00:00:00] I was angry, but also sad. In realizing that the first 40 years of my life, I had spent trying to please other people. I'd been living for my kids, living for my husband, living for my mom, and I was doing a terrible job of it, and I was angry. I was secretly angry. And that's probably what caused the cancer, because when you're under that much stress on a regular basis, your body can't handle that.
[00:00:27] Finally acknowledging that my life was not together and I could no longer fake it till I make it finally feeling those feelings gave me a sense of hope.
[00:00:40] 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.
[00:01:03] In episode four, I share the secrets behind how a health crisis helped me transform and finally realize my real roadblock to self-confidence and success. It might not be what you're expecting at all. I know I was pleasantly surprised at the turn of events. That finally broke the cycle of my people pleasing, achievement-based behavior that was destroying my health and my happiness.
[00:01:29] Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and sign up for my email list at asiansbreakingceilings.com and help spread the word by leaving me a written review at Podchaser.com. Now, let's jump into today's show so that we can help you achieve authentic success without the stress.
[00:01:52] One of my all time worst fears was to be sick and to be alone and I was going to have to face this. I was going to go through stage two breast cancer chemotherapy and I was going through a really painful divorce and I couldn't handle it anymore. So many of us try to keep it together.
[00:02:15] We try to numb our emotions. We try to eat we work harder we try not to think about it. But I no longer could keep it all together. It was even too much stress for me and I remember sitting in my room for a whole week when I could no longer work and just letting the tears fall. I hadn't cried probably This hard in 20 years I remember when I was 13
[00:02:42] I said, “I am so tired of being scared. I'm so tired of feeling helpless and hopeless. I am going to become angry instead.” I did that when I was 13 or 14 and it got me through. It got me through a lot of years of trauma, but you know what? It also numbed me out. It shut off all the fear, but it also shut off all the joy.
[00:03:08] And I realized how unhappy I was trying to live my entire life for somebody else. I realized that I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't really enjoy fulfillment in my life. That when the kids came, my whole job was taking care of them and taking care of my husband and asking him what he wanted. I didn't even know who I was.
[00:03:32] And I was angry, but also sad. In realizing that the first 40 years of my life, I had spent trying to please other people. I'd been living for my kids, living for my husband, living for my mom, and I was doing a terrible job of it, and I was angry. I was secretly angry. And that's probably what caused the cancer, because when you're under that much stress on a regular basis, your body can't handle that.
[00:04:00] And so I said to myself, if I am going to be saved by modern medicine. Because if I were alive in the 1800s, this would be it. It would be done for Jeanny Chai and her life would have been, you know, came to earth, tried to please people, didn't work, lived a depressed life, got sick and died. And that's it.
[00:04:19] And I thought, what a horrible existence. And I made a decision to stop. And I made a decision that if I was going to be saved, I was going to live these next years for myself. And what I felt through all the tears and finally feeling that I was hitting rock bottom, finally acknowledging that my life was not together and I could no longer fake it till I make it finally feeling those feelings gave me a sense of hope.
[00:04:50] A new hope that I hadn't felt for years.
[00:04:53] And it was in the next weeks that I began to do things I hadn't done since I was a little girl. Instead of rushing and running to do errands all the time, I would take time, I bought a new iPhone at this time, I would take pictures of hummingbirds that were flying near the garden of where I lived. I would take time and watch people walking around at the store.
[00:05:18] And noticing their emotions and I thought to myself why did I never care before and notice other people? Because when you're so worried about proving yourself when you feel so bad and your confidence is so low There is no room for anybody else. I felt good To finally have some of that anxiety go because during this time.
[00:05:40] I stopped looking at Facebook. I No longer cared what my friends were up to and how much success they were achieving. I said, I just got to live. You know, I had my bag of 36 different prescription medications. I had a schedule to follow. I had this test and that test. I just had to make sure to take care of me.
[00:06:04] And so for six months, as things got more and more difficult, I stopped comparing myself to other women. I stopped comparing myself and it felt good. However, towards the end of my last week of chemotherapy, I heard this voice come back and it said to me, well, good job. So you got through six months of chemotherapy and You're starting to recover, but you know what?
[00:06:32] You still haven't done anything with your career. You still haven't made use of your Stanford education. All you've done is now you're a failed wife, and you're a bad mom, and you're a failed daughter, and you still haven't accomplished anything in your life. And for the first time in my life, I realized, hey, this voice is not me.
[00:06:52] Because when I was going through all that treatment, it had left. It didn't dare bother me. But now that I was going back to normal, that voice was back and I gave it a name. I called it Clara and I said, Clara, get out. You have been criticizing me ever since I was a little girl saying horrible things. I think you're the reason I got cancer. I want you to get out.
[00:07:18] This was my first epiphany. That I had a 24 7 criticizer going in my head. I knew this because I would have stress dreams. I'd be gritting my teeth at night. My dentist knew that I was grinding my teeth. I'd wake up tired and stressed out because I had a dream that was so traumatic. I didn't remember what.
[00:07:40] I knew Clara was hard at work, not just during my daytime hours, but also at night. And so I started to, to rat her out. One of these examples was when I was finally able to return to work. I left my previous employer and I was looking for a new job. And one day this recruiter found me and said, Hey, we want you to apply for this senior manager job at this company in the supply chain company.
[00:08:08] Now, old Jeanny would have laughed out loud and said, I have a biology degree. I don't know anything about supply chain. I don't think so. But the new Jeanny was on to Clara and said, you know, the recruiter can't be that stupid. If he thinks I'm good enough to apply, I should give it a shot. Now this new relaxed Jeannie was less hard on herself.
[00:08:31] And in the parking lot of this company, I told Clara to stay in the car and I gave her a big box of cookies. This is all pretend, of course. I'm not that crazy. I gave her a box of cookies and said, you know, grownup Jeanny is going to go in there. She has the public speaking skills and she has personality and she knows she could do a great job.
[00:08:49] You stay here with the cookies and don't come in with me. So I went through probably three or four rounds of interviews. And the last one was with the C level exec himself. the head of the supply chain and I was a little bit nervous. He was famous, had written books, but you know what? Since Clara the Criticizer stayed in the car, my natural personality came out.
[00:09:14] I gave a great presentation. I even told jokes and he loved it and I was hired and something huge, a huge epiphany occurred to me that the reason I was different now. Was that I no longer let my criticizer decide my actions. You see in the past, I thought all my feelings were true. Feelings of fear, inadequacy, self doubt, embarrassment, shame.
[00:09:45] I accepted all those feelings and now I realized I didn't have to and I realized that all that criticism wasn't benefiting anyone and it wasn't even true. I started to realize I had been my own worst bully by comparing and continuing to add new ceilings to my life. I realized that Clara the Criticizer always had more ceilings for me to scale and I was no longer going to listen to her.
[00:10:16] Not only that, this was the very first time that I negotiated my salary. Prior to me getting sick, I had applied to a lot of jobs and sometimes the salary range was 80k to 140k and I was excited that maybe I would get 140k and when the offer letter came it'd say 80k and I'd go, Oh, I guess I wasn't good enough, but I never asked.
[00:10:40] And now, when the new Jeanny is here, this time my confidence had increased because I left Clara in the car. And with my confidence increased, I was able to ask for my value. I asked for almost a salary. That was double what my own salary was at the previous company and they gave it to me. And guess what? I didn't need more certifications.
[00:11:03] I never finished that MBA. As a matter of fact, all I did was lie in my bed for six months trying to heal from cancer, but my confidence had been boosted. You see, many of us complete our high school, our college education, and we keep getting more certifications. We get better and better and more competent, and we add more Coursera courses.
[00:11:26] We get the MBA. We get other Six Sigma certifications, all kinds of new skills, but is our confidence being boosted? What if our real problem is not competence, but that all of us have a crisis of confidence? Many Asian Teenagers graduate from high school with a lot of skill and a lot of success in different subjects and different areas.
[00:11:50] But how many of us graduate with a ton of confidence, knowing that I've got this, I'm awesome, this is what I'm good at, this is what I want, and this is how I'm going to get it. Very few of us are trained this way because you know what in Asian countries Confidence is not a priority. Especially if you're a female, let's get honest. Females are not desired as children by many, many countries. And horrible things have been done to infant baby girls. And so all of us know, at some level, we're lucky to be alive. We were meant to be a boy. This is not confidence building.
[00:12:31] And so is it any wonder that many of us carry this sense of shame, this sense of needing to prove yourself, all the way into our careers. And we think the issue is the bamboo ceiling, because when we get there, we struggle with confidence. And confidence is what is needed to get us to the next level. But the reality is we have had ceiling after ceiling after ceiling ever since we were born.
[00:12:55] And we need to cease these ceilings, ladies.
[00:12:58] I've said in episode one, second segment, that one of the Asian norms that gets in our way is self criticism. And so I hope you're starting to realize that the way to not just break. Through the bamboo ceiling, but to really break out of the Asian bamboo jungle in which you are your own worst enemy, right?
[00:13:20] And you are "shoulding" yourself and you are blaming yourself and overthinking that kind of jungle to escape that number one. First thing you need to do is stop criticizing yourself.
[00:13:32] Before we start the second half of this episode, if you're of Asian descent and you wanna discover what your personal biggest roadblock is to success, go ahead and take the free quiz at AsiansBreakingCeilings.com If you're liking this podcast, be sure to leave a review for me at Podchaser.com and then follow me on Instagram at Jeanny Chai so you can be notified whenever a new episode drops.
[00:13:59] Now let's get back to our show.
[00:14:07] Many of the women that I talk to every week are working so hard that many of them confess and have told me it's a relief, honestly, when they get sick because now they have an excuse to take time off without feeling the guilt, without feeling like they're letting their team down. And I must say, honestly, when I was diagnosed with cancer and I had the six month time off from work in the recovery period, at first I was really antsy because, as you might have guessed, my identity came from not who I was in my relationships, but really over the years I had learned to do things to make myself feel good.
[00:14:49] And one of the common things I would say, midday or end of day, to criticize myself was, I didn't get anything done today. How many of you relate to that, right? I didn't get anything done. And so we feel like our value, our worth as a human being is being re evaluated every day. And that whether I have a good or bad day and whether I'm a good or bad person really depends on how much I did that day.
[00:15:17] I have since then learned to redefine success. And I define it as whether I was allowed to be me and I was authentic and I took care of myself and cared about me. But back then it was all about doing, all about achievement. And so of course, if you have, you can imagine, and of course you can imagine when you're going through a health crisis like cancer, your body's going to shut down.
[00:15:46] And so, finally, I bought myself an iPhone in 2015. Up until then, I was bucking the trend. I needed something to do in the downtime.
[00:15:57] Because I wasn't working, I had to find things to do. I watched the entire two seasons of Dance Academy. And it was so much fun. And then I started in on Pretty Little Liars, which has something crazy like 14 different seasons. So I got through three and decided just to jump through the notes. But what really happened was as you are getting more and more treatment, the effects are cumulative. And I remember being so frustrated because I couldn't understand what the episode was doing. I couldn't follow things.
[00:16:29] Uh, if I was going to drive somewhere, I'd forget where I was going and then I wouldn't know how to get back. And so my brain couldn't even play Candy Crush after a while. One of my children who was five at the time saw my phone one day, I was at some crazy level 850 and he goes, mom, how often do you play candy crush?
[00:16:51] I was ashamed because I associate relaxation with laziness and I just felt really lazy. But here I am with cancer and I'm criticizing myself saying that I'm lazy. But the reality is was the reality was I did take my foot off the gas pedal for a bit. And as I said, after that first initial week of finally letting my emotions out, I actually began to enjoy life.
[00:17:16] And I don't think I ever knew how to do that after I was four years old. And I remembered what it was like back when I was in Taiwan and three years old and didn't have expectations and wasn't worried about someone yelling at me or getting in trouble any moment. And I took out some drawing paper. And I took out some paints and I began to do things I'd never tried for the last 20 years.
[00:17:41] Actually, one of the first things I did when I knew I was going through treatment was I bought myself a piano. I loved playing piano as a child. I wasn't forced into taking lessons like so many of you. I wanted to play piano. My aunt, who I love very much, had taken care of me in Taiwan, and she was a piano teacher and an opera singer, and I think she played a lot of classical music for me when I was a child.
[00:18:05] So when I got to America, I begged and begged for piano lessons. I'd run into the malls. And in those days, there was always a piano store at the malls in Illinois, and I would start playing up in the housetop , and the salesperson would ask my parents, are you looking for a piano? And I did this incessantly until they finally gave me lessons at age eight.
[00:18:25] And I was so ecstatic. So I played piano for a good five or six years and I learned songs quickly because I knew exactly which songs I wanted to play. I love Chopin. I loved Rachmaninoff. I loved Liszt. I loved ABZ. And so I hadn't played piano very much since the birth of my first child in 1997. So the first thing I did was I said, I want a piano.
[00:18:48] I want to enjoy my life again. And so I bought myself a piano and I also got a new guitar and I was singing songs again and playing songs. And then I began trying things that I didn't think I was good at, like painting and drawing. I might have already told you the story. Some of you might have heard that I was a 6th grade teacher for a while when I graduated from college.
[00:19:09] And one of the things my students would ask for entertainment, was saying, Mrs. Chai, can you please draw a horse? And I would draw this rectangle with four stick legs and it was so ugly, they would laugh. And so I always never tried drawing, didn't think I was good at it. And so in all these areas that I hadn't spent energy in, I began to take ownership again.
[00:19:31] And so I actually went through a drawing book and learned to draw this beautiful horse and I started to paint. I started to do my nails. One of the first things I did after chemotherapy, because it affects your fingernails, is I went to a salon. Now, in the back of my head, there was always this voice that, "You should do it yourself. You know, go buy the nail polish." I'm not very coordinated with my left hand. There's no way I can paint anything on my right hand to make it look decent. And so I finally went to a salon. It's called Loma Spa here in Cupertino and the wonderful woman, Cindy, I still remember her name, uh, painted my nails and they looked beautiful and there was still a little bit of discoloration in the thumb.
[00:20:14] And so she said, how about we paint a beautiful little flower? And so she put on a white flower and then she gave me a little bling, a little diamond accent piece and I just stared at my fingers. I stared at my hands a lot and just felt great, felt like I'm proud of me. I'm worth it. No, I'm still worth something. And in the back of my mind, I was thinking my mother would not approve because this is so extravagant, you know, $35, $40 for a manicure where you could have bought your own container of nail polish down at the CVS for under $8 and I even posted it. I started posting on Facebook– little things about my journey and my mother saw it. And the first thing she wrote was, did you know that nail polish causes cancer? So I began to live in a different way where instead of living by fear, or lack, and worrying about how much money I was spending, I lived for enjoyment and I found it to be really fun.
[00:21:15] And this was the beginning of me starting to break through the bamboo ceiling. I know it doesn't sound like anything you'd expect because when we have the bamboo ceiling discussions, we think, okay, she needs an MBA. She needs to go to Toastmasters. She needs to learn executive, strategies and techniques for how to speak, how to lean in, how to manage up all those things, Six Sigma, whatever you need.
[00:21:40] But what was happening in my life was I was starting to appreciate myself. I was starting to let go of my inhibitions about having abundance. I began to like me. And then one of the most pivotal events that I believe really was the beginning of me breaking out of my imposter syndrome and scarcity mentality was when I worked for many startups in the past, there was a lot of tech conferences in Las Vegas and we would fly there early in the morning. I would fly there early in the morning, help set up, do all the work. And then when the booth was closed, I would rush to the airport and go home. I would take a late flight and go home. I would never stay overnight and play and use the company's money. And I thought that my loyalty, and my sacrifice would somehow get me noticed.
[00:22:30] It didn't get me anything. It got me very, very tired and I never got to play. That very first. Uh, birthday after the treatments were done. I had short hair. It was my real hair. I was no longer wearing a wig. I booked myself a trip to Las Vegas. Don't worry, I didn't do anything naughty. I didn't gamble and lose all my money. But I did eat! Because you know, I'm a foodie. All Asians are foodies.
[00:22:50] I have a theory about that. I think it's because we... Enjoy food so much because the rest of our lives are so stressful that food is one of the only things we enjoy. Anyway, I love to eat. So I went to Caesar's Palace and I stayed there at a room and I don't remember if it was three or four nights, but I just felt like a princess.
[00:23:09] I'd been through so much in my life. I was still going through a really difficult divorce. I had lost my hair. I had lost, important parts of my body. Not feeling my best. Gained tons of weight because the steroids and the anti weight loss medication they gave me. So I was like ballooning out, but I didn't care.
[00:23:26] Because for the first time, I wasn't comparing myself anymore to all my college dorm mates. I wasn't looking at Facebook, comparing myself to who was doing better in their life than I was. I wasn't telling myself, "you're behind." I just wanted to enjoy and play. And I felt this spirit of hope and a spirit of freedom and joy that I hadn't had for years, not since I was four years old.
[00:23:52] And something was changing deep inside of me and I was really excited. So something on this trip to Vegas changed my outlook.
[00:23:59] And so you see, I learned to advocate for myself. I learned to speak up, not because I took more classes or I, uh, suddenly was a different person with more skill. I changed my mindset, in my mind, I began to believe in myself and I encouraged myself.
[00:24:19] Now, many of us do not grow up this way, right? There's a joke about Asian parenting where If parents want to encourage you, they actually criticize you because they think criticism is the best motivator, and if they praise you too much, you might get lazy.
[00:24:35] So some of the things that I let myself do in the next year and a half, I'm going to share with you. I love singing. As a little girl in the basement of my home in Illinois, I would sing, even though I was scared of the dark and I was scared of basements. I would let myself sing down there because there's a nice echo and I would sing somewhere over the rainbow.
[00:24:56] It was out of key, didn't matter, but I love singing. And so that was the beginning of me going, I want to join a choir. And there happened to be a Craigslist ad. Saying that the San Jose Symphonic Chorale needed more singers and you had to go sing some kind of an aria. And so I just went to Yelp and looked up voice teachers.
[00:25:17] And without overthinking it, I found somebody who had just come back from Europe. And I said, can you help me prepare a song? I've never done anything like this. Song in choirs, but haven't had to sing an aria. Will you help me? And that's how I began taking lessons. And I actually, I passed the auditions and I began singing in this gorgeous.
[00:25:37] Gorgeous building in downtown San Jose with a real orchestra with amazing other singers and love that part of my life Other things I did I colored my hair for a long, long time. I've been talking to other moms and we talk about highlights and bayalages, bayalages did I say that right? And I've wanted to try dyeing my hair and I finally did it.
[00:25:59] And then when I did, after I did that, I got real brave.
[00:26:03] You know, I was working at this job, this supply chain job, and in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I want to start my own business. And I go, if not now, when? And so instead of thinking of all the negative things that might go wrong and being afraid of people judging me, I got the courage to start looking into starting my own business. It took about another two years for me to work through all the imposter syndrome, but I began to ask questions and I began to even though I was scared I didn't let the fear stop me.
[00:26:37] One thing else that changed greatly in this time was I let go a lot of the anger. In my days, right before I got the cancer, I was super angry. I was angry at myself. I was angry at other people. I felt ashamed that I wasn't doing anything with my career. I felt like I was behind. I felt like a bad wife. I felt like a bad daughter. I felt like a bad everything. And I was angry that somehow, I felt like if there was a God in the universe, He hated me too, because it felt like my life wasn't working out.
[00:27:08] We had been going to marital counseling for a long time. And I just felt like someone should be helping us because I care about these things. I'm trying to fix them, but they're not getting better. And so I was angry at God. I was angry that my childhood had been so difficult and I felt a bunch of resentment.
[00:27:28] And when you're like that, when you have a whole bunch of unprocessed emotions, I really encourage you to somehow face them. And what I was afraid of was if I faced that I would cry forever, and I would never stop, and I would just be in a funk. But the reality is, when I was diagnosed with cancer, as I shared, I let myself feel, I went to the beach every day, I let myself feel and cry, and let those emotions come, and it lasted only a week.
[00:27:57] And at the end of that, there was a feeling of finality, of having gone through it, and I felt a sense of hope. Not of depression, of hope. And so hiding and stuffing our feelings and not acknowledging the truth is a way to keep us stagnant. And so I also made my peace with God in that time. The cancer actually helped me because one of the, one of the worst things that I was afraid of, uh, ever since I was a young woman was being sick and being alone.
[00:28:27] I felt like I was so good at taking care of other people, but if I got sick, I knew no one had my back. But that's the exact thing that happened to me. And ironically, that's the exact thing that I had to live through to help me overcome that fear. And so during those days, I remember running out of money because I didn't have a job.
[00:28:47] I had to go to a church and ask for their special needs fund. I went and did a GoFundMe for my friends to help pay for my medical bills. And while the old me felt a ton of shame of embarrassment that here is a Stanford grad, not being able to pay her own medical bills. It felt like a sense of failure. I felt really ashamed; at the same time I felt really loved. I felt cared for.
[00:29:10] I felt like I was part of a community that cared. And that anger that I had towards God, towards everybody, and feeling like no one cared or understood me, that feeling started to fade. And it was also during this time, I heard a really comforting message. And it was one of those days when I was half in and out of consciousness, trying to fight the pain and discomfort of going through chemotherapy.
[00:29:34] When I heard this voice , I believe it was God himself speaking. He said, you are approved already. And it was so loud. And I thought, Oh. I've never thought of that before. What do you mean I'm approved already? And I began to think about that for the next several weeks, several months.
[00:29:54] And that was the beginning of my company, Bamboo Myth. I began to think, what if women realized that they could stop proving themselves, that they are already valuable and instead of living from fear, from guilt and shame and fear of getting in trouble. We live from a place of confidence, a place of value, a place of knowing who we are, knowing our worth and going and doing our thing.
[00:30:23] And it was such freedom. It was such freedom. And it made the connection for me for the first time that change is not about getting more degrees. Change is not about getting more certificates. Change, is not even about finding the right mentor or right sponsor or DEI. It's about what you believe right here.
[00:30:43] It's about what you think of yourself. And if you think you are not enough, you are going to be not enough and nothing. Nobody can help you cross that line. And feeling like you finally have value and you are respected. Change starts with self respect. Change starts when you let go of the lies that keep telling you you're still not enough, you have to prove yourself, you have a gap, you're not very good yet.
[00:31:07] Change comes from stopping those lies. And starting to encourage yourself just like you would your best friend. Many of us treat our best friends with kindness, compassion, encouragement in a way that we never talk to ourselves. And that's one of the tricks that I use when I coach my clients is The negativity that you feel, the embarrassment that you feel about that mistake.
[00:31:31] What if your friend made that same mistake at work and they were beating themselves up, how would you feel? And their first comment is, I would feel really bad for her that she's so hard on herself. I go, right. And because you feel compassion for her, what would you tell her is the truth? And the client will say, "You're fine. You've done such amazing work. Everybody at the company thinks you're great. Don't overthink it and go do something fun and let yourself off the hook." Right?
[00:31:59] That self criticism is what's causing all the roadblock in your career, in your success. It's not the English. It's not the lack of presentation skills. It's not that you're missing a certification or you don't have a master's or you're the youngest person. It's not because you're an immigrant and you don't understand the culture. We all have that one thing. That we think is the reason causing us problems and causing us to stagnate in our career, and it's never that reason. It's always confidence.
[00:32:29] And that's what I discovered during this amazing journey. Painful yet extremely transformational journey that I went through during those six months I was going through chemotherapy. And if I can bring that wisdom to you so that you don't have to go through the pain of that, that is what people learn oftentimes when they go through life death situations, is they get the confidence to finally live and be who they are.
[00:32:52] I've attended many entrepreneur conferences where people share their businesses and their ideas and what they're doing, and the crazy thing is almost all of us have been through a life death situation. That usually is the catalyst that gets us to feel in such a way that we have compassion and we no longer tell ourselves that we're fine.
[00:33:13] We no longer tell ourselves that it's okay if we put off our dreams any longer. We start to live them. And that is the encouragement I want to give you. In addition to all the things I've talked about that I tried, I also did these things. I tried out for America's Got Talent and I got to see Simon Cowell.
[00:33:31] I took hang gliding lessons. I bought a saxophone and I've been practicing "Careless Whisper". I took a hip hop class as a 40 some year old and everybody else in there was 20 and I stopped caring whether I was making mistakes or couldn't learn the routine fast enough. I had a blast. And when we had to do demos, the teacher, who was probably in his twenties, said to me, "You know what I love about you? When you mess up, you don't care, you still own the stage and the confidence is riveting."
[00:34:00] I'm like, is that a good thing? But it felt so good to finally not care what people think, whether it's in the class or it's at school or at work or anywhere, because then you get to be free. And for the first time I thought I've never lived like this except back in the 1970s when I lived in Taiwan.
[00:34:20] That's what I've been missing out on. That's why proving yourself is so difficult. It's because you're not free. You're not free and you don't have confidence. And those two things are now my definition of success. It's not the accolades, the titles, even how much money you make, but are you letting yourself authentically be you?
[00:34:42] And if you were the authentic you, and you didn't criticize yourself, and you didn't call yourself lazy, what would you be letting yourself do in your life? What hobbies would you pick up again? What activities might you volunteer for? What might you take out of the closet and do again that you haven't done in 20, 30 years?
[00:35:01] And most importantly, what might you do in your career so that you can be more fulfilled? So that you can start shining and leading in a way that you haven't done yet. So that people can honestly recognize your leadership skills. What might that be?
[00:35:19] Okay. Ceiling breakers. That's the end of episode four and part two of my personal story and how I happened upon how to start breaking these norms that were no longer serving us. I hope that these insights from today's episode have helped you to come to closer understanding about what it is that you need to break through the bamboo ceiling, to overcome imposter syndrome, to relieve some of that stress and start experiencing authentic success.
[00:35:50] Starting with episode five, we are going to systematically go through each week, a story from our past, some strategies and proven techniques that work, techniques that I use with my clients that tell me they experience life changing mindsets, life changing behavioral changes just by working with me for 12 weeks.
[00:36:13] I know it sounds too good to be true, but if you know exactly what it is that's broken and you go in there and fix it, it doesn't take a lifetime to undo cultural norms that are no longer serving you. So be sure that you listen to these episodes in order. Season one is meant to be systematic, incremental, step by step explanation of strategies and ways that you can start transforming without having to go through years of therapy or trial and error, or just trying to suck it up and hoping that things will get better.
[00:36:45] Make sure that you go to my website and book a call with me, a free strategy call. You can look for this link in the show notes, and I'm happy to spend 50 minutes talking with you, looking at what your biggest roadblocks and stresses are in your career and your life and see if we can help you. And if so, we're happy to offer what that looks like.
[00:37:07] And if not, you'll still get a lot of clarity and value from the call. So do that now, if you're ready to take the next step and not just try to make things better, but to start training to make things better and be sure to follow me on Instagram at Jeanny Chai and leave a review for me at Podchaser.com -thank you so much. And I'll see you next week.