This is a guest blog by BU student Sarah Clark about her experience of attending the Business School’s annual Experience & Development festival – EDfest. 

As my intuition grows, I’m increasingly getting drawn to attend certain events or talks – but little did I know just what an enormous impact EDfest would have on helping me turn things around after a few months of a crisis period. I’ve had a very challenging few months, so EDfest was the start I absolutely needed to pull me back up again! It was across 3 days, and there was a mixture of workshops, guest talks, fun and creative, practical and educational sessions.

Personal Impact Coach, Jodi Goldman’s ‘Be the best version of you’ talk, certainly inspired me! I had already been delving into Teal Swan’s work around manifestation and also started to look into the “your thoughts create your reality” paradigm but Jodi’s talk just gave me the push I needed to go away and delve so much deeper into all this.

I learned that thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and how changing your ‘brain filters’ and what you focus on changes your opportunities, as well as the importance of “how you show up in the world”. In addition, I learned about the importance of being awake and aware and about the magnetic confidence you can create, and the impact you have on other people and situations you encounter.

EDfest allowed me to get into my creative mind and out of my analytical mind, it also inspired me to go away and do lots more learning.

I was late-diagnosed last year as being autistic and lately I’m trying to push my boundaries by going to small events or talks to practice talking to new people, especially events around self awareness! I’ve been going to BU’s Graduate Masterclass Programme and BU’s Graduate Skills + Award over the last few months which ties in really well with EDfest as a lot of it is about self awareness, focus and values.

As someone who has always felt like a misfit and never fitted in, always felt very misunderstood, now my autism is diagnosed I’m finally ‘finding my tribe’. So, Mark Masters’ talk ‘Do you Belong’, which was about belonging and community, rang true with me on so many levels and highlighted the importance of being part of a supportive community – which BU certainly is to me.

I think going to talks given by such high-energy, high-vibration people such as Jodi Goldman and Mark Masters has an utterly amazing impact to your wellbeing for weeks to come because you pick up such amazing energy from them when they walk in the room, such inspirational people!

Above anything else, after a few months of crisis, EDfest, and in particular the creativity and inspiration I got from the Friday afternoon Vision Board session was absolutely the FUN I needed at the right time in my life!

Huge gratitude and thanks to the BU Business School and EDfest for helping me realise how to turn things around!

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