My most relevant learning experience of the work life balance workshop
There has not much time elapsed since we started to get the first impressions about business life and the way to be successful in it but it’s already quite apparent that there is no option than hard work if you want to make it to the top. It is required that students act very responsible with their time and manage to fit it all in. As one consequence of this, people often tend to neglect spending time with family and friends because they’re strongly focused on their success in business later on. When the pressure leading from exams, presentations or studying itself gets too high it might be dangerous not to recognize some warning signals of the own mind and body. To avoid this but to be successful either way there are some strategies which we were introduced to during the different presentations of the Work-Life-Balance workshop. The presentation I liked most was the one of Jasmin Nordiek with the topic „Cope with stress“ because it was great to get an insight into somebody’s personal experience and the development of her way of thinking. She started her career with the same goal as many others: gaining a leading position in a big enterprise. She climbed up the career ladder successfully and finally her mission was accomplished. She was where most of the students at this university hope to be someday - in a leading position and enjoying all of the comforts it was bringing with it. After a while this wasn’t enough anymore, she recognized that something was missing in her life. She didn’t really love her work anymore. I think this is an important point and something to really think about when choosing my future workplace. In my opinion there are too many people suffering from psychological stress with the result of a burn-out or similar diseases. I took away from the session that there are more relevant things in life except from material goals or money. If you really love what you do this leads to higher personal profits in a long term view and you are automatically more engaged while doing your work and this has a positive effect not just for yourself because when you’re acting passionately it’s much easier to use all of the personal potential and not just the expertise. Spending time with some good friends or staying in contact with family is such an important part of not

getting lost in the job. Only with getting a short distance between yourself and your job you can free your mind from time to time. There are also parts in business life where it is required to use the „heart side“ or at least to combine heart and brain - in order to be empathetic and to be able to work in groups. As everybody knows this is an useful ability for our future life and to improve our teamwork skills we did the spagetti tower challenge. Unfortunately I already knew that one from the english preparation course. Maybe there’s an opportunity to avoid this repetitions in the future. It was a pleasant surprise that our university is not just focused on filling our brains with academic content but also supporting us how to manage all this. The Work-Life-Balance workshop was a very interesting experience and hopefully I will be able to make use of the methods and hints we were shown when I’m in need.