How to Overcome Failure in Your Overseas Career

Say you quit your job, moved to another country and then hated it. Could you pack up your bags and return to your country to do the walk of expat shame? How could you face your family and friends again when you just promised them you’d kiss a monk, eat a live octopus or climb Macchu Picchu and you never ended up doing that?

Well, we’d never kiss monks but that’s exactly what happened to me and my fellow travel blogger, Prime of the Gypsy Gals – a travel blog of solo female travel advice and inspiring stories.

I quit my job in China and moved my savings and my sanity to Chile. Prime quit her journalism job in the Philippines to become a teacher in Hanoi, Vietnam. I hated Chile Empanada Land and didn’t really like studying Spanish and Prime hated Hanoi and didn’t become a teacher.  In the end we moved back to the Philippines and rebooted our careers.  While I traipse around Southeast Asia doing different odd jobs, Prime kept her freelance journalism business and decided to dedicate herself to becoming a lifecoach.

How did we swallow our pride when our overseas goals didn’t work out and started from scratch again?

1. Know when to quit

For me, it all had to do with how I was feeling. I didn’t like the culture, the food, the people and the cost of living was expensive in Chile. I was miserable most of the time. It wasn’t worth it. When I realize that staying there longer would not advance me in terms of career, relationship, personal development and friendship, I knew it was time to go.

It was the same for Prime as well.  Having developed a motorbike phobia and a disappointment that there was no mall in Hanoi, her chances of staying at that place diminished especially as the bosses of the language center were very racist and passed her up because she looked too “Southeast Asian.” That was just one of the too many things that made her decide Hanoi was not for her.

Most importantly, you also get that feeling that the forces of the universe conspire against you. No matter how hard you try you just stay put or opportunities didn’t open that would enable you to stay in that country.  Then you wonder why you had to undergo that devastating experience in the first place. That’s when you realize that the universe wanted you to have a life lesson. Perhaps this experience had to really hurt so you can learn something important. I learned that I couldn’t be too far away from my Asian comfort zone a.k.a. heaps of rice, vermicelli, siomai, red peppers, sushi and dumplings.  Chile had very few of these and they suck.  I also couldn’t live in a small town which was where I lived in Chile. These are important factors to consider when I make my next overseas move.

2. Pray, Decompress and Accept.

Prime advised praying to God for guidance. You can also meditate or seek advice from people you trust.  It’s also important to write in your journal daily to record your thoughts.

Don’t get in a rush to do anything drastic after you decided to quit and return. I stayed for a few days in HK to get together with friends before returning to the Philippines. There I relaxed for a while before looking for work. Prime booked a flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a healing session before returning to Manila.

Finally just Accept your situation. This is very important because if you can’t accept you can’t move on. Take a deep breath and just tell your family and friends. It is very embarrassing, true but compare  a) you’d rather stay and be miserable or  b) endure a brief period of embarrassment and move on to something better. I’d take the latter any day.

3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Prime had the forethought to not quit her freelancing and she still retained her former job as one of her freelancing clients. Thus, she was still able to keep afloat in Hanoi and in Manila when she returned. She was still able to continue to work while looking for another career path.

I however, was not too fortunate. I didn’t have a backup job or a line of work waiting for me when I returned.  I didn’t have freelancing to rely on as my former teaching work took up all my time. I also spent most of my money in Chile not having known how expensive it was.  Next time I should have another line of work going or get enough freelance clients on the side. I should also have sufficient back-up funds.

4. Look deep within yourself and plan your next step. Know that not every path is for you.

This is the time to move forward. For Prime it was time to reflect, take action and take a different path. Re-navigate. Tap into her intuition and discover that what she was most afraid of was the path for her – to become a lifecoach. It was terrifying but deep inside she knew this was the direction for her. It wasn’t to become an ESL teacher and travel the world while developing her solo female traveler online business. That was a path laid for others but not for her.

It was the same for me. I thought I would teach ESL in South America while building a freelance writing career and then travel and live around the world. It wasn’t meant to be. I realize then you are free to make your own path. You don’t have to follow others because what works for them will not work for you.

For Prime’s path – it is to build a coaching practice, enroll in more courses for energy healing and do more business planning to make it a profitable business.

My path is more fluid as I haven’t fully discovered what it is I want to do. Probably explains why I had moved from one job to another thinking, “This is it.” I am open to experimentation and trying out what will work for me instead of plunging deep into something I haven’t tried out yet. I will stop being so hard on myself and trying to set things in stone especially since I am in transition. I will accept that the universe still hasn’t presented me an opportunity to discover my path but I will continue to move ahead- one step at a time.

You can choose to dwell in the past and your mistakes. Remain bitter at how stupid you were. Beat yourself again and again at how you could have done things differently. Tell yourself, “If only I hadn’t –.”  Or you can look back one last time at the past and then turn around and move forward.

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When I get into a taxi, the driver usually asks, “Where to?”

I say, “Rhode and 15^th.” Or some other random address.

Let’s imagine this time you are getting into the taxi of life. The driver asks, “Where to?”

You say your own destination. “Earn $3,000 a month. Lose 10 pounds. Have a successful online business so that I can quit my job.”

What happens to you when after driving for a while the cab driver tells you, “I’m sorry but we can’t go there.”

You feel crushed. Frustrated. Disappointed. A lot of time had been spent. You had already taken off. Why now? Cue cower under the bed in depression and eat a whole load of cookies and ice cream.

This is what happens when the goals we have been working so hard do not work out. This is what happens when things do not go our way.  You invest a lot of time and money and for what? For things to burst in front of your eyes. For a lot of regret to accumulate, “I wish I hadn’t spent so much. If only I spent the time instead on something more substantial.”

This is what happened to me.

No matter how hard I shape my future, it doesn’t often often turn out the way I wanted.

My last post talked about goals and how we should not start the year with a bang and rush to achieve them. This time I want to talk about how your goals and plans not happening or end up not being what you wanted in the first place. Let me share with your some experiences.

1. After I graduated college, I had a plan. Finish my degree in Special Education and apply for a job as a Special Education teacher in the USA. Live in USA.  Instead I ended up as an English lecturer in China.

1. Australia. Finding myself stuck in China and in ESL teaching, I wanted to break out of it and try different industries (not actually knowing yet what industry but it was anything! anything but teaching). I applied for 6 months leave and took all my savings to Australia. The plan was to look for a job there while I was on a tourist visa. I had hoped to follow my friend Jay’s path in which he secured a job in New Zealand and then applied for permanent residency. Some Filipinos have also done it before. I didn’t know that the Australian dollar would rise so high in value when I arrived making my RMB savings depreciate (there goes my budget). And that most companies wouldn’t hire if you don’t have a migrant visa. But in order to get a migrant visa you need a job offer. A total catch 22. I went home to China, broke and disappointed.  I went back to teaching English.

1. Chile. But I still had not given up. I was so fed up with teaching English at this point. Since Australia was very daunting to migrate to, I decided on the easiest place to migrate – New Zealand and daydreamed living a free healthcare utopian socialist life. I started the paperwork process. While I knew it would take a while, I made plans to get out of China again and hurl myself to jump starting my freelance writing business. I had dreams of myself working wherever I wanted. The trick was to find a safe place where I can study there and make contacts which would lead me to a job. I picked Chile, South America because I fell in love with a picture of its beautiful port Vina del Mar. So I quit my job and moved to South America. Only to realize Chile was way more expensive than I thought (more expensive than China- again there goes my budget), its food was crap, the people seemed cold and snobby and I suffered from depression. I went from hanging out with my tight knit group of expats in China everyday to hanging out with nobody in Chile. I had withdrawals and was homesick for Asia. I did manage to finally do some freelance writing only to find I didn’t like its solitary aspect, the type of work I was doing and to be constantly hustling. So after 4 months and again most of my savings, I said “ciao!” to South America and moved back to the Philippines to contemplate my next step. I was bruised and battered from my recent big spendings in Australia and Chile that came to no avail.  I vow to check out a country first and not to move to another until I was guaranteed a job there.

1. New Zealand. Keeping up with my own promises, I used the last of my savings to book a trip to New Zealand to check the country out. I had but one more step (the job offer) before I can complete my migration to Kiwi Land. I was so glad that I visited because I found my heart just wasn’t in settling in New Zealand. Beautiful and picturesque it was, it felt too quiet for me and far from anything else. I also found that they were not in need of teachers. So with some measure of bittersweetness and sadness, I hang up the towel of NZ migration. My application expired last October 2013.

1. Vietnam was probably the least painful in terms of the pocket. In 2013, I was guaranteed a job but typical Vietnamese fashion, they do not promise you the terms that you agreed on. I had envisioned of putting up with the teaching for a year while trying to apply to grad school. Instead of teaching high school business like we agreed on, they had me teaching ESL (a total step back for me) and middle school. I HATED kids. I hated the whole experience and dreaded waking up in the morning to teach the brats. From the get-go, I should have said no. To go back to teaching ESL was a warning – a clear sign of stepping back. I had sacrificed that for the sake of security. I had wanted to quit the very first week but I needed the money. In retrospect, it was a good thing I held on for an entire month (though it almost cost me my sanity) because I was able to use the money to go to Japan and the USA.

What I learned is that I should not invest on a single goal and envision my future shaped around it because the future I dreamed of will not match the present that will hit me in the face. That I should test the waters first before pushing all the chips into one big gambling move and risking them all. That these goals will not turn into the roadmap of success that I want.

I often see people who have “made” it and have settled. Start from the bottom – PhD student, instructor, assistant instructor and then professor. Or intern in a bank then become a teller and work their way up to be a bank manager and then Vice President. I envy these people and strive to emulate them –looking for a way to get a secure career that I like and work my way up from there. I strive to follow their roadmaps not realizing I was free to create my own. Their lives are far different and more stable than mine is. For me to follow them would be like to mix oil and water together. I am me. I am unique and I will never be one of the “settled” ones. I have to go carve a path that is mine alone.

I have learned my lesson. I am through with “this is it.” but will instead go through life with “well, I guess this is it.” Because no matter how hard I imagine what my future will look like 10 years from now it will never look like what I imagine.

But that’s the best part isn’t it? The surprises. Because if life happened as planned how boring will that be? 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d have moved to 3 countries in a span of a year or I’d work in marketing. When I was studying Special Education, who would’ve thought I would be working in China? How happy would I be if my past self knew I would become a freelance writer or I’d survive a 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

No matter how hard I steer the wheel, it seems life is taking me along for the ride. Who am I fooling? I’m a passenger. I give the destination but the driver decides where to go. Whether or not I like the route is up to me to decide. So I’m done fighting against the current. It is time to let the current take me. I can only trust it will take me to the path where I will be happy.

This year I’ve decided to hell with it. What have I lose? I will take things step by step, a month at a time. Against all sensibilities and practicalities, I’ve also decided on a simple goal of doing what makes me happy- write what I love. For that seemed to be the only constant destination that I have.

So when I get into the taxi of life and the driver asks, “Where to?”

I shall say, “To happiness.”

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I QUIT!

People have envisioned quitting jobs they hate. Visions of yelling and giving their bosses the finger and possibly the occasional throwing of corporate Satan’s computer monitor out of the window and hearing the satisfying crash as it explodes into fireworks of spastic sizzling LED bits as it kisses the  concrete. This didn’t happen to me but hey, a girl can dream.

My resignation induction happened on a smoggy Thursday. I stood before my boss in her office explaining to her that I wanted to take time to pursue my graduate studies. That and because of the political unrest between China and the Philippines I feared for my safety and because of these- takes deep breath– I decided not to renew my contract for the next academic year.

In other words, I quit.

I’ve been meaning to quit since 4 years ago. Since starting the blog in 2006, the bulk of my entries were repetitive moaning singles crying to a single theme – “I hate marking papers.”

I hadn’t quit because I couldn’t find another job. Guess I was lucky in 2006 and 2007 when schools in China would accept Filipinos as English teachers. Now it’s increasingly more difficult as Wild China tightens its grip to become ‘respectable’. Also, Japan and Korea were just plain racist. I received this answer when I tried applying for a post in Japan, “I’m sorry you just don’t fit the appearance of what we’re looking for.”

Education is a vocation with the only perk being extended vacations. They say there are three awesome reasons to becoming a teacher – June, July and August. And 6 years in this profession, I certainly raped (that’s right, raped)  the benefits- escaping my prison for three months only returning to serve my yearly 10 month sentence and dreaming again my next escape

“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from,” Seth Godin said.

I do enjoy teaching but the endless lesson planning and marking floods of paperwork and mindless bureaucracy of admin just sucked the joy out of it. I’ve already lost the drive years ago and what I see now is just a robot going through the routine motions she’s been perfecting for the past 6 years.

In September 2010, I attempted to escape by taking a semester off to backpack in Australia and look for a job. In my naiveté, I didn’t do enough research and found out the hard way that employers have to pay AUD$2,000 to sponsor your work visa and most were not willing to spend that much.

I returned to my old job in China, broke and disappointed and started all over again. In June 2011, I almost got evicted out of the country because they refused to give me a work visa claiming I couldn’t speak proper English because I wasn’t American, British, Australian or Kiwi. They couldn’t even read my diplomas and certificates in English because they couldn’t speak a goddamned word of my language. And these are the people who decided who couldn’t speak English. Inside I was screaming with the unfairness of it all that my credentials and degrees didn’t matter because of my passport. But most of all the ironic twist that all this time I was trying to get rid of you China and it turns out you were trying to get rid of me.

In the end my college was able to get my visa and I had a new fondness for China seeing how I almost lost her. But almost losing my job had taken me absolutely by surprise. It taught me the hard lesson nothing is for certain. The rug of comfort could be pulled out from your feet. You could stay lying down or you’ve taken precautions to get back on your feet in no time.

After quitting the company I’ve worked at for 6 years, I thought I’d feel elated, pumping my fists and busting into an impromptu rendition of Hall and Oates’ ‘You Make My Dreams’ scaring Chinese migrants from their mahjong boards. That or this growing clawing fear of anxiety, of ‘what now’? tightening its grip around my chest choking my windpipes as the wide chasm of the unknown yawns before me. This time there would be no safety net of my old job and old life to catch me. Instead though I feel a strange calm enveloping me. I feel nothing but the urge to continue moving forward.

Who knows what lies down in the depths of the unknown? When a door closes, another  opens you to many possibilities. There’s nothing to do but jump right in.

Stay tuned. 🙂

Photo from Smartly

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