Making friends as an expat can be an intimidating task. How do you prioritize getting out there and meeting new people when you’re also thinking about starting your life again in a completely new place?

To help with this very important area of your wellbeing as a new expat, we’ve spoken to Sarah Siegert. She’s a friendship coach for expats, and has moved abroad herself almost five years ago.

You might find yourself asking – what does a friendship coach do exactly? Through her coaching, Sarah helps expats overcome any barriers that are holding them back from making new friends and maintaining healthy friendships. Here are her best tips!

What helped me survive the first year as an expat were the relationships with my old friends from my home country. How do we make sure we keep those alive and well while building a life in a new country?

The most important thing to mention is that the quality of a friendship is only ever determined by the thoughts we have about the other person and the friendship itself. So even though you’re not physically close to your friends from your home country anymore, you can still feel close to them. That’s what is going to determine the quality of your friendship and it’s in your control. So instead of focusing on thoughts like ‘I won’t see them as often anymore therefore I won’t know what’s going on for them and we will drift apart’ focus on thoughts like ‘I won’t see them as much anymore but I will ask them every week what’s been going on for them so I will still be a part of their life’. 

Strategies you can apply include: regular contact (videocall, phone call), being curios and asking questions, sharing things from your personal life, continuing hobbies together despite distance (cooking, yoga, etc) e.g. via videocall, remembering important dates, sending personalized gifts or planning trips together.

For that to work, both you and your friends must be committed to keeping your friendship alive and well by working towards staying emotionally connected. I would encourage you to have an open conversation about this with your friends to find out how they think about keeping the friendship well and alive and what worries or concerns they might have so that you can both find a solution together to keep your friendship going.

With that being said, it is also important to remember that your friendships with people from your home country might change and that is absolutely normal. Friendships are meant to change as much as we are meant to change as individuals – it’s part of life.

If someone is an introvert and finds it difficult to go out there and meet new people, what are some good ways for them to make friends in a new country?

I like to think about introversion and extroversion as a way of how we recharge our batteries and not as a way of how we make friends. I am an introvert myself but I’m very good at making friends. These two things aren’t necessarily correlated. When you apply this definition, it resolves and frees you up from the thought error of ‘Introverts struggle to make friends’ because that’s not true. They might struggle but not because of their introversion but because of them being shy, them not finding people they click with, etc.

When you’re an introvert, you like to recharge your batteries during time alone or quiet time. When you’re an extrovert, you like to recharge your batteries during social situations. 

In order for you to make friends, you only need to follow three steps:
1. feel confident within yourself,
2. meet your ideal friends,
3. connect with them. 

It’s very simple and we all know how to do it because we’ve done it in the past. It becomes difficult when our brain has drama or thoughts about one of the steps, e.g. I am not worthy, I don’t know where to find people I click with, I hate small talk.

An exercise you can do is to sit down and write down all the thoughts you have about the three steps I mentioned above, this is where your work lies. You need to overcome the thoughts you have about the three steps in order for you to do them. Coaching is a great way to overcome those thought barriers.

What would be your one tip for an expat who is constantly feeling like an outsider?

When we feel like an outsider we often blame external reasons for it, e.g. the others don’t include me, I don’t speak the language, I grew up in a different country. We believe that those external reasons are preventing us from belonging and being part of something, but that’s not the case. Belonging starts from within and it’s something we need to create, you need to feel like you belong in order for you to create belonging.

When I moved from Germany to London I told myself that I was an outsider, because I grew up in a different culture. I thought that was a fact, until I realized  that I used the external fact of having grown up in a different culture as a barrier to belong and connect. I focused so much on the differences between me and other people that I didn’t see what we had in common. I prevented myself from feeling connection because I was too busy feeling like an outsider.

I changed my focus from disconnection to connection and found proof for what me and the other person can connect over – we’re both humans, we’re both women, we’re both in our 20’s. This allowed me to see a possibility of me belonging in this group and so I showed up differently and I allowed myself to be part of the group

If you feel like an outsider, I want you to know that it isn’t anyone else’s job to include you but yours. You need to include yourself, no one else is going to do it for you. That starts from within, feeling like you belong and is followed by acting like you belong. But you can’t act like that if you focus on your thoughts of why ‘you’re an outsider’. 

You might have some thoughts about that, write them down and check if they’re true, if they serve you and if you like thinking/ believing those. Then ask yourself ‘would I rather wait for someone else to do something (which is totally out of my control) OR do something differently myself (which is totally in my control)?’

How does one know it’s the “right” time to start making an effort to find friends in a new country? Does it make sense to take a bit of time in the beginning to just figure out your new surroundings and settle in a bit?

You will know when it’s the right time for you because you know yourself best. There is no right or wrong/ generic answer to that, all you need to know is that in order for you to successfully make friends, you will need to invest time and effort. Now you get to decide when you’re ready to do that.

Generally speaking, it often makes sense to wait until you have taken care of your immediate/ basic needs such as finding an apartment, a job, etc. before you work on creating connections and making friends. If you’re trying to do everything at once, you might feel overwhelmed,stressed, confused – that is not the best place to start taking action from. 

Important note: Even if you have taken care of all the things on your to do list, you might still not feel ready. That’s when you have to check in with yourself and ask yourself why. This is the perfect proof for us to understand that our external circumstances don’t create our emotions. If you have ticked everything off of your to-do list and you still feel stressed, it isn’t because of your to-do list but because of the thoughts you’re thinking that make you feel stressed. Again, coaching is a great way to address and solve this.

We keep mentioning friendships and building these deep connections. But can it be equally useful to build other types of relationships as well that are more “superficial”? For example, can having acquaintances, or people we just share a hobby with be equally beneficial?

Yes, every connection is important. There is actually a study on the importance of superficial connections (weak ties) which shows that they are highly beneficial for things like promotions, job opportunities or employment – see LinkedIn as an example. There is a place and a time for everything, we need deep connections and we also need more shallow, superficial connections. The only thing that matters is to have a good balance between both. 

You work with expats from all over the world, and are an expat yourself. From your experience so far, are there certain countries where it’s very difficult to make friends as an expat, or quite the opposite – where expats have a particularly easy time creating a social circle?

I can’t say that I have found particular countries to either be difficult or easy when it comes to making friends and I don’t think there is a generic answer to that. The fact that we’re all unique means that even if I would say the UK is a difficult country to make friends, someone else might move to the UK and find it easy. There is no black or white way of answering this because it depends much more on who we are and how we show up than on the external factors.

I know that people in a big city find it hard to make friends and people in a small town find it equally as hard. What does that tell us? That it doesn’t depend on the place where we live but on how we approach making friends.

Do you think knowing the local language is an important part of making friends in a new country? Or could expats just focus on meeting other expats?

Knowling the local language is a crucial part of making friends in a new country. You don’t have to know the language but it is helpful for us to communicate in a confident way with a local person from the new country we moved to.  Making friends with locals is so important because it

a) allows us to fully integrate and see ourselves as part of this new country and it also helps us to
b) explore the country we moved to and we get to see things that only locals know about.

You don’t have to speak the language perfectly, I believe that most locals appreciate seeing that expats at least try to speak their language. So if you can’t speak the language perfectly yet, you can still try, even if you make mistakes.

Alternatively, you can make friends with expats. You get to speak either your mother tongue or probably English which might be easier for you. And there is nothing wrong with befriending expats, but people often tell me that their expat friends move away again. That means that you’ve invested time and effort into building a connection with another expat, only for them to move away again. That leaves people often feeling discouraged, hopeless and burnt out to start making new friends.

So if you want to save yourself from having friends moving away again and you want to speed the process of fully integrating and exploring the new country you moved to, learn the local language and make friends with locals.

Being an expat means there’s a constant mix of emotions and a significant mental load you have to carry around, especially in the beginning. What would be your top three tips for people to be able to manage this better?

My top three tips are:

• Prioritize tasks: You can’t get everything done immediately. Being able to prioritize what is most important and crucial to do right away is going to be helpful to determine where to focus your energy, helping you to carry around less mental load.
• Be patient: Similar to the first tip, some things will take longer and others will be postponed to a later date and learning to live with that and accept it for what it is will be very helpful for you to feel less stressed and pressured. 
• Learn how to manage your mind and therefore emotions: No matter what your circumstances are and what you have to think about and sort out, you can find your life and to do list overwhelming and stressful OR easy and manageable – you get to simply choose. Many people don’t realize that it’s their thoughts creating their emotions and that you can choose your thoughts. Learning how to choose the thoughts that will create the emotions you want is the key to the universe, I promise. If you want to learn how to do that, get in touch with me and I will help you.

Whether you’re getting ready for your expat journey, or you’re already in the middle of this experience – a chat with an expert can be helpful. Schedule a free coaching call with Sarah and set yourself up for success when it comes to making friends abroad.