Intercultural Communication: Use Mindfulness to Reduce Your Anxiety

This is an article on using mindfulness to reduce your anxiety when engaging in intercultural communication. When you meet a stranger from another culture for the first time it is important to be mindful that you are open to this new experience. With intercultural communication you must be mindful not to misinterpret gestures when a stranger is someone from another culture. You must be mindful not to place them into the preset categories in your psyche. Disparities in behavioral expectations can cause anxiety for both parties involved.

When engaging in intercultural communication there is a potential for anxiety and uncertainty for both parties during the communication process. People from different cultures operate using different sets of rules and norms and thus may have differing interpretations of the same situation. In order to make strangers more comfortable, reduce their anxiety and create the most favorable environment for intercultural communication, we must turn off our auto-pilot and consciously develop the skill of mindfulness.

"Langer (1989) isolates three characteristics of mindfulness in intercultural communication: (1) creating new catetories (2) being open to new information, and (3) awareness of more than one perspective" (Gudykunst & Kim, 2003).

When meeting strangers for the first time we make an assessment of the person and place them into previously developed categories. However we should be mindful not to do this when engaging in intercultural communication. These categories may be negative, positive or neutral. Humans come by category creation naturally as they help us reduce our anxieties as we navigate through our environment in our daily lives. The most basic of categories would be safe and dangerous.

Our categories act like a Rube Goldberg machine. The ball starts at the top and depending on which sub-categories this stranger fits into it filters down into a basket where we sub-consciously associate this stranger with all the others we have encountered who are in the same basket. The more like us we perceive the stranger to be the more comfortable we feel about our interactions with them. Once placed into categories, our mind then makes more specific assumptions, sub-categories. We have basic categories in common (man or woman). As adults we also develop sub-categories that are unique to our own experiences.

Strangers from other cultures may not fit into our sub-categories and we must be mindful to decatagorize and recatagorize them. This means giving the stranger the opportunity to show themselves to be a different person than we have originally perceived. The amplified anxiety incurred when engaging in intercultural communication, increases the probability for a negative outcome. Mindfulness allows us to create new and inclusive categories to reduce anxiety during communication.

Intercultural communication is generally spurred by necessity and the initiator of the conversation has a desired outcome. When the interaction is not going as anticipated, perhaps there is a language barrier; we become distracted as we realize this process may be more work than originally thought. With mindfulness we can pay close attention to the stranger and the interaction itself rather than the outcome. When engaging in intercultural communication we must focus on the "nuances or our own and others' behavior" (Langer, 1989) if we hope to be successful.

Sometimes the mechanisms we rely on to cope with the world hinder rather than facilitate our success and we need to be mindful of novel perspectives. What if you went to the bathroom in a foreign country and there was no toilet paper? At home you might not even go to the bathroom until you found some, but maybe there is no toilet paper to be found. You would need to change your perspective quickly on what is acceptable for you in this situation. If you didn't adapt you would either never go to the bathroom or be quite dirty. The same is true when engaging in intercultural communication, if you are not mindful to adapt the situation could get messy.

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Reference:

Gudykunst, W. and Kim, Y. (2003). Communicating with strangers: An approach to intercultural communication. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Langer, E. (1989). Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.