What Moving Countries Taught Me About Listening, Identity and Letting Go
Updated: Jul 27
"Mothering can be more demanding than war reporting."
- Siobhan Darrow
From War Zones to Parenting: Insights from Siobhan Darrow
When I moved to Geneva in 2017, I arrived with much more than luggage.
I brought the experience of several careers, three children, multiple languages, two burnouts, years of international work, and a deeply practiced ability to adapt quickly.
I also brought patterns I did not yet fully recognize.
My patterns luggage included the instinct to anticipate and the reflex to solve.
I also brought the belief that being helpful meant being ready with an answer.
The habit of remaining composed, even when something inside me needed time to catch up was also part of this luggage.
Moving countries has a way of revealing these things.
A transition may look practical from the outside: boxes, documents, schools, work, housing, new routines. Internally, however, something far more complex is unfolding.
You are deciding which parts of yourself still belong in the life ahead. Which identities need to expand. Which strengths remain essential. And which strategies — however useful they once were — can now be released with gratitude.
Every move reorganizes more than geography
When we move to a new country, we do not simply change location.
We enter a new system of language, relationships, expectations and social codes.
The person who felt competent in one environment may suddenly feel uncertain in another.
The qualities that once made us effective may need to be expressed differently.
Even familiar roles — professional, partner, parent, friend — can begin to shift.
Geneva asked this of me.
I had spent years moving between languages, institutions and professional worlds. I knew how to enter unfamiliar rooms. I knew how to observe quickly, understand the context and become useful.
Adaptation was one of my strengths. But adaptation can also become automatic.
When you have learned to adjust rapidly, you may keep adjusting long after the situation requires it.
You may become so skilled at reading the room that you stop noticing what is happening inside you.
You may become so focused on making the transition work for everyone else that you lose contact with how the transition is changing you. This is one of the quieter costs of competence.
The moment my child asked me not to fix it
The turning point did not come through a dramatic professional crisis. It came through one sentence from my child.
When my youngest started school, the experience was difficult. My immediate reaction was familiar: understand the problem, identify the options, intervene and make things better.
I began doing what I had always done well. I tried to solve.
Then my child said:, “Mom, I don’t need you to fix it. I just need you to listen.”
That sentence stopped me.
I was a conference interpreter. Listening was central to my work. I could follow complex conversations across languages, retain meaning, detect nuance and reproduce ideas accurately.
Yet I began to understand that professional listening and relational presence are not the same thing.
I could hear every word and still be mentally preparing the solution.
I could understand the content and miss the experience.
I could love someone deeply and still hurry past what they were trying to feel.
Nobody had taught me how to listen without immediately converting what I heard into action.
Looking back, I can see how tightly these ideas were linked for me. If I could solve the problem, I was caring. If I was useful, I was loving. And if I was a good parent, I should be able to make discomfort go away.
For much of my life, care, usefulness, and love lived unusually close together. Solving felt like caring. Being needed felt like loving. And parenting looked less like accompanying discomfort than removing it.
My child was asking for something different.
Not rescue.
Presence.
The workshop that gave language to the shift
Not long after, a friend reminded me about a workshop in Geneva led by Siobhan Darrow.
Siobhan had been a CNN war correspondent and was raising twins who, like my child, attended Ecolint. She had since become a marriage and family therapist and coach.
Her workshop focused on resolving conflict through the art of listening. It was overbooked, but she allowed me to join. At the time, it felt like luck. Looking back, it also feels like one of those moments that arrives precisely when we are ready to understand it.
Siobhan spoke about the demands of parenting and once observed that motherhood could be more demanding than war reporting because, in a war zone, you sometimes get a break.
The comparison was striking, but it was not the drama of the statement that stayed with me. It was the recognition beneath it.
Parenting can require a form of continuous emotional availability for which many of us were never prepared.
We may know how to manage tasks, solve practical problems and organize a family.
But staying present with another person’s distress — without rushing to remove it — is a different capacity.
It asks us to tolerate uncertainty and to remain connected when we do not have the answer. It also asks us to stop treating every difficult emotion as a problem that must be fixed.
Listening is not passive
One of the most important things I learned is that listening is not a pause before speaking.
It is an action in itself.
Real listening requires us to notice what happens inside us while another person is speaking.
Do I become anxious?
Do I start rehearsing advice?
Do I feel responsible for making the discomfort disappear?
Do I interpret their feelings as evidence that I have failed?
Do I leave the conversation mentally, even while appearing attentive?
These reactions are not signs that we do not care. Often, they come from caring intensely.
But care without awareness can become control.
We may start managing the other person’s experience because we cannot tolerate our own response to it. This happens in families. It also happens in leadership.
A team member brings uncertainty, and the leader supplies the answer too quickly.
A colleague expresses frustration, and we move immediately into reassurance or correction.
Someone we love is struggling, and we become so focused on improving the situation that they no longer feel accompanied inside it.
Listening asks us to stay long enough for the person — and sometimes the problem — to reveal more.
What we inherit about danger and emotion
During the workshop, I also found myself thinking about the stories we inherit. I have not lived in a war zone in the literal sense, although I experienced the proximity of conflict during the early 1990s.
The immediate danger may pass, yet families can continue organizing themselves around its logic. Vigilance becomes normal. Emotions are carefully contained. Readiness turns into a way of life. Beneath it all sits an often-unquestioned assumption: survival depends on staying useful and never asking for too much.
Because these adaptations are rarely named, they are easily inherited. They shape how we lead, parent, work, rest, and respond when life becomes uncertain.
Sometimes they appear as resilience or exceptional competence. At other times, they reveal themselves in our inability to simply stay with pain — our own or someone else's.
When discomfort has long been linked to action, listening can feel surprisingly exposed. Action offers relief. Presence requires us to stay.
When a nervous system has learned that every discomfort requires a response, doing becomes easier than listening. Action softens the tension. Presence asks us to remain long enough to feel it.
Fifteen minutes without an agenda
During the workshop, Siobhan shared a practice that stayed with me.
A wise woman had once advised her to spend 15 minutes a day with her children as though they were the last 15 minutes they would ever have together.
When family life became difficult, she returned to that practice. Not to create a perfect moment, to teach, fix or improve.
Simply to be there.
She added, with humor, that the practice could also be useful with a partner.
The idea was simple enough to place on the refrigerator. But its implications were larger.
Most of us do not need more time as urgently as we need a different quality of attention.
Fifteen minutes without correcting, planning, checking a phone or preparing the next task can create more connection than an entire day spent physically together but mentally elsewhere.
The practice is not really about imagining loss. It is rather about interrupting automaticity.
It asks:
What changes when I stop treating this person as part of the machinery of my day?
What becomes possible when I meet them as a human being whose inner world I do not already know?
Living soul to soul
During the coffee break, Siobhan mentioned that she had learned Russian while working in Russia for CNN. She was trying to remember an expression that conveyed a particular kind of closeness between two people, a sense of living in deep harmony, almost soul to soul.
The phrase did not come to me immediately. Only on my way home did it return from my Soviet childhood: жить душа в душу. Literally, it means to live “soul to soul.”
It describes harmony, closeness and a way of being deeply attuned to one another. The phrase stayed with me because it captured something I was beginning to understand.
Connection is not created by solving every difficulty. It is created by being present enough for another person to feel that they do not have to carry their experience alone.
Living soul to soul does not mean avoiding conflict. It does not mean constant agreement.
It means staying connected without needing to erase difference, discomfort or uncertainty.
What Geneva asked me to leave behind
Moving to Geneva began a larger period of recalibration. Transitions often require mobilization.
We organize, perform and solve because many practical things genuinely need to be handled. But after the move is complete, another question emerges:
Which version of me has arrived here?
I had brought with me an identity shaped by movement, responsibility and reinvention.
I knew how to rebuild, how to enter new systems, and how to help.
What I needed to learn was how to stop mobilizing when mobilization was no longer necessary.
I needed to distinguish responsiveness from vigilance, support from rescue, listening from problem-solving, and adaptability from self-erasure.
I did not need to abandon the qualities that had carried me across countries and careers.
They had served me well. But I needed to update the pressure underneath them.
That is one of the deeper tasks of transition.
We do not simply ask, “What should I bring with me?”
We also ask, "What deserves gratitude but no longer needs to lead?"
How countries shape who we become
Every country I have lived in has changed me.
Moldova gave me language, complexity, resourcefulness and an early understanding that identity is rarely simple.
International work expanded my sense of possibility and taught me to move between cultures and institutions.
Switzerland brought me into another rhythm, one that made some of my strengths more visible and some of my automatic patterns harder to ignore.
Places influence our personalities because they reward different behaviors. They change how loudly we speak, how quickly we trust, how directly we communicate and how much of ourselves we reveal.
They influence our relationships because each transition redistributes roles. The competent person may become dependent. The familiar expert may become the newcomer.
The parent who usually has answers may suddenly be navigating a school system they do not yet understand. These shifts can unsettle us. They can also make us more curious and spacious.
Living in different countries has taught me that identity is not a fixed structure.
It is a conversation between who we have been, what our environment asks of us and what we consciously choose to become.
The beginning of a different kind of leadership
My child’s request—“I just need you to listen”—became more than a parenting lesson.
It became part of the foundation of my work, a lens through which I started seeing a recurring pattern. It gradually reshaped how I think about people and change.
Over time, I began noticing how often high-performing people are trained to function rather than feel, to respond rather than reflect, and to maintain control rather than remain curious.
Many of us become the capable one, the calm one, and the person others rely on.
We learn how to anticipate needs, solve problems, and keep things moving. From the outside, this often looks like strength. Internally, however, it can become a state of permanent mobilization.
Yet the shift is not about becoming less effective or less helpful. It is about creating enough inner space to choose a response rather than be driven by one.
Sometimes leadership requires an answer. Sometimes it requires a decision.
And sometimes the most intelligent, regulating, and respectful thing we can offer is our attention — undivided, unhurried, and free from the need to fix.
What transitions can teach us
Every transition asks us to cross two thresholds.
The visible threshold is external: a new country, role, home, relationship or chapter.
The second is internal. It asks us to reconsider the identities and behaviors that once helped us belong.
Some parts will travel with us. Others may need to be acknowledged, thanked and released.
I remain grateful for the woman who knew how to adapt quickly, mobilize under pressure and solve difficult problems. She built a life across languages and countries. But she no longer needs to enter every conversation first.
There is now room for another response.
A slower one.
A more curious one.
One that does not assume that love must arrive carrying a solution.
Sometimes, it arrives by listening.
A question to carry with you
When someone you care about shares something difficult, what happens inside you first?
Do you become curious, or do you begin preparing the solution?
And what might change if, for a few minutes, you allowed listening to be enough?
Questions this story may raise
How does moving to another country affect identity?
Moving countries changes more than location. It places us inside new languages, expectations, relationships and social systems. This can unsettle familiar roles while revealing which parts of our identity are deeply rooted and which were adaptations to a particular environment.
Why do capable people often try to fix instead of listen?
Problem-solving can become a form of safety, care and belonging. When someone is used to being reliable, another person’s discomfort may trigger an automatic urge to act. Listening requires enough inner regulation to remain present without immediately taking responsibility for changing the experience.
What is active listening in parenting and leadership?
Active listening means giving another person focused attention without preparing an answer, correcting their feelings or rushing to solve the problem. It involves curiosity, emotional presence and a willingness to let the person fully express what they are experiencing.
Ambition Without Exhaustion is for those moments when the ways you learned to succeed remain powerful, but the pressure beneath them no longer belongs in the life you are building.
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