Angela Akinyemi: Learning Through Reflection (#118)
Our Guest Today: Angela Akinyemi
I met Angela Akinyemi during Seth Godin’s altMBA in January 2017. We both belonged to session 8 in a cohort called “Ruby”.
altMBA is “an intensive, 4-week online workshop designed by Seth Godin for high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead.” Previously on Feisworld, I interviewed another classmate named Gustavo Serafini on the show. The episode was very well received.
There’s no physical classroom at altMBA and we tune in daily via Slack and Zoom (a web conference service). Each week, we were dropped into a new discussion group to continue our learning with different people.
Angela is not your typical extraverted, overly ambitious “MBA” classmate. Instead, she was curious and exceptionally good at listening to what others had to say, and always offered thoughtful and supportive feedback.
altMBA, at the core, is all about reflections. Not just feedback for others’ work, but also your own called Reflection Summary (RS). Angela and I both found this requirement particularly challenging.
Here is the pattern that repeats for each project:
- Project due at midnight
- Comments due at 8pm – You’re commenting on the work of 5 people, and waiting for comments from 5 people.
- Reflection summary (RS) due at 8pm – After seeing the comments from your peers, you reflect and write a ‘reflection summary.’
Before we graduated from altMBA8, Angela was awarded one of the most valuable contributors in our cohort. Soon after our session concluded, she was one of the chosen few to be a coach for altMBA10 (she wrote this as an self introduction to her class).
In this episode, we talk about both of our experiences as students at altMBA, and Angela as a coach.
Bonus: Angela and I met up in NYC not long ago and exchanged a few stories of our lives you are going to hear again on the show, including my new diet called Whole30 (Angela first introduced me to Whole30 and it has worked wonders on my body and mind.).
For millennials who are listening to this episode, this is an opportunity to rethink what’s possible. Angela is someone many of you can relate to. What have you learned from this conversation? Share with us in the comments below, or via social media on Facebook or Twitter.
Show Notes
- [06:00] How and why did you decide to sign up for altMBA?
- [09:00] How did you feel when you were chosen the most helpful student of the cohort?
- [12:00] What was the experience like being an altMBA coach, and what did you learn from it?
- [15:00] What were some of the tough parts about being a coach?
- [17:00] What are some of the things that you’d change from the altMBA program now that you have been a student and coach?
- [22:00] What are the projects you are currently working on?
- [28:00] What was it like for you to navigate your life at school?
- [32:00] You mentioned that you like writing and wellness. What would you like to write about wellness, in particular?
- [34:00] What got you into Whole30 and what was your experience?
Favorite Quotes
[12:00] It’s just really interesting to hear how you move through the world, how you affect other people, and I don’t think it is very common to get that. altMBA is such special place where officially part of the program is to get feedback and reflect.
[14:00] What I found challenging being a coach is to not be super involved, but to still be impactful. You are not in the group sessions so you don’t have a clear view of who’s is bringing what to the table and how is everyone interacting, but you still have to deal with it.
[19:00] Who you surround yourself with makes such a huge difference. It can change the way you think about all the doubts.
[25:00] One of the things I appreciate now is this idea of possibilities. If you wanna be a writer then OK, go write, you can start now. It doesn’t have to be about giving up your whole life and go write in the woods.. It can be assigned 30 minutes a day to writing and see what happens. At the time it was this very daunting decision, what do I wanna do with the rest of my life?…
Transcript
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Acknowledgements/Music
- They Say by WowaMusik
- Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0
- Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/E6LCO7SH8kA