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Career Development · Non-fiction
Unrooted
The job seeker's guide to knowing yourself, telling your story, and getting hired.
Are you sending applications into the void and hearing nothing back? You're not alone — and it's probably not what you think.
Most career books start with what's next: the resume, the search, the interview. Unrooted starts earlier. It begins with the moment everything — the title, the company, sometimes the country, and the version of you that went with all of it — is suddenly gone.
This is a practical, human guide for job seekers who want to stop spinning their wheels. It walks you through how to understand what makes you genuinely valuable, shape your experience into a story that resonates, and show up in ways that get you noticed — and hired.
The heart of the book is a shift most job seekers never make: moving from the standard elevator pitch — a tidy list of skills anyone could recite — to a story only you can tell. A list gets you compared. A story gets you remembered.
- Understand your identity and strengths before you market them
- Build an elevator pitch that opens doors instead of closing them
- Turn your experience into a story that sticks with the listener
- Develop a networking strategy that generates real leads, not silence
- Work through it with exercises at every stage
Why I wrote it
I reinvented myself and my coaching practice after relocating from Germany to North Carolina with credentials that didn't transfer. This book is what I learned — and what I've since used with hundreds of jobseekers navigating layoffs, pivots, and starting over.
Immigration & Culture · Non-fiction · Bilingual Release
The Second Move
Available in English and German — one book, two languages, written for the same person: someone who has done everything right to get to America, and is now discovering that getting here was only the first move.
English Edition
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The Second Move
The cultural guide nobody hands you at the airport.
There is a well-developed industry around moving to America. Immigration lawyers, tax accountants, relocation consultants, business plan specialists. They handle the visa, the entity, the apartment, the school registration. They are real professionals doing real work.
But they stop at the airport.
On the other side of the departure gate is the country itself — and almost nobody has prepared you for it. Not for how Americans communicate and what they actually mean. Not for how trust is built here. Not for how the workplace operates, how customers buy, how friendships form — slowly, through repeated proximity, warm on the surface and closed at the core for longer than you expect.
This book addresses the gap between the move you planned for and the one that actually happens. It is written for three people in particular: the corporate assignee who arrives with a generous relocation package and discovers the package left out the country; the partner who followed and whose plan was never part of anyone's plan; and the entrepreneur who spent eight months on an E-2 business plan and is about to meet America at full speed.
- Why the identity relocation is harder than the logistical one — and why it hits the most competent people hardest
- How Americans communicate, and what they actually mean when they say what they say
- How trust is built in America — and how different that process is from everything you learned at home
- How the American workplace operates: the unwritten rules that govern every meeting, every email, every hire
- Specific chapters for corporate assignees, trailing partners, and E-2 investors
- What the Valley is — and how to move through it
Why I wrote it
I moved from Germany to North Carolina with years of immigration counselling experience — and still found a world I wasn't prepared for. My professional field didn't exist here in the same form. The framework I had built my career on didn't transfer. This book is the conversation I wish I had been able to have before I left. It is grounded not in academic research but in my own experience and in the patterns I have observed working with German-speaking individuals and families navigating this same transition for over a decade.
Deutsche Ausgabe
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Auswandern nach Amerika
Der kulturelle Schlüssel für einen erfolgreichen Neustart.
Rund um den Umzug nach Amerika hat sich eine gut entwickelte Branche aufgestellt. Einwanderungsanwälte, Steuerberater, Businessplan-Spezialisten, Relocation-Unternehmen. Echte Fachleute, echte Arbeit. Ohne sie wäre der bürokratische Teil deutlich schwieriger.
Aber sie hören am Flughafen auf.
Auf der anderen Seite des Abfluggates wartet das Land selbst — und niemand hat Sie darauf systematisch vorbereitet. Nicht darauf, wie Amerikaner kommunizieren und was sie wirklich meinen. Nicht darauf, wie Vertrauen hier entsteht. Nicht darauf, wie amerikanische Arbeitsplätze, Kundenbeziehungen und Freundschaften funktionieren — langsam, herzlich an der Oberfläche, im Kern lange verschlossen.
Dieses Buch schließt die Lücke zwischen dem Umzug, den Sie geplant haben, und dem, der wirklich passiert. Es richtet sich an drei Menschen: den Entsandten, der ein üppiges Relocation-Paket bekommt — das das Land nicht enthält; den mitgezogenen Partner, dessen Plan in niemandes Plan vorkommt; und den Unternehmer, der acht Monate an einem E-2-Businessplan gearbeitet hat und nun auf Amerika trifft.
- Warum der Identitätsumzug schwerer ist als der logistische — und warum er die Kompetentesten am härtesten trifft
- Wie Amerikaner kommunizieren — und was sie wirklich meinen, wenn sie sagen, was sie sagen
- Wie Vertrauen in Amerika aufgebaut wird — und wie anders dieser Prozess ist als alles, was man gelernt hat
- Wie der amerikanische Arbeitsplatz funktioniert: die ungeschriebenen Regeln hinter jedem Meeting, jeder E-Mail, jeder Einstellung
- Eigene Kapitel für Entsandte, mitgezogene Partner und E-2-Investoren
- Was das Tal ist — und wie man hindurchkommt
Warum ich es geschrieben habe
Ich bin von Deutschland nach North Carolina gezogen — mit jahrelanger Erfahrung in der Migrationsberatung im Gepäck — und habe trotzdem eine Welt vorgefunden, auf die ich nicht vorbereitet war. Mein Berufsfeld existierte hier nicht in derselben Form. Das Framework, auf dem meine Karriere beruhte, ließ sich nicht übertragen. Dieses Buch ist das Gespräch, das ich gerne vor meiner Abreise geführt hätte. Es basiert nicht auf akademischer Forschung, sondern auf eigener Erfahrung und den Mustern, die ich in über zehn Jahren Arbeit mit deutschsprachigen Menschen in diesem Übergang beobachtet habe.
Historical Fiction · Novel
Unwalled
A Blacksmith's Journey to the New World
Palatinate, 1746. Johannes Hege is thirteen years old, the third son of a Mennonite family that farms land it will never be permitted to own. There is no inheritance waiting for him, and no place either.
When a death in his uncle's household leaves a forge without a striker, Johannes is sent north to learn the blacksmith's trade — the first of many departures that will define his life. What follows is a road that runs half the length of Europe: four hard years at the anvil, a father buried, journeyman years spent among communities that each hold the same faith in a different grip. Then an emigrant ship out of Rotterdam, a fever that nearly kills him in the mid-Atlantic dark, and a vow made in that darkness that he will not merely survive the life ahead of him.
Philadelphia offers him work, friendship, and a woman whose restlessness matches his own. His own people, in Germantown, offer him something colder. And when word comes of a raw settlement five hundred miles south in the Carolina backcountry, Johannes must decide whether a life well lived means guarding what he has built — or letting it go, and building again.
Why this book belongs beside the other one
This is a novel, but it is not a departure from my work. It is the same journey told at a distance: a person shaped by a narrow inheritance, learning a craft, moving through cultures, and slowly outgrowing the frameworks he was handed. My own family traces back to the Hege line of Swiss Mennonites, and I emigrated to the United States myself. Writing Johannes let me explore the arc I see in my clients every week — skills development, identity shifts, and reinvention — in a life far enough away to see it whole.
- Spans three decades, two continents, and one long road west
- Illustrated, with maps, a family tree and a chronology
- Drawn from real Mennonite migration history and the author's own ancestry
- Includes an author's note on the personal journey behind the book
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