Hola todos! Seven weeks in, and as I sit down to write what is one of my final blog posts of this program, I find myself reflecting on something that has quietly been one of the most important threads running through this entire experience. Communication. Not just the language barrier, which is its own ongoing adventure, but the deeper, more subtle way that people here express themselves, build trust, and move through professional and personal spaces in a fundamentally different way than what I grew up around. This week’s prompt asks about the spectrum between low context and high context communication, and honestly, I could not think of a more fitting lens for everything this summer has put in front of me.

For anyone who has not come across this concept before, the basic idea is this. Low context cultures, like the United States, tend to favor communication that is explicit, direct, and self contained. If something needs to be said, you say it clearly, you put it in writing, and you do not expect the other person to read between the lines. High context cultures, which describes much of southern Europe including Spain, operate very differently. Meaning is carried not just in the words themselves but in tone, timing, body language, shared history, and the relationship between the people speaking. A lot goes unsaid because a lot is assumed to already be understood. Coming from Pittsburgh, where directness is basically a cultural value in its own right, stepping into a high context communication environment has been one of the more genuinely disorienting and ultimately rewarding adjustments of the summer.

The first place I noticed this was in the office. In my early weeks at Bond EMEA, I kept catching myself in meetings wondering whether a piece of feedback was actually feedback or just a passing observation. When a senior colleague would comment on a section of work I had contributed to, the response was rarely a straightforward “this needs to change” or “great job.” It was more often a thoughtful pause, a reframing of the original goal, or a question directed back at me about my thinking process. At first, I genuinely could not tell whether I had done something wrong or whether the conversation was just taking a different shape than I expected. It took me a few weeks to understand that those moments were the feedback, and that the expectation was for me to be attuned enough to the conversation to pick it up without having it spelled out for me. Once I started listening for what was not being said as much as what was, my ability to understand and respond to the team improved dramatically.

There was one moment in particular that stands out as my clearest example of a genuine miscommunication I had to work through. Early in the internship, I sent a fairly detailed written summary to one of my colleagues outlining my progress on a section of our training program and flagging a few open questions I needed their input on. I wrote it the way I would write any professional update back home, structured, thorough, and fairly long. I did not hear back for a couple of days, and when I did, the response was brief and conversational rather than point by point. I walked away from that exchange genuinely unsure whether my questions had been addressed or whether I had somehow missed the actual answer buried inside the casual tone. What I eventually realized was that my colleague had not been dismissing my message, they had simply responded in the way that felt natural to them, which was to have a quick verbal conversation rather than trade long written responses back and forth. From that point on, I started following up written questions with a short in person or Teams chat check in, and the quality of our communication improved almost immediately. It was a small adjustment, but it made a real difference.

Navigating all of this in a hybrid work environment has added another layer of complexity that I did not fully anticipate going in. On the days I am in the office, picking up on tone and body language comes naturally enough. I can read a room, notice when someone seems distracted or uncertain, and adjust accordingly. But on remote days, when all of that nonverbal information disappears and everything gets compressed into a Teams message or a video call, the high context signals that I have been training myself to notice simply are not there anymore. A message that might have felt warm and collegial in person can read as curt or dismissive on a screen, and I have had to become much more deliberate about adding context and warmth to my own written communication to compensate for what the medium naturally strips away. It has made me appreciate in person interaction in a new way, and it has also made me a more thoughtful writer in a professional context, which is not something I expected to take away from an international consulting internship.

Outside of the office, the high context nature of Spanish communication has shown up in equally fascinating ways. Conversations here rarely feel transactional. When Valentina checks in on how my day went over dinner, she is not just asking about my day. She is reinforcing a connection, making space for something deeper if I want to offer it, and communicating care through the ritual of the question as much as through any answer I might give. Learning to receive that kind of communication, and to reciprocate it in kind rather than defaulting to a quick “it was good, thanks,” has made my experience living here so much richer than it would have been if I had just kept treating every conversation like an information exchange.

What this summer has taught me about communication, above all else, is that the way you say something is just as important as what you say, and sometimes it matters even more. In a world that is only getting more interconnected and more multinational by the day, the ability to flex between different communication styles, to know when to be direct and when to listen for the layers underneath the words, is one of the most valuable professional skills a person can develop. I came into this program thinking I was a pretty good communicator. Seven weeks later, I think I am becoming a genuinely better one, and I am grateful every single day for the environment that made that possible.

¡Hasta la próxima!