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 »

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 »

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 »

Trailer Trash?

Posted on March 14, 2010 by thesmartexpat

On her Facebook page, my friend Madeleine refers to herself as “Living in Shanghai, China, as trailer trash for my beloved [husband]“.   In doing so she is not-so-gently mocking the outdated term  ”trailing spouse”.  Though the term is slowly being abandoned, it remains in common use in HR departments and among relocation service providers (For convenience, I’m going to lump everyone under HR for the remainder of the post)

The term has always bothered me.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines “trail” as “to be drawn along behind” or “to move slowly or wearily”.  It’s a negative word and implies reluctance and lack of choice.  While in the past  expat spouses may have been dragged along against their will on international assignments,  I and most of the other women and men who are accompanying our spouses and partners on international assignments these days are doing so willingly.  We are equal partners in carefully considered decisions to move overseas and, though we have often made difficult compromises, such as putting careers on hold, we are anything but trailing.

Moreover, as budgets for international relocations are cut, the role of the accompanying partner, always important, is becoming an increasingly crucial part of the relocation process.  Our partners leave for their new jobs, often before the movers have packed up our houses and we are the ones who are organising the move, finding schools for our children and sorting out the immense amounts of paperwork that go with an international move.  In our new countries, we find that our spouses are working long hours and traveling, leaving us to take delivery of household goods, settle our children into new schools, wait around for hours for utilities to be connected and transform our rented houses into homes.  In short, it is we who coordinate the details and logistics of the move and enable our partners to move seamlessly from one job to the next without skipping a beat.

The term “trailing spouse” certainly doesn’t reflect the key role that accompanying partners play.   I don’t think that the persistence of the term is a conscious attempt to insult us; it is just so ingrained in the HR lexicon that it is used without any thought to its meaning.  However, in many cases, it seems to set the tone for the relationship between HR and accompanying partners.  It is implicit when we agree to move to a new country that we accompanying partners will assume responsibility for a significant portion of the work involved and yet, in my own experience and that of many of my friends, when direct communications are required, we are  considered “trailing spouses” and are not included in the process.  We are resentful of the lack of communication and inclusion, our partners are irritated by it and it is the first step toward the development of what is all too often a highly acrimonious relationship  between HR and the expat family.

Which brings me to the point of my rant on this subject: I’d like to appeal to everyone involved in the international relocation industry to please stop calling us “trailing spouses”! A more respectful name would be a good first step toward building a more mutually respectful relationship between accompanying partners and HR.  If we are including as a valued part of the relocation process, expat families and HR might all be surprised by how much less painful the  relocation process becomes.

A final thought:  ”Accompanying partner” is not the zippiest of terms and phrases which describe our real role, for instance “amazing person who manages to coordinate the details of an international move in a very short time” don’t really roll of the tongue.  Post any suggestions for a better term (and any other thoughts on the subject) in the comments section, on my Facebook page or on Twitter (@thesmartexpat)

Filed under: Accompanying Partners | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Identifying my Identity

Posted on January 15, 2010 by thesmartexpat

Browsing the discussion boards at the ExpatWeb group on LinkedIn, I came across a thread started by cross cultural coach, Margarita Gokun Silver which posed the question “Your identity in expatriation: will it stay or will it go?”  My answer?  A resounding “Neither!”  I’ve been an expat for a long time and have a very strong sense of identity but it’s not the same identity I had when my expat journey began.   15 years ago, my identity was inseparable from my career.  I was an investment banker, respected by my clients, often asked to speak at conferences and write articles in industry publications.  Now I’m a serial expat, an expert in moving my family and our lives from one country to another, a yoga teacher, a philanthropist and now an entrepreneur.  My high school French teacher would be surprised to know that I am also a linguist, currently working on learning my fourth language.  My career as an investment banker is a distant memory and expat life has afforded me the opportunity to explore these interests and develop myself in a way which would not have been possible in my old life.  Living and working in multiple countries has also shifted some of my values and my worldview.  I am less likely to make black or white judgements about world events as I can view them through the lens of other cultures and appreciate the shades of grey.  It has even changed my personality.  Years of putting myself out there to make new friends in each new country have all but eliminated my shyness.

If you’re a soon-to-be expat, particularly someone who is putting their career on hold to accompany their partner on an international assignment, you should  be prepared for a sense of loss of identity, but ready to mitigate it with a plan.  Explore the many opportunities that are available in expat communities and set goals for becoming involved.   If you can’t decide what will excite and motivate you, work with a coach to help you discover what is right for you.  Having decided to go on an international assignment, make the most of it; be open to the new experience.

For me the changes in my identity have not always been smooth or painless.  I’ve had a few false starts in finding the things that I am passionate about and I’ve learned the hard way that some pursuits are definitely not for me.  However, I can say without reservation, that the me of today is happier, has a richer life and a lot more fun that the me of 15 years ago.  And I still remember a surprising amount of that high school French.

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