Working in a Country That Was Not My Own Showed Me How Much of My Confidence Was Cultural
I had been competent and confident in Jamshedpur. The same capability in Toronto produced a completely different experience of myself in professional rooms.
Story
What actually happened
I had taken a two-year placement with the Indian arm of a Canadian mining company at 26 and had arrived in Toronto with a professional track record I was proud of and an expectation that the skills which had produced it would translate directly into the new context. They translated partially.
The analytical and technical dimensions of the work were largely portable. The specific interpersonal and communication dimensions of professional life in a Canadian corporate context were structured on assumptions I had not encountered and had not known were assumptions because they were universal within the context I had worked in before.
The directness expected in feedback conversations was different from the diplomatic indirection I had learned to operate in. The meeting participation norms - who spoke when, how disagreement was voiced, the specific relationship between what was said in the room and what was said after the room - followed patterns that were different from mine in ways that I had to fail at several times before I understood what was happening well enough to adapt.
The specific experience of being very good at something and temporarily unable to express it because the channel through which it was expressed was tuned differently than I knew produced a quality of professional self-doubt I had not experienced before.
I had not known how much of my confidence was built on cultural fluency rather than purely on capability until I was in a context where I had to rebuild the cultural fluency from scratch.
What I developed over two years was a more robust professional identity - one that was less dependent on operating in a familiar cultural frame because I had had to identify and separate the cultural fluency from the underlying capability.
At 31, having returned to India and then worked across several international contexts, the experience of Toronto is the one I point to most often when I think about what made me better.
The lesson
Actionable takeaway