 So, I'm going to attempt to work the clicker and my notes at the same time. I can't promise you it will go well, but I will do my best. So, a little bit about me. So, I was born and raised in Auckland. I lived overseas the first time when I was four. My father is from Christia, so we went back for three months when I was four. I don't remember much of that. We went back again when I was eight, and I had to go to school, so I remember that a lot more. The thing I remember most is that in the summer, school finished at noon, so I got to spend all of the afternoon on the beach, which I thought was a much better system. I then went on my first OE and lived in Scotland for two years in 1998. And then in 2005, my then-boyfriend, now husband, and I left New Zealand to go off adventuring. And we went to the Netherlands because my husband has Dutch parents, so he had a Dutch passport, and we thought that would be a great place to go. We then moved to the UK and then the US, that should say, and came back in 2017. So I have a lot of experience personally of moving around and living and working in different places. And then in my professional life, I'm a talent development manager and leadership development specialist, so we used a lot of mobility as a development tool. So we moved a lot of people to different locations to gain work experience, particularly with leadership development. We're developing leaders of global organisations. We want them to have experience in different markets. So I've also kind of moved people around for professional reasons. Since I've come back, I've started a blog called How to Have a Happy Homecoming, which is actually about repatriation and the experience of coming back to live in New Zealand. And I interviewed a bunch of people from all over the world who've come back to live in New Zealand. So, and I'm married with one cat. So what I'm going to do tonight is talk you through at quite a high level the experience of being a GLOMAD. And to start off, as all good talks do with a definition, what is a GLOMAD? Well, it's a made up word that I made up to try and kind of describe what I mean. So the first part is global. So this is to do with being a citizen of the world or having a kind of global outlook. So it's about how do you kind of see yourself? You know, are you just, you know, from Auckland? Is that your main identity? Are you a New Zealander? Or do you see yourself as somebody who's kind of a citizen of the world and you have an international orientation? One of the defining characteristics, though, if you're going to be a GLOMAD, is that you have to also be really good at becoming a local very quickly. You have to be able to grow where you are planted. You can't just go and live in other places and kind of be a hostage until you get to leave. And then there's the nomadic part. GLOMADs move around. And so in that sense, they're quite different to immigrants who move to one place and stay there forever. So how do you become a GLOMAD? The common paths. One that's becoming even more common is the self-initiated. A lot of New Zealanders kind of go off and do this. They get their OE, their working holiday visa. They go there two years somewhere. They're not quite ready to come back. So they move somewhere else, then they move somewhere else, then they move somewhere else. It can be quite accidental. Usually because they're a bit bored and they want to have a sense of adventure or they're not quite ready to settle down and get a proper job, all these kinds of things. Company transfers are also very common. As I said, if you have aspirations towards leadership, particularly if you're working for a multinational firm, you will probably get the opportunity to make a move overseas. If that's kind of what you're interested in, you need to be aware that this is increasingly becoming a requirement for multinational firms. And then there's the trailing spouse. So often if your partner is moved for their career, you will go with them to support them and you are kind of considered their appendage. But you go through exactly the same experience that they go through. But your happiness in lots of ways is actually more important. So the number one cause of assignment failure, someone who's been sent to another country by their company, is that the spouse is unhappy. So when the employee has to choose between their partner or their job, they'll usually choose their partner, not always, usually. So they're a very, very important part of this process if you are travelling as a couple or as a family. So what I'm going to do tonight is I'm going to talk you through what I call the glomadic lifestyle cycle, which some of you will recognise as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the reason I use this is that a few years ago when I had just moved to the US, a friend that I'd made in the Netherlands got in touch with me and she had moved for the first time ever to another country. She was about 41 at the time and her partner had got a job in Indonesia in Jakarta. So she had gone, thinking it would be a great luck and three months in she sent me this email saying, you have to help me, I don't know what I'm doing, I can't cope, how do you do it? And she's got a similar background to me, she was in leadership development and kind of organisational development and I thought, how can I explain it to her in a way that will make sense and also kind of give her some structure with which to understand this experience. So this was kind of doing the rounds on Facebook and I thought, actually that's perfect, that's exactly what it's like. When you move to a new place, you start at the bottom of the pyramid again and you have to work yourself back up it. So this process that I'm going to walk you through tonight, that's something that you will go through regardless of how you got there. So it doesn't matter if you took yourself, it doesn't matter if the company transferred you, it doesn't matter if you're the trailing spouse. The process of getting settled in a new place, of establishing yourself in a new place, that's going to more or less follow this. I'm going to talk about how you can increase your globality quotient. Another made up term, don't look for it in your OB textbook, it won't be there. But it is a set of skills and an ability, a set of abilities that you can learn and you can develop. So the more practice you get, the better you become at it. Members of the same family may experience the process in different ways and of course you do need Wi-Fi to do anything these days. So I'm just going to give you some examples from my own experience. Obviously this is a massive topic but what we will have at the end is about 20 minutes of Q&A so if you've got something specific that you want me to go back to, write it down and ask me at the end. So the first thing that you're probably thinking is, well, if I'm going to go and live in another country I'm going to need a job. And jobs are interesting because they're related to the safety element, they're related to security and for a lot of people they're also related to self-esteem. Practically, in order to work somewhere in another country you need the legal right to work there. So that means that you need to have some sort of work visa. Now, whether or not if you take yourself you will be responsible for making sure that you're legally entitled to work somewhere. So you need to do your research and find out what kind of visa you need. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about this when I give you some kind of advice on practicalities. If you have a residence visa you may be entitled to live somewhere and you may be entitled to work there. And that's particularly important point for some of the trailing spouses. So, for example, when my husband and I moved to the US he was on an inter-company transfer executive visa in L1, which meant I was on an L2 which gave me the right to apply for a work permit so that I could then apply for jobs. If he'd been at a different level he would have been employed given an HB visa which meant I would have got an HB2 visa which would have meant I couldn't work. So, the technical aspects of visas are really important and you need to do your research if you're going to live and work somewhere. If a company employs you and they sponsor you for a visa that also means that your right to live in that country is tied to that job. So if you leave the job you may have to leave the country. So, lots of kind of technical things to do with visas. The main takeaway from this is really, really do your research. So, if you are being moved by your own company you want to find out what visa you're on and what that means for any partner you might be taking with you. If you are applying for a job overseas and you're having to sort out your own visas sometimes it's actually worth employing a consultant to actually help you with this. And then there are the cultural norms around jobs. So, time frames. I remember a few years ago there was a number of articles in the Herald from young people who'd gone to London and they were really disappointed by how long it took them to get a job. It was taking them three months to get a job, six months to get a job and they thought this was outrageous. But the reason it takes you six months to get a job in the UK is that if you're a professional your notice period is three months. So do the maths. So I resigned from my job I give a three month notice my company then decides okay we need to advertise to find someone new so it takes them a couple of weeks to put the job out there applications come in they do the long listing they do the short listing maybe a month, six weeks go by then they're ready to do some interviews they do the first round of interviews they do the second round of interviews and then somewhere maybe two months after I've resigned they make an offer this person considers the offer they accept the offer and then they resign and they have to work out a three month notice period so we very easily get to six months now of course if you are looking for quick employment you might consider doing some temporary work but if you're like no I'm going and I'm going to get the perfect job do some research find out what's actually going on in the field that you're going into don't assume it's going to be the same as New Zealand because it probably won't be Tax and other deductions are totally different and if you move around a lot if you're a true glomad and you're moving every three or four years you have this fabulous thing called a trailing tax liability which follows you for many years to come and it means that every year you may have to do two or three tax returns so we currently we've just moved back from the US we do a UK tax return we do a US tax return and we do a New Zealand one and I say we I mean EY does it but we have to provide the paperwork and even more fun New Zealand's tax year runs from when to when 1st of April to 31st of March the UK is 6th of April to 5th of April and the US is the 1st of January to the 31st of December so lots of fun so jobs I would say talk to your employer if you work for a multinational firm find out what their policy is on providing overseas opportunity what kind of relocation packages they offer and really ask them some you know, deep questions on the visas you can get in touch with local recruiters in any other country and kind of say this is what I'm thinking of doing and then of course there are the expat forums and I'm going to talk about those a bit more coming up finding somewhere to live is also probably pretty high on your priority list it may be the first thing that you want to do but in lots of countries until you've got a job you're not going to be able to get a flat so looking into how you're going to do this I would suggest if you've got a place in mind you find a Kiwi's Inn group so there's lots of them Kiwis in Switzerland Kiwis in Barcelona Kiwis everywhere and start asking questions about you want to double check things like minimum lease and notice periods again you know, in countries like the Netherlands and the UK you normally have a fixed term lease and if you break the lease you are still liable to pay the rent until the end of the lease and even if you give notice it's probably going to be something that you have to give them three months notice on so even with the leases set to end on a particular day you still have to say three months ahead of time whether you want it to end on a particular day so you know the New Zealand kind of rental market is very very different it's quite fluid and then buying houses overseas is even more complicated so I'm not going to go into it if you want to find out what it's like to buy and sell a house in different countries go to one of these Kiwis Inn forums and start asking questions so just to give you some examples of what might be different so in the Netherlands if you get a flat and unfurnished flat it literally means there is nothing in there when people move they take their light fittings they take their floorboards they take their kitchen they take the curtains so so if you're only going for a short period I'd suggest you find a furnished flat pay a bit more it's definitely worth it a one-year lease is standard and be aware you are most likely going to be signing a contract in a foreign language so you want to find out what you're actually doing so multi-lingual lawyers are your friend in the UK furnished flats are more common again the one-year lease and the minimum notice clauses are strictly enforced so if you say you're going to leave earlier you just have to pay and the UK buying and selling process is very complicated so don't necessarily assume that you're going to move somewhere by a place, flip it when you want to leave and it's all going to go easily so do a bit of research in America basically you can do whatever you want you just have to pay for it so if you have a one-year lease it'll be a certain amount per month if you want a six-month lease three months, a little bit more month by month it'll be more expensive you want to check your lease agreements to see what's included because some will include your utilities and some won't include your utilities so you need to kind of read the fine print Shopping, this is not rude this is Dutch and lemonade is just fizzy lemonade so one of the things that I kind of want to convey tonight is how the little things are the things that can be the most challenging so going to the supermarket and you might sort of think well if it's a foreign language I kind of get that you know I'm not going to be able to understand what it says but even in English you may find that there's different words for things the brands are certainly different at the moment you probably go to the supermarket, you go to the shop you have your preferred brands and you know what they say about you so you know what you want to buy so that it reflects the kind of individual that you are and the values that you have and then you turn up in this foreign country and those brands aren't there and all of a sudden you're having this identity crisis because you don't know what to buy so you have to kind of start again allow at least three times as long to do your shopping and so again in a foreign country a foreign language you think well that makes sense so you have to learn your survival language you have to learn what are the kind of basic things that I need to understand if you're buying still water or fizzy water you want to know what the difference is but even in an English speaking country you might be reading the labels mostly than you do here so when I moved to the states I would go to the Whole Foods shop because I knew that was healthy and you know the one thing I knew about America is that you can't trust the food so I thought well I'll go to Whole Foods because at least then I'll know it's good food and I would pick things up like I would pick up a block of cheese and it would say no added hormones and I think that's a bit weird does that mean that if it doesn't say no added hormones I should assume it has added hormones so I'd put it back and then I'd look again at the cheese and then I'd try and find one that wasn't American and I would buy that I put a lot of Irish cheese I trust the Irish so you know you've got to allow time to get used to things at this very very granular level so and to be and have flummoxed and overwhelmed and go with a shopping list and come home with three things the other things that can happen quite often is that things are sold in a different shop to the one that you might expect so you don't know where to buy certain things and if you don't have any friends there if you don't know anybody to ask you spend a lot of time either trying to find things online or wandering the streets kind of wandering into shops and sort of hoping that you stumble across things I'm not going to spend a lot of time on safety other than to say that it's really common to feel anxious and insecure because everything is new and actually the people that I've interviewed for my blog actually cite feeling safe as the best thing about coming back to New Zealand so some of that's to do with I think the geographical isolation but a lot of it's just psychological safety it's just being that things are familiar so if you kind of know what are the dodgy areas you can avoid them you move to a new city you don't know what the dodgy areas are you'll be blissfully unaware as you wander through them and it's not until a local friend says I can't believe you went there that you realised that you were actually taking your life into your hands ignorance can be bliss and you will adapt so we lived we were in London on 7-7 we were meant to go to Cambridge that day we missed the train but you know you kind of adapt you're like oh well people are blowing up tubes you just get on with your life we were in Ealing during the Ealing the London riots I was actually standing at my window watching groups of young men run up and down the street and on the TV there were cars being burnt I was in my pyjamas I was looking at the neighbour's car thinking I wonder if someone's going to burn that car I should probably go and get dressed what will I do with the cat you know these are the kinds of things now my parents are watching it freaking out thinking oh my god you're an imminent danger and I'm thinking well actually my biggest concern was should I put my clothes on and what am I going to do with the cat you just adapt so don't worry whatever you're seeing on the news about what's going on in other parts of the world if you live there this becomes your normal and you just cope you'll be fine belonging now I'm going to spend a bit more time on this because this is actually the thing that will make or break your experience of being a glomad and this is to do with a sense of belonging to a place being part of a community and it's a very basic level having friends now most of us haven't had or hadn't had to make a new friend as an adult you know we went to school with people we went to university with people people were sort of wonderfully provided for us in close proximity with shared interests and it was a relatively simple thing to kind of find someone that you liked and you know form a friendship and do things together when you turn up in a new place and you don't know anybody your phone never rings you know you never get an invitation to do something so you actually have to go out and literally meet dozens and dozens of people proactively to try and make new friends and that can be really daunting for people so a lot of people don't do it and we see the impact of that in the expat community we have quite high levels of some mental health issues around depression and anxiety we have high levels of loneliness so it's really really critical if you're going to go and embark on this kind of lifestyle that you actually get good at putting yourself out there and proactively meeting friends I'm just going to walk you through how I met some of my friends in the 12 years that I was overseas so you see some ideas about how you might do this so if we start up the top here that's me on the left the girl in the middle is Viviana she's from Mexico and this is Jocelyn, she's from New York and I met them in Rotterdam and the way I did it was I actually met them online so I was working in the Hague for an international organization that supported the international community lots and lots of expat groups in the Hague, none that I knew of in Rotterdam so I said, is there any group that you know of and they said, well there's this group called Rotterdam Glam you could try them they've got an online forum and this is 2005 so this is before Facebook this is before meetups so I went online and I found the forum and I wrote in hello, I've just moved to Rotterdam would anyone like to meet for a coffee and Viviana and Jocelyn replied and so did a girl called Mary so we all went out for a coffee and Mary was recalled to her home office a couple of weeks later but the three of us became best friends for probably the first two years that I was in Rotterdam and we did everything together and what was really interesting is that when we got talking we found out that we'd all moved there within a week of each other so what had happened is that we'd all got to that same stage of the cycle where we'd got settled in we'd found somewhere to live found jobs we'd figured out how to do the shopping and then we were ready to make some friends we were ready to do that next step of starting to build a community and that actually rang true for all the friends that I met so over the five and a half years that I was there the ones that I met in that first year had all arrived in Rotterdam within a week or two of each other so we all kind of went through that process together so here's a question for you if I was to say to a bunch of you let's go out for dinner would you assume we would meet? Seven? Seven, six? OK, one of the fun things about living abroad and having international friends is that you realise dinner is a cultural concept so this is a group of friends in the Netherlands and when you say to them let's go for dinner what time should we go the Dutch will go six o'clock so when dinner is the Dutch have lunch at 12 and dinner at six the Argentinians say well, not before 10 because oh my god who would eat before 10 the Italians are very clear it's eight o'clock you have dinner at eight o'clock and you have a spritz before you eat and then you have your dinner and then you have a digestive the Brits are kind of like well, eight or nine I'll just fit in with anybody and the Canadians are kind of the same or they'd probably go for seven so you meet these fabulous people and then you suddenly realise that all your assumptions about what's normal is actually not true, they're just assumptions so this is our leaving party so we've got Dutch Mexican, Italian Australian and Canadian this lovely lady in the middle she's actually Kiwi but I met her in Rotterdam but this is her wedding in Denmark so the way that I met her was that she developed a website for Rotterdam and when she was moving to Denmark she got in touch with the international organisation I was working with to ask if we wanted to take it over and then we worked out that actually we lived five minutes apart from each other in Rotterdam, we could have been best friends but we are good friends now she now lives back in New Zealand having gone through various countries and I went the other way so when we moved to London the only person I knew was this girl, her name's Catherine and I knew her because she worked with me in Rotterdam and she'd come over she's English but she'd come over to live with a Dutch boyfriend and the relationship had ended so she'd gone back to England but she wanted to keep her job so I said well our boss said you can work remotely if you come over every month or so so she would come over and she would stay with me so we became friends and when I moved to London she was the only person that I knew so when we were trying to figure out where we were going to live she was the person I was emailing going what are the good areas to live in London Adam I met him and his wife through a friend in London when they came to flatsit for us we were going overseas I put a little note on a message board saying does anyone know someone who'd want to flatsit Adam's Australian but that's actually us in Seattle because he travels about 25 days a month so when he was passing through Seattle we would catch up for a coffee so you're starting to see how you meet these people through all sorts of different cycles and then you kind of they become part of your friendship world and they're very international this is Katie I met her in Seattle at an internations event in the toilets and she's actually seriously big as can't be choosers you will befriend anyone she's one of my favourite people in the world originally from New York but she'd been living in the north of England for 25 years and her and her husband had decided as their kind of last hurrah they were going to come to America and have this adventure that's actually my cousin in New York who now lives back in Auckland and this is Joe who's a New Zealander that we met in Seattle and he now lives back in Raumati and we met him at a Seattle Church Sister City Association we're not from Christchurch but they weren't that big and we needed friends so off we went so when you when you move to a new place if you move somewhere like London the tendency will be to stick to your own there are hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders and you could probably spend decades and never actually meet anyone other than a New Zealander I would really encourage you not to do that if you're going overseas to have an overseas experience but there are times in the process where you will just be feeling like you need a bit of familiarity and someone that you don't have to translate for so that can be quite handy to have a few kiwi friends the other thing that you will get used to is that you just leave a piece of your heart everywhere that you go whenever you move you make these friendships they're often quite deep friendships because you've gone through some challenging times together and then you leave them and start again so their life goes on you're not really a part of it you're now making new friends investing in the relationships that you have now so you kind of get used to that as you move around you leave a little bit of yourself everywhere you go the other thing that kind of happens is that you get really good at feeling at home everywhere you know growing where you're planned to doing this quite quickly but you also feel at home nowhere because you're kind of always temporary you're always transient and often the people that you befriend and the relationships that you have are with people who are very very similar to you so it can be a kind of strange existence in that sense and then something I'm going to talk about in a little bit is that this kind of lifestyle can also put an enormous strain on relationships so if any of you are thinking of kind of heading off with a new partner wait till I've done my bit on relationships and then self-esteem so have a think what makes you feel good about yourself right now like how do you know that you're a good person that you're a worthy person and how much of this is dependent on external things so how much of your sense of self do you get from where you went to university or where you went to school or your position in the community or who your family is so now imagine all of that stripped away you've turned up in this new place no-one's even heard of New Zealand let alone the university you went to let alone the school that you went to maybe you don't even have your job anymore maybe you're the trailing spouse and you've just gone along so you have none of that what do you where do you get your self-esteem from where do you get your sense of self-worth that's another really important set of skills and abilities that you need to develop if you're going to embark on this lifestyle you need to be able to figure out who you really are independently of all these external markers around you and for a lot of people it's a big chance for reinvention self-actualisation I'm not going to talk about this those who know this model know that when you self-actualise you become yourself and some people do become themselves they go overseas and they find that once they're stripped of all those external markers and all those influences that form to them they can actually be themselves other people lose themselves and they kind of become battered about by the wings of change to the point that they don't really know who they are but if you get to this point if you're like me you've probably just got to level four and then you're off to the new place so it doesn't matter because you're going to be back to figuring out where to live and what cheese to buy so why do it well I think the best metaphor that I like for this is to think of yourself like this little plant down here so when you start off you're kind of this little pot little plant in a pot and you fill the whole pot and then every time you move somewhere you go into a bigger pot and the pot's a bit big for you so you have to grow to fit it you have to put down some roots you have to expand you have to kind of grow and the more that you do it the more you kind of grow yourself as a person you learn more about yourself humbling and confidence building experience I've ever had in equal measure so humbling because you get stripped of all your external attributes so it's really your personality and character that will determine your experience so if you go out hunting for new friends and these people don't know anything about you they're not friends of friends they haven't been introduced your ability to make those new friends to meet these people from different cultures to kind of develop these sorts of relationships that comes down to you and when you work out that you can actually do that that's an enormous boost to your self-esteem constantly being put in the position of the novice helps you get really good at learning so then nothing becomes unmanageable over time the first time you have to do anything and you live as a glow mad you're always having to do things for the first time you learn how to do it so when you then get faced with a new challenge or a new dilemma you have some confidence that you're going to be able to figure it out because you figure everything us out up until that point every time you do something new and scary you add to what you're capable of self-esteem from the inside out so a lot of people get self-esteem from external markers so they get it from their job or what they achieve or what other people think of them but when you start to kind of do these things for yourselves and set those challenges for yourself that really builds it from the inside out and it doesn't matter if all that external stuff is then stripped away from you again you carry that with you you develop the skills of agility and resilience because when you move to a foreign place you can't control anything nothing works so when we first moved to the Netherlands we still had our kind of Kiwi mentality with us we thought anything could be solved with a quick phone call to somebody and you just explain the situation and she'd be right mate no, this is not how it happens in the Netherlands in the Netherlands you just have to fit in and follow the process and so after a while you work out that that's what you do when we moved to England things were done differently again and you know you kind of bash your head against it for a few months thinking wow I could just figure out you know kind of the right thing to say but no, that doesn't work and of course what you're carrying with you now is normal in the New Zealand way it's the Dutch way so now you think the Brits are weird because they're not like the Dutch who you used to think were weird because they weren't like the Kiwis resilience experience is what you get when you don't get what you want living this kind of lifestyle will put you through enormous challenges you know there will be times that you're thinking I don't know what I was thinking doing this but you get through it and you learn that you can cope interestingly these are two of the most sought after competencies in the business world today for exactly that reason in the business world we never know what's coming so we have to be agile, we have to be able to adapt and we need to be resilient lots and lots of setbacks so one of the reasons that we send young emerging leaders off to foreign markets to get this experience is to build these very skills because if we know that somebody has been moved from London to Jakarta or moved to China or moved to the Middle East and they've been able to work there they've been able to live there they've been able to be effective in their job then they're going to have some really valuable skills that mean that if they go into the kind of role that's really uncertain they're dealing with a lot of ambiguity they're going to be much better at that somebody who's never actually had to deal with that kind of ambiguity in their own life and you get to be you so this is a kind of interesting one so some people find this a real challenge but if you discover yourself in a foreign land with no no one has any expectations of you nobody knows who you are you get to figure out what you actually like and what you don't like and what you stand for so for some people it can be kind of a process of figuring that out for the first time if up until that point they've always kind of done what their parents expected of them or they've always kind of followed the crowd in terms of what their friends have done and so it can be quite a liberating sort of experience so the practicalities if you are between 18 and 35 and you want to have a taster I would suggest that you get a working holiday visa now there's about 30 countries I think it is in the world that New Zealanders can get a working holiday visa too so you don't have to just go to London you don't just have to go to Australia you can go to all sorts of interesting places, lots of countries in Europe the Netherlands, Germany and it's pretty straightforward always double check with the embassy because things can change and I would say, given what's happening in Europe and America at the moment like really triple check and just make sure that the old regulations you know that the regulations are not out of date if you're older than 35 then you're probably going to need to find either an internal company transfer and so let HR know that you're keen I know from my own experience as a talent manager that we were always at the strategic level wanting to move people around our different markets but if people didn't tell us that we couldn't look out for opportunities for them so if I would talk to people and they would say, I've got a real interest in being in the Asian market or something then I could point them in the right direction or have their name in mind if something came up but if you're just sitting there thinking, god I wish I could go and work overseas and you don't tell anybody it's very unlikely that they're going to come to you with that opportunity also have a look in your internal job boards if you work for a multinational company they'll probably post all the vacancies internally and kind of keep following up on that check out job boards in other countries where skill set most big companies will pay to relocate you sub-headhunters in other countries will even contact you for job opportunities abroad so keep your LinkedIn profile up to date if you are interested in working overseas you might even want to I don't know if you can do that indicate you're interested in jobs overseas or if you just need to interested in jobs and see what comes up one of the good things about New Zealanders is that we can have as many passports as we want so if you have a parent or a grandparent who has a passport for a different country you can probably get one of those and then that will take care of your visa issues as well so kind of draw through the family tree see what passports you can get in terms of housing customs, social networks that sort of thing I would read up on what to expect on some of the local forums so there's a website called expatica.com in Europe it covers a number of European countries and it has all sorts of information everything from jobs to housing there are all sorts of little articles like why did the Dutch do this why did the Germans behave like that give you little insights on some of the cultural nuances and often they will have kind of boards that you can post a question so if you've got a particular question you can usually get it answered my blog is mainly on repatriation but in the interviews you can read some of the stories of people who have gone overseas and I think the most interesting thing about those is how few of them actually none of them did what they thought they were going to do so they all went off thinking that their overseas experience was going to go one way and it went some very different directions so I think it's good to kind of have just a flavour of what might happen if you are thinking of heading off you can go on Google and just type in expat put in the country name and find other forums there's pretty much always an Australia New Zealand group everywhere you go in the world so you can kind of tap into them again as a source of information and when you first arrive they're good for social engagements and the Netherlands I don't think the ambassador had much to do because they're always having parties at their house and if you're one of the New Zealanders in Holland you always get invited so it's worth kind of connecting up with these New Zealand societies abroad Kia Network is anyone already a member of the Kia Network? Has anyone heard of the Kia Network? Okay so I'm going to tell them they'll be horrified the Kia Network is a global network which represents the kind of Kiwi diaspora and their focus is mainly on trade and creating opportunities for New Zealanders who want to do business abroad so if you were trying to get into the American market or the European market there'll be some representatives who would kind of help you do that they also hold lots of social events overseas they have some interesting speakers and then they publicise New Zealand events in your local area so when I was in Seattle it was from Kia that I would always know when brutes were in town playing and you know the revamped LMNOP you know all this kind of stuff so if you join these networks you can kind of get a sense of what's going on and connect in that way Internations anyone a member of Internations here? So this is another international organisation and they have an Auckland chapter and it will be mainly foreigners who live and work in New Zealand and I would go along for a couple of reasons one it's a really good place to practice hello will you be my friend and two it's a really good place to find out from people who live this kind of climatic lifestyle you know what it's like and you know you can even just ask them what was it like when you came to New Zealand what was different what was unusual to give you a sense of the kind of experiences that you might have when you go somewhere else okay relationships so normally when you're talking about careers you don't talk about relationships but if you're going to be aglomad and if you're going to either travel with a partner or you know have find people when you're over there you actually have to consider this so from a practical perspective look into the visa regulations as I said before some countries will have different variations on whether a spouse can work depending on the level of the visa that the person gets some countries will only allow one member of the couple to have a work visa so when I was in my job in London we were moving someone from America to our Istanbul office and her husband was coming with her or her partner was coming with her and he had sourced a job and we thought this was fabulous and then we found out that if they were married the Turkish Government would only give one of them a work visa so the race was on we wanted the visa for our person and then we found out that they weren't married which solved the visa problem but they couldn't live together so you know which brings me to my next point some countries will only allow you to bring import your partner with you if you are legally married if you are not legally married and that means married it doesn't mean de facto your New Zealand standing has no bearing in other countries you need to kind of weigh that up not all countries acknowledge same-sex marriage so if that's you and you're wanting to travel as a couple you might need to look into which countries are going to be safe for you to go into and then if you do have children you want to consider schooling options for children and who will pay for this now most most glow-mads most people that move around a lot every three or four years put their kids in international schools and that's for a couple of reasons one is the international schools generally have a curriculum the same curriculum in every country so it's easier for the children academically to kind of move from place to place the other reason is that they're usually all taught in English or French there's a French network as well or German but the language of instruction is the same so the kids don't have to kind of become proficient in every language of the country that you move to but of course these are fiercely expensive we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of that assignment if you've got a couple of kids so if you are moving yourself and you want to put your kids into the international schools then you need to think about negotiating that kind of into your package if you're accepting a job if the company is moving you then you want to make sure that's a part of your deal if you want to put your kids into the local school and some people really want to do this because they're like no we want to have the full immersion experience want the kids to learn the language and all the rest of it you need to do some research and find out if you're actually going to be possible because not all countries will allow a temporary resident and their kids to kind of go into the school and then if there's a language issue you need to think about how you're going to work around that as well so all solvable hundreds of thousands if not millions of people do this every year but they're just things to kind of consider and do your research on the deepest stuff so the divorce rate in the expat community is higher than in the general population not surprising considering the strains that your relationship can come under especially if it's just the two of you and you haven't gotten the other friends and then all of a sudden you have to be everything to each other and it's all a bit new and difficult and you take it out on each other so it's really really important if you're thinking about doing this and you have a significant other to be honest about your priorities and your values you will be tested and I can say from personal experience my husband and I did get married while we were overseas and we are still together so it can make you stronger as a couple but it could also kind of show up any cracks that you've got in the relationship so you need to be really clear on whether you have the same priorities and you want the same things out of life because if you're kind of going and you're dragging someone with you who doesn't really want to go that's probably not going to end very well so the most common cause of assignment failure is an unhappy spouse and of course that can have career implications so if you do choose the spouse over the job and you leave the assignment you have to think about what might that actually mean in terms of my future prospects so you know, kind of lots to think about increasing your globality quotient so you can actually develop some of these skills while you're here in New Zealand so practice making new friends managing loneliness is the hardest part about being a glomad we see higher levels of worker holism alcohol and drug use depression and anxiety in the expat community if you are thinking of doing this I would start trying to make some new friends now to kind of develop some of those skills and put yourself out of your comfort zone it's very now, see we don't have a problem when I went because there was no social media so I couldn't stay in touch with my friends online but what I hear now is that some people kind of are doing this and they're trying to maintain online relationships rather than making new ones and that's actually making them even more lonely and depressed for a couple of reasons one, they have no sense of belonging in the community where they live and the other is that they feel like they're on the outside looking into what their old friends are doing so they kind of feel betwixt in between and are not part of anything there's lots of ways that you can meet new people and internationally focus people in New Zealand there's lots of meet-up groups now there's internations you know, there are care events so you can start to kind of get a little bit involved in this kind of international climatic community while you're here and get a sense of what it's like and you know whether you'd like to be a part of it the other thing you need to do because if you move overseas and you're setting up and you haven't got any friends you have a lot of time on your hands so you can need to cultivate the ability to be alone so if you had a whole week or a whole month to yourself and you knew that the phone wasn't going to ring no-one was going to invite you anywhere there was going to be nothing kind of no family events to go to there was kind of nothing you had nothing to do how would you spend your time and what would you do so I think one thing that's really important if you're thinking about embarking on this kind of life is to think about some location independent hobbies and interests starting a mindfulness practice is useful because it helps you manage the kind of rollercoaster of emotions and that's something that you can do now yeah so one thing about this is kind of interesting is that she was a mother Aveline her name was so this was three years ago and I said to her what makes you feel like you what makes you feel like you're yourself because she was totally a loss and I said for me it's yoga so I can go anywhere in the world I can walk into a yoga studio get on my mat and I feel like I'm home and she was like oh it's swimming swimming's how I feel she started swimming and she started working out and all the rest of it and she discovered that in Jakarta this was actually quite difficult to do because you know she's female and the norms are very different and all the rest of it so she kind of went through this process and she kept it up and this year she co-opened a female only gym with a local Indonesian woman so she actually took her location independent hobby that gave her her kind of sanity made her feel like herself in this new place and she's actually ended up making that into a business so her career as a talent manager is probably over she wasn't allowed to work in Jakarta she couldn't get a work visa she had to figure out who she was independent of this very successful career that she'd had for the past 15 years and this is kind of where she's ended up so you know life when you go on the road you never quite know where the road's going to take you but sometimes it can take you to some pretty cool places so one kind of final slide before I open the floor to questions when you start talking to people about their overseas lives they will tell you lots of horror stories so for example you might have been in Holland for six weeks you've applied for a residence permit you've been turned down by such governments threatening to deport you TV doesn't work you've threatened to sue your landlord you're not sure if you'll be evicted you've no friends and Sunday closing is driving you mad six months time sponsored as a knowledge migrant you've got a great new job fabulous circle of friends in the Albert Hine that's the local supermarket it's just announced they'll be open on Sunday afternoons in the lead up to Christmas or you're in the US supporting your husband's career so if you have a work permit your qualification you have isn't recognised so you can't actually do what you were planning to do two years later your headlining at a national conference talking about global perspectives on work-life balance having been talked into it by your new friend an award-winning author and documentary maker both of those things happen to me and I survived and these sorts of things will happen to you too and you will get through them and you'll be alive and then you'll tell people about it at parties and they'll think it's hilarious these become some of your best stories remember the time I almost got deported remember the time I was held up at the Dutch border and put in the room with all the other illegals while they checked my paperwork that was great cool so I think we've now got about 20 minutes for questions so we're off negotiation so you so in Holland it was actually quite easy because all the kitchens and the restaurants closed at 9 so we sort of had a window and we would normally go for the middle ground and then sometimes you do like a rolling dinner so some people would come at 6 and then some would come at 7 and some would come at 8 so you just kind of negotiate and just really roll with it I think yeah yeah so for me the same reasons that we left were the reasons that we kept moving and it was to do with when things became predictable I got bored and so I wanted to go somewhere new so that was what prompted us to leave New Zealand that's what sent us to the UK and then when we were in the UK we were actually going to come back to New Zealand and then we got asked to go to the US unexpectedly so we just thought well why not so we kind of did and the priority was always the experience rather than anything else so if someone offered us an opportunity to go and live somewhere we would take it and the timetable is you kind of go after 4 or 5 years or you tend to stay so those friends that I made who arrived at the same time as me most of them are still there Viviana took the Gromad thing to a whole new level and she has been in her country every 3 months I have no idea where she is at the moment I have lost track because she is not on social media every now and again she emails me saying hello I am living in the Maldives but the others they stayed and they are essentially immigrants now they live in Holland it takes a year to go through there is a well documented cycle you can look it up online it is a cycle of the first year and you kind of go through a honeymoon period then you hate everything then you kind of remove yourself from the host culture so that is when you retreat into anything that is kind of familiar so you hang out with lots of Kiwis and Aussies because overseas Aussies are honorary Kiwis they will do it is close enough and then by the end of the year you are kind of well I like this but I don't like that and then you start to settle in properly but I think it is probably not until your third year that you really feel like I live here things are familiar you know I know my way around and you have done most things that you are going to do for the first time you have done most of them so you have done a tax return and you have I don't know got a haircut all these kinds of things so all those things that you are doing for the first time you have usually done most of them by the time you are in your third year it doesn't get faster but you know what is coming and that for me makes it easier so rather than thinking oh my god I have made the worst mistake of my life I don't know what I was thinking you just think oh I am in that phase where I hate everything you still go through it you still hate everything but you understand better what you are experiencing the biggest challenge making friends making friends is the biggest challenge because you I am not a natural extrovert so I had friends who were just amazing at this and they were all about every single night in a different group meeting people forming friendships whereas I would kind of go and then I would talk to 300 people I only like one of them and it is kind of difficult to do that so you really have to put yourself out there and kiss a lot of frogs until you actually meet the people that are going to be your friends that is a good question it depends a bit on how you are moving so if you are being moved by a company they will probably pay your relocation costs so your furniture they might put you up for the first couple of months in corporate housing but you do go out and buy quite a lot of stuff I don't think there is a figure that is going to apply to every country so what I would do is get on to the forums in the place that you are thinking of going and ask people how much is it going to cost because for example if you are renting you might have to provide first and last month's rent plus a bond and that might be if it was somewhere like New York or Hong Kong that might be tens of thousands of dollars and if it was if you went to Cambodia or Burma it would probably be a lot less so you need to kind of do a bit of research and find that out but I would if you don't have a guaranteed job to go to you'd also want to do some research and to kind of live in costs and then maybe allow for say six months that you could support yourself most of your the country's your own were speaking in Holland did you learn the language much or was it much of an obstacle did it make it that much harder than being in an Anglo country no actually the most foreign country I lived in was the US not Holland so I learnt survival Dutch so I learnt how to recognise food so I could order food at a restaurant and do the shopping if you learn a language you can understand a lot more than you can speak so often you would have conversations they would speak Dutch and you would speak English and you'd both understand each other professionally I worked in an international business school where the business language was English and one of the reasons I was employed was to raise the standard of English in the department so we weren't allowed to speak Dutch but I think socially it would have helped if my Dutch was better because the Dutch have this great tradition of clubs everyone belongs to clubs and if I'd been proficient I probably could have gone to more things socially like that and the reason America was the most foreign place was actually not just the politics but it's because they have the imperial system so I couldn't understand the weather forecast so and every time I went to cook something using a recipe I would have to google what is 180 degrees centigrade in Fahrenheit so that I would know what temperature to set the oven to so lots of little things like that make you feel this is different any other questions some down the back here you said you've been living in the country what about when you're preparing to leave a country where that's your home country or one that you've been living in what are some practicalities outside of obviously the tax liability it's not good tips it relates a little bit to your point I would say take half as much stuff and twice as much money so it's that kind of old adage about travelling so even if you try not to you will accumulate things and often people will put them in storage thinking that they're going to want them in the future no one ever wants it so just get rid of it all if you are so that would be my first thing look at your things and think what do I really need to take with me other practicalities are to do with I mean really little things like changing your addresses and stuff like that so for example I've got a situation now we've got American Netflix well we don't have it, it's New Zealand Netflix but it's linked to our US credit card and our US credit card and bank accounts still have our US address because the way that the credit cards are verified is via your address so if I changed it to our New Zealand address and then I wanted to buy something it would cancel the card so I left everything in the American situation but the cards are expiring so they've sent new cards to our old address so I'm kind of like well what do I do now do I kind of switch out the credit cards to things which are not very important but they're just kind of stuff that you might want to take into account so if you're thinking about leaving New Zealand and going overseas it's that sort of thing like when you what are you going to do with your bank accounts here are you going to take your credit card with you do you need to talk to your bank here about what happens once I'm set up over there can I change the address just the what you take with you really have a good look at what you're thinking of keeping versus what you're going to take someone had a question here over here I am aware that there is a lot of discussion about changing the visas and so I would at the time that you're going to get it would be the time to ask the questions and find out what's the current status and the US has dozens and dozens of categories of visas so if you're doing it yourself I would hire a lawyer who can actually advise you're an immigration consultant who can actually advise you someone that's in the US if your company is doing it they should have somebody doing that for you so it's usually EY or KPMG who does the tax and immigration for company moves you were talking about trailing tax liability if you're moving around different places is that only relevant if you're still generating income in those countries or why is that you're still liable for tax years after you've left somewhere it depends on whether you are still generating income and that can be for all sorts of reasons so you might have cashed in some shares or if you have a property in New Zealand and you have rental income so there's all sorts of reasons that you might have it and then you may have no income but you might still be required to file a tax return in that year so it's something if you're moving a lot and you if you think that applies to you I would say get a bid accountant someone who's experienced in the international kind of tax law and if you are moving with a company it's like the number one thing to ask for when you're negotiating your relocation package that you want that tax support for at least a year or two after the assignments finished thanks were you ever attached to any of the countries that you visited so how did you manage to deal with starting all over again to a different country I was attached to people in the different countries and I think the way I managed it was to maintain those relationships so when I moved from the Netherlands to London I would go it's quite funny I ended up becoming a client of my former employer so I would go to Holland and I would catch up with my friends by that stage Facebook had come along which was remarkable and Skype conversations that kind of thing but the countries themselves to stay sane one thing that you really need to be able to do is to move and instantly forget that you ever lived there because otherwise you spend way too much time living in the past and then you can't really start to live in your new home no worries any other questions age or like staging your life to do this? no any age when I was in London there were women coming over in their 50s and they kind of had their kids kids growing up gone they'd had their career here and they just wanted a bit of time to explore they set themselves up they travelled, they got great jobs so I think any age is a good age to do it on the back of that do you think once you've become a glomad does it ever stop? he came back to New Zealand you said do you feel settled or do you still feel like it's going to be in your opportunity at some state? I think it's a great lifestyle one of the reasons that we came back was there were some pull factors to do with parents and all the rest of it but for me it had become predictable so coming back to New Zealand this is actually really different but I've got no doubt that we'll go somewhere in the future and I think most people who live this way they kind of feel the same so they might go back to their home country for a number of years but they'd never roll out going and living somewhere else overseas was it hard for you to start going to your first country? or did you wait some years? no, well as I said my first experience was when I was four so I think the die was kind of cast and then my OE to Scotland, I didn't do that very well I didn't I was in Edinburgh and my boyfriend at the time was Scottish and we knew a couple of people but we didn't really know people we just worked all the time and travelled and we didn't really establish ourselves there so I knew that that was the wrong way to do it so when I went to the Netherlands worked out what I hadn't done in my previous experience so I was really proactive about investing that time and then I took that as my key learning so when I moved to London I negotiated with my employer to work virtually for them for six months so that I would actually have time to go and put all this time and energy into meeting people so that I wouldn't just be working 12 hour London days and it wasn't until I had established a social network that I was like okay well now I can go and get a a local job where I don't need to be so flexible with my time How much of a disadvantage do you think for a job overseas from care at the moment you spend money just doing your wheels over there and we could work here at the same time How much of a disadvantage is it to the person looking to be present? Do you sort of push it well to one side if a candidate would come in if he was not present or not able to be present? It depends on your skill set and how how sought after you are so I mean there's no doubt that being physically present is an advantage because what that shows is that you're serious and you've made that commitment to move people will say that they're coming but they haven't even spoken to their wives I used to be in recruitment before I left New Zealand and we would recruit a lot of people from the UK and Australia and we'd often get to a certain interview stage and be ready to offer and then the guy better talk this over with my wife who had been completely oblivious the whole time so I would say you are really serious and you can go go and apply on the ground but certainly get in touch with recruiters overseas and kind of let them know that you're around because they'll be the ones who send you the opportunities and for sure companies will bring you over if you're the right person and you've got a rare skill set that they're looking for because the alternative is they don't hire anyone and you know it doesn't work How do you deal with accessing medical services in different countries? Well it depends on the country so that is so there's the there's the there's different elements so there's the NHS is the easiest because it's public and it's free at the point of service so you just rock up to a doctor or a hospital but every country has its own rules so in the UK and in the Netherlands for example there are only certain medical centres or hospitals that you can go to depending on either where you live or what insurance you have in the US your health insurance will usually be provided by your employer and then that health insurer will tell you which hospitals it covers and which practitioner it covers so again particularly if you're going to go to the US even Canada but the US in particular this is something that you really do want to look into because there is no safety net so if you don't have health insurance then you will have to pay for any treatment that you get and it will run into the tens of thousands so there are also some reciprocal agreements between certain countries so you again maybe want to look into that but if you are living in a place and you're paying local tax to that country and it has a social welfare system that includes health then you will probably be covered but you might just need to find out whether you need to register with a particular doctor's surgery or dentist according to the area that you live and these are the sorts of questions that are really good to ask the expat forums the people who are living there because they will have found this all out before you get there so you can really learn from their experience that is cool oh see I've got a question who's still going to go the university and the business school so thank you a small gift, a token of ours thank you very much