I spent the summer interviewing some of Denver’s most accomplished and successful women as part of an internship. One of those women said something to me that completely changed the way I think. Something I’ll never forget.

She’s the CEO of her own technical engineering training company, so you can imagine the conversation I had with her was one that left me scrambling to keep up. A brainiac, yes. But her spirit of giving and compassion for others is what struck me most.

She’s spent the last several years raising awareness about the harms of female genital cutting/mutilation, specifically in Kenya. She’s also been an advocate for those girls, a cause that has become extremely important to her.

The words she said during our interview in June that haven’t left my mind for even a moment since went something like this (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here):

“I realized that there’s no reason I was born as a middle-class, white female in America in this time and not as a starving child in a third-world country, afraid of physical mutilation and disease. When I look at those girls, I see myself, just a little bit different.”

When you put that lens on your world view, when you realize that you aren’t so different from your human brothers and sisters all over the world, everything changes.

I’ll never see the world the same way, thanks to the words of one woman.

That’s what I’m looking for in every interview I conduct, in every story I write. Something that alters what I once believed. Finding that gem isn’t easy, but once you have it, everything changes.