What Moving Countries Does To The Mind — A Conversation With Dean Wall

In this episode of The Common Room, Joshua sits down with Dean Wall — an international educator with over a decade of experience living and teaching across Egypt, Ireland, Alaska, and Vietnam. Dean has taught subjects including ESL, Global Perspectives and Sociology, and is currently completing an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King's College London. With a rare dual lens of lived international experience and current academic study in psychology, neuroscience, and mental health, Dean brings a genuinely reflective account of what repeated relocation actually does to identity, belonging, and the mind.

Together, we explore what moving countries really does to a person psychologically — and why the effects rarely show up when you expect them.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Why culture shock often doesn't hit until months into a new country — and what that "six-month mark" actually feels like
• How resilience can quietly tip into exhaustion, and why constantly "pushing through" isn't the full picture
• The revolving door of the expat community, and why friendships built fast can also dissolve fast
• How loneliness can exist as a hidden, almost invisible layer beneath an outwardly full and adventurous life
• What sobriety taught Dean about identity, socialising, and rebuilding friendships without alcohol as the glue
• Why therapy, journaling, and boundary-setting became essential tools for staying grounded across multiple moves

Whether you're an educator considering your first move abroad, someone already deep into expat life wondering why things suddenly feel harder, or simply curious about the psychology of belonging, this episode is a genuinely honest look at what the international life doesn't often get said out loud.

A huge thank you to Dean for his time, his openness, and his reminder that vulnerability — not just resilience — is often what actually builds community.

The Common Room is hosted by Joshua Sussex — Deputy Head of Secondary and EdD candidate: researching leadership in international schools.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

International education. The classrooms, the staff rooms, the lives built far from home. This is the common room. I'm Joshua Statistics. Let's talk. Dean Wall is an international educator with a background in the social sciences and around 10 years of experience living and teaching internationally, including in Egypt and Vietnam. He has taught subjects including ESL, global perspectives, and sociology, and is currently completing an MSc in psychology and neuroscience of mental health at King's College London. His interests center on mental health, well-being, philosophy, and human development, particularly how our experiences, relationships, and environments shape who we become. Dean brings a genuinely dual lens to this, a decade of his own lived experience, moving and teaching internationally, alongside current academic study into psychology, neuroscience, and mental health. This episode goes into what migration and relocation can do to identity, belonging and well-being, and where the current research at Dean's own experience meet, and where they don't. This is a genuinely reflective episode for anyone who has moved countries themselves, anyone supporting others through that transition, and anyone curious about the psychology underneath an experience so many international educators share, but rarely unpack. So, Dean, when you first started moving internationally, what did it actually do to your sense of identity, the sense of who you are?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

I remember exactly 10 years ago when I first started my journey of moving internationally. And my the first place I ever moved to was actually Kodiak Island, Alaska. And I remember before I went, I had this moment where I sat and I paused and I had this realization, for the first time in my life, I am going to be a foreigner. And I remember sitting and thinking, this that is so scary. I've never been a foreigner before. I don't know how that's going to feel. I don't know what that's going to mean. And I remember almost having a crisis of identity before I even left to move to Alaska. And I would say my sense of identity has changed dramatically over the course of these past 10 years. The strange thing is when you first move, you think, wow, my perspective is going to change so much about the global world and other countries and other cultures. But what I realized is the first thing I noticed as I started reflecting on my own. I remember being six months into Alaska and I couldn't stop thinking about Ireland and how that culture operates and what that is. And I remember having a moment where I sat down and realized I actually learned so much more about my own culture by living in another country and having something to compare it to. And what I realized is Irish people are extremely friendly. Um, they're loving people, they're kind people, and it's such a small knit community that everybody knows everybody, everybody's your cousin or somebody's your friend. In Ireland, I started to become more interested in politics, which is something I was never interested in in Ireland. I started to become more interested in why do countries have relationships with each other? Why does that have to exist? What are these global connections and why are they important? So the first part of my identity started to change was my horizon broadened and I started to think about the world in a very different way. I started to think about global perspectives and I started to wonder about the connection between countries and what does culture actually mean and why does culture exist? And that's when my love of psychology and sociology was born from my experience in Alaska. And towards the end of my time in Alaska, if I were to compare myself to when I first arrived and when I left, I would say I went from a small town boy to an adult with a global perspective. So I basically went from having only a local or national perspective of the world as it exists to having a more global perspective. And after Alaska, I came back to Ireland for two weeks and I had reverse culture shock. I was looking around and I was so confused, and everything felt familiar but kind of strange at the same time. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. And then this urge to leave continued. So within two weeks, I signed up to do uh an ESL course, and I signed up to go to Hanoi and an internship that was supposed to last three months. Those three months turned into ten years, and here I am ten years later, uh living in Vietnam. I continue to live here, and my perspective continues to grow, to develop, to broaden. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Can we just tap into that sense of belonging? Can you talk about your sense of belonging and how you felt if you belonged in each environment and how perhaps each environment changed your sense of belonging?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

So with Alaska, it took me some time to fit in. I would say the frequency was kind of similar to Ireland in the sense I was in a kind of a small town. But their difference was it was definitely more multicultural despite it being a small town, and it took me some time to feel like I belonged. For the first two weeks, I didn't really have any friends and I didn't really know how to approach friendship. And then I decided to sign up to some clubs and I decided to try something new like basketball, which I'm pretty bad at. It did not end very well for me, but I gave it a try. And through that, I made some friends. And when I was in the Laska, I actually worked in the disability sector. I worked in assisted living. So I worked with clients and I supported them to live their lives. And through then, I experienced a great sense of belonging. I'll never forget this woman I met whose name shall remain unnamed, but she was a Native American and she was telling me about her life and how she grew up and lived subsistently on the land and how she would go hunting for her food and was part of a tribe, and how she always said to me that you need to belong to somebody. Belonging is a natural need. And through that I became very curious and I started researching, and then I started meeting other Native Americans there and befriending them. And my sense of belonging really became solidified then. I made friends, I sat in, and a good way to fit into Alaska life is hunting. Hunting is a very common, shall we say, way of living there. And when I say hunting, I didn't actually participate because I was too scared, but I would watch from a distance and I would admire and respect. So my sense of belonging grew with time. And then in Hanoi, I would say that was definitely the biggest culture shock. It was my first time ever being in a city for more than two days. And what a first city to experience. It's a beautiful city, it's a chaotic city, it's kind of like a city that never really sleeps. It's a city that never really has peace, it's always noisy. And that was a challenge. But luckily, with that experience, I was part of an internship where there were 80 of us who went on this internship. We didn't know each other. And so I was very lucky in that sense because I had the greatest sense of community from day one. We met each other at the hotel, we bonded, we became friends. I had friends from Ireland, from the UK, from Spain, from all around the world, from New Zealand. So I started that journey as a community. So I was very lucky in that sense, and the sense of belonging was kind of there at the beginning. Let's talk about resilience.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

How did your resilience in those times of mentioned Alaska? And then you moved to Hanoi and you found other friends of international expatriates in a similar book. Through that journey, how do you think your resilience developed over that time?

SPEAKER_00 7:17

So, with resilience, it's not that you don't feel fair, it's not that you aren't scared, it's not that courage is not required. You feel all those things, but you choose to work through it anyway. So I allowed myself in Alaska to feel that loneliness for the initial weeks, to feel uncertain, to feel a little bit scared, because that is the natural way of moving to a new country. You're going to have those feelings no matter what. But when you have resilience, you decide I'm going to stand up and I'm going to try to do something new, even if it scares me anyway. So putting yourself out there to meet people, to try to overcome your sense of awkwardness or anxiety about meeting people, because I am naturally introverted. I'm a person whose energy is restored by being alone or by being with a very select few people. So I naturally do not put myself out there. But with my resilience, I chose to feel that fear, but still put myself out there anyway. And another thing I've realized with resilience over the years is that resilience is an amazing thing and it's something that we need in this life. But when you're so resilient for so long, there comes a point where the rubber meets the road. And there comes a point where it can exhaust you or it can give you a sense of brokenness because you have been so strong for so long. And that's when my love for psychology even expanded more. I remember sitting down and thinking, I am so resilient. I have overcome so much and I exude resilience. But why do I feel so weak right now? And that's when I realized that with resilience, there there does come a point when you have to sit down and you have to look at during those experiences of being resilient. And that's when the journey of therapy started for me. And I explored that with a therapist in both in Vietnam and in later in Egypt and then back in Vietnam again. And I I realized that resilience is an incredible thing. But there comes a point when you have to face yourself also. Because when you are resilient, you allow yourself to feel the emotion and you put yourself out there continuously. But along the way, I feel like certain parts of yourself could be hidden, or certain undiscovered traumas, or certain feelings might be ignored. And there does come a point when you have to sit down and realize through my resilience, which parts of me have I ignored or not honored? And that really came into fruition from my traveling. And I got to explore that through various types of therapy, like EMDR therapy or CBT talk therapy. And now I remain resilient, but I also counter that resilience with a sense of self-awareness and a sense of bringing my body into the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

So your international journey actually took you on a path to proactively seek therapy, to proactively learn more about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Exactly. So even though externally I was traveling from country to country and experiencing many cultures, but the real journey was actually the journey with inside me, within my brain, within my body, within my existence. And even when you trap, you change the external environment, the internal remains. Although I left Ireland, Ireland came with me, and all of my history came with me, and all of my experiences came with me. And they don't just go away, they stay in your body. And when I first read the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Dijk, it completely opened the door to me. And I discovered that when your brain and your body are almost like two different entities, they experience things in two different ways. And now every time I face a decision or I face an experience, I always have to see what my mind react and then how is my body experiencing this feeling. And I always bring the body into the conversation. And through this journey of traveling and meeting other people and meeting doctors, psychologists, and teachers and principals, they always kind of shine back to me the need to discover within as well as what's happening without.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

And have you shared these insights and these experiences with colleagues or friends that you've met along this international journey?

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Absolutely. Especially with my friends, I share these experiences with them. And around nine years ago, I started journaling. I journal as much as I can. I'm not strict with myself where if I miss a day, I am going to berate myself. I'm much kinder to myself now than I used to be. But journaling has definitely helped me bring my body and mind together and try to connect it. And I share these experiences with my friends, with colleagues, especially when new teachers arrive to Ho Chi Ming from other countries, and I can see that they're very overwhelmed. And I always sit down and we talk about culture shock and we try to figure out but what is culture shock? Sometimes I wonder if shock is the right word because it doesn't always feel like shock. I discovered that culture shock can be very subtle. It can kind of creep in very subtly over periods of time. It could manifest in not being able to sleep or feeling anxious and not knowing why, or heightened stress and not really understanding why am I feeling so stressed, or it could manifest in not being able to socialize. And eventually they all come together, and you might realize that actually is what we call culture shock. I always find as well, something I discover, there's something about the six-month mark of moving to a new country where the culture shock kind of really hits. I don't know what it is about the six-month mark, but in my experience and in others that I've met along the way, it's always that six-month mark where something happens, where the culture shock truly comes into fruition. Perhaps it's because your body has been in this new environment for long enough to realize, okay, we're not going back to where we were. And maybe it's also because the novelty of this new country and this new culture is starting to wear off. So the novelty's wearing off, your body's starting to realize you're in this new environment for the foreseeable future. And I think that's when culture shock truly comes into foreign.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

What's one thing or you wish schools or communities understood about supporting people through what you're describing here?

SPEAKER_00 13:07

I think schools do a great job of helping us with the visa, helping us with the housing, with the job process, with the bank. But one thing I feel like the schools really need to do is be aware of what culture shock actually is and what it means. And maybe instead they should also work on creating a sense of belonging, creating a sense of community whereby every few weeks they can have events or have team-building events where the teachers can do something together and bond with each other, create social interaction and have check-ins and have well-being. Make sure that the well-being of the teachers are also a priority as well as the visa. I remember when I first came to Vietnam, and I'll never forget this, I worked for a company where in the public school and we offered English lessons to them. And in our first day, the woman said to all of us, Welcome to Hanoi. If I'm going to tell you to do one thing now, create your family. You need to create your international family. Before you do anything else, I want you to look around this room and I want you to find your family and I want you to create your family. That is the most important thing. And at the time I remember thinking, really, a family? But I already have a family. And now when I look back in hindsight, truer words were never said. And we did create a family. It was the greatest sense of family I've ever had in Hanoi for those four years. And it was the thing that protected us against all challenges, culture shock, stress, experiences. And that sense of family was very foundational, very important. And it was the truest thing that she could have said to us at that time.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

I'm just thinking as you as you're sharing that, I can relate. One of the things I personally found difficult was you build that family very quickly in international education because you're aware of how transient it is, and you meet like-minded people, and therefore you connect quite quickly, and as you say, they become your family. How did you, and perhaps how do you now deal with that when because it's such a transient environment, your family members leaving?

SPEAKER_00 15:08

That's the catch 22. Um, it's actually started two years into it, where important members slowly started to drift off and slowly started to move on to other countries or return home, whatever their goals were. And that is a big challenge. And that's when I discovered the revolving door of the expat community. And that is a challenge I still have today. After the four years, the family did dissolve, and I had to try and quickly make new friends and try to make new family members. But in Egypt, and then when I came back to Vietnam, the expat community is a revolving door of people, and that is probably the biggest challenge because you create these bonds and you create these experiences, and they're often very short term, and you have to keep finding new people because that revolving door continues. And that is a challenge, and that's a challenge I remain to have today. And I think that's where loneliness can creep in. And over time, when you're trying to keep up at the pace of this revolving door, it can fatigue you, it can exhaust you. And sometimes you might sit down, you might ask, why do I have to keep doing this? Why do I have to keep trying to find a new community? It's so tiring. And you just kind of want to have that thing that is with you and it's forever. Um if you're a single person who doesn't have a family, it can be challenging. One solution I found, and I don't recommend that everybody does it, but it's a solution that works for me. But maybe you can hear my cats in the background. But getting pets is something that definitely helped me a lot because they they are mine. They're they're not going to revolve and move on and find other communities. So in Egypt, I actually was walking on the street one day and I saw this beautiful black kitten just looking at me, and I said, No, I can't have a pet, it's too much responsibility. I want to be free. I left Egypt two years later with two cats, and I brought them here to Vietnam with me. And having those pets has absolutely helped a lot and in hidden kind of ways, it opened up a whole other type of community that I didn't know existed. And now all the time I meet expats who have pets, who have dogs and cats, and we are forming bonds. And because they also have pets, they're not all so so quickly to move on. I'm not saying that everybody should get a pet, but for me, in my situation, as somebody who will stay an expat for the foreseeable future, it is definitely something that has worked for me and it's something that has brought a lot of joy and meaning to my life, and it is something that does help with the loneliness. And I look at the World Health Organization, they say that one in six people globally experience loneliness. And when I look at that figure, I can't help but wonder when you're measuring that, what is your rubric and what is the metric? Perhaps they are not aware that they are lonely. Me, for example, even I don't always recognize when I'm feeling lonely. And if I can give a personal anecdote, over these last six months, it's only a few weeks ago I realized, oh, I I've been feeling very lonely. But over the last six months, the signs were actually there all along. I just did not recognize them. First, they started in a sense of feeling like I was isolated and feeling like I couldn't socialize so much. Next thing I noticed is I was having almost painful nostalgia where I was reminiscing about times of old when I was with my friends and always thinking about that community. And it was almost a painful kind of experience because I kept yearning for the past and kept yearning for that sense of community, and that nostalgia was very deep and kind of painful. And then the next thing I noticed that I was starting to have a lot of dreams that were centered around being with a community, and all of these things kept adding up and adding up until eventually I realized only a couple of weeks ago through writing in my diary, when I read back a few pages, I realized, wow, I am lonely. My loneliness has struck me and I hadn't even realized it was there. So I do wonder as well with loneliness. I'm not sure perhaps that everybody is aware that they're feeling lonely. People might have these symptoms and they might have these experiences, but they might not be able to realize that is what loneliness is, because loneliness is a very complex experience, and I think people can experience it uniquely. And one thing I found in my research, and it's quite scary in some ways, is sustained loneliness carries a physical element as well as a mental element. And the World Health Organization said it can have the same impact as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day on the brain, because it's such a physical experience, and the increased risk of premature death by 26%. I mean, when you look at those facts or you look at those this emerging research, it just shows that loneliness is far more painful and far more important than we give it credit to. And if we can have that effect physically on the human body and on the brain, I think we as a community globally or nationally, we need to put a lot more effort into loneliness. And we need to help people, first of all, realize that perhaps they are feeling lonely, and then to be able to put their pride aside and actually admit, maybe I am feeling lonely, and kind of normalize that. As I said before, we are biologically created to be part of a group, to fit in. And when that doesn't match our lived experience, loneliness can often creep in, and it can be a hidden experience. Even for somebody like me who is self-reflective and who goes to therapy and who journals very often, even I couldn't recognize that I was feeling lonely for six months. It took me six months to actually realize, wow, I am feeling lonely.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Thank you for sharing that. I think that's really powerful. You mentioned yourself being uh very self-aware and proactively seeking confirmation and clarity of yourself and how you're feeling. I would imagine you then start to develop an almost a toolkit of recognizing moments where you start to think, oh, I feel more lonely. And you mentioned the dream, how you're feeling day to day, yearning for those past experiences. You then notice it in other people and have those conversations with them at all.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yes, but first I have to be able to put aside my pride and admit that I'm lonely, which as a man, sometimes that can be hard. At least in Ireland, men, we are often conditioned to not speak about our feelings, to be stoic. And we call that male gender conditioning. And that's something that remains within my psyche even today. But because of my self-awareness, I first have to admit that I'm feeling lonely, then I put that aside, and now I'm able to have conversations with people. And one thing I that quickly became aware when you actually model to people that you are able to be vulnerable, it gives them permission to be vulnerable. So it requires a sense of bravery in one way because you have to be brave enough to put your vulnerability out there, to admit that you're feeling lonely, to explain and show them the signs of loneliness. And you see the reaction on their face and they're almost surprised. But then that gives them permission to say, You too, you've been feeling that way? I thought I was going crazy. And then the conversations start, and then the community actually deepens, and then relationships and bonding becomes better. And with other people, I can recognize it with certain colleagues. I can see a level of stress within them, I can see isolation. And my job is not to go and say that to them and say, Oh, I you're I can see that you're. Feeling isolated, or I can see that you are not socializing as much because that can actually affect people quite negatively. Instead, what I do is I hang out with them and I show my vulnerability and I show that I am feeling lonely and I give them permission to then come back and then be bond. When you notice something in somebody else, maybe it's not always wise to say, oh, you're feeling lonely. I've noticed you're feeling lonely. That can push people further away, and that can actually push people to even close up more. I think a secret weapon is to be vulnerable with that person and put your heart on the table and let the rest happen naturally.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

As you're saying that, I'm putting myself in that position. And I would say I would not naturally find that easy to do. It would be a challenge for me in certain situations. I certainly would have had to have formed a very good relationship with that person and trust as well. Trust would be a big factor for me, which would take time for me.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Has there been times for you where you've attempted to offer that vulnerability and attempted to start that conversation and it just not land whatsoever? And it's made you perhaps feel an increased sense of insecurity as a result.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah, there have been times when I've put my heart on the table and I have tried to be vulnerable and it didn't always work. And that tends to happen a lot with my male friends or male colleagues. And that does happen. But instead of me going home and feeling insecure, I go home and I think, what can I do better? How can I change my approach? And this is when resilience is very helpful. My resilience then comes into play and I start reflecting and I start journaling and I start figuring out what I can do to help and what can I do to support without making it so obvious. And then you can start organizing community events. You can start saying, Hey, would you like to join the pickleball club? Which is an amazing sport by the way, super fun. And then I will start inviting them to pickleball. And then I will start saying, Hey, let's make Tuesday a day where we all go out and eat at this restaurant. And then you start putting those things on the table. So you have a sense of community, you're starting this experience together, you're playing pickleball or basketball, or you're going to the cinema, and you're just creating structure in regular meetups subtly. And then from there, that is the first kind of lifeline you can offer to somebody is creating the community with and for them. And sometimes you don't even have to have the discussion about loneliness. Sometimes you just need to be there. Sometimes you just have to be there and you have to socialize and you play sports together, and that can be enough sometimes. And with that journey of going to the gym, another unexpected thing happened where I became very sober curious, not from reading a book or not from talking to people, but for years I was wondering what would life be like if I just stopped drinking, even though I didn't drink that much, just like on the weekend here and there, and now I'm two years sober. Just by going to the gym and just by being curious, and again by not drinking and by being sober, another type of community is now also open to me.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

That's really interesting. I lived in Vietnam for two years, as we discussed before, and I'm aware of the drinking culture in Vietnam. It's quite prevalent, shall we say? For sure. So that's that's that's interesting that you've taken that conscious choice. How did that land? You made those friendship groups with the people you've mentioned when you were drinking alcohol, and we mentioned it is is prevalent in Vietnam. How did the transition between you drinking and not drinking? How did that land with your friends?

SPEAKER_00 25:23

That was quite a transition because speaking about identity again, my identity started to change again. Not only did I have to stop drinking, I also had to enforce within my own identity I am now somebody who identifies as a non-drinker. So my identity, it took me a while to do that, and it took me a while to allow that to be my identity. And regarding friendships and groups, it can be very tricky because I can still go out and I can still enjoy it. But people become very curious when they are in the social gathering and they're like, Why did you stop drinking? Or did you have a problem with drinking? All these questions can come out, and then the more drunk they become, the more curious they can become. And then I realize after some time, me not drinking has actually shone a light on them and their relationship to alcohol. And that's when I realize that's what it is. So when you go down this journey of being somebody who's sober, it does come with challenges. And I have some friendships I would say have dwindled out because I no longer am that person that can go out and have some brunch and have some cocktails. It's no longer who I am, at least for for now. But the biggest insight for me with not drinking is it does tend to shine a light on other people's relationship with alcohol, which can be uncomfortable for them. So from their perspective, they may not want to always be around you in that kind of social gathering. And that's something that I've had to accept, and that's something that I've had to become aware of. Just my existence does shine a light and it may not always be received well. But when I get those questions from people, I'm very open, I'm very calm, I'm very understanding, and people can even start mocking and say, he doesn't even drink anymore. Who does he think he is? And even in that situation, I'm very calm, I'm very relaxed because I know that they're just starting to have that internal struggle and they're starting to look at the fact that their relationship with alcohol. So it's actually not a reflection of me at all. And because of that knowledge, I'm able to sit with it, I'm able to take it.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Brilliant. And those experiences you talk about, whether that be stopping alcohol and being more self-reflective, taking part in different activities, making different friendship groups and acknowledging people come and go and finding new friendships, journaling, therapy, all these things we're discussing. How do you think all of those have impacted you on a day-to-day in your workplace?

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Hugely. I am far more productive than I've ever been. I've also noticed that I'm learning, it's a lifelong learning, of course. I'm learning to care less how others perceive me. I am learning to drown out the noise that does not serve me. But the most important thing is through all of this, through the journaling, through the therapies, through the self-affection, through being sober, I am learning to set very firm boundaries. And I'm no longer afraid to say to somebody, if this behavior continues, this is what I am going to do. I will stop this if that behavior continues. So I am no longer allowing situations in my life where people bring me down or try to make me feel bad about myself or just carry a darkness that negatively affects me. So now I'm much better at setting boundaries now. The next thing I noticed from starting this journey, especially the last two years with the sobriety, is the dreams that I've had for my whole life are slowly starting to happen. I became brave enough to sign up to do the master's, to do my master's in psychology, neuroscience, and mental health, which I was so scared to do for so long. And I actually was supposed to start it five years ago, but the fear held me back. And by becoming sober and really trying to deal with my issues, I became brave enough to start this journey of my master's. And the next thing I notice is another lifelong dream of mine has always to adopt. To adopt a child eventually is my dream and it's something that I want to do. And now I'm brave enough to even open that door and even to start that goal and to slowly create a foundation for that. So I would say it has had a very big effect on me and it has made my life better. Although there are still challenges. I still sometimes suffer with insomnia, and to me, that highlights that there's still something within me that hasn't been dealt with yet, or there's something that I need to figure out and I need to add to my goal list. Life is not perfect, but it's better than it was yesterday. And I still have challenges, but my sense of self is stronger than it's ever been, and my sense of priority is there, and my ability to set boundaries is firm.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

Do you think you would have achieved all of what you've just described there if you didn't uh go into international education?

SPEAKER_00 30:03

Absolutely not. First of all, I wouldn't have been exposed to the types of people that I met. I wouldn't have been able to see examples of excellence. I wouldn't have been able to see phenomenal leaders that I've had over the years who exhibit such work ethics, such excellence. I wouldn't have been able to see firsthand that these things can be done. I would have remained in my small pond and my perspective would have only been a national or local perspective, and I would not have been able to expose myself that there is more to life than this pond. So I can say with 100% guarantee, all of these experiences and where I am now in my life absolutely would not have happened if I hadn't taken that journey to become an international educator. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

And just before we finish, what would be your other advice or things to consider for someone listening to this who perhaps is considering an international move for the first time?

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Do your research about a country or and values that may align with yours, and then allow yourself to be brave and get yourself ready, have your finances in order and take the leap. Just go and take the leap. When I first went to Kodiak, there was people around telling me you're not ready, you can't do this, you don't have enough money. But I took the leap anyway, and it was the best decision I ever made. But I would say do your research on a country that aligns with you, or perhaps do a research on a country that maybe doesn't align with you and it may offer you some insight. Try to find other travelers along your way, try to see other people who are doing it. For me, the best thing to do was I went as part of a group, as I told you, to Hanoi, where I signed up to an internship. And I think that could be the best way to do it for the first time because you're you're guaranteed that you're not by yourself and you know that you're doing it with a community of people who are in the exact same position as you. So if somebody can find an internship, if they're teachers and they can research and find internships, three or four month internships, I think that would be a phenomenal way to start.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

What would you say to school leaders for their consideration of mental health, resilience, confidence building relationships in the environment that they're in? What would you advise school leaders to consider when they're speaking to their staff?

SPEAKER_00 32:12

I would advise them to be vulnerable and to show them that you're a human being first. You are somebody who was in their position, you are somebody who started this journey a long time ago, you were somebody who had challenges along the way, and you are somebody who has become excellent because of your journey. I do think their vulnerability goes a long way. When I went to Egypt, for example, and I had a leader there, I was riddled with culture shock because I had never experienced anything like it in my life. And that leader on day one exhibited vulnerability and explained how difficult they found it at certain points and how it affected them. And straight away my anxiety reduced. Straight away I felt connected. So with leaders who were bringing in new teachers, I would say be professional and you can be vulnerable at the same time. You can do that easily. And in doing so, you are allowing these teachers to understand and realize, oh, it's not just me. This is normal. It's normal to be overwhelmed, it's normal to have culture shock. And I think I would make it a part of their induction to have a well-being meeting where you explore what culture shock is, how it can affect you, how it can make you feel lonely. And you would straight away normalize that. So from the onset of their journey in a new country, they know that it's not going to be easy and they know that it's going to be hard. And they also know that they are working with people who's already done it and they've experienced it.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

How do we ensure that we are considering people's well-being practically actually on a day-to-day?

SPEAKER_00 33:38

Why not allow the individuals to have autonomy? Why not allow them to suggest things that they would like to do as a group themselves? Instead of creating, oh, we're going having a social and we are going here, why not create a survey and allow people to have their input, to suggest activities that they would like to do, or to suggest interactive games that they would like, and also to suggest topics or perhaps experiences or meetings that they would like to have themselves. I always find when you do a survey and people are not being forced to say, This is who I am and this is my name, they're far more willing to give you what they're really feeling. They're far more willing to say, This is actually what I'm experiencing and this is something that I feel. So having that two-way communication where people feel safe enough to actually provide feedback and provide suggestions, I think it is invaluable. You can allow people to help themselves by giving them the space to actually communicate it in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

Thank you very much, Dean. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. And I have to say I appreciate everything you're doing. And I truly believe that this podcast will continue to grow and become even more successful. And I for sure am a fan, and I am going to pass this on to my friends, and I'm going to let them see that you're not alone here either.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Just the conversation has been exactly what the this podcast intended to do, and it's it's giving that voice of people just like yourself and those experiences you mentioned.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

So it's really great to have you on, and I really do appreciate your time. Thank you so much, and best of luck going forward. I will be listening and I'll be watching from afar.