During our February 16 webinar "Cross-Border Business Development; Palm Beach & Bahrain" we were honored to have so many diplomats and professionals speak about the evolving relationship between the business and educational communities of Palm Beach and Bahrain, including Renata Urban, a certified and experienced language teacher, intercultural coach, and communication skills trainer.
Thank you very much, Al. Thank you, everybody participating today, including all dignitaries and wonderful contributions we've heard today. Very honored to be part of this panel.
I've been working with the World Trade Center Palm Beach as a provider of webinars and input in terms of intercultural communication. As the owner of Urban Training and Services, I work with executives, businesses, and individuals, and I help them to communicate effectively in their own language, in a foreign language, and across cultures. In that capacity, I've been providing input, like I said, webinars and articles and help to the community that the World Trade Center Palm Beach serves to better understand how to interact with other cultures, with other businesses abroad, which is an integral part of doing business internationally.
As an intercultural trainer, a language teacher, and a communication skills coach, I work with people from all over the world on a daily basis. Therefore, I know that good intentions and acting in a way that you personally consider polite and appropriate can still backfire without considering intercultural differences. I see it every day that negative impact it can have on people's businesses when they make assumptions about others of the cultures without doing their due diligence in intercultural communication.
So what should you do? You'll want to venture out and use this opportunity to do cross cultural business? Well, if you do business internationally, I can highly recommend the following five steps. And that's hopefully what you can take away from this brief interaction with me here as a panelist today. So five steps.
Step number one, build awareness of your own culture, personality and preferences. Step two, acquire knowledge of another culture. And by that, I mean not only the do's and don'ts of business interactions, but also values, beliefs, customs, norms, attitudes, assumptions, and other patterns of behavior and communication, as well as other people's personality and preferences.
Step two is awareness of another culture or people you deal with, which is followed by step three is to compare and look for congruent and divergent areas meaning what do we have in common, what is different? And then the most important step of all. Number four, realize that there is no better or worse – it's just different. And finally, hopefully you'll come to step five where you can build an understanding and an appreciation for other cultures, personality types and preferences.
If you're able to adopt that kind of mindset, you'll be very successful in dealing with other cultures and diverse groups of people. If anything, in that brief period of time that I have, if that's anything I can give you to take away as a recommendation – I hope you'll be successful doing so. Please do reach out to me directly if I can support you or your business with training coaching in the field of intercultural communication.
Thank you very much for your attention.
— Renata Urban, Urban Training and Services
Certified and experienced language teacher, intercultural coach, and communication skills trainer
