EW 028 – How To Support Globally Mobile Leaders and Their Families With Data Driven Results – Winning with Karina Lagarrigue, Psychologist and Advisor To Globally Mobile High Performers

Gordon Sheppard (00:01.112)
Karina, welcome to the show.

Karina Lagarrigue (00:04.017)
Thank you Gordon for having me over.

Gordon Sheppard (00:06.466)
Well, it's just really interesting to have you here because you are a complex thinker. You are someone who has global experience. The audience is gonna get so much from hearing you describe not only yourself, but where you're at in your work to help the people that you are helping. And I can't wait to get into the interview. It's gonna be really, really good. But you know, if you met somebody at a party and they didn't know who you were, what would you say to describe yourself?

Karina Lagarrigue (00:33.019)
Well, funny enough, one of the first questions people ask you is, where are you from? And that's one of the most difficult questions for me to answer. I'm an adult third quarter kid and you're probably going to have to some literature to our audience to know more about that. So I'm a cross-cultural kid and a highly mobile person from birth. it's something that would say defined me very much. This very highly mobile, multicultural personality, would say something that defines me in many, many

ways and probably the two next things probably that I would use to define me it would be I'm a mother of two I think my motherhood is something that is very important to me and I am also a person that is highly sensitive and I dedicate my life to supporting people I'm a psychologist and I specialize in global mobility and multicultural couples

Gordon Sheppard (01:27.502)
This is global mobility and multicultural couples. You're a mom. You've got that in there too. High mobility. So just get me into your world for just a second. You are in a family dynamic where you are mobile. I'm gonna just say that way. So you were in, and you don't even need to give me the history. Like you were in one country in your family scenario and you moved to another country at least once. How many times have you done that?

Karina Lagarrigue (01:51.537)
Before age 18, I did that 20 times.

Gordon Sheppard (01:55.182)
20 times as a kid. you like, and you're not, that's not an army brat. That's like, you know, moving around with your, whatever your parents are doing, whatever they were doing. And we could dig into that. But what I mean to say the mobility is there when you're younger. So you already know that thing. And then you've got this time now as an adult where you're then changing countries, literally. Is that fair?

Karina Lagarrigue (02:14.561)
Exactly. Exactly. So I continued that and I just came to realize how much it just becomes part of our lifestyle. When we get that as a kid, we kind of normalize mobility. It's kind of just part of who we are, part of our identity. And the sooner you understand how much is shaping your decisions and shaping your relationships and perhaps even shaping your life choices like partners or countries where to live or even your job.

I need a very highly mobile or flexible job. Why? When you dig into it, you may find a person just like me with over 20 moves before the age of 18 and they just don't know why, but they just feel that urge inside that we call restlessness. are restless. They don't know how to rest because it's just part of who they are. And if they stop, you kind of feel weird. It's like, what's going on? You know, like in Spain,

They say you have kind of a little worm inside that is kind of tickling you and it's like, when is the next move? When is the next move? Right? So, yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (03:24.448)
And so mobility is at the heart of your life experience, but then it's also at the heart of your work as a psychologist. It's led you to your PhD work, which is significant in terms of, we're gonna hear a little bit about that in just a second. But the unique thing here is your lived experience combined with your unique observations to then start to solve a dilemma in this area, right? Because mobility sounds exotic. I think it's also for probably a lower percentage of, most people don't get a chance to live in.

many different places. So you're in a unique subset of sorts of your experience and the types of scenarios that you've been in. And this led to, you know, at least to my first question was, which is if you had to describe your biggest win in the work that you do in this area, what would that win be and how would you describe it?

Karina Lagarrigue (04:09.881)
To me, think the work I'm doing, both professionally and as a researcher, is to finally have the data to just prove what I've always intuitively felt and even experienced in the first place. So I am getting the opportunity to be surrounded by the right people that can help me to craft the right words and the right numbers for all those families because...

Unfortunately, many people think that I am in this very unique position, but we are many more than you can even start to imagine. We are a very large and growing community because nowadays mobility is much more accessible. In my times when I was a child, perhaps we were a smaller community and you will recall in some of those fights, the military bards, but there were also the missionaries. There were also the diplomats that have always been there. And nowadays there are more and

more international companies, CEOs, management specialists that are called to just go and fix a project, whatever in the world and just mobilizing families here and there for temporary projects sometimes that would just go up to a year, even less sometimes. And we don't get to realize how many lives these mobility is impacting. Not only the person per se, the specialist, the adult, in this case you're talking about my parents, but the children.

me, right, and everybody that follows with them, right, and those that are left behind, the family members, the friends, the neighbors, and those receiving these families for six months, for one month, how are their lives disrupted by those projects? It's huge, Gordon.

Gordon Sheppard (05:54.798)
And there's all baggage that comes with that. You don't just sort of pick up and everything's all happy, right? You as a kid, I mean, if I can talk about living in Canada and moving from one province to another, that's moving from one place to another. And I have that experience of coming in, you know, as a grade seven kid, mid-year, that's sort of my experience. You did it, whatever, many more times than I did, let's say in your younger years. But now we're thinking about from a business perspective, we've got these senior leaders, are...

high specialists essentially in their leadership level, their technical level, whatever that is. You mentioned sort of, again, it could be missionary or again, but there are a lot of people, again, having to pick up and go. And there's a lot of baggage that comes with that, but you are getting the data on what that looks like to actually substantiate how to dig into this area. And would you say that you're able now with your data and the work that you're doing in your PhD around this mobility issue,

How are you helping, how are you gonna help people now that you have this data? What's the thing that you do to help?

Karina Lagarrigue (06:58.041)
The first thing to highlight in my research is that I think there is more and more awareness of neurodiversity. We are more and more aware that we not all the same, we are not cabled the same way, we don't experience the world the same way. I think we are over-labelling, I would say, things. I don't necessarily agree with using labels, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that the same experience is completely

differently experienced by each person and the trait that I'm observing and kind of digging in is sensory processing sensitivity and the reason why I really wanted to understand that trait better first of all is because it's it's not a disorder is not a personality problem or anything it's just a neurobiological trait that 30 % of the population is born with so if we take into account that

30 % of the population is a lot of people. And actually when we look at the expert population, it seemed to be a little bit kind of higher. So there are more people that are highly sensitive among the expatriated population. And to me, after my over 15 years of experience working with this population, it makes absolute sense because one of the things that we see with the data is a sensory processing sensitivity correlates. So that means that a lot of people that are highly sensitive

also open to experience. There are those open-minded people looking for novelty. They are much more open to what expert life is all about. All this novelty, all this uncertainty, all this exploration. And they're also much more sensitive to these beauties in the environment, to those little subtleties in the environment. So it makes absolute sense. Like global mobility, traveling the world, discovering all these new places, new places.

new smells, new things can be very eye-opening experience. But at the same time, highly sensitive people are much more sensitive to all these environment stimuli that will get them to, because they have a lower threshold, they will get more easily overwhelmed. Because I always explain sensory-positive sensitivity as this very thin cable.

Karina Lagarrigue (09:27.571)
It's as if you were cabled with thinner nerves and then very little wind will be sensed in a much more intense way and if you are open to all these experiences there is a positive side of it. It's like wow that's wonderful but if you shake a bit too much well you have more chances to get overwhelmed. Okay just stop the wind. It's like that's too much. And so for a long time

Highly sensitive people have seen us weak people, but they can't stand things like they just can't handle things but then

How come are they the majority of those that take one of the hardest lifestyles, which is high mobility and expatriation? Well, I wanted to figure out that. I was like, I need to understand how do they do it? How do they do it? How is sensitivity playing a role in their adjustment? And my data, Gordon, is just proving how.

Gordon Sheppard (10:28.703)
And so you had this instinct, do you know what mean? Plus your lived experience, plus your observational pieces, but you wanted to put some concrete blocks onto that with your data. Now the data is actually showing the reality of high performers who want to go and get it all. And getting it all means getting the beauty, getting the tastes and wonderful new environments, along with probably having a tougher time managing when things are not going well.

you know, in terms of, cause they are more sensitive. So now you've got not only got to do your high performance job, but you've got your family coming along for the ride and you know, it's the dynamics sort of multiply when more sensitivity is in play. So there's a lot going on here and you're able to get at it. Well, that's great. you've solved sort of your win is sort of getting in there, getting this data to now prove out this point. You can see now with your own, you know, lived work in your 15 years of work experience, how this is going to start to move forward.

for problem solving for these expats in a sense, the way things are gonna go forward. I always like to jump in here for what I call the anatomy of a win to kind of break down the win then as a little bit as we go forward. So when you look at sort of getting this far in your work and getting to this data point, what was the strategy? The anatomy of a is what is the strategy, work plan, people, operations and results behind a win. But what was the strategy as in the vision, the mission, the values that led you to wanting to do this at all?

in terms of your own approach.

Karina Lagarrigue (11:55.473)
So the first point, like where everything started was with my own experience as an expert, highly sensitive mother myself. And as we just mentioned before, highly mobile, right? Upbringing. I was like, I got it all. I know how to do this. I've done it 20 times. How can it be another time? Well, yeah, it's a bit different. I've got a two years old and a 10 days old, but I got this. It's just an international move. And again, there is all these

beautiful narrative around me. I'm so privileged. I moved with the container. I've got a temporary home. My husband got this wonderful job. I am going to go to a place where everything has been prearranged for me. So how can it be? Like, come on, I can just reinvent myself. I can just start having therapy online. I can certainly just close my practice back in Brussels and just do it again in Dublin. How can that be? Right? I only have two babies and

yeah, a postpartum to go through, but I got this, right? And that's where everything started, Gordon. I was like, why can't I? What's going on? What's different from these times to other times? What's different? Why am I not able to just bounce back like any other time? What's going on? What other things are happening in this context, right? And actually motherhood was going, motherhood was going on, right? It was this additional,

role, these additional responsibilities, these additional adjustment that I was going through. I just talked about in postpartum, I had a whole body in transformation while being transferred to another country. So my PhD started looking at other mothers around me that were in the same situation but not experiencing it in the same way. So I was like then maybe my sensory processing sensitivity has something to do with it. Like they were attuned to the children differently than I was and that had

has been very highly proven and there is thousands of data that proves that highly sensitive mothers attune much better to their children. that was kind of normalized for me. But I was having troubles to adjust to many other things, right? And there was a sense of overwhelm that I was experiencing that other mothers were not. And so I started digging into this understanding on how much these had to do with my sensitivity, these had to do with my personal kind of cocktail that I call

Karina Lagarrigue (14:25.043)
how I am built, my extraversion, needs for social interaction, et cetera, et cetera, right? And that motherhood comes with very little of that. You're cut off of the world because you're breastfeeding. So there is a lot of challenges that comes with motherhood per se, right? So I started digging into these experience and then adding the expatriation per se, adjusting to a new country. How much it had to do that I moved from Brussels to Ireland in January, minus seven degrees.

that had to do, right? The mobility. And this is how everything started. But then I started realizing that I wasn't the only family that was experiencing that. There are thousands of mothers in the world that go through these changes constantly. And some of them do well, some of them don't do so well. But what the data shows is that approximately between 20 and 40 % of assignments fail. And 70 % of those failures are because

of the partner's dissatisfaction or lack of adaptability.

Gordon Sheppard (15:29.262)
So these high impact companies, the biggest multinationals you can imagine, the biggest whatever, again, military, whatever, whoever's moving, we're going to bring in the best of the best. But in the meantime, their family has to come too. And it's a 360 degree proposition. And you just said that's really interesting, 20 to 40 % failure rate, which I'm just going to take it from the business perspective. And I don't mean to sort of, you know, not acknowledge moms and kids for a second, but from the business perspective, that's a disaster.

Karina Lagarrigue (15:58.448)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (15:58.607)
Because these are high impact people, experts that are being brought in to solve an issue over, like you said, a year, five years, whatever that is. Think about all those professors that run around the world, for example, for our post-secondaries. And here you are saying, no, here's the stark reality of what that looks like. And now with that basis, I can, again, you've got four lifetimes of work to do here because that rollout about saying, well, now we've acknowledged it and we've substantiated it with the data, now what are we going to

do about it, you can see where that's gonna lead to and then the relief that you might have been looking for, not even knowing that you needed as a young mom will come from the work that you do as you grow in this area as you kind of go forward. Well, that's interesting. Again, there's sort of even more to explore in there. Of course, I always get into, if we ever have a strategy, we always need a work plan. So there's a first moment of a spark of an idea here.

Can you think about the month and year when that sort of first occurred for you? And then how long did it take to get from there to this PhD work? And we can kind of know the of the work plan that was involved.

Karina Lagarrigue (17:01.969)
So the first thing I did, Gordon, believe it or not, I started interviewing moms. I was like, I'm just going to get the stories, just get the stories out. Let's see what happened. Let's see if it's just in my head, as you were saying. Is it just me or is it something that is worth telling the world? And I really thought that that was going to be a book. And then I landed. So only 11 months after that, we were relocated again to Spain. And when I got back to Spain, I got to see one of my university teachers and I talked about

my experiences and what I was writing about and she said no no way like you're not writing a book about that you're writing a PhD because the science needs to know that the scientific population needs to read what you say need to have the data because you know what if you want to change the way companies are doing it they're gonna ask you for the numbers

And you need the numbers because you have some numbers. know that all these projects are just making up to 15 million dollars per year in losses in all these companies that are relocating people. So you know that they're losing money, but they don't know how to fix it. And you're talking about something very kind of intuitive. You're talking about the environment. You're talking about the importance of adjusting the environment because you're talking

about a very large part of that population, 30 % of them are highly sensitive. If we take out of these 20 to 40 % of failing projects, 30 % of them, just because we help them by adjusting their environment, they're going to be saving millions already with something.

Gordon Sheppard (18:48.47)
And I love it. If I'm thinking about onboarding somebody into a new country, you've just said something that's so important. Because the HR departments here would have all kinds of, and like you said, we got a shipping container. They gave us a stipend. They rented us a car. They did these things that you think are supposed to be privileged. But in fact, that's part of the solution. But there may be other things around community building.

actual matching kids to schools and teachers or whatever those other things are that would come into play that would be very practical that might up that chance of success. Is that making sense?

Karina Lagarrigue (19:22.705)
Actually, something that I think that they are not seeing is that this sensitivity on top of things, it is a competitive advantage for the company per se, because those people that are highly sensitive are much more attuned to everything. they're gonna be, actually what my data shows is that they are better at adjusting. They are better at doing things well. They are better at finding the right resources, but they have one condition.

the results are showing us that there is an interplay between these traits and actually the environment. So if we do not assess, address and kind of take care of the environment where those people are landing in, then we are lacking, we are kind of missing on this competitive advantage that was naturally given and that most probably, Gordon, was the reason why they had been hired.

Gordon Sheppard (20:22.254)
No doubt, mean, so this is hitting on so many levels. It's hitting on a company level from a profitability point of view. It's hitting on, when we think about the leaders themselves, we could break that component out to say, a lot of these people are good family people as well. So they want their families to be successful, but they just may not have the information or the knowledge or the self-awareness, which this also lends into. Another group in here is the mums. And I'm gonna say spouses probably these days. I don't mean to sort of pick out just mums only, spouses of.

expats that have to come along for the ride and then we could break out the kids too. So what a multi complex family dynamic scenario that then if it's done, if we've you're hitting the awareness button big time with your data, cause now no one can refute you. You've got the data, you're going to have that ability to show that. But then this will then lead to all these strands that start to again, build on and make things more successful for people as they go forward. Wow. There's so many of these moments where we could talk again for hours and hours and hours. So we talked about the strategy, the work plan.

There's always people involved in a win. loved hearing about your professor, right? As a spark. How would you describe your professor that helped you spark? No book for you, time to do a PhD, because PhDs take more than a minute to build up, right? They take a while. So how would you describe your professor's attitude in getting you to spark into this area? And then please describe your own attitude from before you thought you were going to do a PhD to afterwards. Go ahead.

Karina Lagarrigue (21:50.993)
So to me, if I had to describe, I would love to have her name in this podcast, her name is Maria Palacin. And she's also the right hand of the rector of the University of Barcelona. So she's a very well known and recognized person. And she was at university, she was my teacher of psychology of groups. So she was precisely helping me already in this group dynamics, right? And she's that kind of person that, you know, when she feels that

that something needs to be done. I still remember when I was in university and was having this very personal situation that was very hard and I was telling her about it and she was like, no, Corina, this is what you're doing. This is not what you're doing. And I still remember that day and she was so right, Gordon, whenever she says something, there is something about the way she says things that just feel right. I still remember one of her own

kind of sharing in one of the groups and she was saying, you know what? Having very successful parents, because she is a very successful psychologist and teacher and so on, and her husband is a very successful and very respected architect, she said, it's very tough on kids. And I still remember that day, sharing from her own experience, my kids have it much more difficult that those that don't have successful parents. You know why?

Because now they feel that they need to meet our expectations and they have to get even higher. And that's something that other children don't have. And this is our work at home to get them back on their rails and say, no, no, no, no, no, that's mommy's path, that's daddy's path, and now you go and do your path.

Gordon Sheppard (23:40.772)
You do you, isn't that wise? And how lucky that you've had this wonderful mentor in your life to have this big impact. Again, a whole other area, but there's something about that theme that's running through your work as well. I can hear that in what you're trying to hold up the people, you're neurodiverse, let's make you aware of it. Here's the statistics, let's help your company help you. Let's help the individuals within your family achieve to their own.

abilities not with these things and then you're bringing in the tools and all those things at all at once how lucky the future families that will benefit from the work that you're doing now this is really really neat and then there's also you you're you're in this story right how would you describe your own attitude prior to the PhD journey and then we're how do you feeling now from you how would you describe your own attitude now

Karina Lagarrigue (24:25.093)
Bye.

Karina Lagarrigue (24:35.163)
So to be honest with you, I thought that after eight years of university, I was done. I was like, come on, Maria, come on. I've got three master degrees. Isn't that enough? Like, do I really have to go through a PhD? And I still remember that there was another teacher in university that said at the very beginning, like I just got in university, I got so frustrated, Gordon, because it was my first year of university. And I was in this class asking all my very normal questions. And at some point he stopped me and said, Karina.

I'm really sorry, but I'm gonna have to stop you because I have a curriculum here that I have to give and you asked me so many questions that are you slowing me down so much and To be honest with you you ask me questions. I haven't even asked myself So I don't even have the answers So I remember at that point then he got me afterwards. He's like, you know what? think you would do a very good PhD because that's exactly what PhD do they ask those difficult questions and they find those difficult answers So when Maria told me you have to do a PhD at the beginning

I was like, no, you know what, I'm done with academia because you never get the right answers. Like you don't have the answer to my questions. And that's what you pointed out again at that point. That's precisely where your PhD is going to be something that you are going to enjoy because there every question is allowed. And Gordon, I'm loving it. It's the first part of my very long education that I can honestly say I am enjoying as much as I'm

suffering but I'm also enjoying.

Gordon Sheppard (26:07.471)
isn't that great? Because again, what's so, you say it so easily and then there's whatever, three, five years worth of engine underneath and I can't even imagine how much you've read. So, and the people you've met and all those things along the way. Again, neat, we can hear the before and afters of some of the key people that have gotten you here and we didn't even get into the subjects and the people that you've encountered and all those things along the way, which are a big part of this story as well. Strategy, work plan, people, we talked about that as well. Operationally.

if you're gonna pull this off, and I just mean to dig in because we said data, data, data. Tell me, just give me a feel for if you had to summarize that process of gathering the data so that we can get a feel for operationally how that all came together. Go ahead.

Karina Lagarrigue (26:49.809)
So you have to think that my PhD started during pandemic.

So it wasn't an easy moment and that's why it has kind of pushed many things to happen, many things to be analyzed and so on. But these moments was to me, to be honest with you, a very nice moment because I was connecting with all those moms that were in this very difficult situation and I was analyzing something that I think may surprise your audience. I was getting to realize that we were doing better, much better than those

that had never been expatriated. Because all this novelty that you guys were experiencing for the very first time, how does now the social system works and I can't go to hospital to see my mother dying and I'm not allowed to go and bear my father across the pond because there are no flights and there are all those things that I may sound very harsh when I say it this way but it has been our life, our day to day from, I would say from

from my perspective from the start. I remember when my grandpa passed away and I had to take a plane and everything, so it took time, so I couldn't see his body anymore. He was already incinerated and I had to see just the dust. And I got lucky, but I could go and spread the dust and do things. But there are many, many things like dealing with uncertainty, dealing with all these different situations that were so normal and we were so used

that we were dealing in a very different way. It was very interesting to see that there was a clear difference between how those that were expatriated and those that were not expatriated were experiencing that. And then it was very hard because I'm a very curious person and I have a lot of questions. So my quantitative survey is over 90 items.

Gordon Sheppard (28:53.647)
90 items on the survey, cause you want to really dig in there, which means that if you can get anybody to actually survive that survey, you're getting good results, but my goodness, it speaks to what you like to find out.

Karina Lagarrigue (29:05.334)
Exactly. So it was it was a challenge to find a significantly large enough sample, especially because we were in cover. So it was not something that I could just have a gathering at school or go to university or go to. So everything happened online and online was kind of crowded by many other distractions. So it wasn't easy to just get the survey across. And again, when they will get this, they're like, come on, 15 minutes of a survey. What does she want to get out of that? Well, hopefully a very

powerful PhD, but yeah, that was part of the process.

Gordon Sheppard (29:38.319)
Love it. So we get some insights into there about sort of how it happened. We really hear you reflected in that in terms of the level of detail, that coming out the other end, that level of detail is going to serve you very well as you kind of go forward. Strategy, work plan, people, operations. Finally, there's results. The result is, is the PhD completed yet? Is that, you, no, you're going to get, so you're on your way to completing the PhD. That's going to be sort of quantitative. There would be a number of people that have taken the survey quantitatively. So again, when we talk about results,

What are the quantitative and qualitative highlights around this win that you'd like to sort of get out to the world?

Karina Lagarrigue (30:11.769)
I think the most important one is what I was highlighting is that I think we are finally making visible, I would say, the challenges of expatriation that I think were very invisible. the population, like to me, expert mothers are those invisible or unspoken leaders in relocation processes. That's how I like to define them. And I have the feeling that they have been underrepresented in the research. Like when I was looking, as you were saying, I had to read a lot.

I was reading and reading and I had all these very, so to say, focus on the employee success and the assignment success, but there was very little on those spouses. We know about that, about the impact that it has on the success of the assignment, but not on the success of the adjustment, which is what they are seeing that is creating this 70 % of the problems. It was like, why don't we look at what is going on for them?

And why don't we look at it because a lot of them are mothers. Like it is the majority of the people that actually are relocated that actually go and have their families abroad and experience all these in this multiple, multiple or multi-layer experience of adjustment, right? They are adjusting to a country. They are adjusting to a new work position, but they're also adjusting to a new role. Like, and, and I've heard that so many times, Gordon, when are you going to do your PhD on expert dads?

Because we go through a lot of changes too and I get it and it's true. But they don't go through prosperity. They don't go through this very sensitive and vulnerable moment where my PhD and I'm really looking for a place for this qualitative data that I have collected at the beginning. They go through awful experiences, Awful. As far as I can just quote you some of them like going to a doctor in India and being in labor and the doctor say I need to talk to

and sir being in a meeting across the globe and the lady just being in that very sensitive moment giving birth and saying sir is not coming but the baby's coming so please talk to me take me into the delivery room because the baby is coming now with or without sir so I think there is a lot of things that we need to make much more visible and I would say this data is helping us also

Karina Lagarrigue (32:41.319)
to make visible this diversity in personality. So my first paper is on the importance of these environment and this one is the one that is already accessible and just highlights what we just said, right? That sensitivity can be a competitive advantage if we have the right environment configuration, right? And then the second paper that we're working on has to do with all the personality trait combination. Cause I think more and more surveys when they are hiring people, all these head hunters are using a lot of personality trait combination.

And I think they're forgetting on some of them such as sensory processing sensitivity. And I want to kind of just work into this process of seeing it as a possible competitive advantage if we combine it with the right environment, right? Because we have seen, we have the data that proves that those leaders can be so much more intuitive, so much more empathic. And we want that, right? But if we don't give them the right environment, then they can't function.

we end up with those that don't do the job well. So why don't we start adjusting?

Gordon Sheppard (33:47.577)
And at the heart of it, you said you had a professor in group work. If I can sort of draw on my own sister who did 33 years of frontline social work in Montreal, Canada around family and family being the critical unit around this whole thing, I can hear that through line that's there. There's benefits for everybody, whether or not you get to do that second PhD for

Karina Lagarrigue (33:52.806)
Yes.

Gordon Sheppard (34:11.962)
for the leaders themselves, right? The first one is gonna help the moms, because maybe that's your experience and that's maybe where you wanna, there's a lot of good energy that can go into that. There'll be a benefit there. There's gonna be a benefit to the kids, because there's another one in there for the kids in here too, about how are they adjusting and what's that doing. How lucky that you've got your lived experience plus the will, plus the means in a sense to pull all of this together, get back in the school saddle.

and then there will be post-school and another whole sort of multi-decade sort of continuation of this work for you and what a nice time to be able to focus up all those efforts and have that come together. It must be so satisfying for you. What's your sort of piece of advice for anybody else that's trying to go for this type of win in their own work?

Karina Lagarrigue (34:57.617)
So I think the most important thing, if you want to do something like that, you definitely need to be internally motivated. Because as you just said before, it's very draining and you need to know why you're doing it, to remind yourself every day why you're doing that. And as you just said, I know why I'm doing that. You just mentioned it again, like moms are these emotional anchors. They are those that are managing the crisis in the families. They are also these cultural translators

between many times their partners and the children when they return back home, when they leave, when they are in this kind of expert bubble or work bubble and they have to come back to, hey, you know what, in school they don't speak English, we are in Spain and they speak Spanish. So here it is what it has been the day for us, right? So I think as you were saying, I am very clear in why I am focusing on the mothers and then you said,

then there are the children that come with it as well. And let's just be clear here, they are the leaders of the future, okay? Like the children are our future leaders. And if we keep doing things the same way, well, things are not gonna change. And we're gonna have burnout leaders because they hadn't processed their own life experiences. They haven't understood how global mobility, multicultural environments, and so on have impacted their life. And they may just be switching

works over and over not only because it's trendy but because they are restless themselves and we have a growing population that had their life experiences in global mobility while developing. So we need to understand better what is going on and I would say if you want to do something like that just be always aware of this big picture like have your clear motivation on why you're doing it.

and then see how it's going to impact the big picture.

Gordon Sheppard (37:03.6)
How lucky. Thank you so much for being on the show. If people need to get in touch with you or find your paper, what's the best way that they can do that?

Karina Lagarrigue (37:11.643)
So my paper is on frontiers and if they find the special issue that has been released by frontiers on sensory processing sensitivities, my article is one of the 16 amazing papers that have been published and hopefully my second one will be there too. And if they want to get in touch with me, I have either my website, which is expertworldpsychologist.com or they can also reach on LinkedIn. I would say is where I'm more active. So Karina Lagarrigue on LinkedIn. There are not so many.

you have it written here. And I'm also in Instagram. I'm starting to understand the algorithm. I'm not so much of that type of person. And I am very happy to also contribute and collaborate in conferences. I am going to be part of one in a university in Montpellier talking about international negotiation.

Gordon Sheppard (38:05.914)
Thank you so much for being on the show.

Karina Lagarrigue (38:08.507)
Thank you Gordon for having me and for those wonderful and very well structured questions.