A huge interest in understanding and adapting to different cultures amongst the globe is what drives these individuals to move forward – cultural intelligence. Nowadays, the whole world is connected through the internet or the possibility to easily travel to each country. With that, cross-cultural communication and exchange are rising in importance.
Let’s look at culturally intelligent individuals’ strengths and weaknesses to see whether you might be one of these increasingly needed people.
Strengths:
When it comes to the strengths of culturally intelligent individuals, it’s possible to roughly divide them into four categories: one’s drive, knowledge, strategy, and action. Let’s go through them.
Drive: These individuals’ first strength lies in their interest and motivation. Without that, other abilities regarding cultural intelligence would be useless. They are driven to understand and possibly adapt to multicultural environments. This sets the foundation for cross-cultural exchange.
Knowledge: They understand similarities and differences between cultures and know that these affect values, learning, and behaviour. Therefore, culturally intelligent individuals show high cultural sensitivity and are able to interpret the unfamiliar. This is key to building connections and fostering cultural communication.
Strategy: Strategy refers to these individuals’ talent in planning multicultural interactions. Some cultures vary heavily in aspects that might be difficult to communicate without guidance. That’s when culturally intelligent individuals step in. They can effectively help to cross boundaries.
Action: The last aspect, action, describes these individuals’ abilities in global adaptability. It includes relating to and working with different cultures, which requires mutual understanding and adaptation and is the starting point for cross-cultural growth.
Areas for Improvement:
Being very interested in other cultures can come with a set of negative effects. Understanding other cultures is not solely possible through reading about them. Most often, experiencing them live is necessary as well. The occurring problem is that traveling is expensive and time-consuming. This can lead to feelings of sadness and unfulfilled dreams.
Another problem that might arise is a loss of belonging. This can happen if someone constantly focuses on others’ ways of living. Once the realization that they are not actually a part of the life they are so invested in hits in, they might start to feel alienated.
Both of these factors can lead to restlessness in culturally intelligent individuals’ behavior.
Lastly, this is not a specific difficulty occurring in cultural intelligence but rather something important to look out for – biases. Each and every one of us is confronted with stereotypes and assumptions about different cultures each day; and this leads to every one of us forming an opinion beforehand. When working with different cultures, being aware of and looking out for biases is extremely important.
Have you recognized yourself? Congratulations on being a culturally intelligent individual! To help you move forward and understand yourself better, we’ll now give you some tips on how to refine your strengths and start your improvement work.
Refining Strengths:
We’ve mentioned it before, but to really understand different cultures, to learn about every perspective and aspect of them, you’ll need to take action towards making your own experiences with them. Ultimately, cultural perception is usually driven by outstanding aspects, which might leave out other beautiful parts there are to discover.
Expose yourself to diverse cultures. Whether through traveling or engaging with individuals from different parts of the world, you can surely find a way to learn more about the way others live across the globe.
Be open! Showing openness can truly help you get close with individuals of other cultural backgrounds. This also has a connection to biases. Don’t let your judgment be tarnished by prejudice. But, besides biases, openness also refers to the willingness to accept and understand values and beliefs different from your own. Keep in mind that you might come across behaviour you don’t validate.
Deepen your cultural knowledge. This will help your interpretation of different behaviours and planning for multicultural exchange. Make sure you understand and value specific cultural taboos.
Lastly, networking or overall working on social skills can come in very handy. To foster cross-cultural connections, you’ll need to engage with others and be social. Therefore, working on your socialization abilities is necessary.
Improvement Work:
Your number one tip on your improvement journey revolves around self-work. Get to know your own being to ensure not losing your confidence and individuality during the process of researching other perspectives. Though this does not mean you’re not allowed to learn or change in the process. Having your own values for comparison will help you to interpret other cultures more deeply.
Create a home. Now, this might sound trivial or abstract at first, but when your main interest lies far away, make sure you always have a safe place to return to. This will prevent you from losing where you belong. Connect with friends and family and create a space that makes you feel comfortable and warm.
Lastly, learn to recognize biases. To do that, you’ll need to understand argumentation. Is an assertion well-founded or simply stated without any proof or context? Train your critical thinking and make sure to take every piece of information in with a certain amount of skepticism. I’m not saying to ignore warnings and carelessly throw yourself into dangerous situations, but investigate and trust your own judgment.
Now that we’ve learned more about your skills, let’s look at some jobs and hobbies you might enjoy.
Jobs:
For you, as a culturally intelligent person, jobs in international relations might be a good fit. Working with global business in need of cross-cultural exchange or as a diplomat would suit your intelligence type as well. Also, working as a teacher for immigrants and helping them during their integration could be a well-suited job for you.
Hobbies:
Your number one hobby, or dream, is probably to get to know each culture around the world. Therefore, a hobby such as traveling does not come as a surprise. Other than that, language learning or cultural studies, on your own or in clubs, could be something you’d enjoy.Lastly, to fully understand the impact of cultural intelligence, we’ll take a look at its effect in everyday, social, and personal settings.
Everyday Relevance:
In everyday life, cultural intelligence enables global communication, which is, as stated in our introduction, significantly rising in importance due to today’s connectivity. There are capable individuals all across the globe, and effectively communicating with one another is what you are enabling us to do.
Another related topic is diverse team management. Simply establishing contact between different cultures isn’t enough. You’ll need to understand and value the different beliefs to effectively and peacefully work together. As a culturally intelligent individual, you know the importance of and have the ability to manage diverse teams to reach a state of peace and mutual understanding.
Societal Impact and Personal Impact:
For society, you foster inclusivity and tolerance. Mutual respect through understanding and acceptance, appreciation, and learning; this ultimately results in harmony, which is fundamental to move forward. You are essential to not just one but every society to globally connect and cooperate.
Personally, your interest and understanding enable a broader worldview, which ultimately allows you to adapt to diverse environments. Your knowledge can also enable you to create your personal ideal way of living.
Cross-cultural learning is important; for harmony and peace, for growth. We live in a world with multiple cultures, but letting that stop us from connecting with one another would have a huge negative impact.
Understand the importance of your ability. You influence and connect, learn and inspire, teach and grow; you are important for everyone. For the ones who personally want to learn more about others, and for all of us, to exchange, share, and improve as a whole.