Culture

When you are preparing your presentation for foreign audiences it’s critically important that you avoid certain cultural references that just aren’t going to make any sense to that foreign audience.

Now the classic example is the American talking about the touch down and all these football metaphors and crush them in the huddle and nobody else in the rest of the world knows what they’re talking about because football to the rest of the world means soccer to Americans.

So avoid cultural references that deal with sports specific to you.

That’s the biggest blunder I find this problem most acute for American businessmen because so many of them do like football and they make references blocking and tackling all these analogies and references come from football.

So if you’re saying it to a foreign audience they’re not going to know what you’re talking about and you’re going to lose them and you know what happens when a foreign audience is lost by your speech exactly the same thing that happens when a U.S. audience gets lost by your speech.

They tune out and they read their email and you have wasted your time.

So you’ve got to treat this at some respect like any other speech you’ve got to be focused on their audience.

You’ve got to make sure.

Are they paying attention.

Do they look like they’re understanding.

So part of what you’ve got to do is not completely strip out everything interesting from your speech but you’ve got to make sure your examples your case studies are things that resonate with people either everywhere or specific to the country you are in now.

The more advance you can do you’re in with your preparation and research is specific to that country if you can reference particular sports stars from that country famous in that country great.

If you don’t have time to do that or you’re now willing to do that make sure your references your analogies your metaphors resonate at the human level everywhere you can talk about family you can talk about joys you can talk about childbirth you can talk about all sorts of things that translate across culture but don’t talk about your college football game and things that are really unique to right here in the US.