Full Transcript

• Introduce yourself.
• Hi, my name is Renae. I am the founder of Beyond Tourism. It's my small business that I founded in 2024, and the main goal that I have is to help people connect better across cultures. And I became really passionate about this topic after I lived in South Korea for a year teaching English to kids. And when I came home, I realized that, as I was going through reverse culture shock, I realized how big of an experience this was, and I started to really process my experience, and I discovered cultural values, and I discovered cultural intelligence, and it was something that I wish I had known before. I wish somebody had taught me about these things so that I could have had a smoother experience in South Korea and throughout my travels, and to be able to connect better with people who are different from me.
• Tell us what you do.
• I work with people, either individuals or groups, who are interested in increasing their cultural intelligence skills because this conversation around communicating cross-culturally, it's really important to frame as a skill. It's something people can get better at. And so, either in groups or individually, I can give you a cultural assessment that measures your cultural values and the four dimensions of cultural intelligence. And then I can sit down with the group, in many different formats, and walk through everybody's differences and their similarities, and help people have healthy, productive conversations about the differences that they have. I can also help individuals go through the same process, and really, what's happening is we're digging deep, below the iceberg of culture. So this is not the visible side of culture, this is the invisible stuff that people don't talk to you about, and they don't explain things to you when you're interacting cross-culturally. These are the things that people just don't talk about. And so, how are you expected to know? These are things that we bring to the surface in our sessions, in a conference or any kind of talk that I can give, and to really challenge everybody to examine their own selves, their own cultural behaviors and then, how they can connect better with people who are different.
• Tell us about your signature talk.
• My signature talk will go over some basics of culture, and especially, like I mentioned, the below the iceberg aspect of culture. And then, we'll go into framing the conversation about why this particular conversation is important for this particular audience. Then we talk about cultural values. So this is things like individualism versus collectivism. This is direct communication versus indirect communication. And we'll talk about those in depth, so everybody can really fully understand what that means and also start to see some of those cultural values in themselves. Then, we'll move into the four dimensions of cultural intelligence, and we'll walk through what that means and how you can build your skills by using the four dimensions of cultural intelligence. As we do this, we can use case studies and conversation, and I can answer questions as I go. And I have a fairly academic approach to things. It's something I'm extremely passionate about, but I also am very good at bringing practical skills and knowledge so that people can learn how to connect better. And that's the most important thing to me. We want to connect better as humans, and cultural intelligence is that skill that we need as our world becomes more interconnected. So please reach out to me and let me know if you think this might be a good fit for your group. Thank you.