4 Strategies for Digital Nomads to Develop Intercultural Skills
If you are a digital nomad, you are exposed to new cultures all the time.
However, whether or not you are making the most out of this experience utterly depends on how you are approaching your interactions with people from the “foreign” culture as well as your own personal internal journey.
“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.” — Marcel Proust in Tribe of Mentors
As is implied in this quote by Marcel Proust, the real goal of traveling to different countries should be to enhance one’s own learning experience to the point that we develop the ability to look at the world from a completely new perspective.
And yet, developing this ability is not the natural response of people when they are moving abroad.
Rather, the first reaction is perhaps curiosity, but often combined with a degree of conscious or unconscious rejection.
The reason why this is the case is that throughout our lifetime, a certain cultural conditioning has been ingrained into our psyche to the point that we perceive the behavioral patterns of our own culture as “normal”, while we perceive other behaviors patterns as “strange”.
In this article, I am therefore going to look at 5 different strategies that will help you to overcome that natural response to new cultures and learn to look at the world from a new cultural perspective.
Strategy #1: Be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of constant movement for purposes of cultural learning
Remember, one important goal for moving to another country is to be able to look at the world from the perspective of the local people of that culture.
One of the main problems that digital nomads are facing is that often the time span during which they are living in another culture is relatively short (perhaps only a few months or so).
During a time-frame like this, it is simply impossible to internalize a culture’s way of looking at the world to the point that we can become comfortable and confident actors within this particular environment.
You have probably heard of those people that are called “bi-cultural”. They are people who have internalized a second belief system to the degree that they are comfortable to act within it almost to the same degree as a local would.
To be very frank — as a digital nomad, you are unlikely to ever reach that point.
But, living the lifestyle of a digital nomad has its very own advantages.
A digital nomad who has a high degree of cultural sensitivity (defined as the ability to perceive nuances of cultural differences to a high degree), will be able to adjust his behavioral style to the new environment quite quickly.
Through experience with various different cultures, a digital nomad will be able to perceive patterns of behavior and how they fit into the cultural system as a whole much faster than somebody who has experience with living in a single foreign culture for a long time.
All cultures in the world share certain similarities and certain differences.
A digital nomad has the right mental toolkit to analyse a new culture extremely quickly in terms of the similarities and differences of one culture to the other.
He or she will then be able to see the patterns underlying these behaviors and adjust his or her own behavioral style accordingly.
But still, this does not imply gaining the ability to completely put ourselves into the perspective of somebody from the local culture.
In order to do so, a skill called “intercultural empathy” is needed. This skill essentially consists of two different qualities:
- the knowledge that somebody from a different culture may have an extremely different perspective from one’s own
- the ability to put ourselves exactly into the perspective of that person and experience his or her feelings
Digital nomads excel in the first skill, but they may struggle with the second if they haven’t internalized the host culture completely. In order to do so, staying in one culture for a certain period of time will be necessary.
For an optimal learning experience, my advice is therefore to balance short-time stays in new cultures for several months with at least one long-term stay of several years.
Strategy #2: Make active choices around which countries to live in and learn as much about a culture before moving there
Nothing has really prepared me for the first time that I saw a woman who has literally “kept her child on a leash” a few years ago.
Today, probably everybody has seen this behavior by traveling mothers mostly coming from East Asian cultures at some point of their lives.
Luckily, when I first encountered this behavior, I had at least some knowledge of collective cultures.
This gave me the general sense that the mothers’ behavior would probably have something to do with the fact that mother and child are perceived as one entity, and that the child is so dependent on the mother that she should never allow the child to be far enough not to be in direct sight of the mother.
For somebody from an individualistic culture, this behavior is extremely difficult to understand. After all, we want our child to develop into an autonomous and independent person.
My basic understanding of collective cultures at least prepared me not to be so shocked by this behavior that I immediately dismissed it.
For digital nomads, it is extremely important that they have some degree of preparation before they are moving to another culture in terms of the cultural environment they will encounter.
Since you will not have years of time to adjust yourself to the belief system of the new culture, you should make the most out of your experience by at least having an intellectual understanding of the culture before moving there.
Before moving to another country, you should have already made your choice that there are particular values and beliefs in this culture which fascinate you and that you are interested in learning as much about them as possible, perhaps even to the point that you make them your own.
Strategy #3: Focus on seeing behavioral patterns by comparing the different cultures you have encountered
No two cultures are the same.
And yet, there are always certain similarities between any two cultures as well, even if the cultural distance between them is very high.
Cultural distance in this case refers to what degree the two cultures are different from one another.
For instance, the German and the Austrian culture are probably going to be significantly closer to one another than the German and the Indonesian culture.
And yet, there are always certain similarities that we will be able to observe. After all, we are all human and, in essence, we share the same needs with one another.
By analyzing the similarities and differences between a new culture and the one’s we have already been exposed to, we will be able to understand the behavioral patterns of any given culture much better.
When you are moving to another country, this may the second one where a high priority is placed on hierarchy, which is collective and which at the same time places a high degree of importance on harmony.
While the manifestations of how these tendencies show themselves will be quite different, nonetheless there will be some patterns that will help us to make inferences from one cultural perspective to the other.
Using your experiences from other cultures helps to understand a new one, but only while applied with extreme caution.
Expecting too many similarities will cause us to remain stuck in the cultural perspectives which we have already internalized. Expecting too many differences makes us forget that we are all human and share the same needs.
Strategy #4: Constantly try to put yourself into the perspective of whoever you are interacting with
The ability to put ourselves into the perspective of a person from another culture is one of the key skills for digital nomads in order to develop intercultural competence.
There are three situations in which doing this is important:
- While communicating with the other person
- After the communication encounter has happened
- During the preparation for meeting somebody from a new culture
During the process of communicating with somebody from another culture, we constantly need to ask ourselves:
“Considering his or her values, what is his or her perspective on this issue likely to be? In which way is my own perspective on this issue making it hard for me to understanding his or her viewpoint?”
Once we have faced a communication with somebody from another culture, we should take time to reflect on questions like these:
“Looking backwards at this communication process, in which ways was her perspective different than I would have expected? Which values or beliefs does she seem to hold that I do not have a clear understanding of? “
When we are preparing ourselves for a meeting with somebody from a different culture for an important meeting for example, we should also prepare ourselves by reflecting on how our perspectives are likely to differ:
“Keeping the values and beliefs of his cultural background in mind, how is his perspective on this issue likely to be different from mine? What assumptions do I make about the world that might make it hard for me to understand his perspective?”
So, what are the next steps?
As a digital nomad, you will have to work hard to develop the necessary intercultural skills to function in a large variety of cultural environments.
In that sense, you will need to develop the ability to read another person’s emotions, understand the values and beliefs that are underlying this person’s behavior, and compare this person’s cultural background with those you are familiar with.
Only by acquiring these three skills, you will be able to really take on the perspective of somebody from another culture.
Now, I would like to leave you with one simple question to ask yourself that will not take a lot of time to answer at all, but might make a lot of difference in your life:
Can you honestly say that whenever you are communicating with somebody else, you are trying your hardest to understand his or her perspective on the world?
Remember, the most valuable aspect of moving to other countries is to develop the ability to see the world from a new perspective.
If you are not putting all your energy in actually trying to take on the perspective of these other people, then you should really ask yourself if you are really maximizing your learning experience during your stay abroad.
I hope this article has been helpful for you. If it has, please don’t forget to 👏 and to share it with any friends for whom you might think it might be helpful, too.
Have a lovely day!
Tim
