Many people moving abroad, especially for the first time, find the experience stressful. While some of this stress is unavoidable, changing the way you think about things – psychological flexibility – is key to making your move abroad a more fun and rewarding experience.
Psychological flexibility is the ability to respond in the most appropriate way to a given set of circumstances. It enables you to act in the way most likely to achieve what you want, using all the resources at your disposal. This may mean doing something you would not normally do because it better fits the circumstances than your usual habit. Giving up on fixed ideas helps us to gain flexibility.
Navigating obstacles
A simple parallel might be driving to work. You may have a normal route that gets you there and which you know well. But one morning you hear a traffic report that tells you your normal route is blocked due to a traffic accident. Do you then follow the same route? You could choose to do that, but you would likely end up being very late. Taking a route you know to be longer but not blocked, checking a map for an alternative or asking a friend so suggest a different route is likely to work out better.
Our ability to think flexibly is a powerful tool to help us get what we want. Sometimes our inflexible thinking is not obvious to us. As a coach, my job is often to ask clients questions that make them re-examine their own though patterns and come up with new routes that serve them better.
Moving abroad, you may well find a lot of ‘normal routes’ blocked. Different social customs, language, legal issues and a number of other factors can make things you expected to be simple much more difficult in your new life. Expecting your usual approach to work and finding that it doesn’t can be stressful and frustrating. This is where coaching can help you, by identifying your own inflexible thinking and helping you to think around problems in novel ways.
Our flexible brains
The good news is that this new flexibility also helps in other areas. Being more open to new ideas and ways of living in a new country can pay dividends in other areas as you become more able to respond flexibly to life. Our brains are not static, but rather adaptable and programmable through experience. And the more new experiences, the greater our opportunity to develop flexible thinking.
The BBC and Open University have produced a fun short video about flexible thinking here
