Book excerpt: YOUR Unique Cultural Lens is a guide to help you develop your own cultural competence - your ability to effectively interact, communicate and influence across cultures at home or overseas. It advocates that the most efficient way to do so is by increasing your self-awareness and supports your efforts through the Unique Cultural Lens (UCL) Exercise. Your UCL is your own set of perception filters (biases) accumulated over a lifetime. It reflects the rich ancestral, cultural, educational and experiential heritage you emerged from and informs who you are now. Together, these filters define your authentic self, influence how you perceive and interact with the world, and affect the decisions you make - whether you are consciously aware or not of them.By increasing your own self-awareness, Your Unique Cultural Lens argues you will more effectively be able to create the conditions for better, more inclusive and more productive working environments.