Your culture is determined by your community, attitudes, social behaviour, language, and family structures you have experienced.
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These experiences inform your perspectives (or your point of view).
Reflecting on your perspectives helps you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and where you might improve. Self-evaluation is a process that involves examining yourself and thinking about your attitudes, knowledge and skills.
Self-evaluation
Each day, when you interact with people, you are faced with new cultural information. Self-evaluation allows you to manage this information and show respect for others. To do this, you can ask yourself questions that open your mind to the perspectives of others. This can become a continuous practice that challenges your own perspectives and biases.
Two tools you can use to self-evaluate include:
| Practice | Description |
|---|---|
| Reflect on biases | Consider your point of view in relation to your work colleagues and clients. Learn to ask for feedback from others. |
| Reflective cycles | Look back and consider your actions. Think about ways to improve your actions and reactions. |
Self-evaluation questions help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and where you might improve.
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Select the items on the image to reveal some examples of reflective questions.
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Your attitudes are influenced by your personal experiences and by the different people you have met.
Many values and beliefs are formed from past experiences. The way you were brought up and your parents expectations play a major role in the values and beliefs you hold. Culture changes over time due to changes in laws, society’s values, life and work experiences and where you live.
Reflection allows you to think about your beliefs. It can help you identify biased behaviours and work towards improving your attitudes and actions. For reflection to be effective, you must first be open and willing to find out about yourself and other people, and to consider how diversity impacts the different social, economic, cultural and political aspects of work and life.
Record your thoughts
Document your thoughts to each of the reflection questions presented. When you have finished, select Create Document to export your content and keep for later.
Cultural competence
Reflecting on your own biases will help you work towards cultural competence.
Cultural competence involves:
- being aware of your own views and beliefs
- developing positive attitudes towards others
- finding out about the world and other people
- using skills that enable you to communicate positively with all people.
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Select each bar to expand and reveal different ways you can help improve your cultural competence.
Case study
This case study explores how you can improve your cultural awareness at work.
Rohini has just started working in an aged care home that has a number of residents of Greek ancestry. Although she is aware of her own cultural background, she has little understanding of Greek culture represented in the aged care home.
To improve her cultural awareness, she asked her manager if he could suggest any resources for her to read. She was pleased to find out that not only were there resources, but she had also been offered some training in cultural competence as part of her induction into her new position.
Reflect
What other strategies can Rohini use to improve her cultural awareness?
Record your thoughts in your digital device or notebook.
Cultural bias
This occurs when someone feels their values and beliefs are not in line with those of someone from a different culture. Cultural bias usually comes from fear or misunderstanding, such as when the life choices of another person are not acceptable or clear to you.
You will be unable to understand and accept others if you have not identified and understood yourself and your own limitations. Your limitations might be based around the level of knowledge you have about community attitudes, language, work policies and structures of a culture, or about how these things impact different people and groups.
To help generate self-awareness, think about your own limitations, including:
- what you knew already
- what you learnt
- how your life experiences or understanding have either limited or improved your understanding of others.
The reflective cycle
Cultural competence is a cycle, not an end point. Reflection requires that you respond to new cultural information.
The reflective cycle can help you analyse and overcome any cultural bias you may have. It is a useful tool to help people think about and make sense of their personal experiences.
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The Gibbs Reflective Cycle provides a systematic approach to reflecting on experiences. Select the items on the image to reveal more information on the reflective cycle.
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Apply your skills
Christine works as a care worker with aged care clients in their own home. This is how she uses self-reflection to improve her work practices.
1. Christine finds it a challenge to induct new clients into her organisation, as she is not confident when she meets new people.
2. Christine decides to focus on building her confidence and thinks about what it is that makes her feel anxious before meeting a new client.
3. Christine realises that she holds bias against people who don’t speak fluent English. She gets worried that she won’t understand what they are saying or be able to make herself understood.
4. Christine decides to speak to her supervisor and discuss ways she can prepare for each new client, including strategies for speaking to new clients who are not fluent in English.
Like Christine did, think about an an area in your work that you would like to improve. Write a list of actions you could take to build your skills in this area.
Check your understanding
Fill in the blanks by dragging the words into the correct place, then select ‘Check’ to see if you are
correct.