It Is Not Me. It Is My Western Mindset.

Jul 16

Okay. Maybe I have some sort of guilt for not having a mentor yet. It feels like an admin task I keep postponing. But honestly, with this heatwave in Europe I am not judging anyone for postponing life entirely. I mean 🫩 I am over summer already.

But yes, if you are wondering from my past posts: did she find a mentor? The answer is nope. And it is not as straightforward as it sounds. You sort of start mentioning it to people hoping a name will pop up. Some people will say that is a great idea while others will give you a look that says, how professionally immature are you to need a mentor?

I am not immature. At least I hope I am not.

I had this discussion before with someone saying I am not a marketer, while I see myself as one. I might not be Sol Price, yes, I have been listening to the Costco episode of the Acquired podcast, and I highly recommend it—but I do study business, and I do not feel unprepared.

Then Rhoda Bangerter, author of Holding the Fort Abroad, sent me this:

"Sometimes being mentored is having a few different people who feed our brains and challenge us, not just one."

Chef's kiss.

If this were a MasterChef competition for good wording, she would be taking the prize home.

And then my SIETAR brain went sideways, because it always does. It cannot receive an idea without immediately asking: Is the single mentor model a Western construct, and is my discomfort with it not a personal quirk but an inherited assumption I absorbed from a culture that places greater emphasis on individual achievement and formal career development?

Turns out: possibly.

Organizational researchers have argued for years that mentoring does not have to come from one person. Kathy Kram and Monica Higgins introduced the idea of developmental networks—the notion that people often grow through a constellation of mentors, peers, colleagues, sponsors, friends, and teachers rather than a single guiding figure.

Cross-cultural research also suggests that the familiar contrast between an individualistic West and a collectivist East is much more nuanced than we often assume. While many Western organizations have traditionally emphasized one-to-one mentoring and individual career progression, learning in many other cultural contexts has historically been embedded in broader networks of family, community, elders, peers, and multiple teachers. More recent research has also pointed out that countries across Latin America, including Brazil, often do not fit neatly into the classic individualism-versus-collectivism framework.

Which might explain why the traditional mentor model never felt quite right to me.

I grew up in a culture that runs on networks. The WhatsApp group. The cousin who knows someone. The grandmother whose kitchen is the actual place where knowledge lives.

The idea that one person should hold the entire map to where I go next is simply not how I learned most of the important things in life.

Rhoda named something I had been living without language for.

Distributed mentorship.

A few different people who feed the brain and challenge the thinking from different fields, different contexts, different countries, and sometimes completely different disciplines.

That shift, from looking for the one person with all the answers to building a network of people who each hold different pieces of the puzzle, feels strangely familiar, like identity migration itself, the discovery that wisdom was never supposed to come from just one place.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Kram, K. E. (1985). Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life.
Higgins, M. C., & Kram, K. E. (2001). "Reconceptualizing Mentoring at Work: A Developmental Network Perspective." Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 264–288.
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). "Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation." Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). "The Weirdest People in the World?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83.
Vignoles, V. L., et al. (2016). "Beyond the 'East–West' Dichotomy: Global Variation in Cultural Models of Selfhood." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(8), 966–1000.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

It Is Not Me. It Is My Western Mindset.

Further Reading

How to Prepare Your Child for Starting School in a New Country