Featured By Global Living Magazine As One Of Best Expat Books

Thanks to Shelley Antscherl for naming Expat Harem among best expat anthologies in the January/February 2014 issue of Global Living Magazine!

I'm proud the book is listed alongside the work of editors like Suzanne Kamata of "Call Me Okasaan: Adventures In Multicultural Mothering", Monica Neboli of "Drinking Camel's Milk In The Yurt: Expat Stories from Kazahkstan", Diane Dicks of "Ticking Along Too: Stories About Switzerland", and Kate Cobb of "Turning Points: 25 Inspiring Stories From Women Entrepreneurs Who Turned Their Careers and Their Lives Around".

And thanks to Summertime Publishing publisher, Expat Book Shop proprietress and fellow expat writer Jo Parfitt for the review. "A fine bit of not just good writing, but literary writing, and that is due to the fabulous work of the editors."

See what else is in the issue here. Global Living is a luxury lifestyle magazine for global citizens and sophisticated internationals who live, have lived, or may someday will live outside their country of origin.

Network Science Says Info Brokering Between Networks Makes You A Game Changer. It's Also 2nd Nature To People With Hybrid Cultural Identities.

Don't I know it.

My own hybrid, cross-disciplinary, limbo-state life and work is founded on this phenomenon that network science acknowledges.

Michael Simmons, author and cofounder of iEmpact, explains in "Why Being The Most Connected Is A Vanity Metric" at Forbes that your network is a set of clusters and when you manage to broker info between them you're a game changer. And, being an info broker is a way of life, and you have to constantly fight the urge to relax into the comfort of a group you know. He points out being an info broker is a good foundation for entrepreneurship.

It's no coincidence (to me, or anyone else who read, wrote for, or commented at my hybrid identity discussion site expat+HAREM back in 2009! or anyone who's familiar with the principles of my current community-driven, social web curriculum startup GlobalNiche) that this Forbes piece was written by a multicultural, multiethnic hybrid identity entrepreneur whose life has naturally made him an info broker between networks.

Peruse the expat+HAREM discussions on identity and hybridity.  Look at the highlights of Rose Deniz's podcast about living the hybrid life and what you leave behind in order to do so.

That's echoed in Michael Simmons' piece -- the reason why we can't get comfortable in one group if we want to participate in what he calls "the renaissance of network science" -- is because we lose value and impact by staying ensconced there.

We need to move between all our clusters -- online, offline, professional, personal, ethnic, family, school, friends, interests -- bearing rich, precious, communal, resonant information. That's our job (and our lifestyle) as network game changers.

Worry About Who You Follow: Unpacking The Mysteries Of Online Community At Curatti

Your social networks are your window onto the world, and a lens on your market, I write in "Who You Follow Is Important And Here's Why" my first post in a new series at Curatti: Editors Of Chaos. On a regular basis at Curatti I’m going to be unpacking the mysteries of online community, and exploring how to organically grow a network filled with people who are all deriving value from their connection.

In this post I go on to explain that you determine how wide your window is, and how focused the lens. Ultimately, your online connections will color your day, slant your view, and propel your actions.

Take a look at your timelines. They are the fruit of your curation efforts. You selected whom you follow.

Do the people and accounts you follow challenge you (in a good way)?

Read the whole piece here.

We're All Digital Strategists Now

With the web's power, reach, and endurance, we're all digital strategists now. And if we go online (or don't go online!) disregarding this fact, we miss the boat, and the point.

Here's A Way To Ask For And Get Support For Personal & Pro Challenges, On An On-Going Basis

Graduates of my program are prepping to bring GlobalNiche's online presence & online community building methodology to their own worlds as servant leaders in peer-based workshops (like this group led by Silvana Vukadin-Hoitt starting in November). With this framework, in six weeks the network is connected and has a model to continue working together and a place to do so.

I've also been brainstorming the groups of people in my life I want to connect with more effectively. (You try it. Bet you can name three groups of people close to you that you want to see succeed.)

My groups share a common thread.

We are peers and colleagues and friends and acquaintances -- and we are siloed in what we know, what we are trying to do,  how we do it, and with whom. We don't fully consider or know how to tap the resource we represent to each other.

That's what I'm proposing. A methodology to work in community on our own goals, with a stronger network as a result. A way we can all be cocreators of an effective network using the backbone of the social web. A way to ask for and get help and support for personal and professional challenges, on an on-going basis.

I see you.

You are people whose dreams I've been privy to, whose skills and talents I'm aware of, whose personal and professional pressures I know, whose untapped potential I recognize, and who I feel a commitment to helping put it all together to get where you want to go.

You're also people I would love to be better connected to, and who I'd like to connect better to fellow kindred spirits in my network. People you'd like to know. People who can help you and improve your life.

Groups I'd like to be a servant leader to are:

1) people I've collaborated with professionally or been in peer work groups with, including writers and media pros and publishing world types.

Often coming out of traditional models and feeling the brunt of disruption, I understand your skepticism and why you are slow to adopt today's social web tools and ways of operating;

2) friends whose work and dreams I'm aware of but we've never really brought our full professional selves together to make things happen.

We can go beyond commiserating over coffee and silo-ing the personal and professional in our relationship;

3) people I have a history of interacting with intellectually in the long term, like fellow alumnae of my college;

4) acquaintances who ask me about what I do or how I do it, but don't imagine yourself doing it.

This would include my hairdresser who as an independent professional who moves from salon to salon could use the continuity and discoverability of an online portfolio. The young pilates instructor I met at the Wisdom 2.0 conference who could be establishing her practice with instruction videos online. The woman I met at a cocktail party recently who hadn't heard of local and online gatherings of people who share her cross-cultural experience;

5) people who have followed and appreciated my cultural work like Expat Harem the book and also the blog but don't see how it translates into GlobalNiche's social web training and online community building and personal brand building -- or why any of that is a way to help you live in the world the way you saw glimpses of in my cultural work.

People who haven't yet grasped that your cultural understandings, sensitivities, interests, experiences are assets and guidance you can use to live more fully with the help of social, mobile, and online tools and life. People who don’t yet see how your cultural understanding can help you on the internet, and in fact, give you an advantage online.

I see you, and I can envision what will emerge from our better connection. Don't wait for me to contact you. Reach out right now and let's get started.

Being Hip Offline Doesn't Make You Hip Online

I have bad news for you.

Being a hip person offline doesn't mean you're suddenly hip online.

Same goes for being funny, deep, interesting or another quality you're known for and proudly own offline.

To be so in online spaces actually takes effort and awareness to build up your faculties on the web and with online tools for expression.

To be hip (etc, whatever!) online you'll have to interact in places appropriate for your qualities with a freshness and understanding that telegraphs your au courant nature, for instance. You'll have to display how on-trend you are from concept to execution. You have to prove it.

You can't just declare your qualities in your digital bio and assume because you've logged on you've automatically brought online everything you are offline. No, your work has just begun.

What Happens When You Connect Without Meaning

Culture hacker and 'social alchemist' Seb Paquet noted this phenomenon: in an explosion of connection, too few of us have found any belonging.

I believe that's exactly what happens when we connect without meaning.

Mashable Lifestyle Features My Social Media Advice To College Students Applying To Grad School

Thanks Mashable Lifestyle -- part of the Mashable news site for the connected generation, one of the largest blogs on the Internet-- for featuring my social media advice to college students in your new weekly Twitter chat on the digital life!

Other guidance for college students applying I shared during the live tweeted #mashadvice column this week:

• demo via social media (activities, blogs, commentary) strengths you'd include in your application
• besides showing interest in a topic via social, also show *engagement* (what you DO about it)
• Twitter, LI, any service: what's findable should reflect you/path you're on, match up w/what you present in applications
• think about using Pinterest to create portfolios of your work (actual, or imagined-future), curate your vision
• photos can be used as complement: to create atmosphere, demo aesthetic, show history

Mapping My LinkedIn Network

My network has a new branch since I last did this network map in March 2013. That maroon group on the lower lefthand side is from PJ Van Hulle's 90-day list-building challenge, Listapalooza.

The blue are Turkey and Expat Harem-related. The green are Turkish diaspora. The pink is Bryn Mawr College, the orange is social media and online marketing pros, and professional coaches. The bronze is NYC, SF, writing and travel peers. The yellow at center is Silicon Valley, startups and the VC world, while the light blue is the TED community.

Click on the image to see a larger version. Here's where to get your own.

Is Marketing Yourself As A Brand Right For Your Career?

"Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. Is this right for your career?" asks 85 Broads, the high-powered global women’s network, on its Facebook page today. My answer:

It seems like the question should be "what possible reason could you have for not being a distinct, knowable, findable professional entity?"

Social media strategist Tara Hunt replied too, and said "I owe the lion's share of my career success to personal branding", despite struggling with the term and being criticized for her self-promotion.

I think Tara Hunt's right that personal branding is a loaded term and the act of it doesn't come easily for women, nor does becoming visible always bring positive attention for women.

But none of that makes it less a valuable, meaningful, self-actualizing way to operate.

Online Self-Loathing & Surveillance

Personal branding online sure gets a bad rap, like this New Yorker post by Tony Tulathimutte, which warns us "You Are What You Tweet".

He's talking about the self-loathing variety of personal branding online -- heavy on the self-censorship with no mention of integrating what matters to you with the vulnerability that actually connects us as people,  both concepts we emphasize at GlobalNiche.

Tulathimutte concludes, "The more immediate threat may be the surrender of private identity: to perfect the total image of an impressive life, we prune off the parts of ourselves that can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t be seen."

Meanwhile, The Guardian writes about the psychological effects of surveillance. Research shows being surveilled fosters distrust, conformity and mediocrity.

I can't help noticing that the most deleterious effects of being watched seem to track with the defensive, inauthentic personal branding approach Tulathimutte writes about. As if when we reveal ourselves voluntarily we're avoiding actually being seen.

"Science can lay claim to a wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance...indiscriminate intelligence-gathering presents a grave risk to our mental health, productivity, social cohesion, and ultimately our future."

That's serious business not to be taken lightly.

But do we have to approach the online presence we build as if we are being watched against our will? As if all we aim to communicate is 'successful' conformity (which is of course mediocre and gives the rest of us nothing to connect to).

Can we make being seen (when we choose it, that is) a path to our own resilience?

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Sarah Kendzior makes a related point in Al Jazeera September 9, "The danger of data: Not the information, but the interpretation".

She writes: "Our online self-expression - selective and self-censored, complicated and contrived - is being mistaken for the summation of our being. The great existential fear is no longer not knowing who we are. It is not getting the chance to find out." 

Media Empire Building For Women, What We Can Use Our Platform For & Why We Need To

Regarding an on-going kerfuffle in an area I follow pretty closely (media & journalism plus gender disparities in those fields), this post by magazine editor and journalist Ann Friedman on media empire building has a lot of lessons in it for those of us building platforms and what we can use them for, and why we need to.

We need them for leverage, if we're thinking bigger or one day will. We need them as evidence. If we're women, many of whom are relegated to supporting roles in our fields, we need our own platforms to grow strong as marquee figures.

"I’m doing pretty well at building a following for my work that’s mine alone, not reliant on the individual outlets I write for. But I’ve never approached a publisher or editor-in-chief to ask for my own vertical, or the funding to create my own mini-empire."

When she decides to pitch a funder to finance her own media empire, Friedman writes, "There will be footnotes about my own Twitter following and the number of newsletter subscribers I have and my proven ability to cultivate a strong editorial voice."

Linda Janssen's Emotionally Resilient Expat

Thrilled with a new release from my expat publishing kin! I've had the pleasure and privilege of working with and getting to know both these formidable women in the past half decade. Author Linda Janssen just released via Jo Parfitt's Summertime Publishing the masterwork The Emotionally Resilient Expat: Engage, Adapt and Thrive Across Cultures.

The book is filled with personal stories from experienced globalists and cross-culturals  -- Third Culture Kid pioneer Ruth Van Reken, global nomad authors like Tina Quick, global mobility experts, psychologists and family therapists, expats, and me!

Its aim is to provide you with practical tools, techniques and best practices to live a healthier, more positive, emotionally engaged, culturally connected global life.

This book promises to be an enduring and proactive guide to the unique challenges of living in a wide, wide world -- experiences that often have the power to take apart and rearrange a person on an almost molecular level. I've been there. So glad TERE is now available for global operators everywhere.

Massive congratulations Linda and Jo.

Personal Branding Interview By Peter Sterlacci

Peter Sterlacci, an American expat and personal branding expert in Japan, included me in his Brand Mechanics video interview series.

Peter writes: "As a long-term expat, she had to learn from the ground up how to build a global life and work solutions to survive. Her years of experience led to the creation of a holistic approach in building one’s global niche, or what she also calls a global personal brand.

"Her formula is simply: Personal Discovery + Professional Expression = Your Global Niche. The foundation of her formula rests in the fact that each of us already has what we need to be successful and we can use it wherever we are."

Thanks, Peter, it was fun!

Ex-Wired Editor Arikia Millikan Launches LadyBits Media Group For Tech-Savvy Women

Glad to attend the San Francisco launch by Arikia Millikan, who's on a global trajectory since leaving Wired magazine. The evening cosponsored by Michael Gold at TechDrinkUp and Christian Perry of SFBeta at Monarch (yes, that's a trapeze above the bar) introduced a new media group founded by Millikan where tech-savvy women create the content they want to consume.

As Millikan describes it, LadyBits is a collective of tech journalists and a media experiment to source, commission and edit writing of interest to tech-savvy women -- a new layer between the writers and the publishing venues (which mostly serve the interests of tech-savvy men).

You can expect a curated collection of "literary musings about technology, science, business, culture, sex, and politics by writers who actively engage in intelligent discourse about how technology is shaping the future of our civilization".

I'll be contributing to LadyBits, which you can see here at Medium: LadyBits On Medium. They'll also be expanding all over the web, including at Refinery 29 and Popular Science.

Making This Site A Reconstruction Blog

This portfolio site is the #1 Google result for my name. This month I've started a reconstruction blog here.

It's going to be the blog that would have existed if I'd known then what I know now.

...if I'd been telling my personal and pro story all along with today's perspective on where it leads, and what matters.

Few little edits, but mostly going in as it already exists. Later I'll start linking all the pieces together, and developing further some of the content.

I'm also pulling together my material that's been scattered around the web, plus adding unseen pieces that germinated in the dark social of email, and in general, bringing out unpublished and otherwise fallow pieces of all kinds.

I'm thinking it'll be a way to refresh my own interest, and, with the help of web search, eventually connect me with others who are interested in those topics or treatments. They may even be future collaborators to bring the work to fruition. A public filing cabinet of sorts.

Have you tried this, or another retrospective approach to building a blog?

Update: Social media marketing pioneer Chris Abraham posted this related and detailed suggestion to "Fill in your entire social media and blog history", July 26, 2013.

"Spend this week digging through memories predating the moment you joined the online conversation and start posting them," Abraham writes.

Being An Advanced Oddity: Between A Rock & A Hard Place

Here's a conundrum I've been discussing with potential business mentors as we try to find ground where we might meet.

Being the advanced oddity that I am -- that is, an independent scholar and entrepreneur on my own evolving path -- when I seek out specific help from established/establishment entities, I meet resistance to my very own realities.

I told the regional head of a national businesswomen's organization recently that my combination of being way out ahead in my thinking and operations yet a fledgling in business seems not to compute for most organizations with resources.

I may be a startup but I've got 25 years of professional and personal experience. I'm the age of people with established businesses but I don't particularly want to backtrack to become resonant with them, or adopt dying practices or conventions in the process of being disrupted.

So, receiving training on how to be professional or being moved by perks like "can bring your dog to the office" or recognizing myself in the accelerator organization's language of f-bombs or "join the movement, dude" (which is what international digital agency Unison.net's career page used to say), are not really in alignment with the kind of support I need.

On the other hand, more mature cultures of support I gravitate toward often ask for benchmarks I am nowhere near, like "$2M in revenue" and don't yet value (to judge from their own operations) many operational strengths I bring, nor necessarily grasp my outsider, international perspective.

And I note other rock and hard place factors I'm dealing with. I'll go into them more deeply another day but here are big ones: working around and with tech but not offering a "tech solution"; and being global in focus but not considering "global = somewhere outside America".

Still looking for the mature, forward-operating, early-stage business resources out there best suited for global women entrepreneurs.

My 40-Over-40 App

The 40-over-40 Women To Watch celebrates women over 40 who are disruptors, role models and makers...creating momentum and changing the world.  It's an initiative by Dare, Dream, Do author Whitney Johnson and 40:20 Vision founder Christina Vuleta. Excerpt from my application.  

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How are you disrupting professionally, whether in business, tech, media, entrepreneurship, social good, science, academics, creative arts, or politics?

Are you creating growth, jobs or new products, ideas or services?

My startup GlobalNiche works to train women to use the social web and mobile technology (what we call digital literacy) in alignment with their vision for the world they want to live in order to make that vision a reality both through their own work and through the connections and collaborations they make with others through their web platform. We show them how to do this.

In showing people how to build an effective online presence to connect with broader networks and opportunities, and build social capital, I help people appreciate and tap their own assets and the potential of online spaces to find or make their own jobs.

Along with my cofounder Tara Agacayak, I created a 6-step multimedia program and training system that shows women how to lay a foundation on the web for the work they want to do and the life they want to live.

In our experience, even with the availability of technology, extremely capable women stumble when it comes to sharing their expertise, knowledge, ideas, cause, or voice on the web because they feel uncomfortable using the technology or they feel vulnerable calling attention to themselves or joining a public conversation or taking credit for their ideas. We address these issues by bringing them together in a virtual environment that allows them to interact with one another, learn digital literacy skills and test them out in a supportive community, and encourage them to take the steps toward realizing their vision.

When offered to individuals, our program works to empower their vision for their own life. When offered in community, our program supports the community’s shared goals.

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What are some of the outcomes of your work?

What would suggest your greatest achievements are ahead of, not behind, you?

The world is just waking up to the future I’ve been living in. The future I’ve been solving for, and have now created distributable, teachable, learnable, actionable steps for.

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How are you a positive role model to younger women: innovating around work/life issues; promoting women for leadership?

Are you innovating around work/life issues; promoting women in leadership, or simply willing to make tough choices?

As a longtime expat and pro in culture, media, I’ve been forced to create my OWN GLOBAL LIFE/WORK SOLUTION …because it didn’t exist yet.

Younger women share that I have validated their instincts, helped them contemplate their own possibilities, and provided them much needed support & structure to operate.

• A young work-at-home mother says “I am getting organized both in the real world and in my mind. For the first time I am making visual representations of my work and my ideas.”
• A 30-something author and educator says my support community “became my think-tank, support group, go-to team, and more.”
• A 30-something global curator tells me “When I hear you talk about identity and multiple cultural personalities and finding your creative outlets no matter where you are, I feel understood.”

I wouldn’t say I’m a positive role model to just younger women. I work with women older than I am and they tell me

• I “Love the personal & pro growth spurt it’s providing!” in the words of a 60 year old women’s life-transition coach.
• A university instrucutor also my senior says “I felt smarter and more empowered to make decisions” after receiving my training.
• While a 50-something global mobility expert and real estate agent says training “generates introspection. It will open your eyes to the potential of online spaces.”

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How have you disrupted yourself personally?

How are you personally reinventing or creating a new path? Are you applying your prior experiences in new ways?

My current town of San Francisco may be a tech-forward location but that’s not why I’ve increasingly been turning to technology to help me be where and who I am today. Since living in 30 homes in 4 countries -- talk about personal disruption, try serial personal disruption as a lifestyle -- I’m a globally mobile individual and rely on social & mobile tech for my total, global operation.

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Why do you think you are about to 'take off'?

Because after a lifetime of existing in the wilderness, I am finally on-trend.

My custom life-work solution seems torn from today’s headlines and bestseller lists on the topics of future work skills and work-life fit solutions.

• “Leaning in” to your own life, your own preferred way of living and working.
• Optimizing your online presence in the age of the personal platform & personal branding, the global microbrand of you, content marketing, the social era.
• Being recruitable (quotable, invited to speak, hired, you name it) based on the appeal and impact of your web activities in the beyond-the-resume Google age.
• Your digital footprint IS your resume.
• Building global community through expression of your interests in the age of resonance and new world order of the interest graph — people who share your interests.
• Taking charge of your life’s trajectory in the age of the Start-up of You & disrupt-yourself and the ‘everyone’s an entrepreneur of their own lives’ times we all now live in.

Why am I about to 'take off'? Because I have turned to entrepreneurialism, education, and online spaces in order to share what I know more widely.

Brainstorming With Darlene Crane To Advance Careers & Lifetime Earnings For Women

Own your value and take it to market.

That's the message Darlene Crane wants to bring to women in business. She wants us to pursue our greatest ambitions with clear purpose. Seek power, and use it to generate benefits for the broader population. Crane urges us to "embrace ownership, and entrepreneurship."

All messages that resonate with me, a newcomer to the business scene but already feeling like an old hand at embracing ownership of my ideas and content, and very familiar with the entrepreneurial spirit.

What also resonated was what Darlene says too many smart, educated women are missing. The opportunity to drive the future economy, and win their own healthy financial life in the bargain.

I met Darlene Crane, the business growth and sustainable finance consultant at the second meeting of her new discussion and action group -- named, for now, "The $700K Club" -- which aims to gather women to create a supportive new business culture. Thanks to Cynthia Mackey, the founder of the web strategy company Winning Strategies, who invited me, and to Tiffany Roesler's Women Inspire Tech group which brought me and Cynthia together.

The first meeting in February teased out this statement from Darlene:

The recent media blitz on the stalling of gender equality and leadership pushed me to challenge the focus on behavioral issues. Could the challenge be valuing our inherent talents, education, experience and ambitions to move markets and create the opportunities we seek? Imagine if the lifetime earnings of women with college and graduate degrees actually earned as much as a man with a B.A. Each woman could on average increase lifetime earnings $700,000 -- which could finance a small business, start saving for the long-term and purchase real property. If all 30.1 million women with degrees in the U.S. earned an additional $700,000, we would contribute $21.5 trillion to the economy. With a thriving economy families from all communities could experience improvements.

Opening the discussion sponsored by edu-tech entrepreneur Mary Jean Koontz at SOMA Central tonight, Crane referred to Sheryl Sandberg's LEAN IN advice. "We're still asking permission or trying to fix ourselves. We need to reframe the discussion. "

"Women are stalling in this economy and there's a huge economic cost to tolerating this situation. This is a positive response to that."

"Product is what makes money in the future. It gives you IP and control."

Takeaways:

• Product is what makes money in the future. It gives you IP and control.
• Ask how can you make money so you can have freedom of choice.
• Economic freedom through ownership ensures meaning is a part of your work.
• If women pursue their ambitions know that it can effect the marriage relationship.
• If you're married, get a line of credit ASAP and pay it back to show you have a track record of repayment. Get a bank credit card in your name only.
• Find your public voice. Honor who you are, on a spectrum. Practice in safe spaces. Call on your trusted network to help find your authentic voice.
• Ask for what you want.
• Build on your strengths AND get comfortable doing the uncomfortable.
• Don't knock bank debt, which is long term. Get to know a banker now.
• Women need to learn the venture capital model. Investors are pattern matchers. You need to develop a network to groom you to get private investors attracted to your idea and do an offering.
• Young women are at risk. If you don't define your career by 35 you're cut off at 50.

Resources for women business owners mentioned in the meeting: Women's Initiative. Working Solutions. Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center which helps you bank borrow. Score Small Business Development Centers. Catalytic Women. Astia.

Darlene's initiative aims to have quarterly meetings which are invitation only. If you're interested to join the $700K Club, please contact her directly.

"POWER OF MONEY" was scrawled on the white board in the SOMA Central recreation room when we arrived. It fit Darlene's notes for the evening. To be continued.

On the GlobalNiche Bookshelf: Global Dexterity. Reinventing You. The Impact Equation.

Building your global niche is a 21st century skill. For work. For life.

International business, human resources, the future of life & work bestsellers and new releases from Harvard Biz Review are stacking up on our bookshelf at Pinterest.

Finding cultural effectiveness. Career reinvention through social media and your own content. Achieving impact via your platform and social networks. Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset.

These are all GlobalNiche mainstays going mainstream. Click here to tweet about this.

What does it mean to be a global worker and a true "citizen of the world" today? asks author Andy Molinsky in Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process.

It means you're able to adapt your behavior to conform to new cultural contexts without losing your authentic self.

"Not only is this difficult, it's a frightening prospect for most people and something completely outside their comfort zone," writes Molinsky, an associate professor at Brandeis University's International Business School. He straddles the psychology and organizational behavior departments.

"What's needed now," he claims, "is a critical new skill: global dexterity."

Global dexterity? It's what we do here.

This critical 21st century skill is exactly what we've been pioneering at GlobalNiche and expat+HAREM group blog and the Expat Harem book before it, as we have striven to make the limbo state and high cultural stakes of expatriate life a strength instead of a weakness. How to navigate your surroundings in culturally appropriate ways while also honoring the truth of who you are. That's global dexterity. Thanks to Andy Molinsky for the term. Back in 2009 we couldn't find many people talking about it at all, so we came up with our own term: "psychic location independence."

At GlobalNiche we've also come to the conclusion that this approach to a dexterous, global version of yourself  increasingly works for people everywhere, whether you're 'actually global' or not. You might be in your own backyard and need to navigate your surroundings in culturally appropriate ways and have your own, distinct truth to honor. You might not have a passport but can still benefit from becoming a global operative. In fact, being globally aware and globally functional has become an imperative in today's connected world.

"Use social media to build connections" is one of seven steps branding expert Dorrie Clark lays out to reinvent yourself professionally, in  Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future.

"Show what you know" is another of Clark's steps. She suggests you use your content to show the world what you care about.

Again, sound familiar? It should. Using your content online and off to get where you want to go is exactly how you build your global niche. It's why the GlobalNiche program at its heart is about content strategy. Your content and your online presence is the key to creating your place in the world.

Another title that is particularly useful for people building online presences to reach offline goals is The Impact Equation: Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise? by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Brogan is a favorite of ours here at GlobalNiche.

The impact of our ideas is a function of the quality and similarity-but-distinction of the ideas, our ability to reach people and be understood, trusted, appreciated.

Impact = C x (R + E + A + T + E)

C = Contrast – having ideas similar to existing ideas, yet different enough to stand out

R = Reach – connecting higher numbers of people to your idea

E = Exposure – knowing how frequently you connect people to your ideas

A = Articulation – ensuring that your ideas are easily understood

T = Trust – based on multiple factors, such as credibility and reliability

E = Echo – connecting to your community in a personal way

As Brogan explained in a fun January 2013 Twitter chat I participated in (#BizBookChat a virtual book club for the actionable books community by Alyssa Burkus), "The Impact Equation is about how to turn your goals into ideas, & how to get those ideas absorbed and actions taken."

To build a platform, Brogan says, "you've got to find how you can best tell the story and where you can reach the people you hope to reach."

"Start where you are," Brogan counseled us in the fast-moving Twitter chat. "But look for growth. Move your chips to the next table. Strive to reach who you need to reach."

Start where you are. That's your only option. Oh, and start your evolution today.

Evolution is exactly what Nacie Carson urges in The Finch Effect: The Five Strategies to Adapt and Thrive in Your Working Life. The Portfolio.com blogger and founder of TheLifeUncommon.net says it's your best bet in today's high-pressure economy.

Traditional career strategies spell professional extinction, she writes, but the fluid new gig economy offers tremendous potential for anyone willing to adapt.

Carson's five steps for ensuring professional success are all part of the GlobalNiche mindset and skill set.

• Adopt a gig mindset.
• Identify your value.
• Cultivate your skills.
• Nurture your social network.
• Harness your entrepreneurial energy.

Among many other notable titles on the shelf about navigating the world today is Mitch Joel's Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends On It. I hope to tackle this sometime soon. In the meantime, tell us which books on your shelf echo these 21st century life and work skills.