Your Arrival and After

Stage Zero — Where am I?

Don’t try to “hit the ground running.” That’s business–buzzword talk for the easily intimidated. Before you reach “full function” mode — if ever — you need to answer little questions like:

“Where am I?”
“How is business really done here?”
“How do you approach people here?”
“Who can help me?”

You will need to be awake enough to pay attention. And that is a many–step process of opening up, since first you must learn what is it exactly that you need to pay attention to, or even before that, where and how do you need to look? This process of opening the eye wider, then much wider, is part of the beginning of the process of changing oneself.

Stage One — You’re There and Not a Tourist

It may feel at first that you’re some kind of tourist — that’s a more familiar experience to you than what you’re actually doing. Remind yourself, ever so gently, that it isn’t quite so. Remember, you’re there for more than a week or two, more than a long vacation. In fact, you’re committed for two to three years, or more.

To be sure, you’ll discover gradually that indeed you're no tourist — you’re actually, believe it or not, living in the place. But you need to get used to it without dulling yourself to the excitement of the thing. As Han Solo said, rhetorically, in reference to the possibility of outrunning Imperial starcruisers, “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

In terms of quality of work, the first six months in the country the information overload is likely to be so heavy that it’s hard to “produce” anything more than versions of what you've done before — probably not your best work. Don’t worry. It will come.

Endgame for the move; Stage One for your new business base

Still more follow–up, but now you begin to know how to go about it, you begin to believe you can do it "their" way.

Keep following up. The more you do the more easily you see the breaks, the opportunities, maybe even you glimpse what looks like, feels like a torrent of opportunities. You’re using skills you’ve always had, it seems, but you discover that they work here too. You discover you can play “their” game.

Creativity on Mars
On the other hand, you’re discovering at the same time that you can also “be yourself.” That is, you can also do things with an element that is not local, in a way that may make you and what you have to offer unique. I don’t mean to imitate all the things you’ve done in the past. This is, after all, a new opportunity, a chance to try out something different, something that could be fun. So try. See what happens. Yes, such–and–such offer may not materialize (and if it does it will be later, much later); maybe you blew it with too–much creativity, too little creativity, or by not eating enough green vegetables the night before. Maybe the job was hard-wired to a brother-in-law. Try to maintain at least an armed neutrality with your anxiety.
Patience
Remember how slowly these things may move.
It can be half a year from the time a potential client proposes a job or project to the time a deal is actually made.
As I mentioned earlier, it took me seven months to complete negotiations for a long–term project with HP and 5½ months with the National University of Singapore. And, for better or worse, this apparently unavoidable slowness left me with two full–time jobs.
And don’t be afraid to call back — sometimes they don’t get the fax!
Mental preparation and maintenance
There are temptations and traps that can snarl your connection with where you are, just as there are “tricks” to keep your sanity and increase your strength and satisfaction.

Accepting unfamiliarity, anxiety, risk
Avoid the biggest trap of all: don’t fall for the Procrustean bed. Don’t mistake what you’re seeing or experiencing for what you saw or experienced where you grew up, learned everything till the cows came home, and where it all made sense. Don’t grasp for the comfort of the way things used to be. Note your desire to do so; then laugh, jump up and down, or sit and suffer if you can.
The rolling sea of an overwhelming daily information overload that you struggle to bear with means that you're paying attention and that you recognize that whatever it is, it doesn't fit — it's something that you don't understand. The recognition of the newness of the thing is your strongest single weapon, an all-purpose talisman that protects you.
Keep reminding yourself that it is possible to do something new. Don’t be paralyzed because you don’t know everything! Feeling intimidated is normal; being paralyzed is deadly!
And work to accept your own anxiety — it’s good practice for everything else. It may feel like risking “everything,” letting go of all your hard–won continuity and comfort, but you’ll find you can deal with this too.
Don’t get drunk on received ideas
Don’t believe anything that you hear — least of all about a place or a culture. In the end, swallowing such conventional wisdom and “truisms” will exhaust you — and you won’t see what’s in front of you. Keep all your received ideas at a distance from you with some long barbecue tongs.
Probing for the truth and enjoying it
Learning what's really true in this new world can be fun, like finding your way through a maze. But don’t be too quick to grasp — to "learn fast." Remember, once again, that you don’t understand.
If you're going, say, to Asia, don’t be taken in by the propaganda about things like the Emperor’s new Asian values. True, you can’t trust your North American or otherwise non–Asian understanding. Now on top of that, you can’t trust the “official” local line about what’s going on. What’s that leave? All your wits and resources!
To maximize your strength, make sure that you are unprejudiced, open-minded. Don’t be taken in by the many prejudiced, even out–and–out racist individuals that you will need to deal with. Be prepared to look at your culture of origin in a new light too.
Finding and using local literature
I would argue that the literature of a region — whether fiction, songs, cabaret, wayang kulit, or opera — is a better guide to the underlying nature of experience there than this month’s government propaganda. See if you can identify appropriate material and get hold of it. If you can get it in book form or on videotape, you can read or study it before you go and/or after you arrive. The following example may serve to show how important such reading can be.
For Southeast Asia, the most helpful single book that I found was Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife — though her Joy Luck Club was dismissed by many Chinese in Asia as “American.” I finished reading the book, which takes place in China in the first half of this century, during a long winter trip along the Yellow River.
More than from any other book I got a sense of the scale of the suffering, and the fact that even the well–off were not altogether protected from it. And always in the background is a degradation of women that is staggering, massive, horrific.
Though I’d already lived in Singapore more than two years, I finally began to see why people in that city–state like to keep their heads down, why they don’t want to go out on a limb — and how the modern governments of the region can still reinforce and take advantage of these long–inculcated fears.
Dealing with your ignorance, feeling intimidated, your doubts about what you can do
Once more, don’t be so afraid to try new things that you try none! If you feel intimidated because you don’t know everything, don’t let that intimidation stultify you. If you continue to take a few risks — like the big one you took by committing yourself to the Big Move — you’ll find that you can do more than you would have thought possible.
Accepting your own courage
All right, you’ve felt overwhelmed, discouraged, frustrated, stymied, outmaneuvered, defeated, trapped. But you haven’t succumbed. In the face of your own fear you didn’t run away. Don’t minimize what you’ve done; don’t pretend that each of these acts of courage was “no big deal.” There is a humility that is honest and increases the strength of everyone. But there is a belittling that is blindness, that degrades and wounds us all. Learn something from your own strength, and from what you’ve been able to do by employing it.

Stage Two — You’ve Proven It to Yourself

Beware the beauty of your own ideas
You're starting a new system of understanding. Work to accept the fact that, this once, you do not understand. Then you’ll begin to be able to see things as they are. When the foundation is built correctly, you will make rapid progress. Don't expect miracles.
Keep the ideas that you develop yourself (all your very favorites!) — especially for the first year — in their kennels. Your anxiety is a better guide.
Stretching out
Now you know you can do it. Try some experimenting, take some risks you felt you couldn’t afford originally. Maybe you'll discover great things, or at least short cuts.
Making friends
Relationships build trust, outflank suspicion and even cut through red tape. And they can break down your feeling of isolation, renew your faith that communication and all good things are possible, and even connect you with the local mainstream.
Becoming “yourself” again — in the new place
You've gone back and forth between, on the one hand, what you needed to do in the new place, the new culture, your new system of understanding, and on the other hand, what feels meaningful to you. In this struggle and synthesis the uniqueness of what you offer is being forged.

Your base has now become more solid. Many tasks appropriate to the new region are now routinized. You have enough clients to expand the business if you wish to. You know where to go for employees or contractors and how best to select them. You have established the relationships you needed with suppliers. With this latest further confidence, further support, further strength and understanding, further knowledge of when to go forward and when to stand still, you can move ahead to expressing, acting on or according to what is in your own heart. What follows for you and others is then less predictable and may be more gratifying than what had gone before.

Stage Three — Are There Any Limits to What You Can Do?

So in some part this has become — even as you navigate among the familiar paper clips and pagers and deadlines, the unfamiliar customs and languages and propaganda — a kind of spiritual journey, an adventure complete with tests, new powers gained, new Scyllas and Charybdises to twist your boat between, long-buried terror in the face of the unknown, new goals achieved, vistas glimpsed and further goals set, new selves shaped.