Interpersonal Skills Tip From Diversity Training

photo credit: caffeina

Interpersonal Skills Tip With Other Cultures

Since I’m in the midst of doing some diversity training presentations at colleges and non-profit organizations, I might as well outline one of the tips I present.  This is a very useful interpersonal skills tip to develop and many people have not explored this yet.

Since many of our environments today are so diverse, interpersonal skills or people skills has now expanded to include diversity.  That is, to be effective in a diverse working environment, we should be able to use good interpersonal skills with all sorts of people including those from other cultures and ethnicities.

So if you meet somebody new, especially someone from another culture, and you wish to break the ice with that person in order to hopefully start a new business or personal relationship, I would suggest asking yourself this question.

‘What difference about you, can you use to break the ice with the other person?’

My Example From Diversity Training

I’ll share my own example if this question was applied to me.  I’m Canadian-Chinese and I happen to know quite a bit about authentic Chinese food.  That is a cultural difference that I have compared to other people out there.

So I use this difference as a tool to help me build relationships with others.  In Chinese cuisine, we have a special luncheon called dim sum and over the years, I have invited many people, especially non-Asians, to try out dim sum.

My guests have always enjoyed dim sum whenever I brought them to authentic Chinese restaurants that feature it.  I even shot an entire past episode of Motivational WebTV on it – if you missed it, catch it at Chinese Dim Sum episode.

As an end result, I have built up some great business and personal relationship over Chinese dim sum over the years.  This is how I used one of my cultural differences to break the ice with others.

What about you?  What is the difference that you have that you can use?

One thing to note is that you don’t have to be ethnic in order to do this.  As long as you can identify something that is different about you compared to somebody else, especially culturally, that you can use effectively as an ice breaker.

This is an important interpersonal skill to develop in today’s diverse world and based on what I observe in my diversity training talks, many people have not considered this yet.

Here is the video version of this interpersonal skills tip as a new episode of Motivational WebTV.  As an added bonus, particularly for my international readers, this episode was shot in the woods across the street from where I live with their autumn colour leaves as a nice background scenery.

Share Diversity Training Interpersonal Skills Tip With Others

If you know others who would like this video, please share it with them.  There are buttons on the blog post to easily share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and by email.  All past episodes are at my Motivational WebTV Archive.

If you missed the last episode which was on how to stop worrying about how other think about you, catch it at Self Growth Tip.

So, if you can think about a key difference about you that you think you can use to break the ice with others, please feel free to share it with us below in the comments section.