Maintain Your Edge Abroad: Elite Performance Coach on the Tradeoffs you Cannot Afford To Make

Ever feel “lucky” abroad and yet you don’t know how you will keep everything in the air? This episode names that tension and gives you the tools you need to break through to the next level.

Mickelle sits down with International Psychologist and Elite Performance coach Karina Lagarrigue.   Karina maps the hidden character traits and hidden costs of the internationally mobile: highly sensitive nervous systems, shifting roles, and the cognitive lift of rebuilding identity across borders. Together they reframe privilege with precision - visas, language, and family dynamics can stack into genuine vulnerability and show how to design safety first without dimming your ambition.

Karina explains why therapy often misses mobile lives and how to prevent burnout: pace transitions, regulate your nervous system, and choose clinicians who understand culture, language nuance, and relocation. You will come away with a practical blueprint for thriving abroad as a high performer and learn that you likely fit into an elite group of people who are creating new paradigms of living, success and thriving.

In this episode:

  • Sensory processing sensitivity (HSP) and why relocation amplifies it(and how it is more prevalent in the globally mobile)
  • Stacked vulnerabilities turned into strengths
  • Therapy burnout and how to find a modality that can help
  • Visa-linked power dynamics; emotional and financial safety that may be messing with your peace
  • Nervous system regulation as you continue to Level Up
  • Couple prep and maintenance that  you shouldn’t ignore 

Guest

To look at the article referenced - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1539885/full

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View the transcript here