The map and the territory

For a long time, I studied belonging from the outside.

My doctoral research centred on what I called the intercultural encounter: the moment when two different worlds meet, in a classroom or life, and neither remains quite the same. I was fascinated by what happens at that crossing: how people negotiate identity, holding on to what they know while slowly making room for what is new. What also interested me was how being genuinely met by another person can shift something that no amount of knowledge ever could. I wrote about that encounter and built pedagogies around it.

And then I moved to the United Kingdom and became the “Other”.

Living between cultures

I was educated and professionally established. But I was also suddenly navigating a “grammar” that was not mine: the language and the unspoken codes of how things are done here. What is said and what is left unsaid. What counts as warmth and what reads as intrusion. I could understand, intellectually, exactly what was happening to me and still not stop it. The map and the territory, it turned out, are not the same thing. I had read about the gap between knowing and living. I had not yet understood it in my body.

Leading from who you are

What followed was a long, quiet education. I began teaching international postgraduate students, people who had left their countries and their professional identities behind to begin again in a new academic culture. I recognised them. That crossing was familiar to me. I knew what it was to be competent and still feel that no one had yet asked the most important question, to carry a self that did not quite fit anywhere.

The questions that began to matter in those rooms were not only academic. They were about identity, and what happens when the context around us changes and different parts of ourselves no longer sit easily together. It was in the classroom of Inclusive Leadership Practices that I began to see something more clearly. A person leads differently when they lead from who they actually are, not from who they think the room expects them to be. Something in my attention changed too. I was no longer looking at the experience from a distance. I began to recognise myself in it.

Why I became a coach

There, I recognised something I had been doing for thirty years, with students, parents, colleagues, friends and family, without ever having a name for it. Sitting with someone in a difficult moment. Asking the question that shifts something. Holding the space until their own answer comes up. I had been doing it for everyone around me. I was beginning, slowly, to do it for myself.

ALTEA grew from that. The research, the crossing, the teaching, and eventually the turning inward, all became part of the same question: what does it take for a person to come home to themselves?

I do not think this question belongs only to people who are struggling. It belongs to anyone who reaches a point where the life they have built, however good, no longer quite fits the person they are becoming. That moment is a threshold, and it is where this work begins.

Much love,

Charis