Can Living Abroad Can Make You Less Judgmental: The Identity Shift - Jodi Cowles

Your identity can look solid from the outside and still feel unfinished on the inside. We sit down with author and entrepreneur Jodi Cowles, a true “Renaissance woman” who has lived more than half of her adult life across seven countries, and we get honest about what that kind of cross-cultural experience does to the way you see people and the way you see yourself. The surprise is how practical her takeaway is: you don’t need a passport to grow. Sometimes the real shift starts when you simply cross town, sit down for lunch, and choose curiosity over assumptions. 

We talk about judgment head-on, including the uncomfortable truth that we all form snap opinions and then call them “discernment.” Jodi shares how living overseas challenged her first impressions and helped her look for bridges instead of arguments, especially in a time when culture feels loud and divisive. Then we pivot into language learning, where pride gets humbled fast, and where the mechanics of communication can reshape how we think about responsibility, blame, and connection. It’s a conversation packed with mindset shifts, but it stays grounded in real life. 

You’ll also hear the story behind Joy’s World, Jodi’s bilingual English-Turkish project created to help her adopted daughter remember her early years and to support families trying to keep a heritage language alive. We close with an inside look at Blue Hat Publishing and Well Told, where Jodi helps first-time authors tell their stories well, avoid publishing scams, and build a professional book they’re proud to hold. If you’ve been craving more joy, more honesty, or a cleaner next step for your own story, press play, then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

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Transcript

Welcome And Big Question On Identity

SPEAKER_01 1:02

What happened with a person you lived your entire life building was only a small part of your identity or not not part of your story at all? Today's guest is an expert on rebranding yourself and discovering what many live a whole life and never realize. She's an author, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Blue Hat Publishing. Don't forget that name. And World Toe Studios also, she's a Renaissance woman, and the creator of Joy's World, a resource that helps bilingual children and their families thrive in their environment. Please welcome Jody Cow to the flowership. Excuse me. I know my show. Thank you for joining. Jody, good to have you here. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Thank you so much. This is the first time I've been on a live stream, so I'll try to try to make it entertaining.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Oh, you're gonna be gonna be fine. No problem today. You got

Meet Jody Cow And Her Work

SPEAKER_01 1:55

an incredible story and you're doing great things for others. So I'm excited about the combo. You've done something that most of us only dream about. You live more than half of your adult life in seven different countries. Some of us are trying to just do that on vacation. I even live there. So tell us what you think your uh perspective is from living in different countries. I know that we go into that with a lot of assumptions about what we think life is like, culture is like. I'm from New York originally. Before I moved down here to South Carolina, everybody that I was around, I lived with family and search thought South Carolina had huge billions in it, straw hats with a piece of wheat in their mouth, riding on horses in the 90s. That's what they thought. So when you grew when you went to uh different countries, what were your assumptions about it? What did you learn about yourself and other cultures?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Well, that's a that's a great intro for it because very much very similar. I I think the number one thing I learned

What Seven Countries Taught Her

SPEAKER_00 2:54

was that people are people, and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what I mean. There are cultural differences for sure. And some of them are really shocking and some of them are mild. But if you live long enough with another culture, they start to grade on you just because we're we're used to being with people who are like us. But I think people are people, and you find that out the longer you live in a different subculture, whether it's you know, New York to South Carolina or moving from Boise, Idaho to like a Muslim majority country, which in my age bracket growing up, we had us we had some very strong media around Muslims, for instance. So, you know, I mean, just like we we we seem to like to put people in boxes and then and then identify who they are. And man, I I think you no matter what culture you go into, no matter what neighborhood you move into, you'll find people who are warm and welcoming, and you'll find people who are big, big jerks, you know, it doesn't it doesn't matter where, but the more the more you get to get out of your microculture wherever it is that you're comfortable, and go across the street or across the state or across the world, you I think you your eyes get wider and your worldview gets a little bit wider, and you find out I think you find out a lot of things you you can be grateful for about you know your home culture that maybe you didn't know how the other parts of the world lived, you know. You you become less critical, I think, of of your own, your own culture and of other people. So it's it's so I'm so grateful for the years that I that I spent outside, you know, what I would consider my heart, my heart little subculture.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Oh, absolutely. They say the grass is always greener, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

I mean, the it's true.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

It's like, oh, I guess I was kind of wrong. You are you you are, I think you're gonna be probably the best person to answer this question. Hopefully, you don't you might be a little transparent. I realized in my latter years that uh a lot of things I didn't quite like about myself, and they've been around for a while. In your scenario, traveling to these new places, getting immersed in different culture, was there one thing you said, ooh, Jody? I don't like I don't like that part of you. Did you discover something like that?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Just one.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

If you want to give me three, I'll take it, but seven is too much.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

I transparency is my favorite thing. Like, let's have a real conversation. So I don't mind that at all. I I am I'm really judgmental. I have always hated that about myself. Even even just me just meeting somebody, I have three thoughts about them before we have a conversation, you know? And I it it's a personality tick that I have never liked. And I think that that was just squashed, living overseas. Just squashed. I mean, it's it's still there, it's still it still has a little heartbeat. But I think the meeting so many people that were unlike

Owning Judgment And Relearning People

SPEAKER_00 6:24

me and were unlike my first impressions of them really, really helped clear some of that up and helped me be a more just take people as they are and and look for the look for the good and look for the the bridges that we have together rather than looking for, you know, what to argue over.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

I like that. I like that. I know everybody can't, no, you may say they can, but a lot of people can go to other countries and live for extended amount of time. It's not their situation, it's not their life, but that need to be their desire. Can you give uh the people who are watching, listening, or who will on replay a hard truth? Because they can't go to other countries, they can't live the way you did. Can you give them a hard truth about pass their judgment on? Pass they kind of had that those preconceived notions about people before they get to know them. Speak to them straight. What would you say is something you need to deal with or a question you need to ask yourself? Help line everybody up. They can't all live in uh different countries like you did. Help them out today. What would you say briefly?

SPEAKER_00 7:36

I would say go across town and go get lunch somewhere you've never gone before and try to strike up a conversation. Go somewhere that you go to a part of town you normally avoid for whatever reason. You know, it doesn't. I mean, you know, don't put yourself in danger. I, you know, but but go somewhere where you don't feel comfortable because everybody, we've been home from Turkey for four years, and everybody that we talk to talks about how divisive our culture is right now, how we're just yelling at each other from our different, you know, we get into our little camps and then we hurl mean things at each other. Just cross the street, cross the cross the town. You

A Simple Challenge To Cross Town

SPEAKER_00 8:19

do not need to go overseas. Just take a 15-minute walk outside of where you normally hang out and get into conversation with someone who looks different than you, whose whose lifestyle is a little bit different. I bet you'll find some common ground if you're looking for it.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

I love that. I love that. I know you had some some funny stories of things that happened to you when you were in other countries. I heard something about a marriage proposal. I'm like, did the person that proposed to you have like said otherwise? I mean, what's what's going on? What's happening here?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

That is that is what happened. I've had I I worked for an international, yeah, I worked for an international aid organization for a number of years before I got married. And yeah, I got several proposals. One of them, I was in the desert in Senegal. We were, I was a, I was, I did video for our for our company. And we were in the middle of a little tent village, and the the third wife

The Wildest Marriage Proposal Story

SPEAKER_00 9:24

of an 80-year-old stroke victim asked me to be the fourth wife. And that was that was the craziest marriage proposal I ever got. I said, Thank you so much, and and I declined.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Was it because of his age or his account or other stuff?

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Irreconcilable differences in lifestyle, I think.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Copy that. Wow, that is crazy. That's crazy. Uh coming from where I mean my hometown is New York. I talk about it a lot because I learned so much about life in that place. It's definitely still a melting pot. I still interview folks who come from different countries and they go there and they migrate there, and they have to learn you know language and those kind of things. What can you kind of uh wax eloquent about you know the challenges of understanding other languages and how you see that as committed to the human condition, if you can do that? Can you put those two things together?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Well, I can. I think it's another relating back to your earlier question about problems in my own self and my personality. I think pride is an issue in in every human being, and nothing just obliterates your pride like learning another language. It's just it's so hard and it's so humiliating when you just make mistake after mistake. When I was learning Spanish, I was living in Spain and I had a three-year-old Spaniard make fun of me, little three-year-old girl. And I was mortified, you know. So I think I think learning, yeah, learning a language is so good for us. It's good for our pride, it's good for our brain, it's good for just helping you understand

Language Learning And Pride Getting Humbled

SPEAKER_00 11:17

how other people communicate. I mean, not just it's because it's not just translation. It's it's like in Spanish, what I learned in Spain, you we blame, like it's part of our part of our English language is who is responsible for this. And in Spanish, the I remember one one really interesting lesson was the pencil falls to the floor, not I dropped the pencil. Like even the way the language is is formed and spoken, there's less guilt than less less pointing out blame as we have in English. So I think even the even the process of learning a language opens you up to how other people live and makes you more uh open-minded.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

I'm trying to learn Spanish only for like 40 years now. I think I gave up. But as creative of Joy's world, kind of tell us the crux of what you do for these families. What are you doing there?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

I'm trying to help parents keep heritage languages alive. So my daughter was born in Turkey. We adopted her, and it was a long, drawn out, difficult process. So she didn't leave Turkey until she was almost four years old. We moved back to the to the states, and she's not gonna remember Turkey. That's a the because of her age, that's a fact of her life. And so I created the first book, I wrote the first book, Joy's World, to help her remember when she gets older. And it's a bilingual English-Turkish, and I got a Turkish

Helping Kids Keep Heritage Languages

SPEAKER_00 13:02

illustrator, and I sent her pictures of our neighborhood, and there's people we know. And I just did it, I did it to help her remember to kind of introduce American children to Turkey because Turkey is beautiful and it has, you know, people always think, let's go to France, let's go to England, but there's other beautiful countries in the world. Anyway, and but once I did that, I realized there were a lot of parents who are struggling, who there are a lot of, there's a lot of migration in our world now. And there are parents who are struggling to help their children keep a heritage language. So I I've created some more books and some some digital like weekly printouts just to give parents who are busy and stressed and feel guilty about their kids losing their original language to help them, you know, have something to do every day with their kid to try to keep their bilingualism alive.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

I know this could be a heavy task, but you're doing work to help people, I guess, enhance and flesh out and bring their stories to life. You're uh you're you're helping uh people use storytelling as a powerful tool. You tell us in a nutshell how you're doing that with blue hat and well told, kind of how you the vision behind that and what you are trying to copy, who you're speaking to. Maybe perhaps somebody could be ideal for you that's listening to the show, or we'll listen to it later on when we play. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

Well, I think story is about the most important thing telling our story, telling it well, and having somebody listen. So, what we do, Blue Hat Publishing, we are three authors who created an independent publishing company that we wished we could have had. And we just we take mostly first-time authors and we walk them all the way through the process, and they get a beautiful book at the end and their passion project, and they get to hold it in their hands, and it is so fun because that I mean, publishing right now is the wild west. Traditional publishing is going crazy and self-publishing you can do, but it's so it's so complicated and difficult

Publishing, Scams, And Telling Stories Well

SPEAKER_00 15:21

to get a beautiful professional product. So we're just coming into that space and and helping. And then Well told grew out of that with another friend of mine who runs a different publishing company. We were just complaining about all the scams that our authors are falling victim to because there's so many people, there's so many people taking advantage of the first-time author's enthusiasm and desire to get their book out there, and they don't know what moves the needle or doesn't. They don't know if this, you know, proposal that they get from somebody is really valid or if it's just, you know, a bunch of nothing. I think there's a lot of people taking advantage of this desire that we all have to tell our story. So well told is really simple, transparent. Here's some things that we know move the needle when you're trying to increase your audience. So we're just it's it's really a wide spectrum of trying to help people tell their stories, tell them well, and expand the amount of people who know about them.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Love it. Final segment. We normally do what I call a mirror check segment of the show where I have you speak to the people, you think it's pretty deep and intensive, but do your best with it. If we have somebody that's watching or listening today that is at a place in their life where they feel as though there's no need for them to change anything. They feel like they have been they've gotten along fine all these years doing what they've been doing. I know you're a nice person, you never want to come back them and come at them. I'm asking you to come back them today. I'm asking you to kind of share something that's gonna be a a needle-moving idea or mindset uh in a in a snippet of

Mirror Check On Joy, Grief, And Quiet

SPEAKER_01 17:11

time. How how would you speak to somebody who maybe is a new friend of yours or a relative who has that kind of mindset, that kind of mindset about for beliefs, cultures, and experience? What would you say to them to get them to stop and think half this is a better route? What would you say to them?

SPEAKER_00 17:31

I would say if you would take an hour of silent time and put your TV away and your phone away and go sit under a tree and think about your life, you would be amazed at what thoughts came to mind. And there and there are there are so many areas where we can experience more joy in our lives. But we're all prone to being satisfied with enough. It's fine, it's fine. But if you if you take the time to to look at your life to think, to think in quiet and thoughtfully, I think you can you can find new levels of joy, you can find new levels of healing. One of the hardest things I ever did last year was spend a year trying to write my memoir because my family and friends were badgering me about it. And it was, I woke up at five every morning and I wrote for an hour and I cried almost every day, but it was one of the most beautiful things I have done. It, you know, I I don't think everybody needs to do that, but I I am so I looking back on my life, I am so grateful. And I I think I shed some grief just by thinking it through. And I think we all have that. We all have grief weighing us down because of the kind of world we live in. And you can you can be more joyful. You just you just need to pause the busy life for a minute and try to try to think about it. Think about the people who shaped you in for the good and the bad, and just think it through and let some things go. You'll be lighter, you'll be happier, you might be can you can see things that you couldn't see before.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

I love it. Very profound. Thanks for being here, Jody, and sharing your story. I'm sure somebody's gonna hear this or watch this and they look at life a little bit differently. Thanks for your perspective. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

My pleasure. If this episode resonates with you, share it with somebody who loves travel, who values meaningful conversations, or who wants to just better understand people, cultures, or themselves. You can find Jody at Jodiecows.com. The links in the comment section, also in the show notes and episode description. And of course, subscribe to the Call Me Mr. You the Podcast on YouTube. We love your help there wherever you get your podcast from. You can find us. And don't forget, the difference between who you are and who you could be is found in what you do every single day. That's Jody Cows. I'm Mr. You. This is the Call Me Mr. You the Podcast. Thank you for joining the flights today. Have a fantastic day.