What Are Your Connectors?
I remember the first time I felt different.
I was 10 and I had just started going to an International school in Burkina Faso.
Suddenly I was this skinny Nigerian kid with a strong Nigerian accent in a French speaking country in an American intenational school going through puberty.
I need to find a way to connect and my default had always been sports.
At that time, I only knew how to play soccer but when I looked around me, I saw that people were playing basketball.
So I decided that I needed to learn how to play basketball.
I went to the library and checked out all the books on basketball and then all the Sports Illustrated for Kids.
Once I got the fundamentals down, I now needed to apply it to the courts.
I went to the best basketballer on campus and asked him if he could teach me the game.
He said yes and our 1 on 1’s became 2 on 2’s then 3 on 3’s and then 4 on 4’s and then 5 on 5’s
All of sudden our differences didn’t matter anymore. I had Ivorian, Taiwanese, Dutch, Cameroonian and American teammates but on that court we were one.
We had a common goal to win!
What if we applied that to everyday life? How much of a difference would that make?
Find your connectors and use it to connect across cultures.
Mine are sports, pop culture and geography. What are yours?