Free ourselves from our cultural chains
Beyond the ideas of doing evil and doing good there is a field. See you there. When the soul lies down on that grass, the world is too full to talk about it.-Rumi
We are often afraid of what is different. It’s easier to stick with what we know, especially when it comes to relationships. We tend to stick with a group of people who think, act, and do things like us. This is where we feel confident that we belong. We can understand and feel understood. Everything is easier when we are around people we know, however, this can also be a big limitation. When we know or think we know, we are closed to knowing anything else because we already know: there is no more learning to experience. We know and that is enough. We can stay in our comfort zone safe in our knowing where there is no fear or uncertainty. Beliefs and norms of behavior are predetermined, independent thinking is not required.
However, a danger arises here: we must ask ourselves if the world around us has shaped us so much that we have lost ourselves in the process.
Human beings rarely, if ever, manage to accurately perceive their own culture. It is true that this is how most of us live our lives. We are victims of our culture and most of us don’t even realize it. We are born into a national culture and the problem with culture is that it is impossible to know it when you are in it. You just can’t see it. Although your life is defined and shaped by your culture, we are all like fish swimming in the sea: we are surrounded by the water of our national culture, it is literally everywhere and so we take it for granted. We can’t see it unless we have an experience where we notice an absence of our cultural norms and know at a gut level that something is missing.
So what do we understand by culture?
Many people cite the work of Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede, whose dictum “The Software of the Mind” informed many opinion leaders about culture. What culture covers are the common traditions, values and ways of behaving of a particular community. And it’s not just limited to our national culture, we all live within layers of cultures; cultures within cultures. Our mental programs begin to develop within the family in early childhood and are reinforced in our educational process within schools and in our working life within organizations. These mental programs also contain components of our national and religious cultures. Every human being in the world is a product of numerous cultural influences. Culture has literally impacted the different ways we think, feel, and behave. We are who we are today because of our cultures. it is impossible to exist outside of culture.
And that’s not all, culture is a dynamic phenomenon that surrounds us at all times. It is a constantly evolving ecosystem that is being shaped by our interactions with others and a set of structures, routines, rules, traditions, and norms that guide and constrain our behavior. Each of us plays a role in the evolution of our culture, but how aware are we of when culture is shaping our decisions and when we as individuals are making an independent decision? In fact, is there even an independent election?
As an executive coach working internationally, I have guided many executives moving from many different cultures around the world through what we commonly refer to as “culture shock.” I understood the concept and coached many executives and their families through the emotional turmoil that goes along with leaving their home country and settling in a new location. I know that limiting cultural beliefs work the same way as limiting personal beliefs: they prevent you from realizing your potential. However, they are harder to spot and harder to overcome, as these cultural beliefs are shared beliefs that have been reinforced many times over your lifetime, and are often considered unquestionable “truths” or “facts.” Many people refer to them as “the way life is” or “that’s the way I am” and use them to excuse behavior. The good news is that cultural beliefs are simply self-imposed limitations that act like self-fulfilling prophecies and can be overcome with a change in mental attitude. The simple fact is that you can break free from your cultural chains.
Despite having all this knowledge, I was surprised at the level of “culture shock” my family and I experienced when we moved to another continent. I had worked internationally, visited many times, knew the subject, had read the literature, was up to date with current research, and therein lay my biggest problem. I thought I knew. My subconscious expectations were that I would transition without a problem, how deluded was I? He was completely unaware of what he didn’t know (and acted as if he did) and it’s hard to describe the visceral and emotional reactions that come when you’re thrown to the limits of your experience and realize that perhaps for the first time the world It’s not the place you thought it was. Not even close. I did not know what I did not know or anyone else. It was like speaking a different language, I found many situations where there was no shared understanding and we struggled to find it.
My eyes were opened a little more to the diversity of the world and I was humbled as my experience expanded in unimaginable ways until I knew on a deeper level that life would never be the same again. I would never know for sure. I can see myself and my children emerging from the shackles of our culture and finding ourselves again. My relationship with life has changed, a new energy has recharged my curiosity; I am less attached, more agile and want to learn more about this amazing diverse world of ours, even excited to find my place as ever changing within it.
And it seems to me that this is a tension that we are all living in at this point in our human evolution. We are evolving so quickly into a global community that there is a lot we don’t know. However, many of us want to be seduced by the security of knowing, even if it is an illusion. We want to know. We need to know. We cling to the familiar when everything around us calls us to find a new path, to allow a new world order to emerge. We all need to learn how to live in the unknown, how to manage complexity and keep moving forward when everything around us is uncertain. And we need to free ourselves from the ordinary to allow a new one to emerge.
The importance of breaking free from the ordinary
When you look back in history, breaking free from our cultural beliefs is the way we have evolved over the centuries. The cultural belief that a woman’s place was in the home oppressed half the population for many centuries. The cultural belief in the racial superiority of whites has also oppressed many cultures for a long time. We have broken the shackles of many of these false and limiting beliefs, and yet in all cultures we still live under many delusions and it is up to us to decide the direction we want our lives to take, both individually and collectively.
I have yet to meet someone who is not interested in finding and developing their potential. Overcoming self-imposed limitations unlocks your individual potential to do and be all you can be. Increase your quality of life. The same goes for culture. Accepting racial and gender equality has opened new directions for us as a culture and has enriched many lives. When we shed false impressions we clear a pathway to truth and a clear soul resonance.
The direction of a culture is driven by the people within it, it is the collective mind that counts. We the people have the ability to change direction and become more intentional in our collective cultural consciousness. All we have to do is get out. And we no longer need to expatriate to a different country to do this: diversity is all around us. All we need is an open mind; individually and collectively. We must be willing to be open to changing our beliefs, to discover where they may be flawed, and to always seek the truth. It is a journey of evolution for each of us in our personal lives and when we see ourselves as an agent of change it can become our contribution to the collective evolution of humanity.