Life Coaching in A Place in the Sun Magazine

A Place in the Sun Magazine commissioned Claire to write a 3-page article for its July 2005 edition, entitled "Take steps towards your goal".

Take steps towards your goal

To bridge the gap between daydream and reality - and make that move abroad actually happen - you must be focused. And, among all the practicalities, you need to pay attention to emotional factors, too. Life coach Claire Bradford provides a helping hand…

There is plenty of practical help available for people who want to move abroad – A Place in the Sun magazine, for instance. There are companies to help you find your ideal home, businesses to help you finance your venture overseas, legal experts, language schools… All of these are for people who have made the decision to move away and are looking for guidance on what to do next.

But what about assistance with the more personal, emotional side of making a new life somewhere else? There’s a big gap between daydreaming about a move and actually doing it. For a start, there’s making the decision to move, which involves examining what you want your new life to be like, choosing where you might want it to be, setting a realistic timescale, calculating budgets and myriad other factors which need to be born in mind.

Once the decision to move has been made, there are many more issues around settling into a new life in new surroundings: making friends, finding work, maintaining personal and family identity and keeping realistic expectations. All of these issues are highly personal and there can be no organisation with a package that will tell you definitively how to prepare for your move.

So how do you bridge the dream and the reality? For a start, you need to write down what you want. Sound too simplistic? Try it. Just putting in writing what you want can be an incredibly powerful step towards achieving it. Write down as much detail about your dream as you can at this point This might range from ‘I willl be living somewhere sunny by the time I retire in five years’ to ‘By May 2006, we will be living in Andalusia in a five bedroom villa with a swimming pool, a garden and beautiful views. I will be teaching English in a local school and my husband will be running his own business.’

Remember you can always amend or add to your goal. The only rule s are that your goal should be positive, it should be as detailed as you can make it and it should be written in the future tense (‘I will’ – not ‘I want to be’).

You might find it harder than you expect to write down what you want. That’s because writing your goals down sends a clear message to your subconscious that something has shifted and you now want to get moving after all this time daydreaming. Your subconscious is self-protective and will try to stop you by reminding you of all the difficulties moving will entail, or maybe making you doubt that you can do it. Try to ignore the doubts for now – we will be dealing with them later.

Now that you have defined your dream, your next step is to find out what your motivation is like. To succeed in moving abroad happily, you need to want to do it enough. To see what is driving you, take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. Write ‘away from’ at the tope of one half and ‘towards’ at the top of the other.

In the ‘away from’ column, list all the elements of your present life/location that you are looking forward to leaving behind you when you make the move – for instance, noisy neighbours, British winters, your job; there are no set answers, just what is right for you. In the ‘towards’ column, list all the positive points of your new life as you imagine it – more space, slower pace of life, good food. Write as much as you can in both columns. Keep adding ideas as they occur to you – this is a work in progress after all.

After a few days of adding ideas to your lists, review them, preferably with someone whose opinion you respect. Try to ‘step back’ from them emotionally and edit out any unrealistic expectations. Can you see any patterns emerging?

On reflection, might this move actually be about trying to escape from something that you need to deal with? Is it reasonable to expect to have more time with your family once you’ve all moved to Ital when you’ll have to be working the same hours and you will have further to commute?

Be brutal with each item. Don’t worry if some of your expectations are a bit wild or it turns out there are things you need to sort out at home first. It doesn’t mean your dreams have to be shelved. It might be that you need more motivators in the other column to give you a good balance and provide you with a healthy drive to achieve your ambitions. This exercise can often spark off new ideas – instead of commuting in Italy, how about setting up your own business from home, for example?

If you really want to get things going, set yourself a date. If you are just starting this whole process, it could be a moving date; if you already have a move date, why not set a date for your first dinner party with your new friends or for starting a new job? Whatever your date is for, write it in your diary or your calendar. Keep light about this date – it is to motivate you, not put pressure on you (you can always change it if you need to). Use your date to plan: if, for example, you plan to move in six months’ time, what do you need to start doing now? Could you take an evening class in the language? Could you start preparing your house for rental or sale? Work out your timescale and schedule tasks accordingly, writing them in your diary as you go.

No matter where you are in the moving process, there are bound to be lots of thoughts, ideas, expectations, problems and fears whizzing around in your head so fast that you can’t keep up with them. The best way to deal with this dizzying phenomenon is – you guessed it! – to write it all down.

On a large piece of paper write down all of your expectations, aspirations, hopes and dreams about your new life. Jot down everything you can think of in brainstorm-fashion - what experiences do you want as a result of living abroad? What will your house be like? What about your work? How about money? Social life? What else is important to you?

Of course, as you are doing this exercise, there will be questions or potential problems that occur to you about your new life - is it difficult to find a job in Lisbon? Will I miss my friends too much? Are my language skills good enough? Can I really do this? Acknowledge these and write them down in a similar way on another large sheet of paper. They are important and must be addressed early or they may come back to haunt you later.

Separate your problems and questions into two lists, 'practical' and 'emotional'. Practical questions will need research - speak to ex-pats, scan websites and contact experts such as solicitors or embassies to find your answers. Emotional issues are a little less easy to resolve - try keeping a diary to record your feelings, hire a life coach to walk a part of the journey with you, or talk to a trusted friend or family member (be aware though that family and friends may not always be impartial - after all, they don't want to lose you - so choose carefully!)

These exercises will give you the clarity you need to make informed decisions about your move and may well give you a better picture of who you are and what is important to you. It is crucial to have a strong sense of your own identity when you move away in order to live your new life with integrity. However, with everything familiar hundreds of miles away, it is easy to lose touch with who you really are. So once you have completed the exercises detailed above, it’s time for one last task.

Write down ten answers to the question ‘Who am I?’, each beginning with ‘I am…’. Do this as quickly as possible, without thinking too much about your answers. Now review what you have written. Each statement is a fundamental part of your identity. Some statements, ‘I am my local football team’s best striker’, will have to change when you move away, and you can think about how that change will affect your life and whether you might be able to build something in its place. Other statements, like ‘I am a loyal friend’, will remain true wherever you live and you can plan strategies for keeping these at the heart of your new life abroad

On completion of these exercises, you can be sure that you will have put a lot of effort into understanding and analysing your motivations and expectations about your place in the sun. This will put you into the very best position to make focused and considered decisions about your future and ensure that you arrive at your new home feeling prepared and ready to take on the emotional challenge of settling in.

Pearls of wisdom from those who’ve been there

“Be careful not to isolate yourself in the first
few years - it takes time to build friends.” (Eric Farr, Lower Wisconsin, USA)

“I was one of those crazy people who just moved with very little preparation. I wouldn't advise others to do that and it's always best to have some work lined up and be able to speak at least some of the language.” (John Nelson, Essonne, France)

“Research the place you plan to move to and find some way of giving it a test run, leaving yourself the possibility of going back to your former lifestyle.” (Ray Parker, British Columbia, Canada)

5 Things to bear in mind
• Friends and family are not always supportive
• Nothing has to be permanent
• Learning the language will ease your transition enormously
• Changing location doesn’t automatically mean your lifestyle will change for the better – remember you won’t be on holiday
• Have a clear idea of what you need, or that home you fall in love with may become an expensive, impractical burden

Claire Bradford, of Straightforward Coaching, specialises in relocation life coaching. For more information, to contact her for a free consultation or subscribe to the email newsletter, call 01903 218 736 or email info@straightforwardcoaching.com.

If you would like more information on this subject, or you'd like me to write something for you on life coaching, feel free to contact me. Please do not publish or reproduce any of the articles or information on this site without my prior consent. Thank you.

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