Living and working in another country is no doubt an experience that looks very good on our curriculum vitae and opens the door to a wide choice of work opportunities. It is a life challenge and a good and direct way to learn a new language, become familiar with a new culture as well as test our adaptability.
Whether for a long or a short period of time, this new journey is always a major challenge, because we have to overcome numerous obstacles. Leaving behind life as we know it is the first one. It is definitely a challenge to start a new life without family, colleagues, and perhaps not speaking the language.
If you ever made this important decision, you might remember your first days in the new country, arriving at the airport and the adrenalin surging when you breathed in the air of the new adventure that would change your life forever. You did not know when you would be at the airport again, but on your way back you were a different person.
From the first moments of our new journey...
The moment when we arrive in another country, we feel life is giving us a new opportunity. Difficulties we have to overcome provide the reward of moving us forward, stretching our limits.
Situations we do not normally face in our home country, we now do on a daily basis. For example, if we are not yet familiar with the local language, we are forced to learn seemingly small things such as buying train or bus tickets, finding our way to school or work even though we do not know how to ask, not knowing where to buy a good lunch and overpaying for food for the first weeks until a kind soul helps us understand. Yet all of this helps develop our independence and adaptability to new situations. One day, we will smile at the experience when we think about how we panicked that one time.
The other advantage of living abroad is meeting new people. Whatever the purpose of our stay, work or study, we have to build a new network. Now networking is not about people we know from our childhood, classmates or colleagues we know well; we learn to talk to as many people as possible who may help develop our social lives. And, if we add our limited knowledge of the new language, we might end up with some interesting adventures.
Professional and personal experience
There are two sides to the expatriation experience: the personal and the professional. Developing an awareness of our limits is important for the former. Whether we move to somewhere in Europe, Australia or Africa, we face a new environment. We learn to adapt to new people with a different lifestyle and habits. Witnessing people’s different problems and the way they deal with them might help us re-evaluate our own difficulties and see them from a different perspective.
On the professional side, this experience can increase our resourcefulness and resilience. It shows that we are able to accept different working practices, which makes us more flexible and adaptable.
New country, new attitude
No matter where we come from, we live in diverse environments with specific attitudes, and we are all different. One lifestyle can seem stressful, another relaxed, but once we change our environment and start to adapt, we must be ready to change. Very often this happens unconsciously, and frequently before we adapt we go through difficult times. Everybody has their own experience depending on where they are going and where they come from.
Does this mean that we have to change our personality? For example, shift from being an introvert who likes to keep a certain distance to a public, jovial person? Not necessarily. We do, however, need to learn to be accepting of differences and become accustomed to them. It is a lesson in tolerance.
Attitudes also affect our professional life. What seems normal to us may not necessarily suit others. Some people work long hours, taking short brakes, while others work at a less strict pace, take long pauses or even break for a siesta. These factors play an important role in our job performance.
It is a great achievement to make it through the hardships of living abroad and to see ourselves do things which we had previously thought we could not do. Yet how else would we know that we can learn a new language in a couple of months? How else would we know that we are capable of working under conditions we have never experienced before, such as a different economic situation or even an unfamiliar climate? If we never travel without family and friends, how do we build the self-confidence that we can make friends from around the world? We cannot know until we try.
Time to go back
Once we have adapted, made friends, learnt the language, understood the culture and overcome our limits, before we know it, it is time to go back home. This part of the journey might by surprisingly difficult. We have learnt new things about ourselves, lived in a different environment, and our expatriation has had a big impact on us. Now we have to say goodbye to our new friends, those who were there for us in our new home.
After our absence, things as we knew them may not appear the same anymore. Back home, the job market, our resources, our social entourage, the economy and our family have moved on. The change may also simply be that, because of what we experienced, we come back with different perspectives, expectations and opinions. There are things about our expatriate experience we really start missing: perhaps the greater affordability of cultural events and restaurants, a more diverse population, or even the weather.
We find ourselves wanting to share our stories, feeling at times misunderstood or simply frustrated that our experience is not so interesting to everyone. We need to remember that we are the ones who left for new horizons. Our excitement may not be shared as we would have expected, and people around us might simply not be interested in hearing what we have to say, not because they do not care about us, but simply because they cannot relate.
A unique opportunity for personal growth
During our travel period we learnt to respect and accept a different way of life, a different culture, and now we may just have to do the same in reverse and in a more familiar environment. We may feel like strangers in our own city; readapting to our environment becomes our new challenge. The same personal skills we put to practice moving to another country are mobilized once again. It should seem so much easier this time... should it not? After all, we are back to our roots and culture. That is probably the time when we realize most clearly the difference between learning a foreign language and being able to speak the same language.
Text : Petra Grand and Manuella Nalesso
photo credit: elobofoto via photopin cc; garryknight via photopin
