Tag: cross-cultural

Everywhere You Go Is Normal: How You Can Use This to Change How You Travel

Photo Credit: sippakorn

When you visit a new place in the world that you have never been to before, that place can often seem really exotic or really scary. Having never been there, we can feel an ambiguity when we think about it. Our mind sometimes casts that ambiguity into one of two extremes: the most amazing place on earth or a horrible, scary place where we will constantly have to be worried about safety concerns. Which one you pick often has to do with whether we have built positive or negative associations based on the types of stories we have heard about that place. 

Psychologically, this is normal, but these initial conceptions unsurprisingly turn out to be completely wrong. You may initially see what you think you will see, but if you stay long enough or keep an open mind, you will slowly discover all the ways in which you were wrong. 

For me, one of the most important lessons I learn when traveling to a new place is that this place, in all of its wonderful unusualness, is normal for the people who live there. When I visit a new part of the world, instead of thinking about how strange it is – whether strange in the exoticness or strange in the weird or scary sense – I try to think about how those who live there can consider it normal. For every place is normal for someone. 

By thinking about how weird it is, I mentally separate myself from the place, but by conceiving of how this too is normal for some, I force myself to confront one of the most perplexing things about humanity and the world: how we can create so many different types of normal. Thus, I come to terms with how in its distinctiveness, it still has something major in common with the place that I call home: that it is a home for the people there. 

Adjusting Expectations When Living in Abroad

Over our lives, we develop expectations for how our needs will be met based on the culture(s) we live in. This includes our physical needs but also our emotional needs, social needs, and all our other needs. There’s nothing wrong with this; expectations help keep us sane and allow us to determine how to make choices in our daily lives. 

However, in new cultures, these expectations tend to break down. The most difficult yet most important aspect of long term cross-cultural adjustment is to learn how to develop new expectations and use those to determine how to meet our needs. 

Every culture can meet people’s needs. If it did not, people would not survive there. But a new culture may have vastly different methods or tools to meet those needs. In another culture, you must learn how their ways of doing things can and do meet people’s needs in life. And you must not only understand this consciously but internalize subconsciously. 

Internalizing that is not always easy, and it’s okay if it takes time. All humans have built a set of expectations over the course of their lives based on how we are used to things happening. This helps produce the (generally subconscious) filters we use to assess the world around us: to determine, for example, what people mean when they communicate things, what they want from us, whether we are safe or secure, and what to expect from another in any given interaction. Without these things, we couldn’t function or handle daily interactions. 

But in a new culture, all of this has to be rebuilt. It’s easier said than done, but much of the difficulties one feels in another culture – including culture shock, frustration or anger at local practices, sadness, etc. – deep down stem from the difficulty of experiencing a mismatch from your expectations and subconsciously sensing that you will fail to have your needs met. If so, it’s okay to pause and know that you are doing a complex psychological reset.