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I Left Home to See the World. I Didn’t Know I Would Meet Myself. · Just Julia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I left home to see the world.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know I would meet myself.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: When I returned home to Brazil after a year in New Zealand, I was 18 years old.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: My father looked at me and said something I have carried with me ever since.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: If every young person had the opportunity to live abroad at least once,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: maybe there would be fewer wars.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: At 18, I understood the words.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I understood the idea.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I had left Brazil a year earlier as a very shy 17-year-old girl from
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: a relatively small city with a relatively small window onto the world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: This was before we carried other people's lives around in our pockets.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Before social media could show you,
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  SPEAKER_00: within seconds,
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  SPEAKER_00: what teenagers were wearing in Seoul,
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  SPEAKER_00: what a family was having for dinner in Copenhagen,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: or what someone's mourning looked like on the other side of the planet.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The world was still something you had to go out and find.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I did.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I went to New Zealand thinking I was going to learn English,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: experience another country, meet new people.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know I was about to meet other versions of myself.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: We talk a lot about personal development today.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: There is an entire industry devoted to helping us change.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: We meditate,
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  SPEAKER_00: we journal,
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  SPEAKER_00: we go to retreats,
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  SPEAKER_00: we read books,
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  SPEAKER_00: we take courses,
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: we work with coaches,
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: we examine our beliefs, our habits, our childhoods, our patterns.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've done many of these things myself, and I believe deeply in the value of looking inward.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: But lately I've been thinking about how one of the greatest periods
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: of personal development in my life happened before I even knew
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: the term personal development.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody told me I was going away to work on myself.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I simply changed countries.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps there is another kind of personal development that begins not
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: by going deeper inside ourselves, but by going far enough outside what we know.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because living abroad isn't simply seeing somewhere different.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: You have to function there.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly the language you've always used isn't enough.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The social cues you've learned aren't necessarily the right ones.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Humor changes.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Friendship changes.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: What people consider polite changes.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ideas about work, family, relationships, ambition, time and success can change.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Things you've spent your whole life calling normal become simply one version of normal.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in that process, something happens to you too.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, I discovered there is an entire field called cultural neuroscience.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I found that fascinating.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because neuroscience gives us a language for something many of us have experienced intuitively.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: The human brain is not a finished object that simply accompanies us unchanged through life.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: It remains capable of adapting in response to experience.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Research into neuroplasticity and second language learning has documented changes
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  SPEAKER_00: in brain systems involved in language and cognitive control.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Cultural neuroscience research has also examined how sustained cultural experience
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: relates to processes involved in self-representation,
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  SPEAKER_00: social perception, and emotion.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean I can say that New Zealand rewired my brain.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody scanned my brain before I left Brazil and again when I came home.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the changes I experienced cannot be reduced to one brain region or one mechanism.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I find the underlying idea extraordinary.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The worlds we repeatedly ask our minds to navigate can leave something behind in us.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: At 17, I wasn't thinking about neuroplasticity.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was simply trying to understand people,
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  SPEAKER_00: trying to communicate,
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  SPEAKER_00: trying to belong,
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  SPEAKER_00: trying to find my way around a world whose rules I hadn't grown up knowing.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But my brain was learning all the time.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so was I.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Recently, I heard someone describe the yellow butterfly as a symbol of transformation.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It stayed with me.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I believe the universe has assigned one fixed meaning to
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: a yellow butterfly,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because transformation is exactly the word I would use
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: for what international experience has done to my life.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: A butterfly doesn't become something entirely unrelated to what came before.
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  SPEAKER_00: It transforms.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is continuity, but there is also something that cannot be undone.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that is what crossing cultures has felt like for me.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't stop being Brazilian when I left Brazil.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't become a completely different person when I lived somewhere else.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: I carried what came before with me.
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  SPEAKER_00: But every place added something.
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  SPEAKER_00: A language.
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  SPEAKER_00: A perspective.
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  SPEAKER_00: A relationship.
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  SPEAKER_00: A way of communicating.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something I stopped believing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something I learned to question.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something I discovered I was capable of.
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  SPEAKER_00: And after enough borders,
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  SPEAKER_00: enough people,
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  SPEAKER_00: and enough different versions of normal,
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  SPEAKER_00: I could no longer return completely to the person who had left.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that is why the butterfly feels right to me.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I became someone else.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because I became more.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is an irony I only noticed much later.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I eventually built a career around international expansion.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: For years,
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I worked across countries,
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  SPEAKER_00: markets,
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  SPEAKER_00: and cultures,
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  SPEAKER_00: building partnerships and helping businesses operate beyond
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  SPEAKER_00: the environments they already understood.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the first lessons of international expansion is very simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: What works at home is not necessarily universal.
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  SPEAKER_00: You have to observe before assuming.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Listen before imposing.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Understand the context.
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  SPEAKER_00: Learn what should remain and what needs to adapt.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: It took me years to see the parallel.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Before international expansion became my profession, it had already happened to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every new country had asked me the same questions.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: What do you keep?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do you adapt?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do you question?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do you add?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps that's why I have started thinking of international experience as a form
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: of personal expansion.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not because living abroad automatically makes someone wiser.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not because everyone needs to move across the world to become a better person.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And not because every international experience is transformative,
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: but because deep exposure to another culture can give us something difficult
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: to acquire while remaining entirely inside what we already know,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: another point from which to look back at ourselves.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me back to my father.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: For years, I interpreted his sentence very literally.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: If every young person could live abroad, maybe there would be fewer wars.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Today, I hear something different in it.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: When another culture exists only at a distance, difference can be easy to simplify.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: They do things differently.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: They believe strange things.
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  SPEAKER_00: They aren't like us.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then you live there.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: You sit at people's tables.
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  SPEAKER_00: You become someone's friend.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: You hear the stories behind behaviors you previously saw only from the outside.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: You begin to understand why something
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: that makes no sense inside your cultural framework might make perfect sense inside
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Understanding doesn't require agreement, but it complicates judgment.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: The unfamiliar acquires names, faces, and stories.
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  SPEAKER_00: It becomes human.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot tell you that sending young people abroad would create fewer wars.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: My father's sentence was a father's hope, not a scientific hypothesis.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I understand now what I think he was trying to teach me.
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  SPEAKER_00: The international experience doesn't only change the way we see
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  SPEAKER_00: the world It can change,
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  SPEAKER_00: at the same time, the way we see ourselves and the way we see others.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that is why,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: almost 20 years later, I still think about the girl who got on that plane.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: She thought she was leaving home to see the world.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: She had no idea that the world would eventually become part of her.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: These days, when I think about transformation, I think about that yellow butterfly.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think about how much effort we sometimes put into becoming someone new.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe transformation doesn't always require us to search harder inside ourselves.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we need to encounter something outside ourselves that we cannot fit
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: into what we already know.
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  SPEAKER_00: A different language.
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  SPEAKER_00: A different culture.
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  SPEAKER_00: A different definition of normal.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: A different world.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then allow that encounter to change us.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps some of the greatest journeys of personal development don't begin with
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: the question, Just juliasillveira.