WHY CREATIVITY AND ENERGY LEVELS FADE ON RETURNING FROM EXPATRIATION



It is now several months since you returned home from expatriation. Time has gone by and you feel that you are once again settled into a daily routine, the desire to discover or learn which you felt during expatriation is slowly fading away.

During expatiation, there are several reasons why your creativity increased: discovering a new environment and for some, the luxury of having time to develop new activities. You may feel that your creativity level was high during expatriation and on returning home, it was still at a high during the first few months, however over time it has dropped.

I looked at some of the reasons which can explain this drop in creativity experienced by returning Expats:

-        Settling back into your home country
-        Finding your place again with friends and family
-        Starting work or looking for work
-        Children starting new schools
-        Getting new home in place
-        Administrative papers
-        Less free time to develop activities
-        And finally, caught up in a routine; a feeling of repetition which can lead to a state of boredom.

Let us look at the last point, that is getting stuck in a routine where the focus is handling work and home which can result in a type of stress where you will be overpowered by this alone. You have invested your time and energy into settling back and you feel at a point where you have little energy or enthusiasm for doing something new. 

So how do take hold of your time again, incite your energy and by doing this reactive your creativity. The following are some areas you can invest in:

-        Regularly practicing sport  
-        Getting out of the house at weekends. Going to the theatre, Cinema, Museums…
-        Join a group
-        Follow a course or training to advance your career and to keep up to date with advancements in your domain

Learning something new is a great means of reigniting our curiousity and keeping atrack of our career. In previous articles I looked at MOOCs which are a great solution for online learning, in particular if you are an Expat in a country where you don't speak the language. Now that you are back home, you also have the possibility of attending classroom courses where you have the interaction with others and your professors. Many Universities and other Academic or Training Institutions offer the possibility for mature students to continue with or compliment their education. It is never too late to learn something new and get the creativity following! The first steps are in your hands!

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