Surviving cultural shock is

key to working abroad

By Geo! Choo July 28, 2003, 12:00 AM PST

Working abroad can be a tumultuous experience,
both professionally and personally, due to culture
shock. Success depends on manuevering through
the ve stages of adjustment.

Contrary to what you may think, the hardest part of working abroad
isn't nding a place to stay or learning the language. It's learning to
cope with the cultural shock. The anthropologist Kalvero Oberg rst
coined the term cultural shock. He reported that cultural shock was
caused by the "anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and
symbols of social intercourse" while living and working in another
culture.

These cues are part of everyday life, and include the myriad signs,
gestures, facial expressions, and customs that help us cope with daily
life. When we enter a new culture, these cues are usually not present or
so di!erent that they're no longer comprehensible to us.

"When an individual enters a strange culture," wrote Oberg, "all or most
of these familiar cues are removed. He or she is like a sh out of water.
No matter how broad-minded or full of good will he may be, a series of
props has been knocked out from under him."

This is what happened to Lara, a young American IT consultant our
company relocated last year to our southern European headquarters.
Three weeks after she arrived in Europe, Lara sent a desperate e-mail
begging to return home. "The people are so unfriendly," Lara wrote.

"They eat at strange hours and I'm starting to get allergic to the local
food. I can't get anything done because their way of doing business is
so disorganized and so ine#cient. It's all just a big mess. And to top it
all o!, I think I'm developing a terrible skin itch because of the water. I
want to come home!"

What Lara and other IT consultants encounter on their initial
assignment abroad is culture shock, which involves ve distinct stages
that you need to move through to have a successful relocation or
assignment abroad.

Learn to recognize the signs
While you can't prevent cultural shock from happening, you can take
steps to minimize and mitigate its e!ects. Your rst step should be to
recognize when you're su!ering from cultural shock. People often
associate cultural shock with frustration, irritation, fatigue, anxiety, and
depression. You can't cope. You isolate yourself to escape. You turn
aggressive toward your host culture.

But there's more to the picture than that. Way back in 1958, Oberg rst
observed that cultural shock didn't happen as a series of random
events. There was a denite pattern to the condition and it evolved over
a series of ve stages.

Stage 1: The honeymoon
The rst couple of months of living abroad are typically a honeymoon
period when everything's new, exciting, and fascinating. Everything
seems to happen like a dream and you're happy to have accepted this
posting.

"Things went fairly smooth for me during my rst couple of months in
Europe. I was really jazzed about living in a new place and being able to
experience new sights and sounds," Lara said when asked about her
rst impressions. "There were some minor hiccups along the way but I
accepted them as part of the game. My European colleagues treated
me like visiting royalty. I got treated to lavish dinners and they brought
me to all the coolest places in town. Everything seemed really new and
challenging and fascinating!" she added.

But as everyone knows, no honeymoon lasts forever.

Stage 2: The rejection
Soon enough, the sheen rubs o! the new, exciting, and fascinating
experiences and you have to come back down from the clouds and
actually live and work in this place. Suddenly you'll start to discover
that your ways of doing thingsprofessionally and otherwisejust
don't work in the new environment. Stores aren't open when you need
them, and the phone operator doesn't speak English well. Leisure time
is frustrating because the television programs and the lms are dubbed
in another language.

As your troubles add up and no one wants to lend a hand to help, you
start thinking the locals are either incapable of understanding your
problems or just don't care. This in turn triggers the emotion that is one
of the surest signs of culture shock: hostility to the new environment.
You begin to hate your host country and everyone and everything
connected with it.

"Around November, it began getting much colder and I'm not just
talking about the weather. It's like all of a sudden, everything became
much more di#cult," said Lara.

"What were minor inconveniences before became insurmountable
obstacles. I began seeing (and feeling) the small di!erences between
here and homesmall di!erences that began to get on my nerves.
When I tried to explain my problems to my new colleagues, they got
really puzzled over my reaction to what they saw as the norm. These
people didn't seem to care about what I was going through. I
concluded that they were all selsh and insensitive people," she said to
her boss. "I'm normally a very easygoing person but all of a sudden I
felt very sad, lonely, and lost. I had trouble sleeping at night. I probably
alienated whatever friends I had left with my terrible temper and general
lack of patience. I blamed the natives of my host country for all the
problems I was having here, and I concluded that the people here did
not like foreigners," she added.

Stage 3: The regression
Once you start rejecting your host culture, it's much harder to regroup
and recast your attitude. You can either decide to try againapproach
everything again with a smile on your face and change your attitudeor
you can take the easy road and just withdraw further into your shell.

In the latter case, the signs for failure in the new locale are pretty clear:
You refuse to continue learning the local language, make friends among
the locals, or take any interest in the local culture. And worst of all, you
begin to believe that people are out to cheat or swindle you just
because you are a foreigner.

Following this path will inevitably increase your isolation because
people will sense the antagonism and begin to avoid you. You'll then
have no choice but to seek out other disgruntled souls to grouse about
the host country and the people and their strange practices. Everybody
feels better bashing the local culture, but it never occurs to anyone that
the problem may lie with themselves instead, as Lara's feedback
illustrated:

"I gured that I was just wasting my time trying to learn the local
language and culture, since no one seemed to appreciate my e!orts,"
she said.

"So I took the decision to only hang out with people who spoke English,
especially if they were Americans. I bought a DVD set so I could nally
watch a lm without those irritating subtitles and I joined an expatriate
support group. It was great to meet with other people who hated this
country as much as I did. Why did I ever leave home? Things were so
much better back home!"

Stage 4: The acceptance
If you can make it through stage 3, the road to getting over cultural
shock typically gets smoother. One day, you'll nd yourself beginning to
smile or even laugh at some of the things that caused you so much
grief at the start.

When this happens, you're on the road to recovery. As you begin to
become more comfortable with the local language and customs, your
self-esteem and self-condence will return. Your a!ection for your new
home will grow from reluctant acceptance to genuine fondness. You'll
nally understand that it's not a matter of whether here is better than
there: There are di!erent ways to live your life and no way is really
better than another. It's just di!erent. You'll wonder what all the fuss
was about in the beginning.

"I lost my way one day and I unexpectedly found myself in a particularly
dodgy part of town. I saw a young unkempt girl approaching quickly
toward me. My initial thought was that she was going to rob me and
take all my credit cards," said Lara on how her acceptance stage
began. "I was surprised when she asked me if I was lost and whether I
needed help. When she saw that I didn't really understand her
directions, she went out of her way to personally guide me to where I
had to go to. That event triggered a sort of realization that maybe the
people here weren't so bad after all," she added.

Lara actually managed to laugh about getting lost in one of the
roughest parts of the city, and began to feel a little guilty about how
badly she had been treating her friends and colleagues.

"From that day onwards, I made the resolution to try a little harder to t
in. I began taking language classes and tried to participate in as many
local social events as I could schedule into my PDA. I began going out
with my coworkers and I even made the e!ort to cook a couple of local
dishes for them," she said.

Stage 5: The re-entry
Many times, it's just about the time where things begin to jell that you
may realize that your assignment is ending and the time has come to
pack up and return home.

Most start thinking about how nice it will be to return to familiar
surroundings, back to friends and family and all the things you love and
cherish. But the re-entry can be much harder than most realize.

When you slowly forced yourself to like and love your new home, you
probably had to confront your long-held beliefs and attitudes and
gradually deconstruct them to make room for new values and ideals.
You adopted new habits and a new lifestyle and it can be di#cult to go
back to your old life. Things change and people change.

It will take a while to reacquaint yourself with the cues and signs and
symbols of your home culture. Give yourself time to adjust. You can
minimize the re-entry shock by understanding your reaction and taking
things with a positive attitude.

Going with the ow
Self-awareness is the best strategy for overcoming cultural shock. As
Lara said, you can't stop cultural shock from happening, but you can
minimize the downtime you spend in the three vicious downward cycles
of rejection, regression, and re-entry. Remind yourself of the following:

Ignorance is not bliss. Culture shock is here to stay, whether you like it
or not. It will probably a!ect you one way or another, but it doesn't last
forever. Learn to recognize the signs and understand where you are in
the process. Sitting around being negative and critical will just deepen
your gloom. Try to look for the positive side of the worst situations.

Don't blame it on the bossa nova. When you're down and in trouble,
remember that the problem probably isn't so much in them as it is in
you. So stop whining and shape up or ship out.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Adapting your style to the local
customs may be tough, but it will pay o! in the long run. Coming with
guns slinging and imposing your way of doing things is not a good
approach, although it happens more than you would think.

Set a goal and stick to it. The busier you are, the less time you have to
think about your sad situation. Try to organize something pleasant to
look forward to each day. Set goals for yourselfmaking a new friend
each day, for exampleand stick to them.

The best of both worlds
When it comes down to it, the number one way to get past cultural
shock is to understand that it's not a matter of which culture is better.
You have to learn to neither completely reject your own culture nor that
of the new one. The better you get at conveying openness and
comprehension across cultural borders, the easier it will be for you to
enjoy the richness of the best of two worlds. Remember that your
colleagues who have spent assignments as visitors in the United States
have gone through the same types of experiences, too.

Lara hung in through the cultural shock and eventually fell in love with
the country (and one of the natives too, apparently). The company is
currently having problems convincing here to return to home base, but
that's another story.