Learn a new culture | Julien S. Bourrelle | TEDxArendal

[Music] I had a great pleasure to live in Spain for two years in Spain when you come into a shop you say hola the cashiers replies hola and then everyone else in the shops replies ora it looks a little bit like this and you feel very much welcome I was in Spain this summer I came back to Norway where I live and then I got into a grocery store and then I said hi suddenly people are wondering why is he saying hi because they're expecting me to start a conversation to ask a questions greetings means

something different there much more purposeful they're much more pragmatic and this is one of the first thing you realize when you move to a different culture yeah it's the outer shelf of culture and it's not just about greetings it's about how you do it and when you do it I was born and raised in a french-speaking part of Canada and like in that part of the world like in many other places around the world when you leave an event or you leave a party you're gonna go around and say goodbye to everyone so you're gonna

go around and shake hands with every man and kiss every women it's expected it's welcome it's part of the cultural rituals and norms actually if you don't do this you will feel a little bit uneducated if you do this in Scandinavia you're weird yeah why would you go and disturb someone in the middle of a conversation just to say goodbye when you know you're gonna see the person again yeah greetings is the outer shelf of culture and this is one of the first challenges you will meet changing culture people like to call me the rocket

scientist which is not entirely true I studied Astro dynamic which is a subfield of mechanical engineering studying the rigid body motion of human made made spacecraft outside the Earth's atmosphere something quite different than culture and social anthropology yet it is through studying rocket science that I've learned about culture when I was 20 years old I had never been outside Canada and I could only speak French 10 years later I had lived in five different countries and learned four new language and in each of these countries I've made a conscious effort to observe how people behaved

and communicated and that my own behaviors and ways to communicate to these people so that they feel comfortable around me and this is what I'm trying to do today that's the reason I'm here today and the reason why I wake up every morning I go around the world helping people to communicate across cultures I help people to see the behaviors of others not based on what it means in their own culture but based on what it means in the cultures of others I was in the very remote region in Sichuan province in China I was

sitting in a bus in the morning and the bus was starting to drive it was pretty empty when I sat in but then silently people started to come in and at one point was completely full and a woman that was older than me came into the bus since I was born and raised in in in a Latin culture my mom has always told me to leave my seat for women and so I I stood up and I indicated she could set and then she said no and since I had been living in certain countries in

Europe and learned that when a woman says no like this you should just sit down in silence and look down and don't say anything yeah so so I did that but then something very special happened she looked at me she smiled and then she sat on me [Applause] [Laughter] but not only did she sit on me in that part of China people don't have hair on their arms so she was sitting on me pulling my hair and laughing about it with everyone else in the bus yeah as you can imagine this not this did not

feel very comfortable for me but it seemed to be quite comfortable for her because she sat there for half an hour yeah and everyone was laughing so I thought okay Julien just tried to enjoy the moment and so I started to laugh with them and and you know well is a long bus drive and what that meant was that 2p2 families felt very comfortable and they ended up inviting me for dinner that night when we arrived to the village and I ended up to stay over a couple of nights at one of the family because

I've managed to put myself in a situation that was uncomfortable for me and and become comfortable so the locals felt that they were much closer than me and this is what we're trying to do when we learn a new culture it's about learning to be comfortable in what is uncomfortable how is it possible that it is more comfortable for a Chinese woman's which to sit on a stranger than it is for us to sit next to someone that we've been commuting with for years but never talk to personal space is very cultural now but what

is culture culture is our mental programming this is our mental programming that tells us what is good behaviors or bad behaviors wanted or unwanted behaviors what we should do or don't do what is welcome and not welcome and now I'm not just talking about national cultures we also have subculture it could be an organizational culture the culture you have within a company or an organization or it could be also a different culture and different social economy group within the same society and all of these group all of these cultures have rituals and have norms that

we need to respect and if you want to feel part of that group you need to adapt your own behaviors to that one group there's the outer shelf of culture and there's also the inner shelf of culture the outer shelf is everything we can see the nonverbal the verbal the inner self is more the valley the logic of socialization how we understand in a deeper way the cultures were interacting with I was invited to a wedding its Switzerland and it was a Swiss German girl that was marrying a Lebanese man and when I came into

the church the two families were sitting there on the water side was the Swiss German family they were all sitting in silence looking straight waiting for the ceremony to start on the other side was the Lebanese family before their ceremony even started the women were crying the men were talking loudly the kids were running around it looked a little bit like this if you've been to a multicultural wedding you may relate quite easily you could feel the cultural tension the cultural differences actually in the middle of the ceremony when the man need down to put

the ring in his wife's finger three people from the Lebanese side jumped on stage to take a picture of the man kneeling down to the great despair of the Swiss German well behaved family but luckily that evening the Lebanese people had brought musical instrument while they started to play the Swiss German started to drink and within a few hours the Swiss Germans we're dancing on the table on the Lebanese beer and they've been dancing there up until four o'clock the next morning and both family live happily since then and now this is what we try

to do to bridge culture we try to find these musical instrument that will make people jump on table and dance on table we need to try to find these tools that make people understand the world and connect despite the cultural differences and this is a lot about emotion if you come from a culture where the emotion is very obvious when you meet someone and you're very happy you're showing it to the person you're showing you're very happy maybe you're going to hug the person you're showing it very clearly if you're angry you're gonna do the

same you're gonna show that you're angry and the person will see it very clearly so if you come from a culture like this and you you move into a culture where emotions are much more subtle and you try to interpret the behaviors fathers it may look something like this for you so you see that maybe the person is very happy or very angry however BAE's in your own cultural perspective you won't be able to identify that because happiness and being angry is expressed in such a much more obvious part so you may end up to

completely misinterpret the emotional feedback you get from another person the key here is to observe and and and pick up what are the subtle differences and it's also to see the world not based on what it means in your own culture but based on what it means in the cultures of others the lens through which your brain sees the world shapes your reality if you can change the lens not only can you change the way you perceive other people's behaviors but you can allow yourself to see the world in someone else's perspective and if we

manage to do this we're going to manage to solve some of the biggest problem we're facing in society today which is to make multicultural organization in society work well I like to see cultures as extremes or I like to represent extremes of culture so that people see the differences and today I'm going to be using fruits to sort of express different type of culture extremes of course so the first one is the warm culture is the culture which is very soft from the outside you feel very welcomed and I've want to use the peach to

represent best so and we can think here about for example an American woman you don't know her very well and she wants to show that she's happy to see you so she will be doing something like oh my god I'm so happy to see you and come closer to you maybe hug you and say you know that I love you and you feel you feels very soft and and she really wants you to be there and so that's the soft culture the other culture I like to represent is the coconut culture in a coconut culture

is different it's a bit of the faces we saw just now it's much more subtle emotions you have more physical distance you may not invite people easily to your to your activity there's a distance actually these are the cultures that very often we considered as cold culture but these people are not college is that it takes more time to build up trust to actually get to know the people once you Ragna call after a few months or a few years yeah you're coming into that coconut and it's beautiful inside it's great inside a coconuts the

same in this culture in the peach culture when you try to get the to know the person very often you're going to hit the stone and it's actually quite difficult to get to know these people so it's just an inversion being aware of this when you move to a different culture when you try to learn a different culture will give you tools not to misinterpret the behaviors of others up until now I've been concentrating on the outer shelf of culture I want to finish on something which is much deeper into us our value and to

try to represent this I I will talk about equality most of the world believe that we should have a certain level of equality actually most of the world believes that we should have a certain level of equality of opportunities but what does that mean the meaning changes a lot depending on which culture you're in one culture may see equality of opportunity as providing the same resources to everyone something like this so whatever your potential you're gonna provide the same resources so that everyone can flourish to their full potential other cultures around the world equality of

opportunity doesn't mean this what it means is that we're gonna help those who are struggling the week's in society so that at anytime in in time any point in time they will have the same opportunity to succeed as the one that art is strong another representation of equality of opportunity would be maybe where I am more from where you will put a threshold and you will say for example in the education system you will say if you get straight A's if you're in the top 5% of the class you're gonna get this amazing scholarship to

go to this amazing university yeah you under interpret that it's the same opportunity for everyone to get that scholarship you just need to get good grades right but yet only the strongest people would get that and then they will get all the resources funneled towards these that have managed to get that threshold now when you come from a society like this where we're the strongest people are being pushed forward and you come into a society where we have a tendency to help the weak you may find a lot of frustration because you're used to working

very hard and then getting a reward because you work very hard but in these culture if you work very hard maybe we're gonna give the the reward to those who are struggling because this is our understanding of the quality challenge yourself to see the world in the perspective of others challenge yourself to be more aware of your own biases of your own expectations and in the way you perceive other people's behaviors if we all do this we're gonna solve some of the biggest challenges our societies and generations is facing thank you [Applause]