TL;DR: Freelancing across four different cultures – US, Estonia, France, Spain – taught me that the norms I’d grown up thinking of as “just how people behave” are actually British social constructs, not universal laws. Erin Meyer’s Culture Map gave me a framework. A Nomad Summit talk by Renita Käsper this month gave me the reframe that finally made it click: don’t treat others how you want to be treated. Treat them how they want to be treated. And ask.

There is a moment in every experienced freelancer’s life when you realise the problem was never the client, or the language barrier, or the time zone. It wasn’t even that one editor who seemed to hate everything you wrote. The problem – or, more generously, the thing – was that everyone in the exchange was operating from a completely different set of unspoken rules about how humans are meant to work with each other.

And the reason it took so long to spot is that unspoken rules are, by their nature, unspoken. You only notice yours when someone else breaks them.

I sat in a room in Tallinn last weekend at the Nomad Summit and watched Renita Käsper open her talk on cultural intelligence with an Estonian grandmother’s proverb, evolved the excretory habits of poultry, and you had to be there. But it grounded us in the understanding that even the smallest, most absurd-sounding cultural detail from your childhood shapes what you assume is normal, polite, and correct as an adult. “I am grown up with sentences like that,” she said. “And whether you want or not, this is something you take with you.” I sat there thinking of Erin Meyer, and of every freelance client I had ever misunderstood.

The Culture Map came first

I read Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map years ago, not long after going freelance and finding myself in front of clients from wildly different backgrounds who did not, it turned out, share my British instincts about how professional relationships should feel. It made sense of so much retrospectively – meetings I had walked out of confused, feedback I had misread, silences I had over-interpreted. And it made sense of what was in front of me at the time, too: it gave me a set of scales to look at each new client on, and to ask myself where they might land on directness, trust-building, disagreement, hierarchy, and the rest, before I made too many assumptions about what our working relationship was going to feel like.

The core insight of Meyer’s book, if you have not read it, is that different cultures cluster along measurable axes – direct versus indirect feedback, task-first versus relationship-first trust, egalitarian versus hierarchical structures, and so on – and that the axis you were raised on becomes your invisible baseline. You do not notice it, because it’s completely internalised. Because of that everyone else’s behaviour looks like a deviation from a norm you cannot see from the inside.

The four countries where I have done the most freelance work make an accidental case study in exactly this.

United States: cheerful, direct, and unafraid of money

American clients were the first ones to genuinely rattle me. Direct, ambitious, comfortable talking about money and profit and success in a way that felt slightly indecent to a Brit. They wanted to know what my rates were, what my results were, and what I was aiming to achieve – none of which I had ever been asked in Britain without a lengthy preamble and at least one apology. And they did not have the patience for the classic British move of pre-emptively undermining yourself. Self-deprecation, delivered as I had been trained to deliver it, did not read as charming humility. It read as though I did not believe in my own work, and if I did not believe in it, why should they?

It took me a while to stop apologising for my own sentences and just quote a price. To be proud of the rates I had earned the right to expect. Once I did, the working relationships became much easier. American clients want to know you are serious, that you’re successful. Once you show them, they are some of the most generous, straightforward people to work with, and they celebrate individual and collective accomplishment, always bringing receipts.

Estonia: direct, intense, and comfortable with silence

Estonian clients were also direct, but the flavour was completely different. Punctual to the minute. Short on small talk. Uninterested in preamble. Praise more or less absent – but not because anything was wrong. Silence in an Estonian working relationship, I learned, is the sound of things going well. Nobody is going to write and tell you what a lovely job you did. If you have not heard back, nothing needed fixing.

This was harder for me to get used to than the American directness, if I am honest. British professional culture runs on a low-grade constant hum of encouragement, feedback, checking in. Estonian professional culture runs on the assumption that adults do not need to be reassured they are doing their job correctly. Once I stopped waiting for the reassurance, I found it liberating. But it required some recalibration of my nervous system, to stop asking if everything was okay all the time.

France: the editor whose calls I dreaded

Then there was the French editor whose calls I used to dread.

I say that as somebody who was, apparently, her best writer. I did not know this at the time. What I knew at the time was that every call went the same way: she would open my piece and dismantle it, paragraph by paragraph, with what I experienced as forensic contempt. I would come off the call feeling flattened, questioning my career and life choices, and stare at the ceiling for a while before I could face the rewrites.

When I finally met her in person – properly, at a lunch, months into the relationship – I mentioned, cautiously, that I found the calls stressful. Her face was a small masterclass in cross-cultural surprise. She was, she said, astonished. Rigorous feedback was her job. She was giving me her full attention because she thought I was good – better than the other writers, in fact, worth investing the time to sharpen. If she had thought my work was mediocre, she would simply have accepted it and moved on. The calls I had experienced as soul-destroying were, to her, an act of professional respect.

Erin Meyer would have called this instantly. France is one of the most direct-feedback cultures on the map, alongside the Dutch, the Israelis, and Russians. Britain sits at the polite-hedging end of the spectrum. My editor and I were reading the same conversation from opposite ends of a scale I had not known existed. Neither of us was being unreasonable, we were being culturally consistent – just with each other’s opposites.

I wish I had had that conversation on month one, but as an adult professional working globally I should have at least understood enough about cultural differences not to take it personally. She had literally learned in high school how to critique a piece of content presenting ideas, how to argue from different perspectives in a rigorous academic way, she was just doing her job.

Spain: go with the flow, because you cannot force it

Spain is where I live now, and Spain is where I have the least freelance business history – and I suspect those two facts are related. In personal life, Spain has taught me that you go with the flow, or the flow goes without you. A dinner starts when everyone arrives. A conversation happens when it happens. you can get told that important medical tests “probably won’t happen now because it’s going to be August soon.”

Here, business runs on relationships that are built slowly, meetings that overlap and interrupt each other, and a comfort with volume and emotion in professional exchange that a Brit needs a while to read correctly. What sounds like passionate disagreement is often just how people work things out together. What sounds like chaos is a functioning system with rules that are not written down.

I have done less freelance work with Spanish clients than with clients from anywhere else I have named, and honestly I think it is because something in me avoided it. Not consciously. But I was tired of translating myself, not just linguistically but culturally Spain requires a version of you that is willing to lean into the relationship-first mode and stay there. I do that in personal life; I have not built the business muscles for it yet.

That, too, is data.

What Renita named that Meyer diagnosed

Sitting in Tallinn last week, I realised that what Renita was saying was not new to me. Meyer had said much of it. What Renita did – and this is what a good speaker does – was give me the language for the thing I had been feeling for years but not quite articulating.

The line that stopped me was about trust. In task-first cultures (Germany, the Netherlands, the US, and – she pointed out, correctly – Spanish professional culture in significant ways too), the sequence is: you prove the work, then trust is granted. In relationship-first cultures (parts of Latin America, the Middle East, much of Asia), the sequence is inverted: you build the relationship, then the work becomes possible. When these two operating systems meet, the task-first person looks rude and transactional to the relationship-first colleague; the relationship-first person looks slow and evasive to the task-first colleague. Neither is a character flaw. Neither is a talent problem. It is a starting point that needs an explicit conversation, or you never get past the beginning.

That framing did something for me that Meyer’s chart had not, quite. Meyer had shown me the map. Renita had shown me what it feels like to be standing on one square of the map while your colleague is standing on another, and how much of your working life you can waste diagnosing each other as broken rather than different.

It also took me back to my earliest days of building a remote team in the first years of the millennium. The fact that my business partner was ashamed to say that I worked from home, and I quickly learned a habit of feeling I had to prove our capabilities before disclosing to a client that we didn’t have an office – “No problem, we’ll come to you!”

Today I feel strongly that remote work is all about trust. I didn’t have that perspective 20 years ago, nor did I have the intercultural experience I have now. Being able to show rather than tell, measure the value you’re creating, working out loud, are all remote competencies that we’ve had to develop as both employees and freelancers, and in some cultures the expectations around that are going to differ wildly.

The reframe

Renita ended with a line that has been rattling around my head ever since. It is a small edit to a phrase most of us grew up with, and it is the entire point of the talk.

Do not treat others as you would want to be treated. Treat them as they would want to be treated. And ask, and keep the curiosity.

The version we all learned as children – treat others as you want to be treated – is only useful if everyone else in the room shares your cultural defaults. In a distributed team, or a global freelance practice, or any modern working life that spans more than one national context, that assumption breaks the moment it comes into contact with someone raised in a different tradition. The person who applies the golden rule most enthusiastically, without checking, is often the person who causes the most quiet damage.

The reframed version asks something harder. It asks you to notice that your instincts about polite behaviour, appropriate feedback, comfortable silence, and reasonable directness are not universal. It asks you to ask. And it asks you to keep asking, because you will not get it right by default.

What working internationally actually gives you

There is an angle to this I want to end on, because it is what has kept me in this work for a long time and it is not, I think, said enough.

Working across cultures – really across them, not just parachuting a laptop into a different time zone for a fortnight – is one of the few experiences left in modern professional life that reliably shows you which of your assumptions are yours. Not human. Not universal. Not “just how people are.” Yours. British. Middle-class. Late twentieth century. Constructed.

Everything you thought was “manners” turns out to be a specific dialect. Everything you thought was “how meetings work” turns out to be a house style. Everything you thought was “how you build trust with a stranger” turns out to be one option among many. That is genuinely destabilising for a while, and then it becomes one of the most freeing things you can experience as an adult. You get to see your own defaults, choose which ones still serve you, and discard the ones that were only ever camouflage.

I’ve seen this in bringing up my British daughters who were in Spanish school from a young age, around Spanish peers and learning different ways of talking and socially transacting that would not wash in British culture, for example, having to educate them on how and when to actually use “please” and “thank you” in a way that would be expected around their British family (including their parents.) The Spanish might think it’s hilarious and sometimes call us the “por favors”, because of the way we sprinkle these words about in translation, but I would have cringed if either of my daughters had not said thank you to a grandparent putting a plate of food down in front of them.

Once you know the intercultural layer is there, you can start to notice when it is running the show – and pick a better prompt for the room you are actually in.

That, in the end, is what cultural intelligence is. Not a personality trait. Not empathy, though empathy helps. It’s a working practice, a daily habit of noticing that your normal is not the world’s normal, and asking the person in front of you what theirs looks like – so that you can build something that actually works between you.

And it is so worth it!

Renita Käsper spoke on cultural intelligence at Nomad Summit Tallinn 2026. Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map (PublicAffairs, 2014) remains the single most useful book I have read on cross-cultural professional work.