Please look under your car for penguins! If you saw this sign would you pay attention? A colleague of mine, previously an expat for 14 years in Japan, shared that after years of using Japanese, learning the language and really paying attention and listening deeply, he found himself back home needing to acclimatize in surprising ways. He missed the effort and the attention required to understand what was being said. The focus, the exercise of leaning in and listening was missing. Free of the “struggle” to communicate, comprehend and understand all day long, he found the return to his homeland a bit of a let down, like there was a challenge missing. He finally came to the conclusion that his brain was no longer stimulated in that particular way. He shared that life back in his home country was almost nauseatingly boring, that he missed the challenge that his brain had been programmed to adapt to. Expat adaptation arrives in so many packages, and languag