[00:00:00] And so I hear so often, especially Asian American women in a Western corporate environment, we hide things, right? We are taking one for the team. We often hide our disappointments. We hide our frustrations. We don't speak up when we feel disrespected. If our work is stolen from us and we don't get credit, when we don't get that promotion, when we don't get that raise, we don't speak up. But internally we're feeling the stress, we're feeling the disappointment, even the resentment that years of hard work are going unnoticed. 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.
[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.
[00:01:11] In episode six, we are going to get authentic and talk about how a lot of Asian norms keep us in denial about things that are bad for us, things that are painful, things that don't serve us, that are not good for us. And we keep tolerating them because we've been taught to sacrifice, to be a martyr, and to handle really tough situations, even when they are unnecessary.
[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.
[00:01:54] If you want to find out the greatest roadblock to your success, take the quiz at AsiansBreakingCeilings.com/quiz and do write me a written review at Podchaser.com and spread the word and I'll be so grateful. Let's jump into today's show so that we can help you achieve authentic success without the stress.
[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.
[00:02:37] We're going to talk about some long term Asian norms that I find to be completely insidious because they create so much suffering and so much problem. If you're not ready for this, go back to episode one and listen your way up to episode six. This one is called what Egypt has to do with your roadblocks to success.
[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?"
[00:03:26] Like we have this public face and we have this private face that's completely different. And as a young kid, you pick this up. Right. That the way you get treated in your family is so different than how your mom treats people outside of the family.
[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."
[00:03:56] If we were ever able to say that how many of you heard the response, "It's because I love you. I love you the most. That's why I'm harshest on you." Right? That is such an ingrained cultural norm for us that we think it's normal Why is this a problem? Because it's based on self criticism. It's based on Unkindness, it's based on abuse, actually, and cruelty. It wasn't until I was in my late thirties, maybe early forties, where I will just say this.
[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.
[00:04:44] They don't teach this to you in college, unless maybe you take psychology courses, but I took a lot of psychology courses and this didn't show up. And so I was shocked because there were 12 things on there that said, this is what abuse looks like. And it was things like silent treatment. It was things like making someone feel bad about themselves.
[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.
[00:05:30] Yeah. And what's hard about this is we think it's normal because when you grew up in a family, unless you have a lot of friends of a different culture, it just looks like everyone behaves like this. And so what I've noticed is this sets us up for a lot of pain and suffering and difficult relationship.
[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.
[00:06:12] If you have children around, this episode's not for them. I'd go, " stupid fat bitch." I'd go, "what are you doing with your fucking life? You're screwing this up royally. No one else is as far behind in life as you. You don't deserve to be here, Jeanny you are a terrible wife. You're a terrible mother. You didn't do anything with your education. You're failing in your professional life. "
[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.
[00:07:00] And many of us are in denial. I will just say that many of us are so resilient, so tolerant, such survivors. They're actually all positive traits. We have so much grit. That we can still do amazing things. We can have a full time job, run a whole household, while being toxic to ourselves. And that is what breaks my heart. Because if you can be amazing with all this self hatred, who would you be if you didn't have even a fraction of that meanness and unkindness for yourself? What would you be able to do?
[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 .
[00:08:00] And it's not okay. How many of us heard you have to do it because I said so, I'm your parent, or I'm right because I'm your parent. That is considered abusive once you are an adult. Maybe that's okay for a two year old, but when you're 35 and your parent says, "Hey, you made a stupid decision. I'm always right. And you don't know what you're doing." That is emotional abuse. And that doesn't help you to have confidence in life. Most people who get treated like that have depression and anxiety. And you don't feel good about yourself, right? Cause you're constantly in conflict with people who love you the most, who think they love you the most, or you think love you the most, and they don't like any of your decisions.
[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.
[00:08:56] There was a time in my life. When I would call my mom and I was in my thirties, forties, I was still working out this whole thing about how to have a relationship with them without feeling like a piece of crap. And every conversation with her somehow would end up with me feeling depressed. And it wasn't just for a couple hours, it'd be for 3, 4, 5 days.
[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."
[00:09:41] And so when I look back now, I want you to look at your family and the environment you grew up in. And can we, can we come out of denial? I'm not saying here that our parents suck. I'm not blaming anybody, but we do need to call out what I call asshole behavior.
[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.
[00:10:21] And the worst is we will exhibit that kind of behavior to ourselves. We will treat ourselves with asshole behavior if we don't call it out. And so if you want to stop being your own worst enemy, we have to have this conversation today. And so I want you to go back and look at some trends in your life. Don't worry. If you stick with me to the end, I'll bring you out of this. We have to go somewhere dark first before we can clean out the closet, so to speak, and have the light shine in here and heal it all up.
[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.
[00:11:05] So these are the only examples I have. Right. So I remember at a young age, feeling sad or disappointed with friendships and I would try to share with my mom because I had I had a Western upbringing in schools, but I had an Eastern You know Asian heritage and so I'd say, you know My friends are my friends are being mean or I don't feel like I belong and we didn't know how to Resolve that so what my family would tell me is oh, don't worry They're not going to be your friends once you go to college, right?
[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."
[00:11:58] And so we had some pretty violent behavior that I'm not going to go into, but I thought that was all normal. And so again, we're in denial about how bad things are, and we don't realize we need to get help and we need to change. Why? Because it affects our wellbeing.
[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.
[00:12:42] I've, I've heard countless stories of there being favoritism in families. I've heard of stories where girls are treated worse than boys. I've heard of children being helicopter parented, where they are told they're wrong or bad for talking, for having a personality. You know, for laughing, for singing in a store, I've heard of so many stories of children having their natural, beautiful extrovert personality shut down over and over again.
[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.
[00:13:27] Because we, we don't understand that the, the treatment we've received is, is mean, is unkind. When someone tells you your personality is wrong and not to sing at a store and hushes you up and says, stop embarrassing me, that is emotionally abusive.
[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.
[00:14:15] And I didn't learn to find my voice until my 40s when I got cancer and said screw this! I am done playing the little scared girl that's afraid everyone's upset at her that people are disappointed and that someone's mad at me at any moment. I am done playing that because when I did that, I lived in fear. And when I lived in fear, I had stress. And when I was stressed out, I got two tumors and got stage two breast cancer.
[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.
[00:14:59] So I'm not here shooting down any culture, but I'm saying if there's anything that you've learned as a kid that makes you depressed, anxious, afraid of other people, you can't talk up in class and your voice is this quiet. You've got to fix that because you're unhappy and your life is not fun. And you might look successful and yes, you've got into an Ivy league school, good for you.
[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.
[00:15:43] And that breaks my heart because we got to start talking about this. So back to the mental health, emotional regulation topic. When I was in college, my mom disowned me and I lost 12 pounds and people around me said Jeanny are you okay? You're looking really thin and I knew what it was. I was depressed.
[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.
[00:16:21] All the two minute ones, the three minute ones, the ones that she left at two in the morning. And I listened to those, and I lost a lot of weight. Because I thought she was speaking truth. I didn't know yet at that time that a lot of what she was saying was unkind and mean and cruel and abusive. And so I listened to this and I thought it was true.
[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.
[00:17:00] My mother had treated me so badly, but she was in denial that any of her behavior might have affected me negatively. And so she had, " my God, you must have thyroid disease. You must have some kind of health issue." Because that's all she knows.
[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."
[00:17:33] I don't think I was that eloquent because I was still in my 20s, but I tried to explain to her. That her behavior was causing me to lose weight and she, she gaslighted me. That's the first time I understood what that word was. She said, "no, no, no, you must have thyroid disease. Mommy doesn't have that much influence over anybody. And you know, I do it because I love you." Or she made up some bullshit about why her behavior was okay. And she would not accept that her behavior was bad.
[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.
[00:18:21] And now when I coach my clients, I call that out. I go "no. Asshole behavior is asshole behavior. The way she treated you, leaving voice messages, that's border insanity."
[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.
[00:18:45] So she made an appointment for me, sent me to the hospital. And they drew like vials and vials of blood, tested me for every possible medical disease. Cause they called the hospital saying, please check up on her. Something's wrong. I was so angry. I was especially angry because when I was at the hospital, I couldn't say the truth. How many of you have felt this where a partner has treated you badly or a mom or a dad or a boss has treated you badly, but somehow our culture teaches us not to say the truth.
[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.
[00:19:44] You know, I was the. Star student of Downers Grove South High School that graduated 1991. And I could not shame my family. I could not say my mother disowned me. She has been mean and I'm depressed. I couldn't say any of that. So I just stayed silent. And I can still feel my face burning that day in the conflict of wanting so much to come out of denial and break out of this pattern. Of not being able to recognize and acknowledge the truth and say what's really going on.
[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.
[00:20:36] But you know what, I continued to live that way. For another 20 years because I was in a mutually abusive marriage and I never, never told my friends about anything that was going on. I only told therapists, and even then, I took all the blame.
[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.
[00:21:25] If there is an issue in communication or something, both of you are responsible for working that out. There's never one person, a hundred percent at fault. And what's wrong with that is you're never going to address the real issue.
[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.
[00:21:56] I know now why I did that. I know now that I have a high, I did have a high degree of control that I wanted in that marriage. I felt like if everything that was wrong was a hundred percent my fault, then I could fix it. It was the sense of false control because I was really scared and I was not trusting of someone else to have 50%, right, of the responsibility because if your responsibility in the marriage is 50 percent and mine's 50, I really can't control your 50 percent and that scares the shit out of me because that means I can't control whether you love me or not, and whether you're going to do things that make me happy and you're going to meet my needs. And that scared me to death.
[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.
[00:22:57] And if you're afraid of conflict resolution and you won't speak the truth and you're in denial, it's not going to get better. If someone is disrespecting you and you think it's your fault, you're never going to have that conversation that says, "Hey, I have sent three emails or I've sent three texts and you haven't answered me in three days. I'm concerned about the lack of communication here. What's your perspective?"
[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.
[00:23:35] You can only do this for a certain number of years, which is why I find when women hit 40, I discovered this and I did not want to discover this, but I discovered that when we hit 40, if we've lived this way in which we're in denial about how badly other people treat us and how much stress we really feel and how badly we bully ourselves, if we're in denial of that, our body can only handle it up until about age 40.
[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.
[00:24:55] And we handle the stress and we keep pushing, we keep doing the chores, we keep going to work, we keep raising the children and we think it's okay.
[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.
[00:25:21] Before we start the second half of this episode, if you're of Asian descent and you want to 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 geniechai so you can be notified whenever a new episode drops.
[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."
[00:26:14] And I'm going, I'm kind of skeptical because I know other. Departments other customers have told us about some bugs and difficulties and why are they painting it to be this amazing experience? So after the American execs got off the phone, I said, "Hey, stay here.
[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?
[00:26:48] If it's a business setting, not a big deal. But here's the issue is if we do this all the time, if you're lying to other people in company meetings, what kinds of areas are you lying to yourself? Where are you afraid to hurt people's feelings and save face where it hurts yourself? And you're causing a war in yourself, right?
[00:27:08] If you are always, always keeping the harmony, are you causing a war inside yourself?
[00:27:15] I have a really sad, outrageous story to share with you that I heard many decades ago about a man who was in a business meeting. Right. And in those cases, you have to say face and he ordered, someone ordered soup and he was at a restaurant drinking really hot soup.
[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.
[00:27:54] And so I hear so often, especially Asian American women in a Western corporate environment, we hide things, right? We are taking one for the team. We often hide our disappointments. We hide our frustrations. We don't speak up when we feel disrespected. If our work is stolen from us and we don't get credit, when we don't get that promotion, when we don't get that raise. We don't speak up, but internally we're feeling the stress. We're feeling the disappointment, even the resentment, that years of hard work are going unnoticed.
[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.
[00:29:00] And we don't know how to even speak up when we're disrespected. We don't even speak up when there's unfair treatment or when we were promised something and it never got delivered.
[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.
[00:29:37] And that's why this is so important. We have to start with starting to set boundaries, to speak up in those moments when we feel disappointed, frustrated, or we have a differing opinion. If we can start doing that, then we'll build that muscle. And then it'll translate to speaking up in even more difficult situations that make us feel like bragging because our Asian culture has told us to be humble.
[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.
[00:30:22] The first step is get out of denial about how quiet and invisible and disrespected you feel. And start doing something about it. And that something is speaking up a little bit at a time. Like I shared with you earlier," I've sent a couple texts I haven't heard from you in three days. Could you please respond to this? Because I'm concerned we're going to miss our deadline. What's your perspective?"
[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.
[00:31:10] You have to teach people how to respect you. If you let them walk all over you, they're not going to change. And so the change needs to start with you speaking up. If they end up firing you, they don't deserve you. And that was surely a toxic situation. And that's good because now you have clarity that your team sucks and you need to get out of there.
[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.
[00:31:52] You don't have to be afraid and hide and be invisible anymore. And you will see that you'll be able to voice disappointments and frustrations, and you'll be able to show people when that they disrespect you, how to start respecting you. You're not going to get your work stolen because you're going to learn to speak up.
[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.
[00:32:19] But again, the very first step is get out of denial. How did this happen for me? You know, I was very, very, very lucky that one week when I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer was the scariest and the best thing that ever happened to me because my doctor said, "Hey, this is stress induced."
[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.
[00:32:58] It's normal to be angry and resentful and trying to prove yourself. I had to say, no, none of this is okay. Might be normal for an Asian woman, but definitely not okay. This is terrible. Uh, behaviors. This is not how I want to live anymore. And the cancer diagnosis was my slap in the face, my wake up call that got me out of denial.
[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.
[00:33:40] And I had a book on my shelf called Margin by Richard Swenson, and it just sat on the shelf for 20 years. And there are many times I looked at that book and thought, gee, I should read that. And I never got the chance to. That is a form of denial. That is a form of saying things will get better. I don't need help. Just get on, let's get onto the to do list and get that to do list done.
[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.
[00:34:23] And you know, for those of you who are religious or believe in a God, he can do a lot of things, but if you choose to be in denial about how bad you feel and you try to control other people's behavior by pretending everything's your fault, he's not gonna speak through that. You need to, there's some personal accountability there. So, it's not true that all Christians lives just work out perfectly because there's God in your life. There's still a lot of conflict resolution, there's a lot of communication and honesty that you need to have in order to have your life go well.
[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.
[00:35:16] There is the aspect of forgiveness, but forgiveness does not mean you have to continually put yourself in harm's way in abusive situations. And I didn't know that. I didn't understand that concept. But luckily, as I said, when the cancer diagnosis happened, I couldn't deny it anymore. And that was the beginning of change.
[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.
[00:35:51] In a relationship, You should never be put down, made to feel bad about yourself, get called names, made to think that you're crazy, get humiliated, or feel guilty about things you do. No one should control what you do, who you see, who you talk to, what you read, where you go, limit your outside involvement, or using jealousy to justify your actions.
[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.
[00:36:54] And no one should prevent you from getting or keeping a job. Finally, no one should make or carry out threats to do something to hurt you, to leave you, to harm themselves, to report you to welfare, to make you drop charges, or make you do illegal things. But these are things That are not okay. No one should have to take emotional, physical, or verbal abuse from a boss or a team member.
[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.
[00:37:55] No one should be passed up for promotions year after year. And justify it by, well, at least my job pays the bills. No one should feel like you're devoting yourself to a career that someone else picked for you because it was a good job, but not an area that you have passion in or real interest in. No one should be emotionally drained by a demanding, harsh boss on a regular basis.
[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.
[00:38:49] And then finally, no one should be constantly disappointed in yourself, feel like you're behind or that something is wrong with you and that you're an imposter.
[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.
[00:39:31] Preview for next week in episode seven, we will be discussing how to stop shoulding yourself. This is a very similar concept to this week is that when we're in denial and when we make excuses for things that we're tolerating, we will say, well, I should be happy. I should be grateful. I should, should, should.
[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
[00:40:09] word of mouth is the fastest way this spreads and I want us to be part of a vision and a mission that helps all Asian American Women to finally live their leadership potential and to start experiencing authentic success without the stress. See you next week.