What is an Expat Coach?
An expat coach is a coach that coaches someone not living in their native country. They may have moved for their own career or may be the spouse or partner of someone that moved for their career.
What are the issues expat coaches can help with?
Expat coaching can start even before expatriation with planning for the move. This might include deciding which country to move to, career coaching, coaching around preparing children for a move or around organizing expatriation.
Once the expatriation occurs, coaching can be around life and workplace adjustment in the realm of cross cultural coaching and executive coaching, management coaching or team coaching.
The expat coach may specialize in coaching expat wives or partners and coach them in adapting to a new country, making new friends and finding meaning and purpose in their lives.
The expat coach may specialize in coaching parents that are expats or their children around issues of adapting to a new school, behavior expectations or changes, making friends or cultural differences.
At the end of the expatriation, some coaches specialize in repatriation and adapting back to the home country. Here the coach may look at helping clients return to work, issues around adapting to a life without home help or transitioning children back into a new country and routine. Issues around identity, loneliness and a sense of loss or grief might also be explored.
So if you choose expat coaching as your niche there are many possibilities to specialized down even further and create tailored programs to address specific issues expats face.
How to become an expat coach?
Coaches who choose to become an expat coach have often lived in multiple countries themselves and speak multiple languages. They have experienced what it is like to live and work in a new culture and new countries and they understand some of the challenges faced by expatriation.
Expats often complete an ICF accredited coach training program (because the accreditation is recognized world wide) whilst they are living in another country and find that expat coaching is the perfect career for someone who is themselves an expat because of the ability to work from anywhere.
International Coach Academy offers an accredited coach training program via live zoom classes and an online learning environment and caters for a global coaching community. Our program consists 60 classes per week across all time zones and the program can be taken at your own pace. We have students from over 126 countries in classes making the whole coach training experience a rich one both in learning and networking.
Life Coaching for Expats
A Research Paper By Marta Camacho Tejero, Expats Coach, NETHERLANDS
Life coaching for expats has been my niche for the past few months and I believe it is here to stay. For the last 15 years of my life, I have lived as an expat in France, Georgia, and the Netherlands, and this experience led me to work with clients who are going through the same process of change in their lives. For this reason, this paper wants to focus on the experience of expatriates, like me, during a process of change, and how coaching is crucial to be able to learn, move forward, and achieve any goal. I have also decided to share my own experience as a client during a recent move and life change. Read More