A sabbatical year abroad would help, according to researchers at Rice University, to have more confidence in us, helping us to develop a "self concept" more clear.

The idea of taking a year off to better understand which way you want to take in life, is often derided.
But if that time is spent in a foreign country, it can only help.
And if you can spend years, all the better.
Advertising message Hajo Adam Rice University (USA), he led what his team defines the first empirical research on the effects that living abroad has on their "self concept" - that is clarity and confidence that people show in defining "who they are."
Since nowadays people spend more and more time abroad for work or study, and considering that life experiences "transitional", like having a new job or divorce, it is increasingly associated with a lack of clarity on who we are, it is important to deepen this concept, the author argues.
The researchers carried out several studies with a sample of 1874 people.
In the first study we were selected online 296 subjects, half of whom had lived abroad at some point in their lives.
The subjects completed a scale on the clarity of its 12-item self concept, where you had to indicate what was or was not agreed on items such as: "In general, I have a clear sense of who I am and what I am" or "Rarely do I feel sensations of conflict between different aspects of my personality."
Those who had lived abroad have been shown to have a clearer self concept.
The question that researchers have set themselves is: This result comes from the fact that such people are more likely to follow opportunities abroad?
To find out, they recruited other 261 persons, of whom 136 had lived abroad.
The rest had not yet done but had planned to do so within approximately 9 months.
In addition to the scale on the self concept, participants completed an assessment of the "beliefs of self", with items such as: "I understand if my relationships with others are guided by my values or follow the values of the people around me"; "I was able to determine whether my personality is defined by who they really are or the culture in which I find myself."
Participants who had previously lived abroad had a self clearer concept than the others that they had only planned a move abroad, and this was statistically explained by higher scores on tests of self-belief.
This suggests that spending time abroad boosts the development of beliefs about themselves, leading to greater clarity of their self-concept.
Advertising message Other studies conducted by researchers (including those with students from dozens of different countries) have led to the conclusion that it is the total time spent abroad, rather than the number of countries in which they lived, which allows for greater clarity about your own self concept (the elapsed time of the subjects was on average 3.3 years).
The clarity also allows you to have a practical advantage: international students who had spent more time abroad reported to be safer than the direction of his career.
The fact that we found support for our hypothesis in different populations highlights the importance that living abroad has on our self concept - the researchers write - This research is the first to show that living outside can change aspects structural self-concept.
Other research has found that living abroad can influence the content of the description that a person makes of himself, for example with the addition of words such as "adventurous".
New findings also suggest that living away from their cultural environment allows you to review what is important or not on a personal level, and that this leads to an increase in the clarity and confidence on the idea of self.
The article concludes with a quote from a book in 1919 entitled 'Travelogues of a philosopher' written by the German philosopher Hermann von Keyserling:
The shortest route to oneself leads worldwide.

From Stateofmind