Thoughts About Cross Cultural Communication

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SECTION II: PERSONAL REVIEW OF LESSONS LEARNED FOR FUTURE GROWTH As our professor mentioned the first day of class “Culture is to be engaged, not consume”. No one could ever judge a culture without experiencing the different systems and beliefs of it. Everyone should integrate and experience in order to consume and engage with the culture they are trying to approach. This was one of the most meaningful aspects of cross-cultural communication I learned. Before knowing this, I would said what I think of the different people around me, without knowing their culture nor what they thought, now I realized that to now about a culture, one has to pass through different steps in order to engage it, and finally acculturate. I also learned that they are many ways to communicate with different people, and that talking is definitely not the only way. They are many mediums in which someone can express themselves and a lot of extensions we can use. “We are our extensions, and are extensions are us” explains how everything we say, do or express in any way, reflects what make us who we are. Even our culture can be used as a highly sophisticated “extension system” of symbols, mediums, and processes that are shared and utilized by a group of people with their own identity. Even though extensions could be good in many ways for communicating, they could also be misunderstood and decoded differently by the receiver from how the sender was trying to encode it. Extensions are great ways to communicate, that I didn’t even realized I used when I communicated with the different people around me. I learned that I can keep using it while communicating within the different cultures, but having a healthy self-awareness how I express them and which medium I use to “send them”. Aside from this two lessons, I knew that everyone had different beliefs, but I never thought that they could be

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