Andreia Mitrea is an edupreneur. She is the Founder and CEO of Colina Learning Centre, a new type of school that blends together child education and adult development. 

To finally implement her vision of education, it’s been a long and winded journey. She started what looked like a high-power, successful career at Coca Cola. There she wondered why she was the only one to not care about her job. She left to become a stewardess. She then joined her sister’s brand new private school in Romania. Over the course of 10 years they made it a very successful venture, in particular growing enrollment from 6 pupils to 600. 

She had to leave and she took a break. She clarified her purpose, her vision for education and confronted her fears of failure and not being good enough to found Colina Learning Centre.

SHOW NOTES

2’26 - It's almost as easy to solve big problems as it is to sort small problems. We're just afraid of big problems.

2’33 - Her vision: a school teaching children and parents, turning every family into a learning culture and teaching intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual lessons as early as possible.

5’31 - Our wounds are our most precious gifts: the things we long for the most in our lives emerge from wounds in our childhood.

6’09 - As a child, she experienced hypocrisy from adults: what they requested of children and were not doing themselves.

7’03 - The contrast of education - she learnt so many more competencies useful in adult life in one year in an average school in the US than in all her formal education in communist Romania. 

11’07 - Sometimes you don’t even realise you're lost because you lack the mental perspective. 

11’44 - The 3 main stages of adult development: socialising, self-authoring, self-transforming.

12’28 - In her first dream job on paper, the experience of being totally unhappy and disengaged and of thinking something was wrong about her.

13’20 - She did not accept her dissatisfaction and disengagement and became a cabin crew.

18’04 - She felt lost (“I know what I don’t want but I don’t know what I want!”) until she did a Value Exercise. (Try the 7-Day Challenge to do such an exercise, and much more). 

21’45 - Work is such an important part of life.

23’25 - Wild west of entrepreneurship: starting a school with no experience in education.

24’29 - You have no idea what will happen with your idea when you are an entrepreneur - a bit like having a child, you just do it! 

25’50 - Giving too much to her idea, forgetting about relationships and health

30’07 - When you do a career shift, just keep checking the other parts of your life, because sometimes you can shift into something that engulfs you.”

Quitting smoking (3 packs a day)

32’27 - Working with her family became complicated when she shifted her usual role as a saviour.

36’11 - She became the head of a school location by chance and became a spontaneous leader coach for the team. This worked really well. 

38’13 - Giving herself permission to have the vision to create something new was probably the biggest shift in her life. 

40’59 - The curse of being good at school and believing to be able to do anything, instead of focusing on what you want to create.

43’07 - Failure was the trigger for her shift to create something new. She had to leave the school that she had co-founded. 

47’05 - Doing a career shift programme to dig deep. Led by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett from Stanford University where they apply design thinking principles to designing your life and career.

49’16 - Doing the purpose assessment by Imperative helped her understand that what gives purpose is relationships, growth and impact. 

51’12 - from the HBR Podcast: it takes about 3 years to get into a well-settled career shift.

57’31 - Having the courage to say no, until you have a clear “yes”. Which she got when she got a “totally random” call from American investors to do exactly what she wanted to do.

Saying her vision aloud was a massive step for her giving her the courage to go for it

1’05’16 - Working on her fear of failure and wondering what is the worst thing that could happen? Just not be as visionary a school as she hopes. There is no failure. But if we succeed, it will be unbelievable! Let’s do it!

1’07’03 - While it’s been her best year, it’s also been a very difficult year because she has focused so much on her project.

1’08’02 - We need to normalise that you can’t get perfect balance - yes you can have everything, but not at the same time!

1’10’06 - Exercise to do when you feel your fear of failure: Imagine you are in space and look at yourself on earth on the blue planet. It puts everything in perspective.