How Well Do You Recognise Your Achievements?

In our last blog post and newsletter, we focused on the issue of personal identity and how our “sense of self” evolves in response to the challenges of relocation and the creation of our new lives abroad.

For many, relocating means leaving careers behind and partners can find themselves struggling to some extent with the language and culture in their new surroundings. Feeling like the newbie on the block, it can be easy to be tough on yourself, feeling perhaps that you do not match up to your normal standards of capability and that you are not achieving very much.

Maybe you find this kind of self-talk evolving:

• "I’m not doing what I’m used to doing; everything feels tough; I am making such slow progress..."
• "Should be doing more..."
• "The days pass, but I can’t see what I’ve done other than unpack a few boxes and attend to everyone else’s (the families) needs."

Sound familiar?

BUT WAIT!

Time to make a reality check…

You have achieved a lot. For a start – relocating even within your own country is placed up there with death and divorce as one of the three most stressful life experiences, and you’ve just crossed borders and taken on new cultures and languages.

Additionally, your achievements of the past are not all wiped out the moment you set foot abroad. All that you have achieved prior to relocation is still important and relevant to you. These experiences and achievements have built your skill set and abilities, and these will all be very relevant and useful in your new environment… you may just need to be a little clever and creative in how you utilize and apply those skills, knowledge and talents in your new environment.

In truth we tend to “not see” our achievements. We make personal value judgments about what equates to “achievement” based on our cultural and social definitions of achievement. These judgments often relate to academic study and career. Anything else that we do is simply categorized as “what we do” rather than “what we achieve”.

So, this week, we invite you to think about your achievements. You can do this in one of two ways OR perhaps both:

1. By watching this video and following the instructions.
2. By downloading our workbook, Reframing Achievement.We hope that you find the exercise insightful and helpful. It forms a part of our Thrive programme, and if you are interested you can read more that programme here.

Let us know how you found the exercise by leaving a comment, we love to hear from you!