What shaped you?
I remember a question I was asked at a transport conference early in my career:
“What’s your background?”
Without hesitation, I launched into a description of my family. My mother is Ukrainian. My father was Croatian. I started talking about immigration, culture and where we came from. Standing beside me was a senior engineer and mentor named Denise. In an industry where female engineers were still relatively rare, Denise understood how the room worked.
“No,” she said. “He means your qualifications.”
I remember staring at her, confused. To me, background meant exactly that: background. The people, places, stories and histories that shaped me. To him, it meant credentials.
The funny thing is that Denise herself was already navigating the invisible rules of the environment. In the office we called her "Big Dennis." Another Denise was known as "Little Dennis." Looking back, I sometimes wonder why we didn’t simply call them Big Denise and Little Denise. Nobody sat down and decided Denise should become Dennis. Nobody wrote it into a policy manual. We didn’t consciously notice it happening. Yet somehow the adaptation made sense to everyone participating in that particular landscape. The culture already knew what normal looked like.
Looking back, I think that moment fractured something and set me on an inquiry that has lasted much of the last thirty years: reconciling the gap between what shaped me and what qualified me. For a long time, I assumed those two answers belonged together. Increasingly, I have come to appreciate that they are often treated as entirely separate conversations. Modern professional life has become remarkably skilled at asking people what qualifies them. It has become far less interested in understanding what shaped them. Yet the second answer often explains the first.
I have come to believe that identity cannot be understood apart from place. Before we develop beliefs, careers or qualifications, we are formed within particular landscapes, relationships and stories. When I work with leaders now, I am rarely interested only in their CV. I find myself wondering where they grew up, what stories were told around the dinner table and what success meant in the households that raised them. For some families success meant security. For others it meant freedom, service, sacrifice, survival or status. Long before someone acquires a title, a profession or a leadership role, something is already forming. I am interested in that earlier story because it often explains far more than a résumé ever could. People do not arrive at work fully formed. They arrive carrying the places that shaped them.
The sacred leaves traces
People sometimes assume my PhD in Spiritual Landscapes emerged from an interest in religion. It didn’t. Or at least not in the way most people mean. The inquiry began much earlier.
Growing up, I struggled to understand why some of my father’s Roman Catholic family refused to attend the wedding of my Greek Orthodox mother. As a child, the situation seemed absurd. Both families were Christian. Both believed in God. Both prayed. Both celebrated many of the same holy days. Yet somehow the differences mattered enough to create separation. I remember wondering what could possibly be more important than the things they shared. That question never really left me.
Over time, it evolved into something much larger. I became fascinated by the ways people organise meaning. Not simply what they claim to believe, but what those beliefs make visible in the world. Indigenous worldviews, settler histories, mythology, migration, psychology, homelessness, homeland, identity and belonging all found their way onto my bookshelves. I was circling the same question from different directions:
What shapes people so deeply that they organise their lives around it?
The question eventually led me to spiritual landscapes. I was interested in belief and how spiritual landscapes sit at the intersection of the visible and the invisible. They reveal how our values and notions of the sacred become embodied in the world around us. Landscapes become clues. They show us what communities protect, what they remember, what they name, what they honour and what they are willing to sacrifice for.
The sacred leaves traces. It shapes landscapes, communities and relationships, influencing what people celebrate, mourn and are prepared to defend. It helps determine what is worthy of preservation and what is considered expendable. If stewardship is sacred, the landscape reflects it. If extraction is sacred, the landscape reflects that too. The visible tells a story about the invisible.
I was trained as an urban planner within a largely Western educational tradition. At the time, I could see that different groups understood place in profoundly different ways, but I lacked the language to explain why. What has changed since then is my understanding of ontology and Being. Those frameworks have given me a way to describe how people inhabit different realities, and how transformation occurs when those underlying ways of being shift.
My doctoral research explored what I called Spiritual Geomentality: the relationship between spiritual belief systems and the ways people understand, organise and interact with place. I discussed the invisible architecture and value systems as part of understanding why the same mountain could be a resource to one group and an ancestor to another. Why a river could be infrastructure for some and sacred kin for others. Why one person’s homeland could be another person’s development opportunity.
The differences mattered because they revealed something deeper than preference. They revealed entirely different understandings of what was real, valuable and worthy of care. The sacred is the ultimate value criterion. Now with the ontological inquiry through the Being and Sustainability Frameworks, I have better access to understanding how those invisible value systems become visible in the world. Once you begin seeing them, you start noticing them everywhere, including in the movements and migrations that shape modern life.
Airports, roots and the myth of portable lives
Most modern identity theories begin with the individual. They ask who we are, what we value, how we think and what motivates us. Useful questions, all of them. Yet they spend remarkably little time asking where we became who we are. My experience has led me toward a different conclusion.
People do not exist outside place. Not because geography determines destiny, but because place participates. The small town participates differently than the city. A harbour participates differently than a mountain valley. A marae participates differently than a boardroom. A family farm participates differently than a high-rise apartment. The geographies we inhabit shape the stories available to us and influence what feels normal, desirable, possible and sacred.
Like fish unaware of water, we often stop noticing the environments shaping us.
Maybe this is why I have always loved airports. Not because of the destinations. Because of the feeling. The possibility. The movement. The temporary suspension of ordinary life. Airports are strange places. Nobody belongs there, yet everyone belongs there. They are designed for people who are between things. Between countries. Between identities. Between departures and arrivals. Between one version of themselves and another.
I remember buying my first truly expensive jewellery in a duty-free shop at Honolulu Airport. Stunning pearl earrings. I had never spent that much money on myself before. I walked differently afterwards. Slightly taller. Slightly bolder. Airports do that. Somewhere between departure and arrival, people give themselves permission to become someone new.
My life has unfolded through movement. A small town in Ontario. University. Toronto. Halifax. British Columbia. Melbourne. Brisbane. Tasmania. Auckland. Wellington. Singapore. Tokyo. Masterton. Alongside those places came countless airports, immigration queues, departure lounges and arrivals halls. Some people collect souvenirs. I seem to have collected geographies. Toronto Pearson still reminds me of family departures and arrivals. Frankfurt Airport carries memories of journeys to Croatia. Fiji arrives as warm air pressing against the aircraft door. Auckland feels like return. British Columbia feels like possibility. The places remain inside me long after I have left them.
Years before ontology or sacred geography, I found myself drawing trees. The logo for an early business, UBU, placed heritage and lived experience in the roots, heart, gut and mind in the trunk, and the different domains of life in the branches. At the time it felt intuitive. Looking back, I suspect I was already trying to make visible something that modern identity theories often overlook. We keep trying to understand the tree by examining the leaves.
A tree severed from its roots struggles to survive. Yet modern life often assumes people can relocate, migrate, transition and reinvent themselves indefinitely without consequence. We move cities for work, countries for opportunity and communities for affordability. Increasingly we move entire portions of our lives online, as though geography itself has become optional. I am not convinced it is. Place is not optional. Place is ontological. It is one of the conditions through which identity becomes possible.
We have become extraordinarily skilled at moving people, information, capital and technology across space. We have paid far less attention to what happens to orientation when place is left behind. What happens when movement outpaces meaning?
Home is not a location
Human beings have always moved. Migration, trade, pilgrimage and journey are woven throughout human history. The challenge is not movement itself. The challenge emerges when movement becomes detached from meaning. When belonging separates from place. When participation or success replace rootedness. When people become increasingly connected and increasingly untethered at the same time.
My babushka carried Ukraine with her long after she left it. Seeds dried on kitchen windowsills. Herbal remedies brewed in jars. She taught us how to make medicines from birch and plants that most of us walked past without noticing. Looking back, I realise she wasn’t simply preserving recipes. She was preserving relationship. A way of knowing the world that had travelled across continents and generations. Baba never took Canadian citizenship. Not because she disliked Canada. Canada became a residence. Ukraine remained home. As a child, I didn’t fully understand that distinction. As an adult, I think it may be one of the most important things she ever taught me. Residence and home are not always the same thing. One is administrative. The other is sacred.
Even our attempts to identify significant locations reveal something about meaning. UNESCO distinguishes between natural and cultural heritage, yet many of the places that influence people most profoundly would never appear on either list. A grandmother’s kitchen. A family farm. A local river. A church hall. A marae. The places that form us are not always the places institutions recognise as important.
What I have been trying to understand all along is not identity or place in isolation, but the relationship between people, place, meaning and the sacred. Beneath culture, politics, profession and performance, people are asking remarkably similar questions. Where do I belong? What matters here? Who are my people? What is worth protecting? What am I accountable to?
My PhD eventually taught me something surprisingly simple. There is no other. Across countries, cultures, faiths and communities, people search for meaning in remarkably similar ways. The details differ. The longing does not.
The question from that transport conference still lingers today. The room wanted to know what qualified me. I wanted to answer what formed me. Both matter.
If we want to understand leadership, identity, belonging or even ourselves, we may need to spend less time asking who people are and more time understanding where they became who they are. Long before people acquire qualifications, titles and achievements, they are already being shaped by places, relationships and stories that continue to travel with them.
The roots remain long after the journey begins.
Dr Jordan Marijana Alexander explores how identity, place, culture, and human systems shape participation in work, leadership, and contemporary life. She is the co-founder of RelateAble.Global. If this article has raised questions, sparked reflection, or highlighted something you're navigating as a leader or in your personal life, you're invited to book a conversation to explore it further. You can follow DrJMA on LinkedIn and Engenesis for ongoing insights, research, and practical resources.