Thinking Agility - Another Subdimention of Personal Effectiveness

As the years went by and we moved on, the less and less international students I would see because I was in regular courses surrounded by mainly Americans and just a few foreigners. The more I interacted with Americans, the more I would learn about our cultural differences. There were times were I could not understand why people did certain things so differently, or how others did not understand me. As time went by and the months slowly passed, I got more used to the ways things were here. And on the least expected day, I found myself dreaming in English, and there it was the point where everything I said didn’t need to be translated anymore. It was automatic, I was able at this point to think and speak in English.
Eleven months after my stay in the U.S. I went back to my home country and it was there when I found out all about the differences I had experience in the US. I realized I had lived a different life and grew up and mature faster than many of my friends who stayed in Venezuela. I used to compare everything all the time, and people hated it. My Spanish didn’t sound perfect anymore and I spoke backwards and that was because I thought in English. People thought I was faking it, but they had no idea that this really happened to me. Others would see me as a very cold woman, just because I wouldn’t automatically kiss everyone on the cheek, which was traditional in Venezuela. Many didn’t see me as the same sweet girl that had left a year earlier.
I realized then, how much I changed and the transformation that had occurred in the past year, and I was o.k. with that. After I came back to the U.S. a month later, I was not only able to interact with Americans, but also able to understand their culture and many others. I understood myself better and I learned that comparing two countries out load or referencing too much of one country to people from the other could be offensive. At this point I believe that being able to use Thinking Agility made a large impact on my personality traits. I reflected on many of my mistakes and learned that there is not right or wrong between cultures, just differences.
The before mentioned experience is the root of my cross-cultural background as well as part of my global experience. I had to adjust to new ways of thinking, learn a new language and transform myself into a person that was able to coexist in a new country. I learned to look at circumstances from many different perspectives and became open-minded and accepted different ways of thinking.