I left Bulgaria when I was 19 to find a better future by doing my BA abroad. I had two suitcases and no real plan beyond the next semester. I didn't know I was starting a pattern: Germany, The UK, Ireland, The Netherlands, and now Spain. Six countries. Six times starting over.
Did I get tired? No. Has it been easy? Absolutely not. But moving abroad multiple times has been the best growth opportunity I've ever had.
Here's what I've actually learned.
The first time you move countries alone, you learn resilience because you have no choice. There's no safety net. No parent around the corner. No best friend to call at 11pm when the landlord won't fix the heating and you've had the worst week of your life.
You figure it out. And then the next time something goes wrong — a failed project, a difficult manager, a role that doesn't pan out — you remember that you've rebuilt before. You know what it feels like to start from zero and come out the other side. That knowledge doesn't make hard things easy; it makes them survivable and it gives you incredible mental power.
I've moved to countries where I didn't speak the language, where I had no network, where I had to figure out health insurance and tax systems with a dictionary in hand. Every single time, I came through. That track record is the most underrated form of self-confidence I know.
The biggest misconception about being an expat is that you have to constantly adapt yourself — your personality, your values, the way you operate. You don't. What you adapt is your approach.
Germans communicate directly; Irish communication is built on warmth and indirection; the Dutch are brutally honest in a way that takes getting used to; Spaniards prioritise relationship before agenda. I've had to meet all of them where they are. More patient in some rooms. More formal in others. More relational, more direct — depending on who I'm with.
But I've never stopped being Bulgarian even if I have a Dutch passport now. Loud, direct, passionate, always early, always over-prepared. That stays. What changes is how I channel it. Knowing the difference between your core and your style is one of the most useful things I've ever learned — in leadership and in life.
Before I moved countries, I thought I understood people who were different from me. I was wrong. You don't understand the experience of not belonging until you've sat in a meeting where everyone laughs at a reference you don't get, or filled out a form in a language you're still learning, or realised halfway through a conversation that you've misread a cultural cue that everyone else in the room understood instinctively.
That discomfort is one of the most valuable things that's ever happened to me. It made me slow down before judging. It made me ask more questions. It made me default to curiosity over assumption. And it made me better at working with people from everywhere, because I know what it's like to be the one still learning the unwritten rules.
Most of the empathy I'm capable of today was built in those uncomfortable moments, not the comfortable ones.
I grew up thinking there was one correct way to do most things. Work hard. Be ambitious. Move fast.
Then I lived in Ireland, where the culture is built on slowing down and connecting. In the Netherlands, where work-life balance is genuinely non-negotiable, not aspirational. In Spain, where family comes first, always, and where the pace of life in Jerez de la Frontera where I live makes you question why you were ever in such a hurry.
None of these are wrong. None of them are completely right either. Living across multiple countries teaches you that most of what you believed was simply familiar — not universal, not obvious, not the only way. That shift is permanent. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
I now run teams across EMEA. The fact that I've lived in six of those countries — not just visited, not just worked remotely, but actually built a life, paid taxes, raised two kids in two of them — makes me a fundamentally different leader than I would have been otherwise.
For years I felt like I was always between places. Not quite from here, not quite from there. Like you belong everywhere a little and nowhere completely.
I've stopped seeing it that way. I've built homes in six countries. I've built friendships that span continents. My girls are growing up with parents from two countries, raised in a third, with a fourth and fifth woven through their heritage. That's not a gap. That's a gift.
The ability to build belonging wherever you land — to find community, to root yourself even when everything is new — is one of the most transferable life skills I have. And it's one I'm determined to pass on to them.
Six countries. Five languages. Two daughters born in the middle of a pandemic in a country that wasn't either of our homes. One career built entirely across borders. Not because it was easy. Because it wasn't. And I wouldn't change it for anything.
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