Global Cross-Cultural Worker
Introduction
As a global worker, you may experience similar difficulties as local workers. Additionally, you may face other challenges, many of which may strike to your core, often because they are related to daily living. Few things are as isolating and painful as not being able to make yourself understood.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these scenarios?
- You learned to shop for groceries and order food in a different language, often, having to learn how the money works, too.
- Before you'll share photos with people in the town you grew up in, you make sure you've filed away your family vacation photos to avoid that look in their eyes that makes you wonder whether they think that you're either lazy or misappropriating funds (despite the fact that you know that you took your vacation in the only "safe" place in 100 miles and people need rest and recovery time to be healthy).
- Cultural misunderstandings lurk around every corner.
- People ask your children whether they're glad to be "home" or yell at them because they've done something wrong and won't look them in the eye (not even when ordered to) and your children feel upset about being misunderstood ("home" is complicated and they were being "respectful") and just want to return to life with their friends and to familiar places.