acquisition

Have you ever tried to explain something to your children in the hope they would just listen and take your word for it? That they wouldn’t have to find it out the hard way by actually experiencing it? Welcome to a parental treasure trove. In writing this book, Linda Janssen takes us under her parental wing and invites us to do just that: listen. Browse this book before you move. Flip through its pages while unpacking boxes. Open it randomly in the fall, winter, and spring. When you reach the end, start all over again. These pages contain a well-written harvest of wisdom, both Janssen’s own and that of many wise others, gleaned from many fields of human experience. As with any food rich in nutrition, this book is best sampled regularly and digested slowly. If Janssen had had a book like this at her disposal, she might not have had to write this herself, meaning we wouldn’t be able to read it. Go figure. That must be the power of emotional resilience.

What’s it like down your neck of the expat woods? Exhilarating? Challenging? Tough? Isolating? Life-enhancing? Alienating? All these things wrapped up in a bow? You are not alone. We live in a global village where it has never been easier to pitch a tent in a foreign field. But it’s a sprawling village of brain-aching complexity and diversity, which can stump even the most adventurous and resilient. Janssen has managed to capture the very essence of what it means to try a different culture on for size, assembling an exhaustive toolkit to help the expat explorer adapt and prosper. It’s quite a coup.

The Emotionally Resilient Expat is a siren call for establishing resilience as a key function of successful expat life. Linda Janssen presents the research you need, and an intellectually responsible guide for a great workout in the mind-gym of emotional resilience. A true guide is someone who has taken the path and knows her ways around the gym. Janssen lives on the path and shows how she and others have grown fully fit for the ups and downs of global living. She rightly cites identity as a core issue, especially for those of us who live overseas. Looking at what is meant by cultural congruence, she tackles the challenge of how we can keep that identity in spite of where we live. The highlight of this wonderful book is, for me, the fact Janssen sees accompanying spouses as an answer to the challenge of cross cultural adjustment, and not the problem.* HR professionals, take note!