[00:00:00] Trisha: I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us. Hello everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness.

[00:00:59] Trisha: What can we do to help ourselves and others to experience shifts when needed? I've been speaking to a range of experts. If you've been following along, you know that I've interviewed some people from different work backgrounds, and some people who are very experienced interculturalists and working to facilitate changes in people to help them understand culture and build their cultural intelligence.

[00:01:25] Trisha: Today, I'm doing what we've done before, practicing what we talk about, taking that balcony view to reflect and to shift our own ideas. So I'm going to spend some time drawing together the key themes that came through the different episodes.

[00:01:42] Trisha: So this is what have we learned so far, part five.

[00:01:48] Trisha: The first theme that was repeated was about value differences. And people in many situations discussed how value differences are impacting on the work they do. One of the first value differences referenced was direct and indirect communication styles and how when people come together who are using different communication styles, it can create barriers or people can make assumptions about people that are invalid.

[00:02:15] Trisha: And so building an understanding of those different communication styles can be vital to be able to build bridges of understanding. Another value difference that was referenced was power distance, which is when different ideas about status emerge and people treat people differently. Because they perceive status as something important.

[00:02:39] Trisha: That came across especially in Monique Toohey's interview when she was speaking about being a psychologist and working as a mental health professional. There was also different beliefs, value differences shared about expressing emotions. And we had the lovely story in Lucy Butter's episode where she was talking about facilitating in Egypt with people from Egypt, Jordan, and Scotland, and how the people from Egypt and Jordan occasionally leapt into song or dance in the facilitation session, which she said was not common for people from Scotland or England.

[00:03:16] Trisha: So this is a value difference around expressing emotion, whether we are neutral in our expression of emotion or whether we are effective. And I can imagine that one would have been quite surprising to some of those participants and yet quite glorious if you are open to experiencing it and enjoying it.

[00:03:34] Trisha: You might be able to draw the link and see that speaking about stereotypes also was woven through the episodes and how sometimes we can use them in a way that's not helpful. I loved the fact that Joanna Sell, who's the storytelling expert, said there's nothing wrong with stereotypes. They reduce complexity.

[00:03:55] Trisha: The problem starts when the stereotype is negative and that's our first thought. Thank you so much. At this point, the stereotype becomes a prejudice, and from there we can move to generalizations and discrimination. Rick spoke about how lawyers are often stereotyped because they operate in a way that may not be the most helpful way to operate.

[00:04:17] Trisha: And so there's the stereotype of the tough lawyer. And so stereotypes can be damaging. They can be helpful and they can be damaging. And so one of the next important things to emerge, I think everybody said this in the last Five episodes, don't assume Emily Rogers, who was in the episode about shifting and transitions spoke about the dangers of assumptions, whether they're about me or about organizations and their people or processes or about others.

[00:04:51] Trisha: Don't assume

[00:04:53] Trisha: Rick and Monique speaking about lawyers and psychologists, each needing to interrogate their own assumptions. We make an assumption sometimes that because a person is A, they need B. And we don't see them in all the different ways they exist in the world. Joanna Sells spoke about mosaic identities, which is a beautiful phrase, and a beautiful way of seeing people.

[00:05:17] Trisha: And she pointed out that we often fail to see the beauty of the full identity of someone who is in front of us. So we might see their country, but we might limit them to one perspective of their country or their culture or their history. And she told the lovely story about how , when Joanna was growing up in Poland, her grandmother encouraged her to learn languages, but Joanna herself from behind the iron curtain initially thought that that was a wasteful thing to do because there wasn't the opportunity to use those languages.

[00:05:48] Trisha: And now she's grateful that she did. But somebody growing up in Poland who didn't have that grandmother would have had a very different influence. And so we need to see people for all the identities that they are and they have. And it might be that age, or gender, or our parenthood status, as Emily spoke about her lovely experiences of giving birth in India.

[00:06:13] Trisha: It could be our religious beliefs are part of that Mosaic identity, as Monique shared about her conversion to Islam. Or it could be our profession that could be also part of our identity. And so as we meet people, as we see people in front of us, we need to recognize they're not just one thing, one, one type of person, but they bring that mosaic and we need to work with them to unpack that mosaic and to recognize the value and the beauty of every part that they bring.

[00:06:43] Trisha: Another key theme that came through is that the world is shifting. Emily said, the world is shifting. If we want to try and understand where it might go, you have to come from a position of inquiry. You can't just jump forward out of the space you're in right now. You can't find that certainty. You have to sit with the uncertainty.

[00:07:06] Trisha: Lucy spoke about the fact that some years ago she was training in Syria, and now that would be a difficult thing. And so the world is shifting. And in recognizing that the world is shifting, we spoke about the fact of the way we need to be in a shifting world. In some of the other episodes, when we've gone back over our learning, we've recognized that there are often significant others in people's shifts.

[00:07:31] Trisha: And those significant others. are people who have built the trust, the love, have the kindness, to support people as they move through the shifts that they were experiencing. And in thinking about the world shifting, I was struck with the fact that we are the significant others. Those of us who work within and between and on the boundaries of cultures.

[00:07:54] Trisha: We are the people who need to build that trust. We need to unpack our own assumptions. We need to learn to story tell and story listen. And we need to bring our own cultural intelligence to our work in the world. A number of times in these episodes, the words curiosity and courage were mentioned. I think it was Emily who said if we could all come with that curiosity, that position of inquiry, all the barriers in life, all the tension in life, don't have to be there.

[00:08:25] Trisha: They're there because we make assumptions. And instead, we could use our curiosity. Monique said, we need to sit on the rim of our cultural courage zone. And Joanna said, we need to bring courage. And she referenced the root of the French word of courage and how it comes from heart. We need to bring courage to step into the uncomfortable. And share what we believe is important.

[00:08:56] Trisha: I hope that these last episodes have helped you to build your skills and build that courage, that heart, that curiosity and that openness, and so that you can work to step into the uncomfortable and to share what we believe is important with those around us. Thank you for listening, and please make sure that you're following along so that you can join us again for the next episode of The Shift.