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Being a global leader means that you are comfortable with being in uncomfortable and new cultural situations. It also means that you consider and understand how your culture, however normal it feels, may also be confusing to those of a different culture. Each culture has its own subtle differences including individualism versus collectivism, different amounts of directiveness in communication, types of leadership styles, among others.
[more]A cultural experience that took me out of my comfort zone, and yet was extremely valuable to me, was when I stayed at a boarding school in a small town in Poland for a few weeks. I had the opportunity to travel to Szamotuly, Poland my junior year through an exchange program with my high school. It was a history program devoted to studying the history of cultural diversity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
[more]For the first seventeen years of my life, I lived in a small town in west Michigan—a beautiful place, sure—but a homogenous one. I rarely left the state and if I did it was predominantly for vacation travel, not necessarily an outlet for major cultural learning experiences and integration. Resultantly, my culture was long-informed by rural, midwestern values: always be polite, speak only when spoken to, and regardless of how you feel, it’s probably best to keep it to yourself or only alert those closest to you.
[more]If you had asked me to talk about my culture before I began RGLP, I would have given you a definition narrow enough to be succinct. I would have told you about growing up in New England. I might have talked about my Dad’s Jewish family. That would be it. That is how I would have defined my culture. I perceived it without nuance and without any aspects that I would consider “interesting.”
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