Hello, I am Silke

I call myself a gregarious free spirit, passionate about international living and working to understand, to learn and to connect with people.

My 25 year career in luxury hotels followed by positions in Digital Media  for online travel publication tripcanvas.co in South East Asia and global online luxury travel and wellness publication Destination Deluxe  as well as Malaysia Destination Consultant for Relonetwork Asia opened the doors to a cosmopolitan life in countries such as Germany, England, Kuwait, France, Seychelles, UAE, Mauritius, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.  In each of those places I left a piece of my heart.

While going through the ups and downs of long-term expatriation, short and long-term travel and travel planning, I sometimes found myself impeded by road blocks in my personal and professional life, which affected my overall wellbeing and productivity.

In these situations, I wished for a professional ally who could have offered me deep listening and helped me gain more clarity about my travel and expat living motivations and identifying my personal and professional goals and creating an action plan to reach them.

During my career and especially during the last decade, when for many of us travelling became part of our life, when places far away became more accessible and when holidaying, working and living in remote countries offered new exciting opportunities and experiences, more and more amongst us were longing to spend a short or longer part of our life abroad to fulfill some of our personal and professional goals.

Pursuing our big dreams through short-term or long-term expatriation has to be well prepared though. When enthusiastically starting a new life abroad, we can easily forget to clearly identify our goals and motivations, miss to see that the grass on the other side is not always greener and that regardless where we go, we will always take ourselves and our emotional baggage with us.

Expat living is certainly not a must to live a fulfilling life. It is a choice for people whose essence craves for growing personally and/or professionally through this particular lifestyle path by experiencing different countries and ways of living and working.

The wanderlust people often need more clarity on what really matters to them and someone helping them creating an action plan. Especially long-term travellers and expats need a listening ear when they move from the initial honeymoon phase in a foreign land to the phase when reality kicks in.

That is why I have decided to dive deeper into the field of coaching and professional guidance and pursued an advanced coaching training. As a certified Life & Emotional Intelligence Coach I now combine my experience as a long-term working expat and running a business while travelling and my passion for guiding people with international lifestyles to success.

I work with global individuals, who wish to grow and learn through travel experiences and companies who encourage international travel experiences and expatriate assignments among their leaders to pursue their life and professional goals and become more productive.

With the right mindset and preparation, I believe travel and expatriation can be incredibly enriching, helping people to become more productive, open-minded, culturally aware and achieving an overall sense of wellbeing while being away from home – and keeping that spirit upon return.