I didn't figure this out sitting at a desk. I figured it out by talking to people. A lot of people. Internationals living in the Netherlands. Most of them smart, experienced, putting in real effort. And most of them stuck in a way they couldn't really explain.
After a while I started seeing something. The problem they talked about and the problem they actually had were often not the same thing.
Someone would say they needed to be more visible. Network more, post more, show up more. Maybe. But when we kept talking, something else came up. They didn't really get how things worked here. Not the official rules. The stuff underneath. How trust gets built. How decisions actually happen. Who to know and why.
Or they knew what they were good at. Years of experience, real skills. But somehow that wasn't coming across. It wasn't a language problem. It was something else, something harder to put into words.
And then there were people dealing with things nobody around them could see. Visa uncertainty. Financial stress. A partner having a hard time. A kid still finding their feet. People holding a lot together while trying to appear like everything was fine.
What I kept noticing is that these things are connected. When someone is under a lot of pressure, they have less space to think clearly. When they can't get their story across, being more visible doesn't help much. When they don't understand how the system works, they put energy into the wrong places and nothing moves.
We gave these things names. Navigation, how well someone understands the system around them. Translation, whether they can make who they are and what they do make sense to others. Visibility, whether they're present where opportunities actually happen. And stability, whether they have enough capacity to keep going.
Working harder doesn't fix any of this on its own. Sometimes it just means doing more of the wrong thing.
At Flux Forward we started using the word activation. Just to have a name for what we were seeing. When someone who has been stuck for a long time suddenly starts moving. It doesn't usually happen because they fixed one thing. It happens because they finally worked on the right thing.
I'm still learning from these conversations. But I wanted to write this down because I think a lot of people are putting effort into the wrong place without knowing it. And sometimes just seeing that clearly is the first step.