From Public Relations to Internal Relations
In 2015 I started my academic journey at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam with the idea in mind that I would be working for a top-notch Public Relations agency working on big accounts and changing the industry with my insight and creativity. After a few years of gaining experience I would be starting my own PR agency here in the Netherlands or somewhere in the world. During my entire bachelors I had this dream and I worked hard, taking every opportunity I had in realizing it. However, in my final year I decided to go on exchange to Australia and my dream took a whole different direction.
Hold up, what?
Before I went to Australia, I was in my second year of my bachelor’s degree in international Communications and Media. What I love about this study Is that they give you so many opportunities to choose your direction. Especially with communications being an industry that is so diverse, you have communications in politics, business, healthcare, entertainment, and so on. In your second year you can choose a direction in one of these areas and the courses and seminars that match with that.
I choose the business trajectory which allowed me to take really valuable courses such as Business in Media where we developed a product based on the Business Model Canvas and we learned what different factors need to be considered when developing a product and trying to bring it to the market.
Also, courses such as Corporate Communications where we learned which strategies are most effective when companies for example in need of crisis communication. We worked with many real-life case studies which gave me a feeling of actually working as a communication professional.
Besides choosing our direction we also had the opportunity to do an internship at any company we would like in order to gain some experience in our field of interest. As the dream gives away, I found an internship at one of the best PR agencies in the world: Weber Shandwick. I had the opportunity to see how my future job would be like and I have to say I wasn’t disappointed. Seeing these power woman and men work on such amazing projects and in my eyes create magic for the clients we had. It was the work hard, play hard life that I always imagined it to be and I loved going into office every day.
Side note, during my internship I had regular office hours, if you exclude press events, and I lived at quite some distance from the company so my days throughout the week consisted of waking up at 6AM and being home by 7PM. As the typical high maintenance student that I am, I also had a job in the weekends. This job started on Friday evenings where I worked until 9PM and the weekends where I worked both days from nine to five. I was making weeks of more than 52 hours of work and of course working out, maintaining my relationships with friends, family and significant other.
Fast-forward to Australia.
I suddenly lost the full time being ‘’on’’ modus and had so much space to just be with myself and to relax. This was such a weird feeling , I was literally looking for something to do with my time because I had become addicted to being busy. Suddenly, I was questioning many things in my life such as why am I doing the things that I do? Why do I surround myself with the people that I have? What is it exactly that I contribute to this society and to mankind? All of these questions combined with much more time and space to find answers compared to my fast pace life in the Netherlands led to the birth of Maujha.
The answer turned out to be that I wanted to live a more slow, purposeful, and mindful life. I realized that it is so easy to be drawn into this fast paced, go hard or go home lifestyle that we tend to neglect our bodies and our minds. I mean you hear it all around you when asking people how they are, the common answer is ‘’yeah busy’’. We have made it so normal to just constantly be performing and to attach our personal value on how productive we are. That was how I was living my life as well, before I got my answer that I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to learn how to live a life that would feel fulfilling without attaching values to it and not only that but I want to help and inspire others to that too. Hence, the birth of Maujha! ( if you haven’t read the story, check it out. here ).
More certainty
As much as I loved the idea of being able to start immediately and just help people in creating a healthy and good relationship with their emotions and thoughts, I knew my own experience would not be sufficient for me to be able to help others. This is not criticism to anyone who does coaching out of their own expertise because I do truly believe that practice does make perfect and we often learn more by doing than by just reading about it. However, with the topic of mental health and mindfulness I do truly believe one has to have knowledge of the human psyche in a spiritual as well as a psychological perspective in order to not only help but also minimize the risk of harming anyone. That is why I decided to do another bachelor’s degree in psychology so I would learn even more about how our mind works and why we do the things we do. This information allows me to combine the best tools in the Western psychology with the beautiful and effective tools in Eastern psychology.
Making Maujha the best of two worlds.
