6.4.3. How to deal with Culture Shock: practice mindfulness as a strategy

Practicing mindfulness will help you to enhance your abilities and cope with downfalls. The following abilities will be enhanced by practicing mindfulness.

• Detect cultural cues: Mindfulness makes us more attuned to our external environment. In a mindful state, we are better able to notice subtleties, changes, and patterns in behaviour. This helps us to discern between universal, cultural, and idiosyncratic (personality) aspects of behaviour.
• Understand others: Mindfulness acts as a bridge between our knowledge of cultural differences and our responses to them. It helps us to apply our broad awareness of culture to understand unique cultural settings. We are better able to recognise the influence of cultural scripts on our own and others’ thoughts and behaviours. This helps us to make culturally relevant attributions and better predict the behaviour of others.
• Reduce bias: When we know that culture is influencing an exchange, we are less likely to label partners as deviant or incompetent. This counters ethnocentrism and reduces stereotyping, prejudice, and other forms of bias.
• Accept new ideas: Mindfulness increases our openness to new ideas. This drives innovation and creativity.
• Build trust: Mindfulness increases our capacity to take alternative perspectives. This helps us empathise with others, improving the quality of our social relations. Mindfulness encourages us to reflect on our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. It helps us to see how our cultural filter is influencing our responses. This awareness helps us to manage our responses. Mindfulness helps us overcome avoidance tendencies. It encourages us to approach diverse others with interest, curiosity, and acceptance rather than reactive emotions such as fear, disgust, or frustration.
• Self-learn: Mindfulness increases our awareness of knowledge gaps or areas of confusion in our exchanges. This encourages us to seek information and skills to improve our performance.
• Persist: Mindfulness encourages us to focus on and sustain attention to a task when we are faced with distractions. It supports goal-directed behaviour, even in the face of stress or complexity.
• Maintain a positive psychological state: Mindful workers have higher levels of resilience and well-being, lower levels of stress, less illness-related absenteeism, and greater work satisfaction and engagement. Mindfulness buffers the stress of diverse exchanges and international travel.
• Adapt: Traditional management models assume that by studying the past we are better able to manage the present and the future. But today’s leadership problems are novel, dynamic, and unpredictable. Leaders need to make sense of new and changing circumstances and adapt to them. Mindful leaders attend to the environment through a perceptual filter that help to reduce preconception. They are better able to transcend past scripts and engage in creative problem-solving.