• More about Elizabeth and her work on diversity in the workplace in Japan

How do you get buy-in for intercultural training in what could be the world’s toughest market?

I invest a lot of time in bringing down the barriers on a human-to-human level. For me, being based in Tokyo means doing business not only in Japanese, but also in a terminology that’s familiar to top execs. I work hard to see things from their point of view. And in practice, I make sure that I meet the decision-makers and influencers through projects, networking events and any forum outside of a traditional sales pitch. The five-point approach published on this site is a good way to capture the fundamental spirit of what I do.

What’s the core idea behind your work?

My current mission in life is to help the Japanese deal with their declining and aging population by embracing and integrating other cultures into Japanese culture. It’s fair to say that Japan is still a monoculture.

One of my key goals is to build recognition of diversity issues in Japanese board rooms. That recognition of diversity is growing, and slowly organisations are learning to walk the talk on diversity and inclusion. It’s not quick, but we are making progress.

How do you get started?

I have to give a little personal history, because it’s almost impossible to hit the ground running coming in as an outsider into Japan. Your personal connection with Japan is key. They prefer to deal with insiders and they look for people who have a deep understanding and long history with Japan. I have an Australian background and worked as a Diplomat for the Australian government’s trade commission. I worked in many Asian countries and my connection with Japan goes back 30 years. My role back then was to connect local companies with Australian companies, so I had to act as an Asia expert and a cultural interpreter.

It’s unlikely that a foreigner in Japan will ever be accepted as an insider. You may eventually qualify in the eyes of Japanese colleagues if you work for the company for 30 years, but becoming an insider is impossible for many foreigners. Your track record in Japan is your best hope of being chosen to join the inner circle.

In terms of getting a specific Board-level action started, one of my projects started with a conversation between me and a business leader about introducing CultureConnector into his organisation. I already knew the gentleman. Introducing technology, automation and reporting can really attract the attention of Boards in tech-loving Japan. You just need to connect the technology to their business goals.

Technology is part of the “getting your approach right” aspect of the five-point system for winning Board support.

Talking of the five-point system, what’s your experience of this in Japan…

…on ambition level?

You cannot push things too far, too fast in Japan, especially if that thing seems to come from the outside. The notorious case of the Olympus CEO shows how quickly ideas are squashed if “global” approaches are introduced too rapidly. Working as a board insider in Japan, I see this very clearly now. Learn to walk before you try to run.

…on getting your approach right?

As a foreigner in Japan, you’re only selected for certain roles, so you need to generate maximum advantage from the opportunities you get. The role of “cultural interpreter” may be vague and poorly-defined, but it is important and can get you a seat at the top table.

I’ve taken every chance to introduce the ideas of diversity and inclusion. The approach which is working best now in Japan is to frame culture as an aspect of management, as a management science. In fact, the term “diversity management” makes sense to people here. With a decreasing population, Japanese leaders accept the need to bring new sources of talent into the economy.

…on connecting with individual board members?

One of my many hats is as global research team leader for the Japan Diversity Network, an umbrella organisation for other associations which promote diversity, including some big companies. It’s rewarding to collaborate with so many energetic people who bring energy to the movement towards diversity in Japan.

There are some great high-profile examples here, such as the charismatic former CEO of food and snack-maker Calbee, who made huge progress in promoting gender-balance in the workplace.

…on the financial case?

Japanese boards are like boards in US and European in the sense that they want to see measurable results. They are looking for a connection with business goals and impact on financial performance.

If you manage to demonstrate the benefits in dollars and yen, then board members here are much more likely to sign up to “soft skills” initiatives. But the evidence base here in Japan is still weak and we need more longitudinal studies.

…on getting the timing right?

Few Japanese business leaders will invest their time and corporate resources into pre-empting the need for cultural competence. People here accept cultural training as necessary only when there is a specific business event that creates a “burning platform”

How to win board approval for your proposal

Five steps to preparing your proposal to board-level executives for intercultural training, with downloadable material.

How do you see the future of intercultural competence development in Japan?

Japan is starting from behind. But international comparisons are not useful here. Japan is in fact doing quite well, considering its unique history.

In Japan, we could say that diversity is gradually becoming accepted, but inclusion will be the greatest challenge. People here need to fully accept diversity in principle first before we move forward to inclusion strategies. Training has a role to play here.

You can appreciate the scale of the challenge when you realise that the Japanese believe that it is not really possible for outsiders to truly understand Japanese people.

Japanese organisations do respond to messaging from the top and fortunately I am seeing an increasing number of boards who “get” diversity as a path to future business success.

Ask a global mobility professional what the most enduring problem is with cultural training, and the answer will probably be the “transfer into real workplace situations”.

Getting return on investment in training, by ensuring that people really use their learning in their work to deliver improved outcomes, is not easy.

It’s a challenge with most kinds of training, but especially with intercultural training because of the nature of “culture” itself.

Why the culture challenge resists simplistic solutions

Culture is present in many layers of our cherished identities, right down to our unconscious habits. This makes cultural differences a complex and multidimensional problem for our clients to successfully solve, in both workplace and social situations.

Here are three examples:

1. Intercultural “friction points” can arise at different points of the day. This is especially marked in expatriation. It is said that there is no such thing as “stress-free expatriation”. Clients need to interact constantly with a culture not one’s own both professionally and personally. The unpredictability, relentlessness and range of these “friction points” can wear down the most resilient and open-minded people.
2. Culture operates at subconscious levels. As our clients encounter something that makes them feel uneasy, offended, or even violated, they may be unable to articulate why it makes them feel that way, because some cultural habits may have been ingrained so deeply that they defy rational explanation. This “below the iceberg” element of culture makes it tricky to apply effective interventions to, because most interventions stay at the level of ideas and the intellect and don’t reach down far enough.
3. Applying new learning is cognitively demanding, especially in complex situations. Our clients often need to apply their intercultural knowledge and skills in high-pressure situations that lack clarity. In these circumstances, making the extra effort to apply what they had learned on a course months or years ago is an unwelcome additional cognitive load when the going is tough, and clients are often demotivated or lack energy to do so. Many people end up defaulting back to conditioned responses and actions that feel comfortingly “instinctive” and “familiar”.

How can we deliver our training in a way that makes it easier for our clients to apply what we teach them, when they most need it, but when it is most difficult to do?

Mindfulness can help learning embed better

Mindfulness practice offers trainers a powerful way to help our clients break out of this unhealthy cycle, and embark on a new positive one that is sustainable.

This is something new in intercultural training because, unlike the cultural interventions and frameworks that form the backbone of many trainings, mindfulness works on the level of practice, not ideas.

There are many definitions of mindfulness. For the purpose of this article, we propose defining mindfulness as

the practice of calming and stilling the mind, training one’s awareness to be fully present in the moment, so that one is sharper, clearer, more focused, more stable, and less prone to the pushes and pulls of one’s thoughts, emotions and drives.

This “mind practice” functions as a truly universal tool to underpin and supercharge whichever intercultural frameworks trainers use in their interventions.

Mindfulness prepares the ground for cultural training to “stick” in two important ways:

• Bypassing thought and emotional resistances which stop cultural training from working
• Increasing awareness of the inherent pleasure and motivation for clients that comes from engaging with cultures in a way that promotes beneficial self-growth.

Done well, mindfulness could be the longed-for magic ingredient to make the training embed and flow into the day-to-day of our clients’ lives.

Ideas alone are not enough

Mind, body, breath – we all use these in every moment of our lives. What makes mindfulness such a helpful tool particularly in intercultural settings is that it is based on these three simple elements common to every human being alive.

Mindfulness is therefore one of the few truly “one size fits all” tools that applies to any culture. It can be used as a powerful unifying force to remind our learners that beneath their disparate cultures, we all possess a universally similar awareness, that is embodied in human form and constantly breathing in and out.

While we are all thinking, breathing bodies, intercultural trainers have traditionally targeted only the mind, specifically the sub-section of the mind that is the intellect, in training. This means that more than two-thirds of the fundamental ways in which we exist – non-thinking awareness, body, and breath – are untapped by intercultural trainers.

This gaping hole is particularly obvious when considering that the experience of other cultures is often physical. New cultures, encountered through meeting people or visiting a place, can be jarring physical experiences. Sounds, sights, smells and tastes, personal distances between individuals, and greeting rituals are just some of many ways in which intercultural experiences can be tangibly “alien” from one’s home customs.

When encountering something new, a person’s response can be instantaneous and physical. It is common for people to “brace themselves” against this unfamiliarity by tensing up and getting defensive.

Equally, one’s shifting inner landscape of thoughts and emotions has profound effects on mind, body, and breath. There may be ideas, values and traditions upheld by another culture that one finds hard to reconcile with one’s own. The resulting stress can manifest itself in inner turmoil or resistant body language. One might find it hard to breathe deeply and relax in the face of such unusual or even repulsive ideas.

The limitations of “idea-only” training interventions

When dealing with such physical responses to new and stressful stimuli, it is often inadequate to approach the individual with “idea-only” interventions. Think of the last time you were terrified of something. Perhaps an animal like a snake, spider, lizard, or cockroach; or you are afraid of heights and someone is trying to convince you to go on a rollercoaster ride, go rock-climbing, or jump off a bungee.

How many times have you managed to overcome that fear through “reasoning” only? Perhaps your friend who is not afraid of snakes, spiders, rollercoasters or bungee-jumping is trying to give you all the “rational” reasons why you “should” not be afraid. How does that make you feel? Does it succeed in removing the fear, or is it often ineffectual?

The same thing happens with other strong reactions, such as aversion and repulsion. Given how different cultures can be across so many dimensions of our daily lives, it is virtually a given that at some point we will come across an aspect of a new culture that we really don’t like.

Our reactions of dislike or even disgust are often instant and can last a long time. These are intense emotions that colour our subsequent perceptions and interpretations, and can be very hard to shake off. It takes mindful practice to grow our awareness of the ways in which we quickly and enduringly attach these emotions to these cultural aspects that we find hard to accept.

The problem is that these strong reactions – even those with positive affect, such as infatuation or passionate attraction – obscure our clients’ ability to perceive the full reality of their intercultural situation in a clear, calm, and objective manner. They may believe themselves to be operating reasonably and rationally, when they may actually be blind to their own emotional attachments to their own perspective.

This hampers their ability to be flexible and effective in navigating their intercultural situation, because they don’t know how to let go of their cultural bias and adopt better new mindsets and behaviours. That is, if they are even sufficiently aware of this happening within themselves in the first place.

Dissolve mental obstacles through working with body and breath awareness

Stressed body = stressed mind

The brain is exquisitely tuned to muscle tone; tense muscles produce tense thoughts. Let’s try a little experiment to demonstrate this.

What are you learning from this simple exercise about the intimate link between mind, body and breath? Can you see how interconnected they are? And how what’s happening in one dimension has a “spill-over” effect on the other two?

This is a crucial point for us intercultural trainers. It means we can use the entry points of breath and body to bring about change in the mind.

Resting the mind through calming the body and breath

Now, let’s try the opposite. Let’s focus our awareness on relaxing our breath and body, and see what happens to your mind.

What do you notice? Is it easier now than before? What is different this time round?

Can you feel the peace and clarity emerging, as your nervous reactivity and “hot” emotions, like stress, anger, irritation, and anxiety, get increasingly quietened down? What have you learnt from this simple relaxation exercise of mindful breathing, about the connection of breath, body and mind and how to use the calming of breath and body to also calm the mind?

How does mindfulness work?

Mindfulness practices, such as those popularised by the “father of modern mindfulness” Jon Kabat-Zinn, or deeper-rooted disciplines such as the various forms of meditation, use our awareness of our body and breath to help us escape the tyrannies of our overactive mind.

In our busy modern lives, we are so used to thinking that we easily fall into the trap of thinking that our minds are nothing but thought. This is because for most of us there is a ceaseless chatter going on in our minds. We mistakenly believe that if we were to stop thinking, there would be “nothing” there.

This is simply not true.

When we learn to pay close attention to what is going on in our own minds, we will realise that there are all kinds of things going on in there, including thoughts. For one, our five sensory organs are constantly providing us with a rich variety of sensations moment by moment, which our brain expertly weaves into a sensation of continuity.

Our “inner cinema”

We can liken this to watching a movie. A movie is only a series of stills projected extremely quickly one after the other, but our visual system cannot perceive the individual stills that quickly, and the result is that we feel like we are watching a smooth continuous flowing “reality”.

There is one additional dimension of sensation on top of our five physical senses, and that is the mental dimension. Within this “sixth sense”, there are all kinds of similarly temporary and short-lived phenomena. Thoughts are a perfect example of this. We have many other kinds of mental phenomena, including emotions, impulses, and moods.

The “blank canvas” on which all these various mental phenomena are coming and going is your base awareness. Connecting back to this awareness and resting in it, non-thinking and non-doing, is a central part of mindfulness training.

With practice, one can loosen one’s attachments to one’s own thoughts, emotions, preconceptions and ideas, by returning again and again to one’s underlying awareness, and realising how temporary and “constructed” these seemingly-solid mental concepts are.

The power of using mindfulness to enhance intercultural training

Mindfulness practice is therefore a universal tool that is simple, secular, and only requires that the person has “body, breath and mind” and the ability to pay attention to these three basic elements. From these deceptively simple foundations, a raft of profound benefits to the individual can start to be unlocked.

If we were to pick just one – loosening one’s attachments to one’s own ideas, as described above – we can start to see how powerful it is in enhancing intercultural training.

One of the most stubborn obstacles intercultural trainers face in bringing our clients to open themselves up to a wider scope of cultural ideas and behaviours is the simple fact that everybody is naturally attached to their own perspectives and ways of doing things. “Old habits die hard”, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and other similar sayings testify to the persistent difficulty of even the most noble-minded individuals in overcoming this deep attachment to “the way we are”.

Think about the multitude of problems this “attachment to self” causes in a typical intercultural context. At the start of this article, we examined some of these reasons why the biggest problem intercultural trainers face is getting their clients to transfer the learning into work situations. These included the multitude and variety of ways in which cultures differ from one another, in professional and social contexts, across all six senses (i.e. the five physical senses and the sixth “inner” sense of the mind, which includes things like ideas and values).

We looked at how encountering a new culture can produce strong reactions of like and dislike, and how these reactions can skew a client’s ability to perceive things clearly and objectively, and therefore make sound decisions based on these clear, objective perceptions and a balanced frame of mind.

Therefore, a tool that can come in to address this problem at its root, which is our clients’ inability to shake free of their own perspective and to embrace other ways of looking at things and behaving, is of critical importance.

The reason for this is obvious. By allowing our clients to start realising just how trapped they had been in their own thoughts and emotions, and showing them how to apply awareness of their breath and body to calm the conceptual turbulence of the mind, mindfulness delivers a universal and effective solution for our clients to this exact problem.

It allows the mind to settle into its natural stillness, stability and clarity. From this position, assessing situations and making decisions is significantly improved, without the corrosive influence exerted on their awareness by the push and pull of their thoughts and emotions.

With consistent practice, further benefits are unlocked for our clients as their minds, breaths and bodies get increasingly aligned, allowing them to practice new behaviours more easily and successfully, and increasing their mental and emotional agility and resilience. The positive effects of this will spill over beyond our clients’ intercultural interactions into other key aspects of their lives such as leadership, parenting, or cultivating friendships.

The biggest tip we can give you is to start practising mindfulness yourself. Mindfulness is a tool that cannot be captured by explaining; its essence can only be grasped once you try it out for yourself and observe its benefits first-hand.

This is easy to understand why when we reconsider the fact that intercultural trainings that focus overly on concepts and ideas are doomed to fail, because these do not address the often visceral component of intercultural conflict.

Teaching our clients through engaging, hands-on activities like simulations and role-plays is a big improvement on theory-driven trainings for this reason, that our clients are able to “try out” different behaviours which allow them to become aware of cultural differences at a physical and emotional level and not merely an abstract intellectual level.

However, these activities are doomed to be partially effective at best unless we prepare the ground for them by raising their awareness of their own inner states in the first place. For example, some clients may hold strong opinions about something or have a stubborn or dismissive attitude towards the training. At the extreme, they may be stuck in the “denial” phase of for example.

Clients like these are extremely attached to their own thoughts and emotions. They lack awareness of other points of view, but worse than that, they lack the motivation to step outside their frameworks. To them, their reality is the only reality that matters.

With clients like these, simply addressing their resistance with an intellectual argument is ineffective. There will be no traction. Their resistance is at a much deeper level. At this level, relying on tools from the “realm of the mind” is not going to help these clients with the necessary step of getting OUT of their mindsets in the first place.

Mindfulness exercises reduce resistance to positive change

In challenging situations like these, here is where mindfulness works well as a preparatory exercise, by gently guiding their awareness towards the states of their own bodies and breaths. Resistance often takes the form of tension in the muscles and breathing patterns. Getting clients to taste the relief and comfort that mindful relaxation brings can help render them a little more open and receptive.

Mindfulness exercises that focus on breath and body awareness are also very simple. Anyone can follow the instructions, and they do not need any other equipment other than oneself. This simplicity can be very attractive to a client, as it is uncomplicated and approachable. Most importantly, “the proof is in the pudding” – the client should be able to feel the difference within himself or herself. This will help reduce their scepticism, tilling that stony soil for the gradual introduction of ideas to stimulate intercultural adaptability.

However, it is impossible for you as a trainer to be able to teach these mindfulness exercises unless you have tasted for yourself the positive changes that come with training your awareness this way.

Consider the interconnectedness of mind, body and breath we learnt about in How mindfulness can transform intercultural training. We all can sense it when we meet someone who is calm, centred, and grounded. It is a whole-being display, that goes beyond a merely intellectual attempt to “sort out your thoughts” and “think clearly”.

We all know people, including ourselves at times, when we think we are behaving calmly and rationally, when those other people who are with us can see how our angry or nervous body language contradicts that self-belief.

As a trainer, standing in front of your clients leading the intervention, can you imagine how they will respond to you when you are teaching them a mindfulness exercise, when they can sense that you yourself do not know what it feels like to have a calm, clear, and stable mind?

Therefore, embarking on your own personal practice of mindfulness is really an unavoidable step if you are looking to harness the profound power of this tool to boost your intercultural training.

The good thing is that you stand to benefit in multiple ways. Not only will it increase your effectiveness as a trainer, you will experience increased personal wellbeing and effectiveness that will manifest in other parts of your life.

Kickstart your mindfulness practice

Try out a mindfulness or meditation app

Some good ones include

• Headspace
• Insight Timer
• Imagine Clarity
• Calm.

Some apps like Imagine Clarity offer structured courses that you can follow step-by-step to progress yourself. Others like Insight Timer offer a smorgasbord of different meditations, plus the chance to plug into a community.

Join a class or group, or take a course

An increasing number of centres offer mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and other related disciplines. Many of these have introductory offers, such as class passes that allow you to try out different types of mindfulness practice, meditation, or yoga. Take advantage of these to find out which one suits you best.

There may also be informal groups that meet up in your neighbourhood, or longer and more structured courses offered by these centres or other institutions of learning such as community colleges and adult learning schools. Retreats are a fantastic way of immersing yourself in a tailored and nurturing environment designed to provide conducive conditions for mindfulness practice. They range from a day to several weeks and even months. Have some fun exploring what’s on offer near you that suits your budget.

Read up

Three excellent introductions are:

• The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Practical Mindfulness: A Step by Step Guide published by Dorling Kindersley. 

 Get a mentor or teacher.

As you broaden your knowledge of mindfulness taking a course or reading up for example, you may come across individuals in your classes or specific authors whom you really like. Alternatively, within your workplace there may already be leaders or colleagues whom you recognise as being particularly good at applying mindfulness at work. Seek out these individuals as formal or informal mentors or teachers. An individualised relationship like this can be tremendously powerful to your progress.

If these are well-respected teachers, they may have a community of students following their teachings. Being part of this community and sharing its energy, learnings, and mutual support is of tremendous benefit in and of itself.

Try it out!

Let yourself get curious about ways in which you could do your everyday tasks more mindfully. Catch yourself being impatient, learn to notice signs such as gripping the steering wheel more tightly, tapping your pen hard on the table, or noticing your face flushing or your voice rising while in a tough conversation.

Watch the thoughts and emotions fleeting across your mind at times like these. For the next breath, take it slowly, and recentre yourself. Release tension with the outbreath, and inhale relief and nourishment with the next breath. Repeat. See how this changes your inner state and external behaviour.

The problem is that we too often fail to get leaders, organisations, HR colleagues and clients excited by the opportunities from intercultural competence. We are not succeeding in demonstrating the true value of intercultural training. It’s the challenge of selling intercultural training.

Participants in intercultural training may expect to walk away with some answers. Intercultural training provides answers which are sometimes difficult to grasp and seemingly impossible to quantify when transferred into the workplace.

For a Learning and Development manager, the outcomes of intercultural training may be a hard sell internally.

When participants arrive at a training, they may not be expecting to commit to a new mindfulness task in their already-busy schedule for the coming weeks or months. Like everyone, training participants have the challenge of finding time/space to implement mindfulness.

Fortunately, mindfulness adds to the long list of benefits of intercultural training. Here are some that can help you build your business case for a mindfulness-enhanced intercultural training programme.

Better results in international work

There is now an increasing body of evidence around the cost of mindless business operations:

• Bad decision-making
• Mistakes
• Oversights
• Knee-jerk reactions

Meanwhile, mindful managers are different from their colleagues. Mindful managers are no longer responding inappropriately to the situation because some colleague has triggered them. They are able to avoid more mistakes in intercultural situations and generate a positive result where others are suffering confusion, frustration or conflict.

Business realism

Perhaps most powerful benefit of mindfulness when making the case, is the licence to recognise reality. We do not expect participants to say “diversity is a 100% good thing for me”, and “I love cultural differences and always enjoy working with our foreign clients”. Mindful intercultural training comes at this from a different angle.

The mindful intercultural training session allows the negative as well as the positive responses to come out. Honest negative, positive and mixed emotions are our starting point for getting skilled at dealing with future cross-cultural tensions, and turning emotional flashpoints into an on-going series of insights and tests passed.

Pleasant feelings

The list of benefits includes pleasure. There is a lot of pleasure to be unlocked from cultural difference, if you allow yourself. Imagining a world where diversity really brings fun, fascination, discovery, opportunity, without many of the familiar frustrations is a very attractive idea to many people.

This is not oversell, because mindfulness is not about eliminating the downsides. Instead mindfulness is about accepting and gaining insights and strength from cultural difference. And yes, it promises to unlock more pleasure for people working in globalised environments, leading to more successful international projects and completed expatriate assignments.

Many more personal benefits

People who use mindfulness techniques report a heightened state of involvement, better memory and attention levels and a greater feeling of being present in the moment. The training and the techniques are not cold and calculating.

Mindfulness often brings a greater liking for the task, and by extension, more happiness from intercultural projects. In short, it makes intercultural work more satisfying and fun.

For organisations, mindfulness has been shown to increase employees’ openness to new information and improve problem solving through awareness of multiple perspectives. Applied to intercultural competence training, the list of potential mindfulness-enabled skills is impressive.

Intercultural training is not like most other training. Getting a return on investment is hard. This is because we often need to apply our intercultural knowledge and skills in the most stressful and confusing of situations, when many people fall back into instinctive, familiar responses and actions, not what they learned on a course months or years ago.

A standard aim of cultural training is to “transfer new skills and insights into real workplace situations”. This is a worthy goal. The next level of ambition is for cultural training to begin a personal transformation which returns the investment many times over a long period and overcomes the barriers to successful transfer.

Mindfulness can be the multiplier which turns training into a lasting resource. Mindfulness offers trainers a way help employees break out of the special limitations of intercultural skills transfer.

In short, mindfulness helps participants internalise the learnings in training, removing some blocks which stop cultural training from working.

Ideas alone are not enough

Body, mind and breathing, we all use these a lot. We are all thinking, breathing bodies, but trainers have traditionally reached only for the mind in training. Two thirds of the items on this list are under-used by intercultural trainers.

Experiencing other cultures is very often physical. people get tense, they intuitively sense disconnection or resistance. They may get feelings of comfort or discomfort. Thoughts and emotions are all happening within a thinking and sensing/feeling body. International assignments are stressful. In the most extreme cases there may even be a feeling of violation.

Mindfulness addresses the overwhelming experience of cultural difference directly. It tackles stress reduction.

Incorporate into intercultural pedagogy

An intercultural trainer using mindfulness techniques has a duty to review and prepare for those reactions. How deep is this felt? Where does it come from? In a mindful intercultural training, we review how we’ve locked ourselves into habits and we review the values we’ve been taught.

Stepping out of the safe zone

The trainer may take training participants beyond safety of ideas into a space where training does not traditionally go: into emotion, physical reactions and reflexive responses. It’s more visceral and sensitive than other kinds of training. And the trainer, being mindful him/herself, needs to be entirely present with the other participants, with full attention on the emotional content of the training situation.

A starter exercise

This sounds like a dramatic departure from traditional intellectual forms of intercultural training. But it is possible to start with just small steps. Trainers may sprinkle mindfulness into training, see success and then go further.

One popular exercise as a first step into mindful intercultural training goes like this:

• with the participants, find the cultural habits and values to which they are most attached
• breathing exercise
• run a realistic simulation where those attachments come under pressure
• repeat the breathing exercise, and discuss the thoughts that come up

Enriching not disrupting the work of interculturalists

Mindfulness is not in conflict with other models in the field of cross-culture. There is a little overlap with ideas of cultural fluency and cultural intelligence, but in general mindfulness is content-neutral. Mindfulness underpins cultural competence. It is not an aspect of cultural competence.

An intercultural trainer may bring in mindfulness techniques, without a wholesale replacement of existing approaches.

One of the great pressures experienced by many intercultural trainers is time: the limited contact time available with training participants. A mindfulness intervention in training may be a just a few minutes. Real change can begin in less time than required by the traditional 1-2 day training.

Studies show that there can be positive impact even with very short interventions, though more research is needed on the impact of different formats of training specifically in the intercultural field.

Drip, drip, drip…

In cultural training, there’s often so much content. A typical format is a full training day plus some online activity in the 1-2 weeks before and after. There’s a lot to absorb in a short time. List of Dos and Don’ts is too long for most people to store in their heads or keep in training handouts.

Mindfulness supports an approach which is about long-term engagement, is shorter bursts of learning and shorter episodes of live connection with the trainer.

Risky business

If a training practitioner can achieve more in ever-shorter training sessions, can we as an industry sustain this? Is there a viable business here? These are good questions and the answers are not yet clear.

However, the ease with which trainers can stay connected with participants today suggests a future direction. Mindfulness gets its power when adopted mindfully yet habitually in everyday life.

Trainers and their clients need to explore new ways of collaborating, where the trainer becomes an on-going resource for people and organisations, sustaining participants’ commitment to mindful practices and offering access to those databases of Dos and Don’ts.

Walking the talk as a mindful, culturally-sensitive trainer

There are other questions for mindful intercultural trainers to answer too. Naturally, as intercultural trainers we must walk the talk. We must be respectful of cultures and beware that mindfulness may be perceived as competing with some religious practices.

According to the hype, mindfulness is for everyone. But it would not be a smart move to require mindfulness of absolutely all personnel who need intercultural training.

Intercultural trainers as students of mindfulness

We’ve provided some downloadable slides which can help intercultural trainers integrate mindfulness into their current training approach. But if mindfulness is entirely new to you, the best place to start is by experimenting on yourself.

How to get started with mindfulness in your intercultural training

Leading clients through a mindfulness exercise as part of intercultural training makes you, as trainer, the model for mindful practice. If you are early in your journey with mindfulness, our best tip is that you become deeply familiar with mindfulness in your own life. We offer five steps for getting started.

Practise patience, catch yourself being impatient, learn to notice signs such as gripping the steering wheel tighter, tapping your pen hard on the table or noticing the literal heat rise inside your clothes when you’re in a tough conversation.

Try some breathing exercises, reflect on situations immediately after, and then increasingly do that reflection when you are in the moment too.

A tool for intercultural trainers

So for intercultural trainers, mindfulness builds the business case, integrates smoothly with existing approaches, enables more impact in ever-shortening training sessions, opens new possibilities for on-going involvement with clients, sends training participants away after a memorable training experience empowered with transferable techniques and good prospects for more satisfying intercultural work.

Now breathe, and imagine using mindfulness in your intercultural training.

the mindful perspective suggests we can avoid harmful automatic and reflexive reactions to cultural difference

Mindfulness is a huge international trend. The phenomenon crosses cultures enabling mindful individuals to cross cultures more successfully too.

Mindfulness is intercultural. It is a fusion of Eastern ideas and Western aspirations. Mindfulness mixes aspects of Buddhism with Western preoccupations, such as purposefulness, the need for methodologies, the desire for stress reduction.

For intercultural trainers and global mobility professionals, mindfulness naturally gives us a fresh and practical perspective in our work.

Where mindfulness meets culture

Mindfulness has something useful to say about the interaction between cultures. Three key intersections of mindfulness and culture are:

• awareness
• acceptance
• stress-reduction

When we use our understanding of culture to make intercultural strategies we very often target awareness, acceptance and stress-reduction or anxiety especially among expatriates. Mindfulness can help us achieve these goals.

From concepts into practice

Through awareness of body and breathing, mindfulness is a monitor of cultural difference.

In traditional intercultural training we teach people to recognise their blind spots, to see the cultural iceberg below the surface. Sometimes we might ask people to consider the inventor of the ocean (“we don’t know who it was, but we are pretty sure it wasn’t a fish”). These metaphors for awareness are conceptual and intellectual.

Mindfulness heightens awareness without metaphor. Mindful can happen at a very physical level.

Through awareness of body and breathing, by reflecting on physical and emotional reactions, mindfulness is itself a monitor of the friction caused by cultural difference. When a traveller, expatriate or culturally-isolated person experiences excitement, frustration or anger, the feeling may be an indicator of cultural differences and unfamiliar situations. Monitoring feelings can alert us to cultural differences.

In fact, Mindfulness gives us deep insight into what cultural difference means at a person-to-person level.

To manage cultural differences successfully, the mindful perspective suggests we must first dissolve the mindlessness which leads us into harmful automatic and reflexive reactions when we meet other cultures.

When we achieve awareness of our own physical reactions we get an individual map of where our cultural boundaries bump up against other cultures.

Let go of the idea of a fixed culture

From a mindfulness point of view, the key idea for culture is that thoughts and emotions are transient. They come and go. They do not define you as a person and they do not fix the behaviour of an entire nation over time.

Cultures are made of thoughts and emotions, translated into habits and actions, which are also transient. When you realise that your culture is transient, it is easier to release yourself from your cultural framework. It is easier to recognise your own cultural iceberg, the above-the-surface behaviours and reactions and the deeper needs which drive them.

But if all cultures are made of transient things, does culture lose its meaning? No, we have always known that cultures change, that cultures have fuzzy edges, that cultures seem so solid from a zoomed-out perspective and yet seem to disappear as we zoom in.

Seeing culture as a temporary, moving thing, enables us to detach ourselves from it and view it with more objectivity, more awareness, more mindfulness.

Mindfulness does not ask us to give up the whole idea of culture. But it says we should look for more cultural categories, more perspectives and recognise that these cultural categories change constantly depending on the situation, all without judgemental evaluation.

Cultural difference is emotionally charged

Encountering cultural difference is rarely a neutral experience. For most people, it’s stressful. In the media, business and public life the dominant conversation says that cultural difference and diversity are positive and to be welcomed. For some people in some situations, that is undoubtedly true. But there are strong psychological forces behind group-think, driving our desire to be among people who are like us, to be on familiar ground, to reject the unfamiliar. For most people, most of the time, cultural differences make us stressed.

Mindfulness has something to offer here. With a mindfulness perspective, you can see the irritation coming, and avoid it using mindful techniques.

See the irritation coming, and avoid it using mindful techniques

There are many techniques available for mindfulness. Mindfulness apps such as Insight Timer, practices such as yoga, conscious breathing and stretching all offer moments of mindfulness and a chance for travellers to reflect on cultural difference.

In this way, cultural difference can live up to the hype: multiculturalism becomes fun and enriching, not anxiety-forming. Mindfulness lessens your attachment to your own culture, boosts positive perspectives when cultures collide, and enables you to focus on the beauty of the moment.

Mindfulness allows us to give an honest appraisal of cultural difference:

• true, cultural difference can cause pain
• no, you don’t have to fight back
• no, you are not required to love the challenge of cultural difference.

Mindful responses in cross-cultural situations

Mindfulness is above all a practice, and it is compatible with many other frameworks, including many of the frameworks we use in the intercultural world. We can apply mindfulness smoothly into cross cultural situations.

In very practical ways we can answer the question “What would a mindful intercultural manager look like?”

Being in the moment, not trying to act like the other culture does

When facing intercultural situations, mindful intercultural managers do not just toggle between cultures (switching on/off Japanese or Brazilian style). The mindful intercultural manager does not think “now I am being Japanese, now I am being English”. Instead we have to remove the entire concept of self, so that we can pay full attention to the appropriate reactions in the present situation.

Take different roles

Instead of automatically following a script, as if we are on autopilot, we should consider our different roles, and the other different roles relevant to the situation (colleague, subordinate, mentor, representative, professional, regional player, networker etc). The situation is always new. Mindlessness means that a certain stimulus always brings the same response. A mindful manager takes new roles and views information from various perspectives.

Released from a fixed idea about who you are

According to mindfulness, it is an illusion to believe that you are a fixed person, and an unchanging self. The mindful intercultural manager has no need to follow one single script for all situations.

Detaching from own culture

A mindful intercultural manager acknowledges that his/her own culture is of his/her own choosing and that there is also a choice to detach yourself from your original cultural limitations.

Breathing

When intercultural stress hits, when facing annoyance or frustrations which seem to be caused by foreign cultural practices, a mindful intercultural manager uses breathing exercises to maintain a steady and balanced approach. Increasingly, the mindful intercultural manager can sense these situations approaching, and learns to prevent the stress from ever occurring.

Mindfulness heightens awareness

So mindfulness has much to say about culture and the way that cultures interact. It is truly a reflection of our intercultural society, and the way that new ideas arise globally through dialogue and cross-fertilisation.

As mindfulness changes our ideas about culture, it can also lead us to changes in the way we do intercultural training.

The change has happened. Intercultural training has gone online. And there is more change to come. Argonaut met Béatrice Rivas Siedel, an intercultural coach and trainer based in Paris and member of Terres Neuves Network to get a trainer’s perspective on the rush into e-learning.

“For years not much happened, except for a few early adopters running pilots and low-profile projects” says Béatrice. “Some big organisations had online self-study tools for intercultural skills, but trainers were able to continue training in traditional ways. That’s all past now. Today clients and employees expect to learn online – at least partly.

We are training in a period of complete transformation lasting just a few years

Béatrice is a leading part of the trend in her home market, France. She tracks the development through industry reports, including the IFTS survey. “The trend towards digital learning is happening at rate of around 7% per year. We are living in and training in a period of complete transformation lasting just a few years”.

“That feels like a step change, and we’re noticing it”, says Béatrice. “These trends have hit intercultural training too, and it’s a shock for those trainers not ready or able to adapt.”

What trainers can do

Béatrice believes that further change is inevitable. “The end result must be that trainers incorporate technology deeper into their work. Trainers will find their own unique path which suits them and their client base. I’ve told the story of My breakthrough moments as an intercultural trainer in a recent blog post here.”

Being part of the discussion

We asked how trainers can take a bigger role in the e-learning revolution. “Trainers also need to have a louder voice in this transformation. They have valuable expertise in how learning happens.” Béatrice lists the three groups who could benefit from hearing the insights and getting support from the trainers.

Opening the conversation about e-learning with

• training providers who engage trainers
• clients who have the organisational needs
• employees who participate in training

“They are all on the same journey into technology-enabled learning.”

New training methods in practice

While talking and listening are important, Béatrice says trainers also need to experiment with change. One area is to build solid expertise in facilitating virtual training sessions. Béatrice has shared eight actions for trainers switching to virtual training.

What employees can do

Completing a training programme which is 50%-100% remote can be a great experience as a learner. Here are some of the opportunities which Béatrice encourages her training participants to consider:

• Take advantage of asynchronous learning, which is learning which you can fully schedule, where you are not required to be in a live call or live session with the trainer or others. Make a schedule which suits you in terms of pace, time of day, length of session, your physical location.
• Get to know your own learning style, and make sure you benefit from that, especially if the trainer is remote or if you are working alone. For example, if you are visual and kinaesthetic (using movement and touch), then draw and write. This helps you learn better as you watch video or read content. Do no not allow yourself to take the role of passive recipient of knowledge and skills. Be an active e-learner.
• Get regular feedback: use the tests which are often built into the online learning platform, participate in games, ask the trainer and co-learners to give you feedback
• Repeat and review. Many people learn lasting skills and get lasting knowledge by repetition or returning to material with fresh eyes. Reviews and repetition are great for memory.

What training providers can do

Béatrice proposes that training organisations re-think their business models, in dialogue with their customers and with their trainers. “Some trainers are not convinced. They worry that as e-learning rises, the quality of human interaction falls. There is scepticism and criticism. Here in France, we may express our opposition openly. Often trainers fear that F2F trainings will disappear.”

Some training providers have successfully involved trainers in piloting new models, based on blended learning approaches. “Training providers should empower trainers to design the training structure to fit customer needs.” Béatrice points to one model which already becoming a classic blended learning training structure:

one remote asynchronous module → then live F2F → then social media

But many different structures are possible. “We are moving out of the era when clients come to training providers for a rigid model or fixed approach to training design,” Béatrice continues. “Although training providers need to build their brand and the unique advantages of their approach, they should also reserve creative space for the trainer to construct the learning around the precise needs of the client in each case.”

Innovative intercultural training providers

Terres Neuves, part of the Ceran group, is one example of an innovator in this area which gets good feedback from Béatrice. “They are working with the Argonaut team to provide training for consultants, and support when clients and trainers adopt new techniques.”

“Training providers like Terres Neuves can give opportunities for trainers to acquire new skills necessary for success with e-learning. Key skills for trainers are:

• leading virtual meetings
• using technology in face-to-face training sessions (and know when not to)
• remote mentoring, use of chat rooms for longer-term processes with clients
• content creation, starting with blogs, video interviews and so on.”

Digital learning will not make face-to-face training disappear.

Béatrice notes that training providers have an important role in getting permission from the client to mix synchronous and asynchronous learning. She adds that training providers can make sure that trainers have access to technologies, even something as simple as social media, which is often a great module to complete a training or to enable continued involvement.

“One of the most significant decisions a training provider must make, is the decision to licence learning technology. They will need a good learning management system with good tracking, so the client can find out what’s happening.”

What clients can do

Most of Béatrice’s clients have a learning and development strategy which includes increasing the use of e-learning. They are already on track to boost the use of technology in their employees’ training. But intercultural training is rarely the first area to get investment or to see change.

“Clients can achieve benefits in intercultural training too”, says Béatrice. She highlights some advantages and obstacles that are relevant for intercultural training too.

• Seek flexible training designs, both to control the cost and to find a better individual fit for the employee or group
• Promote the possibilities to employees
• Demand, review and use tracking data about the training, to influence the design of future trainings

Reduce or remove these obstacles for training companies:

• Investment in platform: opening corporate Learning Management Systems for intercultural training, or accepting the platform costs in external intercultural training provider solutions
• Investment in content, including industry-specific and company specific case-studies, shared in e-learning format
• Investment in training skills of in-house and freelance trainers; this can also happen at no cost for example by including external consultants in internal e-learning training courses for trainers and L&D managers

100% face to face is never best

Béatrice has become a convinced advocate of blended learning. “100% face to face is never best, just like 100% e-learning can never be best” she says.

Allowing employees some asynchronous learning time will always beat a seminar or course which is scheduled according to people’s calendars. “In asynchronous learning, you can learn at your own pace and use the synchronous (live or face-to-face) sessions for inspiration, energy, creativity and emotional experience. The Mix is more efficient than 100% face to face.”

Béatrice comments that cross-cultural training providers dominate her industry, and they can be drivers in our industry’s tech revolution.

It will happen anyway

She sees no threat to innovative trainers or training providers. “Digital learning will not make face-to-face training disappear. I would say the reverse. When a trainer can use remote training techniques, it moves the face-to-face part to a higher level.”

For Béatrice, the surest way to preserve face-to-face training is to incorporate digital learning. “As trainers, we can remove the PPT, and make our sessions truly interactive and experiential.”

The zero hour came at an e-learning exhibition in Paris. I have always been professionally curious, but until 2015 I was an outsider to the technologies that are transforming our industry. For a few hours on that day a little over two years ago I had stepped into a foreign culture of geeks, LMS providers, gamifiers, community moderators, MOOC developers, e-mentors and techies.

boring, incomprehensible, technical

My honest reaction was that this e-learning world is boring, technical and incomprehensible. It is also the inevitable future of my profession, so walking out of the exhibition centre I decided that I must understand this revolution. I saw that it had something to offer my intercultural work. I knew that I had to master this new way of training and learning.

Self transformation, year three

So began my two-year transformation. And it continues. I am learning every week, enhancing knowledge and practice, but I am no longer in catch-up mode.

The technologies have become more familiar. The new approaches are still energising and sometimes experimental, but they are now inside my expanded comfort zone.  The world of e-learning is no long boring, technical or incomprehensible to me.

My journey to becoming a blended-learning trainer

Having made my decision to adopt technology into my training, I first wanted to experience online learning myself, in the role of learner.

Walking in the learner’s shoes.

I chose a programme run by the excellent ISTF, the only organisation I found who really train trainers in the new learning technologies, and offer that training 100% remotely.

Getting the concepts clear

I began to understand the culture and the terminology. Basic concepts like synchronous and asynchronous became clear, and their relevance to training design and training delivery.

Acquiring knowledge in a positive cycle

I learned how to design learning scripts for different formats of training, facilite group sessions and structure blended learning courses

I learned how to use my voice, how to move, how to adjust timing, how to set up exercises and much more.

Entering the culture

Nothing was off-limits. I tried every technology and explored every technique. I got to know the terminology and the buzzwords. I joined the e-learning culture that had seemed so foreign at the expo in Paris. I grew a genuine curiosity in anything e-learning.

Open to influences from unexpected directions

I made sure I had not become trapped in an e-learning bubble. I accepted ideas and influences from other directions too. My approach was always interdisciplinary. I absorbed latest ideas and proven models from

• digital learning
• cross-culture
• working styles research
• principles of training
• design
• nature

I established the intercultural afterwork meetings with a few fellow professionals in Paris. Every month or two I got to exchange ideas, approaches, cultural information with my peers, keeping an open mind to other ways of working.

Looking after yourself

All this self-development sounds like too much, right? Well, you can develop a long way in two years, but the road ahead continues. I am not finished yet. I never let the vast world of learning technologies put me under unhealthy pressure. I did not become overloaded. I integrated all my professional self-development into my working days. Saturday and Sunday remained work-free zones.

Looking after your customers

Working with innovative technologies demands an open attitude to experimentation. But I did not want my customers to pay the price of failures resulting from inexperience. I never used a technique or technology I had not used on myself. I was the first to suffer and remove poor-performing elements from the training programme. I became the tester, and more convinced of the value of the approaches with did work well.

Intercultural training goes digital, a trainer’s perspective

Digital learning will not make face-to-face training disappear, says Béatrice Rivas Siedel in this interview with Argonaut. She gives her view as a trainer deep in the digital learning revolution about what we can to do take every advantage. Her insights are relevant for trainers, training providers, client organisations and the learners themselves.

Two breakthrough moments

Two moments stay vividly in my memory, when I recognised that something had changed. I saw that I had progressed to be not only a participant, but a driver of the e-learning revolution.

In France we like to first get the concepts clear, then bring the ideas into practice. In this case, I did the reverse. I built my experience gradually, adjusting my approach, trying new things at a small scale. I was copying, learning, using models, following guidelines.

Now I use a different three words for the e-learning revolution:

Rewarding, flexible, refreshing

To succeed facilitating virtual sessions means changing the approach compared to working with clients face-to-face.

More from Béatrice

My breakthrough moments as a trainer in the e-learning revolution

This is the story of Béatrice Rivas Siedel’s professional transformation as an intercultural trainer. In two years she moved from being an outsider to the technological revolution in coaching and training, to being a full participant, driver and advocate of blending online and face-to-face learning.

Before the first coffee break in an intercultural training session, you may have already covered the main introductory and culture-general ideas, such as stereotypes, culture shock and the iceberg.

Assuming there’s a culture-specific part to the programme, you’ll need to tackle the key differences which make the culture unique, but still understandable from an outside perspective.

Good ways to introduce a specific culture to training participants include some history, some personal stories and some visual, taste or simulated experience. And then how can we take training participants’ instinctive reaction and curiosity and bring transferable understanding?

The 12 key differences represent very practical ways in which a person can improve their confidence, performance and satisfaction working across cultures. For trainers using CultureConnector, there are rich opportunities for giving training participants practical tools for navigating the differences in specific cultural situations yet to be encountered after the training.

Key differences

Everyone who uses CultureConnector gets a cultural profile based on 12 key areas where differences and common ground can mean success or failure in cross-cultural work. Here’s a brief look at the profile you’ll get from CultureConnector.

Resources for trainers

Requiring licence

• Trainer Help – free access to practical information and guides if you have a current Trainer Dashboard licence
• Accredited trainer resources – deeper dive and practical training exercises, with material, based on the 12 key differences. Requires current accredited trainer status.

Free

• More about training with CultureConnector
• How to integrate e-learning into your training
• Training material introducing the 12 key differences in PDF and PPTX format. Use it freely in your coaching and training.