Expat Focus

Posted on December 7, 2011 by thesmartexpat

I was delighted to be asked by Expat Focus to join their group of expert columnists. As their Expat Coaching for Partners columnist, I’ll be writing about the issues that affect the lives of accompanying partners. My first column, about dealing with some of the seasonal challenges that are particular to expat families, is online now.

To read my seasonal tips for expats click here Like to share your own experience or tips? Comment below or at Expat Focus.

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Survey Update

Posted on December 4, 2011 by thesmartexpat

What a phenomenal response we’ve had to our Career Choice and the Accompanying Partner survey!  So far, almost 200 accompanying partners have responded to the survey – an amazing start and almost half way to our goal of 400 responses.  Of course Louise and I have had amazing support from some influential people which has helped us to make such a great start.  If you’re interested in reading more about the survey, here are links to the articles:

Expat Women

Jo Parfitt

Judy Rickartson – Expatriate Life

Future Expats

Shelter Offshore

Kate Cobb

There’s more to come over the next week or two to continue the dialogue on Career Choice and the Accompanying Partner, so watch this space.  If you haven’t completed the survey, please click on the link below – we still need as many responses as possible.  If you’ve already completed it, thank you and please forward it on to all the accompanying partners you know; female or male, working or not. Don’t forget that your response gives you the opportunity to win some great prizes including coaching programs and great books.  We’ll have more updates soon.

Career Choice and the Accompanying Partner Survey

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Career, Coaching, The Expat Experience | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

To work or not to work?

Posted on November 14, 2011 by thesmartexpat


Photo: istockphoto.com

My own career took me from London to New York on my first expat assignment in 1989. Fast forward nine years and my soon-to-be husband and I managed (after a 15 month separation and a with the help of a sympathetic boss) to move to Hong Kong and keep both of our careers moving in the right direction. However, a baby, a new boss and one more move made it difficult for me to maintain my career. Since then, we’ve made three additional moves and had another child and my career in investment banking is a distant memory. Despite having no visa restrictions in two out of those three countries, I chose not to seek paid employment.   Though I have no desire to return to my investment banking, I have often missed the fulfilment and sense of identity that come with having a career. Why make the choice not to work? Uncertainty over how long my husband’s assignment might last, the complexity of our household logistics given my husband’s travel schedule, childcare resources which would not fill in all the gaps, lack of contacts in the countries I’ve lived in and the time required with each move to set up a household and get our children settled into school are just some of the reasons that, until I started my own business two years ago, my career remained on ice.

What decision did you make about working/maintaining your career when you moved overseas?

What factors drove your decision to work or not?

How has the decision impacted your satisfaction with your life?

These are all questions that Louise Wiles, founder of Success Abroad Coaching and I are asking in our new survey “Career Choice and the Accompanying Partner”. By asking these questions we are attempting to shed light on the issues that influence the choice to work or not and to better understand the implications of that choice on an accompanying partner’s well-being. We hope that our findings will help families to make more informed decisions about expatriate assignments and that they will further the dialogue on how accompanying partners are supported in a relocation.

If you’re an accompanying partner currently on assignment and would like to share your experience, please click here to complete the survey. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to complete. If you can spare another minute or two of your time, we’d appreciate if you’d forward it on to all of your expat friends. As a thank you from us, every participant will have the opportunity to be entered into a prize draw.

Watch this space for news of our findings.

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Career, Fulfillment, The Expat Experience | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Turning Points

Posted on November 1, 2011 by thesmartexpat

Remember those moments.  The moments in life where everything changes.  There might be an epiphany; the course of your life is inexorably changed and everything that comes after is driven by a sense of clarity and purpose that didn’t previously exist.  Or there might be some insignificant event; one which alters your perspective which in turn leads to a distinctly different set of actions.  Though the changes are more subtle,  it’s clear that life would have been different had that moment not occurred.

My own turning point took the latter form.  I was comforting a fellow accompanying partner whose youngest child had just flown the nest for university.  She was devastated.  Her whole life, her purpose and her identity were tied up in being a mother to her children.  She had few interests of her own.  She had done little for herself in almost 20 years.  Her life was so focused on others that she had completely lost sight of her own dreams and ambitions.  Her youngest child had left taking his mother’s purpose in life with him and she was lost.  At the time, I was already uncomfortable that I had not worked for the last 7 years and at that moment, knew precisely where I didn’t want to be when my children left home.  In the course of that one conversation, I strengthened my resolve to reconnect with my own dreams and develop a career (paid or not) which gave me a sense of purpose beyond my family.  The journey is ongoing and there have been a couple of major detours along the way, but I can pinpoint that moment as a turning point in my life.

In her new book “Turning Points”, launched today, Women’s Development Coach Kate Cobb brings together the stories of 25 women entrepreneurs and the moments that changed their lives.  In the introduction, Kate looks at how we can recognize turning points and how we can maximise their power of transformation.   Each of the 25 entrepreneurs tell their own stories, sharing not only the moments that sparked change in their lives but also how they made the change happen, what they learned along the way and what resources they used to inspire their journeys.  Two of my favourite expats are featured in the book.  Fellow expat coach Louise Wiles, with whom I am currently collaborating on an exciting new project (more about that in a couple of weeks) tells the story of how she created her own business so that she could have a meaningful career which accommodated her peripatetic life. Also featured is Linda Janssen who writes for a number of expat publications and is the author of the Adventures in Expatland blog.

If you’d like to read these inspiring stories, Turning Points can be purchased from Amazon and, as if the stories, tips and resources are not reasons enough to buy the book, the authors have committed 10% of the royalties from the book to the charity Seeds for Development which supports farming families in Uganda.

P.S. I’m a bit slow in getting my blog post out today, but if you do buy the book before the end of the day today, log your purchase at www.theturningpointsbook.com to be eligible for some amazing launch day bonuses.

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Climb Every Mountain

Posted on October 20, 2011 by thesmartexpat

Life in a new country challeges each individual in different ways.  Some people experience difficulty adapting to the new culture while others adapt seamlessly.  While some find languages a breeze and are chatting like locals in no time at all, others live in a fog of incomprehension for months or even years.  Still more are inhibited from making friends by shyness or lack of confidence yet their outgoing counterparts seem to know so many people and be included in so many things that if you didn’t know better you’d think they’d been around for years.

What aspect of living in a new country was most challenging?

How did you overcome the challenge?

What parts of life as an expat were easy for you to adapt to?

Share your answers in the comments below.  I’ve also started conversations on Facebook and Twitter so have a look over there for more answers.

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Career, Expat Culture, Settling In, The Expat Experience | 9 Comments »

Comfort Zone – Part II

Posted on October 12, 2011 by thesmartexpat

In March, I wrote about moving overseas and what makes those of us who do so step so far out of our comfort zones. As many of you who have moved overseas this summer have probably discovered, the decision to move to a new country is just the first of many times in your expat life that you step outside your comfort zone.  At the moment you may be feeling that every time you step outside your door you’re stepping outside your comfort zone.  Simple things you take for granted in your home country may be feeling overwhelming.  Language can make a simple trip to the grocery store or a phone call seem challenging.  Cultural differences mean that everyday tasks are done differently and you don’t know where to begin.  You may be uncomfortable making small talk with new people but none of your friends and family are around.  By now, the initial excitement of living in a new country is probably wearing off leaving behind the reality of living your life in a country where nothing is familiar.  This is the time when many new expats (I include myself in this group) find themselves in tears in the middle of a metro station because some minor mistake or mishap is the last in a long list of tasks that haven’t gone quite the way they expected.

So how do you motivate yourself to keep moving forward with all the things you need to get done, when pretty much everything you feels difficult?

1. Team up with someone else who’s new.  You may not offer each other much in the way of help but you’ll be experiencing the similar things at similar times.  You’ll be able to cry on each others shoulders and maybe one day soon (I know it can be hard to imagine), laugh about your mistakes.

2. Don’t be shy about asking people who have lived in your community for a while for help to get things done.  You don’t have to learn everything the hard way – every expat has been where you are now and most are happy to pass on their knowledge and experience.

3. Give yourself goals for accomplishing the tasks which are outside your comfort zone.  Continually putting yourself in the situation of feeling helpless because you’re struggling to accomplish tasks that you could do with your eyes shut in your home country can be soul destroying.  Give yourself a goal to accomplish each day based on how ready you feel to take on the challenges.

4. Acknowledge your achievements.  It can be easy to look back and minimize what you have done because you’re measuring it against the benchmark of how easy it would be in your home country.  Recognise the challenges that make the task more difficult in your new country and celebrate overcoming them.

5. Enlist the support of your partner and help him or her to understand the challenges of the things you are doing so that he/she acknowledges the achievement too.  The last thing you want to see after telling your war story of how you negotiated the local systems to pick up your residence permit at the town office is that look that says “So what’s the big deal about that”

Be kind to yourself and, over time, you’ll find that all the things you found difficult at first become as familiar and simple as they were in your home country.

Don’t get too comfy though.  Once you’ve got the basics ticking along, part of the richness of living in another country and culture is to keep experiencing it on new levels and to do that you might find yourself once again stepping outside your comfort zone.

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Expat Culture, Philanthropy, Settling In, The Expat Experience | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Girl Effect – What can you do?

Posted on October 4, 2011 by thesmartexpat

Mea Culpa!!  I have committed the cardinal sin of blogging and have not posted content in quite some time.  So I have to thank Tara Sophia Mohr whose Girl Effect Blogging Campaign has blown away my summer inertia and inspired me to start writing again. Having started, I am committing to a more regular schedule (once a week) for writing about issues which affect us as expats and accompanying partners. Watch this space!

Now onto the main purpose of this post – The Girl Effect. As expats, we are often closer than we know to the sharp end of the injustices that girls experience on a daily basis.  Although, we and our daughters may not experience those injustices directly, they are often happening around us.  Sometimes our experience of living in different cultures and countries simply raises our awareness and makes it a little harder to ignore some of those inequalities.

As accompanying partners, we often find ourselves unable to work.  Although we are privileged beyond the wildest dreams of the people in whose communities we live, many of us struggle with the sudden loss of fulfillment that we experienced from careers or hobbies in our home countries.   I’ve written before about my involvement with the Josephine Charles Foundation while I lived in Shanghai.  While some of the jobs that I did for the foundation were by no means glamourous or intellectually demanding (sorting donated clothing to be sent to children and adults in the remotest areas of Sichuan province springs to mind), I experienced a deep sense of satisfaction doing something which made an immediate and measurable difference to the families and particularly the girls in those communities.  The work that I did is not for everyone, but there are many opportunities to get involved with organisations which help the communities we live in and the girls around us.  If you are searching for a new sense of purpose in your expat life and have time and skills on your hands, I urge you to consider volunteering some of your time and skills to help an organisation which helps girls.  If you’re not familiar with the Girl Effect and their campaign to spread the compelling statistics for investing in girls, check out the video below:

Personal fulfillment and a better world – what’s not to like about that?

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Career, Fulfillment, Philanthropy, The Expat Experience, The Girl Effect | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Still an Accompanying Partner

Posted on May 16, 2011 by thesmartexpat

At the FIGT conference,   Jo Parfitt raised a call to find a replacement for “trailing spouse” and the term STARS (Spouses Travelling and Relocating Sucessfully) was born.   Linda at Adventures in Expatland wrote a wonderful and entertaining article “Expat Bouganvillea: Tale of the Trailing Spouse” acknowledging that although STARS  is better than “Trailing Spouse”, she won’t be using it.

Now as you all know, I hate/despise/loathe the term “trailing spouse” for all of the reasons I’ve been ranting on about for the last year or so, but like Linda, I won’t be using STARS either.  Why?  The nomenclature for what we are doing serves two purposes.  The first is that it gives us a way to describe what we are doing to other people and the second is that it gives the HR community a way to refer to  us as a group.  STARS/CEO of Team X/Execuwife are great in the first instance as they help to paper over those awkward “what do you do” conversations with a bit of humour and they mean that we can describe ourselves with words that don’t feel demeaning.  Unfortunately, I don’t think any of them help in the more important HR conversation.  I just can’t imagine HR/Relocation professionals referring to expats and their STARS!

Although the economics in favour paying attention to family issues are compelling (family issues constitute the second largest cause of failure of expat assignments), most companies provide very limited support to the families of expats beyond the physical move and the early settling-in period.   For many accompanying partners, the time when the support runs out is exactly the point in time when we are getting started with our adjustment. It’s when the reality of trying to create meaningful lives for ourselves in a new country and culture and without our familiar reference points and support systems is just setting in.  It’s when we have to begin creating new identities for our selves in situations where we can’t work or have access to the parts of our lives that have given us purpose and meaning.  If we want HR departments to take us seriously and to consider our transitions as contribution to assignment success, we need a label that can be taken seriously.

That’s why I’ll be continuing to call myself an accompanying partner for the foreseeable future.

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Career, Coaching, Settling In, The Expat Experience | 9 Comments »

Comfort Zone – Part 1

Posted on March 14, 2011 by thesmartexpat

A while back, HSBC’s Expat Explorer posed  the question on Twitter, “Are expat’s born or made?”  and it started me thinking about what it is that gives us the impetus to move overseas.  The question came back to me today in a conversation with a client.  Similar to my own experience, she moved overseas at a relatively young age though she had grown up in small towns where many of her peers settled locally remaining close to family and familiarity.  In my own case, I moved to New York at the age of 22 with only two suitcases.  I had a job and I had an apartment for the first few months, but I knew no one and the sum of my travel experience to date had been a couple of brief student jaunts to Mediterranean islands during the summer holidays.  No one in my family travelled much outside of the UK and among my circle of friends and their parents, only a few ventured on camping trips in the South of France or maybe skiing in the Alps.   One could argue that my job was what took me on my Transatlantic journey, however I had actively sought out jobs which would give me the opportunity to travel.  Clearly something in me made me step so far outside of my comfort zone.

I can’t put my finger on why I wanted to not only travel to another country but to live there.  I can remember reading books as a child and being enthralled with the descriptions of life in other countries and I have vague memories of wishing our family would emigrate to Australia.  Otherwise,nothing in my early history would hint at the idea that I would move at age 22 and, besides visits, not return to the country of my birth.  I’ve considered many possibilities but I really don’t remember the specific thoughts I had at the time, so I can’t even say that it was truly a conscious choice.

Others embark on expat life as an active decision which will take them away from the comfort and ease of the known.  In Alan Paul’s Big In China, he describes the moment when he and his wife decide to move from suburban New Jersey to Beijing “We can spend the next three years in China”, [his wife] said “or we can spend them talking about kitchen renovation”.   Alan and Rebecca’s decision was more deliberate than mine, but for every couple like them who make the decision to do something different, there are tens, maybe hundreds, of people to whom the idea of living in China is frightening and incomprehensible.

What made you decide to step away from your familiar faces, places and routines to embark on a life overseas?  Did you “go with the flow” of a partner’s career or an employer’s offer or did you actively seek out the opportunity?  What made life overseas seem attractive to you?   Use the comments section for your thoughts or tweet them to me @thesmartexpat

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Coaching, The Expat Experience | 11 Comments »

Because we ARE Special!

Posted on January 21, 2011 by thesmartexpat

Its a new year and I haven’t written for a while so what better way to start the year than to get back on my soapbox!

I sparked some discussion way back in March with my article about the (in my opinion) heinous term “trailing spouse” and the fire has been smouldering a away on a number of blogs including the Secret Confessions of a Traveling Spouse, IamExpat as well as on my Definitely Not Trailing group on Facebook.    On the Definitely Not Trailing group, Alan Paul, whose adventures as an accompanying spouse “Big in China” will be released on March 1 this year, weighed in with the comment:

“Anything’s better than trailing spouse, but why not just wife or husband? Does there really have to be a special term for this?”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Alan’s comment and considering both sides of the argument and reading what others have to say about it.  Intellectually, its easy to agree that we don’t need a term for what we are doing.  Each of us is living her or his own life, each of us is dealing with the challenges of living in a new country in her or his own way, so why stick us in a box that assumes we are all the same?  In the end though, I come down firmly on the other side.

For those of us who are new to a the idea that our spouse or partner’s career is going to lead us to new places and to circumstances which involve putting our own careers, dreams and ambitions on hold, giving those common circumstances a name gives us the opportunity to know that the emotions we’re experiencing are commonly experienced by people who make the life changes we have made.  It lets us know that in circumstances where much of what we find comfortable, supportive and familiar is no longer available, we are not alone.

“Before I came across these terms, I felt very alone [and] had all these thoughts/feelings about my identity if I leave my job/town and go somewhere with my spouse once he gets his post-doc job.  Once I found the term “trailing spouse”, even after recoiling at the name, it felt good to know that I wasn’t imagining things.” Secret Confessions of a Traveling Spouse

Moreover because “its not just me”, there are fewer excuses for the organisations who sponsor our moves to ignore the challenges that we collectively face.  15 years ago, when I first stepped into this way of life, I was in a minority of accompanying spouses who had a career.  There were few resources either from our corporate sponsor or in the broader community to support my transition to expat life or the to support the inevitable identity crisis which followed my decision to abandon my career a couple of years later.   Now many accompanying partners have  careers and whether they decide to continue with them or put them on hold, there is a burgeoning sector of support services to help them do so – coaches, mentors and international career services are all available to accompanying partners and it is becoming harder for sponsoring organisations to ignore the transition issues faced by accompanying partners (particularly since failure of spouse and family member to adjust is one of the largest causes of failure of expat assignments – money talks!)

Lastly, and perhaps the most necessary reason for giving ourselves a name is that the HR and academic communities want to give us a name and unfortunately the one they’ve given us is “trailing spouse”   If we continue to leave the space open by not giving ourselves a name,  the vacuum will be filled with labels that other people give us and we might not like them!  Let’s take ownership of our identity as accompanying spouses and partners and give it a name we can be proud of.

Filed under: Accompanying Partners, Career, Coaching, The Expat Experience | Tagged: , , , , | 5 Comments »

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