This year, the International Master in Management participants had the opportunity to participate in the Personal Inspiration Week, a week about accelerating participants’ professional and personal growth. During this week, participants enjoyed three different courses, Business + Career – Walking Mentorship was one of them.
Joao Perre Viana, professor in charge of the course, an EADA alumnus of the International MBA class 2003, founder and pioneer of the Walking Mentorship – combining walking in nature with individual and group mentorship.
Business + Career – Walking Mentorship is an experience designed to help revise the personal and professional challenges. Using mentoring, walking and nature, students experienced an innovative methodology that helped them slow down, reconnect, gain perspective and take action.
Students learned to:
- Identify critical challenges related to their personal and professional life
- Redefine their life strategy
- Update their reality map
- Create an action plan to achieve their ideal future
We interviewed Joao Perre Viana, asked him about his methodology, his course and what he thinks about the Personal Inspiration Week.
1. In what sense does your methodology -walking mentoring- stimulate participants to reflect more deeply and clearly on themselves and their goals?
The Walking Mentorship programs are based on three pillars. Walking, Nature and Mentoring. We use this combination because of the power each brings to the thinking and creative process. We know empirically, but science has helped us to understand better what happens inside our body when plenty of neurotransmitters are released in our brains. Over the years, we have learned that this is a very effective way to think deeply and more clearly. Walking and Nature are like medicine available to everyone at no cost. And Mentoring places a structured methodology on top of this experience to create a framework to identify and capture important insights in a very relaxed and fun way.
All we need to do is move and find hidden gems. This week in Barcelona we have been to beautiful parks, the seafront and even up to the mountains, all at walking distance from the EADA school, which is amazing.
2. Have you get feedback from the EADA Participants?
The feedback we receive is the reason why we have been doing Walking Mentorship programs for seven years already and feel so grateful for our activity. I don’t think we can change another person’s life, but we can create the conditions for change to occur, which is exactly what happens this week.
When you hear your students telling you that they became aware of the things that are working and those that are not in their lives and career. When you see their action plans being constructed step by step over the week, and finally when we cross paths years after the program and learn that these days played a central role in making fundamental decisions. You understand that something very relevant has happened, and somehow we were fortunate enough to contribute to the final result. Everything makes more sense. The education process becomes visible, and we understand that change is the end result of all true learning.
3. In your opinion, what are the main lessons learned during this week?
Life is like an operating system that each of us needs to learn to handle. As we get better at it, we understand how to hack it to make it a better version for yourselves and the ones around us. But whatever you do, please don’t stop. We learn as we walk, and if we stop walking, we stop learning. So, keep walking with me:)