Life happened
My partner had to move for work, and after we talked it through, my dog and I decided we'd go too. Packing up a life is never just logistics. Somewhere between labeling boxes and figuring out what a dog needs for international travel, I kept circling back to the same question: what happens to my career?
The project work didn't worry me. I already knew that part travels — even working from Budapest, the office was more about the energy of being around people, bouncing ideas off them, feeling part of something. My question was everything wrapped around that: the internal innovation work, the presales support I give as a designer, the three mentees who count on me as their mentor. Move far enough away, I figured, and all of that just quietly fades. You stop being asked. You stop being remembered for the next opportunity. It happens slowly enough that you don't notice until it's already done.
The conversation most of us is dreading
I know places where you have to rehearse how you'd bring up a question like this. And in lots of cases a long pause, and a "let's see" the answer you get.
Instead, when I told management and my mentor, the reaction was supportive from the very first sentence. Nobody flinched. Nobody made me choose between the life I wanted and the job I'd built. We just started talking about how to make it work.
Moving to a different country is already stressful, even if you don’t have to worry about your career. This conversation made me feel confident about getting on that plane.
Making it work despite the distance
The truth is that the isolation doesn't announce itself. It creeps in through the slow realization that you're not in the loop the way you used to be.
Mentoring is what kept that from happening to me. I still meet regularly with my own mentor — same honest conversations about what I'm chasing and what's tripping me up, just now with a Paris skyline instead of a Budapest one behind me. And because I mentor three designers myself, I never fully stepped out of the team's story. Their wins, their stuck points, their next steps — I'm still in it with them. The conversations never stopped.
Showing up, on purpose
None of this works if it's one-sided, so I made sure it wasn't.
I fly back to Hungary when it counts — client meetings, workshops, team events. And when I'm home, I don't just stop by. I sit in the office, grab coffee with colleagues, let the days feel like I never left.
What I’ve learned so far
I thought this move would test my career. Instead, it clarified it.
Growth at Hiflylabs was never about the chair I sat in, but rather about the conversations I kept having, the initiative I kept taking, the people I stayed connected to. Paris didn't put my career on pause. If anything, it proved it was never tied to a desk in the first place.
Looking for that kind of trust?
If you want a workplace that backs your life outside of work as much as it backs your work itself, take a look at what we're building at Hiflylabs. My career followed me to Paris. Yours might follow you somewhere else entirely.
https://www.hiflylabs.com/careers
