From a talk at the Career Growth Festival, Brussels
There is a small word that changes everything.
Not a strategy, not a framework, not a new habit stack. Just three letters. AND.
I spoke about it recently at the Career Growth Festival in Brussels — a room full of people navigating careers across cultures, many of them expats, many of them trying to figure out what smart AI use actually looks like in their professional lives. As I looked at the audience, I realised: these two groups share more than a room. They share a mindset challenge.
The Pattern That Keeps Showing Up
In the past two years, most of my work has lived at the intersection of AI and human growth. I have coordinated the AI Navigators project in Belgium – mentoring and training secondary school teachers to become AI ambassadors and mentors for their colleagues. I have also co-led the instructional development for AI Literacy and Mentoring modules for workplace mentors in Belgium, Bulgaria, and Spain.
In both projects, something kept appearing in the early surveys and conversations, a kind of thinking that felt like a wall: AI is either good or bad. It either helps or harms. My role either matters or it doesn’t.
Either. Or.
The teachers in the AI Navigators programme actually pushed back when they saw that two out of five training days were dedicated to coaching and mentoring skills. “We already know how to mentor. Why are we doing this?” What they did not yet see – and what they absolutely did see by the end – was that the coaching mindset was the key to understanding AI. That holding a question instead of needing an answer, that sitting with uncertainty and still moving forward, was precisely the skill AI adoption requires.
After the training, they came back with a different sentence structure. Not “I have limitations with tech AND I am overwhelmed AND this is too much.” But: “I may have limitations AND I know that the only version I’m competing with is myself from yesterday AND I will see the difference if I act today.”
Same reality. Completely different direction.
Living Abroad Teaches You the Same Thing
Here it gets personal.
I have been living in Brussels for six years. I arrived as a wife following an expat husband – which, if we are being precise, makes me an immigrant. Although immigrant feels dramatic and expat sounds a little too polished for what I actually experience. The truth is somewhere in between, which is my point. And I call my experience:
DREAMMIGRANT
Someone who arrives established and does not start from scratch, but continues the journey. Both of life and career.
Since early 2026, I have been conducting one-hour interviews with people living abroad, most of them in Belgium and Western Europe, for my Culture and Strengths Lab initiative. After around 30 conversations so far, some patterns are already emerging.
People who struggle in their living-abroad experience tend to focus on what is different. They (too often) look for signs of belonging. They compare. They see their old life and their new life as two separate, competing realities.
People who thrive abroad do something different. They do not compare or perhaps – they simply do not need to. They hold both worlds without ranking them. “I miss my friends at home AND I am building something real here. This culture is unfamiliar AND it is teaching me things my home never could.”
That little word again.
Three Things to Take With You
Our brains love a list of three. Here are mine.
1. Think AND.
Black and white are elegant. Classic. But the outfit only becomes interesting when you add the colourful scarf. Or the red shoes.
Try this: take a challenge you are sitting with right now and finish the sentence not with but, but with AND.
“But” cancels. “AND” includes.
“I am stuck in my career, but I am doing my best.” (to unstuck)”.
Notice how that lands. Now try:
“I am stuck in my career, AND I am doing my best.” (to move forward)…
Something shifts. You are already closer to movement.
2. Life is a spectrum.
It is not the “fixed” position or situation you feel right now in.
Fulfilment, success, happiness – none of these are a “fixed address” you arrive at and unpack your bags. They are a number on a dial, and the dial is always moving.
If you are at a 5 out of 10 today, the question is not how do I get to 10? It is: what would move me to a 6 this week? A conversation. An experiment. A phone call. Small movement is still movement.
Thinking in spectrum is just another way of saying AND.
3. The dots connect later.
Think of something that ten years ago was a dream: a vague, slightly embarrassing, probably-not-realistic idea, that is now just part of your normal life. You have it. You earned it. You perhaps forgot you once wished for it.
The dots from today will connect later too.
Your job is not to predict exactly how. Your job is to keep showing up – with curiosity, with courage, and with that tiny word: AND.
Inspiration rarely arrives from nowhere. Like intuition, it surfaces from what already exists within us: our senses, our histories, the textures of what we fear and what we hope for. The same is true of the journeys we make when we uproot and rebuild in new countries. We don’t begin from zero. We continue from exactly where we are, in every sense of the word.
This understanding, and a year’s worth of quiet observation gave birth to The Culture & Strengths Lab.
What Is The Culture & Strengths Lab?
It is a process, rather than a destination. Launched in January 2026, it takes shape through interviews, analyses, positive interventions, talks, articles – and whatever else wants to emerge. A living lab: one conversation at a time.
Its first purpose is to surface the cultural beliefs, behaviors, and inner landscapes of people raised in one culture and living abroad. I am curious about the places where origin strengths (once perfectly calibrated) now slow down career potential, create unexpected friction, or generate the occasional positive surprise no one saw coming.
A useful anchor from psychological research: cultural immersion rarely follows a fixed timeline, but the shift from visitorto truly immersed tends to take between three and five years. When does belonging actually begin? That’s one of the central questions this lab wants to hold.
The Case I Present: A Bulgarian in Belgium
I have lived in Brussels since 2020. Most of the people I work with – in teams, in coaching, in the in-between spaces of life and work are also living abroad. Predominantly expats invited to work in new countries, and immigrants building careers and businesses in unfamiliar geographies or at least in places they now call “a home away from home”.
Expat fits my husband. His role brought our family here.
Immigrant never quite landed for me. I wasn’t leaving anything behind. I was building forward, already happy, already mid-trajectory in Bulgaria: career growing, future taking shape.
Restarting in Brussels felt like a continuation of my own becoming. Trained and experienced across broadcasting, communications, organizational culture, coaching, and L&D, I founded New Mindset Coaching & Traininghere, not as an immigrant, not as an expat, but as something I now recognize in many clients, even if they wouldn’t name it this way:
A dreammigrant.
Someone who arrives abroad already established: in skills, education, and experience; and rebuilds without a fixed deadline or an inner resistance to return. Someone navigating the real hurdles of immigration with calculated risk, on a safety net that is woven, at least at the start. The arrival before the continued becoming.
The connections I carried from home launched me. They still support me. Today, ninety percent of my coaching and consultancy work is cross-cultural.
What the Lab Has Already Uncovered
A recurring pattern emerged across individual sessions, group work, and team coaching in the past few years. Four observations began to take shape:
One. People hold beliefs that shape everything: their thinking, their action or inaction, their ambitions. They call these personal traits, habits, behaviors. Often, it is culture speaking. Culture is “how we do things here”. Except that “here” has quietly become “there”. People adapt to new environments carrying their original selves. This is the source of real diversity. Authenticity. Sometimes it can stretch a person to the point of tearing.
Two. Under pressure, people amplify what they already do well. Willpower intensifies. Kindness overflows. A color metaphor that stays with me: rose deepens into neon pink; yellow pushes into bright orange. What powered you at home can overwhelm here. Or paradoxically – no longer feel visible enough.
Three. Goals look like destinations. Rarely are they. What quietly waits on the other side of achievement is often peace of mind: that still, embodied sense of alignment. Less attached to outcome, more attached to the “road”. Goal achievement mostly serves the self. Peace of mind opens space for others. When that expanded view carries shared value, it becomes leadership.
Four. What feels most personal is often most cultural. Positive Psychology’s framework of 24-character strengths across 6 universal virtues, developed by Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman, offers something essential here: strengths are globally valued, yet never fixed in expression. It is on the spectrum, think of a potentiometer, not a static scale. One culture’s patient kindness can read as passivity in another. A client from Estonia lost opportunities in Germany because her warmth was misread as weakness. These gaps live quietly inside global talent and they matter enormously for retention, performance, and authentic collaboration.
The Culture & Strengths Lab traces these paths through real voices. It does not offer a theory framework, though is grounded in psychology, behavioral science, coaching, and communication, and fully tested against lived experience. Semi-structured interviews with dreammigrants like me, with shorter or longer roads behind them toward belonging and leadership. Patterns are already surfacing. Alive. Rough-edged. This will unfold one story at a time.
Is This Your Story?
If you have been living abroad for a few years or more, navigating the space between the culture that shaped you and the one you are now building your life inside, I would love to hear from you.
The Culture & Strengths Lab is looking for voices willing to sit with these questions:
Where do your origin strengths still carry you?
Where do they snag?
What has the journey asked you to let go of, and what has it given back?
Each conversation takes the form of a one-hour Zoom interview, conducted by me, Svetoslava Stoyanova and becomes part of a growing body of insight into cultural efficacy: what it truly means to belong, to lead, and to thrive across cultures.
One conversation at a time.
If this is your story, reach out. Let’s talk. I’d love for your voice to be part of it.
