What Teaching Abroad Gave Me (That I Didn’t Go Looking For)

I still remember making the decision to teach abroad. It felt like a huge moment in my life, and in many ways it was. Although technically, my life changed in real and material ways, there were also ways in which I changed. I have tried through my writing to not hype the experiences up too much and to give clear, usable advice for avoiding mistakes when jetting off to another country.

I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable with describing teaching abroad as life-changing. Not because it’s untrue, but because it tends to imply something sudden or dramatic. As if everything changes the moment you land. It implies a before and after. A clear sense of having become someone else.

That wasn’t my experience.

When I think back on my time teaching abroad, the changes that mattered most weren’t obvious at the time. They didn’t arrive as moments of clarity or transformation. They showed up quietly, over time, in how I reacted to uncertainty, how I related to other people, and how I understood my place within unfamiliar systems and how I adapted.

None of that was what I went looking for.

I went looking for experience, not change

Like many people, my reasons for teaching abroad were fairly straightforward but varied.

I had just got news I hadn’t received PhD funding so wanted to spend the year waiting to reapply doing something out of my comfort zone. I wanted to live somewhere different. I wanted to try teaching. I wanted to see what it might be like to step outside familiar routines for a while. I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself or fix anything in particular.

I assumed the experience would be defined by what I did: the work, the travel, the daily logistics of living somewhere new. These things mattered of course.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much of the experience would also be about learning how to sit with things that didn’t resolve quickly.

Adjustment as a long, uneven process

One of the most persistent myths about teaching abroad is that adjustment happens in a straight line. Very little in life happens in a straight line, it is more wiggly.

There are days where things feel settled, followed by days where they don’t. Periods of confidence sit alongside moments of doubt. Familiarity grows, but it doesn’t erase difference. I found that as time went on, I had less moments of doubt, but they still happened. I think it is important for me to say here that it does get easier to navigate as you settle.

As I say, the moments of doubt didn’t disappear, but I stopped expecting them to disappear. I learned to see uncertainty as part of the environment rather than something that needed fixing immediately.

That shift was subtle, but it stayed with me.

Learning to function without full understanding

Living and working in a place where you don’t fully understand the language or the systems around you changes how you move through the world. Life actually slows down because it is impossible to be on auto-pilot.

You become more attentive. You rely more on observation. You learn when to ask questions and when to let things unfold without explanation.

At first, this feels tiring. Over time, it becomes a different way of paying attention. I would say that learning some of the language is important to get through daily tasks. In China especially, learning how to speak to taxi drivers and delivery drivers is useful!

I didn’t return to the UK with a mastery or fluency in everything around me. What I gained instead was a tolerance for partial understanding. An ability to act without needing everything to make sense first.

That has proved unexpectedly useful since. It has made me more adaptable and tolerant of change.

Relationship to work and responsibility

Teaching abroad also quietly reshaped how I think about work.

Not in the sense of ambition or achievement, but in terms of responsibility. Working with students in a context that wasn’t my own made the stakes of teaching feel more visible. Effort mattered. Presence mattered. Intentions mattered, but they weren’t enough on their own. In many ways, being from a different culture heightened the fact that students react to your energy and given the cultural differences, this became even more important.

I became more aware of how much teaching relies on showing up consistently, even when things feel awkward or unresolved.

That lesson didn’t announce itself at the time. It emerged slowly, through routine. I found that my job became so valuable to me as a person.

What didn’t change

It’s worth saying that teaching abroad didn’t lead to me becoming a whole new person, I was still me.

I didn’t come back with perfectly clear answers about who I was. I loved teaching and felt I had found a passion and something that I wanted to pursue, that was for sure.

What changed was not my personality per se, but my relationship to uncertainty. I became less alarmed by it. Less inclined to treat it as a sign that something was going wrong.

That distinction matters.

Why this is easy to miss

The kinds of changes teaching abroad gave me don’t photograph well.

They don’t fit neatly into narratives of growth or success. They show up later, in small ways, often outside the context of teaching altogether.

Because of that, they’re easy to overlook or undervalue. Especially if you expect the experience to deliver wholesale change. It can lead to huge changes; they will just be more subtle and slow-moving than you might expect.

Looking back

Teaching abroad gave me so much as a person. It gave me more patience than I expected, a steadier relationship with uncertainty, and a clearer sense of how much learning happens outside moments of clarity.

I didn’t go looking for any of that.

But those are the things that have stayed.

If you’re still thinking through whether teaching abroad is right for you, the Start Here page offers a calmer overview.