Everything Is a Language, If You Know How to Listen

I wanted to be a diplomat when I grew up.

I didn't become one. At least not officially. But looking back at the last twenty years, I think that little girl in Rio got exactly what she wanted.

I was maybe nine or ten when I decided. My grandfather's world travel stories. Encyclopedia maps spread out on the floor. The idea that somewhere out there, people were sitting across tables from people completely different from them and finding a way to understand each other anyway. That felt like the most important work in the world.

What I didn't understand then was that I wasn't just falling in love with diplomacy. I was falling in love with language, and not just the kind you learn from textbooks.

Over the years, I came to see almost everything as a language. A new country. A new company culture. A room full of engineers when you're not an engineer. Even the salsa classes I stumbled into as an adult: where the language isn't spoken at all. It lives in a shift of weight, a pressure in the hand, a micro-second of physical cue from your lead that you either learn to read (and that changes from lead to lead).

Every new context has its own grammar. Its own unwritten rules that nobody hands you a guide for. And the only way through is to pay attention, stay humble, and be willing to look a little foolish while you're learning.

I've been learning languages my whole life.

My first real lesson came at thirteen, when my family moved to Montreal. I was enrolled in a bilingual fine arts high school (classes taught in both English and French), surrounded by teenagers who had grown up code-switching between two languages and two cultures like it was nothing. For me, it was everything.

I was already learning two languages at once just to get through the school day. But the real education happened in the hallways. In Brazil, you greet someone new with a kiss on the cheek. It's warm. It's normal. It's just what you do.I did not get the memo that this was not what you do in Canada. I reached in for the greeting. The other person stepped back. There was a moment of mutual confusion and mild horror.

I remember standing there afterward thinking: I didn't do anything wrong. And neither did they. We just came from different worlds. That was the moment I stopped seeing cultural difference as a problem to solve and started seeing it as a new language to learn.

A few years later, I moved to Kansas to study at KU. From Rio (and Montreal) to Lawrence, Kansas. Which, if you haven't made that particular journey, is quite a leap. What struck me most wasn't the logistics, though learning to drive everywhere instead of taking public transit was its own adjustment. It was the philosophy.

Kansas has a history and an identity built around the idea of freedom; the freedom to live your life as you see fit, without much interference and without much explanation owed to anyone. You could feel it in the people. A certain self-reliance. A quiet respect for other people's choices that came from genuinely wanting the same respect in return.

At first it read as distance. Over time I understood it as a kind of dignity. Another language: one that asked me to make more room for independence, and to stop interpreting self-sufficiency as coldness.

Years later, I was leading the implementation of an offshore planning office in Poland, and I walked in thinking I knew what I was doing. I had crossed enough borders by then. And I still almost missed the most important thing.

Back in the US, the culture I knew ran on urgency. Stretch goals. The quiet pride of being the person who stayed late and figured it out. Hustle was a value and a virtue.

In Poland, I encountered something completely different. The professionals I was working with (most of them Gen Z) had a relationship with work that was almost philosophical in its clarity: do excellent work, bring real focus and skill, and then close the laptop. Not because they didn't care. But because they had drawn a clear line between their work and their life, and they held it with a quiet confidence I had honestly never seen before.

My American-trained instincts misread it at first. I wondered: are we aligned? Are they as invested as we need them to be? But as I slowed down and started learning this language (both the cultural one and the generational one) I realized they weren't less committed. They were differently committed. More sustainably so. They brought precision to their working hours because they actually protected what came after.

I had to become a better leader to earn that team. Learn Polish work culture. Learn how they communicated, how they built trust, what respect looked like on their terms. And when I did, the collaboration became something I was genuinely proud of.

The best cultural moments always work like that: they don't just teach you about somewhere else. They hold up a mirror. The same was true in India, and in China. Different mirrors. Different lessons. Different grammars of hierarchy, relationship, time, and trust. Each one asked me to unlearn something I hadn't even realized I'd assumed.

By the time I'd worked across fifteen-plus countries, I'd stopped thinking of cultural fluency as a skill set and started thinking of it as a practice: something you never finish, something that keeps teaching you if you stay curious enough to let it.

Now I sit in Charlotte and work with leaders navigating exactly this: the invisible friction of leading across cultures, the misread signals, the well-meaning mistakes that quietly cost trust. I bring twenty years of those languages into every conversation. The ones spoken with words. The ones spoken with silences. The ones written in how a team runs a meeting, or how they protect a Sunday afternoon.

Not because I always got it right. But because I got it wrong in enough different contexts and stayed curious enough to keep learning. That's how I understand what actually matters. Diplomacy is a practice (not a job title) . It starts the moment you decide that someone else's normal is worth understanding.

What did you want to be when you grew up? And how did it end up shaping who you became?

Email me. I genuinely want to know.