Clarity Rules them All

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes struggle to get motivated and ‘moving’ again, after a break, or a setback. In my case, it’s almost a double whammy. After two years of living on the other side of the World and truly ‘livin the dream’ life I had always wanted, we came home to Australia and really struggled to settle back in.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to see our four adult children again on a regular basis. Our eldest son and his wife had had a baby earlier in the year and it was good to be able to see our first grandchild much more easily. It meant I could see my parents a bit more. They live in South Australia but it’s only an hour flight away. It also meant seeing our friends and other family too (like my in laws) on a much more regular basis.

But it was still very difficult. Leaving England at the time we did (and we had to because our visas were running out), felt like leaving things unfinished.

We decided to give ourselves six months before we would make any important decisions. So, in late July 2019 we returned to the rental house we put our boys in and set about getting things back into a routine. My main focus was on making sure our son started well at his new school.

When we left J was in Grade 3 and jumped into a Grade 5 class in the UK. Effectively he missed 1.5 years of school. Because kids in the UK start in the September of the year in which they turn 5, J would have been in grade 5 had he started school in the UK. The Headmaster of the school he went to, felt that it was better for him to be with his age peers, rather than place him in any sort of academic level. When our one year turned into two and J completed year 6 there, we knew we could not bring him back to Australia and place him in a Year 5 class in the local state school.

Our two older boys had attended their high school years at a local private school. It is in the top 10–15 of private schools in Melbourne and provides a great education (not dissimilar to his education in the UK) and thus have much more flexibility in what they do with their enrolments. I was able to use our past experience with the school and the contacts I still had there, to begin discussions about J going into Grade 6 from August -December and then starting high school in 2020. Fortunately for us, they agreed and that is what we did. So for the second time in two years, J had to learn about a new school and make new friends. So I was very conscious that I wanted to spend my time in the latter part of 2019, helping him do that and being involved with the school. And that is what I did.

Fast forward to March 2020 and all of Australia was locked down because of Coronavirus. Certainly not the start to high school we had planned and not the re-entry to Australia we had wanted.

Getting back to our earlier decision, we did what we planned. We made no big decisions or plans as we promised but by January and February, we were still unsettled and in early February we made the decision to return to the UK.

Once again, we had no idea ‘how’ we would do it. The biggest stumbling block is a visa that would enable us to live there. In the UK they call this ‘Leave to Remain’. If we don’t have this we can’t live there for more than 6 months of the year. Not having this permission also means things like renting a house become impossible, as they require your residence permit to lease to you. Also, entry and exit to the country becomes more difficult the number of times you do it. And as my husband would be travelling for work, one time he will be at the border and they may refuse him entry. Which would obviously cause many problems!

Fortunately, as usually happens, when we get CLEAR about what we want to do, things show up. In this case an offer from a group he’s working with for work that would give us a visa to live there plus additional work in Europe may be available too.All of course on hold until the pandemic is over (but that’s a post for another time).

So, what’s the moral of today’s post?

GET CLEAR

Time and time again doors have opened for us, because we were clear about what we wanted and where we were going. A marketer I know (Tom Beal) says “Lack of Clarity is the root of all failure”.

So that must mean ‘Clarity is the root of success’.

Become clear, and you will go much further than you can imagine.

This story first appeared at www.excellencetakescourage.com

You can follow Michelle at:

www.ExcellenceTakesCourage.com (a work in progress) and www.SavvyTravelHistorian.com (to be launched in 2021).