Have you ever accidentally put your shoes on the wrong feet?
Bet that didn’t feel very good.
We wear our shoes like our cultural identity. Others wear their shoes just as comfortably as you do, and they can be very different shoes.
When we put on someone else’s shoes, we might experience that uncomfortable feeling of having our shoes on the wrong feet.
Why would we want to change our shoes? To better understand one another. To enhance our self-awareness of our own cultural framework and views on the world. To try on another person’s shoes and see what they see. Hopefully, they will be interested in wearing your shoes and learning your perspective too. This is how we build a bridge of understanding to get along and live, work, and be better together.
Through this blog, we hope to create a dialogue addressing the importance of culture and critical thinking when working across cultural boundaries. This involves global leadership at the individual, organizational, and national levels. We want to have difficult conversations that help us engage with each other and create mutual understanding.
To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.
– Eli Pariser
Best,
Melinda and Sarah