Growing up, my mother continually re-inforced that I could be  anything I wanted to be.  Absolutely anything.  Armed with this certainty that only parents know how to infuse, and the natural defiance many first-borns tend to develop, I happily experimented  in the years preceding university, searching for my “calling”.
Safe in the knowledge that I could be anything, I confidently offered up my opinions to anyone who would listen and aspired to solve the world’s biggest and most complex problems.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was slowly …

Third culture kids know all about language barriers, and not only in the absolute sense of language.  The same word in the same language is often used differently depending on where you are.
In England, it’s a biscuit.  In the US, it’s a cookie.  Petrol vs gas. Tomayto vs tomahto.  You get the picture.  You do get the essence of the meaning, but perhaps miss out on nuances by not tuning into the local set of idioms or even dialect in some cases.
It would therefore follow that re-aligning our language constructs …

I recently wrote about listening, really listening.  In conquering that difficult skill myself, I was amazed at how much I was missing, how much I was really not “getting”, and especially about people I thought I knew well.
With the know-it-all judgemental filter off, not only did I get to discover some wonderfully quirky aspects of friends and co-workers, I learned new ways of having fun, new reasons to laugh and new ways to care.
Listening and staying in the moment, I discovered a new game: catching them in the act of …