Be Your Own Cheerleader Video Tip: When To ‘We’ and When to ‘I’
In another quick clip from Neelu’s LinkedIn Live with Kelly from Equipt Women, Neelu discusses the effect of growing up in a collective culture, in which the self takes second place to the group. This dedication to “We” can leave us open to exploitation in corporate America, until that is, we become aware of it.
Transcript
Kelly: So you talked a little bit about, you know, we versus I, but can you maybe go into a little more, you know, maybe a personal experience where it really sort of came to fruition to you or where you had this big “Aha!” or the tensions that exist between those two cultures?
Neelu: Yeah. So when we first moved to the us, my parents would get upset if I said, this is my toy. And so they were like, no, there's no such thing as my toy. This is ours. Everything's ours. Everything's shared. And so it took away that experience of like, something's for me and the rest is for others. It's very much about group harmony, and I think that's across the board of all Asian cultures.
And so that was like the, and I, I think at the time I was too young to, to know what was going on, but in hindsight, that's really how we operated. It's like you don't rock the boat. Everything's about keeping group harmony, and so it’s the complete opposite to when I would go to school and the teachers would say, so what do you wanna be when you grow up? And I was like, wait, you mean to say I have a choice? Like, I didn't think I had a choice. My parents expected us to be in certain professions because of just being Indian. And so the idea of having a choice and the idea of having a voice and an individual voice… I constantly danced between the we and the I from home where we were raised like as Indians from India, and then going into a US-based school.
I think the constant dance daily, I still don't, didn't have the terms or the language for it growing up, but now after being exposed to so much research on intercultural dimensions, realizing like I was dancing between two worlds and I'm not the only one I know other immigrants or children of immigrants do this constantly.
