a child, she experienced hypocrisy from adults: what they requested of children and were not doing themselves.
7’03 - The contrast of education - she learnt so many more competencies useful in adult life in one year in an average school in the US than in all her formal education in communist Romania.
11’07 - Sometimes you don’t even realise you're lost because you lack the mental perspective.
11’44 - The 3 main stages of adult development: socialising, self-authoring, self-transforming.
12’28 - In her first dream job on paper, the experience of being totally unhappy and disengaged and of thinking something was wrong about her.
13’20 - She did not accept her dissatisfaction and disengagement and became a cabin crew.
18’04 - She felt lost (“I know what I don’t want but I don’t know what I want!”) until she did a Value Exercise. (Try the 7-Day Challenge to do such an exercise, and much more).
21’45 - Work is such an important part of life.
23’25 - Wild west of entrepreneurship: starting a school with no experience in education.
24’29 - You have no idea what will happen with your idea when you are an entrepreneur - a bit like having a child, you just do it!
25’50 - Giving too much to her idea, forgetting about relationships and health
30’07 - When you do a career shift, just keep checking the other parts of your life, because sometimes you can shift into something that engulfs you.”
Quitting smoking (3 packs a day)
32’27 - Working with her family became complicated when she shifted her usual role as a victim.
36’11 - She became the head of a school location by chance and became a spontaneous leader coach for the team. This worked really well.
38’13 - Giving herself permission to have the vision to create something new was probably the biggest shift in her life.
40’59 - The curse of being good at school and believing to be able to do anything, instead of focusing on what you want to create.
43’07 - Failure was the trigger for her shift to create something new. She had to leave the school that she had co-founded.
47’05 - Doing a career shift programme to dig deep. Led by Moving Worlds, an organisation from the US, using Design Thinking principles applied to social-impact focused career-development (such as ‘Design Your Life’, the book by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett from Stanford University.)
49’16 - Doing the purpose assessment by Imperative helped her understand that what gives purpose is relationships, growth and impact.
51’12 - from the HBR Podcast: it takes about 3 years to get into a well-settled career shift.
57’31 - Having the courage to say no, until you have a clear “yes”. Which she got when she got a “totally random” call from American investors to do exactly what she wanted to do.
Saying her vision aloud was a massive step for her giving her the courage to go for it
1’05’16 - Working on her fear of failure and wondering what is the worst thing that could happen? Just not be as visionary a school as she hopes. There is no failure. But if we succeed, it will be unbelievable! Let’s do it!
1’07’03 - While it’s been her best year, it’s also been a very difficult year because she has focused so much on her project.
1’08’02 - We need to normalise that you can’t get perfect balance - yes you can have everything, but not at the same time!
1’10’06 - Exercise to do when you feel your fear of failure: Imagine you are in space and look at yourself on earth on the blue planet. It puts everything in perspective.