Welcome to the first special edition of Eyes Up – coming to you as I attend the Women’s Leadership Program at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia – yes that is in the USA!  I was fortunate enough to be awarded a scholarship by the Women in Banking and Finance (WiBF) organisation and TurksLegal in Sydney to attend this well renowned program this year, so for the next week this blog will share my progress and thoughts during the course.

The honeymoon really is over as this trip gave my new husband Mark and I the opportunity to spend a beautiful 6 days holidaying in New York – a place neither of us have visited for some time.  It really has come a long way – last time I was there, anywhere below 42nd St was a no go zone for tourists.  We had a great time seeing the sights, catching up with some old friends of Mark’s, eating, drinking and of course shopping… good job I left some space in my bags when I left Australia – thanks to 25% off at DvF yesterday, I should now be the best dressed person on this course!

I’ve just arrived in Charlottesville to a chilling but sunny autumn day – the guy at the airport apologising profusely as I had to wait a whole 15 minutes for a cab …. he has obviously never been to Sydney Airport. Was I supposed to tip him?  Never quite sure here.. The countryside is rolling green hills and paddocks around here and everyone seems relaxed – everyone except the other attendee for the course I met at reception – we both exchanged names quickly then muttered quietly “Please tell me you haven’t done ALL the reading yet…”  Sighs of relief all round as we both realised that everyone is probably in the same boat given the mountain of pre-work and assignments that arrived just as I went on vacation – I’m blaming the dodgy hotel internet connection for my slackness but the tequila may have had a say in that too.

Tonight’s welcome dinner starts soon – we have to present our 40 character “Tweet” saying what we want to get out of the program.  The only time I tweet is when I post a link to this blog so I had a practice go last week – it appears even my typical text messages go for longer than 140 characters!  After some thought (and another Martini) I came up with this:

My #bigbreak when & how? #untappedpotential #needsponsors

This was actually a challenging exercise – the pre work has involved watching Sheryl Sandberg’s well known address from 2013 again (http://www.hbs.edu/about/video.aspx?v=1_u93gc4ho if you haven’t seen it) – I’m having to face the fear of looking like an idiot in even coming up with the tweet!

The other confronting piece of pre-work was a best self exercise.  This involved asking a large circle of family, friends and work colleagues to give up to 3 examples of when they’ve seen me at their best and what traits they admired.  I had to write my own version first then interweave themes from the feedback in the final version – very hard to look at yourself that way, it would be much easier to ask what I did badly!  But extremely rewarding to get the feedback and realise that some things I thought people never noticed, they actually did.

So here I go off to make friends with the other attendees  – who are probably also sitting in their rooms right now desperately reading up for tomorrow…I’ll keep you posted as time allows…. wish me luck and let’s hope I can keep my Eyes Up!!