In April, 2010 I made my first trip from Budapest to Vienna as a new ARGOnaut, having recently joined the company as Managing Partner for Hungary and going then to the ARGO headquarters for a strategy session. To this day, I can remember very clearly the feeling, as I crossed the border heading “west” into Austria, that my world was opening up, that new adventures and experiences were ahead of me.

There had been many such bigger and smaller openings in my life. Every experience, if we learn from it, opens us to new perspectives. Some, though, open up wide new vistas. Leaving home to university after 18 years in the same small town was one. Leaving the U.S. for the first time in 1995 to start teaching English in South Korea was a big one. Moving to Hungary in 1997 was another. Getting married and becoming a parent was huge, as many of you reading this well know.

This move to ARGO was different, however. Though I had done some business training by then, and though I had consciously chosen to make this shift, I had spent most of the past 15 years as a teacher. And while I loved teaching, I had never really thought of it as my profession. Joining ARGO was even more than choosing a profession, it was choosing a whole new world.

Just how new – and how wide open – I could not have guessed! Within a few months of joining ARGO, I found myself in London supporting a change process in the UK hub of a global IT outsourcing supplier. Within a year I was regularly running workshops in Slovakia and Romania as well. Within 3, I had held strategy, change and leadership development sessions also in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S. in industries as divers as railroads, medical devices, IT & telecommunications, pulp & paper, and banking & finance. Now 16 years with ARGO, I have had the joy of working with leaders and teams in more than 30 countries, from northern Canada to southern Brazil, from California to Dubai, India, China and Singapore.

But a funny thing happened. The more my mind opened with the world and these experiences, the smaller, and more familiar, that world began to feel. The more I learned from customers, leaders, participants and my colleagues, the more comfortable I became moving between these cultures, the more open, humble and curious that I became in the face of all this diversity and complexity – the more commonalities appeared. We all long for belonging, meaning, and purpose. We all want to do good work that we can be proud of, regardless the country, regardless the industry or product.

I still find it amazing to have a day – well, like today – when I have in the same day Teams meetings with customers in Finland, Germany, Italy, Austria and India. Or when we have an online session with participants from 3 or 4 continents. And I am profoundly grateful to our ARGO founders, now my partners, who gave me the chance, to our customers who trust me to support them and from whom I have learned so much, to all the people and participants who have been my teachers.

So, in the end, is this a story about the world opening for me – or me opening to the world? Maybe both, and for both, thank you.

ARGO creates spaces where growth becomes possible across cultural boundaries.