My Cross-Cultural Performance Journey

Life's highway is an endless landscape of on-ramps, off-ramps, and accidents, and how we navigate this metaphor in our minds and in practice charts our journey and its destination (milestones).

Hindsight is always 20/20, but there is a personal development system that empowers individuals to make better choices in foresight.

It's call cross-cultural performance mastery, and its practitioners travel with higher purpose while enjoying a more rewarding journey.

Some losses (accidents) may seem insignificant, but they can have limiting psychological ramifications that pull us towards unintended or even undesirable realities. We passively call it fate or bad luck, while not realizing greater awareness could have made our eventual outcomes a proactive choice.

When I was 16, I lost my hand.

A foolish accident that resulted in several severed tendons in my left hand derailed my aspirations to play in the majors (baseball). I was forced to take an alternative route (offramp), and now realize in hindsight that I wasted too much attention and focus on "what ifs."

Masters of cross-cultural performance develop abilities beyond consciously regulated behavior to advance-with-purpose tendencies, enabling them to reach more favorable destinations even before arriving because they have developed a more confident and optimistic mindset.

Negative forces tend to compound, reinforce and swell to propel us towards undesirable locales, so it is essential that we train our subconscious minds to regulate and eventually reverse them. Cross-cultural performance masters police their undesirable tendencies and develop a healthier modus operandi (MO) that is set on cruize control.

When I was 21, I lost my mind.

After mid-term exams and an all-nighter cramming the night before, we celebrated my best friend's 21st birthday with a typical night of drinking and foolish driving. I awoke in a blurry haze a week later in a hospital bed and didn't fully regain my bearings for several months. This detour was a mild concussion and permanent 2-month memory gap evidenced only by the aftermath photos, DUI "no low" plea, mandatory DUI school, and five weeks of community service.

Amazingly I didn't suffer any external injuries, no scars or broken bones, but the trajectory of my life changed course with no return on-ramp. I graduated one year later than my classmates into an economic depression and had to settle for employment with a less than ideal Japanese company. My journey towards Asia had begun, but in hindsight, I could have better position myself for greater success had I embraced this new reality as opposed to questioning my poor fortunes.

A positive mindset would have accelerated my progress towards a new destination, but a negative or indifferent one unquestionably becomes a drag.