The Fork in the Road: To see or not see different perspectives

“We shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. This is a process that doesn’t end; only in death. The choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt

When my parents came to the United States in 1979, their world became vastly different than what they had known. Before their arrival, they lived in a small hilltop, tribal village in the mountains of Laos, like many of their ancestors before them. They had the simplest tools for doing their work and for living their lives. The natural world provided everything they needed. If they wanted to use the bathroom, they went outside—not to an outhouse but to the woods. When they were hungry, they cooked the meal in a pot over a large fire pit. When relatives asked them to attend celebrations and notified them that the celebration meal would begin sometime when the sun was to set, my parents knew that the path of the sun would let them know when they should leave their house. There were a lot of assumptions my parents made about their world.

When they had to relocate to the United States, they found out how different their assumptions were when they were tested in an environment that contradicted their ways of being. They were not aware of a different way of living their lives, because the norms that shaped their lives influenced their actions and behaviors. The norms helped them to learn that what they did was the correct way to live.

One of their most difficult challenges was to unlearn what they knew in a different context and with different materials and tools that they did not have before. What naturally occurred was a process of culture shock and then a period of acculturation. When my parents’ sponsors showed them how to use the toilet by gesturing what to do and how to flush, my parents were embarrassed. Coming from a culture where modesty is important, they did not know how to respond to the American sponsor’s gestures, yet their embarrassment quickly turned into fascination when they saw how a toilet could dispose of materials.

As human beings who are accustomed to behaving (consciously and unconsciously) in specific ways, we often do not recognize another perspective until it is presented to us. Ellen Langer, a social psychologist, says that it is in the perspective of another that we learn to see ourselves—to see who we really are.

When faced with a fork in the road, culturally intelligent leaders make strong efforts to see a different perspective than what they believe and hold to be true. They choose to confront blind spots, and they know the choices they make are their responsibilities.

This is excerpted from the book Culturally Intelligent Leadership: Leading through Intercultural Interactions. For more information about the book and to download sample pages, visit www.cileadership.com