Interconnected Essentials for Successfulness: Thank You, Peace Corps
Chase Chisholm
National Head of Service at Wall Street English Myanmar; English Educator and Teacher Trainer, Voiceover Talent, Script and Content Writer, Editor, Graphic Designer, Photographer
Another Peace Corps Week has come and gone. Another year I find myself about a week behind posting something about it. 15 years since I was in the beautiful thick of my Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) experience in Guyana, South America (2008-2010). 15 years ago, I was immersed in a classroom of students – all in need of an individualized education program before I even knew what an IEP was.
Together, we learned.
They taught me how to harness my passion into being an educator. I taught them how to use computers for vocational purposes.
When Peace Corps Week comes and goes every year, I take time to reflect on what serving in Peace Corps has meant. Much continues to manifest in ways I could have never imagined they would when I accepted that invitation to serve. Not a day goes by without elements of my Peace Corps training and experience being utilized.
While Myanmar over the past decade or so has certainly set a new benchmark for what it means to be challenged (over and over again), my challenges as a PCV prepared me for all that has happened since, for all that is happening now, and for all that will happen.
So much of what I was trying to make sense of back then, those strategies learned for Peace Corps success, makes total sense now – especially as I often find myself in similar personal and professional contexts.
Here are six interconnected essentials for successfulness I gained from Peace Corps service:
1. It all starts with successful community integration.
Community entry refers to?integrating into a specific group of people. And community can take on many different forms. From a host family to an entire neighborhood, a team to a whole company. For Peace Corps, the goal of community integration is to ultimately be able to identify ways to sustainably support needs by collaboratively working with its members. It is also a way to coexist for survival.
It is crucial to take the first few months of Peace Corps service to successfully integrate into a host community by means of demonstrated integration tactics. Successful community integration makes a PCV’s experience so much more meaningful, allows a PCV to accomplish so much more. Because mutual trust, understanding and respect have all been established first.
I build upon these learned maneuvers to integrate wherever I go, in whatever newness I become immersed within. A move to a new city, a journey to a new country. The first few weeks of a job. I take time to stop by the local convenience store. I get to know the ins and outs of the work my colleagues do. I interact with neighbors I see every day – even if only through smiles. I observe, take notes. I remain aware of my own perceptions and adjust them to changed perspectives as needed.
2. If you want to successfully make a change, take steps to change behavior first.
The act of changing behaviors takes time. Lots of time, sometimes. And without effective community integration as a base, you do not have your bridge’s planks in place to succeed.
Focusing on the necessary stages of behavior change is vital. Acknowledging that change does not happen overnight or even over the span of many nights, but that it is more a process, is core. A process that includes potential relapse.
The key, I have found, is keeping the desired change in behavior in mind. As an aim. Visualize it and get others to be able to see it beyond whatever gap that needs to be crossed. Then navigate how to get members of your team, your community, to that point of shared awareness. Across that bridge with you.
3. It takes a village to succeed.
The Peace Corps’ approach to development is centered on helping people develop the capacity to improve their own lives. Efforts must be focused on people, not things. Successfully integrating, striving to change behaviors, are both people-centric initiatives.
Often PCVs find themselves in literal villages. But, villages, communities, take on different forms. Simply put, ‘it takes a village’ means to involve the collective strength of others in their own betterment.
Using the Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) as a tool guides people to take part in their own development for sustainability through a series of discussions and activities leading to identifying solutions that revolve around inclusivity. And putting into practice the Community Content-Based Instruction (CCBI) method facilitates the incorporation of pertinent issues, topics – content – to meet the needs, interests and realities of a community’s learners. This is a fundamental aspect of what we do as a team, with our students, at Wall Street English Myanmar today. To stay relevant. To evolve. To succeed.
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4. Data quantifies success, but hard-to-quantify moments create the support needed for bearing the heft of favorable outcomes.
While it is important to be able to quantify the progress of projects with data, realize that serving as a PCV, working abroad – life in general – is so much more than numbers. The art of effectively being able engage in cross-cultural exchange often takes the greater part of the day-to-day.
As it should.
Because informal, seemingly nonstrategic interactions line up.
A regular chat with your fruit-selling adoptive local mother brings with it likableness, safety, gifted produce, that trust. Community integration at its finest. A laugh with a coworker over relatability that transcends cultural differences leads to more cohesiveness, a stronger team, a village in formation. Playing games with your host-siblings after training builds relationships that will last a lifetime.
These moments, nearly impossible to quantify, are just as important if not more so than the quantifiable. Being data-driven is a good thing. Being people-driven is a great thing. People drive data in profitable, in sustainable ways.
5. Successes come in all shapes and sizes. The big and small should all be celebrated.
Success in Peace Corps is evident through a combination of main assignment and secondary project work – the countable aspects of a PCV’s life – and honing intercultural competence to further connections and forge bonds with people. Success could look like securing the funding of equipment for a computer lab. It could also look like helping a student with Down Syndrome type faster, or just type at all.
PCVs who know that success comes in all these shapes and sizes, in both quantitative and qualitative ways, likely have the most productive and fulfilling experiences. The big, the small, and the mediums, should all be cheered!
Heck, in Myanmar, sometimes getting the padlock of my apartment door open when the key gets stuck and does not turn, at the same time a taxi turns up, is the biggest achievement in my day. If I am unable to even open that door, how will I successfully open doors through Wall Street English for others? Cheers to that!
6. Develop a resourceful mindset for success. And empower others to do so, too.
Having the ability to find creative ways to achieve positive results with limited resources is a success to be celebrated on its own. Peace Corps taught me not only how to do this, because I had to do it, but that it is an essential for success – primarily in emerging countries.
No power? Inconvenient and uncomfortable, but no problem. Teach computer skills to someone who cannot use their hands and without functioning technological devices let alone electricity to power the ones that do work? Sure!
In these Peace Corps moments is where the magic happened. Resourcefulness in action is magical.
Instead of dwelling on what is not there to work with, revel in the creative thrill of finding the potential of what is possible with what is. No matter how much or how little that may be. Adapt and be strategic about optimizing what (and/or whom) you must work with to overcome challenges, to find solutions. Just imagine what could be accomplished together in a team composed of people with a resourceful mindset.
Conditioning our thinking to able to have this mentality is a much-needed behavior change for some, particularly for those who work in the international development sector. Being fixated on what is missing, on what would make things easier – if only it were – seems to come all too naturally, right?
Peace Corps is often referred to as “the toughest job you will ever love.” While this sentiment is no longer accurate for me because I have experienced what I would consider tougher since, it does remain.
Peace Corps Volunteers need to integrate into unfamiliarity, strive to change behaviors for sustainability by seeking active collaboration from community counterparts, all the while working with limited resources, navigating new languages and cultural norms, so that lives will be impacted in hopeful ways.
I encourage you to incorporate these six interconnected essentials for successfulness into your own personal and professional growth today and every day.
Thank you, Peace Corps, for your teachings that keep on teaching.
I am grateful to be part of a company now, Asia Strategic Holdings, that allows the embracement of these foundations for success to be fostered within our workplaces, and that I get to be part of the creation of an environment that embraces such as well.