S1:E6 Conflict Avoidance keeps us in "DeNile"

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[00:00:50] Welcome to Asians Breaking Ceilings. I'm Jeanny Chai, founder of BambooMyth.Com and confidence coach for multicultural professionals. The goal of this podcast is to ignite your confidence, to empower you to overcome imposter syndrome so you can finally break that career ceiling and get what you want in life.

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[00:01:36] Until we talk about this, we're going to stay stuck, tolerating a smaller version of ourselves and even being our own worst bullies. So let's get real today and talk about what we really need to face in order to start turning things around and get unstuck.

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[00:02:19] If you've been following me, you know that we talk about real topics here. And if we don't get to the core of the issues that are causing bamboo ceiling and a lot of burnout and suffering in the Asian American professional community, then we're not going to see any change. And so today's episode -warning- is going to be really authentic.

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[00:02:58] And what we're talking about is denial. Denial is almost built into the Asian cultural norms. What am I talking about? Right. So from a very, very young age. Don't you see your parents kind of fighting or, or yelling at you in the car, you know, being upset and the minute they're in public and like, "" Auntie Glo! We haven't seen you in so long. I'm so happy. How's Michael doing?"

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[00:03:39] And we had this weird understanding that we treat family members the worst because of love. How many of you were told when you said, Hey, if any of us were brave enough to say mom, "Your yelling scares me and I don't feel appreciated."

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[00:04:23] I had to take a parenting class about anger management and within the course, there was this piece of paper I had and it showed what emotional abuse is. You can find this if you just Google anywhere, emotional abuse diagram. And in my 35 years of life, I'd never seen this anywhere else. They don't teach this to you in school.

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[00:05:03] I'm like, uh, that's like every day. If you're an Asian child growing up in an Asian family, not only that, but I do it to myself. Right. And there were things on there like, uh, manipulates makes you do things in order to control behavior. I was like, ah, again, normal for Asian behavior. So a lot of what we think is regular human interaction is actually abusive.

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[00:05:51] And we have friends that are toxic. We have bosses that are toxic. And as a matter of fact, we're toxic to ourselves. I can just be really honest with you. Until I started doing this work, until I got cancer, I would look in the mirror and often, almost every day, maybe five times a day, I would call myself names.

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[00:06:34] I was my worst abuser. If you live like this, you know what I'm talking about. We think it's normal. Would you ever say those things to a friend? Have I ever said that to any of my four children? Maybe in anger, but not on a regular basis. Like, wow, you're a failure. You suck. But I do this to myself all the time. We're going to discuss this today. And the key takeaway is this is not okay.

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[00:07:33] And that's what I've discovered only in the last seven to eight years, I stopped being so critical to myself. It hasn't all gone away. A lot of it has gone away, and I love my life! And I can't believe that I wake up actually feeling happy sometimes. I wake up feeling motivated. I wake up feeling energized. And the reason is because I finally stopped denying that the mean ways that we treat our own family members .

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[00:08:41] They don't like what you're doing in life. They don't like your choices. They think you're behind when that is constantly on your brain. There's no way you're going to have confidence and feel good as a human being, let alone function in corporate America and climb the ladder. We can barely get out of bed when we feel so bad.

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[00:09:16] My teens, my mom disowned me, and that year , she would call me once in a while. And I'd be physically sick. I would actually, be physically sick and I had a roommate at the time and I said, I need to call in sick today. She goes, "you know, you're, you're not really, you don't have a cold or some kind of stomach bug. It's your mom, the stress. The stress is hurting you."

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[00:09:57] And asshole behavior. Anybody is capable of that. I am capable of asshole behavior a lot. And I do this and did it more when I was younger, anyone is capable of asshole behavior. And the reason we need to call this out is because if we don't, we'll continue to normalize it. We'll continue to accept that kind of behavior from our boss, from our coworkers, from our own partners, even from our own children.

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[00:10:50] But I want you to remember who treated you. With disrespect, who made you feel stupid, who manipulated you, I will share some stories again, not to call out people and blame them, but my, my, my experience only is in my own family.

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[00:11:36] We just learned that if things are difficult, we don't solve them. We just hope they get better. Uh, other things that happened. I saw a lot of fighting in my family and I didn't see any resolution. I didn't see someone ever, ever, ever, ever say, "I'm sorry. I was rude. That was inappropriate behavior."

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[00:12:17] Right. Mental health is a huge issue for Asian Americans. And many of us do not talk about it. Many of us do not get support. We can't even talk about emotions because mental health, I hate that word. I'm going to change it. Just emotional regulation. It just means that you're sad and you're sad a lot, and you're disappointed because something in your life is very, very wrong. And unfortunately, a lot of that times it has to do with your own family treating you like garbage.

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[00:13:08] And the uncle says this and the grandma says this and the cousin says this. And so this child starts to think something is very wrong with me when in reality, she's just an amazing leader and she likes to talk and she's spunky. I've heard this dozens of times just in the last few years of my coaching and it breaks my heart.

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[00:13:46] Because what that child is going to deal with when they grow up, and I know this cause I've been there, is very low self esteem, self doubt, shyness, not talking much anymore. I had a voice that was about this loud when I Went through school because I got blamed for so many things. I was afraid to speak up anymore and every day in the first day of school the teacher would say Jeanny, Can you talk louder? And this was the loudest I could talk.

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[00:14:37] And I realized a lot of the teachings I learned. Not everything, but a lot of the teachings I learned made me have stress, anxiety, and depression. And I wasn't going to have the cancer come back every five years and do chemo because I had a five year old that was needing a mother. And I had other children, three other kids that needed a mom and I wasn't going to live like this anymore.

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[00:15:20] But guess what? Inside you are hurting, you're crying. There is a war in you because you can't make decisions. You don't like yourself. And you feel like you're living a fake life, trying to please everybody else. And that's where many of us are. And I know because I speak to hundreds of people a week, usually of Asian heritage, and that's the internal landscape.

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[00:16:03] You know, I felt like a complete failure My mother can be very scary when she's mad, and she would randomly leave voicemails on my phone all the time. This was back in the day when I had a real answering machine and a phone in my dorm room, and I felt compelled to listen to them. I felt disloyal if I didn't listen to all of her voice messages, every single one.

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[00:16:42] And I became very, very depressed. I think I was already depressed before, but I got even more depressed. Now I was losing weight and I wasn't eating. And so, funnily, that summer, even though she disowned me, I still went home to live with my family for three months for summer vacation. And when they saw me, they were in denial.

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[00:17:15] And I tried to tell her, "Mom, do you realize that you leave voice messages that scare me and then I can't even go to class because I feel so bad about myself. Do you know that you yelled at me so much that I couldn't function and that I can't eat and that I'm scared all the time and I feel terrible."

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[00:18:00] This is huge. Because when someone treats you like that and she treats her husband like that and she tells you it's because it's love You treat yourself badly. You start saying mean things to yourself You adopt her thinking and you think it's normal because it's from a motivation of love You gotta call bullshit.

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[00:18:31] And you don't, you don't accept that and you don't say that's normal .And you don't pretend that my problems are physical. I knew a thousand percent there was nothing physically wrong with me. I did not have a thyroid problem. I didn't have that and she wouldn't believe me.

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[00:19:19] And so my doctor looked me in the eye and he goes, what? You've lost 12 pounds. That's a 10th of your body weight. You look like a skeleton. What is going on? And because unfortunately this doctor was not someone I wanted to pick. This doctor was the father of a student that I went to school with. They all knew that Jeanny, Jeanny Hwang, my maiden name was valedictorian.

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[00:20:17] And I left crying, driving and screaming in the car because all the vials of blood they took, they put all these band aids on and the band aids broke and I was bleeding out from my arm into the car and I was so mad that no one could understand what was really going on.

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[00:20:56] There is something strange about the Asian culture that glorifies sacrifice and martyrdom. Somehow believe that everything in the marriage that was wrong was my fault, and I put my ex husband on a pedestal. None of that was his doing and I would take all the blame. Well, what's wrong with this is in any marriage, in any relationship, work related or personal, it's, it's a hundred percent both of you.

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[00:21:37] If you keep sweeping everything under the rug and you keep denying that they have faults too, and you have faults too, and you both need to work on them when you don't want to be honest and say, wow, that behavior is painful and hurtful to me. You're never going to change and things don't get better.

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[00:22:37] And so many of us will take on full responsibility for our boss. For our partners, because we're scared, but you know what that means? We're also in denial of the truth because your boss probably has some things that they're doing that need to be addressed your partner or spouse. I'm sure has a lot of things they're doing that need to be addressed.

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[00:23:22] If you never have those kind of conversations, you keep being the person that absorbs the stress. And no one is a saint.

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[00:24:00] And what happens is. Yeah. We start to get sick. Our immune system can't handle this. All our energy is going into managing stress, the fight or flight mode, and our immune system gives up. And so a lot of us have eczema. I got cancer. You know, no fun there. A lot of us have cysts. We have unexplained headaches. We have migraines, IBS, lupus. Early onset arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's. As I interviewed thousands and thousands of women and they told me this, my heart just broke. Because I'm positive a lot of this is caused by our own inability to admit how much pain and suffering and anger and disappointment and criticism we feel all the time, whether it be from other people or ourselves.

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[00:25:04] And that denial ladies is the reason that things don't get better and there's burnout. And there's numbing out of our lives because we were never meant to live this way.

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[00:25:54] I'm sure you see this at work too, especially if you work with any Asian countries, businesses from Asian countries. And I remember we were at a meeting with some American execs and we were speaking with our team in China. And during the meeting, we were all speaking English, and the China team said, "the software is wonderful. We love it. We've enjoyed it. It's going really well."

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[00:26:29] I go, Zhen de ma? Really?" And they said, "No, no, no, no. You know, we stopped using it six months ago. It was terrible." And I'm like, Oh, guys, you just completely. fabricated that, right? But that's so common because we're taught to save face. We're taught to not make anybody feel bad, which again is kind of kind, right?

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[00:27:08] If you are always, always keeping the harmony, are you causing a war inside yourself?

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[00:27:29] It was so hot cause there's a layer of oil on top, but he was not going to spit it out. So he swallowed it anyway. And that night he had to go to the ER because it did something to his stomach that had burned a hole through him. Well, that is horrific. That is horrific. I don't even know if he made it. It's just a horrible, horrible example of how we're so afraid to break norms that make other people look bad or embarrass them that we hurt ourselves.

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[00:28:29] And the word that I hear all the time that is used to describe Asian American females is invisible. We feel invisible because we are invisible. There are more confident, charismatic leaders who may not have the experience or the intelligence that we have, but they're, they're visible and they're advocating for themselves. They're good at speaking up. And because of that, they're the ones getting promoted because this is Western corporate America.

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[00:29:11] If we don't even speak up in those situations, I guarantee you we are not making connections with executives. We are not selling ourselves and talking about our accomplishments in a way that the leadership gets to know us. And that's what's necessary and needed for success. And relationships and connection and visibility in American corporate culture.

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[00:30:04] If you can start speaking up when you're uncomfortable, then you can start speaking up when you are comfortable in an interview or in front of an exec team or a group of 5, 000 people. Right? That's how you build the muscle. But the first step is not just going to Toastmasters or practicing communication.

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[00:30:48] Copy that template and use it. It's going to be scary the first time, but I teach my clients to do this and when they do it the first time, they are certain they're going to be fired. But you know what? If the boss or the person you're speaking to is decent, they usually respond well and they begin to respect you because now they know they can't treat you like shit and they're going to start respecting you.

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[00:31:29] If that happens in my, in my coaching program, I take that person through how to interview, how to remove themselves from that situation and start learning to look for supportive, kind. Awesome, energetic people with empathy who support you and care. And once you're in that environment, you don't have to be afraid to communicate.

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[00:32:08] And you're going to be very clear about when you expect the next promotion, the next raise. You're going to be talking about it a lot and people will know you and it's going to happen. And that's how you start the change.

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[00:32:40] She was basically saying, you're living your life in a way that is so bad for you, so unhealthy that you have cancer. And so I couldn't lie anymore and say, everything's fine. You know, uh, it's normal to be self critical. It's normal to have family members disown you because they love you so much. It's normal to be fighting with your spouse all the time.

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[00:33:20] Now were there moments before I got breast cancer that I knew my life wasn't so great? Yes, but I had an amazing ability to talk myself out of it. For instance, I knew I was working too fast. I put way too much energy into everything I did to the detriment of my health, my own wellbeing, and my family's care and concern.

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[00:34:04] There were moments when I got glimpses of how a lot of things we were doing in the marriage were so toxic and bad. But then I would just go, well. We're Christian. Maybe it should work out. God will help us. God's gonna help us. I had that Christian crutch that somehow God would fix it all.

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[00:34:56] And I know now that even as a Christian, it's okay to talk to your mom less, to not call her. If there are friends that are rude to you and who use you and only want to take from you and not give to you, uh, even if you're a Christian, there's nothing that says you have to see these friends on a weekly basis.

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[00:35:38] And let me explain why. When you finally acknowledge that there are certain things in your life that you've tolerated that are painful, you are showing yourself self compassion.

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[00:36:27] No one should make light of any abuse or not taking your concerns seriously, saying the abuse didn't happen, shifting responsibility, or saying that you caused it. No one should treat you like a servant or make all the big decisions in the relationship, acting like the master of the castle, being the one to define what men's and women's roles are.

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[00:37:29] We should not feel boxed in a job and stuck in a job that you don't love. We should never have to work so hard that you don't have time for anything else. And we shouldn't have to constantly worry about not being good enough and proving ourselves over and over again every year. No one should have to play a supportive role doing mundane, repetitive tasks that weren't even on their job description.

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[00:38:24] And no one should be treated badly because of your race or gender. You shouldn't have to transfer from department to department, worrying if it's too late to find fulfillment in your career. You shouldn't have to feel stuck as you wait and hope for something better. No one should have to do the work of three people and get paid for the job of one.

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[00:39:05] You've come to the end of episode six. So in essence, what you want to stop doing is stop pretending you're fine when you are not. Stop saying those words, I'm fine. It'll be okay, whatever, because those keep us in denial and we want to be strong empathizers of ourselves so that we can turn this around and we can live a happy, fulfilling and impactful life.

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[00:39:51] And this is one of the things that needs to change in order for us to see greater growth and for us to break out of the bamboo jungle. So see you next week. If you've enjoyed this episode, please help me spread the word by emailing your friends, texting them, tell them about Asians Breaking Ceilings

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