Cross-Cultural Communication 30-Day Challenge – Build Trust
When you first begin in international sales you can spend some time learning how to cultivate trust. In the beginning you might try to use the same trust-building tactics you would use in your own culture. But you soon learn that trust-building in an international business environment is not as straightforward as it may seem.
Different cultures react to these tactics differently and they also have different expectations. One of the easiest ways to improve your international trust-building skills is often overlooked. Instead of focusing on the cultural differences you see on the other side, look at how you can improve things your end first.
Cultivate Quiet Self Confidence
When you meet clients from different cultures you can feel overwhelmed by the cultural differences.
As we saw yesterday, people can sometimes feel these cultural differences as aggression.
Feelings of aggression and trust do not mix together.
Cultivating a quiet self-confidence is the solution to feelings of aggression.
Trust In Cross-Cultural Communication Challenge – Tip 7
Know yourself and feel confident with who you are
It is easy to think you know yourself as best you possibly can when you are in an environment you are familiar with. But when are taken out of your familiar surroundings and put in a foreign place it is natural to become slightly disoriented.
Unexpected Adjustments
If you are immigrating to a new country, you expect this and adjustments happen. But if you are in international business, you may not expect the personal adjustments you have to make.
I have noticed this disorientation several times in inexperienced international sales professionals. People react differently when they are disoriented.
They can rebel against the foreign culture. It is interesting that the person doing the rebelling is often the person that needs to look at himself internally. Some of the most difficult cross-cultural conflicts can only really be resolved when one person looks internally and finds self-confidence.
When people become disoriented they can also lose their self-confidence. Generally the cross-cultural communication stalls at this stage until someone makes an effort to move forward again.
Personal Development
Remember, developing cross-cultural skills involves personal development too. The self-confidence we are talking about here is simply the confidence to be who you are.
Before you can truly be confident in who you are you need to have a deep understanding about yourself. For the purposes of strengthening cross-cultural skills you can simply begin by questioning your feelings when you react to other cultures. And focus on yourself. Saying you hate Martians because they are green is not enough.
- Why do you hate the color green?
- And what does that mean?
- What shades of green do you hate most?
- And why is that?
- How did this hatred start?
- What if the Martian was blue?
- What if he liked eating your favorite food too?
- Why does this change things for you?
Personal development plays an important role in acquiring cross-cultural communication skills – the 4th Cross-Cultural Challenge in December will be focused on this.
We can feel threatened by what we don’t understand… and this can also be not understanding ourselves when it comes to cross-cultural communication.
Be Confident
Another part of the question here is that me do like to be friends with people like ourselves. We like to model people we like.
It just does not seem easy, or even natural sometimes, to associate ourselves with people who are so different from us. This is common in human nature. Instead of responding to any primal instincts, we need to remember:
- When we meet people from other cultures we do not need to change anything about ourselves. Instead of feeling aggression of any sort, we should remain quietly confident in our knowledge of who we are.
Although this may seem much easier to do in an international business environment than in our social lives, some cultures have very social business practices. And this is where things can become a bit challenging. This is where you need to know yourself well and find the right path to walk.
Questions For Discussion
- When have you noticed a feeling of aggression during a cross-cultural encounter?
- Have you ever questioned yourself after a cross-cultural conflict?
- How do you respond to cultural differences you don’t like?
Get All Cross-Cultural Communication Tips:
- Read more about all of the 2009 Cross-Cultural Communication Challenges
- Cross Cultural Communication Challenge 1 – Expand Your Mindset
- Cross Cultural Communication Challenge 2 – Get Extreme With Clarity
- Cross Cultural Communication Challenge 3 – Build Trust
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| Mindset | Clarity | Trust |
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| Expand Your Mindset | Get Extreme With Clarity | Build Trust |
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