I Went to Coffee with an Expat Looking for a Mentor. Here Is What Happened.
Rhoda Bangerter invited me to join the first Coffee with an Expat meeting.
If you do not know Rhoda, she wrote Holding the Fort Abroad and she is the kind of person who calls the coloring book brilliant over a salad with super seeds and means every word of it. When Rhoda invites you somewhere you go.
So I went. And I want to give you some context about where my head was before I walked in.
I have been on a search for a mentor. I wrote about it recently. The vira-lata move of assuming nobody would bother to teach me. The ten steps ahead brain that forgot to ask for directions. The very Brazilian instinct to figure it out alone until you absolutely cannot anymore. I went into that meeting with my antennae fully extended. Finally, I thought. A room full of experienced expat professionals. Someone in here might be my knight in shining armour.
But first. Annette Ebbinghaus was in that room.
I forgot to take pictures of the meeting but here’s the picture of the creamy risotto I had after.
Annette is a Mental Fitness Coach, Master Sophrologist, Mentor and Speaker. She started in civil engineering. Then sustainable development in business. Then stress management and wellness. Thirty years of practice across three continental moves while raising children. She has worked with IMD Business School, the World Trade Organisation, and international schools across Switzerland. I took one look at her and thought: we should start next time from the things she did not do. Because the list of things she has done is significantly longer than any introduction allows for.
She is also working in exactly the territory I am circling with the burnout book I just announced. I am choosing to call that a coincidence. I am also choosing not to look too closely at it.
And then there was Rima Elahi-Syed.
If Annette made me want to take notes about everything she has done, Rima made me want to take notes about everything she knows about parenting. A parenting mentor with the kind of presence that makes you feel like every question you have ever had about raising a child in a world that keeps moving is suddenly worth asking out loud. Another legend in a room that was apparently full of them. I told her I would send her a copy of Parenting Unpacked once it is out. June 24th. She will be one of the first to have it.
I went in looking for one knight in shining armour. The room had several.
Three people approached me after. One wants to do a presentation on parenting. The others are navigating the publishing process and the marketing labyrinth that comes with it and looking at me like I might have the map. I told them about the burnout book. And then the conversation turned to parenting, which felt like the universe nudging me because Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self is coming out on June 24th and apparently the room already knew it needed to exist.
So here I am. Still looking for my mentor. Still somehow ending up as everyone else's. Still convinced that somewhere out there is a person further ahead who will sit across from me and say: yes, I see exactly what you are building and here is what the road looks like from where I am standing.
The knight in shining armour does not always arrive on a white horse. Sometimes she shows up at a Coffee with an Expat meeting and has already done everything you are still figuring out.
Still searching. Slightly more hopeful.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
P.S. The knight in shining armour has not formally arrived. But I have a lead… I think. TBC.
