get to know me (a little better)

It took me a long thought to address the question of who I am. Until a few years ago, this answer would have been very simple.

“I am Hannah. At the moment of writing this text, I am 23 years old, just finished university, and am about to travel the world now.”

If you would have then asked me to tell you more, I would have told you, that I am from the south of Germany and grew up in the countryside. I had an extremely sheltered childhood. My parents own a house on a hill, with a view of the valley and a big garden, where I planted a peach tree when I was 7. I have a sister and we grew up with a cat. When we walked through the garden, in which my parents cultivated various types of vegetables, berries, and blooming flowers, we could sneak through a little path to our grandparents’ garden. One day of the week, my grandma would cook us delicious bohemian food, her way of connecting to her culture, after fleeing from Bohemia after the Second World War.

Meals in my family own great importance. Cooking and eating together was and is still, when I am there, our daily ritual to sit together, have extensive conversations, and organize our day-to-day tasks. My parents, who are both physiotherapists, have the beautiful gift of finding activities that we as children enjoyed, which they found pleasure in equally. On weekends we would go strolling through nature, picking flowers in spring, looking out for woodland animals in the little forest close to our house, playing with our fantasies, and building gnome houses from old tree trunks. We imagined maple leaves as blankets, moss as pillows, pieces of bark as tables and chairs, acorn hats as small plates, and beechnuts as fireplaces. In summer we went swimming in the river and let the wind blow us while flying kites in autumn. During winter, my father still insisted on going outside every weekend, no matter the weather, and after my mother would prepare a hot soup to warm us up, sitting in the living room, reading or watching a movie together to the crackling sound of the fireplace.

While this, if you do not know me, gives you a good insight into what my childhood felt like and what my source of primal trust is, which in return is essential to who I am, it does not quite tell what I am like nowadays. Thus I will give you a bit more detail, about what I am doing now and how I got there.

I was that insanely interested child, who liked to read and learn, hence school came easy to me unless I had to learn something by heart, which I despised. After turning 15 or 16, when I had overcome the difficulties with myself and my peers, that I describe in the story behind betweenness, I was part of a group of friends where we dreamt about a bigger world than the one we lived in. We pondered on traveling to distant countries, a spark that for me was lit through photos I had seen of my parents’ travels before my sister and I were born. The place of my dreams was Cuba, I was fascinated by its rich history, pictures I had seen of the stunning nature, and the imagination of music in every street. After, collecting signatures of interested fellow students to organize a Spanish teacher for our school, finishing high school, and a few months of humbling jobs in a galvanizing plant, we finally smelled the sea breeze at Havanna’s Malecón, ate peanuts, bought with a few pesos and rolled in cones of newspaper pages and watched a group of young people, sharing a bottle of rum, casually dancing to Salsa rhythms, blaring from a dented speaker. These impressions from our first night in Cuba were followed by countless adventures of voyaging through Chile, Argentina, and Brazil in the following eight months, where I met my boyfriend at the time, but that is another story.

During my travels, the pressure of what I should do after did not let go of me. I applied for countless university programs reaching from the history of art over psychology to international management. The last on the list ended up being my final pick. I cannot even tell you why I chose it, but now that I finished the program I am satisfied with my choice because I met a few of my now closest friends and learned about sustainable and socially responsible ways the economy can be used to create systems which minimize social and environmental inequality, which today, I recognize as the core of my purpose.

Besides university in Berlin, I volunteered, organizing events for people with and without refugee backgrounds to engage in intercultural relations and aid the formation of friendships. I further developed a great interest in entrepreneurship and supported four startups of different sizes in their growth. I worked in Marketing, Business Development, and Product Management and gained a vast skillset in these areas. The thing that hooked me the most, was leadership dynamics and the formation of company culture in those early stages of an organization. During various workshops, I attended through transformational leadership programs during my exchange semesters in Sydney, Australia, and Lisbon, Portugal, I narrowed this interest down to the topic of impact entrepreneurship. Hence the choice of topic for my thesis: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset: Perspectives from Theory and Practice. During the qualitative research for this, I had incredibly inspiring and stimulating conversations with professors, entrepreneurs, and coaches that convinced me to dive deeper into the topic.

My desire to learn more about it led to the decision to join a certification program for aspiring coaches that taught me a lot about behavioral psychology, neuroscience, mindset work, and somatic techniques. But most of all, it connected me with a cohort of wonderful like-minded individuals all over the world and brought me back in touch with my creativity and writing.

Things I am most grateful for lately are the network of inspiring and comforting humans that have entered my life in the past years and the deep connection my sister and I have formed since she moved to Berlin, which provides me with great trust and joy. The week I spent in the circus a few weeks ago between the ease and happiness of children still echoes in me (I will tell you more about this soon, but no, I am not an artist, but a circus youth instructor). The last thing I want to mention is the pure freedom I feel at the moment in anticipation of my journey to India, to attend yoga teacher training. I am awfully excited.

From a traditional point of view, I believe, you know me pretty well by now. However, a few years ago, at a leadership summit, I attended, one instructor said:

“Tell me who you are, without telling me your name, age, or what you do.”

This made me think and the answers of the participants were extremely interesting. So let me attempt to give you an answer to this as well.

I am a calm and hopeful individual who believes in the power of curiosity and brutal honesty. I dwell in and thus strive to create brave and safe spaces. I do not mind rain on my cheeks. Dancing, writing, and exploring bring me joy. The values that guide every action of mine are honesty, humbleness, integrity, sensuality, liberty, and love. Letting my intuition guide me, it is my endeavor to take a stand for the collective and the planet on a mission to dismantle interlocking systems of oppression in our world, commencing by nudging individual healing and facilitating growth towards general welfare.

I hope this gives you enough material to get to know me at least a little better. The question of identity is an intriguing one. I follow a constructivist approach¹, which basically means that identities are not fixed, but rather develop throughout time and situational circumstances. It is in my opinion definitely worth reflecting on it more.

I am curious - how would you answer the instructor?

Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Identity Construction. In Science Direct. Retrieved on September 27, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/identity-construction