I'm especially looking forward to honing my speaking skills at Christchurch Toastmasters. One of the benefits of being a toastmaster (apart from improving my skills) is receiving the excellent magazine, The Toastmaster.
My favourite recent article was written by Jeanne Feldman, a business communication trainer and coach based in Paris. Jeanne wrote about how cultures vary in how they give and receive information.
Culturs can vary in how much background information surrounding an event (or context) will be given. In a high context culture, such as France, most of the background information to a situation is assumed, so it isn't repeated (unless you are explaining something to a child).
In a low context culture, such as the US, the assumption will be that it is normal to explain the background information so that everything is clear.
Jeanne went on to point out that explaining all the details to a high-context audience will only serve to irritate them, and make them feel patronised!
This immediately made sense to me, and its applications are limitless. Knowing the context of a communication is important to me not only in training, public speaking and coaching, but also in every-day interactions in different countries, and within different communities.
For example, if you are speaking to a roomful of people on the Privacy Act, it helps to know what training they've had in the past. If you pitch your message too high, you run the risk of people misunderstanding or making false assumptions. Pitch it too low, and you irritate them.
I'll be on the look out for more examples I'm sure.
If you're interested to find out more, check out Jeanne's website. She drew upon the book Understanding Cultural Differences by Edward T. Hall. To buy the book follow these links: (Amazon US
) (Amazon UK) .She also wrote on the difference in cultures between the expectation of friendliness and formality, but I'll blog that later.
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