Leadership: Being intentional about how you begin

I began the New Year traveling, specifically in Paris, France. I was deliberate in how I started, as it establishes the tone for a more fruitful year of growth. In my work of scientific storytelling, traveling has become central. I never anticipated it to be so.

I am willing to bet that any entrepreneur or scholar would agree that the most valuable lessons come from travel. The learning experience is limitless because it constantly evolves, regardless of how often you visit the same location. I am on my third time to Paris, France.

How does travel affect my leadership? It has the biggest impact because I concentrate on growing in one key area: culture.

How Culture Develops Competence

Leadership requires the adapting of behaviors and habits to effectively and authentically interact across diverse cultures. Leadership must move beyond awareness to genuine understanding and valuing differences as opportunities for growth. It involves an ongoing journey of learning about other cultures, understanding your own biases, and integrating this understanding into your personal spaces and lived experiences. This is true inclusion, resulting in the most important outcome, which is YOU. Below I offer three key ways travel has been most beneficial to my leadership and growth:

• Decision-Making: It offers up a candid conversation with myself. It forces me to ask internal questions with distraction from others. Travel is what it is, and when you are in another country you are faced with adaptation. All which require internal conversations about right and wrong. Which, when in another culture, decison-making skills become paramount about what is right and wrong.

• Familiarity With Foreign Language: Learning a second language offers a "mind-expanding" experience by presenting concepts that might not be present in your native language and can be challenging to understand. I find it much simpler to learn a new language when I can hear it spoken by those who use it in their daily lives in real-time. Real-time is a game-changer.

• Research Skills: Understand historical roots of current events or the significance of traditional practices that have had an impact on pressing issues has been critical to my storytelling.

  Through my travels, I've discovered that reading about a situation is one thing, but being in the location where the event occurred offers a completely different learning experience. At times, the experience is beyond comprehension.

Education and leadership has many layers. We often focus on the number of achievements, the status of being on a certain platform, or the amount of likes and validation we receive for our intellect. However, I have realized that safety, peace of mind, and emotional well-being are unrelated to these factors. Even the most intelligent and accomplished individuals can be deceived or misled by those with far fewer credentials.

I like to focus on becoming a person of emotional intellect, one who can decipher manipulation, head off those who seek to destroy everyone in their path and simply cut them off, because I am emotionally inept. This my dear scholars is my definition of being a SMART LEADER.

Be encouraged to use your travels as a source of education. In addition, a unique piece to your leadership development.

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