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Reflective Essay About Asian Culture

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Take someone aside!

Let me tell you another little story. This one has to do with the Asian culture, to some extent, but is a lesson that we all need to learn.

Over the course of my career, I worked for several companies where I spent a lot of time traveling to the Far East. I lived in Thailand, Korea and Japan. I spent about two years in Singapore, and even set up a training center in Hong Kong.
During the course of all of this travel, I learned a very valuable lesson. We are going to relate this initially to the Thai culture because it is the clearest way of explaining it.

When I lived in Thailand, I just loved the people. It is one of the most wonderful places in the world that I have ever lived. The people are just

great! I love them! But the Thai culture is such that, their stock answer to a question is “yes.” If you ask them to do something, and it is not something that they can actually perform, they will still say “yes” because that is their culture. You need to learn to ask the question a different way, so that the answer would be “no.”

That is not the point of this whole little lesson that we are talking about now. It has to do with how you approach criticizing someone from that area of the world. By the way, this includes many, many other-than- Caucasian areas, including India.

All over the world, one of the things that you do not do—and I know many of you have heard this—that you

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