LionHeart Regional Winners!

The LionHeart Regional Final was a much anticipated event for the Year 11 students. A challenge for the best of the best young business women and men, a challenge the ever competitive Year 11 girls intended to win. Mlle Bajer, the member of staff accompanying the team to the event, encouraged us to take advantage of that innate ambition and competitive nature to fuel our journey to success.

Both the night and the morning before the Finals were hectic for all of the girls, Amy Tamerat, one of the team’s scribes and researcher, described her feelings the night before as: “Enthusiastic, I was incredibly nervous, but very excited too. I knew we had prepared as much as we could. So I was excited to work with my team and share ideas so we could create something very cool.”

The whole experience, from researching to the event itself at CIMA headquarters in the City, was full of lifelong lessons, as the team leader Edwina Wetsi wisely advised the future LionHeart competitors to “take a break, step back and breathe for a second, especially in a fast paced environment with people you would not necessarily work with otherwise.” Edwina agreed that teamwork is the key to success; the LionHeart booklet given to us on the day was filled with quotes such as “No one gets very far without working as a team” and “There truly is no ‘I’ in team”.

The LionHeart challenge truly did push all of the team members out of their comfort zones, allowing them to do things they would not necessarily do normally. Kathryn Soower, the team’s Marketer, described being told she would be taking on the responsibility of marketing as: “A little bit shocking. I usually take on more business related roles, but I was relatively confident, because of my experience in business which allowed me to apply it to marketing.” Although the team did not win ‘Best Marketing Plan’ Kathryn believes if she had not been perceptive, the marketing may have reduced the team’s overall points, and costing the team greatly.

But we all know that the winning team could never have won without a champion leader. Edwina Wetsi’s belief and confidence in how far the team would go was inspiring and constantly cheered the team on. “I always knew we would do well, it was a matter of how well,” Edwina said during a quick interview after the finals.

Edwina’s tip for the new Year Ten LionHeart Team, in particular the leader, would be “Make sure there is a vision in mind and a plan that you have shared and discussed with your team. Trust everybody’s capabilities.  At the end of the day, “there is no I in Team!”.

And so, I present to you the winners of the LionHeart LondonFinal: St Martin In-the-Fields High School For Girls!

Mya Seizer, Year 11 student