You moved abroad. You experience all these various different (weird?) things. People tell you to adapt to the new culture. You feel uncomfortable, not even sure if you are you anymore. Everyone else around you seems to know better what you should do, how you should adapt, how quickly you should do it (surely if […]
Recently I started wondering whether there are some common personality traits that would define an expat or would allow us to predict the possibility of different people going abroad. I don’t know the definite answer to this nor I have done any quantitative research about it, but I have been observing myself and my fellow expats […]
So you’ve now had the days when you loved the new city or country you moved in to. You’ve also been through some tough times where you just wanted to go home and never come back to this weird and intimidating place. After the whole spectrum of (completely normal!) emotions that you’ve experienced there should […]
So you’ve spent a couple of weeks, maybe even months enjoying yourself and saying all the good things about your new home. There’s a high chance you will go back to those feelings. Really! Before that happens though you might need to face the downside of moving abroad: Da Culture Shock.
No, no, it’s not going to be a post about marriage, don’t worry. Many smart books describe how the phases of the culture shock run, that there are four (you can find them under various names, but the idea behind them is the same): Honeymoon stage, Frustration stage, Adjustment stage and Acceptance stage.
On this sunny (at least in London :)) Sunday afternoon I’d like to share some interesting reads with you. As usual, you will find something interesting about Business, Psychology and Expat life. Let’s start with business. Continuing on the Cultural Map series , I definitely encourage you to read some more of Erin Meyer’s blog […]
Culture shock is more than just differences between where you’re from and where you arrived. It has its origins in our childhood environment, in the social groups we’ve been surrounded by and a part of, in our everyday life that we have been leading until the moment of moving abroad.
I hope you enjoyed the series of posts about one of the approaches to identifying dimensions of cultures, created by Erin Meyer. This post is supposed to provide a brief summary of the dimensions so that you have them in one place as well as encourage you to explore the dimensions in more detail.
Some further reads on culture, intercultural business and expat life today 🙂 The first article is an introduction to some further studies that have been made around how cultures and their values still have a great influence on individuals even in this globalised world. How we use colours, how we think about a society […]
Going abroad is a great opportunity to learn a foreign language, try working in a new environment, meet new people, grow as a person in general. It seems like a perfect thing for extroverts – lots of new things, lots of new people, lots of uncertainty, and lots of energy that you need to put […]