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How you can reach us
• We are located at:
LTC-Circuit bvba-sprl
Rue Willemsstraat 14
B-1210 Brussels Belgium
• You can send us your comments and requests for further information by e-mailing us to this e-address
• We will answer your calls at number +32 475 267 341.
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Crossing the ultimate frontier:
Towards Trans-Cultural Excellence
For quite some time people have believed that adopting one world lingua franca would solve all communication problems people encounter in this increasingly global civilisation.
As the political agendas behind this contention became blatantly clear people started to realise that genuine and honest interest in other people's cultures was a necessary prerequisite for all to be able to communicate at all – including some degree of familiarity with the language embodying and carrying the other culture.
If only in the area of trade this was proven right by former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt's famous words “I sell in English but I buy in German”. Care for and empathy with the customer obviously means some understanding of the customer's culture, and hence language.
This last point is essential. The sympathizing and sympathique fascination with exotic cuisine will just not do any more as an example of genuine interest.
After all, if you do not eat what your customer eats, you may starve – and just as well get sick when you do. Speaking the language might help you avoid both extremes.
The relationship between language and culture has many sides. But on one hand it obviously penetrates all aspects of the culture its carrier it is – if only because it provides words and phrases to name and express these aspects.
But not only is language's cultural impact wide-ranging, it is also definitely “hard-core”.
Sentimental interest for the other's exoticism, let alone the conqueror or dominator's agendas for the other's riches are easily seen through. More is required as more is at stake.
It is when we actually start to learn the backbone of the other's culture, his or her language, that our incipient interest is put to test. Unless we do just that, we will have fast exhausted the other's respect.
While we evolve on the language-learning track, we gradually move from multilingualism (at which stage we practise various languages to various extents) into plurilingualism (at which stage we surprise ourselves at actually thinking, feeling and dreaming in the other's language).
Logically, this is not different from the move from mere juxtaposition of mutually exclusive cultures in our present-day multicultural patchwork societies in the direction of pluriculturalism, where we can partially or wholly identify with the other's culture that we share.
Gradually our mastery of various languages allows us to blend over effortlessly and indiscriminately from one language into the other, crossing the boundaries without hesitation.
This level of plurilinguistic and pluricultural ability can be epitomized by the famous phrase of a Belgian politician, speaking about the two national languages Dutch and French: “I am bilingual in the two languages”.
As we progress, we notice that acquiring new languages – as well as understanding, empathizing with and loving other people's cultures – becomes increasingly easy. It is as if each language and cultural layer added, by creating new “fireable” neural links in our brain, or energy flows in our body, soul and spirit, exponentially increases our ability to take on new learning challenges.
(It is this phenomenon that has become the basis of our Trans-cultural Excellence Score Card – which is our main steering tool for helping to manage and coaching people's language-learning adventures.)
A horizon then comes into view, in which we seem to get aware of, to understand, to “see” the essential set-up of any languages as complex systems of symbolic communication (in their full deployment of means for expressing meaning through vocabulary on one hand, and of means for relating and combining meaning through syntax on the other hand).
This awareness is both consciously present and expressible in expert opinions about language and languages, as well as intuitive as an immediate grasp of what “symbolic culturality” is really about.
As we seem to comprehend how this fundamental “deep-structure” (or even “deep-essence”) of language “incarnates” itself in each language we come across with, we also seem to exponentially increase our readiness to accept the cultural values of the other as valid – we empathize naturally with his or her emotions, we mirror easily his or her body states and movements, we pattern our thoughts after the configurations taken by his or hers.
In one sentence: our ability to love the other grows.
While sensing this horizon and “lovingly” getting nearer to it – we still do not lose the ground of the language and culture we started with in the first place.
Over the years of this evolvement however our “base camp” has gradually changed shape – it is no longer confined to “just” one language and culture, our so-called mother tongue. Fathers, and more mothers, have joined our family – and we welcome any newly adopted parent, sibling or child.
It is this horizon which we call “trans-cultural excellence” – in which the prefix “trans” not only expresses that it involves the transcendence of the “limits” of any specific culture or language, – hovering, as it were, over languages and cultures like the condor over the Andes – but also, more humbly, that it involves, again and again, our crossing the “frontiers” between cultures and languages, and going out to the Other.
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• The schoolkid kit
• “All this is marketing”: Coaching is co-creation or The proof of the pudding is in the eating
• Assessing the Learner's needs and skills
• How we plot the Learner's Language learning Adventure
• Plan thoroughly and implement flexibly
• Plurilingualism is key but also the key
• Assignment: Company-wide progress in Spartan circumstances
• Assignment: Company-wide coaching of High Performers
• Assignment: Customer-oriented writing in an insurance department
• Crossing the ultimate frontier: Towards Trans-Cultural Excellence
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