8 Habits of Successful Intercultural Communicators
Developing the right habits is one of the most effective ways to increase your intercultural communication skills.
One of the main problems in intercultural communication is that it requires us to pay conscious attention to both our own behavior and the behavior of our communication partner since both sides have internalized completely different cultural scripts.
Cultural scripts themselves are habits — the kind of habits that we have learned as part of our cultural socialization process. In that sense, they are habits that you are sharing with people from your own cultural background.
For example, this could be the way in which you are addressing somebody in a superior position to you, ways in which to behave with a stranger, or the customs around what to do or say when you are coming late to a meeting.
Not having the same cultural scripts makes it necessary for us to consciously reflect upon the behavior that we are using in order to reduce the chance of creating misunderstandings to a minimum.
In other words — we are forced to suddenly actively think about our behavior as opposed to simply being able to act based on our gut feeling.
The habits that I will be talking about in this article are therefore not going to be habits about how to behave in intercultural communication encounters. Rather, they are habits that help you to reflect about the communication encounter itself.
Habits like these directly translate into effective behavior since they are automatic responses to certain internal feelings, rather than a particular external situation.
So let’s get right into it.
Habit #1: After every intercultural communication situation, carefully reflect about its outcomes
Perhaps you can’t afford to do this when you were dealing with people from your own country, but in intercultural communication situations you simply have to if you want to gain any significant learnings from them.
Here, you can ask yourself questions like the following:
- what behaviors did the other side use that confused me/that I didn’t understand?
- how did the other side perceive my behavior?
- have I achieved the outcomes I was looking for? What were the reasons for my success/failure?
- in what ways do the other person’s behaviors/beliefs different from my own?
Habit #2: Always try to understand the other side’s motivations behind every behavior
Keep in mind that one of the primary reasons why intercultural communication situations fail is because the two sides have completely different belief- and value systems.
One of the most difficult aspects of intercultural communication is therefore to understand the beliefs which are underlying the other side’s behavior.
Consequently, during any intercultural communication encounter you should ask yourself questions like these:
- what are the beliefs and motivations underlying his or her behavior?
- in what way does his or her perspective on this issue differ from my own?
Habit #3: Question your beliefs and assumptions on a regular basis
Being grounded in one’s core beliefs is one very important aspect of having a solid sense of self.
Nonetheless, beliefs are just that: beliefs.
Almost all assumptions we are making about the world are subjective and a result of the cultural conditioning that we have received by living in a particular environment.
In other words, while being confronted with people from other cultural backgrounds, by definition we will constantly face situations where our own beliefs differ significantly from those of the other side.
Therefore, it is very important to see every encounter with somebody from another culture as a learning opportunity. As an opportunity that can help us to recognize wrong ideas we held about the world and thus refine our own worldview.
Habit #4: Seek out uncomfortable situations
Within the realm of intercultural communication, discomfort usually means one of two things:
- you are facing a situation where your own beliefs are being put into question
- another person’s behaviors are displaying a completely different set of values than anything you have ever experienced
Either way, they are both learning opportunities. Seek them out actively and learn to appreciate discomfort as something that can help you to grow.
Habit #5: Practice mindfulness
Mindfulness is an incredibly important skill for intercultural communicators. It allows us to pay close attention to a large number of factors, even the smallest of which can have enormous impacts on the outcomes of our communication process.
Some of these factors that we need to pay close attention to include:
- our own emotional responses to the other sides’ behavior and vice versa
- behavioral patterns which may differ between both cultures
- our general feelings about the other culture we are trying to understand and how they affect our perception of it
- any hints that can give us a better understanding for the other side’s deep beliefs and values
Habit #6: Suspend Judgment
There will always be situations where certain aspects of the other culture will evoke negative emotions within you.
In these situations, it is easy to judge certain behaviors or ways of thinking of the other culture by placing negative labels upon them. Whether it is ‘foolish’, ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’, either of these negative labels will prevent you from gaining a real understanding of the other culture.
This, in turn, will not only make effective communication with people from the other culture impossible, but it will also make it impossible for you to learn and grow.
Of course, we all judge ‘other’ cultures in one way or the other. But the important point is to suspend judgment until we can claim that we truly understand the other culture.
Otherwise, we will misjudge the culture for something that it is not.
Habit #7: Always double-check any assumption you are making about another culture
When we are trying to analyse the behavior of people from another culture, we always tend to come to conclusions about their underlying beliefs and motivations too quickly.
It is natural that we do have this tendency as it helps us very much in dealing with people from our own cultural background. Our experiences in this cultural environment makes our intuition quite strong in predicting other people’s way of thinking.
Even if you have spent a significant amount of time reflecting on the behavior of people from another culture, you should still remain cautious about coming to any final conclusions on your own.
Rather, it makes more sense to double-check with other sources that have more knowledge of the other culture compared to you. This could include:
- other expats who have spent significantly more time in this cultural environment than you
- local people who also have experience in living abroad and understand both perspectives
- other resources such as articles on the internet, books written on the subject and so on and so forth
Habit #8: Constantly ask for feedback
One very common outcome of intercultural communication situations is that while we personally have perceived it as successful, we do not notice that the other side perceives things completely differently.
In other words, we are misinterpreting the other side’s perception of ourselves, our behavior and the outcome of the communication process.
Consequently, one very important habit to develop is to regularly ask other people from the other culture with whom we are interacting about how our behavior came across to them.
Or, to describe the situation to a friend of yours who understands the other culture better than you do, and to ask him how he or she would have perceived your behavior.
So, what are the next steps?
Developing the right habits is one of the most important steps that you can take in order to become a more effective intercultural communicator.
Now, I recommend asking yourself which of these habits you are personally still weak at. Once you have identified an area of weakness, think about what steps you can take in order to become more effective at it.
For more articles on intercultural communication, feel free to visit my website.
