The death of linear careers
I have been active in professional women’s networks for many years and I believe that one of the main reasons why people join is the search for role models.
The purpose of a network is to provide their members with examples of inspiring women at the top.
I have been having a lot of fun serving as regional director for Europe of The International Alliance for Women (TIAW). And yesterday we launched our Global Cities program, an initiative meant to bring together senior women from the region to discuss topical issues.
Ruth Sealy, Doctoral Researcher from the International Centre for Women Leaders at Cranfield University’s School of Management, spoke about the work she has been doing to highlight the importance of female role models.
According to her research, organisations need to develop much deeper levels of cultural, emotional and relational awareness, in order to encourage women to aspire to leadership positions.
Ruth interviewed a series of top female executives. This is what a female managing director from a global investment bank told her (I love this quote!):
“In a group of 10, if you have at least 3 people that are the same, then you actually have a platform to speak from and be heard …for most of us, literally we’re the only woman in a group of 40 (men).
….So if you are agitated you’re being an emotional female, if you’re angry you’re being a bitch, if you cry you’re being weak. But if there were 3 or 4 of you, then you actually get heard.”
Our keynote speaker was one of the women interviewed by Ruth.
Andrea Sullivan is Head of Corporate Philanthropy and Cultural Partnerships for Europe and the Middle East at Lehman Brothers.
She spoke about her career journey both professionally and personally. Andrea mentioned the fact that women tend not to have linear careers and are sometimes needlessly ashamed about it.
I am so glad she did this. Linear careers are a myth that needs to be dismantled. I am sure Generation Y will help to do away with this.
My favourite quote from Andrea’s speech: “Sometimes you have to get right to the edge to know what you want.”
Crazy English
“Five languages are too much! That’s crazy”
This is what a Chinese friend of mine told me recently after she found out the number of languages I speak.
I had never looked at it this way. But may be she has a point.
You do have to pull yourself through some crazy stuff if you want to learn a language.
Then, there are times when you are tired or sick, and you happen to mispronounce a word. Your friends give you that look. You are no longer the person they used to know. You have just morphed into a monster from the lagoon and are regurgitating gibberish mixed with greenish foam at their feet.
That’s why I was so intrigued to find out about Crazy English.
The Chinese entrepreneur/motivational speaker Li Yang came up with this method to teach English. He encourages his students to shout English sentences at the top of their lungs.
He draws enormous crowds from all over China. The 2008 Summer Olympics’s Organising Committee has hired him to help make sure that visitors will be taken care of by people with sufficient English language skills.
He uses motivational sentences like: “I can totally conquer English. I am no longer a slave to English. I am its master. I believe English will become my faithful servant…”.
Li Yang’s technique taps into the dreams of millions of Chinese who see English as a passport to professional success and wealth.
I have to admit it…. it is a little creepy, but the psychology behind Crazy English is fascinating.
Li Yang has been able to turn learning a language into a life-changing experience.
He is selling hope packaged in exercise books. And he has managed to turn the anxiety that everybody experiences, when uttering new sounds, into an outlandishly joyous experience to be shared with thousands of people.
All this reminds me of how learning a language has always been about much more than learning grammar and new words.
A Czech friend of mine has never been able to learn English. During the cold war, she had learned French and Italian, two languages considered “neutral” by the regime. English continued to have that “capitalistic” connotation in her mind. She knew that learning it would have helped her a great deal in her work. She just could not overcome the mental barrier.
I am beginning to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more effective to deal first with the emotions we attach to a language.
Wouldn’t grammar and vocabulary follow much more easily once we have taken care of that?
Photo: thanks to newyorker.com
Creating “foreigners”
“I don’t have a village. I am a floating person”
I simply adore this line.
I went to listen to a talk by Lord Meghnad Desai last night at the Ismaili Centre about diasporas and migration.
Having been a “foreigner” for most of my life, I have a strong interest in phenomena that turn people into strangers.
Lord Desai was talking about migration being at the core of human history. “We all came from East Africa. We all descend from Lucy”.
It was really in the 20th century that people began to insist on national identities. “By thinking in terms of citizens and foreigners, we have created barriers for ourselves”.
According to Lord Desai, before the rise of national identities people used to think in terms of clusters of households. But in the 20th century, “our imagination stopped to see individuals and families and began to see only nations”.
While I was listening to this, my mind wandered back to Prague. I heard the voice of a Jewish friend of mine saying how much he hates nations. And he does have a strong point.
Prague’s cultural and social life was much richer before WWII when they had a Czech, a Jewish and a German community.
All this is gone for ever. Thanks to people chasing national identities and turning neighbours into strangers.
Lord Desai also spoke about the urge that people have to create “locals and foreigners”.
That puzzles me. It does exist. I have often been called a “foreigner” and I have always found it intriguing.
I don’t really know what a foreigner is. May be it is because I cannot really identify with a specific country or a particular place.
I have always thought that nations create distance between people. Or may be it is because of what I have seen in Easter Europe.
No, I don’t particularly like the word “foreigner”.
Rethinking who we are
I escaped to beautiful and sunny Paris this week where I gave a talk about the future of interactivity and the impact of web 2.0 on communications.
Check out this video which was part of my fellow speaker Chauncey Zalkin’s presentation.
It is amazing.
It had never really dawned on me that every time we post or tag content, we are teaching the web how to think.
And every link we click on is a person with their thoughts, passions, hopes…
I absolutely love the music
My “little mother with claws”
I went home last weekend. To Prague that is, the home of my spirit.
Prague is the place where my spirit can roam free …tourists allowing.
I could not believe the masses of tourists on the Charles Bridge…and this in April.
So, I decided to wait until after midnight for my usual walk. No people in sight, just a half moon in the sky and the glorious might of the Prague Castle in the distance.
I began walking on the bridge and… it was like entering a cosmic cathedral. The beauty of the city is so overwhelming that I felt like a visitor from another planet discovering the shapes of a primordial world.
The statues on the Charles Bridge, dark and austere, blended into the night sky. They take my breath away. They look like silent mementos.
When I walk through Prague, the streets speak to me. I tune into the aura of the city. I observe the details on the facades of the Art Deco buildings and empty my mind. After a couple of minutes I have become part of Prague.
I am so good at it that every time I do this …a local comes up to me and asks for directions….
Like on Sunday morning, when I was waiting for the underground at Mustek station. I was a little bored so I did my tune-into-the-spirit-of-Prague exercise.
Less than five minutes later, a guy came up to me and asked in Czech how to get to Cerny Most. I remembered that it was at the end of the B line so I told him. I don’t look Czech and I definitely sound like a foreigner when I speak Czech, but that man was absolutely certain I could help him…
Mysteries of Prague…
Frank Kafka wrote in a letter to a friend in 1902: “Prague doesn’t let go of you. It doesn’t let go of us two. This little mother with claws. You have to adjust to it or else…You would have to set it on fire in two places, Vysehrad and Hradcani and this would set you free….”
I don’t want Prague to let go of me and… it never will.
photo: thanks to angelfire.com
Trance inducing
There was this cartoon character when I was growing up in Italy. A Native American who used to sit on a large stone in the middle of the Arizona desert.
A feather stuck to the back of his head, he would spend his days writing. The bubble above his head said endlessly “Scribble, scribble, scribble….” That was apparently the noise his quill made on the paper (from the Italian scrivere for writing).
And Scribble Scribble was the nickname my father gave me at some point during my school years. I would spend hours in my room writing.
I had this inexplicable urge to write.
May be it is because of my family. They all used to write. My great-grandfather wrote so much in his job and free time that he got terrible cramps. The pain made him unable to work and my grandfather had to support him.
Sometimes, when I look at my right hand, I see my great-grandfather’s, I feel the pain shooting up my arm and I hear his voice saying “Write, Silvia, write, write all the things I couldn’t write….”.
Yes, the act of writing does hold an enormous fascination over me.
No wonder I couldn’t stop listening to my friend Tom last week. He was describing the trance he puts himself into every time he writes with a fountain pen.
“Once the nib is worn in, the pen is not scratchy any more, ” he told me. “Your thoughts flow much better than if you were writing on a keyboard. A keyboard stops you”.
Tom also told me that sometimes the trance gets so deep that it becomes an intense physical experience.
Writing is certainly an intense experience.
At the moment, I am spending days working on my book on international PR.
It is just me, my ideas, my notes and my computer. My entire being is focused on producing what I want to say and the number of words I have to write.
Like Tom, I get so deep into my writing ….and my mind….
Would somebody rescue me?
Photo: thanks to lifehack.org
Dizzy in London
“It is like a journey through your subconscious”.
My friend Gina and I were trying to make our way home on the Underground after a dinner at a Chinese noodles place near the British Museum.
Midnight at Holborn station can feel like walking through the meanders of your mind (Have you ever watched Being John Malkovich?).
I love London with all my heart.
But sometimes I feel so confused. I move through the streets, rushing from meeting to meeting. A lingering dizziness starts to form in my heart, as if I was floating through a realm that doesn’t really exist.
I sometimes make strange encounters. I cherish them. The stranger the better. They help to soothe my dizziness…
I went into Boots yesterday. The lady at the counter looks at me: “Where are you from?”
You will probably know by now that I have a knee-jerk reaction to this question. I have been asked it a billion times over the years. I don’t even hear it any more. My ears switch automatically to a Buddhist mantra every time somebody in my vicinity formulates it.
But this time, it was different….
The woman had such a sweet face. So I told her I am Italian.
She looked at me with dreamy eyes and said, “Have you ever met the Pope?”
I told her that I had been to Rome on a school trip as a young girl to see the previous Pope.
The lady fell deeper into her dream, “He was such a nice man.”
“He was,” I said. And this time it was my mind to wonder off, back to Easter Europe and to dreams of better times that I hope will stretch into eternity.
Later on, I was chewing my noodles near the British Museum and looking at the peaceful face of our Chinese dinner companion.
“The restaurant smells like Asia”, said Gina.
Behind me a wall-to-wall flat screen was showing MTV-style videos from the 90s.
I leaned back and gave in to the energy of London. May be my dizziness is a sign that I am becoming part of it.
Photo: thanks to inmagine.com
Bewildered in Tokyo
My friend Daneeta’s feature documentary Tokyo Cowboys is about to premiere at the Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles.
I am so excited!
Tokyo Cowboys tells the stories of a group of westerners who gave up their jobs, homes and countries to pursue their dreams in the cut throat world of Tokyo. The film’s delicate and humorous portrait illuminates the price some pay for a taste of Tokyo’s success. It follows the trial and errors of its heroes’ quest for opportunity on this post-modern urban frontier.
The documentary reminds me so much of my years in Eastern Europe.
Some of its characters are like the confused expats I used to meet at parties in Prague and Bratislava.
It was all so surreal. History had just turned a major corner and we were not sure of the role we were going to play in it, if any.
Watching Tokyo Cowboys brought back to me that old feeling of being suspended in time.
So intriguing….so liberating.
The documentary will be shown at the Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles on April 14th. It is the only film in the festival directed by a non-Asian and the only documentary to deal with the subject of gaijin experience in Japan.
Lured to “uncharted territory”
I wrote last week about the surreal feelings connected with having spent most of my life abroad.
Many thanks to Mike for writing on my Facebook that this post resonated with him.
It’s great to know I’m not the only one.
I am always on the lookout for comforting messages of this kind and a couple of days ago… I hit the jackpot
I was reading in the International Herald Tribute about the life of Barak Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann, and the influence she had on him. And I came across this quote by Obama’s sister, Maya:
“She [Stanley Ann] felt that, somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core”.
Obama’s mother lived in different parts of the US before moving to Hawaii, where she met Obama’s father. She then moved to Indonesia where she became a consultant to the USAID on setting up a village credit program. She also worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta specialising in women’s projects.
Ever since I read Maya’s quote, I have been thinking about that “something” that makes up my core.
I think I know what it is.
I was wandering through “uncharted territory” in Eastern Europe and I came across what became the essence of who I am today.
Now that I think of it, it is all quite clear, but you first need someone to explain to you how it works.
That’s why I love this quote.
All of the sudden, it all makes sense. To use the words of an old friend, it is as if someone came into your kitchen and started to make order. The cups with the cups….the plates with the plates….
This quote is exactly what you need to read to yourself when you feel confused. And living in different places can leave you confused. Your path is so different from that of many of the people who sorround you.
So every time you start doubting that path, just read this quote.
Picture: thanks to iht.com
Time travelling
The weather in London was so miserable over the weekend that I felt like checking out how it must feel to travel to another planet.
So I watched 2001: Space Odyssey.
I was surprised to see that it has become much easier for me to sit through the final part of the movie, the one about “Jupiter and beyond the Infinite”.
That is when, to quote Wikipedia, astronaut Dave Bowman “appears to travel across vast distances of space and time through a ‘Star Gate’, a tunnel of colorful light and imagery and sound”.
I always had problems with these scenes when I was younger. I didn’t get them. They would unsettle me. I just wanted someone to tell me where Dave Bowman was going. Full stop.
On Friday, I discovered that they no longer unsettle me. Why is this happening?
I have been thinking and I believe that the fact that I finally got it, after so many years, has something to do with my living abroad for most of my adult life.
Moving around has felt like going through a “tunnel of colorful light”. You have to remain flexible. The places that accompanied you yesterday are not here to lead you into the next stage.
So you just watch the colors go by…
And every time I enter my old bed room in Italy, I feel a bit like Dave Bowman entering that surreal room with its Biedermeier furniture, so reassuring (for someone like me who spent so much time in Austria) but at the same time so alien.
And I do love Strauss’s An der schoenen blauen Donau . Like in the case of this movie, it has been the soundtrack of my life.
Listening to it gives me a sense of the time flowing, of an era that was better (but why did it lead to horrible things then?).
And I see myself dressed in a long pink gown attending a ball in another surreal setting, Prague’s Palac Kultury. It is the winter of 1991. I am leaving the ball and dancing in the snow on my way to the Nusle valley together with a friend…
Prague is awakening from a surreal dream only to find that it cannot go back to the time before it fell asleep. The Biedermeier room is gone. Only time travelling would help in this case…if only we knew how.
Well, I will be going back to Prague in April, for the first time in two years.
One never knows…
Photo: thanks to www.imdb.com
