A decade mostly remote does something nobody mentions. You get out of practice at people.
Not the work. The people. The small, constant, in-person stuff: the corridor conversation, reading the mood of a room before you open your mouth, holding a thread through an hour of faces rather than tiles on a screen. I used to do all of it without thinking. Remote let the muscle quietly waste.
The new role handed it all back at once, and then some. The office runs to thirty-odd nationalities, a dozen first languages before lunch. The shorthand I'd built over a career, the throwaway phrase, the assumed reference, the joke that lands in one place and dies in another, none of it travels as cleanly as I'd assumed it did.
So I had to slow down. Say the thing plainly. Drop the shorthand. Check I'd actually been understood, rather than assume the words had carried just because I'd said them.
It was humbling, in the useful way. I'd always thought of myself as good with people. Turns out I was good with people who shared my defaults.
Strip the defaults out and you find how much of "good with people" was just familiarity.
Now I prepare for a room the way I'd prepare for a pitch. It's slower. It's also better.