STEPPING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE WITH TRAVEL.
Travel to grow as a more resilient, flexible communicator.
Being a visitor to a foreign land, especially if you don’t share a common language, is an incredibly beneficial opportunity to improve your communication.
Let me explain.
There’s something extremely humbling and eye-opening about travelling somewhere unfamiliar, embracing that challenging experience and thriving.
As a communicator, you are forced to recognize the difference head on, not only in style, slang, and directness, but when in the context of a lack of common language, an entirely new sound repertoire. Brand new sound combinations! Those that can learn to embrace that challenge, and grow in their communicative effectiveness and comfort simultaneously augment their flexibility in communicating, confidence in using that language to navigate and negotiate their environments, and learning to do so in the most effective and efficient way.
TRAVELLING WILL PUSH YOUR BOUNDARIES.
The challenging thing about being comfortable is the familiarity of the routine. There’s no need to put ourselves out there. When we’re home, you know the local spots, the day to day routine, the places to go and the people to see when you need help with something. You know who to steer clear from, the places to not go, and how to negotiate and communicate in a way to get what you want.
When you travel, that comfort blanket goes away. That safety net disappears. And instead, everything feels like an exciting adventure, coming from a new perspective.
Even if what you are doing is rather mundane.
Asking the price for a product. Navigating to a local sight or attraction. Ordering a meal.
WHAT DOES THIS EXPERIENCE MEAN FOR COMMUNICATION.
When you travel, you begin to realize how other people communicate.
You learn about
the nonverbal cues — the hand gestures, eye movements, facial expressiveness
the nuanced sound differences — the vocal pitch changes, the loudness changes, the pauses or extended vowel duration
the sociopolitical influence — the slang, the word choice, the directness of one’s speech
Traveling quickly forces you to become comfortable with trying new things and learning new words as well as being in new scenarios. Because it is all new when travelling.
TRAVELING TO A NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY WHEN YOU ARE AN ENGLISH SPEAKER
You walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. For you, who may have never not been able to communicate your wants and needs, it’s a healthy reminder of the struggles and context that non-English speaking individuals face in your community.
You can no longer rely on habits, routines, and familiar routes to guide you. You must seek new people, new interactions, and in doing so, different ways of communicating.
those new experiences on a daily experience makes us recognize that people come with their own prejudices, experiences, communication styles, biases, tendencies and those are also impacted by their culutures, their politics, their beliefs. all of it.
Maybe we rely on those convneinet habits, routines, and interactions too much?
Ask any English speaker when they try communicating in a dfifernt language. Japanese, German, Italian, French, Koreran, Chinese, any of them. Just because your langague skills in those mlanguages are not up to par with English doesn’t mean you don’t have those thoughts.
TRAVELING TO AN ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRY WHEN YOU ARE NOT AN ENGLISH SPEAKER
If you’ve stumbled onto this blog post, chances are you fit into this category and already resonate with this feeling of foreignness and discomfort. But a lot of my clients are at the point where they can meet their day-to-day needs good enough.
Whereas that early-on experience resonated with what I’ve said before, now you’ve built up habits, routines and familiar routes to guide now. You already have established a new tribe of people you call friends and family, and things aren’t so uncomfortable and new anymore.
I urge you to continue that experience of newness.
It will continue to serve you well as a guide to hyper-rapid communication learning. And now that you have a safe haven of experiences, habits, and routines, you will begin to notice and experience the subtleties more clearly.
By practicing introducing yourself to new people again and again, you improve the effectiveness of your communication while learning tips and tricks to deliver it more charismatically. If you stopped introducing yourself because you were comfortable with your ten friends, then you don’t practice that introduction, and you don’t refine it.
Similar to a business pitch, you get a decent presentation after ten pitches BUT after 100 pitches, you refine your delivery to know when to deliver a pause, a joke and read the audience better.
STEPPING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE BUILDS EMPATHY
Travel makes you more tolerant, resilient and patient because it builds empathy.
It does this by forcing you to think about your listener or communication partner. How do I say this better? What happened to make this communication fall apart? What didn’t work well? How do I deliver that message more clearly or effectively?
When you settle into your habits and routines, these kinds of thoughts fade into the background. You are already thinking about something else. You aren’t thinking about the interaction anymore because you have a routine, you have other things to do, and you have a life to live outside of this interaction.
And this empathy is a skill. It is a skill to be empathic towards non-native English speakers as a native English speaker because you may not recognize or appreciate the bravery needed to put yourself in a vulnerable but exciting situation. Some people never leave their home countries or get passports.
It is also a skill for a non-native English speaker to learn the nuanced English communication skills that require conscious effort, thinking and decision-making. Native English speakers do it automatically without necessarily consciously thinking about it, but emphasizing certain words, overarticulating during potentially confusing scenarios, or phrasing something differently prior to a communication breakdown to avoid a misunderstanding are all things that separate good from excellent communicators.
I’M TRAVELING TO HONG KONG
I myself am currently travelling to Hong Kong, and it is always a humbling experience to consider the things I usually take for granted.
It forces me to directly face the reality of my own limitations in communicating in Cantonese and reminds me that I am not as proficient as a native speaker.
It reminds me that communicating is more than just the sounds I bumble through. Communication is much more than individual sounds and pronunciation.
It reminds me of the patience of native Cantonese speakers who patiently encourage, support, and take the time to communicate with me as I slowly unravel the mouth movements into crudely formed words.
Finally, it reminds me that in my mind, I am much more complex than what I can communicate. I am a grown man but communicate at an elementary school child’s proficiency in Cantonese.
And just because my language skills are simple, my inner thoughts are much more complex, sophisticated, and nuanced than what I can currently express in a different language.
In that same vein, it means that non-native English speakers speaking in English likewise can have much more complex, nuanced thoughts that aren’t necessarily revealed in English. And therefore, a little patience and encouragement can go a long way to revealing their competency.
