Gyl Golden
Trainer & Life Coach at The Language House
Gyl Golden is a job abroad coach and specialist in culture transition with special focus in the Mediterranean. She has a certificate in Personal Performance Coaching issued by The Coaching Academy and is a member of the International Coach Federation. Currently Gyl is working on the Personal Performance Diploma with The Coaching Academy. With over eight years of living as an expatriate in countries such as Japan, Thailand, Spain, France, Morocco and Italy, Gyl has been motivated her clients to live and work successfully abroad.
Gyl Golden, formerly Gyl Johnson, has a Master’s degree of Architecture and spent eight years as an architect in professional practice. During that time she realized that architecture did not provide the fulfillment that she craved. The last year of her career she decided she had to get out, however, considering the fact that she was only trained for architecture and her parents had refused to finance further education she had to ponder what she could actually do to make money other than being an architect. So she asked herself, “When was I happiest?” and “What am I good at?” The answer was when she was in graduate school; more specifically when she did two study abroad assignments in Italy. She realized she was good at traveling.
Now the bigger question, what could she do where she could earn money and travel without further education? At that time there was only one answer; teach English abroad. So despite all the time, energy and her parents money spent on her architectural career, she decided to leave it all and go to Japan to teach English. She didn’t speak Japanese, she didn’t know if she would like Japan or even if she would like teaching English but she knew for sure it was a way out.
It turns out that she enjoyed Japan and teaching English and stayed for two years. Afterwards she did teaching stints in Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. She started working as a teacher trainer in Barcelona, Spain before ending up in Rennes, France. After one year, with limited French, no contacts or friends, she decided to open her own school, The Language House, in Montpellier, which is in the south of France. That was in 2004 and as her business has grown slowly but surely, she added a new location in Marrakesh, Morocco and one year later a location in Genoa, Italy.
Along with teaching people with little or no teaching experience how to teach English to students of other languages, The Language House also provides language training in six different countries for studying six different languages including French, Spanish and Arabic as well as specialty travel tours to France, Italy and Morocco.
Gyl’s aim is to promote cross- cultural understanding and immersion by educating her clients through the methods of education travel, language training and cultural exchange and awareness. The best way to understand each other is to spend time in other countries.
Working as a trainer, Gyl has been coaching her clients to find jobs abroad for 6 years. Gyl motivates her clients to take the big leap of faith necessary to move abroad just as she did. But more than that, she guides them to develop the “real” tools to find jobs and carve out a life abroad. “Yes, we must follow our dreams but what counts is not what we’re dreaming but what we’re going to do.”