In blogs about emigration, one topic appears again and again: “My biggest mistakes after moving abroad.” These texts are easy to recognize by their titles. A person looks back, remembers the first years in a new country, and lists the decisions that still make them feel a little awkward. Recently, I caught myself reading such titles in a completely different way. I once wrote about my own mistakes in emigration, and I remember very well the tone I used back then. There was a lot of irritation toward myself in that list. Now I am more interested in something else: why the same word can start to sound so different over time.
My negative attitude toward mistakes appeared long before I moved abroad. In Russia, any small mistake could often turn into a question of status. A person could make a mistake in one specific situation, but the conversation would quickly move to their position, competence, and right to make decisions at all. At that point, the mistake itself was no longer the main issue. What mattered was who now had the power to explain to you what kind of person you were.
In such an environment, a person gets used to being constantly on guard. You prepare in advance to defend yourself, argue, explain yourself, hide your weak spots, and, in the worst case, shift the blame to someone else. Over time, this becomes an inner habit. Even when the old boss, the old company, or the old Russian tone are no longer around, the expectation remains inside: after a mistake, punishment will follow.
Moving abroad suddenly pulls a person out of their familiar environment. The people who could once teach you how to live, judge every step, and quickly choose someone to blame are now far away. But their voice can keep sounding in your head for a long time. For me, this voice often sounded like a toxic boss: it demanded an immediate result, expected failure in advance, and turned any loss of time, money, or energy into a reason for an inner investigation.
But emigration works very differently. Here, every day you have to try things that you had no access to before. For the first time, you deal with local documents. For the first time, you look for housing under unfamiliar rules. For the first time, you speak with a doctor, an official, a colleague, or a neighbor in a language where you still do not feel free. In this kind of life, you cannot demand perfect accuracy from yourself right away. If you put yourself on trial after every failed attempt, you quickly begin to fear the next step.
The hardest part comes when every step after moving abroad turns into an inner exam. A person applies for jobs but does not quickly find a good one, so they decide that something must be wrong with them. They attend German classes for two weeks, but the language still feels heavy and unnatural in their mouth. They go out in the evening to meet new people, come home alone, and are already ready to decide that they will never have their own circle in the new country.
In emigration, this kind of logic is especially dangerous. A person often does not yet fully understand what result they need or how to reach it. A good job requires dozens of conversations, a rewritten CV, an understanding of the market, and a clearer sense of your own role. A new language requires time, mistakes, and many awkward phrases. New friendships appear through repeated attempts. If you expect a big result from every first attempt, life after moving abroad quickly shrinks into fear of the next step.
There is another difficulty as well: many things can only be lived through once you are already inside the new country. While a person is preparing at home, German remains a lesson in a schedule, a CV remains a file on a computer, and a job interview remains practice in front of a screen. Around them, the old life continues, with its own tasks, habits, and daily routine. In that reality, moving abroad can easily become something you do for a few hours a week, not a rebuilding of your real life.
When a person is afraid of making a mistake, it is easy to fall into the trap of endless preparation. From the outside, it looks reasonable: they read blogs, watch videos, ask other emigrants questions, compare other people’s stories, and try to understand in advance where trouble may be waiting. There is value in this. Other people’s experience really can help you see things you would not have thought about on your own.
But at some point, preparation starts serving a different purpose. A person no longer wants only to collect information. They want to protect themselves from the very possibility of making a mistake. It seems that one more conversation, one more blog, one more piece of advice from another emigrant will finally give them the feeling of being fully ready. But this feeling keeps moving further away. The more stories they hear, the more new fears appear.
This way, you can stand in front of the door for years and keep telling yourself that you are still preparing. In reality, at that moment a person is often trying to make a deal with their inner boss: I will study everything, check everything, calculate everything, and then there will be nothing to criticize me for. But emigration is too alive and too individual for such a system. Every person has their own language, job market, savings, character, accidents, and tiredness.
That is why other people’s experience is useful only up to a certain point. It helps you draw a map of the area, but it does not live your own move for you. At some point, the new country starts responding only to the person who is already taking steps inside it. Then every new piece of information stops being preparation for a perfect start and becomes part of reality.
Inside the new country, everything feels different. You suddenly need the language not for an exercise, but for a conversation with a real person. A new meeting is no longer an abstract goal, but an ordinary evening after which you understand a little better how people here build connections. This is when real involvement appears, and with it come the inevitable “mistakes.”
At some point, I wanted to compare my personal feeling with psychology. It was important for me to understand why a harsh inner voice takes away energy so quickly, while a calmer attitude toward yourself helps you keep moving.
In Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, there is an important idea about how people see their own skills. When ability feels fixed once and for all, every difficulty starts to sound like a judgment of your whole personality. A failed job interview, a difficult conversation in German, or slow progress with the language can easily turn into proof of your own weakness. With a growth mindset, the same situation feels less destructive: a person sees which skill still needs attention and understands where to direct the next effort.
This topic is well supported by the work Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterror Adjustments by Jason Moser and his colleagues. The authors studied how people react to mistakes and showed something important for me: a person with a growth mindset pays more attention to a mistake and corrects their actions better after it. In this way of seeing things, a mistake gives the brain material for the next attempt. Harsh shame takes attention away and sends it into self-defense.
In her work on self-compassion, Kristin Neff writes about treating yourself with kindness in a difficult moment. For a Russian-speaking person, this idea can sometimes sound suspiciously soft, almost like permission to relax. But for Neff, self-kindness means the ability to recognize that a moment is difficult, live through unpleasant feelings, and keep acting. In emigration, this kind of support is especially important. There is already enough uncertainty, tiredness, and unfamiliar rules here, even without an inner prosecutor.
Nina Keith and Michael Frese have a meta-analysis called Effectiveness of Error Management Training. They studied training where mistakes are used as part of learning a skill. This approach is especially useful when a person has to transfer old experience to new tasks. For emigration, this is a very accurate description. You arrive with your old education, your old profession, and your old habits of communication, but the new country forces you to adjust all of this while you are already moving.
Another important scientific basis can be found in Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman’s book Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. They write that stress depends on how a person evaluates an event. The same difficulty can be experienced as a threat to the whole future or as a hard but solvable episode. In emigration, the difference between these two evaluations is huge. When every mistake immediately becomes a disaster, a person has less energy. When a person sees a specific task in front of them, there is space for the next step.
Emigration is too alive to be fully calculated in advance. Moving abroad includes a huge number of factors that a person can see only partly. A new country affects you through language, the job market, documents, money, people, tiredness, random meetings, and your own state on a particular day. Too many things change at the same time. That is why there will always be some action that can later be called a mistake, especially if a person is already looking at themselves through the eyes of a future accuser.
Another view helped me: emigration can be seen as research. A scientist does not know the result in advance, and therefore cannot blame himself for failure. He tries, observes, receives information, and changes the next step. Then going to a bar is no longer a test of your ability to immediately find friends. It becomes a way to learn how people here spend time and get closer to each other. A conversation with an official becomes a way to understand how the local bureaucracy works. Looking for a job gradually shows where your experience is understood more clearly, and where the market answers with silence.
This way of seeing things gives the mind more energy for the next step. Every attempt brings knowledge, even when the result is smaller than expected. New knowledge helps you choose the next step more precisely. This creates a certain freedom: you no longer have to prove to yourself every day that you did everything perfectly. You learn to see how the new life works and slowly find your place in it.
In this sense, emigration forced me to replace my inner toxic manager with a supportive leader. Adaptation in a new country requires exactly this kind of voice. It helps build new habits, new connections with people, new reactions to your own mistakes, and, strangely enough, it helps you look for yourself again. Because in the end, you still have to build your own path yourself. For me, the most honest way became the view of a researcher: to go, observe, make mistakes, learn, go again, and slowly build my own happy life out of these attempts.