I Expected a Corporate Box-Tick. I Got a Room Full of Laughter.

Today I wrapped up a Business Chinese training with the team at Titan, and my heart is full. I did not expect to feel this way about a corporate program, but here I am, already missing them.

When you’re hired to run a “Business Chinese corporate training,” you walk in with certain assumptions. Professional. Polite. A little transactional. A box on someone’s annual learning plan that you help them tick. And then, if you do it right, something else happens. The room stops being a corporate room. It becomes a group of real people fumbling through tones together, laughing at each other’s first attempts, slowly turning into a cohort that looks forward to the next session.

That’s what this group became. Honestly, I haven’t laughed that much in a classroom in a long time.

There’s a particular magic to teaching offline that a video call can’t quite manage. The energy bounces. A joke lands and the whole room catches it. Someone nails a tricky phrase and you can feel the table react. These were busy professionals with full inboxes, and they showed up anyway, game to look a little silly in the service of learning. You cannot teach a language to people who are busy protecting their dignity. You can teach it beautifully to people willing to laugh at themselves, and this group was.

We call it Business Chinese, but the goal was never just vocabulary for meetings. It was helping a team of Indian professionals connect more easily, and more warmly, with their Chinese counterparts. The gap between the two countries gets bridged one relationship at a time, in real rooms, between real people who decided to understand each other a little better. A corporate classroom is simply one more place that bridge gets built.

So thank you, Titan, for one of the most joyful programs I’ve taught. I’ll carry the laughter with me, into more companies, more rooms, more cities. There are a lot of bridges left to build. ☺️