My Blog

In this final post in my series on international transitions I share my personal take on what to do with an experience that reshaped you when there's no job waiting to help you make sense of it. The Hardest Adjustment Wasn’t What I Expected Of all the adjustments we made when we returned to the US, the hardest one for me was the restaurants. This was not completely unexpected. On a visit to New York City a year or so before we moved back, I snapped at a waitress when she came

My employer got every piece of paperwork right when I moved abroad, but none of it touched what actually made the transition hard.

An org chart can show you reporting lines. It cannot show you where history, trust, and unwritten knowledge live. Building relationships beyond your reporting line can help you understand an organization beyond your own role.

One of the biggest surprises of working internationally was discovering how many assumptions I carried about communication. This post explores what happens when familiar signals like feedback, silence, directness, and tone mean something different in a new cultural context.

When we move into international roles, we often assume credibility will come from expertise, decisiveness, or quick execution. What happens when those assumptions don't translate to our new environment?

Stepping into an international role often means letting go of something we don’t always recognize: our identity as the expert. In this post, I reflect on what it takes to become a learner again, and why that shift is central to navigating cross-cultural transitions.