For the last passion post of this series, I am going to talk about myself. I know, it sounds and looks narcissistic, but I really hope I do not come off that way. Someone recently brought it up to me about how in the world have I met so many people around the world and have known them to the level of them sharing their life story with me. I have never thought of this before because to me it was just a part of getting to know about someone. In this blog post, I will be spitballing about some of the things that I have used to make people feel comfortable with sharing with me.
I think the first thing that I try to do is make eye contact. As a child my mother (an eye doctor) would get super pissed off when I did not look into the patient’s eyes, so from a young age I have been practicing eye contact, even when the eyes were diseased and sometimes really hard to look at. I think another quality that makes it very easy to meet new people is the power of a smile. With a language barrier between the people I meet, a smile is something that all humans share with one another, and once someone smiles back it gives me the option to talk to them even if they may not speak my language. I always start by talking about how much I love the country that they are from, which is true because there is something I find unique and cool about every country, and then mention slightly that I am from the United States, not America. When I am talking to people from different countries, I try my best to not be like the typical ‘dirty Americans’.
Once the conversation is started, I begin to open up quickly, because I feel that the sooner that one person starts to open up, you can feel more comfortable when you are talking with them and vise versa. Another huge part of this is that one of my favorite things is to meet people from other countries. All said in done, I am in communication with around 20 people from Europe, and a few from Central America, and I always try to stay in touch with them. Thank you for reading my passion blogs, I hope you learned about some of the awesome people I have met in the past.
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