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About This Week’s Guest

Paul MacAlindin

Paul MacAlindin is an internationally renowned conductor and author of “UPBEAT: the story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq“.

He led the orchestra from 2008- 2014 in Iraq, France, Germany and Britain, solving enormous hurdles of culture, language and education along the way.

The National Youth Orchestra of Iraq is by far the most challenging and rich intercultural experience of his career. UPBEAT is out on August the 18th 2016.

His three tips to become more culturally competent are:

1. Know yourself culturally. Realize that you’re the fish in your own bowl and that you might not know enough about your own culture. If you do this, you can realize that you’re different than the other person but you can still work together.
2. If you can, learn another one or two languages. Although not easy, it helps tremendously in overcoming cultural differences.
3. Learn to laugh at yourself. Remember, when it’s about culture, it’s not about them. It is about you!

Interview Links

Links that are mentioned in this episode:

• LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/conductor
• Twitter: @paulmacalindin
• Email: [email protected]
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/macalindin/

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In the Culture Matters podcast, we interview real people with real stories.

Every other week there is a guest with broad international experience and lots of cultural insights. I interview real people with real stories.

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Finally

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this far, and to listen to my Podcast.

I hope you will be back for the next episode of the Culture Matters Podcast!

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Chris Smit

Chris is passionate about Cultural Differences. He has been helping organizations save time and money when they work Internationally for the last 20+ years. While doing this he had the fortunate opportunity to hold lectures, workshops, and consulting projects on this subject World Wide. It has made him understand his own culture much better and appreciate the differences around the world.
His education is in Organisational Psychology and he has lived in the USA, the Netherlands, and currently lives in Belgium.

Chris Smit

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