CAREER
The UK: The place to find your purpose and passion
Living an expat life can be a wonderful adventure but can sometimes also feel very challenging.
Moving to a new country can mean saying goodbye to your personal and professional support network. If you’re single, you may worry about feeling lonely. If you have a family, you may be concerned about how they will settle into this new life and you may be nervous about making new friends. Stress and pressure can affect your mental health, you might experi- ence unhappiness or even question if you should be going home for good.
All these feelings can provide the perfect opportunity for you to really think about what you want, your life purpose and how you can achieve it.
It’s your life and you can choose what to do with it
If you’re feeling like there must be more to life, at a subcon- scious level you might be running and living your life based on what you were brought up to believe. As a child, you inter- nalised a set of rules – what you can, can’t and should do – and it may be that these rules are behind many of the career decisions that you’re still making.
If you were brought up to believe that your value lay in per- forming well at school, university and beyond then it’s not un- common to feel unhappy as an older adult, when you’ve achieved your goals but still feel empty and unfulfilled. This could be because you are no longer fulfilled by your work life.
What’s your purpose? Finding your purpose is often the intersection of a number of factors. If you’re no longer feeling motivated by work, it’s use- ful to reflect on this. When you think about the work you do right now, how many of these can you tick off?
30 FOCUS The Magazine May/June 2019
► “I love it” ► “The world needs it” ► “I am paid for it” ► “I am great at it”
If you don’t have as many ticks as you were hoping, it’s time for you to have a think about how you can get your work life back on track.
It’s time to make new rules
There are tools and techniques which will help you break through and discover what you really want and what’s right for you. This can feel challenging, but scary is good; it shows you’re stepping out of your conditioning and doing what’s right for you. Fear holds you back. But it’s just the limbic part of your brain, the amygdala, keeping you in your comfort zone to keep you safe. Living an expat life opens all sorts of opportunities to other ways of living. Which life will you end up living? It’s up to you.
Here are a couple of ways you can start thinking about what you want now:
Be your own coach Chopping and changing jobs, and frequently moving countries or cities is great if each change gets you closer to your goal and helps you live your purpose. However, it may be that all this change is signalling that it’s time for you to spend some time working on yourself.
Help can be useful when it comes to mapping out your life and purpose, especially if you’ve been supressing emotions for many years, and there are many resources available to help you be your own coach. For example, to get started, you could think
www.focus-info.org
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