The last couple of days I’ve been toying with a new identity statement, I guess you’d call it. Really it’s more of a slogan.
I connect.
It has meaning in at least three distinct dimensions:
- Cross-cultural communication is one of the few themes uniting different segments of my life. Once I was passionate about traveling internationally. Then I became passionate about uniting Brasilian immigrants and English-speakers in Boston. Then I became passionate about doing outreach to subcultural young people. At times I’m passionate getting people to see across divides of corporate or organizational culture.
- My brain sees connections between items that other people would find wildly disparate.
- I naturally find empathy easy. I tend to “connect” with people I talk to, even when their value system differs radically from mine.