Adapting to expat life – a journey outside your comfort zone

As an accompanying partner, the decision to move to a new country is just the first of many times in your expat life that you will step outside your comfort zone.  Once you are actually living in your new country and starting to adapt to life there you may feel 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 feel overwhelming.  Language can make a trip to the grocery store or a making 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 is around and calling them may serve to make you feel more alienated.

Once the initial excitement of living in a new country begins to wear off you have to confront the reality of living your life in a country where nothing is familiar.  This is the time when many accompanying partners find themselves in tears in the middle of a supermarket or a train 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.

The challenge is how do you motivate yourself to keep moving forward with the myriad tasks of getting settled in a new country when almost everything you do feels difficult?

• 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 laugh about your mistakes.
• 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.
• Give yourself goals for accomplishing the tasks that 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.
• 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.
• 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.

If this article has hit a chord with you, why not consider joining our ADAPT program with its’ built in support community of Accompanying Partners from around the world.  Click here for more details.