Six months ago, I packed up a familiar professional life and relocated to Thailand.

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Not a sabbatical. Not a working holiday with a laptop. A genuine, full-stop transition — new country, new chapter, and a fairly radical dismantling of the context I’d been operating within for years. I won’t pretend it has been seamless, and that’s precisely why I want to write about it here.

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What this experience has given me, more than anything, is a close-up view of something I’ve spent years helping other leaders navigate from the outside: the particular disorientation of stepping into genuinely unfamiliar territory, and what it demands of you when you get there.

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These are three things I’ve learned. I think they apply far beyond my own story.

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1. The Expert Beginner Problem

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There’s a particular kind of uncomfortable that arrives around the three-month mark of any significant transition. You’re no longer in free fall — the basics are in place — but you’re now competent enough to see exactly how much you still don’t understand. The terrain has come into focus, and what it’s revealed is how much of it remains unmapped.

 

I’ve started thinking of this as the Expert Beginner phase.

 

You arrive with real skills, genuine experience, a track record that meant something somewhere. And yet the specific knowledge that makes the difference in a new context — the unspoken rules, the cultural logic, the way things actually get done here — can’t be imported. It has to be learned from the inside.

 

I felt this most sharply in the mundane. In my previous professional life, I knew how to navigate complex systems. Sorting out financial arrangements, getting the right people on the phone, moving things forward through a mix of persistence and process. I assumed, without examining the assumption, that this capability would transfer. It didn’t, at least not in the way I expected. Getting something as routine as banking arrangements or car registration sorted required a completely different approach — more patience, more relationship-building, a willingness to abandon the timeline I’d privately decided was reasonable.

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The system wasn’t broken. My mental model of how systems work was simply wrong for this context.

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This is the central psychological trap of the Expert Beginner phase: the temptation to perform competence before you’ve earned it. To reach for familiar tools not because they’re right for the situation, but because using them restores a sense of capability that the new context has temporarily taken away. Herminia Ibarra writes about this dynamic in Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader — the way leaders in transition often cling to a proven identity long past the point where a new one is needed, performing the role they know rather than developing the one the context requires.

 

The leaders who navigate this well do the opposite. They stay curious longer than feels comfortable. They ask questions that more established people around them have stopped asking. They hold their expertise as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The Dunning-Kruger curve is humbling precisely because the most dangerous point isn’t ignorance — it’s the early confidence that arrives just before genuine understanding begins.

 

2. Your Environment Has Been Propping You Up

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Within a few weeks of arriving, I noticed something I hadn’t anticipated: I could see myself more clearly.

 

This seems counterintuitive. You’d expect disorientation to obscure self-perception. But I think the opposite is true, and the reason is this: in a familiar environment, your identity is partly held up by the context around you. The colleagues who know your history, the professional shorthand you’ve built over years, the rhythms that structure your days — all of it quietly props up your sense of who you are and how you operate. When that scaffolding disappears, what remains is more “you” than you realised.

 

I’ve started calling this relocation as a mirror. It’s uncomfortable in the way that honest mirrors tend to be.

 

My clearest example: I am professionally someone who gets things done through process. Clear owners, defined timelines, structured follow-up. This approach had served me well for a long time, and I’d come to think of it as simply how things get done — a neutral, effective methodology rather than a culturally specific one.

 

In Thailand, it created friction almost immediately. Not hostility, not incompetence — just a persistent gap between what I expected and what happened. What I gradually came to understand is that patience and courtesy are not merely cultural norms here; they are more effective operational levers than deadlines and deliverables. Relationships precede transactions in a way my previous context had never really required me to internalise. The environment wasn’t being inefficient. I was using the wrong logic — and I hadn’t even recognised it as a logic rather than a given.

 

For leaders stepping into new organisations, this matters enormously. Your leadership style didn’t develop in a vacuum. It developed in response to a specific culture, specific relationships, specific incentives and constraints. Some of it is genuinely portable. Some of it is local knowledge dressed up as universal principle. The leaders who struggle most in transitions tend to be the ones who can’t distinguish between the two.

 

The more useful question at the start of any new context isn’t how do I apply what I know? It’s what does this environment demand of me that my last one didn’t?

 

3. Belonging Doesn’t Transfer

 

Of the three things I want to write about, this is the one that surprised me most — and the one I think has the most direct relevance for leaders moving into new roles.

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One of the quiet costs of any major transition is that belonging doesn’t come with you.

 

In a long-held role or a familiar organisation, belonging accumulates in the background through shared references, mutual history, and a reputation that has built up over years without requiring conscious maintenance. You are known — not just for your capabilities, but for your character, your instincts, your way of being in a room. That kind of knowing is what makes trust easy to extend.

 

When you move, all of it stays behind. You arrive as, essentially, a stranger — regardless of your seniority, your track record, or what was written about you in the announcement email.

 

In Thailand, I’ve had to build community deliberately. Not passively, the way it tends to form through proximity and shared experience, but intentionally — showing up, making the effort, being the person who extends the invitation rather than waiting for one. It has taken longer than I expected and required more sustained effort than I was used to having to deploy.

 

What it has made visible is something that familiar environments keep hidden: belonging is built through repeated acts of genuine presence. It isn’t conferred by status or competence. It can’t be accelerated past a certain natural pace. And it requires a willingness to be new — to not yet be known, to ask and offer without the safety net of an established relationship — that leaders in particular often find difficult to sustain.

 

This is one of the most consistent failure modes I observe in executive transitions. Leaders arrive assuming that the title, the track record, or sheer performance will establish trust quickly. They underinvest in the slow work of building relationships before they need them. They wait for the culture to come to them rather than going to meet it.

 

The belonging has to be built, every time, from scratch. The leaders who do this well don’t go through the social motions; they invest genuinely in understanding the people and the culture around them before they try to shape either.

 

What This Means for Executive Transitions

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Strip away the Thailand backdrop and these three experiences describe something I encounter regularly in my coaching work: what it actually feels like to be a leader in transition, beneath the surface of the formal onboarding plan.

 

The Expert Beginner dynamic — the pull to perform competence before it’s been earned. The loss of environmental scaffolding — the moment a leader discovers which parts of their style were genuinely theirs and which were borrowed from a context that no longer exists. The slow, deliberate work of building belonging in a place where no one yet knows you.

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These aren’t soft challenges on the margins of a leadership transition. They’re strategic ones, sitting at the heart of why capable executives so often underdeliver in their first year in a new role. Formal onboarding covers the what and the how — strategy, structure, key relationships, early priorities. It rarely addresses how it actually feels: the disorientation, the identity friction, the patience required to build trust before you can meaningfully begin to lead.

 

That gap is where transitions succeed or stall. And it’s the territory that good executive coaching is specifically designed to help leaders navigate — not by smoothing the discomfort away, but by making it legible, and by helping leaders use the liminal space as the development opportunity it genuinely is.

 

A Question Worth Sitting With

 

Think back to the last time you stepped into genuinely new territory — a new role, a new organisation, a new context of any kind.

 

What did you learn about yourself that your old environment had been quietly concealing?

 

I’d genuinely like to hear. Do feel free to reach out directly.

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I work with leaders navigating significant transitions — new executive roles, career changes, and the identity shifts that sit beneath the surface of both. If this resonates, you are welcome to explore my work further or arrange a confidential conversation. 

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Original article published on Substack.