all right you have made it to the last video go you this section is developing intercultural communication competence so just reminding you back to chapter one when we learn about communication competence that is what we're shooting for here communication competence is just you know knowing how to communicate uh respectively and uh respectively respect fully there you go respectfully and ethically in any situation and also and the feeling of being comfortable having social ease in that situation so when you think about intercultural communication the issue is that sometimes we run into culture shock that kind of causes us not to feel competent in our communication within that intercultural situation so that like for us as communicators and what i hope that you'll learn in this class is how to start going into new situations that maybe is something you're not used to but you can still feel competent in your communication skills so the first thing we want to do is look at potential barriers potential barriers might be anxiety like you may just have anxiety about having to go into this situation and communicate with someone like just like simply not knowing the language that would be a major reason you would have things of anxiety and kind of have potential barrier to your ability to communicate well and be communic to be competent in your communication right i know i feel that right now so i've been doing duolingo and learning spanish and i could read spanish pretty well now but i mean i've been doing this for a couple months but i still get anxiety every time i'm out like every time that i go to a or put myself in a situation where i can speak spanish i freeze up and i'm like i don't want to do it right i think about my students that i've had that have spoken different language man and i am just so proud of my the students that i've had that english as their second language because i know how much anxiety that probably creates within them or you when you go into a classroom and the teacher's not speaking your native language so please if that is you you're a rock star not a lot of people can do that okay so anxiety then we have assumed similarity or difference remember we learned about that i believe in our perception chapter on why we might like try to force somebody or try to you know try well we perceive someone a certain way that's not necessarily accurate right because we're trying trying to um assume similarity or it's like assume we perceive things the same way and we assume that we or we assume that we're too different to understand each other it's the same kind of thing here right you can go into a situation and assume someone a barrier might be to assume that this person is like you and they really don't have the same life experiences uh because of where they're from they may there may be things that your your brain chooses to select i remember think about the perception process you may select things about a person and say okay that makes us alike so they probably think this way um and they might think no that's not at all how i think or anything um that's assume similarity just like selecting one aspect of a person and assuming that you're similar but on the flip side of that you might go into situation and think like oh they're not from where i'm from so there's no way they can see things the way that i see them and that's that assumed difference and so that might be a barrier for intercultural communication you may not want to engage with that person if you think that they're so different regardless of language barrier like genuinely they just think that they're too different you have different values we just see things differently so i don't even really want to engage with that okay so then there's this thing called ethnocentrism and i kind of think about this as being egotistical but ethicism is really just thinking you're believing that your culture is superior to others right believing that you that who you are somehow better than the people around you you know like right now in my head i really didn't even want to say this but i mean thinking about like i think about like ku klux klan and things like that like just the hate that's happened in our like in our society in our world um associated from believing that somebody is a superior race or a superior type of person i mean this is like what causes um like when we think about the holocaust you know and we think about uh slavery all these things is star they're all started from ethnocentrism so you know like while it's you may think like it like this is something that's a major issue but like we may not think that i do you struggle with that like you may not think you struggle with it i may not think i struggle with it because we aren't doing those kind of crazy big terrible things but it still applies to like daily little things as well you know any type of view that you are somehow superior to someone else based on something about yourself and so today what that looks like is something like a what might be like a microaggression and microaggressions are like little things people say that um just kind of show some in some way that they they they think they're above you and that can lead to microaggressions it can also lead to biases and so believing that certain people i mean you may not even recognize some of it but like thinking that someone's uh having like having a tendency to be a little bit more biased towards someone because of some aspect about them so those things still happen today but that is definitely a barrier to to strong inter-person intercultural communication competency all right then we have stereotyping of course and i think that kind of it's kind of like before in the last chapter in perception where we kind of as a building thing you see you know like selective perception and then um for simultaneous differences and then you like force consistency like you try to makes me believe that which kind of then leads to um stereotyping which they can lead to things like racism and any kind of like i guess ism you could say thinking that like you're something one of your co-cultures is better than another coal culture so um that's where we stereotype and we kind of just we perceive one group of people or one group of cult like run whole culture in a certain way and we just decide well that's what you are that they're all like that everybody in that group they're all like it and that's hardly if not ever the case so incompatible communication codes so communication codes we haven't learned about language like specifically like the building of language we haven't learned that yet so you may not understand like communication codes are i mean that's like language that's like a code we'll talk about that later but then also just like culturally like you may have like words that are used different or like they're differently used so a great example of this was i went to turkey last year and um the i had to use the restroom so bad and i was running around asking all these people and luckily a lot of people at this resort that i was at they all spoke english and or lots of them do they did so i was uh so i'm talking to them i'm talking to people i'm like please i need a gesture where's the restaurant where's the restroom and they kept looking they're like i'm sorry what are you asking for what are you asking for and they kept grabbing other people like what is she what is she asking for and then finally um this the manager that like came up and was like what are you needing to do in this like what are you needing to do and i said i need to pee and he started laughing he was oh so you need the toilet and i was like well that's a very just straightforward way to put it yes i need the toilet so he said okay well he's like i'll show you the way but as we were walking there he said sorry we understand we know british english not american english we don't get a lot of american english speakers here and so there's certain words that literally the communication like it might be the same language but the communication codes are different and so that can cause some barriers in our ability to communicate well and then incompatible norms and values sometimes when you have two cultures that are so like on opposite ends of the spectrum that sometimes we walk into situations um you know the the highly valued uh norms of two societies clash or they like are so opposite so that might make you feel really uncomfortable it might make you not understand them again in turkey i feel like their society was very different i really liked a lot of it but one of the things was like how much they care about animals it was so different like we were amazed at this like the guy that was driving us um he like was telling us how he would they would stop and like if they hit a bird they would go and like take that to the bird to event and make sure that bird was okay because that was just normal to them whereas for us we would just be like will you get bird flu if you do that you know so but you see there's this the different values and we if we told him that we wouldn't have done that they probably would thought we were terrible people right but that is um sometimes our norms and our values are so vastly different that it causes it causes a barrier in our ability to communicate well all right so then let's talk about competent communication strategies so now that you know like what can cause the barrier let's say what can we do to make it better first we should acquire accurate knowledge so i'm just going to kind of go through this quickly uh the way we can acquire knowledge is through formal study like actually maybe going and um watching or watching a video going on youtube learning about a society reading up on it you know like the actual formal study and then then there's observation so maybe you're like more so um it says non-participant observation like you can watch like watch more so like this might be like when you look at national geographic or if you watch um discovery or something i feel like there's shows that are history right like you can watch about cultures kind of as like a non a non-participant observer then you have immersion and that's going to be more like if you did a study abroad program right you go in there and you're there and you learn so that would be participant observation all right then you want you could adopt or you should adopt an appropriate attitude and that's going to mean tolerate ambiguity ambiguity ambiguity means um kind of like a fluidity differences right like um that things are not always going to be like perfectly defined it's kind of like i guess i could kind of translate that to like vagueness that might be a way to put it um you know it says if you're if you enter in an inter intercultural interaction believing that it is okay to be unsure about how to proceed you're likely to pay closer attention to the feedback you receive you can then work on to adjust your communication to demonstrate respect and achieve mutual understanding so like not going into something assuming everyone's like you right but and but going in or assuming everyone's different just going in with the open mind which then i think leads us to the next one which is be open-minded you have to be open-minded in order to be able to tolerate ambiguity right like for things not to be perfectly defined you have to be open-minded to that and so also open-minded to differences in people and understanding one of the best things that i that i hope that i can teach you is that you know understanding does not mean that you have to believe someone is right or change who you are it just means you understand them and when you can understand you can then respect them and your values and their culture right so that's really important be open-minded be altruistic altruism is a display of genuine and unselfish concern for the welfare of others this is the opposite of being egocentric meaning like you genuinely care about other people and want to understand them fully again just trying to understand not necessarily that you're changing yourself or anything along those lines and then let's see the last thing would be develop culture centered skills so the first thing and probably the most important thing any of us can learn is to practice listening yes practice listening then we should practice empathy so intercultural empathy means imaginatively placing yourself in the other person's cultural world and emptying and attempting to experience what he or she is experiencing i feel like this has to do with like with open-mindedness right like you have to put yourself in someone else's shoes to get where they're coming from um and in doing so then you're gonna have automatically have more um be more altruistic meaning that you're going to care more like genuinely care more and understand better probably going to be open-minded more all those things but empathy and then develop flexibility and this again goes with tolerate ambiguity is the ability to adjust your communication to fit the other person in the situation uh you know that's that's something that is really important being able to understand like good competent communicators they listen they pay attention they genuinely care about making the other person feel comfortable in the space and they want to not change themselves but they want to understand and be able to coincide and coexist with these with someone that may be from a very different culture than your own so all right i hope that this helps you and i hope that you'll really pay attention to this and truly try moving forward because this isn't just like one big dominant culture to a not another dominant culture this is like in your own dominant like in your own culture like in american society um understanding cult deco culture to another co-culture right something like a culture that does seem like very different than your own trying to understand them um be and being able to coexist with them