This is a guest entry by Nandika Puri
Nandika has been an expat for eight years, living in two countries and building a career now seven years long. She met her partner abroad and earned her MBA along the way and has quietly fallen for a different version of herself in each city she’s called home.
Most global mobility programs run on a simple idea: you go abroad, you pick up some experience, and eventually you come back home. It’s clean, and it’s easy to plan around. But it quietly assumes one thing that isn’t always true, that home stays the same while you’re away.
Mine didn’t. Or maybe it’s more honest to say that I changed, and home changed with me.
I was 24 when I moved abroad for the first time for work. Like a lot of people early in their careers, I treated it as temporary, a chapter with an end date, after which I’d slot back into the life I’d left behind. What I didn’t expect was that the biggest change wouldn’t be the new city or the new job. It would be me.
The first few months were all logistics. Learning how to live on my own, figuring out how things worked in an unfamiliar place, building a routine from nothing. But underneath all of that, something slower was happening.
Being far away gave me room to think. Away from the people and habits I’d always known, I started asking myself basic questions I’d never really stopped to answer. What do I actually value? What does a good life look like to me, and not to everyone around me? Over time it stopped being about adjusting to a new country and became about getting to know myself.
And a lot of that happened outside of work, which caught me off guard. This is the city where I took my first solo trip, something I’m not sure I’d ever have done back home. It’s where I downloaded an app to meet complete strangers and slowly pieced together friend groups and little community circles from scratch. All of it made me uncomfortable at the start. Messaging people I’d never met, showing up to things on my own, sitting in rooms where I knew absolutely no one. But I kept pushing myself to do things beyond work and to make friends outside my professional life. The funny part is that it worked both ways: the more confident I got socially, the more confident I became at work too. It’s also the city where I met my partner. At some point it stopped being a posting and became the place where I actually grew up, in the way that counts.
That’s where the usual expat story starts to fall apart.
For people who stay abroad a long time, going back isn’t a simple decision anymore. Not because home changed, but because they did. Every new place adds something, not just a line on your CV, but a layer of who you are. After a while, your relationship with where you’re from gets more complicated than a plane ticket can fix.
The question quietly shifts. It stops being “where is home?” and turns into something more like “where do I feel most like myself now?”
And people stay for all sorts of reasons. For some it’s financial. For others it’s social or cultural, they’ve built a life and a community they don’t want to walk away from. For some it’s simply the exposure, or wanting a bit of distance from home because that distance is genuinely what they prefer. There’s no single reason, and I think that’s exactly the point.
This matters for organizations too.
Most companies still manage expats through a fairly narrow lens: cost, logistics, and the timeline for when someone “comes back.” That works if you assume people stay tied to one place. In reality, a lot of long-term expats develop a much looser sense of where they belong. What drives them isn’t returning to a specific country; it’s finding somewhere they can keep growing and do their best work.
Companies that miss this risk losing genuinely good people at the exact moment those people have the most to offer. A few things follow from that.
First, going home shouldn’t be the default. For a lot of globally experienced people, a forced or badly timed return creates friction, not stability.
Second, career paths need to allow for geographic flexibility. The old linear, home-country ladder often doesn’t match how these people actually see their future.
Third, long-term expats are a strategic asset, not just a line item. People who can handle ambiguity, work across cultures, and operate without a fixed anchor are exactly who you want in global leadership roles.
Put simply, expats aren’t just employees who happen to be mobile. They’re globally integrated talent. What starts as one international assignment often turns into something bigger, a rethinking of who you are, where you belong, and what home even means. And once that happens, coming home stops being about going back to where you started.
For me, it started with losing almost everything I knew, the routines, the people, and especially the markers I’d always used to measure whether I was doing well. What replaced them came slowly. A kind of diversity I absorbed just from being somewhere new. The independence that comes from running your own life in an unfamiliar place. And a strange sense of liberty, a quiet permission to try things I’d never have tried back home.
That’s what shifted growth for me. When you’re doing new things all the time, you end up redefining what you’re even aiming for, the goals, and the yardstick you hold yourself to. Growth stopped being about climbing toward a fixed point and became something quieter: getting to know myself a little more honestly, wherever I happen to be. So, when I picture home these days, I don’t picture a place I go back to. I picture wherever I can keep becoming more myself. Home, for me, is less a location and more a function of where I can keep growing.