#177 Empower Teens to Bridge Differences and Thrive with Tara Harvey Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker Robbins  00:33

Are you concerned that your teen might struggle to connect with and understand people who are different from them in today’s diverse communities and educational environments, the ability to bridge differences effectively, whether across cultures, generations, socioeconomic backgrounds or neurodiversity. Well, it has become an essential skill that can significantly impact your students’ future success with colleges and employers increasingly valuing individuals who can navigate varied perspectives and build meaningful relationships across many, many differences, helping your team develop these crucial intercultural and Global Skills early can create significant advantages for them. Yet many families aren’t even sure where to start to really apply these to everyday contexts. That’s why I’m excited to welcome Dr Tara Harvey. She’s the founder of true north intercultural and she’s a highly regarded specialist in intercultural Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Tara brings over 15 years of expertise in helping individuals better navigate cultural differences. As a mom of two teens herself and someone in an intercultural marriage, she understands firsthand the importance of these skills in both personal and professional contexts. In our discussion, we’ll explore what intercultural competence really means and why it’s about much more than just international experiences. Tara will share practical ways families can create meaningful learning opportunities within their own communities, and how developing awareness of one’s own cultural values creates the foundation for connecting across differences of all kinds, whether you’re concerned about your teen’s ability to thrive in diverse educational environments build meaningful relationships or develop the People skills needed for future workplace success. This episode will provide valuable insights into preparing teens for an increasingly interconnected world, starting right in your own community. I’m Lisa Marker Robbins. I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right into a great conversation. Tara, welcome to the show.

 

Tara Harvey  03:06

navigating difference, intercultural competence is really just the capacity to engage or to communicate effectively, appropriately and authentically across cultural differences, whether that’s local differences or global differences.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  03:25

So that brings, I mean, I’m going to just show my ignorance right away on this topic. So when we talk about cultural differences, let’s go a little bit deeper with that, because even something that pops into my mind, we do a lot with neurodiverse students that we work with with our career coaching. So we’re serving all students. And one of the most common questions I get is, do you work with neurodiverse students? And I’m like, yes, the process works the same, but there’s awareness that we need to have around those differences and how it relates to the world of work. So as you start to say, cultural differences, of course, right away we go to somebody who maybe speaks a different language than us, or their skin’s a different color than ours is. But does it? Does your work even? Does it go out broad, even broader, to like neurodiversity and things like that, absolutely

 

Tara Harvey  04:21

like you or I or any other person. We’re part of many different cultural groups. Our cultural groups are the groups that we’re socialized in that kind of teach us what’s right and wrong and respectful and disrespectful. So our our nation state, is a cultural group, maybe our racial group, our gender group, our socio economic group, our ability groups, all of those might in some way impact the way that we make meaning of and experience the world and way other the way others may make meaning of and experience. Experience us. So I think sometimes of culture like an onion, like we all have multiple layers that are impacting the way that we experience and make meaning of the world. You

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  05:12

know, I often advise families, and you are a mom yourself of teens, I often advise families that if you look ahead to the college application well before your student’s going to be filling it out in the fall of their senior year or the summer before that, it will give you some guide post about what you should be doing now to be able to be a good applicant, then one of the most common questions that a college can ask a supplemental college question, so every student you know writes a personal statement. My favorite one is, why do you want that major? That would be probably like the why us, why our college, and then why that major are come in number two, I would say, really about number three is, what’s a community you belong to? They’re really looking for like, what is your place in that community? How do you identify with it? What do you add to that community? What do you receive from that community? And so, the work that you’re doing, I love how you just, you know, set that up, like, when I’m working with a student, it’s like, there’s so many different communities. Different communities you belong to. And so what are those?

 

Tara Harvey  06:28

Yeah, and so developing intercultural competence, a big piece of it is developing self awareness, like, who am I? What groups am I? A part of how has those shaped? My values, my thinking, my interests, and then how might others who are part of different cultural groups have been shaped differently? How can I better understand that, empathize with that, and then bridge the gaps between us?

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  06:55

Do you find that young people have a lot of gaps in that area, more than or would we just say all people? Do you think that all people do? Do you think that young people have more gaps?

 

Tara Harvey  07:08

I think we all have gaps. I don’t know that. I would say that young people have more gaps, maybe different gaps, but I work primarily now with faculty and staff in universities, helping them develop their capacity to help students learn across cultures. But I always say first step is working on it yourself. So even you know, faculty with PhDs, experts in their field, a lot of times, haven’t really done the self awareness work of understanding, what are my values? How are those shaped? Etc. So I don’t think there’s any one group that necessarily needs it more. And it doesn’t just come with maturity or education, but it actually comes with experience combined with somebody needs to help us reflect on and make meaning of those experiences and really extract the intercultural learning piece from what we’re what we’re doing or the experiences we’re having. Yeah,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  08:16

I like, I mean, it takes intention, right? We’re all super busy. And I know our listeners are moms like you who are pressed for time. Amy and our teens are busy. You know, parents are busy, but on the important stuff, we have to create space for it. What resonates with me a lot is we are our first pillar of career advising and career development is building self awareness, right? I always say we understand our world. You know, we’ve guided 4000 students through the Berkman assessment, and then contain and then using that for either self development or career development. And it’s like, I can’t really understand others very well until I understand myself. And so for us, that’s like looking at my strengths, my aptitudes, my expectations of other people in my environment, my values and things like that. When you’re talking about building self awareness, how, what? How do you define that? Is it the same type of stuff that I’m identifying, or is it? Is it different? Yeah, it’s

 

Tara Harvey  09:22

a lot of the same things that you’re identifying, our values, our expectations, in the context of the groups we’ve been socialized in. Because when we’re in those groups, we oftentimes take those things for granted. I assume you know, everyone practices respect this way, by looking you in the eye, by raising your hand and then waiting to be called on. We take that for granted, that that’s normal. But then when we interact with people who have a different normal, instead of going, Oh wow, they have a different normal, we might judge them. And so that’s. A big piece of the intercultural learning is starting to understand, yeah, what are my values? What are my norms, beliefs, and then how might those impact the way I perceive others?

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  10:11

So when you so you’re advising people in higher ed faculty to create programs and availability of intercultural exposure, we’ll talk about, like, the ways that that can be done to to broaden the horizon of a team, right? Or a college student. We should

 

Tara Harvey  10:31

say, yeah. So I work with a lot of faculty, for example, who lead short term study abroad, and they’re probably an expert in their field, and so they’re thinking about going to Costa Rica and teaching biology in Costa Rica, but there are a lot of other elements to that learning experience. People might, you know, just be driven crazy by the humidity or time, might be approached very differently. It might be more fluid in Costa Rica, and so the educator needs to know how to help students take that experience, the emotional experience, especially that they’re having of frustration or discomfort, and turn that into an opportunity to develop that self and other awareness of Oh, my expectations around time have been shaped my by my own experiences. It might be different here I’m judging my experience based on my own norms, and so I work with faculty and staff to help them facilitate that kind of experiential learning during study abroad, but also, you know, back on our campuses, in the classrooms or in other intercultural learning opportunities that we might create on our campuses.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  11:44

Well, I think you made a great point about if you’re an expert in anything, you’re so close to it that you take things for granted. You You have really misconceptions about what the person on the outside might think or experience. And so just saying, like, oh, I might be an expert, or know everything there is to know about Costa Rica, but I have to think through it through a different lens. So it makes me also think of, I was just this morning meeting with one of my executive coaching clients. So she has a small business down in Texas, and she has a new executive assistant to her, who is abroad, who’s in the Philippines, and she was talking about like this, one thing is creating a little bit of friction for me. She didn’t, she didn’t think that it was necessarily creating friction for her executive assistant, and as she began to describe it, I said, I think that’s cultural I don’t think that that’s a her issue. I think that you would experience that with anyone from that culture, given what I know of that culture, and it’s not a culture that I know super well. So already I’m going, like, oh, there’s a workplace benefit to understanding other cultures, right? Because my client was just feeling friction and like, how do I get out of this friction, and how do I address it? And I’m like, I think there’s a broader lens. I think is really understanding that culture. And so this is a workplace thing. So that would be one benefit that I can see from building the self awareness and the cultural awareness is going to be at the workplace. What are some of the other benefits? Like, you know, if you were selling a college on, hey, you need to, you need to do the work that I do. I’m here to support you. What are the other benefits in this area? Well,

 

Tara Harvey  13:41

this goes back to what I said at the beginning. Is it’s really about navigating difference. It doesn’t have to be difference between me and someone from another culture. It could be difference between me and my kids that are raised in a different generational time. Grew up with cell phones. I did not grow up with a cell phone. It could be differences between me and my spouse, so all of the tools that I have in my intercultural toolbox, I can pull those out and try to practice use those when I’m engaging with anyone who’s different from me for whatever reason, whether it’s cultural or personal. So workplace for sure, but outside of the workplace, just in our everyday lives too,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  14:25

as you’re saying that I’m right away thinking, you know, when I approach the career development piece or advising, or, let’s say, there’s even a company that I’m assisting with, and we’re using the Berkman with them, the two places that we know in a workplace that we look when they say there’s friction or things aren’t going quite as well, I look at the data on personality around assertiveness, and a lot of that can come whether you’re assertive or suggestive. That can really be very cultural, and it can just be personality. And if you are a rule follower, systems person. Or if you’re a flexible go with the flow person, right? And as you’re talking through that, I’m like, these are really just the human skills that employers are telling us they want everyone to have right now, you know, I get questions all the time. Oh, should I ask? Should I have a second major or a minor? And like no do things to build your human skills, and that’s really what you’re doing, right,

 

Tara Harvey  15:27

right? It’s human skills, it’s emotional intelligence, it’s self awareness, especially in today’s world that is much more diverse, more globally interconnected, almost every interaction we have is with somebody who is different in some way, whether it’s small or big. And so these skills help us in all of our relationships and interactions. Colleges tell

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  15:55

us all the time on the admission side, they’re looking for people who owe a positive impact, but also have a a global perspective, right? One of the benchmarks they’ll look at is is why they like World Languages. That’s why they want to see a strong applicant taking at some schools two years is going to be enough. At others. I know here in Ohio, our state, flagship Ohio State University, they say we prefer three years of a global of a world language. Others expect you to do it all years that you’re in high school, even if that you started in your language in eighth grade. You know, we talked about, we really talked about this, and it kind of, it dovetails, really, with what you’re talking about. Back on episode 160 we talked about how World Languages open doors, and it really does. So you mentioned study abroad as one way, and I know that there are, there are actually study abroads for high school students. I had on episode 135 with Johnny talk. He works with high school students doing study abroad, but it’s more common at the college level. What are the other types of experiences that teens and young adults college students can do that you’re teaching the universities to offer so that they can develop this intercultural competence?

 

Tara Harvey  17:19

Yeah, well, I work primarily with universities, so we’re thinking about what they’re doing during the university, undergrad and graduate years. But as the mother of teenagers who my teenagers are bicultural. My spouse is from Spain. You know, I’ve been trying to get them to have intercultural experiences their whole lives. So that took me more the route of looking for opportunities for younger people and teens at any age. You can host an exchange student yourself in your own home. I think that’s a great way to expose kids from a very young age to other cultures, other perspectives. So hosting an exchange student is one option. There are many different programs these days. Exchange programs, virtual and in person for high school age kids. My daughter went on she did a one month program between her sophomore and junior years of high school, and it, it just changed her perspective on career, everything, I think, just that one month experience, she went to Argentina for a month. So the those are great opportunities. There’s things in the US, like Concordia Language Villages, you mentioned language it’s a language immersion camp, and then they have other kinds of experiences. But I was actually a camp counselor way back now, in a way, yes, in my 20s, I was a camp counselor at Concordia Language Villages, the Spanish camp. So it’s a camp where kids actually go, and most of the camp counselors, at least in my day, were from native speakers of countries where that language is spoken. And you just go to camp and do all the camp things, but you’re doing them in this other language, art, sports, you know, swimming, canoeing, all those fun things, but everything’s happening in another language, so you’re immersed without necessarily leaving the United States. So those are some of the key,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  19:37

yeah, I’m thinking about like this goes back to the neurodiversity piece too. There was a student I worked with years ago. Her High School had the PE option for the kiddos who a lot of them had physical disabilities, but also other disabilities and the. The mainstream kiddos could go and take that same gym class. It was almost like a buddy system, right? So she took it one time to meet her, you know. I mean, what teenage girl loves a PE class in the middle of the day? No one, right? I’m gonna get sweaty. What will my hair look like? And so, I mean, you have a daughter, you know, and so they don’t love that, but she went and she did this, this experience, and then she ended up taking PE every semester until she graduated, because she had such a positive experience. And it, and then it like rippled into other areas. It ultimately did not impact career choice, but it did make her interculturally competent in a very and compassionate like built just wonderful skills. She was a fantastic college applicant, really, in large part, for a lot of the things that grew out of that one experience. So I think there’s all these things that are out there that people can kind of DIY as well, right? Yeah.

 

Tara Harvey  21:12

And I think I want to differentiate between travel and an intercultural experience and intercultural learning experience. You don’t necessarily have to travel. You can take the gym class with students who you normally haven’t been been in the same experience with. It’s about the combination of engaging with people who are different from you, and then some form of mentorship or facilitation that helps you, like, reflect on that experience, make meaning of it, and transform the experience into learning. And sometimes that happens on those experiences when you go abroad, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it can happen right at home,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  21:55

well, and that’s going to take intention. You know, one of the things we do in our newsletters is we give a conversation cue each week so that you can use it with your teen or your young adult, because they’re not always super excited about sitting down and having a conversation with mom at a specific time, but is how to gently, kind of open up very meaningful and purposeful conversations. And so maybe parent I’m thinking, you know, when my kids were younger, like, now they’re in their 20s and 30s, and they’re much more open to having conversations, but when they’re teenagers, like, maybe the parents part is, oh, you’ve identified They’re over here and they’re doing something that would qualify as an intercultural experience, whether it’s at home or abroad, and then you kind of coming up with, okay, what are some conversation cues to kick off conversations that are reflective, so that I love what you just said? There’s experiences, and then there’s the learning from them, and you’ve got to, you’ve got to dig in on that piece of it, right?

 

Tara Harvey  23:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I, I’ve, I could be accused of having used experiential learning theory on my own children before, probably, which is just the basic idea of they’re having an experience. You want them to reflect on the experience, kind of think about what happened, how they felt, make meaning of it, connect it to other experiences. Does this remind you of anything else that’s happened before? Do you recognize any patterns? Has this happened to your friends, that kind of thing? And then think about, well, what’s the takeaway? What’s the learning from this experience, or what could you go try out? What will you do differently in the future because of this? I mean, you don’t want it to seem like a lesson that you’ve mapped out for your kids, but just in conversation, helping them kind of walk through those steps a little bit can, can help them take a learning experience, or like an experience, and transform it into learning.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  24:04

We’re we’re good at that as sneaky moms of teenagers that we have to be at times, right? So this is fantastic. This gives, I love that you took what could have just been a study abroad conversation, and we’ve really blown it up into this cultural understanding of just anybody who’s in a different community than I am. We’ve got many different communities so, so helpful, such great brainstorming. I know you work with universities, so our listeners aren’t going to call up Tara and say, hey, help me with this. But if they you’ve got great blog articles. I mean, that’s where I invited you on the show, because I’m like, this is fantastic stuff just to think about, and it really does also relate to career. But if people want to stay in touch, what’s the best way to do? So

 

Tara Harvey  24:55

my website’s probably the best way to find me. It’s TrueNorth. Of intercultural.com and as you said, I have a blog on there. It’s usually aimed more at faculty and staff at universities, but like you said, we connected because I am a mom and I have personal interest. So I wrote a blog, for example, about intercultural learning opportunities for teens, so we can share that on the podcast episode page, I’m sure. But otherwise, also, LinkedIn is a good place to find me Tara Harvey. I think it’s listed under Tara Harvey PhD, and we’ll put it

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  25:36

in the show notes. It’s always the it’s the easiest way on a podcast. It’ll be in the show notes, but yes, we’ll put that blog over there, because I think it’ll help families think more creatively. And I’m just gonna say these experiences are only going to serve to open up your kids horizons, and whether they’re headed to college or straight to employment, make them a better applicant for all the things. Thanks, Tara,

 

25:59

yeah, thank you.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  26:07

Thank you for joining us for this insightful conversation about empowering teens to bridge differences. If you’re ready to help your teen develop these valuable skills, here are your next steps. First visit Tara’s blog at True North intercultural.com where you’ll find practical suggestions for intercultural learning opportunities specifically designed for teenagers. That blog posts that we talked about in the show. I’m going to go ahead and put the exact link in the show notes. Her blog offers actionable strategies for creating meaningful experiences. Next, take my quiz at flourish coaching co.com forward slash quiz, to assess if you are too early, too late or right on time, to dig into essential career development. To successfully launch a young adult, remember, successful launches don’t happen by accident. If you found value in today’s episode, please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast. Your support helps us reach more families who want a successful launch for their own team. I’m Lisa Mark Robbins, and thank you for listening to College and Career Clarity, where we help more families move from overwhelmed and confused to motivated, clear and confident about their team’s future. You.