EQ/IQ

Let's talk the interplay between EQ, emotional intelligence, and CQ cultural intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the soft skills, like social information processing, social skills, and social awareness. These are all incredibly important skills for everybody to have. How these social skills show up vary from culture to culture, though, so you can have extraordinarily high emotional intelligence in the United States, but then when you cross a cultural boundary, all bets are off. Your immediate social instincts built in the USA will not be effective in other cultures. The new culture’s social processing and social awareness is completely different.

Individuals sometimes believe that their hard-won social skills are universal. As in, everyone loves a smile and a firm handshake. Or how could kindness not translate across cultures? But it doesn’t. You have to start from scratch to rebuild your social skills in multicultural settings.

It can feel really demoralizing when you've spent a lot of your life doing self-reflecting and building your emotional intelligence skills. Those hard-won social skills are hard-won for a reason. However, your core motivation of caring about people and wanting to be socially aware remains the same. That part of you doesn’t change. So now all you have to do is learn how to connect with people in a different way. And that's what cultural intelligence is, and you can learn it with Beyond Tourism.  

A Signature CQ Workshop is a two-hour introductory workshop that is perfect for introducing your team to CQ concepts, and to begin the conversation of improving your abilities to connect across cultures. Schedule a free consultation or email Renae today at renae@goingbeyondtourism.com.