The message arrives on a Sunday evening, and it reads like a project report.
"We've done the flat, the school, the car, the bank account and the dog's flight. My husband started work in his first week. I've found a dentist and the good bakery. Everything on the list is done."
Then a shorter paragraph underneath.
"I don't know why I'm writing to you."
Bongani reads it twice on a bench outside a pool in Mirdif, where his daughter has a swimming lesson. He has coached for six years, and twelve years ago he made a move like hers, from Durban, with a list of his own. The move is finished. The woman who made it hasn't arrived.
His thumb is already typing a reply: a walking group she might like, a volunteering project, a pottery class at a community centre. Good ideas, and close to what carried him through his own first year here.
He stops with the cursor blinking after "pottery", and doesn't send it yet.
Bongani and the woman who wrote to him are composites. What he does with that reply is most of what this specialism asks of a coach.
What is relocation coaching?
Relocation coaching is coaching for someone in the middle of a move between countries, before it, during it or after it. The practical arrangements are handled elsewhere. The coaching works with what the move does to the person: the roles it removes, the sense of self it unsettles, and the decisions that come next.
Dubai is a city of arrivals, so there's no shortage of people standing where she stands. What makes it a specialism is what it asks of the coach.
If people on the move are the clients you can picture yourself working with, one of our RS Method Master Coaches can look with you, on a free Zoom, at which route, if either, fits you. In the apply page's own words, the call is "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes. No pitch. No pressure." Book the conversation. Or read on.
Who does relocation coaching serve?
In our experience, four kinds of client come up most.
The one who moved for the job. The title made the move with them, and for a while it holds everything up. Then a restructure, or a long weekend with no plans, shows how much of who they were at home was the role, and the people who watched them grow into it.
The one who moved for someone else's job. Often a partner who left a working life behind. On paper the move is a success, which can leave them with the most to carry and the fewest people asking how it's going. The woman in the Sunday message is one of these.
The one deciding whether to go. An offer from another city, a parent getting older back home. Here the coaching is about the decision, and the coach has no stake in which way it goes.
The one going home. After ten or fifteen years away, home has moved on, and so have they. People brace for the leaving. Fewer brace for the landing.
The outside of a move is usually finished well before the inside is.
One boundary first. The paperwork belongs with the people who handle it, and the sessions stay with the person. If you're still deciding whether this is your ground, choosing a coaching niche starts from the ground you've walked yourself, and how to become a career coach in the UAE looks at the career side of a move.
Why are the logistics the easy part?
Because a list can be finished, and the part of a move that happens to a person can't be ticked off.
Picture the life someone had at home as a high tide. The job, the friends, the language they never had to think in, the family twenty minutes away: it's all water, and it covers a great deal. A move is the tide going out. Things that were under the surface are suddenly in plain view, and most of them aren't new. They're old certainties that never had to be looked at, because the water kept them covered. "I'm only welcome when I'm useful." "If I'm not busy, something's wrong." "Here, nobody knows what I'm worth."
That's how a woman with a finished list comes to write, "I don't know why I'm writing to you." The list was all about the water. She's looking at the rocks.
A lot of good relocation support helps people refill the bay quickly: a new circle, a routine, a full diary. Nobody should spend a first year alone. But water poured back in a hurry covers the same rocks, and the next move, or the next empty weekend, shows them again.
The coaching we train works with what the low tide shows, and it works by removal, taking away rather than adding. The old certainty comes out of the bay instead of going back under the water, and the person can stand where they've landed without needing the tide back in to feel all right.
What does relocation coaching ask of the coach?
Three things, and the third is the hardest to see in yourself.
No side in the move. A relocation coach can't be selling the city or selling home. A coach who loves Dubai may hear a homesick client as someone who hasn't given it a chance. A coach who still misses home may hear a settling client as someone in denial. Either way, the client ends up working on the coach's opinion.
Room for a grief nobody will name. A chosen move is still a loss, and people often feel they've no right to mourn something they said yes to. The coach's job is to let it be said, not to point out the sunshine.
Your own move, finished. This is where Bongani's reply came from.
In his own first year here he filled every evening: five-a-side on Tuesdays, a choir from the second month, any invitation going. It worked. Twelve years on he still doesn't like an empty evening, and he's never looked at why. So when a client writes about a finished list and a quiet week, the reply he starts is the plan that got him through. It was the right plan for him. Sent to her, it refills her bay with his water, and the rocks she wrote about are still there.
I've carried a version of it myself. After I left my home country, there was a long stretch when doing everything myself was the only way to eat, and the habit stayed on long after the need had gone. In any coach, a habit like that can reach clients dressed as strength, with the best intentions.
So a coach who has made the move, and is finished with it, is worth more than a checklist. Nothing in them needs the client to settle, or to leave, or to fill the evenings the way they did.
RSCI unpacks in one order, whatever its trainees arrived carrying: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
If parts of your own move still draft your replies, a training should reach them early, not after your first relocation client. On the free Zoom, the question is whether either of our two programmes would be that training for you. Find a time for the Zoom.
How can you run a first session with someone who's just moved?
Use a question ladder: seven rungs, about an hour, in this order.
- Start with the list. "Tell me everything you've already sorted out." Let them read all of it, and say what it took.
- Ask what people at home relied on them for. Not the job title. The thing friends and family would ring them about.
- Ask where in the week they feel most like a visitor. A time and a place, as exact as they can.
- Ask what they've quietly stopped doing since they arrived. Often something small: a dish they used to cook, singing in the car, a weekly call home.
- Ask what they've started doing that doesn't feel like them. Saying yes to everything, scrolling at dinner, staying in.
- Ask what they'd like to need less of by the end of your work together. Not what they want to have. It keeps the sessions on what the tide uncovered.
- Close by asking what they'd like you to remember from today. Write it in their words, and open the next session with it.
Through all seven, use the client's own word for where they came from. If they say "back home", don't say "your home country". Small words tell people whether they've been heard.
A note on where coaching stops. Low mood after a move often lifts as a life takes shape, and sometimes it doesn't. If a client's low mood has lasted for weeks, or is affecting their sleep, their work or the people around them, suggest they see a doctor or a qualified mental health professional. Our guide on when to refer a coaching client to therapy covers how to raise it without losing the relationship.
What should training have asked of you before a client's move is in your hands?
Three things, and RSCI is built around them.
- Your own ground cleared first. Every RSCI trainee does their own work before outer practice, inside the cohort and under supervision. A coach who still needs a client to stay, or to go, will steer them, however kindly.
- Supervised application, not just study. Our life coach training page describes training that "combines self-paced online study with live practitioner training and supervised application." The supervised part is where a reflex to hand over your own plan gets seen by a supervisor.
- ICF education in the price, and the credential left to ICF. RS Method Coach, at AED 18,000 with ICF education included, carries ICF Level 1. RS Method Complete, at AED 35,000 with ICF education included, carries ICF Level 2 and five days of live training in Dubai. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
Wherever a client started out, and wherever they land, the coach beside them has one job. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Marko Mladenovic described his own state like this: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?"
Both programmes, and what sets them apart, are on our life coach training page.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. A move takes apart more than anyone puts on a list, and that includes the coach's own. Life coach training lists the modules and live days of each programme.