Get creative about your place in the world: how to operate on a micro-yet-global level with a Global Niche by Anastasia

Ashman Do you ever feel suspended between multiple worlds -- challenged in your pursuit s and interests by culture, geography, language or time zone? Welcome to the club. The Global Niche club, that is. Here we take advantage of o ur situation mismatches. In fact, after fourteen years of expatriatism and through my cultural identity w ork as a writer/producer Ive come to see this psychic limbo state about who we ar e and where we belong -- familiar to people with transglobal lives and culturall y hybrid lifestyles -- as our secret weapon. To start at the beginning, were all born global citizens even if that knowledge g ets trained out of us. As we mature, a global identity seems nebulous, and ungro unded. Better to bond with the more concrete: family, culture, nation. Our schoo lmates, colleagues, neighbors. Theres a problem with concrete, though. It cracks over time and in quickly changi ng conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight. Id even venture to say that our people today are not who they used to be. Were unbo unded by the communities in our physical midst. Now we can find inspiring new ki nship in interest and outlook. Expats and international types have more reasons than most to find a way to oper ate independently of where we happen to be physically. But with today s economic uncertainties no matter who or where we are, we all have to embrace an enterpri sing view of ourselves -- a way to operate unlimited by the options around us. W ith recent advances in virtual technologies like mobile devices and the social w eb, we have tools at our disposal to help us live a globally unbounded life. Now we dont have to be a tech expert or social media guru to build a micro-yet-gl obal base of operations with a professional web platform and virtual network for continuing education, professional development, and a close-knit but world-flun g set of friends. We can be digital world citizens and achieve a cutting-edge st ate of being -- that is, what I call psychic location independence. I coined the concept of a global niche -- defined as a psychic solution to your g lobal identity crisis-- at expat+HAREM, the online community of global citizens, identity adventurers and intentional travelers I founded in 2009. The group blo g was inspired by the global community that gathered around Tales from the Expat Harem, an anthology by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey that I coedited in 2005 with fellow Istanbul resident Jennifer Gokmen. Expatharem.com was also informed by the idea of an expat harem itself, where all t he writers in the book and the readers drawn to them are cultural peers in a vir tual realm. Along with my partner Tara Agacayak, a creative enterprise consultant from Silic on Valley in America whos spent the past 10 years in Turkey, this fall I launched a new work-life initiative at GlobalNiche.net. In this hands-on venture we ll be practicing creative self enterprise for the gl obal soul, based on the philosophies evolved from 175 incisive neoculture discus sions and 2800 comments archived at the expat+HAREM site. http://www.expatharem. com Besides the expat+HAREM revelations, were also applying life-work innovations Tar a and I have been exploring in the past few years in our professional communitie s of creative entrepreneurs and social media proponents. Combining our expat and entrepreneurship experiences has led us to the conclusion that networked realit y is the most important independent survival skill of international people. If youre interested to receive email about the life-work journeys of mobile progr essives and cultural creatives in situation mismatches, please sign up at Global Niche.net (http://globalniche.net).