no. 012 - the fruit incident

Hey {{first_name}},

I’m very excited to share that the Meristem landing page has been updated with the new branding - you saw last week that the newsletter itself got an upgrade and now the webpage is ready as well. Shout out to Lindsay from my team for supporting me with this! Check it out here - and as always, please share with anyone you think may be interested - let’s build this community together :). 

Last week’s poll results: Most of you said creative rest is the type that you’re most missing - I feel the same. Grab some markers and paper and just start doodling without any expectation - see what flows!

Picture this. I'm 23, standing in front of a class of 5 year olds in Seoul, trying to teach them the names of fruits in English I’ve never even heard before. The students were just looking up at me with empty faces, clearly wondering when this was going to end (exactly my thoughts).. I stood there aggressively pointing at flashcards and saying the words louder and slower, as if volume and force would magically make them understand. 

I was getting frustrated, and mostly with one little girl, Shine, who simply could not understand me. I am a little embarrassed to say it somehow became a battle between us, this tiny child and me (I learned a lot that year about cooling my temper. Shine, wherever you are - my sincerest apologies.)

Fast forward twelve years. Last week I was on a panel about cross cultural entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto, speaking to a room of students from both Seoul and Toronto, and I was asked to share what I had learned about working across cultures. It felt very full circle, standing there as the person with the answers, when the last time I worked in a Korean context, I could not successfully explain a piece of fruit.

Here is what I wanted to tell you, though, because the panel brought up some things that I hadn’t consciously realized. We tend to think of cross-cultural work as something that happens when you are literally working across two countries, but actually it's happening all the time - even when you’re from the same place. Every person you work with is running on a different set of references, a different history, a different sense of what is normal. 

Learning to read that, to decipher what someone means underneath the surface might be the most important thing a leader ever learns to do.

I gave an example on the panel that seemed to resonate. At Sunflower, we recently worked with a nonprofit in Honduras, a small group of women, and on the kickoff call, we asked them to share the stories behind their organization so we could shape their communications plan and storytelling. Partway through the call, they started to cry. And I mean, bawl - not a stray tear here and there ... they were sobbing, openly, all of them. 

In the Canadian context I was raised in, that is not typical in a work context. For these women, though, the crying WAS the message. It was them handing us their passion for the work, undiluted, and if I had read it through my own cultural context, my vision would have been clouded. Their crying didn’t make their message any less important. 

The work of a leader is learning to accept and decipher all of the unique languages their team, clients, partners speak. My own team is scattered across different cities and countries, and over time we have made our own Sunflower culture, a warm and soft and safe place everyone can properly show up in. 

I still get it wrong though, I still catch myself saying the word louder and slower when someone is telling me something I have not slowed down enough to hear. Twelve years on, I am a little better at it and also nowhere near finished.

So here is what I will leave you with: what have you been trying to speak louder, when the real work is to learn what’s underneath it?

My favourite photo from the 2026 World Nature Photography Awards. There are so many good ones. Take a deeeeep breath, and check them out here.. Slow your pace for just a moment.

This week’s hot tip or info on entrepreneurship, team culture, leadership, AI and more.

→ This is one of my favourite ways to use AI currently. Use a notetaker for all your meetings (I use Fathom) - your transcripts are gold. Then in Claude, use the Connectors feature to connect it to your notetaker. Then ask Claude to analyze all your calls for different things. For example: 

Bonus - schedule this to be a task that automatically runs weekly to give you content ideas/analyses of your calls.

Want to be featured in a future newsletter? Fill out this super short form.

Poll time!

💌 Hit reply and tell me about a moment when you misread someone completely and later realized they'd been speaking a language you hadn't learned to hear yet. (Or just hit reply and tell me what you thought of this letter — I love hearing from you and am always open to feedback.)