‘At University, I Just Wanted To Survive’ – Freya’s School of Leadership Story
I didn’t really know what to expect going to university.
Last year I was interning for a church, spending the year growing in leadership and living with a vicar and his family, which was lovely. But I wasn’t really sure how I was going to be leading at university, in a new environment much more out of my comfort zone.
In a way, I just wanted to get there and survive.
But I was also pondering these things – how I could lead as a fresher, how challenging it was going to be and how nervous I felt! It was an exciting time to be thinking about leadership and impacting culture.
It was because I’d always had such a great experience at the Onelife conferences that I decided to apply for the School of Leadership.
‘Listening well is such a small way of shifting culture, but it was my way of showing people a little bit of Jesus’
From the outset, at university there’s a culture of feeling the need to impress people, and it can easily lead to a lack of depth in relationships you form. As I navigated Fresher’s Week, I had the session on soft skills from the School of Leadership at the forefront of my brain. That session taught us how to make people feel you’re really listening to them – using your body language, using their name, leaning in smiling… All really small things, but during Fresher’s Week I was shocked at how many people said to me after I’d had a conversation with them that they felt I’d really listened to them, and that I’d been really kind in that conversation.
It’s such a small way of shifting culture, but it was my way of showing them a little bit of Jesus.
My experiences of the Onelife conferences and School of Leadership have always involved really powerful times of prayer and seeing the Holy Spirit move in amazing ways. One song we sang at the School of Leadership was ‘Battle Belongs’, which has a lyric in it that says ‘when I fight, I fight on my knees’. While we were singing, God gave me a picture where I was in my university room on my knees praying. In some ways university really feels as if it’s a battle at times, because you're super stressed about how much you have to do. It is so easy to become stuck in a place of comparison or insecurity. And so going into university it was really helpful to have that image to hold on to, and to lead from a place of ‘God, you've put me here for a reason. I'm going to surrender everything to you.’
I still hold on to that image now.