Feeling stressed and overwhelmed is normal, but putting the following feedback and best practices in place will help significantly. Additional resources including Best Practices and Coaching Videos are readily available for clients.
Finding Empowerment Helps When Overwhelmed
Your GCA Report empowerment scores (84% is average) relate to several topics. One such topic or dimension is feeling trusted and showing trust toward others, which builds empowerment. Another dimension is displaying reliability, patience, and consistency toward others. A third dimension is how much personal control you experience when your life is not regulated by circumstances, luck, or strong people who exert unusual influence. This concept is similar to what is often called internal locus of control or field independence, and speaks to your outlook or actions regarding trust, reliability, patience, tolerance and consistency toward others as well as perceiving these same qualities about yourself. A person can experience a little or a lot of relationship trust and be perceived as a reliable person for many reasons, including attitudes toward others, level of patience with people, missed expectations during an encounter with a group, or inaccurate cultural stereotyping where there has not yet been ample opportunity to build reliability and trust.
Best Practices
- Initiate trust leading to reciprocal actions; start with respect for others
- Create an affirming and supportive communication climate, learn how to disagree, how group meetings work (i.e. Latin Americans don’t do the American “Hi all” but greet individually). Learn how the host culture agrees to disagree and how to maintain civility
- Simplify or delete your expectations; mistrust occurs with cultural violations
- Ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that could happen”?
- Finish projects in a timely way, which helps you avoid feeling out of control, trapped, and powerless
- Give honest praise to others; surprisingly, you may well receive it back when you need it most
- Ask for advice and help on new ideas and tasks
Focus on My Work
Go ahead and review the GCA Report under task confidence. This sections deals with self-view of assurance, poise, confidence, and ability to be trustworthy. It also means you will want to believe that you really can succeed in accomplishing tasks. How? Goals, being prepared, and literally believing you can do it are starting points. Here is more:
Best Practices
- Recall successful ventures — what did you do then?
- Transfer past successes to new role as expatriate
- Set goals and measure your results — reward yourself for achieving
- Develops scripts to affirm others — can lead to reciprocal affirmation