Playing Big With Your Global Niche: Tara Sophia Mohr

Building your global niche -- the place you belong and operate to your true potential -- is about being both as unique and as big as you can be. This week Global Niche invites you to a live, interactive, online conversation with writer, coach and personal growth teacher Tara Sophia Mohr.

Join us in our Linqto* web room on Friday, January 13th at 10am ***Pacific Time*** [be sure to convert to your local time] to talk about optimizing who and where you are.

Tara Mohr will share the tactical skills she teaches in her upcoming Playing Big program [http://bit.ly/zeasyU] which we can all use to hone our specialties and deepen/broaden our impact in the world.

Have a question for Tara? Post it at our LinkedIn Playing Big discussion here: http://lnkd.in/4JmGgS

If you can't make it to the call, we'll release the recording soon after.

* Instructions for entering the Linqto space - go to http://www.linqto.com/rooms/taraagacayaklive test web cam and mic, if you wish to ask questions on camera enter the room enter a screen name

Here's a calendar of our previous and upcoming events: http://www.globalniche.net/conversations/

Hosting Personal Growth Teacher Tara Sophia Mohr In A Live, Interactive, Online Conversation

This week at GlobalNiche we'll be talking with Tara Sophia on the live web video app Linqto. Participants can ask questions during the call, either on-camera or by typing them into the Linqto chat room while we talk.  This will be my firstLinqto call. Tara Mohr will share the tactical skills she teaches in her upcoming Playing Big program [http://bit.ly/zeasyU] which we can all use to hone our specialties and deepen/broaden our impact in the world.

...excited to get the GlobalNiche year started with such an inspiring topic and expert. I met Tara Sophia in person last month for the first time now that we're in the same city (San Francisco) and she's got a great presence: focused, and serene, and so clear.

What I like most about Tara Sophia is that she balances a desire for results with a gentle understanding of why we might not be getting those results yet. She knows what it's going to take to get there, to "play big". She cracks me up, too. This is the woman who landed a book segment on the Today Show before she even had a book to sell.

Community Crowdsourcing My Move From IST to SF

As I relocate from Istanbul to San Francisco, we're crowd sourcing the psychic transition. Whether you're familiar with Istanbul or have a little bit of San Francisco in your past or not, the Global Niche community is full of experts on the growing pains of displacement -- and replacement.

In your opinion, what connects Istanbul to SF, and vice versa? What are the biggest differences?

Care to share your favorite places to see, eat, relax, exercise, work in SF? What Bay Area 'hood can you see a global citizen like me settling in? Suggestions of who I MUST meet in town?

FOREVER GRATEFUL! ....for helping me say my goodbye to Istanbul -- and hello to San Fran. (And be sure to let us know when you need the Global Niche crowd to help you process a displacement of your own!)

GlobalNiche.net

Suspended Between Multiple Worlds -- Challenged By Culture, Geography, Language or Time Zone? What I Did About It.

Do you ever feel suspended between multiple worlds -- challenged in your pursuits and interests by culture, geography, language or time zone? Welcome to the club. In fact, after fourteen years of expatriatism and through my cultural identity work as a writer/producer I’ve come to see this psychic limbo state about who we are and where we belong -- familiar to people with transglobal lives and culturally hybrid lifestyles -- as our secret weapon.

To start at the beginning, we’re all born global citizens even if that knowledge gets trained out of us. As we mature, a global identity seems nebulous, and ungrounded. Better to bond with the more concrete: family, culture, nation. Our schoolmates, colleagues, neighbors.

There’s a problem with concrete, though. It cracks over time and in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

I’d even venture to say that ‘our people’ today are not who they used to be. We’re unbounded by the communities in our physical midst. Now we can find inspiring new kinship in interest and outlook.

Expats and international types have more reasons than most to find a way to operate independently of where we happen to be physically.

With today's economic uncertainties no matter who or where we are, we all have to embrace an enterprising view of ourselves -- a way to operate unlimited by the options directly surrounding us.

With recent advances in virtual technologies like mobile devices and the social web, we have tools at our disposal to help us live a globally unbounded life.

Now we don’t have to be a tech expert or social media guru to build a micro-yet-global base of operations with a professional web platform and virtual network for continuing education, professional development, and a close-knit but world-flung set of friends. We can be digital world citizens and achieve a cutting-edge state of being -- that is, what I call ‘psychic location independence’.

I coined the concept of a global niche -- defined as a ‘psychic solution to your global identity crisis’-- at expat+HAREM, the online community of global citizens, identity adventurers and intentional travelers I founded in 2009. The group blog was inspired by the global community that gathered around Tales from the Expat Harem, an anthology by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey that I coedited in 2005 with fellow Istanbul resident Jennifer Gokmen.

Expatharem.com was also informed by the idea of an ‘expat harem’ itself, where all the writers in the book and the readers drawn to them are cultural peers in a virtual realm.

My partner Tara Agacayak, a creative enterprise consultant from Silicon Valley who’s spent the past 10 years in Turkey, and I launched this new work-life initiative here at GlobalNiche.net. We’re applying the innovations we've been exploring in the past few years in our professional communities of creative entrepreneurs and social media proponents along with our expat experiences. We've realized that a robust online presence that helps us reach our offline goals is the most important independent survival skill of international people.

My Memoir Work In Progress

A forensic memoir of best friendship with a multiple personality, a family culture tale that parallels the development of string theory with its multiple dimensions. Both tracks of the story are controversial (and so far unprovable!) cosmologies. Repped by Foundry Literary + Multimedia, NYC.

Please visit my work-in-progress Pinterest board for conceptual images that capture the making of the book and relate to its contents, comparable book and movie titles, elements of the story. It's the best way I've found to transmit the mood and the reach of the work. If you haven't seen a Pinterest board about an author's process, check this one out.

At the bottom of this photo set are some images from my work-in-progress, a forensic memoir of friendship. Hover over the images to see the caption. Click on an image to enlarge. (There are some unrelated images in the below Facebook set for reasons out of my control.)

[fbphotos id="181185521896004"]

My Global Niche: An Interview With Today's Zaman Newspaper

American reporter in Turkey Brooks Emerson asked me about the foreign edge, and the challenges of finding my niche in Turkey for his series on expat success stories in national English-language newspaper Today's Zaman. In the far-ranging interview, Emerson asks me what the initial impetus for my success as an expat was, and how I've evolved.

No surprise to those who know me, foreign language adoption has not played much of a role -- once I realized that taking business meetings and doing live television interviews in Turkish literally was rendering me mute! But mentoring in all realms of my personal and professional life has been a "secret weapon" in the creative entrepreneurship of self that I aim to practice.

Emerson asks me how the environment affects the outcome of an expat's endeavors. I tell him how sense of place can inspire a sense of self.

"Anastasia says that she has always been attracted to places with an amalgamation of people and cultures. However, the biggest pull is “the idea of crossroads … like Rome, where [she] studied in college … and now here on the Bosporus,” where she senses a positive energy and vibration for self-discovery and reinvention.

"Anastasia believes that working and living abroad is an excellent way to discover new self-potential."

Read Emerson's entire July 2011 interview "The global niche of Anastasia Ashman" online.

Expat Images: Unrecognizable Vs. Iconic

On my first serious expat stint, Southeast Asia in the ‘90s, I achieved a state of photographic oblivion. When I set out from Los Angeles I was already solidly unemployed, unproductive, and unmotivated. I had a capricious romance to see me through.

In Asia, life losses piled up: heirlooms ransacked at the container yard, the cruel theft of a puppy, the unfathomable demise of my best friend.

I did not write about any of these things. Too much shock, no support. Turns out capricious romance isn’t the best fallback in a crisis.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL BARRIERS PREVENTED ME FROM BONDING WITH THE CHINESE, MALAYS, TAMILS AND THAIS AROUND ME. My reactions were miscalibrated: I laughed when introduced to a person with the name of a celebrated American boxer -- a common moniker in Malaysia -- and took offense at the quickly-retracted handshake of a traditional Malay greeting. I expected dinner party banter at gatherings that instead seemed to focus on the scarfing of food in silence.

Soon enough I was as unrecognizable as my new world.

My own body was erasing me. A spongy, knee-less Southern Italian genetic inheritance asserted itself with the help of a greasy local diet while my hair frizzed mercilessly in the tropical air.

Friends who knew me during cosmopolitan past lives in New York, California, and Italy wouldn’t identify me as the 30-pounds heavier creature with the ill-fitting clothes and unschooled haircut photographed in jungles and palaces.

Uprooted from my milieu, in a harsh climate and surrounded by perpetual strangers, I was desperate to locate comfort whatever the cost.

My Asia photographs are stowed, an expat adventure distressing to recall, impossible to frame. Yet, scraping bottom (especially on the far side of the world) has a benefit. It’s easy to see which way is up.

My 12-time zone couch surf back to New York was like a Phoenix’s ascent from the ashes

RECENTLY I'VE BEEN PICTURED MONSTROUS AGAIN. Breathe easy: happily married, in possession of a hard won sense of self. This particular snapshot of expat life is a mantle piece pride. There I am in 2005 commandeering the lens, the microphone, the printing press in Istanbul as Turkish newspapers and television discuss my expat literature collection by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey. Tales not universally known, many writers never before published. All of them minority voices in a Muslim nation with a reputation for censorship.

The celebrity-studded book launch is a blur, except for my unauthorly leather pants and shiny rock star coiffure -- those are in fine focus in my mind’s eye! I haven’t often been so polished before or since, nor managed to squeeze into the lambskin trousers, but no matter.

As a coiner of the concept of the Expat Harem virtual community -- feminine storytellers making sense of life’s evolutions through the filter of another culture -- in a flash I became iconic.

A positive image of an expat to others, and to myself.

THE FLEETING, PICTURESQUE MOMENT CAPTURES AN ENDURING TRUTH ABOUT MY EXPATRIATISM. In a wide world of strangers I’ve finally found my perpetual peers, and a theoretical home for both my literary career and my life abroad.

Now I have a way to nurture and sustain my most valuable expatriate possession -- my sense of self -- no matter where I am, or what heights or depths I face.

What image captures you at your most unrecognizable  -- and your most iconic? What was happening in your life in that moment? +++++ This post originally appeared in Amanda van Mulligen's blogseries "Expat Images"

Social Media Consumption, Filters, and Overcoming The Reluctance To Share

From a discussion at the GlobalNiche LinkedIn group about creatives being reluctant to promote themselves that morphed into a discussion about the opposite issue of dealing with sources who share more than we can handle: This is another reason to use Google+: you can put useful-but-prolific sharers into their very own circle if need be, then dip in when you want. You can also do that with Facebook lists but apparently very few people have exploited their existence. I use mine all the time.

It's why I directly visit NPR reporter @AndyCarvin's Twitter account but don't have him in my main feed. I also have him in a list but cannot see native RTs from him that way.

As Clay Shirky has famously said years ago -- the problem is filter failure, not info overload. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10142298-16.html

Would I want @AndyCarvin to cut down on what he shares and how he works because I can't figure out how to best access his stuff? No.

Maybe we're not in his position yet, but what would happen if we reframed our challenge to be "how do I become someone whose content and contact-style people will want to find a way to use that works for them"? The tools are there.

On the other hand, the tools are there for us content sharers too. I use SocialOomph to schedule tweets in advance, and an autoresponder series on AWeber. I think I could contact people more than I already do. I know I am leaving tools on the table. We can offer our audience options at various stages of the game: "Do you want more like this? A weekly digest?" via our newsletter provider, etc.

We can take the guessing out of it -- I bet we pull back long before we reach our audience's limit because we don't like to promote ourselves. We can do split-tests and get the stats on our side like Tim Ferriss.

Theory Into Practice

Hope you're enjoying the nature in your part of the world, and as you make your mid-year plans, you're using the playful travel buzzwords bursting out all over: (palidays! set-jetting! buddymoons! frightseeing!) +++++ AT expat+HAREM

Those April showers have us blooming too. We've got a new video section at the site, with some golden oldies like the Expat Harem editors on NBC's Today Show with Matt Lauer, a steamy talk with Martin Anthony on The Crossroads, and recent material like my "Evolution of a global niche" slideshow (about how to use an identity crisis to your advantage!) and a talk at Microsoft Turkey for Turkish Women's International Network last month.*

Hybrid life coach Amna Ahmad shows us how to "decolonize your inner world" with a simple writing exercise, while Rose Deniz grapples with a unique lingo as she leaves her native tongue behind. Sezin Koehler calls for essays about Third Culture retirement issues -- a pressing concern for Baby Boomers and adult-onset Third Culture types like many of us.

+++++ AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

We're intrigued by the concept of Trunk, a global culture magazine "in the spirit of a Hemingway novel" which proclaims "there are no foreign lands", but we can really use the real-life logistics of expat women packed into a just-released book from ExpatWomen.com (download a sample here). Check out author Andrea Martin's $5,000 launch lottery too.

+++++ *BTW, these fresh videos offer a sneak peek into expat+HAREM's newest initiative -- Globalniche.net --  a private and practical membership community to learn exactly how to operate professionally and personally independent of traditional limitations. Putting theory into practice. Join us on Facebook and Twitter!

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

What would you want to learn in our new educational community? Which expert do you want to hear from? Your votes will determine the topic of our first (complimentary) webinar...coming soon!

Click here to share your most burning question.

+++++

Perennially yours,

+++++ MISS LAST MONTH? Check out April's Upheavals +++++

How To Use An Identity Crisis To Your Advantage

What comes after cultural disenfranchisement?

What comes after Expat Harem, the book?

What comes after expat+HAREM, the community site?

This slideshow charts the evolution of Globalniche.net (or, how to use an identity crisis to your advantage). Below is the script of my accompanying talk The Evolution of A GlobalNiche, delivered at Turkish Women's International Network, Microsoft Headquarters, Istanbul

EVOLUTION

DREAM of belonging how PLAYING with cultural identity has helped me ACHIEVE new sense of myself, personally and pro

CONCEPT & COMMUNITY we can all can use to be successful.

MAP

FB contacts. Where in the world do I belong?

Dream of belonging. Not just fitting in. But being in the right place with the right people. Place to lead your ideal lifestyle, chosen livelihood? Work you love to do so much it’s play?

For ppl who dream of life/community beyond what surrounds u now.

Story begins. Southeast Asia. Disenfranchised experience. lost my voice. Writer but I could not make myself understood. I didn’t understand what was going on around me.

What saved me: play. Pasttimes that put me into context. Taught me about the place. Historical travelogue. Acting in a period film. Drawn to crossroads, places where time meshes, opposites collide and cultures fuse.

EXPAT HAREM

Turkey 2003. Asian complaint travelogue. Snake infested island! Pirate-filled waters! No metaphors, really happened.

Turkey kidnapped me instead - metaphor. Theoretical home with the Expat Harem anthology. Inspired by the foreign women in sultan harem, liminal state of TR.

Showed how we can be embedded in a place, yet forever alien. Survive, but thrive in limbo. Also my character, like working alone at home, in collab with others. Found historical counterparts, also cultural peers. 100 women in 14 nations answered call for subs. 100s more on book tours. No longer alone in my limbo, even if American publishers suspected I was. worried book’s nonexistent audience, 15 New York publishing houses passed before sold. proved wrong. Thanks to Turks Turkophiles, expats, travelers, women writers, Near Eastern studies types -- people like you.

EXPANDING

EH called together virtual community but nowhere to meet. 2yrs ago: group blog to address readers and see what was beyond the book.

Expand circle. not just woman expat writer in Turkey. Expats everywhere. Global nomads, multicultural types. Immigrants, intentional travelers. Men, even! Anyone in cultural limbo.

New social order, most meaningful bonds not family, culture, nation. School. Work. social web connect us on interest, experience and world view. we can find each other, learn.

HYBRIDS

EH community started teaching me. Podcast roundtable discussion, realized all using creativity to manage hybrid, multifaceted lives. Flex skills/perspectives cd bring to all endeavors. Our life trajectory not a liability! Cd be asset.

AUTHOR PLATFORM

While launching EH online, also working on 2nd book, about my friendship with a multiple personality. Problem. After success/acceptance of EH book -- 5 yrs -- committing career suicide? lose my audience, or transition them to new topic? to prepare my author platform for 2nd book, began explaining why cultural writer shifting to psychological topic. Emphasizing identity, how formed thru culture -- getting away from travel focus. Also apparent expat and hybrid life writing more concerned with personality and psyche issues than travel often is.

MULTIPLE CULTURAL IDENTITIES

there WAS a link between past work, new book. have multiple CULTURAL personalities -- like a multiple personality, honor/care for each key to health/happiness. Career 'problem' both addressed personal issue and paved new pro growth! We have fusion!

GLOBAL NICHE DEFINED

called expat+HAREM site global niche, meant niche for globalists, home in world. 6 mos definition emerged. Looking at lifestyle design, location independent movements pioneering gate-jumping new paradigms, digital nomadic practices we require when geographically or culturally disadvantaged.

Detected my community's distinctly different need. Our question not Generation-Y: "how can i live on a beach in Thailand by running a blog."

PSYCHIC LOCATION INDEPENDENCE

Instead, PLU looking for in a GN is answer to: "how can I live the life I want wherever it is I happen to be?" To live/ work to our abilities independent of location and whatever its limitations.

Maybe still in hometown, or everyone speaks language we're not good at -- whether language of tongue, some other kind. best customers 10 time zones away?.

This addresses more universal issue. How to be okay with where we are, plenty reasons why we are where we are. Don't always live in optimal setting for our dreams. Doesn't mean we have to defer. We can get started, right now.

GLOBAL NICHE WORKGROUP

Past yr: cofounded creative entrepreneurship workgroup, mastermind how building life/livelihoods around strengths and interests. What we UNIQUELY bring. Belonging into own hands, playing with possibilities to find ourselves, audience, peers. Focus on web platforms reflect our place in the world, connect to relevant ppl, communities, integrate into offline activities.

Love fusion. NOW combining workgroup with expat+HAREM mission to make our psychic limbo a productive state. A global niche workgroup.

Developing private edu community -- GLOBALNICHE.net -- to equip psychically location independent PLU -- transglobal, multicultural, dreamer in a situation mismatch -- with skills/ tools need to achieve dreams.

Please visit so we can keep u posted about upcoming launch. Thank you TurkishWIN, good night.

Masterminding An Expat's Reluctant Entrepreneurism

Along with Tara Agacayak, I run a private mastermind group on LinkedIn (it’s a subgroup of my Creative Entrepreneurs & Social Media group). Each participant presents her case study and we brainstorm next steps.

Here are some of my thoughts on an expatriate writer's mention that if she weren't an expat and forced to find ways to make a living outside the norm, she wouldn't be an entrepreneur.

It reminds me of the Dialogue2010 conversations at expat+HAREM, and how our hybrid lives have *forced* us to be flexible about a lot of things most people (especially those in our 'previous lives' if we're living outside an original territory, including who we might have been if we'd stayed) never have to deal with. Our careers are one of those things.

The beauty of being a creative entrepreneur is that it's about making your work type and situation *work* for you, for the type of person you are, and the situation you face. That doesn't mean it's the easy choice, just that it has the potential to deliver much more than you'd get from being a cog in someone else's wheel.

Was also reading something the other day about how we don't have to make money from everything we produce (or even try to sell it), but if we're professionals (or hope to be, that is, we're not hobbyists) earning money for the work we do has to be part of the larger plan.

Writing ONLY for money is different type of job than writing what you want to write and receiving money for it (at some point on the journey, and maybe not directly from the writing).

If your interest in writing dries up at the prospect of selling it, or using it as a form of content marketing for something else you are selling, then maybe writing is not an element of the paid work you want to do. Maybe you want to keep it as a hobby, a special form of personal entertainment. That's totally cool.

But, if you harbor dreams of yourself as a professional writer, not only sharing your work widely but receiving compensation for it, then writing *is* an element of your livelihood. If you have the luxury of already knowing what you want to write, and already writing what you want to write (some people are on a different carousel, where they write for hire and dream of writing from the heart and soul and it's hard to get off that carousel for the very reason that it's scary and hard) then all you have to add to your picture is a strategy to get paid for what you are already doing.

Will you have to make changes in your plans, will you have to improve to be competitive, will you have to be sensitive to your readership? Will you have to be aware of the market and how it works and what the shifts are in publishing? Will you see clearly whether you have achieved your professional writing goals or not? Yes.

In fact, writing might suddenly seem like a different kind of work if all that stuff I just mentioned has previously been kept separate from your writing life. I think this might be the key for you. Integrating in small steps your writing as professional, and with a market purpose.

++

Another participant of the group points out this post by creativity coach Mark McGuinness of Lateral Action that if Shakespeare had continued to work for a patron, we may never have heard of him.

How Can We Maintain Our Web Presence & Data When Social Services Are In Flux?

In our GlobalNiche LinkedIn group, Tara Agacayak asked what we're doing to protect our content. Her blog on Blogger was blocked by court order in Turkey. "Not as in legal protection - but how to you make sure your data doesn't disappear? We've seen what happens when companies like Delicious get acquired and we lose our bookmarks or when Turkish courts ban sites like YouTube and Blogger. What are some things we can do to maintain our web presence when it is constantly in a state of flux?"

Here's my answer:

Redundancy, back-up. And trying out new services to capture your feeds...

Even microblogging sites like Tumblr -- you can set it up to capture your blog posts, your tweets, your bookmarks (at least for Delicious it worked).

Content aggregators -- I'm trying out the beta MemoLane to build a social media timeline with FB, Flickr, Twitter, RSS, vimeo.

Here's an example:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=204181789596377&set=a.187853447895878.54875.180650641949492&theater

Groupon Ad Fiasco + Kenneth Cole Twitter Debacle = False Cosmopolitanism

Groupon's SuperBowl ad fiasco when the company attempted to mix consumerism with sensitive political, environmental, cultural, economic and social issues, and the Kenneth Cole Twitter debacle which appeared to make light of unrest in Cairo are examples of the bellyflops that come from false cosmopolitanism.

I wrote about this back in August of 2010.

We’re suffering from a false sense of cosmopolitanism. Access to the worldwide Interwebs leads us to imagine ourselves global thinkers. But we’re not -- unless we’re true xenophiles, bridging cultures, immersed and knowledgeable about multiple worlds.

Most people hang out in “like-minded microcosms” and when we cross a boundary online the new light shed on everyone’s prejudices and assumptions can take us by surprise.

“Xeno-confusion” is happening more often in the virtual realm, with higher and higher stakes. How are you preparing yourself for a wider world?

+++

Related: Global Dexterity

The Joys Of A Second Screen

Now completely addicted to having an external monitor hooked to my laptop. It means you can work on twice as many things at once without the delays and the "what was I going to do...?" problems when you don't have a visual in front of you. In fact, I feel hobbled when I'm just out with my laptop.

I also use an external ergonomic keyboard. I'd never be able to type anything of length on a laptop.

Custom Creative: The Making Of An Authentic Indie Life

Happy blizzard -- or dense fog in the morning! We've got entrepreneurial social media life/work things to do in the low-visibility season ahead. BTW here's an overview never before available: If you're at all interested you can now peek behind-the-scenes of my top five cultural producing projects related to but not strictly expat+HAREM. Hint: Family culture clashes! Art historic soap operas of imperial proportion! [link removed, no longer available]

+++++ AT expat+HAREM

Our shiny new Facebook page replaces a group set to retire one random day. Don't want to lose you in the shuffle. Please post on our FB wall any kind of culturati link you're liking today.

Do we look older more experienced? We just celebrated our first full year of bloghood! 23 guest bloggers to thank, we're also grateful for 2300 comments which took us to surprising intersections of culture and identity. Here we all weigh in on the posts which affected us the most.

2011 starts with the editor of Matador Life Leigh Shulman contrasting the peregrinations of a fictional exile with her own rolling stone life. Why do we leave the places we know, and is the melancholy of disconnect any different if it's elective or imposed on us?

YOUR PRO GLOBAL NICHE IS A WEB PLATFORM...

Not just a dreamy concept of world citizenship, your global niche is about "blooming where you're planted" in a holistic way, being creative and entrepreneurial to find happiness, growth and success wherever you are and in all your aspects.

In conjunction with creative biz consultancy Turquoise Poppy, expat+HAREM is excited to lead a January 22 demonstration of how to build your global niche through social media.

Not geographically convenient, or complete newbie? Cultural creatives and mobile progressives everywhere can now start learning the web tools, techniques and technology: our new mailing list will get you started with free tutorials and keep you posted about next steps, like our upcoming mastermind program for creative entrepreneurs.

That's a high-impact online course where a supportive set of your international, creative peers will help you build your global niche on the web. +++++ AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

We loved Dr. Brene Brown's recent TEDxHouston talk on  wholeheartedness and its root in expressing our vulnerability.

But the blog of longtime expat Diana Baur and majorly creative entrepreneur (the American potter is an innkeeper in Italy) sharpens the point for identity adventurers and global nomads like us. "Wholehearted people don't have an externally-driven directive about living correctly."

To live authentically individual lives we need to embrace the parts of ourselves that don't fit anywhere.

Publication to watch --> BETA is an about-to-be-released quarterly print mag from the global online travel network Matador. All about motion, journey and place, apparently the cheeky thing subtitled the topography of living will be sold at "some of our favorite camel markets and opium dens worldwide."

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

In the new year we're looking at where others end and we begin. "What are you redefining?" we asked.

Beth Wettergreen, the new liaison between a private university in Istanbul and U of Maryland, is struggling with the concept of 'private life' in Turkey. "Here, one is almost never unobserved. I have a feeling that the notion of a truly private life is reserved for the upper middle class and upper class."

Meanwhile another expat is facing the boundaries of a life vision at odds with cultural expectations of a woman who 'works' from home yet is not a traditional housewife.

"I risk appearing rude and living up to the stereotypes of the self-centered American in order to further myself along the path that feels right to me - even if others can't see it or understand it."

What creative, custom life/work solution are you looking for?

Talking to She's Next

Happy to contribute a 60-second She'sNext interview for Hana Kamm's inaugural month. Here I'm talking about how multifaceted, 21st century women can find their global niche.

In this series of inspirational videos, I join other inspiring women around the web and the world in the fields of entrepreneurship, digital life, wellness, empowerment, and personal development, including Alexis Neely, Gloria Feldt, White Hot Truth's Danielle LaPorte, Ali Brown of the Millionaire Protege Club, Courtney Martin, Carol Roth of The Entrepreneur Equation, Aliza Sherman, The Flourishing Muse Hiro Boga, SOBCon's Liz Strauss, Tara Gentile, Laura Roeder, Chris Carr, Laurel Touby, the location independent Lea Woodward, The Suitcase Entrepreneur Natalie Sisson, Shama Kabani, Dusti Arab, Tara Sophia Mohr, Tamar Weinberg and Penelope Trunk.

Making The Psychic Limbo Of Global Citizens A Productive State

The expat+HAREM COMMUNITY AIMS TO HELP YOU: 1) DISCOVER your psychic peers + global community 2) CREATE a hybrid identity from your many worlds

Why do you need our help? The short answer: Because liminal life is a bittersweet limbo -- coming, going, never quite arriving -- and here at expat+HAREM the community embraces this unmoored and central reality of our globetrotting, multicultural, hybrid times.

A PLACE WHERE DIGITAL NOMADS, EXPATS, IMMIGRANTS, FUTURISTS AND WORLD CULTURALISTS ARE UNIQUELY SUITED TO SUCCEED

The psychic limbo and identity adventure global citizens experience today is expat+HAREM's sweet spot. Our neoculture.

This neoculture is our situation in life and our world view. What we work to make sense of, and to capitalize on.

Here at expat+HAREM we've defined the problem, and provide the solution.

Glo· bal· niche, n.

a psychic solution to your global identity crisis

[More about Anastasia Ashman, the founder of this global niche.]

MAKING LIMBO A PRODUCTIVE STATE Limbo is usually considered a place in-between. A state of suspended animation. Paralysis, a spinning of the wheels. Nowheresville. But it can also be an unconstrained place where anything is possible. That's how expat+HAREM choses to see it. Multifaceted people like us have strength and flexibility and experience and access to multiple perspectives. These are all assets.

WE'RE IN THE VANGUARD AND NEED EACH OTHER Globalization has had an unfortunate disenfranchising effect. (Perhaps like many in our community you've been there personally!) However, despite the resistance and misunderstanding and worrying 'purity' movements we're witnessing in populations large and small, at expat+HAREM we believe fostering our particular dialogue of culture and identity is a way forward. A chance to find new and meaningful connection to the world while making sense of conflicting situations.

IT'S NOT ALL BIG PICTURE Sure, we like to talk about the big picture -- whole hemispheres and societies! -- but at our heart we're concerned with the smallest details of the individual. Navigating relationships with people in your life. Achieving psychic location independence. Negotiating our personal connection with the many worlds we love to belong to. That's how we'll find our global niche.

HERE'S WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY "WE'LL HELP YOU FIND YOUR GLOBAL NICHE": a psychic solution to your global identity crisis.

COMMON INTEREST AND EXPERIENCE DEFINES US

Our most important bonds are no longer solely decided by geography, nationality or even blood. When we find where we uniquely belong in the world we've found our global niche.

expat+HAREM, the global niche embodies the Expat Harem concept* -- localized foreigner, outsider on the inside -- while speaking to intentional travelers, identity adventurers and global citizens of all kinds.

This 2-year archive of neoculture discussions delves into perspective on the crossroads and dichotomies of our hybrid lives:

• modern existences in historic places
• deep-rooted traditions translated in mobile times
• limiting stereotypes revisited for wider meaning
• the expat mindset as it evolves from nationalism to globalism

More.

THOUGHTS ON HYBRID LIFE WRITING Combining outsider-view-from-the-inside and journey of self-realization, we think expat/emigree/immigrant literature deserves a shelf of its own.

+++ OUR ROOTS +++ Based on the original Expat Harem concept by Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen

expat+HAREM, the global niche is the archive of a group blog and community site launched in 2009 by Anastasia Ashman, coeditor with Jennifer Eaton Gökmen of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey.

* The site is inspired by the cultural embrace and self-exploration of that best-selling and critically acclaimed 2005 expatriate literature collection.

+ DETAILS: media coverage, academic uses, and awards for the anthology created and edited with Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, compiling the work of 32 international Expat Harem writers.

+ BEST 5 BOOKS ON TURKEY: Turkey’s most-read author Elif Shafak picks Expat Harem among the best 5 books on Turkey (Five Books, November 2010)

+ THE ACCIDENTAL ANTHOLOGIST: expat+HAREM founder's personal story behind the book.

+ HAREM GIRLS FOR SALE: 2 years from workshop to bestseller list -- the story of two expat editors.

Editors interviewed on The Crossroads satellite TV, July 2009

+++++ Take the next step with us --> into GlobalNiche.net's creative self enterprise for the global soul.  Another good place to explore:  Anastasia Ashman's producer page at Facebook.

The Output Of A Holistic Writing Coach

Check out the cool shelf of books (including my Expat Harem, and my college pal Lisa Lemole Oz's US: Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most, and my Twitter acquaintance Maryam Montague's Marrakesh By Design) from Victoria C. Rowan's Ideasmyth clients.

I've worked with Victoria as a holistic creative consultant since I did her journalism bootcamp at Mediabistro in 2001. (Victoria launched Mediabistro's media training program.)

Later I joined her writing critique groups for 40 weeks, and then I was a private writing coaching client.

Her workshops focus on "development of craft, professional writing habits, editing skills, communication skills, marketplace savvy, career development, and life/creativity management in that order."

Authority Abroad: What It Takes To Become Your Own Expat Icon

I've always admired the rugged ability of certain adventurer-writers to appear masterful in the wider world. True or not, it’s easy to envision legendary expatriate authors like Karen Blixen and Ernest Hemingway crushing it in their overseas exploits. Satisfying wanderlust. Surviving exotic illness. Operating transnational businesses. Donning local garb or exploration gear. Pictured alone on the landscape, or comfortably surrounded by teeming locals. Iconic.

Then they write personally relevant opuses Out of Africa and The Old Man and the Sea.

Larger-than-life expat writer personalities seem in tune with far-flung surroundings, able to produce their best work from foreign atmospheres.

These two predecessors were clearly troubled. Alcoholism. Venereal disease. Financial ruin. Divorce. Suicide. However, aspiring to their ultimate of travel feats -- achieving a personal and professional high point -- remains an urge for writers abroad like me.

I explore my own brush with the weight of expat image expectation at a colleague's blog this week by delving into the photos that correspond with a highlight and a lowlight of my expat experience. Despite previous and future international depths, it only takes one flashbulb moment to remind us we too can outdo ourselves abroad. And that memory can empower us and our expat life for a long time. Take a peek at Unrecognizable vs. Iconic.

Which expat icons do you admire -- and when have you found authority overseas?

Psychic Solution To Your Global Identity Crisis

Glo· bal· niche, n. psychic solution to your global identity crisis

Don't coin too many terms, warn the smart search engine optimizers. "No one will know what you're talking about plus they won't be able to find you!" At expat+HAREM we like to talk about unconventional, unbounded and unmapped life as we experience it, and if we could find the lingo we need in common usage, we'd certainly use it.

(Tell us the terms you use.)

On Twitter someone asked, “is ‘hybrid life’ kinda like what a salamander leads?” Uh, sure...you could call us cultural amphibians. Water, air, land, we (try to) do it all.

If you've arrived in the expat+HAREM community, perhaps you do know what I'm talking about. Or maybe you want to see what's next in neoculture (another coined term to-be-explained).

Here’s the deal.

WE'RE ALL BORN GLOBAL CITIZENS even if that knowledge gets trained out of us. A global identity seems nebulous, and ungrounded. Better to bond with the more concrete: family, culture, nation.

Problem with concrete though: it cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

Globalization means we’re entering a permanent state of psychic limbo about who we are and where we belong in the world.

Mixed blood. Crossculture. Third Culture. International work, study, travel. Fusion faiths, dual nationalities. Many of us know the bittersweet liminality of living between multiple worlds, and the soul-sprung righteousness of refusing to settle on just one.

The more we move around the less home is one place --  not to mention the mirage home becomes as soon as we leave it -- so our associations spread and bifurcate and split again. Our capacity for inclusion grows, and our sense of self expands along with it.

Coming, going, never quite arriving. This is where we live today. We’re searching for our place in the world, our people, the hybrid lifestyle that will make it all cohese. We know this:

Our concrete center will not hold.

OUR PEOPLE ARE NOT WHO THEY USED TO BE We also recognize we’re unbounded by the communities in our physical midst and traditional markers like geography, nationality or even blood.

Now we find inspiring new kinship in interest and outlook.

Virtual technologies like social media and mobile devices help identity adventurers, global nomads and digital citizens integrate even faster across out-moded boundaries.

• We’re segregating along the lines of our true selves. Joining tribes. Ning networks. Realtime Twitter chats.
• Finding ways not to be limited by where we are, and methods to be who we are, doing what we love, regardless of location.
• In the exquisite pull of online social networking -- as opposed to the usual blunt force push of actual social circumstance -- we  demand more value and relevance from our connections. They demand the same of us, filling our interactions with dynamism and serendipity.

To become the global citizens we truly are, we need to find our place in the world.

This has always been the case. But the 21st century offers new ways to find where we uniquely belong, and a new urgency to actualize our global citizenship.

Here at expat+HAREM we believe you can create a psychic solution to your global identity crisis.

Call it psychic location independence.

She'sNext interview: Here I'm talking about how multifaceted, 21st century women can find their global niche.

TAPPING INTO OUR OWN GLOBAL BEING When we discover our psychic peers and foster a global community with them  -- fashioning a hybrid identity and a 'salamander' life that intersects and honors the many worlds we belong to -- we've found our global niche. It's good to be home.