I grew up with accents:

  • my grandmothers’ East European and memorable ways they used English (“let’s not put him up on a pedastool”),
  • my parents’ Bronx patois,
  • my growing up in the South (one friend wanted to attend the Ivy League school she pronounced “Ya-yul,”),
  • my living in southwest Connecticut where they pronounce “pizza” as “a-beetz,” and
  • throughout my professional experience, in global banking, and multinational corporate finance, which grew my respect for those I worked with who spoke English as a second language to my only one, across the globe’s 2 hemispheres, in countries I visited, from regions, hailing from ethnic groups, and achieving their education therein.

These days zoom enables my connectivity and I am serenaded in words from colleagues in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Mexico, India, Ghana, everywhere! Their command of English, spoken and written, as their second language, is uniformly perfect grammatically, seasoned richly with their accents. Our nurturing conversations are a mélange (yes, a French word) from which I receive, process, learn, and benefit from their cultures, ideals, opinions, viewpoints orientations, and intonation. Yes, I offer mine as well.

I use several networking tools to stay in touch, zoom as the conduit (the silver lining of the pandemic era), but LinkedIn of course, as well as Pick My Brain, Octopus Movement, Erudites, Adrian’s Network, Gotham, SNG, Facebook (friends only), and more. Toss in ad hoc chats as mentors/mentee (I often wonder who’s menting whom?), and look forward to each pre-scheduled weekly, semimonthly, or monthly chat to keep the good times rocking and rolling.

We laugh, compare, enrich, suggest, discuss, analyze, co-collaborate, refer, recommend, and in such, we grow together.

They must hear my accent, but I do not, and as always the shades of meaning are in the (in this case) ears of the beholder.

On this leap day I “fly with them,” as a Brazilian banker expressed it (I suppose a Portuguese metaphor) and cannot accumulate enough “frequent flier miles” in contributed global perspective, it being so vast and impossible to absorb completely. I am truly fortunate to have their glorious support around me, 24/7/366.