SwingUp Coaching Ltd. | Kathryn Supka
Every international business runs on people who move. A manager takes on a role in another country, a partner follows a career across a continent, an expat comes home after years abroad.
On paper, these are the changes: a new contract, a new address, a new name on the organizational chart. Companies have become very good at managing them. What they rarely see is what happens inside the person.
The American author William Bridges described this difference in the early 1990s. Change happens around us and usually has a date. Transition happens within us: letting go of who we were and discovering who we are becoming. Relocation is an event. Transition is a process.
A life in transition
Sociologists have a name for children who grow up between cultures: Third Culture Kids. I am one of them. I was born in Switzerland with Hungarian roots and relocated to Brazil at a young age. Since then, my life has included ten international relocations across three continents including the returns home, which I have learned can be transitions on their own. Now, my eleventh is unfolding as I prepare to return to Switzerland after nearly three years in Cyprus.
I didn’t have a word for adaptability then. I simply learned to observe, to listen and to understand that something normal in one culture could be perceived entirely differently in another. What began intuitively became increasingly relevant throughout my international and professional life: reading situations, adjusting to unfamiliar environments and finding my footing without losing myself in the process.
For decades, I didn’t think of any of this as expertise; it was simply my life. Only much later did the pieces connect: international experience, more than three decades in the corporate world, professional coaching training and certifications, and a fascination with people and their ability to adapt and grow.
Arriving and adapting
Most people in international transitions aren’t falling apart. They are holding everything together. A manager arrives and discovers that the rules have changed. Feedback is perceived differently, hierarchies work differently, and a polite “yes” may not mean what it meant at home. Nobody hands you the rulebook, yet these invisible differences can determine whether you build trust and lead successfully.
Here, adaptability becomes more than a business word. Something is happening that you didn’t plan and cannot immediately change. This is happening to me — how do I react? Do I force an old solution onto a new reality, or can I understand what has changed and decide what to do next?
And the employee rarely moves alone. A partner may leave behind a career, an identity and a network, and children need to find their place in a new school, language and culture. You cannot relocate the professional without relocating the person.
When things don’t go to plan
Some deeper challenges only become visible once the intensity of arriving has passed: the boxes are unpacked, the team is built, the family has found a routine. Then something shifts. The role requires different expertise, the partner doesn’t settle, or someone is performing well but has stopped feeling like themselves.
Is it the person who doesn’t fit, or the role? Could responsibilities be redesigned? Is the challenge professional, cultural, personal, or all three? Changing course doesn’t mean failure. Not learning from it would be.
Adaptability does not mean endlessly bending ourselves until we fit. Real adaptability requires flexibility and a sense of self, and at some point the task is no longer reinvention but integration. Resilience may help us get through transition, adaptability helps us respond to it, and integration
allows us to grow from it.
Coming home
One of the most underestimated international transitions often begins when the assignment is over. Going home should be easy, except you are not the person who left, and home hasn’t stood still either.
Returning may mean moving from considerable autonomy abroad back into the hierarchy of headquarters. Status changes, networks have moved on. A partner may face another career restart, while children may suddenly feel foreign in the country everyone tells them is home.
People who have lived and worked abroad can return with capabilities that are difficult to develop in a classroom: making decisions without familiar reference points, reading what isn’t being said and building trust across cultures. Yet the organization may still see the person who originally left.
We talk a great deal about preparing talent to leave, and far too little about who comes back. Bringing an employee home is a logistical process; reintegrating the person they have become is something else entirely. Experience alone does not necessarily create wisdom. Integrated experience can.
Where SwingUp Coaching fits
This is where the threads of my own life and professional experience eventually came together. Today, I bring my lived international experience together with more than three decades in the corporate world, professional coaching training and certifications, while currently working towards the ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential.
I work in the space between external change and internal transition.
Through SwingUp Coaching, I support international professionals, leaders and their families before, during and after relocation, including when an assignment doesn’t develop as plannedand during the often-underestimated transition of coming home.
For organizations, this creates a confidential space outside internal hierarchies to understand what has changed and what the right next step might be, for the person and for the business. Sometimes that means adapting, sometimes redesigning a role, sometimes returning home. The
aim is not to force the original plan to succeed at any cost, but to make sure the value created along the way — human and organizational — is not lost simply because the plan changed.
The next frontier is human
AI will make international business faster, and technology will make global mobility easier. What may increasingly set us apart are deeply human capabilities: empathy, adaptability, cultural sensitivity and the ability to connect with people who see the world differently. The organizations that thrive internationally will likely be those that recognize and retain the human potential created through change.
Because international business doesn’t happen between countries or organizations. It happens between people. So the most important question may no longer be just Where are we going next?But: Who are we becoming on the way?
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