How Living Abroad Helps Build your Confidence
In today’s highly globalized world, more and more people are choosing to live, work and study abroad, and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. The tread seems good as it has helped reduce intergroup biases, increase creativity and promote career success.
Steve Mburu 
International experiences can better help one improve their sense of self, especially their self-clarity. Self-clarity can be linked to several things from; psychological well-being, ability to cope with stress, and job performance but the research on these is very limited.
- Measuring Self-Concept Clarity.
Most studies have shown that transactional experiences such as job changes and romantic breakups, reduce our self-clarity. However, those who have lived abroad have a better sense of who we are. This, makes us wonder about the unique effect that this transactional experience is different from others, and how it may improve our self-clarity.
Research has shown that people who have lived abroad felt a better sense of clarity than those who hadn’t lived abroad. One possible explanation for this is that those who have lived abroad already have a sense of clarity, to begin with, compared to those who intend to.
- Helps Develop Self-Discerning Skills’
Moreover, living abroad has been shown to help improve our self- discerning skills. People tend to behave and act similarly to other people from the same area and thus they are not compelled to question if what they are doing is based on their values or the values of the culture in which they are embedded. In contrast, living abroad exposes one to novel norms and prompts them to repeatedly compare them with their beliefs which are then discarded or strengthened.
Depth, and not breadth, of living abroad experiences matter most. We expected that depth mattered more because the more people lived abroad, the more opportunities they have to engage in self-discerning reflections.
- Better sense of self and better feedback
A clear sense of self leads to more-congruent feedback and this leads to better decision-making in cooperative environments. A clear sense of self leads to better alignment between how you passive yourself and how others see you and this provides complete feedback to the system. This system is highly prevalent in large organizations. Congruence is related to self-clarity because when people have a clear understanding of themselves, they are more likely to project a clear and consistent self-image to others.
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- Clear Career Decisions
It also leads to clearer career decisions. Studies have shown that people struggle to make difficult career decisions at some point in their lives and what to do after graduation from university, and it’s one of the biggest challenges for students. It stands to reason that a clear sense of self helps elucidates the best match for our strengths and fulfill one’s values thus helping people to be clearer and more confident about their career decisions. Research showed that those who studied abroad showed more clarity in what they wanted to do after their graduation.
- Limitations and Future Direction.
One limitation of this could be the idea of having a ‘culture shock’- the idea of panic that comes from losing familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse. People may never overcome this anxiety because living abroad might be an alienating and bewildering experience that prevents them from growing their careers and developing a sense of self and reaping the benefits that come with it.
Most people eventually end up overcoming this stage as they get used to the surrounding. When you are stripped of your ordinary surrounding, friends, your daily routines you are forced into a direct experience that inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience.
