Most leaders think working abroad is about learning a new culture.
In my experience, the deeper challenge is something else entirely.
Living abroad quietly shakes the assumptions that made you feel competent in the first place.
Sometimes, it even cracks your professional identity.
Coaching international leaders is not a specialization you acquire by adding a cross-cultural tool to a generalist practice.
The question is not whether you have lived internationally.
It is whether you have done the personal, cultural, and psychological work required to coach in this terrain without simplifying it, projecting onto it, or prematurely reframing it.
What follows is not only a “must-have list”. It is the minimum bar I hold for myself when working at this level.
Since moving to Seoul, I keep crossing paths with the same kind of women — small, determined, often wearing floral pants and a big sun visor.
When I described these scenes to a friend who’s lived in Korea for years, she smiled knowingly. “You’ve just met ajummas,” she said — and with that single word, a whole world of meaning opened up.
