Intercultural competence

This was an important issue in our text, and although we talked about it earlier in the semester I wanted to touch on it again. Intercultural competence is hard to attain because people share so many differences culturally. People have different norms, languages, and rules that they live by. Things are socially accepted differently in different cultures which makes being a competent communicator with someone say in India so difficult. We have a hard enought time communicating competently with people from our own culture that throwing in a whole different set or norms and ideas makes things even more difficult.

To help be a more competent communicator cross-culturally, we could be less judgemental. Although we are all going to judge people regardless because it is human nature, we can make points to not act on our judgements. By not taking our judgements to heart and treating everyone equally, we could make a difference in the way in which we all communicate cross-culturally. We also need to be open to new ideas. Just because an idea is different than what we are used to does not mean that we have to assume it is bad or wrong. By bashing another person's cultural beliefs, we could never fully competently communicate with them.