Embrace Culture: Benefits of Immersing in a New Country

Are you moving to a new country? Uprooting yourself from your home place and settling in a different environment with unfamiliar faces and sometimes language is the adventure of a lifetime.

Internationality is quickly becoming the norm in our constantly connected and innovative world. We find more and more cities becoming melting pots of culture, employees of different nationalities in one workplace, and interracial marriages happening left and right.

Finding yourself in this global phenomenon is inevitable. It might frighten you initially, but take it as a unique way to experience life from a broader perspective, embrace culture, and deepen your understanding of the world and yourself.

Benefits of Learning and Embracing Cultures

Discovering a new culture might make you feel like a fish out of water. However, when you’re courageous enough to step out of your comfort zone, you’ll realize you can gain and enjoy many things from embracing a new culture.

1. Widens Knowledge and Creativity

You can gain fresh insights from a country with a different climate, geography, and ways of living. It can be mundane things, like cleaning strategies, or more complex, like raising children. What’s more, understanding different perspectives allows for more efficient and holistic problem-solving.

Embracing a culture other than your own also enhances creativity. A tropical country will have a different color palette, musical taste, and culinary flavors than a country from a temperate region, adding to your artistic sensibilities. Moreover, when confronted with a new culture, you become more alert and engaged. In turn, this improves your creative performance (Tan et al. 2019).

2. Cultivates Better Self-Awareness and Understanding

There is no better way to get to know yourself than to be among people who are very unlike you. When you are in your own country, you may not notice the characteristics that are particular to you. But when the people around you speak their thoughts indirectly, for example, you may realize you have a more direct way of expressing yourself.

These differences can contribute to culture shock and make you feel frustrated. But they can help you understand who you are, your values, and your limitations. The better you know yourself, the easier it is for you to be flexible and adjust to a new environment without losing yourself.

3. Enriches Interpersonal Skills

Living in a foreign country, you are privileged to meet people from different walks of life. This is a great way to nurture your interpersonal skills, which you will always use at work or in relationships. Such personal encounters can also increase your emotional quotient (EQ), which is as valuable as IQ in attaining personal fulfillment.

Real people with real stories are some of the best resources you can learn from. Learning to deal with different personalities in varied circumstances will hone valuable qualities in you, such as patience, generosity, and compassion.

How to Embrace Cultural Diversity

Diversity is increasingly becoming accepted in different parts of society—in the workplace, schools, or families.

According to Pew Research, 64% of Americans view the presence of various races and ethnicities in the country as positively impacting culture (Horowitz 2019).

However, embracing cultural diversity doesn’t come automatically. Adjustment, appreciation, and integration are necessary to live and flourish with your differences.

To do that, here are some habits and characteristics you should instill in yourself:

1. Be Respectful and Non-Judgmental

You carry different norms, behaviors, and beliefs, while your new place has its own. It’s not about which culture is better or correct. The reality is that there is a difference in our customs and values.

Understanding this helps you to embrace culture, be respectful, and be non-judgmental toward people in a foreign country. Maintain an open mind. Stretch your spectrum of possibilities because our presumptions are often mistaken and incomplete.

2. Learn the New Culture

To better understand your new reality, educate yourself about the culture you’re living in. Embracing the culture implies reading about the people, their history, traditions, and values. Reach out to a community of expats or ask a local friend if you have questions or if certain things in the culture confuse you.

You can also try to learn their language if appropriate for your context and if you have the resources. Who knows? It may come in handy when you try to impress someone or buy food.

3. Empathize with Others

A few dangers of only learning about a culture through books are stereotypes and seeing reality as statistics and categories. The culture you experience is through actual people and events, so there should be a balance between absorbing information and putting a culture in a box.

Empathize with the locals. Know them and put yourself in their shoes. This will give you more understanding than the Internet or books.

Converse, work with them, and share your own story. New friendships may arise and become something you treasure as you go down memory lane.

4. Immerse Yourself

An effective way to embrace culture is to immerse yourself in it. As they say, experience is the best teacher.

Go to local hotspots. Try out native dishes and drinks, listen to their music, visit a museum, or watch a play or movie. You can also join town celebrations, volunteer in an outreach program, or just walk around the city and see who you bump into.

Do not be afraid to embrace culture and discover the wonder of diversity, but also try to prepare yourself for the wildest surprises. No matter how adventurous you are, you can still be caught off-guard by a strong-smelling delicacy or a seemingly harmless conversation that gets lost in translation.

Discover a New Culture by Living in One

As the Internet and more convenient means of travel make our world smaller, we see more of the importance of embracing cultural diversity. Learning another culture, especially by living in one, may sound daunting, but it is a unique experience that is truly rich and fulfilling.

When we embrace diversity, we gain more from our experience and live more harmoniously with others and ourselves. We emerge with a lighter and more generous heart that not only understands and appreciates our own culture but also knows how to welcome and enjoy that of others.