My guest this week, Kristine Madera, was in her early twenties, backpacking alone from Beijing to Moscow. She ended up in a hostel in old town Dali, in a room where sixteen people, both genders, shared space for a dollar a night. She’d just arrived alone, and she kept thinking the same thing: okay, what do I do now? Then a guy named Adam walked in, said hey, and told her everyone was hanging out across the street. An hour later she had sixteen new friends.
That’s not luck. Kristine has spent years since then turning it into something teachable: a specific, learnable way to build community with strangers wherever she lands. She calls it belonging, and belonging has almost nothing to do with fitting in. Get her free guide. The Art of Belonging, twelve skills for creating connection in any culture, at KristineMadera.com.
In this episode:
- A Dali hostel, sixteen strangers, one hour
- Belonging to yourself before belonging anywhere
- The Papua New Guinea micro-tribe trick
- Small talk as the door, not the destination
- Reading who’s too much and who’s just curious
- Pacing yourself: the one-hour rule for introverts
- Practicing curiosity as a skill, not a personality trait
“I can belong in the world and appreciate and experience that culture without giving up who I am.”
Kristine Madera
What actually makes belonging different from fitting in?
Kristine doesn’t love the word believe but she’s come to experience the first level of belonging as feeling like you belong to life, to yourself, before you belong anywhere else. She pointed to marketing as one of the places we absorb the opposite message, one that tells you there’s a right way to be, and you’re not quite there, but this product or this follow will get you closer.
I’ve lived in places and taken trips where I didn’t feel like I belonged, and if I’m honest, I don’t always know that I wanted to. That’s close to what I got into in Why Alone Isn’t Lonely When You Travel Solo After 40. But if you’re craving connection, Kristine’s answer isn’t to force belonging where it doesn’t fit but rather to separate belonging to a place from belonging to yourself. So you can appreciate a culture, even let it change you, without adopting anything from it.
What’s the trick a Peace Corps trainer taught her in Papua New Guinea?
During Peace Corps training in Papua New Guinea, a trainer pulled the women aside and told them something that’s stuck with Kristine ever since. The local women build micro-communities wherever they go, and the method is simple: eye contact, a smile, a comment about something obvious (the heat, the sunset, whatever’s true in the room). She calls the resulting connection micro-tribes. It’s a specifically Papua New Guinean practice, but it still works almost everywhere else.
It matters for women traveling alone who are seeking community. Build a micro-tribe in the first hour and you’re never really alone. If something goes wrong, you already have people who have your back.
Why isn’t small talk actually small when you’re traveling?
A lot of the women Kristine talks to say they don’t like small talk. She gets it; she’s said the same thing herself. But she draws a hard line between small talk for its own sake and small talk as a door. When you’re building community in an unfamiliar place, small talk is the low-stakes opening that lets both people gauge whether there’s a fit before anyone goes deeper. Nobody wants a stranger on a train asking about her deepest fears in the first thirty seconds.
She practices it in the most unglamorous place there is: the grocery store line. A one-word answer tells you something. A longer one means you can keep going. Either way, you’ve practiced the muscle somewhere the stakes are close to zero, so it’s there when you need it. Kristine isn’t the first guest on this show to build an approach around meeting people on the road. Gina Cambridge, in From Giggling Through Cairo to Leading 30+ Solo Travel Retreats, gets at the same instinct from a different angle.
What do you do when someone comes on too strong?
Not every cultural mismatch is a red flag. In the former Eastern Bloc and elsewhere, people asked Kristine rapid, personal questions because she was often the first Westerner they’d ever spoken with. Some cultures need more familiarity to feel comfortable. Her advice: notice which one you’re dealing with. Step back if someone is genuinely too much. Stay curious if what’s actually happening is that someone is hungry to understand a world they’ve only seen on a screen. It’s the same muscle I got into in Deciding to Speak Up When You Travel Solo, knowing the difference between a boundary worth holding and a moment that’s just unfamiliar.
How do you pace connection as an introvert?
Kristine describes herself an introvert who used to be shy, and isn’t anymore. One of her tools for that shift is simple: give yourself a limit. An hour, two conversations, then permission to recharge before you try again. You don’t have to go from zero to a hundred to build the skill. And you don’t have to apologize for needing quiet, even with someone you just met.
What’s the invitation for this week?
First, find something culturally unfamiliar to explore. There’s no shortage of videos on YouTube about places and histories you don’t know yet. You don’t have to book anything. Just open the door and see if something pulls you in.
Second, practice talking to somebody new every day, even briefly. Take a different route through your own office and say hello to somebody you don’t usually talk to. Strike up a conversation in the grocery store line. Join a donut chat in Slack. That’s the muscle you’re building before you ever need it on the road.
A small invitation
If you want somewhere to keep working on this yourself, come find us in the Skool community.