4
Education of Environment
Now that you've done the hard work of understanding yourself, your thoughts, and why you think the way you do, it's time to educate yourself on the environments around you. It's easy to lose sight of the effect our behavior has on others, yet seeing our behavior through others eyes' is a critical part of becoming more self-aware.
How do you do that? By
- Learning how to collect and gather information.
- Becoming an active listener.
- Being an active part of your community.
Learn How to Collect and Gather Information
Let's start off with collecting and gathering information. I said earlier that my dad was a diplomat and that we moved often because of his job. By the time I was freshman in college, I had lived in five countries and four continents, and with every move, I observed my dad as he sought to understand his new environments and establish relationships.
I watched him try to maintain international relations with regard to issues of peace, war, trade, economics, culture, the environment, and human rights. I also observed as he sought to establish common ground with his colleagues, locally and internationally. His morning routine before he went to the office was to read the newspaper (back when we did that sort of thing), tune in to the BBC, then CNN, and then the local news stations.
I would ask him, “Dad, why do you do these things?” and he responded with this: “Akintayo, the world is bigger than you and if you want to succeed in it, you have to understand it.”
The world is bigger than you and if you want to succeed in it, you have to understand it.
He was basically trying to understand the differences around him and find the commonalities that existed within them. He was working on developing his cultural intelligence or his ability to relate and work effectively across cultures while trying to develop his emotional intelligence by understanding interpersonal relationships.
HOW CAN YOU APPLY THIS TO YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE?
Remember when you were identifying your biases as you were improving your self-awareness to acknowledge the cultures or groups of people you felt uncomfortable around? Now it's time to work through those feelings.
This is part of what I call Finding Your Inner Sherlock, or being able to observe, deduce, and conclude, based on your intuition. Sherlock Holmes, of course, is the most famous fictional detective in the world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation taught us the importance of noticing the smaller details and being present in order to see the bigger picture.
Let's get into how you can start becoming better at collecting and gathering information.
Record Your Observations and Findings Ethnography, as Webster's dictionary defines it, is the study and systematic recording of human cultures. Based on the biases you found you have, create a note-taking system that documents the sociocultural contexts, processes, and meanings within the cultural systems you're investigating. Here's a model I recommend:
- Week 1: Do one action within the week to learn more about the type of person you have a bias toward (read an article, book, blog, podcast, etc.).
- Week 2: Commit to learning more about someone in that group, either at work, in a professional network, or a social setting, and pay attention to your body language and communication going into the interaction, during the conversation, and after. Journal it.
- Weeks 3 and 4: Try to meet someone new to interact with, journal the interaction, and see if anything changed.
Continue to repeat this until it becomes a habit. If you don't want to do this by yourself, I encourage you to find accountability partners. You can do this at schools, workplaces, and in family gatherings. You might find yourself a bit frustrated during this exercise, but trust me when I say that discomfort means growth.
Acknowledge Your Senses I also recommend that, beyond your biases, you focus your attention on acknowledging your senses. You could work on any or all of the following senses: taste, sight, touch, smell, and sound. As you go about your day, you will find yourself encountering different people and different experiences. Record them in your journal this way.
Taste
- What things did I taste today?
- What did the things I tasted remind me of?
Sight
- What things and people caught my eye? Why?
- What clothes did the people I met today wear?
- Who did the people I met look like? What was the color of their eyes? Hair?
- What rooms did I walk into today and what did the room look like? What were the colors of the walls, furniture, ceilings, and floors?
Touch
- What things did I touch today? What did they feel like?
- What did the things I touch remind me of?
Smell
- What things did I smell today?
- What did the things I smelled remind me of?
Sound
- What things did I hear today?
- What did the things I heard remind me of?
What you'll start noticing in yourself is that you begin to notice patterns and come up with frames of references that are familiar to you. This will put things into perspective from a point of view you can understand. You will begin to build connections between what your senses feel and what you know. You'll start calling on memories you have had before, which will boost your drive to form connections in your environment.
Meditate When I first heard about meditation, I thought it was some woo-woo tactic that was practiced by people who were out of touch with reality (an example of how my bias misinformed me based on limited exposure). However, as I started to study leaders like Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama, I began to see how it helped them connect with people vastly different from them. After seeing this, I decided to give it another try. I downloaded a guided meditation app called Breethe and committed to meditating at least 10 minutes a day. I noticed that my focus and my memory improved, I was able to reflect on my day and journal recordings, and I had more emotional control.
As you incorporate meditation into your life while learning about your environment, I urge you to set an intention to connect with others and to imagine how you will react to various scenarios that could arise as you seek to understand your environment. This will help you to become more comfortable connecting across cultures as well as help you manage some of the discomfort that may arise as you're collecting and gathering information. The more you meditate, the more your day slows down. The more your day slows down, the more you become present. The more present you become, the more you notice. According to a Harvard study, about 47% of waking hours are spent thinking about what isn't going on. That means we spend close to half of our day being absent.1
Study Microexpressions While doing research for this book, I got to interview two of the leading body language experts in the world and founders of the Center for Body Language, Patryk and Kasia Wezowski. I wanted to learn more about microexpressions and how to read nonverbal body language. Microexpressions are facial expressions that occur within 1/25th of a second (see Figure 4.1). They are involuntary and expose a person's true emotions. According to Patryk and Kasia, even though body language varies significantly across cultures, microexpressions remain consistent across all known cultures.
FIGURE 4.1 Patryk and Kasia Wezowski Highlighting Different Microexpressions.
Recognizing and interpreting microexpressions takes practice, but there are a few things you can start doing immediately to improve your skills. Listed below are what Patryk and Kasia suggest you can do to study microexpressions.
- First, study the common microexpressions pictured in Figure 4.1 so you know the hallmarks of each. Disgust, for example, involves downturned lips, while people feeling contempt might show it by inadvertently pulling one side of the mouth up. Surprise and fear might look similar, but the latter emotion will cause people to pull their brows together.
- Second, if you know you're about to visit or interact with another culture, educate yourself on the local body language—including masking techniques. YouTube is a great tool for this: Find videos of 10 executives from that culture and watch how they communicate.
- Third, when you're in the moment, pay attention. You can't interpret microexpressions if you don't notice them. Don't make your counterpart uncomfortable with an unwavering stare. But do keep your focus on the face.
- Fourth, listen to your intuition. When you notice a tiny facial movement, ask yourself: “What could that mean?” Humans are wired to subconsciously detect even the subtlest of emotional flashes, so your gut instinct may be correct.
- You might also try to mimic the movement. When you repeat what you saw—whether it was a quick eyebrow raise or tightening of the lips, it not only gives you more time to think but also fires the mirror neurons in your brain, making it easier for you to associate the movement you saw with the correct emotion.
- If you're still perplexed, start to exclude emotions. After memorizing the expressions in Figure 4.1, you should be able to quickly assess what the facial cue does not mean. For example, if you saw someone's eyebrows going down, you can exclude surprise, fear, or sadness—all of which are associated with raised eyebrows—and work from there.
- If you're presenting to a crowd, as we were in Qatar, continue to scan the audience for microexpressions. Don't fixate on one negative look; instead, try to discern the sentiments of the majority.
- Body language can be cultural, but emotions are universal. Microexpressions reveal someone's true feelings in a fragment of a second, so it pays to notice them and calibrate your behavior in cross-cultural interactions accordingly.2
To deepen your knowledge on the subject be sure to check out Patryck and Kasia's book, The Micro Expressions Book for Business.
As you start to do all this, you'll find yourself developing your critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills.
Become an Active Listener
Once you've incorporated collecting and gathering information into your routine, the second thing you can do to understand the environment around you is to become an active listener. Research shows that we only retain between 25 to 50% of what we hear.3 It's no wonder a lot of us don't understand each other, right?
Just look at the divisions in today's climate:
- Republican versus Democrat
- Immigrant versus nonimmigrant
- Nationalist versus Internationalist
- DC fans versus Marvel fans
So much us versus them—from the mundane to the serious!
And I get it! We all like to think we are right, but are we willing to put all that pride aside?
I ask this because, if we are not willing to do this, we miss out on a chance to truly connect with the unfamiliar. A lot of us think we are listening but not many actively listen.
Active listening is:
- Listening to learn
- Listening to evaluate
- Listening to understand
LISTENING TO LEARN
Listening to learn starts with your intention. Tell yourself before you go into any listening session that your goal is to learn something new. Think of yourself as an interviewer. When you study the great interviewers like Oprah Winfrey and Graham Norton, you realize that what they are truly good at is asking open-ended and clarifying questions as opposed to leading questions. Their questions uncover emotions and open the door to storytelling. Storytelling is important because it allows people to tell you how they interpret the world. When people feel like you care about their stories, they become more comfortable.
These freeform types of questions provide opportunities for you to probe, which indicates interest and gives you insight into your audience's way of thinking. When you treat people the way they want to be treated and not how you feel they should be treated, you're onto something magical.
You're onto connection.
LISTENING TO EVALUATE
Listening to evaluate means critically examining what you've heard and seeking alignment. Once you find the alignment, frame your conversation by speaking to the values both you and your interviewee have. As you continue to ask open-ended questions, your goal should be to listen for personal feelings, opinions, or ideas on a particular subject. These will give you insight into the cultural significance of several things that are important to that person.
LISTEN TO UNDERSTAND
It takes a lot of concentration and determination to be an active listener, so ask questions, reflect, and paraphrase to ensure you understand the message. Remember, your goal here isn't to influence an outcome; it's to listen to what has been said and what hasn't. If you don't listen actively, then you could find that what someone says to you and what you hear can be amazingly different! Repeat what you heard verbatim. This is the easiest route, because the prospect will hear exactly what they just said and can either confirm their meaning or clarify their statement. Paraphrasing communicates to your audience that you care enough about what they said to put it in your words, which is empathy.
Be an Active Member of Your Community
The third thing that you can do to understand the environment around you is to be an active part of your community.
Pop quiz!
- In your current community, do you know about the different types of people who live in it?
- Do you know the socioeconomic makeup of it?
- Do you know who your local and state leaders are?
- Do you know how the same set of laws affects different types of people in your community?
If you don't, I encourage you to work on that. I encourage you to build your awareness of government, the community, and the authority and power of the environment you're investigating. This is about being informed about the world and rights of those around you.
Personally, I got my start with this type of behavior when my eighth-grade teacher, Miss McDonald, made us learn all the countries, capitals, and bodies of water in the world. When we asked her why this was important, she told us that if we wanted to be global citizens, we needed to understand the actual globe. She also said it would make us more curious.
In the spirit of her challenge to me back then, I'd like you all to challenge yourselves to build your curiosity muscles. Find out what's going on outside the walls of your comfort zone. Pick up a new language. Make a commitment to regularly travel to new communities. Volunteer in the inner cities. When you travel, don't just go to the tourist spots; enmesh yourself with the locals. At work or in school, join an affinity group or club that you know nothing about.
Curiosity is one of the most important traits you can develop. Here are some reasons why:
- It keeps your mind active rather than passive.
- It ensures that you become more observant of new ideas.
- It opens up new worlds and possibilities.
- It brings excitement into your life, which boosts your drive to learn.
Like my dad said, the world is bigger than you and if you want to succeed in it, you have to understand it.
Doing all this allows you to build empathy and become a perspective taker, which means you'll be able to temporarily suspend your own point of view in an attempt to view a situation as someone else might.
Notes
- 1. Steve Bradt, “Wandering Mind Not a Happy Mind,” Harvard Gazette, 11 November 2010, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/wandering-mind-not-a-happy-mind/.
- 2. Kasia Wezowski, “How to Get Better at Reading People from Different Cultures,” Harvard Business Review, 18 September 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/09/how-to-get-better-at-reading-people-from-different-cultures.
- 3. Ralph G. Stevens and Leonard A. Nichols, “Listening to People,” Harvard Business Review, 1 August 2014, hbr.org/1957/09/listening-to-people.