Episode 45
Revisiting: Grace Boker Mungkaje - Deciding when to climb the tree.
With Trisha working with Papua New Guinea expatriates this week we wanted to revisit her interview with Grace Boker Mungkaje.
Grace Boker Mungkaje a Forensic Auditor from Papua New Guinea. Grace speaks about growing up as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) in the USA, returning to PNG and making cultural shifts as she was selected for opportunities and scholarships around the world. Her awareness of the need for cultural shifts began young as she was told not to climb the trees in her village in PNG after returning from the USA. We also speak about the need for Auditors to have cultural intelligence in their work as they build bridges across organisational cultures.
Grace's global moves included relocating to Australia where she met Trisha - then as she was awarded a Chevening Scholarship, completing a Masters Degree in Forensic Audit and Accounting she moved to Wales. Later she was selected to be a part of the Young Pacific Leaders group an Australian award– and then more recently selected to be a part of the US Professional Fellows program where she went and worked in the USA.
You can connect with Grace on LinkedIn especially if you want to learn more about her work supporting people in their scholarship applications.
If you want to learn more about TCK's from Tanya Crossman, the resources on her website and in her books are a great place to begin.
Transcript
[00:00:14]
[:[00:01:04] Trisha: It's been a wonderful experience, not only to help others navigate cultural transitions. but also to reconnect with people I've mentored in the past who are now dear friends. One of those people is Grace Boker Mungkaje, someone who's left a lasting impact on me and whose story perfectly illustrates so many of the themes we explore here on the podcast.
[:[00:01:54] Trisha: This conversation highlights a concept that I've spoken about before and really is central to all of these podcast episodes. Cultural metacognition, the ability to think about our thinking when we interact with people who are different to us. Grace exemplifies this in the way she reflects on her experiences, adapts to new environments and remains deeply committed to preserving her own cultural roots while learning from others.
[:[00:02:44] Trisha: This is a powerful example of leveraging cultural intelligence to build bridges and create meaningful change. And as you'll find out as you listen to episode 10, she's helping people now as they learn and grow and apply for opportunities to expand their abilities and their competencies and their knowledge globally.
[:[00:03:18] Trisha: They show us how cultural intelligence is not just a skill for navigating work or travel, it's a mindset that can enrich relationships and communities no matter where we are. So whether you're new to The Shift or you've been with me for a while, I invite you to listen to this conversation with fresh ears.
[:[00:03:58] Trisha: Today I'm speaking with someone who has made many cultural moves and who is high on all of those aspects of cultural intelligence, and she's brought them to support her not only on those cultural moves, but also in her day to day work as a forensic auditor.
Welcome, Grace. Grace Boker Mungkaje.
[:[00:04:19] Grace: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.
[: [:But I do have sort of aspects of all those different cultures that I that I find are things that I favour and I use every day, depending on like where my personal interactions or professional interactions. So yeah. But like, pretty much there's a good thing about every culture.
[:You appreciate how different we are as human beings and how we see different things from different cultures. And then at the same time, how different we are and how that's that's perfectly okay.
[:[00:05:48] Grace: So different because the current cultural setting I'm in in Papua New Guinea to be different is often it's often a challenge, especially if you're a female.
It’s, we're brought up to be sort of conformist and we we listen to the head of the family, be that our father, our husband, you know, a partner or your boss at work.
[:So I can go between. Yeah. So, I think my favourite part about the early interactions in other cultures that don't sort of live in collective societies is the ability to switch between individualist and then group.
[: [:[: [:
[00:06:52] Trisha: So I'm interested then to think about a time when you have experienced a real shift, you know, when you might have suddenly become aware of a new perspective. Can you tell me about a time like that?
[:And and so when I was in that setting, when I moved to PNG, I think the hardest thing to for me to grapple with, I think I remember two major incidences or not, incidents sounds bad. Situations.
[:[00:07:45] Grace: Moments. Moments I became aware. It was when we returned and it was sort of our first holiday to go to a village.
So every Papua New Guinea has a village that they go home to for holidays. And so I come from a little island and so I went with my family and then I saw my male cousins climbing the trees.
[:And so I started climbing, but then my grandmother came down and she scolded me and she was like, you're not you're not supposed to be climbing the trees. That's something for your cousin brothers to do. And even the term cousin brothers, that's not something I had been exposed to in the U.S. because in the U.S., it's very it's your nuclear family and it's brother is only by biological link.
But in the Pacific,
[: [:[00:09:18] Grace: that what I was doing wasn't acceptable and so I came down.
And I remember it was quite sad. I remember like I came down and then I just sort of went and sat on the side and watched them sort of climb the trees. And I think she never, She didn't she didn't come over and explain to me why I couldn't do it, but she expected that maybe my parents would have taught me that.
[:[00:10:00] Grace: you know, not aware of it.
But I think seeing it applied in that setting and being that young, I think it caught me off guard. And so I never really knew, you know, why I couldn't do that. And later on, as I went through life, as I went on to further my education and then when like began working life in Papua New Guinea, I realized that there will be many moments where I'm
[:And I have to decide when is a time when I will apply what I learned in my American cultural upbringing, which is to speak up. And as long as you justify yourself and to stand up for what you believe in, then that's perfectly fine. And as long as you do it in a respectful manner, you're not harming other people,
[:So when to apply that and then when I apply my Melanesian cultural values, which is there's sometimes that I cannot do certain things, it's not acceptable for me as a woman. So that one incident is something that I make reference to a lot when I talk to people about moving between worlds.
[:But our culture is still something we bring in even to the workplace.
[:[00:11:54] Grace: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. To climb the tree or to get off the tree.
[:[00:12:15] Trisha: and then as an adult working in your profession, you were selected to represent your Papua New Guinean organisation and moved to Australia for a year of learning and growth, which was when we met.
And and after that you moved back to PNG. Then a few years later you were awarded a Chevening scholarship, which is, you know, a real privilege and honour
[: [: [:But I think you were the first person that taught me the word TCK.
[: [: [:Everybody has a different culture down to yeah, every district it's very multicultural
[:[00:15:20] Grace: I feel to someone from an emerging economy, it's the same thing.
I couldn't I couldn't raise it. They they were just like, oh, well, you were just being disobedient. That's why you had attitude to get off the tree. But through meeting you, when I went on that secondment to Australia, I don't know if you'll remember, but there was you showed us the iceberg of what is culture. What else? What are the things we see and what else is below it?
And then when you got to know me and then you were like, Oh, you're a third culture kid. And so I immediately went home, Googled a bit more, iceberg a bit more, and I read.
[:[00:15:55] Grace: I read some of the research being the nerd in which I've now learned to accept that I am.
[:[00:16:03] Grace: And then I realized, Oh, there's a wealth of information. There's people out there that understand what I'm going through. And so that really set the tone for when I went to Canberra and going to Australia, I realized also that Australians also differ from Americans. And so learning that that that shift as well, that okay,
[:Somewhere in there. And so learning, learning that was important I think for me. Canberra, the thing that stood out was meeting you and being introduced to the concept of TCK.
[:[00:16:42] Grace: So equipped with that, when I returned back to Papua New Guinea it helped because after my experience in Australia it also meant I moved up in the organisation and so that required me to be, you know, interacting with before I was sort of like I'd be like the intern, the understudy that went off.
[: [:[00:17:14] Grace: This time when I'm going to the client once again, I'm confronted with whether to climb the tree or not, because often the people I'm interviewing are older, they're male now, but now being equipped with what you taught me during the ten months and, and my exposure back into, you know, in Australian life and then coming back here, I find that it made me a bit more sure of myself, Because I now know that there are times where I need to sort of back off and there are times that I have to do.
I have to go forward and climb that tree because it's either there's a deadline to parliament or things that I need to do for work.
[:[00:17:59] Grace: Yeah, absolutely. That really helps me.
[: [:[00:18:32] Grace: It rained a lot up there. Why are you doing that move? And I said, Well, for the sake of the degree that the specific degree I want, there are only a few places in the United Kingdom, let alone the world that offered this course so that's where I'm going in search of education, that's where I'm headed.
And they're like, okay.
[: [:[:
[00:19:28] Grace: And I was like, Oh my God, it's that. It's their language. It's so beautiful. I remember feeling I actually got goosebumps at the train station because I thought back to Papua New Guinea and how we have over 800 languages. That's what we like to tell everyone, including what I'm telling you today. I really don't know how many of those 800 actually exist currently
[:I'm pretty sure that some of the last speakers of certain languages are dying off because as Papua New Guinea becomes more educated, our our language for education and business is English. And the other other language we speak here Pidgin is sort of a mixture of English. It's like broken English. And so we're losing our mother tongue and none of our signs are in our languages.
None of our announcements are in our languages. But I can understand why, because we have over 800.
[:[00:20:26] Trisha: and it might just be a small, small group that speaks your language. Yeah. Yeah.
[:[00:20:41] Grace: for all those 800. So the phonetics comes in as well, and that will take some time. And that's still something that like that needs to be done.
[: [:[00:21:30] Grace: and then I have my American mind switched on.
You describe it to people that go, Do you suffer from multiple personalities? What is it? But it is actually the lenses that I will shift. So even speaking, it's not just about speaking the language that they speak English in the U.S. they speak like English. In Wales, they speak English in Australia. But even the freedom of thinking, even if it's in the same language, for me it changes depending on where I'm at.
[:[00:21:59] Grace: Yeah.
[: [:[00:22:29] Grace: Okay, so time is something that I see is there's a big stark difference from other cultures. Papua New Guinea island time is very it's it's yeah it's interesting.
[: [: [:[00:23:53] Grace: We will have to divide our time along the way when we finally reach our destination.
And, there is also the concept of in our culture, if you don't greet someone, even if you're rushing automatically, they think you're being rude. And so nobody wants to be perceived in their community that they're being rude.
[:And for us, respect for elders is very important in our culture. And so even if I'm running late, if I bump into somebody that's, you know, an elder that lets a friend of my dad or my mum, I have to stand there and talk a bit.
[:[00:24:35] Trisha: And pay them the honour of time. Yeah,
[: [: [:[00:25:28] Grace: and the person that was actually my manager had a very similar shift as me. She she had originally come from Nepal, moved to Canada, spent her high school years there and then moved to the US and there was something that she told me that that sort of cements further on how to deal with whether to climb on the tree or to get off the tree because apart from the cultural influences on my own, me, my sort of personality
[:So it really gets and you're absolutely that's why I'm laughing when you asked me that question, because you know me too well many times where I just want to run up the tree and shake the tree and be like, Hey, I'm here. It needs to be done, you know? But I she told me because she I observed her I observed in the office that I was attached where she works.
[:[00:26:56] Grace: she because I had already shared with her some of the struggles I will have and the kind of things that I want to do.
And and she realized that she had to share that with me. And she also realized that I had observed her be quietly bold because we had discussed a game plan for for this this sort of situation that she was in. But then when we went before the people that she had to sort of present to, she she took a different turn and see my face because my dominant
[:I was like this was not what we discussed. What's going on but in the end it it it she achieved her objectives and that's when she she realized and she she knew that I had noticed that. And then I told her later on, on the drive back when she was going to go, leave me at my Airbnb,
[:And she said, Yeah, I saw your face in the crowd. You were like, Oh my God, that's not what we planned, right? You had this calm smile. And I said, Because I realized that you still achieved what we we needed to do, what you were trying to do. And so when after she dropped me at my Airbnb and journaling, which is, you know, something that you reminded me to do when, when you when I was in Canberra and it's still something I do today,
[:And that's when I reflected back and I was like, it's still again about when to know when to climb the tree, get off the tree. And so it's that reminder again. And I think that is something that I, I, I needed to be, I, I needed that now, sort of the shift in my career more than ever, I'm now dealing with more sensitive things
[:And so I have to be very, very careful on which trees I get on and breaks and when is the right moment or to quietly climb up. Yeah. Being. And so that was a good reminder
[:[00:29:14] Trisha: and so they need to build bridges across organisational cultural differences, or if they're external, they're coming into an organisation and they might need to build the bridges to get cooperation and understand the organisation.
And so that sounds exactly like the sort of situation that you're saying that sometimes you'll go in and you'll go, I can climb the tree,
[: [:[00:29:57] Grace: you did that wrong. And then oftentimes I find that it's just about building that repertoire with the client and it's all about respect as well because we can't get the information.
The thing with audit is that we're not there to point out everyone's mistakes. We're there to improve the organisation and their processes.
[:And there are two types of auditors and, you know, there will be people that will go in and be like, I want this, this is that. And they're very cold towards the client. And there are others that, you know, will have to go with a higher sort of emotional intelligence to realize you're not going to get much information.
And it's a skill that you have to learn.
[:People skills are very, very important. And I find that there's there's times when I use the American sort of upbringing that the culture I learned from that if I've sent a polite email to the client, I've sat down and talked with them, but they're still sort of delaying.
[:Yeah, well, okay, I sent that email and now I need this because we're only here for three weeks. This right given. And then when I go in, I often go in very Melanesian because we are operating in Papua New Guinea.
[:But like that's usually that's sort of what I did as a financial compliance auditor and I was for most of my career I've been an external auditor. So usually when you're coming from the outside in, people are always very edgy when you go in. But that edginess is edginess is sort of increased now when I go in as a forensic investigator, forensic audit as well, fraud, all of that
[:I'm here to find fault this time. I'm here to find where with the fraud occurred, where where the internal control processes were not occurring the way they were supposed to. And that led to this.
[:But it might be perfectly okay. There might have just been a process with sort of the the data entry between the manual process to the system
[:But when you're a forensic audit, so you're suspicious of everyone.
[:[00:33:06] Grace: Yes. But at the same time, you still have to build trust to start to figure out and shift through. Okay, this is what this person said,
[:Being from a certain part of Papua New Guinea, we all can tell where each of us, we can tell what part of Papua New Guinea you're from.
[: [:[00:33:54] Grace: or is it their own internal politics or if I listen to this person, is that a cultural bias? Because that's they're from the same part of Papua New Guinea I'm from. So I try not to tune in too much to people that are from the same part as me because I find that it clouded my judgment in remaining impartial.
[:[00:34:35] Grace: come and see me after that.
So that's how I sort of try to weed out what I hear.
[:[00:34:57] Trisha: And so that CQ that you sort of, you know, you've built up over the years, built up as a TCK and then refined on all your that would be really holding you in good stead in those situations as well.
I'd love also to ask you, because I know this is something you've been doing a lot of lately about supporting other Papua New Guinean people who are applying for opportunities.
[:And I know you're helping people understand application processes and practice interviews and all of those things, which I think is absolutely amazing.
[: [:[00:36:03] Grace: My little group is called WRait Meri
[:And so I've sort of played around with that and have it sort of written. W R A I T, like writing. I like WRait Meri
[:I like we, my team and I also review essays.
[: [:[00:37:29] Grace: It was an amazing experience. A lot of people reached out to me, wanted to have coffee or informally send me an email like that that they wanted to apply and noticed that after all the coffees of the emails when it came time to actually click submit,
[: [:You have what it takes
[:[00:38:45] Grace: And I was like, Oh my God, I haven't studied half the things they've listed.
Do I have what it takes? And so that's when I realized that I think that could be what people are also going through and not applying When it came time for the due date. So we started this, I'm happy that now I've seen that slowly the number of applicants that have approached me, it has increased in terms of clicking submit
[:All it's going to cost is, you know, probably you know, your ego if you get a rejection email. But once you get over that, you know the process and you can try again next year.
[:But I wanted everyone to know that there are people out there that have have tried many times and they still got in in the end. So it's all about how many times you apply.
[: [:[00:40:03] Grace: Yeah. So apart from providing, you know, the formal things in terms of reviewing essays and all of that, it's also getting people in the right headspace and getting through imposter syndrome, which is something we all go through.
[:Just the way you sort of highlighted TCK to me. And then that opened up a whole world for me.
[: [:[00:41:11] Grace: And at the time that I had applied, I thought I'd only serve five years.
And I was like, And that's when that was a moment when I was like, No, I'm going to climb that tree, because.
[:[00:41:21] Grace: It's my timeline
[:[00:41:23] Grace: Climb that tree. And I also held myself to a different standard because I saw I had reconnected with my friends from childhood, from the US, and I saw that in the US. People as young as 25 were going and doing their master's 25, 23, and I held myself to that ruler and I was like, No, I think it's within my reach.
People I work with are doing that right now, so I think it's an opportune time and so I'm going to go for it. And so I tell them that story to encourage them because many of them are also going through that.
[:You know, what kind of mother are you? What kind of, you know, you leaving behind your family, all of that.
[: [:And I was like, Well,
[:[00:43:14] Trisha: took the leap,
[:[00:43:19] Grace: and I thought, Wow, okay, there's something there's something good happening from climbing that tree.
Despite me being told not to do that. And so now I'm thinking, I don't think it's only just within our organisation. It's probably happening in other organisations. And now through what I do with the writing coach coaching, I realize that it's happening all around
[: [: [:[00:44:25] Trisha: Thank you for your time. It's, it's wonderful.
[: [:[00:44:40] Grace: Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. And yeah, I really hope that. I think a bottom line is that if there's only if there's one person that listens to this and goes and decides to climb a tree, whether that be applying for a scholarship or a job or just starting something new in their life, I hope. I think they do.
[: [: [:[00:45:24] Trisha: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Shift. Grace's story is such a powerful reminder of how cultural intelligence and cultural metacognition can help us navigate complex transitions while staying true to ourselves and our communities. As you go about your week, I invite you to reflect on the moments in your life where you've had to adapt across cultures, whether that's moving to a new country, moving back to an old country, Working in a diverse team or just encountering new perspectives closer to home, perhaps even within your own family.
[:[00:46:17] Trisha: It's how we continue to grow. this learning community. Until next time, remember the most profound changes often start with those small moments of seeing things differently together. Take care. I'll talk to you soon.
