fully clothed

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.

The topic of emotional resiliency is near and dear to my own heart, and in The Emotionally Resilient Expat: Engage, Adapt and Thrive Across Cultures, Janssen has written a comprehensive guide to help expats navigate the multiple challenges and stresses that come with living overseas. Reading this will help parents to become more aware of the experiences their children and adolescents might face, and find tools that will help their families to become more resilient. School personnel and therapists who work with Third Culture Kids will also benefit from reading this book if they want to truly understand the joys, as well as the tribulations, of life outside one’s home culture and country.

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!