What Diplomacy Teaches Me
The importance of practicing humility in life
Wednesday Morning, 7.15 am Central European Time
I stumbled upon the CNN Europe show after I had finished my 90-minute morning workout.
I didn’t know what I watched, whether it was a program or ads, but I vividly remembered what I saw was a female host and one golfer in the golf course setting.
The host asked a question:
What do you think golf teaches you?
It was a simple but deep question, I thought, for a golfer.
When I had a business trip to Thailand a few years ago with a former Indonesian Consul General, who was a golf enthusiast, he explained to me how golf taught him an important life lesson.
You are drilled to establish a deep connection with someone you play golf with during the 4 hours of the game, he said. In a diplomatic setting, no wonder many deals can be made within the golf course, he continued.
But, after the CNN host posed the question, I didn’t focus on the answer from the golfer.
Instead, my mind was wandering.
Thinking and asking myself a question that I could not answer right away:
What does diplomacy teach me?
It was hard for me to pick one single word that could sum up the life lesson that I got from assuming my job as a junior diplomat for about six years.
Given the nature of my changing role, there has always been a lesson learned from each diplomatic activity that I could incorporate into my life — to be a better human being.
But one of the greatest lessons I carried over to my (non-working) life is:
the importance of practicing humility
When it comes to humility, Cambridge Dictionary defines it as:
The feeling or attitude that you have no special importance that makes you better than others; lack of pride
Yeah, the feeling of being no more special than others — making pride an unnecessary trait in our lives.
I learned this idea in the beginning of my career at the Directorate for Protection Citizens of Indonesian Foreign Ministry — as I wrote in my previous article.
There, I had an opportunity to interact with people from various backgrounds.
From well-educated to illiterate people who were forced to flunk out of elementary school — because they needed to work to assist their parents in earning a dime.
There, I also had an opportunity to realize that status and privileges are not permanent.
One day, I entered an immigration checkpoint at an international airport. As a diplomat, I could pass through the diplomatic lane, so I didn’t need to queue as long as any other tourists, even though we had landed from the same airplane.
The following week, I needed to accompany the victim of human trafficking whose house was located 4 hours from the capital of Western Kalimantan via road. The car was stuck in the mud around 11 pm in the middle of our journey. We had to wait a few hours in the middle of the forest until the rescue officer came before we could continue the trip.
No amount of diplomatic privileges could save me from this incident.
These experiences taught me that, in life, practicing humility is a must.
At some point, we have to interact with people from different backgrounds or be in a situation where our position, status, and privileges are no longer important.
Without humility, I might be reluctant to interact with people from different backgrounds.
Without humility, I might expect everyone to treat me the same in every situation.
You can imagine how upset I would be if I had a huge expectation from the local driver that the journey in Kalimantan would be smooth and without hurdles, as if I were entering the immigration checkpoint.
Outside my diplomatic life, I have a role as the eldest child in my family.
My parents retired a few years ago, and I have one younger sister studying at university. So, being a breadwinner in the family was inevitable.
There’s a trap of being a breadwinner, though.
The trap that made me feel deserved not to take care of my parent’s other problems and gave a burden to my sibling, let alone I was living far away from home.
As a breadwinner, I used to feel like a “winner” for financially supporting my family — other things outside the money problem were not my problem.
I’ve got a valid reason: I was busier than my sibling, right?
I’ve got a valid reason: I was working, and my sibling was “merely” studying, right?
Wrong.
These false assumptions derived from my “pride” made me less empathetic toward my sibling’s situation.
Just because my sibling was “merely” studying didn’t mean she was free from her college-life problems.
She had to deal with her problems like stress out with the minor thesis, quarreling with her boyfriend, or entering a quarter-life crisis — to name a few.
It wasn’t until I incorporated humility into my life that I was willing to care for my parent’s outside financial issues.
I swept away the status of a breadwinner and detached my pride so I could go hand in hand with my siblings — taking care of our aging parents together.
I started to check in with my parents more often.
I used my spare time more to listen to their life problems and ask if there was something I could help to figure out the issues.
I no longer feel special and better than my sister in my family.
I am just the eldest child who needs to care for everything about my parents — like my sister .
Doing so made me more connected with the most important people in my life, which is my family.
Derian Antonio Daniswara is an Indonesian junior diplomat currently posted in Zagreb, Croatia. He loves sports, especially football, and playing them is a second nature to him.
