The Conversations That Changed Me

It was August 2001.

I was spending the summer in the United Kingdom with a group of friends from Texas. We were young, broke, and convinced that taking a weekend trip to Paris before returning home was a great idea.

It was—until we missed our train back to England.

With almost no money, hotels weren't an option. For several nights we slept on benches outside Gare du Nord station while trying to find enough money to get back across the English Channel.

At the time, it felt like little more than an adventure gone wrong.

Looking back, I realize it was the beginning of something much bigger.

That trip was the first of what would become more than forty countries over the next two decades. Along the way, I discovered that the destinations themselves were rarely what stayed with me. It was always the people.

My fascination with other cultures actually began long before I boarded my first international flight. My grandparents served as missionaries in Indonesia for thirty-five years. Their home was filled with artwork, photographs, and stories from around the world. As a child, those stories awakened an insatiable curiosity. I wanted to know what life looked like beyond the small corner of Texas where I had grown up.

That curiosity has led me to some extraordinary places.

In 2008, I spent a summer in Guatemala working alongside medical teams before traveling throughout the central and northern regions of the country interviewing survivors of the Guatemalan Civil War. I met people who had endured unimaginable violence, loss, and displacement. Many were still living with the consequences decades later. I expected to remember the places we visited. Instead, I remember the conversations.

Years later, my sister and I spent a month in Amman, Jordan, documenting the stories of Iraqi and Syrian refugees who had fled ISIS. We sat together for hours as families described the homes they had left behind, the loved ones they had lost, and the uncertainty of waiting for the chance to begin again somewhere new.

I still think about many of those conversations today.

For a long time, I simply believed these experiences had made me more empathetic. While that's certainly true, I've come to realize they changed something even deeper.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget argued that we all make sense of the world through mental frameworks called schemas. When new experiences fit those frameworks, we assimilate them. But when reality no longer fits what we believe, we must accommodate—we revise our understanding of the world itself.

Travel has done that for me repeatedly.

Researchers such as Joshua McKeown have shown that immersive international experiences often accelerate intellectual development because they expose us to people and ideas that challenge our assumptions. William Perry similarly described intellectual growth as a progression from believing there is one right answer to recognizing that the world's most important questions require us to understand multiple perspectives before making thoughtful commitments.

I have found that to be true.

The greatest lesson travel has taught me is not how different people are. It is how incomplete my own understanding often is.

Every meaningful conversation reminds me that intelligent, thoughtful people can arrive at different conclusions because they have lived different lives. Every culture solves problems in its own way. Every family carries stories that shape how they see the world.

Leadership is no different.

The most effective leaders I've encountered are not those who assume they already understand every problem. They are the ones who remain curious long enough to understand why others see the problem differently.

Looking back, I don't believe travel made me a better leader simply because it exposed me to different cultures.

It made me a better leader because it taught me to ask better questions.

And, more importantly, to listen carefully to the answers.