Right Livelihood

The reason I have chosen to leave my beautiful home, my family, my partner and my culture for 10 months is to pursue an opportunity given to me. An invitation really. An invitation to study strategic sustainability in Karlskrona, Sweden. I chose to come here to learn about a topic I am passionate about; sustainability.

I often make decisions to pursue opportunities based on a "gut feeling" and give little thought to the "what ifs" or the details that come along with making the choice. I accepted this invitation to study following my intiution when 2 years ago, after stumbling over the programme website by accident on Google, I KNEW that it was the right choice.

For some, this is a difficult way to proceed through life and I have several times been called a fool for making choices using these methods. I have never felt foolish with my choices, only regretful at times that I did not make them earlier or I failed to follow my intuition from the beginning and ended up taking a "long way" around to the same outcome.

Today was my 4th day of my Master's degree in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability and I know with every cell in my body that this was the right choice. This will be, and already has been, a truly unique experience. The support shown by the university programme staff has been unusually organic, creative and honest. They have made a priority of helping us to have the best learning experience possible on their part, while allowing us the space to be creative and explore our leadership potential.

Underlying this is a sense of urgency and an understanding that in order to make changes to our society to reach sustainable way of living in time, it's important to train as many leaders as possible as we cannot achieve this goal individually.

This point was re-iterated today when we had the great pleasure of having a day of lectures from Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert. He is the founder of The Natural Step framework and the CEO of the non-government organization with the same name. He is a medical doctor, a PhD, and the winner of several awards; the most impressive being The Blue Planet Prize, often referred to as the environmental nobel prize.


Dr. Robert is profound.

He is a beautiful mix of knowledge, experience, patience, humility, honesty and humor. He thanked us from his whole heart for being here in Sweden and said that it was the highlight of his career to welcome yet another student body here to study. We are the fourth and largest class to date to begin this master's programme.

If I am a fool, then I know there are at least 59 other fools in this world and I can name them all.