There are times in life that, no matter how much you try and avoid it, you need to take a “leap of faith”. This is something that I’m sure almost expats are familiar with. But a leap of faith doesn’t have to be as drastic as jumping to another country.

You might be weighing up the pro’s and cons of a career change.  You may be choosing to commit to a life partner. Or you simply may have to choose between one university or another.

We make decisions every day in our lives. Some have a larger impact than others. However most of the time, there comes a point where we can procrastinate no longer, and we just have take action with whatever knowledge we have.

Taking the leap of faith can be hard. Because it often means acknowledging you do not know everything. It means putting your trust in a system, or in the judgement and advise of others. Of course, that is why it’s called a leap!

As hard as taking that initial step can be, it’s so important. Since it will be the catalyst for change that we ultimately want… it’s just we may not like the journey to getting there. And there are ways that you can prepare yourself to make sure that while you are putting your faith into the leap, you have also done enough work on yourself that you are ready for what lies beyond.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Laozi

Be as prepared as possible, before the leap of faith

You should be prepared. Often, we think about those people who go on a life changing event on the spur of the moment. And sometimes spur of the moment change can be good. However not for everyone. If you have a family, dependents, loans, or investments, you might not be in the situation to just up and leave everything.

So, before you make the leap try and prepare yourself as best as possible. You will never be able to prepare for every outcome. Because we cannot possibly know all the factors and variables in our lives. But what we can do is try and make sure we have enough resources and tools to make the upcoming journey smoother and more successful.

Thinking about a career change? What are the pro’s and cons of both staying in your current job and moving? Thinking about moving cities and becoming an expat? Do some research on what other expats have done before you.

Finding stories of people who have come before you on a similar journey is always helpful. You can learn what they did wrong, what they did right, and what they’d improve if they had the chance. Do your research before taking the leap of faith.

What if no-one has walked my path before?

In most cases, there will be someone who has come before you who you can learn from. And if not, don’t stress! Try and find people who share similar parts of their story with you. While you may not share the same story exactly; maybe the initial few chapters of your story is similar to someone else you know. Then, you might have another contact whose middle or turning point was the same as yours.

For me, this was a big factor for creating this blog. A way of journaling my thoughts and experiences, and helping other men who choose to follow the expat spouses overseas. There are many expectations to be managed, some of them I talk about here in this article. “Managing Expectations of Being Married to an Expat Wife. “

Accepting feelings of loss and infrequent failure

The thing with trying out new stuff, is sometimes you may not always succeed. At least initially. A lot of us have a big problem with the idea of failure. We may feel that we have lost time, or that there has really been no point in our journey up until this point.

Perhaps the new job you wanted is more similar to the one you left than you thought. Or maybe the city that you had high hopes for, is actually very different to what you expected. Maybe the project you spent an entire year working on, was never meant to come to fruition. And it is just getting harder and harder to make things work.

What was the point then, of working so hard towards these goals?

There are always going to be some stumbling blocks, some setbacks. But these blocks were placed on our path for a reason. Why?

Failure is actually a reminder, rather than a final step or endgame. It reminds us to check our expectations. Did we really have reasonable expectations about our journey before beginning? If not, that’s ok. It’s time to realign our expectations and change them with the new information provided.

If you’d like to read a story of how an initial setback turned into a fulfilling adventure and approach to travel; check out this article I wrote for NOSTALGIACS.

We are reminded that we haven’t reached the final stage in our adventure yet. For all we know we could be just beginning. Failure helps put things in perspective and can make us realise just how large our goals are and how much more work there needs to bed done.

Understand that failure is not a reflection of you and your abilities. It is part of the journey and an opportunity for growth and self-improvement. You cannot truly know how far you have to go down until you have the leap of faith.

“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.”

John F. Kennedy

It’s time to reject FOMO

The very first time my school had an athletics race was a new and unique time for me. I didn’t win, and for the first time I found there were other boys who were faster than me.

I must’ve been watching them in their lanes as they bypassed me and I struggled to catch up, because a teacher came up to me after the race. And he said, “next time, just worry about running your race, and don’t watch what the others are doing.”

The Fear of Missing Out is real, even more so now that we’ve given it a cool abbreviation. However, just because it’s cool on social media doesn’t mean it will help us. Always looking over into someone else’s lane, and worrying that they are having a better time than you will not help you get across the finish line.

In the heat of the moment, in the race, there’s so much we don’t see. We don’t see the training that other person has done, nor the equipment they are using, nor their natural born set of skills that help them in the situation.

Comparing yourself to others too often can be bad for your own personal story. If you are always looking over at what other people are doing you will never have time to work on your own skills. Especially if we are talking about taking a leap of faith. Jumping into a new career, relationship, or lifestyle. FOMO might transition to real fear and stop you from taking the jump at all.  And once your boat sets sail, towards the horizon of the new goal you want to achieve, it isn’t always easy to steer back. You can. But constantly jumping ship from one project to another means that you’ll never really have the chance to sail far on your own quest and enjoy the journey.

The leap is important, but so is the falling

You may notice, if you do ever get to that magic horizon you have been dreaming of. That there are many things that are different now. Does your end goal look the same? Was it easier or harder than you thought when you first expected? Or is it even the same as it was at the beginning? You may have been trying to land on one set of co-ordinates, only to realise the place you wanted was just a little east of there.

And what about yourself? How have you changed since taking the leap of faith, or since beginning your journey. What you should find is that you are in a completely different space, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, than when you started this journey. And it should be for the better.

When we take the leap of faith we understand that there may be a significant amount of time where all we are doing is free falling. Where we are just allowing ourselves to be taken by the wind, and reacting to it.

A long, long time ago. When I first started this blog, I reflected on the idea of “getting used to floating”. Accepting that there is some amount of time that all we can do is enjoy the prolonged sensation of falling, after we have made the leap. It’s definitely in need of an update, but you can still check the article out here.

In this way, the leap of faith is as much about the preparation and the leap itself, as it is getting used to the experience of falling. And of being suspended in time, in the now, in what is happening. In the moment. And as much as I hate to leave things on a cheesy note, there is no real better way to sum things up. You can learn just as much, and become just as good, from the act of falling than from landing at your destination.