When cultures collide...

I was talking with a colleague the other day about coaching a young woman from another culture. In passing we touched on a question that has been haunting me ever since.  Does our coaching implicitly teach or assert that the assumptions of our culture are better than the assumptions of hers?

I am a great advocate of, and great believer in, individual agency coupled with individual responsibility.  Much of my coaching involves helping people to think through what their goals are, what options they have in pursuit of those goals and what actions they will therefore take (or what experiments they will run to establish what actually works in their context).

This coachee came from a culture that places a much higher emphasis  on deference to the wisdom of parents, teachers and older people more generally. The underlying assumption being that those with more life experience may have more wisdom than those with less; and further that tradition is the cumulative wisdom of the lived experience of those who have gone before.

Yet when as coaches we hear someone say they need to do what their parents, boss, or indeed tradition instructs them, our instinct is to ask: 'But what do you think?'

Is this a form of cultural imperialism? Are we not implying that the Western liberal understanding of personal responsibility, autonomy and agency is superior to their culture? And given our current Western liberal concerns about de-colonising our educational offerings, should we not be giving this more thought?

I find these difficult, but important, questions...  What do you think?