Whether it's your first time or your tenth, moving abroad can be challenging. What can help us get through those tough times? For October 2019, FIGT focuses on the theme of "Dealing with difficult times / resilience."

Moving abroad can be daunting, challenging, enriching, and intimidating at the same time. This is true not only for first-timers but also applies for seasoned expats who have lived through the good and the bad before.

There is ample evidence that difficult times can hit us all regardless of how often we have moved abroad. Previous expatriation experience might help in coping with difficult times only in so far as we learned to expect some rough patches (Lessle, 2019).

While some researchers emphasize that moving abroad is a main stressor itself, difficult times can be triggered in various domains (McNulty et al., 2019). Our own mixed feelings about the move, health or family issues, organizational misunderstandings as well as environmental, cultural, or safety problems--any of these can trigger a crisis and test our limits.

This month’s topic for FIGT’s content examines the difficult times in global mobility and how to develop resilience in order to master the challenges.

To access the content: Please join us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Video content will be available for the month and then archived to the members only section of this website.

References

• Lessle, A.D. (2019). The cognitive, affective, and behavioral adjustment of expatriate Spouses. A case study. (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database.
• McNulty, Yvonne, Lauring, Jakob, Jonasson, Charlotte and Selmer, Jan, (2019), Highway to Hell? Managing expatriates in crisis, Journal of Global Mobility, 7, Issue 2, p. 157-180.

(Items with * require FIGT member log-in.)

From this month's social media

• Difficult Times and Resilience: From the Archives
• Interview videos*

• • Mindfulness 101 (Jodi Harris)

  • Emotional Resilience as a Cornerstone of Wellbeing (Linda Janssen)

  • How to Use Self-Compassion to Create a Sense of Home Inside Yourself (Dr Melissa Parks)

  • Managing a Health Condition Abroad (Carolyn Parse Rizzo)

  • What to Do and Helpful Steps to Take if Your Relationship Breaks Down (Katia Vlachos and Lucy Greenwood)

  • Supporting Global Teens: Insights from Two Practitioners (Dr Anisha Abraham and Kate Berger)

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