One of the most important things I have learned from my practice in year three was teamwork. The feedback I got from the competency assessments of year 2 was: "Je maakt hierin duidelijke stappen en bent je zelfreflectie. De controle loslaten zal leiden tot een hernieuwde positie in samenwerken. Ga die aan.". I needed to let go of taking leadership, and explore other places inside a group and see what that does with the dynamic.

In the second year I had chosen the practices: New Earth (Social Practice) and New Frontiers (Commercial Practice). I was learning a lot of interesting things in the social practice specifically. But I really wanted to follow Cultural Diversity, since that really would fit my study Anthropology, and I imagined that making it easier for me to explore the ways of how I could combine that with my graphic design major. So for the third year practices I follow Cultural Diversity. Already in the first couple of weeks problems in my initial group started to form. We were with 4 in a group and 2 members of the group wanted to explore different topics, so they wanted to split as a group. This caused me to be left with one other member in my group. 2 weeks later, my teammate said he was quitting the practice. This left me with enourmous stress. As I explained in my competency assessments last year, I tend to be a bit of a control freak when it comes to group assignments. I want everything to go smooth and successfull and most of the times that results in me becoming the leader of the group. It is a comfortable position but I really wanted to challenge myself to not let that happen. So when I had no group at all I was really stressed on what would happen. I ended up joining another group. They were already working on their own project and although they welcomed me very nicely, it is always hard to join in later. Their group had already found it's dynamic and because I joined later I had to explore this.

In the end this really helped me to change old habits. There was no space for me to take charge, because I was behind so my only focus was to find a spot to be of help. It took me some weeks to get comfortable in the group and really feel like I could speak up, something I normally had no trouble in doing. Maybe this wasn't the ideal situation to be in, but it really forced me to let go of my controlling side. I started believing more in others and letting go of all my doubts. It made working together actually fun. We went out for drinks and started to enjoy each others company, this had never happened to me in groups before.