"True leadership is not about showcasing your own abilities, but about unlocking the potential of others." - Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo

Since I am now living in Brazil, I am learning Portuguese, but I am still a beginner, so I sometimes have a brain freeze. The other day, we were leaving our housing development and my husband encouraged me to speak Portuguese to the security guard. I blanked and couldn’t remember how to say, “good morning”. There are two ways to say “good” and one goes with morning (“bom”) and the other (“boa”) goes with afternoon and evening. I panicked and said, “boa whatever”. Roberto and the security guard thought this was hilarious.

Over the last several weeks, I have been doing my best to adapt to the daily VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity) that I face when living in a new country. Speaking another language is a momentous change.

Learning a new language can be an exciting and rewarding experience, but it can also be quite challenging, especially if the language you’re learning is Portuguese. In this blog post, we’ll explore four reasons.

We live in our own cultural bubbles, shaped by our values, norms, and experiences from where and how we grew up. What seems interesting to us might not even register on the radar for someone of another culture.

On Sunday, we were sitting by our pool in the backyard, and we saw several monkeys in the trees behind our house. As Americans, we were thrilled to see monkeys in their natural habitat. Our dogs were extremely interested in the monkeys and the monkeys seemed to be very curious about our dogs too. I shared videos with friends and family back in the US and everyone was amazed that these little creatures live in our neighborhood. We mentioned this to our Brazilian friend, and he didn’t think anything of it.

Connections are essential personally and professionally. My husband, Roberto, has lived outside his home country of Brazil for more than 20 years but he always maintained a connection with his old friends and extended family. He stayed in touch on social media and made it a point to reach out to folks whenever he planned to be in town.

When living in another country, so many things are different. One thing I’ve learned is that you must appreciate the humor of the odd things you experience. Here’s a conversation I had with my husband last week about a car he rented while we were in Brasilia.

Most cultures are ethnocentric to some degree. We see and interpret things from our cultural point of view. Americans and Brazilians both fit this mold. When we see things from a restricted lens, we often incorrectly interpret information.

This story is a simple example of this.

Shipping Animals Overseas - Part 2

Moving to Brazil has been an adventure full of unanticipated challenges and learning. As I mentioned in our last blog, we will be posting some of our stories about the extreme changes associated with living in another country.

This is the second part of the story...shipping our cats.

My husband, Roberto previously tried to ship our cats in November, but he had trouble catching them. When he finally did, they clawed him up so badly that he ended up going to the emergency room. There is an art to catching cats and getting them into their carriers. We abandoned the mission and determined that it would be best for me to handle this task instead of him.

I booked vet appointments and the flights and thought that everything would happen as planned, I should have known better.

Over the weekend, I went grocery shopping with my husband at a large supermarket. We needed to pick up a few things for a cookout we were hosting at our house. We bought a couple of large steaks (picanha) for the grill.

When we went to check out, Roberto had to take the meat to a special station to have the sensors removed.

Shipping Animals Overseas - Part 1

Moving to Brazil has been an adventure full of unanticipated challenges and learning. As I mentioned in our last blog, we will be posting some of our stories about the extreme changes associated with living in another country.

Anyone who knows me understands how much I love animals. My husband and I always have a houseful of rescued dogs and cats and we love them as if they were our children. When we decided to move to Brazil, it was important for us to find a house or apartment that accepts dogs and cats and to find a way to transport them safely to Brazil.

Where have you been?

I took a 2 week break from posting on social media because of my recent move to Salvador, Bahia in Brazil. I didn’t think that I would be offline for so long, but life happens.

This is my fourth time living in another country. And it was by far the most challenging move. That’s saying something because I lived in China in the 1990’s! My husband and I have faced many obstacles related to this move. I can honestly say that my resilience, tenacity, and problem-solving skills have been frequently tested and I have learned so much in the process.

Today, I thought I would share a brief story about getting to our new home in Brazil with my cat while overcoming challenges along the way.

Stop Spinning and Focus on What You Can Control

Every time that we face a challenge in our lives (personal, family, professional), we have two choices:

✅ To feel overwhelmed and paralyzed or

✅To feel that there is always an opportunity to overcome the challenge

When this challenge involves VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) it becomes more extreme. It is easy to get frustrated when things aren’t going your way.

Read the rest of our blog entry to learn more about controlling your mindsets and behaviors as you face VUCA.

They say that there are only two people in this world that you need to make proud. It's the 8-year-old version of you and the 80-year-old version of you.

Imagine for a moment that you have the opportunity and privilege to travel into the future and meet with your 80-year-old self. What would you share? What would you ask? I am sure that you will be enormously proud to talk about your accomplishments, but you would also want to ask about regrets you would have when you are 80 years old, so you would be able to prevent them. This allows you to capitalize on the learning from when you were 8 years old, and to know when you need to endure the pain of discipline now to avoid the pain of regret later.

We become less competent the more we run away from or avoid challenges. Competence is like a muscle; it requires activity to function.

Unfortunately, many people think that they can coast on their current level of expertise. As a result, they run away from challenges and avoid the unknown, instead focusing their attention on things they believe are tried and proven. Unfortunately, the more they do this, the less competent they become because the value of their knowledge & skills erodes over time. In other words, they over-rely on their strengths and these strengths will end up being a liability.

Change affects people’s behaviors and mindsets. Think of the mindsets as the thought patterns and feelings associated with change while the behaviors are about how people act. The way you think will influence how you act and ultimately, what you do.

Change often causes fear, anxiety, and stress. People spend a lot of time worrying about what will go wrong and focus on the worst-case scenario. Change can feel uncomfortable because you are dealing with new and uncertain situations. It is also quite common to feel like you have no control over the situation.

You can often recognize change resistance by watching how people behave. There are several behaviors that are typical when people fear change.

In our recent blog posts, we talked about the benefits of positive psychology and some tips for overcoming a negative mindset. We thought it would be a good idea to follow this up with some practical tips to reframe your thinking.

When we continue to replay negative thoughts in our mind, we start to believe them, and these negative thoughts will create a negative mindset. To overcome this, you can start with a technique called “reframing”.

Reframing is a simple method to shift your thinking about a situation to give it a different meaning. The reframing process is not difficult, but it takes some time and practice. What you think influences how you act so when you change your mindset, you will find it much easier to adapt your behaviors.

We will all deal with a negative mindset at some point in our lives. It might be a difficult day – for example, you got stuck in traffic, missed an important meeting, and your boss is upset that you are late again. Or it might be a series of negative events like finding out that you must spend money on another unanticipated and expensive home repair right after you found out that your company is not paying bonuses this year. You could then start thinking negative thoughts like you are unlucky or that nothing ever goes your way. External events can get into your head and create a negative mindset. If you let the negative mindset fester and don’t learn to overcome this, you could lead an unhappy life or struggle with depression.

A negative mindset can influence the decisions you make in your personal and professional life. If you want to avoid being overpowered and controlled by negativity, here are five ways you can adjust your mindset to be more positive.

Positive psychology focuses on mental assets rather than a person’s problems and weaknesses. It starts with the identification of character strengths and focuses on happiness and fulfillment. Although the positive psychology movement has endured its fair share of criticism, there are many benefits of positive psychology.

Studies show that techniques associated with positive psychology can boost emotional and social well-being. Positive psychology also explores how character strengths such as meaning and life purpose contribute to positive life outcomes such as better physical and mental health in older adults.

Success begins with a goal. Regardless of whether your goals are big or small, they will give you some purpose and keep you headed in the right direction. Unfortunately, many of us remain stuck at the goal stage. We start with good intentions, but we can't seem to make it happen. These are some common obstacles: struggling to get started, staying focused on the goal, overcoming setbacks, and recognizing progress.

Before we can believe in a goal that we've set for ourselves, we first need to have a good idea of what the goal looks like. This is where visualization comes in.

The other day I heard the song, “Happy” by Pharrell Williams and it made me smile and got me thinking about the characteristics of happy people.

Some people are hard-wired to be happy most of the time. These are the people who have a zest for life, they are energized, smile and laugh more often and focus on making things pleasant for others. What do happy people do differently?

In addition to publishing our book, Javier and I decided to start a Mindset Wizardry blog this year. Since August, we've been publishing weekly and have covered a wide variety of topics. It has been fun for us to share our thoughts and perspectives and we plan to continue this next year. As we close the year and reflect, we thought it might be helpful to share a few of our lessons learned from writing a blog.