Greetings, in my two previous posts, I introduced two steps we can take to remove the barriers to effective multicultural communication: enhance your self-awareness and increase your empathy. Another action we can take to reduce stereotyping, a lack of understanding and judgmental attitudes is to suspend judgment:
Suspend Judgment. A final step that we can take to remove the multicultural communication barriers is to reduce the extent to which we evaluate and judge others. Now this is very difficult for most of us. That’s because we spend so much of our lives standing in judgment of others (e.g., managers evaluating job performance, teachers assessing student performance). The problem is the criteria we use to make those judgments. Most of us use our own values, styles and beliefs as the criteria for how we assess others (this is the essence of ethnocentrism). The more alike someone else is, the more positively we judge them. However, people from different cultures may be unlike us in terms of values, styles and beliefs. It is then that we must suspend our judgment and try to understand others as individuals. And we must attempt to gain this understanding from their cultural perspective, not from our own. The best way to do this is to be more accepting of others. Acceptance refers to a willingness to support and validate others even when you disagree with them. You can be totally accepting of a person while still disagreeing with their ideas or certain beliefs that they hold. You can demonstrate acceptance by actively listening to others, attempting to understand where they are coming from and trying to address whatever issues or concerns they raise. Always remember that communication is most effective when it supports and validates the other person.
NEXT POST – September 11, 2008
