Two Questions that Have Shaped My Work
November 3, 2025
by Dr. Mya Fisher
When I was invited to speak at a recent gathering of colleagues and fellows, I arrived with a set of notes and talking points — but by the time the evening began, I realized I wanted to do something different. My curiosity, the thing that’s always guided me, nudged me toward conversation rather than presentation.
So instead of the more formal talk I originally planned, I began by asking the group two questions.
Question One: Your First Time Away
“By a show of hands, how many of you had your first international experience when you were a student?”
I didn’t limit the timing of “student” to K-12, but included college and graduate school. It could have been as part of a formal study abroad program — or family travel, volunteering, or simply living somewhere new for the first time. After sharing some of what those experiences were, I further asked:
“What words would you use to describe that first experience? What (if anything) did it change for you?”
Hearing their answers opened the door to sharing my own story — my first time abroad, as a rising high school junior, spending the summer in Japan. I told them what that experience meant to me at the time, how it felt to write about it in my teenage diary, and what I see in it now, years later.
At the time, I didn’t yet have the words for what I was feeling. I just knew it mattered. I knew Japan would somehow be part of my life; I just didn’t know how yet. The feeling came before the language.
Looking back, that trip planted the seeds for the trajectory of my career and the work I am doing now — helping others see the invisible threads that connect our experiences across time and place.
Question Two: Experiencing history on the outside
“How many of you have ever experienced a major personal, national, or global event while outside your home country?”
Before sharing their answers, I paused, asking: What did that feel like? And how, if at all, did it change the way you think or talk about that event with people who lived through it at home?
For me, that moment came when I was living and working in Japan during the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the attacks of September 11th, and the start of the U.S. War on Terror. Like many people, those events were consequential and felt deeply by the me of my early 20’s. But experiencing them abroad changed me. It altered how I understood belonging, identity, and perspective.
It was the first time I came face-to-face with how profoundly our vantage point shapes not only what we believe, but how we communicate about it — most notably what can or cannot be said in polite company. Even today, there are parts of the narrative of 9/11 I can’t talk about easily with people who were in the U.S. that day. We saw the same images on TV, made the same panicked phone calls about loved ones in the air or on Capital Hill, listened to the same wall-to-wall news coverage following the emergency response, but it feels like I saw it through very a different window.
That experience became a turning point. I realized that difference isn’t something to fix or overcome. It’s something to hold — to acknowledge — and to learn how to move through with care.
Where the Two Questions Meet
Those two questions, and the tension between them, sit at the center of everything I do as an educator, a cross-cultural trainer, mentor and consultant. The tension is not always resolved. It is carried forward and shapes our relationships, connection and collaborations. So then I ask to you two questions,
How do we live, lead, and learn across difference without erasing it?
And what can reflection and empathy teach us about being human in a complicated world?
Every project I’ve taken on — from the Light Fellowship to the Iceberg Project — has been an attempt to explore those questions more deeply. Because when we learn to notice the invisible, and give language to what we’ve long felt but never named, we begin to practice what I call reflection as rigor — and empathy becomes not a soft skill, but a necessity for living a life in one’s fullness as a human being.