Discovery with CompeTalent

Some time ago (before I came to Stockholm) I met a very interesting couple during a hitch-hiking competition in the Netherlands and Germany. First, a guy who picked us up in my hometown. He worked for Microsoft and had a lot of interesting stories to share with us. His main point was mostly that it’s not really important what you know or what you can do, it is more important that you know the right people and you can improve your knowledge and skills in a later stage. Because we had such a great conversation (yes, we students also had quite a lot of experience and lots of stuff to talk about) from where he picked us up, to his work in Amsterdam, he called his wife in Amsterdam to bring us further and help us gaining distance in the hitch-hiking competition we were in. This woman was at least as much interesting as her husband. F

rom now on I’ll skip the story about the hitch-hiking (we became 3d place) and continue of how we kept in contact and did an interesting test for her.

She is calling herself rebeL wiTh a Cause within her company (Raad Van Stuur), because she helps organizations to grow to a trustful and entrepreneurial environment. She helps to let people go out of their comfort zones and gives them energy.
She helps people to get to know themselves better and how they should use their capacities. This was also what the test was about, it was called ‘Discovery with CompeTalent’.

We were going on a mission in Utrecht, a city in the middle of the Netherlands, with minimum information and without smartphones. The first part of the test was individual, just to find some stuff and places in the city and find the other players in the test. Then we made teams ourselves and split up for the assignments in a later stage of the test. We received cryptic descriptions about places we needed to go to and there receive the next instructions.
Before the test we needed to fill in a survey about ourselves, the main point about this was that the organizers could via this way figure out what kind of person you are and how you can help other people with your capacities. From those capacities I got to know myself better, I didn’t know most of them before.

What the organizer knew was how the test would have ended, which teams would be formed and which way we thought about the descriptions we received. The test was not about winning or being back first, it was just about confirming their survey. Afterwards we talked about the test, and again a lot of the conversations happened as the organizers expected because of the survey.
This whole test may sound a bit blurry, but long story short: You have some (entrepreneurial) capacities you might not know, you maybe can’t call them skills or knowledge yet, but they are useful for sure! Go out and find yours, maybe entrepreneurship is your big capacity and you can develop them into one of the most important skills of your life!

Martijn Legêne