Step out of your comfort zone

Share this post:

A blogpost by Reinout Miedema and Anastasija Efremovska

Another wonderful week has passed by without us, the Extreme Blue interns, even noticing it. We have been busy working on the details of the final chosen idea by the team’s clients, but were also challenged to try something new and creative out of the project’s frame.

At the end of the previous week and the beginning of this last one, the teams met with their clients with one goal on their mind – choosing the main project idea. Once chosen with both the agreement of the teams and clients, we are to spend our energy and creativity in the next seven weeks working on it. If one was to step in the Extreme Blue corner at the IBM’s main building, there will be buzzing faces working hard on specifying the details of the final idea. Some of the teams and mentors were pleasantly surprised by the choice the clients made – applying the “extreme” in the project was a challenge many warmly accepted, by choosing very unconventional ideas for the final project.  While other teams got challenges that were somewhat expected from their clients, which are more goal oriented but will still require hard work. We are equally excited and anxious to get our hands dirty deploying our unique and inventive solutions for the challenge at hand.

The biggest surprise for us came when we were asked to participate in our secret workshop – do an improvisation theater course! All the interns were divided in two groups, and each group had a workshop either on Tuesday or Thursday. The idea of the workshop is to try and participate in improvisation acts to get us out of our comfort zones and focusing on making our body language match what we want to express with our voices. In addition, it helped us get an idea of how to bring more energy to our presentations with our clients, to make them as excited as we are about Extreme Blue. As our teams are composed of either technical or business students, this was a very different experience for all of us, and what is even better our mentors took part in it too. By doing simple short scenes depicting usual or unusual everyday situations, we were able to work on team building but also on concentrate a bit on physical expressions, rather than mental contribution, when dealing with a task. This gave us a chance to enhance our ability to react in unusual situations and to get to know each other better and have a ton of fun.

All in all, this was a very successful and fun week indeed!