S1:E14:The Enemy that Steals Our Confidence and Happiness

[: 00:00:00

[00:00:23] Right, because shame says, I'm not enough. I'm not worthy. Something's wrong with me. I don't deserve good. And when that is your pervasive filter as a kid, anything that is fun, anything that is peaceful, anything that gives you joy, for a long period of time is going to feel uncomfortable.

[: 00:00:47

[00:01:08] In this episode, I give you a real look into what has happened into my life that ended up creating a long gap in my podcast and how shame affects all of us. Many of us who grew up in a shame- based society are so used to chasing our dreams and not meeting them that when we experience happiness, when we have set a new milestone, it's awkward and uncomfortable Just like you, I have a hard time receiving. And I go into detail about why this episode took so long to produce.

[: 00:01:38

[00:02:00] I know that one of the false beliefs I've had about myself is that when things go well, it just means the other shoe is going to drop. Another way of saying it is I don't deserve long time happiness. The way I became like this probably was from early childhood. At one point, things were really chaotic, things were difficult, and whatever you go through as a kid, you kind of get used to.

[: 00:02:23

[00:02:48] What happened to episode 14? Where did the podcast go? I was wondering that myself for a very long time. As one of my clients described, it's as if this purple cat came into my life. undetected and just sat on my stomach and stayed there for about two, three months. And it prevented me from the same level of comfort and joy in creating this podcast.

[: 00:03:11

[00:03:32] It's not just learning to communicate. It's not just learning how to lead and negotiate, but many of us growing up in an Asian background, cultural background have have this long standing shame in our lives that somehow we don't deserve good things that we are used to stress, we are more used to chaos and a lot of emergencies happening throughout our day.

[: 00:03:55

[00:04:23] Especially when the source of stress is feeling like we could be disappointing someone at any time, that at any moment someone might get mad at us. We have this internalized shame. When I ask women, how old were you when you began to feel this way? Many of them say, as long as I remember, I've always been this way.

[: 00:04:45

[00:05:17] Um, being controlled or being told what to do a lot, we have a huge sense of shame. And being Asian and having grown up this way, this is the only culture I really can talk about. But I know that, uh, Chinese culture is a shame based culture. If you speak Mandarin, when you were a little girl, how often did you hear" diu lian, Biao dui lian!" Right? Don't, don't toss your face at it. Don't lose face, right? Don't lose face. Losing face means you, you do something behaviorally to embarrass your family and to embarrass your parents embarrasses your entire community. So there's a sense of don't do anything wrong. The other way of saying that is don't make mistakes.

[: 00:05:59

[00:06:23] When did that start? It started when you were a young child, right? Take a moment with me and let's go back and recall. And I know all of you have these. Some of them were so painful we don't remember. Recall some, some circumstances in which you were told what to do. I will share some anonymous scenarios from real people that I've coached, and these stories break my heart, but I want you to know you're not alone.

[: 00:06:51

[00:07:12] And the unintentional, or perhaps intentional, consequence was the little girl became very quiet. And even to this day, as an adult, she is afraid to speak up. And this is completely connected to an event that never got processed, that scarred her so much that it set a new precedence. It's like she got a virus in her mind and the virus is still there until we intentionally get rid of it.

[: 00:07:38

[00:07:59] Or someone would make a pie and she would go sneak a bite and, and she'd be humiliated. And so she learned at a young age, I'm not allowed to be me. She felt like she herself was a bother. She was a bad child. And now as an adult, she still deals with anxiety, an enormous amount of fear of disappointing her boss, disappointing other people on her team.

[: 00:08:24

[00:08:47] Most of my life as a little girl, I was not used to long periods of peace, of freedom, of safety. of feeling loved, of feeling a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, quite the opposite, right? I think you've heard my, if you listened to the earlier episodes, I talk about living in Taiwan, being undisciplined, yet being extremely happy.

[: 00:09:11

[00:09:29] What's the white powdery stuff we need for making cookies? I said floor. And the entire class erupted in laughter. And again, not intentional, but the consequence for me was I felt really uncomfortable. And that's what shame is when you feel like something's wrong with you, versus having an adult explain to you, You know, you're one of the only immigrant children.

[: 00:09:51

[00:10:29] Not all the time, but there are certain situations that bring this up. And so when I got into corporate America finally had a seat at the table where I was the only female and the only Asian, I, I made a joke and no one laughed. And immediately I felt, oh no, here we go. I'm in an environment where I don't fit in.

[: 00:10:48

[00:11:09] One of my false beliefs is that progress should be linear. And it's part of the habits of someone who's a perfectionist, a recovering perfectionist. And so as I am recording my episodes, I can see how many views I'm getting. And so They weren't linear and I felt a bit like they should be getting higher and higher views And so I started to doubt myself I also made the huge mistake of looking at some other podcasts that were highly successful that made the Apple whatever, you know Best new podcast list I certainly didn't make that list and I started to feel that imposter feeling coming back like are you sure you're good enough for this?

[: 00:11:50

[00:12:22] One of them was my kid got sick. I got sick. Oh, this weekend, I'm too busy. Blah, blah, blah. And then, and then it's four months later. And so in that time, I saw this happening and I wanted to get over this feeling once and for all that when things are going well, I, actually become anxious. I actually don't know how to relax and enjoy that sense of success, that feeling of being proud.

[: 00:12:50

[00:13:11] This is not the only time I've done this. When I came out of cancer treatments, one of the things I knew I wanted to embrace again was singing. So I took opera lessons. At first it didn't sound that great, but as I got better and better, I had one,

[: 00:13:30

[00:13:52] And to this day I'm baffled at to how, how this subconscious part of me self sabotages.

[: 00:14:00

[00:14:24] Right? Because shame says, I'm not enough. I'm not worthy. Something's wrong with me. I don't deserve good. And when that is your pervasive filter as a kid, anything that is fun, anything that is peaceful, anything that gives you joy for a long period of time is going to feel uncomfortable. Have you heard of cognitive dissonance?

[: 00:14:48

[00:15:10] And that was such a foreign concept for me because most of my childhood, I choose to remember the really difficult traumatic times where when something goes well, the next thing I know, it gets taken away. And when I love somebody, they disappear. I had enough experiences of that, that that's what my brain was used to.

[: 00:15:28

[00:15:52] And the behavior was that I was loving my opera lessons. I had to, I had to change one of them and that's why I quit. And so the difficulty with shame is that we will end up self sabotaging over and over and over. Let's talk about what that might look like in your life. And again, I'm not doing this to shame you or to criticize, but this folks, we're now getting to the heart of why leadership for Asian Americans is difficult because there's so many layers.

[: 00:16:19

[00:16:41] If you are experiencing in your life, repeated patterns of difficult situations, repeated burnout, repeatedly having people in your life who take advantage of you, who don't support you, who say one thing and do another. Who don't have your best interests or who use you a lot, you probably have shame at the core of what's going on because this pattern is repeating itself over and over again.

[: 00:17:10

[00:17:24] It's a bit like PTSD. If you want to get into the psychology of it, it's called childhood PTSD, it's something where, Like in the, what is it, the movie Frozen, water has a memory, your brain has a memory. And so whatever you started out with as a young child is usually the standard. For instance, I learned to speak Chinese and I still speak Mandarin.

[: 00:17:45

[00:18:00] You're in alignment. If you're used to stress, worry, anxiety, fear, getting yelled at, and then suddenly that goes away and you're happy, you're going to be uncomfortable because now your brain is not used to that. An analogy is this, and I use this all the time in my coaching. Let's, which side of the bed do you get out of in the morning?

[: 00:18:17

[00:18:37] And so cultural norms are the same way.

[: 00:18:42

[00:19:12] You can still access early bird pricing, and I'd love to see you there.

[: 00:19:19

[00:19:35] If you've had a certain kind of boyfriend and it was not a good relationship and you date again, you're like, why is this happening again? Am I a magnet for this kind of stuff? And the answer is no, you're not a magnet, but subconsciously you're so used to it that it's familiar. I will share with you that when I was working in corporate, I kept looking for the most difficult, demanding, intelligent, um, driven bosses.

[: 00:20:04

[00:20:42] And so I say all this not to scare you to say that you are doomed, but to show you where you got to where you are today, how you got to where you are today. And the good news is when we are able to identify. Identify the core of what's causing our stress, causing our cycles, repeated stress and burnout and lack of recognition or even toxic relationships.

[: 00:21:04

[00:21:24] You can also move to a different part of the house so that you don't have to sleep in a room with a leaky roof, but none of those solutions actually solves the problem. What you need to do is fix the roof. And I feel like much of our training nowadays, meditation, mindfulness, DEI, it doesn't really, it does not deal with the source.

[: 00:21:49

[00:22:11] We're not getting to the core issue, which is how do you deal with, and how do you finally get rid of the shame? When you graduate from childhood and you have felt not enough. You have felt bullied. You have felt like you don't belong. You have felt like you made too many mistakes and you're embarrassed about any part of your life.

[: 00:22:36

[00:23:06] If you don't believe me, let me tell you what it looks like. When you have shame, you end up looking for validation from other people. You're very concerned what other people think, what they believe, whether they're talking about you at dinner table and whether they're judging you when you're speaking.

[: 00:23:24

[00:23:51] And so what we, what this is, is you're constantly proving yourself. And you're constantly worried that you might do something wrong and get in trouble. I know this only because I lived like this for the first 40 years of my life, and I thought it was normal. The scary thing is when I got cancer, I looked up shame, Google this, shame and breast cancer.

[: 00:24:14

[00:24:38] So what do we do? Our coping mechanisms, our solutions are usually one, work harder. Unfortunately, working harder does not take away shame. Working harder does not Rebuild your confidence, which is the opposite of shame, right? Self worth. The other thing we do is we get more certifications. We get the MBA.

[: 00:24:59

[00:25:27] I hear this all the time from women who say, you know, I took a lateral move. They said, do this and then we'll promote you. These empty promises and somehow they don't work out and you end up being stuck in that position, doing stuff you don't like, getting underpaid and feeling, uh, stuck in a place that's not fulfilling.

[: 00:25:48

[00:26:42] And so I'll keep putting on the brakes and keep resetting and keep sabotaging. Here's what I tried. I wanted to try every avenue possible. And so one, I started listening to my coaches and listening to my own coaching that says you have to do mindset work every day. This is much easier when it's gamified, when you have a community that does this.

[: 00:27:05

[00:27:27] at all times, which wasn't the default belief. The default belief was if I'm happy, something bad's going to happen next, right? That's a terrible, scary feeling. And the third one was things work out for me. My life gets to be easy. I know that's not how I grew up and I started to believe that things are harder for me or that shit will always hit the fan.

[: 00:27:52

[00:28:15] If you are a believer in God, a Christian or some other religion, it's really important that what you believe is supportive of you having success. Here's what I mean. At some deep level, I didn't have a trust that there was a kind God who absolutely loved me. I, because I was ashamed of myself. I certainly felt he was ashamed of me too.

[: 00:28:37

[00:28:53] And so I had to get prayed over by many, many, many people. And the prayer was that I'm allowed to believe in myself. I'm allowed to believe in success. And I don't have to live in fear that something bad is going to happen just because something good happened. Like logically, that does not make sense.

[: 00:29:12

[00:29:23] The third thing I did was, I let myself face my fears instead of coping and running away from them.

[: 00:29:30

[00:29:53] There were times instead of making up a new rule. When, when I went through those refunds, uh, my clients requesting refunds and my bank account was in the negative instead of making up a rule that, uh, you know, bad things always happen. When good things happen, I said, wow, this is really painful. This is hurtful.

[: 00:30:12

[00:30:34] Again, this is stuff I teach to my clients, right? One of the main pillars I teach into how to deal with the source is to stop evading your emotions and start empathizing, start feeling for yourself. And that's exactly what I had to do in these core areas that I had not yet dealt with. And I can't tell you that I know exactly when the change occurred, but I certainly can tell, and I know you can tell, that this episode, I have a newfound confidence, I have a joy, I have a conviction, I have a drive in me that wasn't there four months ago, because I've overcome some of these fears that have been bugging me my entire life.

[: 00:31:11

[00:32:04] Like me, be freed up, be freed up, not just of poor communication or not being promoted or trying to break through the bamboo ceiling, but on a deeper level where you start to be yourself and you have full access to your talents, to your skills, and there's no more self sabotage and there's very little procrastination because now you're not living in fear, But you're living in full self confidence and in self worth

[: 00:32:38

[00:33:02] I'm behind.

[: 00:33:05

[00:33:17] Do you find yourself overthinking about decisions or presentation notes or what to do And you feel like you have to ask other people's opinions, even though you kind of know what you want. You still want that validation.

[: 00:33:35

[00:33:39] Are you too quick to take responsibility for things that weren't even your fault? Do you say sorry? Do you start sentences with sorry a lot, hoping that it will soften whatever it is you're going to say? When you ask for help, do you feel like a burden?

[: 00:34:00

[00:34:08] When someone promises you something and they don't end up giving it to you, do you blame yourself or feel like maybe you didn't deserve it? Do you have these beliefs that I don't matter? I'm not worth fighting for. If people knew who I really was, they wouldn't like me.

[: 00:34:30

[00:34:41] Here's an affirmation for you.

[: 00:34:42

[00:34:57] or been told that I was I was a bad boy or a bad girl. Even if I lived in fear of disappointing others, I was made perfectly. I was created in a way that was just right. There was nothing wrong with me. I wasn't a failure. I wasn't a burden. And any parent would have been so grateful. And so thankful to have me and all the personality and all my quirks, all the things that I was.

[: 00:35:38

[00:36:11] My worth, my value is the same every day.

[: 00:36:18

[00:36:45] No one can call me a failure. No one can tell me that I ruined their life or they're disappointed in me without my permission. From now on, I accept myself. For all my imperfections, I accept myself and I allow myself to try new things, to make mistakes, to go through trial and error, and give myself the permission to feel free, like a child again, with no fear about being criticized or judged, or should have known better, or shouldn't be wasting time.

[: 00:37:20

[00:37:41] I get to love me. I get to treasure me. I get to value me and I get to take up space. I get to say no to things I don't want that hurt me. And I get to say yes to things that fill my soul, that make me happy, that give me joy, that make me laugh. And when things are difficult, I am not stuck. I'm allowed and I have permission, actually, it's my right to protect myself, to love myself, to create safety and comfort and a life full of fulfillment and joy and impact.

[: 00:38:26

[00:39:17] This is the end of episode 14 and I'm super excited to announce our new season starting next week. It's going to be called Stop Living By Default And I'm going to share with you all the secrets of how your life could be not what it should be. So that you can start living with brand new optimism, with joy, and realizing you have so much unlived potential That's just waiting for you.

[: 00:39:44