Aged four, Bella Collins almost drowned in her parents pool. “I’m a child of the water. It magically attracts me. I feel more at ease on the water than on land,” she laughs. Her grandfather was a sailor, like her father. Her uncle found a new hobby and crossed the Atlantic unaccompanied by rowboat. Her brother Angus followed suit, rowing from Australia to the Seychelles. Yet few would have imagined Bella would soon be sitting in a rowboat  conquering the oceans. “I don’t have typical rowers legs. I’m 1.63 meters short and a bit of a nerd. My brother always calls me Lisa Simpson. The first time I sat in a rowboat I didn’t know which way was forward and which was backward.”

But that’s what spurred her on. She wanted to prove to everyone that you don’t have to be a muscly man or an adventurous person to achieve extraordinary things with a rowboat. “The point of this is to not let life put you in a box.

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I didn’t let the fear of thinking I wasn’t good enough stop me from taking on the challenge.

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Of course, you can’t know everything at the beginning. But if you’re passionate about what you do, you keep the right spirit and surround yourself with experienced people then you can learn anything.

On the boat, the processes must be coordinated. You sleep for an hour and a half at the most, freshen up, eat, and drink, then you row on for two hours. This rhythm continues for 30 to 40 days. It only works if everyone in the team takes on their role and if this role distribution has been internalized. “Where others have strength in practical matters, I bring emotional intelligence. So, my role on the boat is to make sure we’re better friends on arrival than we were when we set off.

It’s not easy when you suddenly get caught in a storm. “One night on the Pacific I feared for my life for the first time. I sat in my cabin and prayed. I’m not religious, but I prayed. My teammate took my hand and asked, ‘do you trust the boat?’ I answered ‘yes’. ‘Do you trust the knots you’ve tied?’, ‘Yes’. ‘Do you trust the team?’, ‘Yes’. She looked at me and said, ‘Well, that’s all we can do for now’.

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I’ve learned that crying is not a sign of weakness. Whoever cries, processes, and if one processes –  one can also let go.

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It’s clear that experience gained from life on the boat also benefits life in the office. Bella is Managing Director at Flexi-Hex, a start-up based in Porthleven on the southwestern tip of England dedicated to making the packaging industry more sustainable. “In England, rubbish is picked up from the streets and taken somewhere out of sight. Haiti, where I travelled for a few years with my family, doesn’t have that infrastructure. On the streets, in the rivers, all is full of plastic. The consequences of our consumption are much more visible. At work,  I want to be able to do something about that  every day.”

That there are more and more young people who not only want to earn money but also make a difference in the world puts a big smile on her face.

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It’s all connected. Companies are founded all over the world where  the two things are not mutually  exclusive: earning good money and doing good.

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“There is a movement; it’s just a question of whether we’re fast enough.” She pauses briefly, then laughs again, “but we have to focus on the positive!”

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