A question I started to tackle lately was "what’s my niche — or do I have one?" With the help of my coach friends, I realised that my niche has come to me without me actively seeking, and I just realised I needed to describe it in a word or two.
So here we go — I specialise in coaching multicultural individuals.
I hear you ask, what is ‘multiculturalism’, really?
Multiculturalism is an identity
In the broadest sense, being multicultural is to identify with more than one culture. You may be an immigrant, or your parents were immigrants. You may be born in a family that has strong roots from another country. You may be an expat working in a country that’s not your birthplace. You may be forced to move to another country due to conflict in your home country. You may have parents from two different races, or more. You may feel more closely linked to your partner’s culture than your own. You may have travelled to a place with an entirely different culture to your own, and hopelessly fell in love with it — and decided to stay.
All of these experiences would have required you to step into slightly uncertain territories at different points in life, adapting and viewing yourself in different shades of what the world perceives the ‘other’ culture to be. Your experience in the diversity of cultures, often represented as collective ideas, customs and social norms, has formed a part of you.
It is little wonder that some who consider themselves multicultural struggle with the question ‘where are you from?’. I am from this place, yet perhaps I feel more at home when I’m in another. I’m ‘neither / nor’. To me, this simple question is much more complicated than muttering the name of a location shyly, but touches on the internal tension between the values, beliefs and assumptions that lie behind the seemingly out-of-place individual with a multicultural background.
Multiculturalism is a gift
It would be naïve to say that multiculturalism isn’t a struggle — you struggle with your sense of belonging, and you struggle to see why others without a similar background may not understand your struggles. The pandemic is one where a lot of multicultural people would have struggled painfully, where their families are completely out of reach due to the geographical constraints and flight bans across the globe. In a world where mobility was turning cheap, the complete lack of control over when you’d be able to meet your loved ones came as a devastating shock. Alas, when you speak to those living without this constraint, the agony only added up.
Yet, multiculturalism is a gift. It is a gift because quite a lot of times your multiculturalism isn’t your own work — or solely your own work, that you can take full credit for. Your family, partner, community and support system formulate so much of this multicultural experience — without them, you won’t have a sense a belonging anywhere at all. Needless to say, being a multicultural person comes with it benefits. On an individual basis, you may have benefitted from speaking or even reading and writing in more than one language fluently, or having a world view and set of knowledge that helps you become more understanding towards different people and races. It is no news to anyone that cultural diversity in the workplace is also beneficial — the insights that people bring from different cultures could help to avoid group-think, and allow for more empathetic communications. As a result, this diversity will help foster open and authentic dialogues in the workplace.
Multiculturalism is a shared experience
Obviously, multicultural could become a bit of a label if we disregard the differences in cultures and lived experience of individuals. It may also be difficult to find similarities between someone who has lived in five different countries and speaks seven languages and someone who has lived in two and speaks only English. This shared experience of knowing ‘another’ culture well enough to call your own, however, seems to speak to the heart. Somehow, multicultural people do find resonance between those who share the tension and joys of a ‘split identity’ more easily than with someone who may identify more as being monocultural. Through coaching people who are mostly from a multicultural background, the beliefs and assumptions that we make, as well as challenges that we face, seem to have more commonalities than I expected there to be.
Tuning into this resonance, I wanted to focus on serving those who come from a multicultural background. That is not to say I won’t be working with clients without this ‘badge’, but I feel that with my own experience being a multicultural person could enable me to understand my clients’ situations more clearly, ultimately leading to better outcomes for my clients.
How does the term ‘multicultural’ resonate with you? You can also read more about what makes one multicultural from this Harvard Business Review article — and let me know what you think!
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