In this episode, I'm speaking with John Hetherington, who moved from England to Canada 20 years ago, and his niece Caitlin White, who landed a few months ago.

I think I've said this before, but immigration is like brute force midlife crisis. You do not get to ease into the questions of who you are. The country strips away the guardrails, the parental expectations, the social norms that told you who you were supposed to be, and suddenly you are standing in a place where nobody knows you and you get to decide what comes next.

For John, a self-confessed introvert, that decision meant going from a career in Ernst & Young to building his own business and speaking on stages.

Caitlin is a few months into her version of this. She's taken to dog agility. She is discovering she is more adventurous than she thought. The stripping away has begun.

John arrived Canada with a job and the momentum of a global firm behind him. He still says it was harder than he expected. Not because Canada was unkind, the country has been generous to him.

But because you cannot take it for granted. You have to put in the work even when it feels like trading the grey skies of England for the snowy white plains of Canada should make the move easier than it is.

The three of us also talk about:

• The "do the opposite" principle and how it applies to everything from buying a stranger's coffee to moving countries

• Why human-to-human communication is the skill John would tell every immigrant to build, and why AI makes it even a more important skill to learn

• What happens to your British humor when you arrive in Canada

• What the Canadian job market looked like in 2007, and what Caitlin is seeing two months in as she figures out her next move

• What it looks like to be the newcomer when your uncle has 20 years of lessons he wants to share

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Dozie's Notes

A few things that struck me as I listened through this week's conversation:

1. John say the one thing he would tell someone arriving in Canada today is that Canada won't come to you. You have to go get it. I would add that going to get it means you have to be willing to be bad at it first. Bad at the small talk, bad at the customs, bad at the unsaid rules of navigating your new home. You are already in the some discomfort. You might as well accept all that comes with it.

2. The feeling of being a guest in your own country is one of the quieter costs of the immigrant experience that does not get named enough. You go back and your parents are there and you click back into something familiar and warm. Then you step outside and the country has moved on and you have moved on and you are somehow visiting a place that used to be yours.

3. Do the opposite thing. When your instinct tells you to hold back, that instinct is usually wrong. Raising your hand in the meeting when you are still reading the room, showing up to the community group where everyone already knows each other, or saying yes to the coffee chat with the stranger who offered. If you allow it, your self-protective impulse will keep you exactly where you are. Especially for we immigrants, where everything unfamiliar triggers caution more often than not.

Official Links

✅ Connect with John Hetherington on LinkedIn