Career By Choice's Expat Professional & Business Success Tips

Expat Expert Robin Pascoe Releases New Online Lecture Series on Successful Living Abroad

Author Robin Pascoe, who created ExpatExpert.com in 1998 to support globally, mobile families, recently posted a new online video lecture series (free) which addresses many of the major challenges of adjusting to life abroad which she writes about in her books in support of the mobile, expat family.

While the lecture is offered in bite-sized segments of three-to-five minutes, the entire program runs one hour and is based on her lecture “Successful Living Abroad” which she has delivered to expat communities around the world.

Topics covered include the subject of her four books for the expat spouse and family:

• Loss of Identity
• Loss of a traditional career
• Raising global nomads and parenting abroad
• Family cultural shock
• Moveable Marriages
• Repatriation

Whether you realize it or not, each one of these issues is important to your professional life. If someone is struggling with parenting or making the move to a new country, it will to some degree affect their career. So part of nurturing your professional life is making sure that you have the resources and support to address all the other unique challenges faced while living abroad. 

Robin has kindly given of her time to answer a few questions about some of the issues brought up in her video series: 

• Robin, in one of your lectures you recommend redefining what a career means. Can you give us some examples for those struggling to do just that? 

Dealing with Job Search Stress: Getting to the Source of the Problem

The job search is stressful. There is no way to avoid that. 

But if we want to stay in top form for interviews, put our best foot forward when networking, and generally avoid putting others off with a sour or cranky temperment that often comes with being stressed, then we need to manage the stress inherent in the process of looking for a job. 

There is a lot of wisdom that is commonly shared about dealing with stress - exercise, meditate, get sleep, eat healthy and well, keep focused on the positive, take breaks regularly.....and the list goes on. 

I would like to recommend getting bit more specific and actually address the source of the problem.   

You see, stress is just a symptom - a reaction to something. So by pinpointing the exact activities part of conducting a job search that cause the reaction called "stress", you can more strategically and effectively manage or even eliminate it. 

The strategies listed above can be effective at managing stress, but they are simple putting bandaids on the problem.  By eliminating the source of the stress you are in a position to reduce it or even eliminate it entirely. 

I invite you to do this exercise to discover how you can identify and reduce or eliminate the source of your stress. 

Are Your New Year's Resolutions Supporting or Preventing You from a Successful Life Abroad?

I chose to wait to post this blog post until February. The reason?  Many people make at least one New Year's resolution. Research shows that over 45% of people who make New Year's reoslutions break them by the end of the first month.

Why is this important to point out? 

There are actually many reasons, but three big reasons are:

1) Making and honoring commitments to yourself is a good habit to be developed. This habit helps you grow personally and professionally and is essential to helping you reach your goals.

2) The way that many people make New Year's resolutions tends to set themselves up to fail - fail to honor their commitment. (More on that in a moment.) Those that make them and then shortly afterwards break them are sending a message to themselves that they can't keep commitments.  If that becomes a belief, then that belief can become a self fulfilling prophecy. They may stop making commitments in order to avoid feeling disappointed in themselves.  Or they make commitments and then not keep them because deep down they believe they are not able.

3) If you want to overcome the challenges necessary to become an expat, or the challenges expats face when trying to make changes in their career or business, you must make and honor commitments to yourself. Learning and intentions are valuable, but without action your desired changes will not materialize.

In the interest in supporting you in overcoming challenges faced by most expatriates, I would like to ask you to investigate how you make New Year commitments to yourself. Hopefully my recommendations will help you build the muscle of making the right commitments and honoring them - and hence realize your professional goals while living abroad.

Using Linkedin as a Business Intelligence and Learning Tool

I invite you to visit a recent post on my lifestream at posterous to see a great video from the LinkedIn European Business Awards website. It features Reid Hoffman, Executive Chairman and co-founder of Linkedin. 

Linkedin is one of the most powerful professional networks which I recommend all professionals and business owners join. Its over 50 million members - 50% of which are outside the U.S. - represent over 200 countries and territories and over 200 industries. More than 60% of members are decision makers, so the connections you make here are with people who can really impact change. (Future posts will explore using Linkedin in more detail.)

In this video Reid discusses how Linkedin is an excellent tool for securing business intelligence that extends what you are able to do, problems you can solve and opportunities throughout the course of your career. He also underscores the importance of professionals seeing themselves as the CEO of their own businesses when it comes to managing their career. I love that he focuses on the fact that continuous learning as key to being extremely competitive in the global marketplace. Are you a member of Linkedin? If so, are you using it to expand your business intelligence and support ongoing learning to keep you at the top of your game?

EXPAT SUCCESS TIP: Keeping competitive means keeping on tope of what is going on in the marketplace and continuous learning. If you are not yet a member of Linkedin, join. If you are identify at least one person in your network on Linkedin who could help you learn more about what you need to know to drive your professional or business success.