Our journey as a skilled immigrant starts with curiosity, which often bounces between worry and wonder. Sometimes we get too excited. We are stepping on a new continent full of opportunities and there are infinite number of choices ahead of us. It is our chance to make a fresh start and re-create ourselves!

Sometimes, however, we get scared… We feel like we are shrinking in front of this giant new world and its wealthy and happy people. We miss our homes, doubt ourselves, and feel excluded. We frequently find ourselves fighting with the demons in our head, wasting our valuable time and energy. As a veteran of these battles, today I would like to talk about four common thoughts these demons whisper into your ear and explain why they are invalid.

Guess what, you weren’t born here and you can’t change that! However, you can realise you are now a global citizen and you have the ability to see this beautiful new continent from the eyes of a former outsider.

If you were born here, you may have been one of those who take things for granted and manage to be unhappy in this beautiful world without any reason. May be, if you were born here, you could have been one of those who are totally unfamiliar with the rest of the world, isolated and insecure. May be you could have been lucky and inherited large pieces of lands and a number of real estate assets. Yeah may be life could have been pretty awesome in that case but who knows what other challenges would life bring to you? There is no point to speculate because you will never know and you will never be able to change the past.

You must understand, as an immigrant, past is your enemy. You must declare war against your past. Forget about your regrets and the world you have left behind and start seeing yourself as a new born baby. You are just born and that’s why life is painful these days. But the pain will go away. Baby will learn how to walk and then start running towards a totally fresh future. Burn the bridge behind you, trust your genes as a healthy human being, and trust the journey. If you do this, you will succeed!

I come across this very often among my fellow immigrants. In their interviews (or phone screenings) they get tense, thinking they will make a grammar mistake and the interviewer will judge them. So what you should do if you end up grappling with this thought in your mind?

The solution is simple: Remind yourself this is a reality you can’t change and this is one of those thoughts, which will not take you from point A to point B. Yes, you are a non-native speaker and whatever you are going to achieve on this continent you will achieve as a non-native speaker. Like me and many of my fellow immigrants did.

With these type of negative thoughts in your mind, things may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having a pre-occupied mind will take away your spoken fluency. But this has nothing to do with English being your second language. I have seen so many native speakers and Aussies also struggle doing public speech and interviews. Under stress, particularly if you are unprepared, it is normal to have disturbed speech and loose fluency.

Finally my advice, be proud of your current level of English (which is at least sufficient enough to read and understand this article) and keep working on improving it. Reading good books will boost your English to a different level as it will give your written and spoken language a character. For Aussie English, on the other hand, below strategies will accelerate your assimilation, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much as it happens naturally:

i) become housemates with Aussies,

ii) go to dates with Aussies, or

iii) listen to Australian radio while driving—don’t waste your time with TV.

If you release yourself to the current, around ~4 years you should be able to fully imitate Aussie accent and its versions on the phone, including some regional ones as well.

In some positions, particularly sales, being local or sounding local—something I ended up being able to do after 4 years in Australia—has a competitive edge. But the real competitive edge comes with your capacity of doing the job itself.

In the recruitment process, there is this thing called “similar to me effect”. This is based on scientific research, which showed people are more likely to hire people who are similar to them. Similarities may be, age, country of origin, a common skill or hobby, a common university attended or similar. Therefore, some of the Aussies (especially the ones who never travelled abroad), may feel more comfortable communicating with people from their own nation. One thing we must do is never to blame them about this, because it is normal.

This is not something special to Australia. Wherever you go in the world, the locals will be favoured at their home countries—try to compete with a French in Paris to land a job. I will give an example from my home country. There are a lot of Azeri’s coming to Turkey to study and when they graduate they start looking for jobs in Istanbul or elsewhere in Turkey. In many instances if both Azeri and Turkish candidate are applying for the same position, and say they have exact same qualifications and skills, the Turkish candidate will have higher chance of getting the job. However, when the Azeri adds significant value in their interview, they will suddenly gain a competitive edge and become the winning underdog.

As skilled immigrants, we are underdogs in Australia. But your time to shine will come and this will become your strength. As a fresh starter, your task is to practice ruthlessly to excel in your speech and interview skills. Excel at a level you will totally outshine the competition. With the fluent and confident answers you give, the interviewer will compare your performance with the performance of the previous average bloke and will be totally impressed.

So from today stop seeing yourself as disadvantaged and get yourself trained up to win as an underdog. Also remember, this thought, “best jobs go to Aussies”, will not contribute to the success of your mission as a skilled immigrant, don’t spend your energy on it…

This is something I keep hearing from immigrants coming from countries where there is a significant economic difference between the middle class and the labour class. In these countries there are heaps of cleaners, technicians, and administrative staff supporting the operations of the skilled staff.

For example in Turkey, many companies employ a full-time tea maker, responsible from making & serving tea to the employees and clients. This wouldn’t make any sense to Aussies and of course there is no engineering consultancy or accounting office in Australia, which employs a tea maker.

In Australia, it is extremely normal to do casual work or any work as an educated mature adult. For example, you may very well work for Woolworths, be happy and proud about having a regular job which pays your bills and help you to save money. I have ozzy friends from Adelaide, who are construction workers, pretty smart people, vegan, and competitive athletes, who has travelled the entire world with the income they received from doing labour at construction sites. In Turkey, try to find a vegan construction worker, who does semi-competitive sports and travelled the entire world.

Australia is a wealthy social state and one of the very first things you must to is to convince yourself to do anything to be successful in your immigration journey. If you don’t keep yourself occupied with activities, volunteering, casual work or similar, you will become a rusty, unhappy, and stagnant person and Australian society do not show sympathy to miserable (you must teach yourself to be a winner). You also need to be ready to do anything and any task necessary to reach your ultimate goal. This becomes particularly easy when you burn the bridge behind you.

Before I boarded my flight to Australia, my wife Gizem, back then my girlfriend, asked me: “what if you cannot find a job, will you come back?” I replied: “I will become a garbage collector if necessary to make this journey a success”. I never had to collect garbage in Australia, but I have done things I would never have done if I stayed in Turkey:

• I applied and got rejected for Mushroom Picking; 

• Sold suits at my very first employer in Australia, Joseph Uzumcu; and 

• Cooked fish and chips at Fish Out of Water—something I enjoyed so much with Christine and Andrew.

Similarly, when I first found my career aligned position, Environmental Consultant, in Sydney. I ended up working full time on the field and collecting soil samples at various contaminated sites in Australia. All these experiences made me a much more skilled and stronger person. I am 100% proud of having done these things and you will feel the same too! Simple labour and casual work are freedom.