I'm an individualist

Hello my faithful readers:

It's Thursday evening and I'm sitting here in my little studio feeling a whole lot better than I was a couple of days ago. The past few days I've been living at the VLG building and it was making me a tired, grumpy, young(ish), woman. This has also contributed to my lack of blogs in the past week. Hopefully the group work that I've been doing will slow down in the next few weeks, or at least be limited to in-class only; but I have the feeling that the slow down in group work won't happen anytime soon.

Our MBA program focuses a lot of time on getting us to work together in groups. We have all been broken out into different groups for each class based on our nationality, gender and background. I, however, am not a fan of working in groups. Both in my professional and personal life I view myself as a bit of a loner. In our Managing Across Cultures course the term for this is "individualist" and in general that's where most Americans fall in the grand scheme of things. It's all about me, me, me and I, I, I...and I'd say the control freak in me likes this an awful lot. Working in groups requires you to trust the others in the group to do what they say they will do, it also requires you to learn to be open-minded enough to see things from a different perspective (even if you think your way is absolutely right). I've learned a lot about myself this week. Yes - I can be a bit of a pushy 'diva' when things aren't going my way; and I believe I still need to do some serious reflection about my behavior when I'm required to work with others.

This weekend is going to be a much needed re-set and rest for me. I need a weekend to recover and decompress from an intense week. Thankfully I survived without completely breaking down (although I started feeling sick earlier this week). Now my focus is on working smarter, because to be honest this 1 year intensive MBA program is more of a marathon for me and not a sprint. My goal for myself over the next few weeks is to find a nice balanced life here in Leuven.

Mwuah,

Georgia Peach

P.S. - I got word earlier this week that my money won't hit my account until the end of next week.

P.P.S - Good news is my police visit was completed without my knowledge and by the end of day tomorrow I will have my Belgian Residence card! Things are looking up!

P.P.P.S. - Did you catch that my sports analogy was an individual sport? (that was my subconscious taking over - I swear!)