© Helen Watts 2023 |
Returning “home” from living overseas presents you with unprecedented opportunities for evaluating your life and moving forward in ways you hadn’t foreseen or imagined.
Whether you’ve been away for a few weeks or several years, experiences of different cultures touch you deeply. You can come back to your passport country and continue as you were, perhaps wondering several years down the line what it was all about. Or you can seek the integration of those experiences into your ongoing life: you can reshape your future as a changed person, allowing the impact of your experience to affect everything you do.
The transition time you face – starting with the decision to leave your location and lasting well after arriving in your new home – is a key time for asking questions and taking hold of the opportunities that arise.
I offer:
Debriefs for individuals or couples – an individually tailored session for you to process what you have been through and experienced whilst you have been abroad, looking at the challenges and stresses of being there as well as the highlights and what you are taking away from your time. See more about debriefing here.
“Re-potting for growth” is a package of six coaching sessions. This is for you if you have recently moved back “home” after living overseas. I help you to assimilate your learning from your time away – working out what you would like to take with you and which parts of you need to be left behind. After that, we put things in place to cope with the chaos presented by your repatriation. Then as roots start to form in your new location, we move towards your dreams for the next stage, and see what resources you have to take you on to a place of thriving.
Debriefs or coaching can happen face-to-face here in Oxford or over Skype, depending on where you are located.
Online course: From Apprehensive to Quietly Confident – preparing to go home. This is a course that you can dip into at your leisure, containing videos, worksheets and information. It will help you finish well in your current location as well as getting you ready for going home.
I offer:
Debriefs for your expat staff and / or their spouses when they return from an overseas assignment, no matter how relatively easy or challenging the assignment has been. See more about the benefits of debriefing here.
Coaching for your returnees who could do with further ongoing support to help them readjust to being back in their “home” country. This can sometimes be a big issue, both for staff and especially other family members coming back. Investing in your staff during their repatriation can lead to more engaged workers and less fall-out from their time away.
Seminars on transition for groups of returning staff to help them as individuals and as a group to work through their experiences. Teams grow stronger as a result of shared experiences in living overseas and in coming “home” – whether or not they were in the same country and involved with the same project. Other seminars I have done include stress management pre-assignment, and re-entry.
Online course: From Apprehensive to Quietly Confident – preparing to go home. This is a course that your staff can dip into at their leisure, containing videos, worksheets and information. It will help them finish well in their current location as well as getting them ready for going back to their home country. See more information here.
Would you like to be supporting your returning mission partners better, but don’t quite know how to do it? I have a list of recommendations for you to help guide you through the process. Click below: