Principle 2: If you don't understand a persons actions or behaviour - ridicule them: their religion, their culture, their language.
Australians are amongst the best at making jokes out of everything. When we are sad, mad, confused, frustrated or just plain apathetic we turn an event into a joke, and often a bad one! When Steve Irwin died jokes about stingrays where heard within hours, and during the bush fires of Black Saturday people told jokes about fires, firefighters and black stumps.
When we hurt, when we are unsure, when we don't understand we ridicule: and most Australians understand - it's who we are, it's part of our culture.
But that's not the way all cultures work. In fact in many cultures that are represented in our society 'saving face' is valued above all. The idea of being ridiculed, or ridiculing another in public is not only embarrassing, but offensive. And therein lies a problem for the person who is trying to communicate an important and life transforming message.
Too often rather than make the effort to understand what makes the Other tick, (what they value, what they believe, how they communicate) we expect them to act and behave as we do - we expect them not only to speak our language, but absorb our values and communicate our way. We assume they should just know and accept the rules of our culture as if by some kind of cultural osmosis. And when they don't, and we are unsure of where to go, we either ridicule them, their insecurity and their uncertainty, or we walk away.
Taking the time to understand culture - what makes another tick - must be the first step in effective cross-cultural communication, after that is when the real fun begins.
