YOGA form and my intercultural competence

I read Alvino Fantini's essay, "A Central Concern: Developing Intercultural Competence", preceeding the YOGA form, and I found some interesting things, I'll summarize subsequently:

• ICC is "the ability to develop and maintain relationships, the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately with minimal loss or distortion, and the ability to attain compliance and obtain cooperation with others";
• Language influences our way to describe, "perceive, interpret, think about, and express one's view of the world";
• ICC "include respect, empathy, flexibility, patience, interest, curiosity, opennes, motivation, a sense of humor, tolerance for ambiguity, and a willingness to suspend judgement, among others";
• "Those who have never experienced another culture nor struggled to communicate through another language, like the goldfish, are generally unaware of the milieu in whic they have always existed."

I alwasy thought that life is filled with relativism. When I went in Spain, when I try to speak in class in English, when I meet my frind Karim and try to speack in Arabics with him, I notice our different mental processes go on and influence our perception of the outside. I dare say that I strongly belevieve in relativism. However it's not easy to cope with this belief that becaomes a value through which you consider every aspect of life. You often try to consider the different aspects and pov of the same issue, and actually you're pushed to think that everything is wrong and everything is right. Sometimes I find myself really cofused because I do not know to what I should believe. I wonder, where is the true? What is right/wrong? Am I right or not?...

Growing your cultural competence, within your own culture and within a foreign one, is not easy because it represents a process which weaken your previous strong values and beliefs and pushes you towards an area where many different values and ideas surround you, without really touching you at your deep self. Trying to be culturally tollerant and open-minded makes you surely confuse because you try to accept averybody's pov, traditions and beleifs. Through the objects that characterize and make a culture, you potentially should explain some behaviours you weren't agree with when you started studying foreign cultures. In my case, the increase in my knowledge of other cultures has being matching an increase of my ability in being empathic. Developing a great degree of empathy mines your own identity and beliefs as well, because sometimes you seem to be able to understand even what is, according to your home society, considered evil. However, I'm confident that one day I'll find a way to judge things through an inner compromise of my own with the cultural experience lived.

Regards the YOGA form I used it in order to check out my cultural competence within different cultural/linguage areas, that are the Romanian, the Spanish and the English contexts. I value my ICC in these 3 cultural areas because I studied English since I was (more or less) 9, Romanian for 4 years and Spanish during last year, when I went to Zaragoza for 10 month with the Erasmus programme. I think I'll be able to use it in order to check my ICC in the Arabian culture, since I studied arabics for a year and I know and often meet people who can speak it. Actually I'm really interested in improving my ICC in this cultural area. However, I must say that I found the YOGA form slightly difficult to fill in, especially beacuse of its terms which sometimes were hard to interpret in an objective way. The absence of previous definitions to the form about the terms used, makes you sometimes wonder whether you interpret the sentence right or wrong, or how you should interpret it. For example, in a sentence like this:

KNOWLEDGE
Level IV: Intercultural/Multicultural Specialist - I am able
to
provide a range of alternative models for conducting education or
training processes that address diverse learning styles, relevant to training
and advising in intercultural and multicultural settings.

I don't know what to answer...and maybe I don't know the answer because I have no competence in this thing at all. However I think that the terms used are so general and so wide-comprehensive that can be greately interpreted subjectly.Moreover, as Fantini says:

The term intercultural competence in now widely used in the field of
intercultural communication; it is still not widely understood, nor do
interculturalists agree upon a common definition, What most do agree is the
"double-edged" nature of the intercultural experience.

So, within the Intercultural issues, definitions are to be considered as important starting matters before checking the own ICC. Fantini precises that "the notion of [...] ICC is fairly new" and researchers still need to clarify the branches related to its meaning and field.

In general, filling the YOGA in, I noticed that some of my ICC is well developed while there are areas in which I need to improve.