EP 90: 5 Mindset Shifts for a More Empowered Life

May 8

In this podcast episode, Judy Tsuei, founder of Wild Hearted Words, talks about empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color by breaking through taboo topics. She shares updates on her personal and professional life, including moving to a new house, working with a therapist, and gaining clarity in her business. Judy also talks about the importance of community, financial independence, and doing grief work to process past pain and trauma. She shares her experience of growing up in a family where she felt different and struggled with emotional abuse. Judy encourages listeners to prioritize their own mental and emotional well-being and take bold and courageous steps towards self-acceptance and self-love.

Are you feeling stuck in your personal or professional life? Have you been struggling to break through limiting beliefs and social expectations? In this podcast episode, Judy Tsuei shares her personal journey of overcoming emotional abuse, shedding familial expectations, and finding her own path towards success and fulfillment. Here are five mindset shifts inspired by Judy's story that can help you move forward with intention and mindfulness:

Embrace Your True Self: Don't let social or family expectations hold you back from being your authentic self. Accepting and embracing your true self is the first step towards creating a life of purpose and meaning.
Prioritize Mental and Emotional Well-being: Seek support from professionals and communities to prioritize your mental and emotional health. Doing the grief work and processing past pain and trauma can lead to remarkable results in life.
Take Aligned Actions: Manifesting and taking aligned actions can help you achieve your goals and dreams. The power of the universe is behind you, and luck favors the prepared.
Let Go of How Things Have to Be: Give yourself permission to have a fun life and make a lot of money doing what you love. Let go of social expectations and create your own path towards success and fulfillment.
Stay True to Yourself: Don't sacrifice your own needs and desires for the sake of fitting in with family expectations. Stay true to yourself and prioritize your own mental and emotional well-being.

By adopting these mindset shifts, you can create a more empowered and fulfilling life. Remember, it's never too late to start living the life you truly deserve. So, what are you waiting for? Start making those mindset shifts today!

Episode Highlights:

02:03 Mindset and the power of shifting it

08:40 Mindset and manifestation

13:21 Challenges in upbringing and how it has affected relationships

16:48 Shame and emotional abuse

21:22 The Mistaken Zygote Syndrome for the person who feels like they were born into the wrong family

23:55 Finding a good fit

28:17 The retrieval of a fled soul and the ingredients required for it.

31:22 Rising up and prioritizing yourself and the importance of taking off the backpack of bricks that her family created for her

33:17 Leaving a marriage and increasing rates

34:52 Manifesting and creating opportunities

39:25 Committing to your dreams

Links Mentioned:

Masterclass: Overcoming Challenges and Traumas through Mindset Shifts and Manifestation wildheartedwords.com/shop

Transcript: 5 Mindset Shifts for a More Empowered Life

Speaker 1 (00:00:02) - Welcome to the Fuck Saving Face podcast, where we're empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color by breaking through taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Make your story beautiful today in case you're new to this show. My name is Judy Sway and I'm the founder of Wild Hearted Words. We are a strategic branding and content marketing agency and we focus on working with female entrepreneurs of color to create sustainable six figure success. If you'd like to experience what it's like to work with me, you can sign up for my latest masterclass that's available on my website@wildheartedwords.com slash shop. It's called Overcoming Challenges and Traumas through Mindset, shifts and Manifestation. And when you sign up for the audio course that's about an hour, you'll also get a bonus PDF filled with incredible affirmations that you can practice every day to welcome in the life you'd like to have for a limited time.

Speaker 1 (00:01:02) - The course is now only $19. Again, go to wild heart awards.com/shop now onto the episode. Hello. We are in season four of the Fuck Saving Phase podcast. I'm so honored that you're here. There's so much that's happened between season three and season four, including a lot of clarity on what I'd love for this podcast to evolve into in my personal life and in my professional work. So for this upcoming season, you'll get even more authentic, meaningful personal essays from me so that you can relate and feel less lonely perhaps in what it is that you're going through will be bringing on incredible experts, as we've always done in the past, to break through taboo topics and really offer insights and advice on how to move your life forward in the ways that are aligned to your core values. And then with the mindfulness practices, they'll really be designed to be affirmations and ways to connect to your infinite self so that you can create the life that you want to have.

Speaker 1 (00:02:03) - So with that said, I'm just gonna share a quick update of the things that have happened within my life because this whole episode is going to be about mindset. It's gonna be about how when you focus on your mindset and you shift and you really master that the results in your life can be truly remarkable. And what I'll do is I'll share with you very openly and honestly, you know, the way that I was raised and the things that I had to overcome in my childhood, in my marriage to get to where I am now in my life, in my business. And speaking of life, I moved, so I'm even closer now to the ocean. I'm in this wonderful house with this expansive yard. My daughter and I started a garden. It's so lovely to be in the heart of community where my friends and their kids will come pop by anytime I see people I know walking by my hairdresser lives a couple of doors down.

Speaker 1 (00:02:58) - It's been so wonderful to, you know, be able to feel the sense of community. And I think that in our modern world, it can be really challenging to experience that. To truly know your neighbors, I've been so lucky. I've always lived somewhere really wonderful and remarkable where it feels so cozy. People come over and they feel a sense of home. And then where the people that I'm surrounded by have become more than friends, they become like family. Best of all. There's a farmer's market on Sundays down the street and it's just so wonderful to be able to be within walking distance of all of these things. In fact, I don't know if you can hear it in the microphone, but the birds are totally chirping because it's about 5 45 in the morning. And I woke up just really invigorated to record this episode. So oftentimes I'll be on Zoom calls and people can tell me that they hear the birds around me and it feels so wonderful.

Speaker 1 (00:03:50) - A bit like paradise, a bit like the Hawaii that I miss so much. And on the professional front, as many of you may know, I own wild hearted words. We are a strategic branding and content marketing agency. We focus on working with really innovative conscious brands and I have an incredible team of writers and designers who work with me. So over the last gap between season three and season four, I've gained even more clarity in my business that I really want to get back into teaching. So when I was a yoga teacher, I loved being able to create that space where someone could walk in, feel safe, realign, connect to their infinite self, surrender what did not serve them, and really reframe their life to move forward in their day-to-day with more intention. So I'll be moving more into that in my work and there'll be opportunities for you as a listener to become involved if it speaks to you in one-on-one sessions, in group settings where there are these accelerator programs focused on specific topics to really move you ahead.

Speaker 1 (00:04:49) - And what I'm most excited about is that I'm working with female entrepreneurs of color to create six figure incomes and more sustainably as a divorced mom, that's super important to me that you have the financial independence to say no when you mean no. Yes. When you mean yes to have full confidence about how to always no, that whatever happens, you can rely upon yourself, you can rebuild if you need to. You can continue to create a life that you love. And when I say a life that you love, when I reference, you know, being wealthy, having financial independence, a lot of this is also centered upon your core values. What is meaningful to you? So community is so meaningful to me, and because of that, I feel like I have such a rich life being able to do what I love, to be creative, to meet clients who deeply respect me and who I absolutely respect.

Speaker 1 (00:05:41) - In turn, that also feels like such a wealthy life to me. Not to mention that through the mindset work that I will talk about today, in today's episode, I've been able to exponentially increase my rates so that I'm now charging 20 times more than when I first got back into the, the country when I was rebuilding, when we had come back from Taiwan four years ago. Okay? I just poured myself some coffee and generally in the past I have been someone who makes super strong coffee. But you know what? I've been making like lighter blends. I'm mixing them with oat milk, creamer and a bit of oat milk. And I gotta say it's really making my day. Okay. And on a personal front, I've started working with an incredible therapist. She is an Asian American woman and it's been really remarkable to be able to, you know, switch into Mandarin every now and again to use words that don't really have that full English definition when you say it in English.

Speaker 1 (00:06:34) - She's helped me move through a lot of grief work, and I'm mentioning that because I think that our culture in our society doesn't really honor grief and we don't really know how to process it. Pain is very hard to hold for ourselves and for anybody else. So there have been things from my childhood, from my marriage, from just surrendering the life that I thought I was going to have to step into this wonderful life that I have now that you know, I haven't really given space to process through. And I'm talking like years and years and years back, just truth that I didn't wanna acknowledge about let's say my childhood or my upbringing because it was so painful. But she helped me see that until I did the grief work, then I wouldn't believe that any of the good things that are happening in my life right now were real that, that I could trust them because there was so much, you know, basically backed up pain and so many things that were creating barriers and walls and obstacles for me to truly let in the life that I have now and the life that I have now is gorgeous.

Speaker 1 (00:07:41) - Sh. So, you know, one of the things that I'm in is a very healthy relationship. So she's validated this . I have another friend who's a therapist who's also validated this because our communication is on point and I know that this person loves me and that when we encounter scratchy bits as I like to call them, that we're able to work through it and that, you know, given the parameters of our lives that we're able to give one another space to honor and celebrate their accomplishments even though they're completely different because we're in absolutely different fields and on and on. So my friends have even remarked that the way that I talk about the relationship is different because I've been able to basically let in more and more layers of love and affection. Also as someone who was raised with a tiger mother and my daughter is now eight, we're encountering new growth opportunities and I see so much basically old wounds coming through.

Speaker 1 (00:08:40) - So if you are a parent and potentially you experienced, you know, a very authoritarian parenting style from your own parents, as I'm moving into watching my daughter be able to have emotions, for example, and that was not a privilege afforded to me, then I struggle with both wanting to give that to her. But that there's, you know, the inner child within me that feels resentful or jealous that I didn't get that. And so I'm working through all of these elements in order for me to show up differently to be the kind of parent who I wanna be had I not had the template set before me. So that's a really good segue into today's episode, which is about mindset, mind shifts, and how to manifest the life that you want. So when I was living on Kauai, I went out on a date with this guy who asked to go to secret speech, which is pretty hard to find.

Speaker 1 (00:09:34) - It's down a dirt path, then you have to find this non-descript entrance, then you've gotta hike down below. But what it affords you is this gorgeous pristine beach with this peachy sand and what looks like waterfalls because it's water running off of the cliffs. So we were walking and I noticed out of the corner of my eye there was a book that was sitting on a rock. There was one woman sitting on a beach towel, you know, kind of far away from it, but that was the only person that I saw. So we kept walking to from one beach to the next and then on the way back, the book was still there. So now both of us were curious. We walked over to check it out and what I saw on the title was this black and gold book that said Women who Run with the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

Speaker 1 (00:10:20) - So he looked at me and he's like, that's definitely for you. I picked it up and you know, it's traveled with me around the world and I wanted to share this story with you as I also tell my story and talk about the things that I had to overcome to create the life that I have now. So if you wanna read this story on your own, you can go to my website, wild hearted words.com/magazine/wolves and you will be able to find it there. Since discovering this book, this Gift from Kauai, I've discovered that this book and Clarissa Pinola Estes is such a notable figure within the space of storytelling, of empowering women of, you know, shifting ideas around how women are meant to be in the world and tapping into our innate internal power. So basically Clarissa came up with this story called The Missing Zygote because over the years of her work and working with women, she realized she needed to have a way to explain why some of us, these children of immigrants, these children of families where we often felt like the black shape and we didn't belong, where different was made to feel bad instead of celebrated, instead of, you know, honoring that we were just unique and maybe we were louder than our parents wanted to be.

Speaker 1 (00:11:44) - Maybe we, you know, were more creative than our parents wanted to be. Maybe we had more questions than our parents wanted us to ask. And so she wanted to give people an understanding of why that might be. So she asks, have you ever wondered how you managed to end up in such an odd family as yours? If you have lived your life as an outsider, as a slightly odd or different person, if you are a loner, one who lives at the edge of the mainstream, you have suffered. Yet there also comes a time to row away from all that to experience a different vantage point to immigrate back to the land of one's own kind. Let there be no more suffering, no more attempting to figure out where you went wrong. The mystery of why you were born to whomever you were born to is over pH termina.

Speaker 1 (00:12:29) - Finish rest for a moment at the bow and refresh yourself in the wind coming from your homeland. For years, women who carry the mythic life of the wild women archetype have silently cried. Why am I so different? Why was I born into such a strange or unresponsive family? Wherever their lives wanted to burst forth, someone was there to salt the ground so nothing could grow. They felt tortured by all the prescriptions against their natural desires. If they were nature children, they were kept under roofs. If they were scientists, they were told to be mothers. If they wanted to be mothers, they were told they'd better fit the mold entirely. If they wanted to invent something, they were told to be practical. If they wanted to create, they were told a woman's domestic work is never done. Sometimes they tried to be good according to whichever standards were most popular and didn't realize till later what they really wanted, how they needed to live.

Speaker 1 (00:13:21) - Then in order to have a life, they experienced the patent full amputations of leaving their families. The marriages they had promised under oath would be till death. The jobs that were to be the springboards to something more stultifying, but better paying, they left dreams scattered all over the road. Often the women were artists who were trying to be sensible by spending 80% of their time doing labor that aborted their creative lives on a daily basis. Although the scenarios are endless, one thing remains constant. They were pointed out very early on as different with a negative connotation. So this, the way that she describes it was exactly my upbringing. And I share this because the hurdles that I've had to overcome. When I talked to my therapist about it, she was like, you're a very strong woman. And that's how you were able to, you know, evolve into who you are now.

Speaker 1 (00:14:10) - Which I understand I'm a very strong, resilient, tenacious kind of person. But it doesn't mean that, again, going back to the grief work, that I don't grieve that I wish that things were different or I wish that things were easier. And it did teach me valuable lessons and it did teach me what it means to step into being a more wild woman version of myself. And it's a continual work in progress. So I will share that when I was growing up, I'm the eldest of four children and my parents' marriage was completely rocky all of the time. As of now, the way that I have described, you know, the things that have happened in my life, I've realized and my family realizes this, that my mother has potentially undiagnosed mental health challenges that because of her generation that just wasn't okay to speak about, to deal with.

Speaker 1 (00:15:01) - And so she's found religion and it's been very helpful for her cuz she now has a sense of group support. And that's been really great to see. However, it doesn't take away that there are some core fundamental things that happened in the past or happen now that still, you know, perk up every now and again. And so that was one element because their marriage was so fraught, they often looked to me to be the marriage counselor. So at a very young age, I was the mediator between them. And when I say that it was chaotic, I am talking about such raging arguments, such volatility that we had neighbors coming and knocking on our door in the middle of the night checking to make sure that everything was okay cuz there were pots that were being thrown. There were, you know, all sorts of things. And so at a young age, 12 and under, I had three younger siblings who were also quote unquote under my charge.

Speaker 1 (00:15:55) - And I was basically parenting them the way that I saw. And I experienced my own parenting. And so my siblings, you know, as we grew up, viewed me as a bully, which I've had to work through. And because I had to serve as their surrogate parent every now and again, packing their lunches, bathing them, changing diapers when my brother was born, then it meant that, you know, my sister got to be their sister and I had to be the parent. So we have very different relationships with our brothers, which you know, has been a lot of growth and healing. But in addition to all of that, my parents were constantly worried about money that was just a undercurrent of our lives. And you know, we had, they couldn't pay the bills at certain times so our phone line was cut off and in junior high that was a big deal cuz the phone was a how you hung out with your friends.

Speaker 1 (00:16:48) - Cause we didn't have a car or anything like that. So I had to deal with the shame of having to explain like why when my friends were trying to get ahold of me that wasn't working. Then we had to have, you know, relatives come in and bring us groceries now and again. And I still distinctly have this memory of my dad trying to repair the roof. My dad owns a construction business and it was pouring rain in LA and the rain was just coming through. So regardless of the fact that he built mansions and landscaped these amazing custom made like ponds and like, you know, all of these spaces, my parents are very artistically talented and they own an aquarium store as well, that we, our own house was always in disrepair. There were holes in the floor, I fell into the floor. Like there were like so many times that it was just so messy, it just never felt safe.

Speaker 1 (00:17:32) - And in therapy I've also learned that you know, when you experience emotional abuse as a child, it can be through commission. So the actual overt act of something being done to you or omission, which is you know, not providing the guidance that you need to move through life. So there's this constant sense of instability and a lack of safety and security, which is exactly what I experienced. So in addition to all of that, my parents and all of the other adults in our lives, they used to be so close. My dad had four siblings and you know, these aunts and uncles would always come over with the cousins. And my cousins were significantly older than me because his siblings were also older than him. And so they were all adults. But each person treated me like the whipping post. And so they would take out all of their frustrations and aggressions, they would complain about me, they would criticize me, they knew that I could hear them if I went to the bathroom and they were in the kitchen and they specifically spoke louder talking about me and all of my flaws as though they thought I couldn't hear, but they knew that I could.

Speaker 1 (00:18:40) - And when I watched Brene Brown's Netflix special call to courage maybe a few months back, she literally in her Netflix special describes shame. As I imagine shame is going into a room with all of the people who you know and love. And then you walk out of the room and when you do, you can hear them talking all of these terrible things about you. So much so that you don't know if you can ever go back into that room and face them again. That is a little definition of shame that she shared on a public platform. And that was my daily life. So what I had to do to overcome that upbringing where even you know, my cousins, as they grew older, different relatives, they did acknowledge that the way that they treated me or they did acknowledge the way that you know, one another treated me was not healthy.

Speaker 1 (00:19:33) - That I was the one who got all of the flack. And I feel like it's because of this mistaken zygote syndrome that I'm gonna go on and tell you about because I was just born different. I was theatrical in nature, I was, you know, the one who intuitively could call out the truth and often truths that other people didn't want to hear. And so over time I learned to be smaller and smaller and smaller, which is how I developed an eating disorder. So I became anorexic without realizing that that was a thing. I just started needing control, needing to do something that would make me feel like my life was my own. And then from there, when I realized like I just had starred myself for so long that I needed to eat, I binged on a bunch of food. This was actually the night of prom cuz there was a whole spread laid out at my friend's house.

Speaker 1 (00:20:26) - And when I say friend, I use that loosely because I had another event occur there, which was kind of similar of hearing, you know, other people talking badly about you when you were out of the room. But that night I ate so much that I passed out and then I discovered bulimia actually from randomly watching an afterschool special. And I didn't know that binging and purging was a thing, but then it became something that I dealt with for over the next decade. So prior for the next 15 years, embodied dysmorphia and things like that. And so my whole idea of who I was was the pain of not getting to be who I was actually born to be. So I'll continue with Clarissa's story because she articulates it really well. And perhaps this will also resonate with you in actual fact they, these wild women were passionate, individual, inquiring and in their right instinctive minds.

Speaker 1 (00:21:22) - So the answer to why me, why this family, why am I so different is of course that there are no answers to these questions. Still the ego needs something to chew on before it will let go. So I propose three answers regardless. She may pick whichever one she likes, but she must pick at least one most. Pick the last one. But any are sufficient. Prepare yourself. Here they are. We are born the way we are and into the odd families. We came through one just because almost no one will believe this. Two, the self capital S has a plan and our P brains are two tiny to parse it. Many find this a hopeful idea or three because of the mistaken zygote syndrome. Well, yes, maybe, but what is that? Your family thinks you're an alien. You have feathers, they have scales. Your idea of a good time is the forest, the wilds, the inner life, the outer majesty, their idea of a good time is folding towels.

Speaker 1 (00:22:16) - If this is so for you and your family, then you are a victim of the mistaken zygote syndrome. Your family moves slowly through time, you move like the wind, they're loud, you are soft, or they are silent and you sing. You know, because you just know they want proof. In a 300 page dissertation, sure enough, it's the mistaken zygote syndrome. You've never heard of that. We'll see the zygote ferry was flying over your hometown one night and all the little zygotes in her basket were hopping and jumping with excitement. You were indeed destined for parents who would've understood you. But the zygote ferry hit turbulence and oops, you fell out of the basket over the wrong house. You fell head over heels, head over heels right into a family that was not meant for you. Your real family was three miles farther on. That is why you fell in love with a family that wasn't yours and that lived three miles over.

Speaker 1 (00:23:09) - You always wished Mrs. And Mr so-and-so were your real parents. Chances are they were meant to be. This is why you tap dance down the hallways, even though you come from a family of television spores. This is why your parents are alarmed every time you come home or call, they worry. What will she do next? She embarrassed us last time. God only knows what she will do. Now I they cover their eyes when they see you coming and it is not because your light dazzles them. I have to say this is exactly what happened to me, that I had a boyfriend in my early thirties and he was also Chinese. And when I met his family, I had actually met them because they own a Chinese restaurant in this town, in this north county, San Diego town. And I went to the restaurant and as I had been trained, if I see an elder who speaks Mandarin, I'm gonna speak Mandarin.

Speaker 1 (00:23:55) - So the woman who served me was asking, oh, what are you here for? Are you in school? Et cetera. Then two days later I went over, I was invited to dinner by my soon-to-be boyfriend cuz his family would do this gathering every Thursday. And they would do this wonderful home cooked Chinese meal. And so I go in with him, it's at his aunt's house and then his mother and his father come in and I look at her and it was the woman who served me food . So I'm still really good friends with his sister. And it became very clear that that was the family that would've been a good fit for me. And I think it was also clear to me that he probably would've been a good fit for the family that I had. And on the day that we finally decided that we were going to break up, he said, you know, do you think that we were brother and sister in a past life?

Speaker 1 (00:24:43) - And I did. And he had never remarked about anything like that before. So it was really interesting that that's kind of the note of awareness that we had at the end of our relationship. All you want is love. All they want is peace. The members of your family for their own reasons because of their preferences, innocence, injury, constitution, mental illness or cultivated ignorance are not so good at being spontaneous with the unconscious. And of course your visit home conjures the trickster archetype, the one who stirs things up. So before you've even broken bread together, the trickster madly dances by just dying to drop one of her hairs into the family stew. Even though you don't mean to upset the family, they will be upset no matter what. When you show up, everyone and everything seems to go quite mad, it is a sure sign of wild zygotes in the family if the parents are offended all the time and the children feel as though they can never do anything right?

Speaker 1 (00:25:34) - So raise your hand if that was your experience that you felt like no matter what you did, no matter how much you tried to people, please, no matter how much you tried to morph yourself to fit someone else's idea, that it was never good enough that you could never be good enough to fit something that was just innately different. The Unw family wants one thing, but the mistaken zeiger is never able to figure out what that is. And if she could, it would make her hair stand up in exclamation points. Prepare yourself. I will tell you this big secret, this is what they really want from you, that mysterious, momentous thing. The Unw want consistency. They want you to be exactly the same today as you were yesterday. They wish you not to change with the days, but to remain as at the beginning of steaming time.

Speaker 1 (00:26:23) - Ask the family if they want consistency and they will answer affirmatively in all things. No, they will say only in the things that matter. Whatever these things are that count in their value systems, they're too often anathema to the wild nature of women. Unfortunately, the things that matter to them are not cohesive with the things that matter to the wild child. Consistency in manner is an impossible sentence for wild woman. For her strength is her adaptation to change her innovation, her dancing, her howling, her growling, her deep instinctual life, her creative fire. So Clarissa goes on to say that the wild woman is defined by her creative life, by her quick sightedness, her flexibility, her deafness, her consistent perceptions. And it's her responsiveness that makes her so powerful. And in so living in your power and your gift, you encourage and inspire other people to become fully alive for them to be responsive.

Speaker 1 (00:27:21) - So if you are a wild woman within you exist this constant push and pull because your loyalty is to that innate gift and desire and nature that you have within you. You want it to be with this family, but it is to your interior self. And that's S with a capital S. And so as Clarissa describes it, you might say her wolf mother has hold of her tail, her worldly family has hold of her arms. It is not long before she is crying in pain, snarling and biting herself and others. And finally, the deathly quiet, you look in her eyes and you see sky eyes, the eyes of a person who is no longer there. While socialization for children is an important thing to kill the inner is to kill the child. The West Africans recognize that to be harsh with the child is to cause its soul to retreat from its body, sometimes just a few feet away, other times, many days walk away.

Speaker 1 (00:28:17) - While the needs of the child's soul must be balanced with her need for safety in physical care and with carefully examined notions about quote unquote civilized behavior, I always worry for those who are too well behaved. They often have that quote, faint soul look in their eyes. Something is not right. A healthy soul shines through the persona on most days, and B, blazes through on others where there is gross injury, the soul flees, sometimes it drifts or bolts so far away that it takes masterful propitiation to coax it back. A long time must pass before such a soul will trust enough to return, but it can be accomplished. The retrieval requires several ingredients, naked, honesty, stamina, tenderness, sweetness, ventilation of rage and humor combined. These make a song that calls a soul back home. And so these are the women who I'm working with in my group coaching, in my one-on-ones in my mentoring, the women who are ready to approach this naked honesty, this tenderness and sweetness as well as the ventilation of rage.

Speaker 1 (00:29:19) - And to do it all with humor because I think it's so important for us to be fully expressed. And the more we do that, the more that it is this act of rebellion and this courageous, brave, and bold thing that we are doing to really change the narrative for ourselves and for others. My company is called Wild Hearted Words. My daughter's name is Wilder. I have wild tattooed on my wrist. It is all over. And yet there's still so many phases. I like to look at it as scaffolding, you know, building one on top of the other to continue to create that life that we love, that we feel good about, that we are proud of, that maybe doesn't look like anything that we have been trained to know and believe is right because we've experienced what this feels like, what Clarissa talks about, this like sense of having those dead eyes of just losing yourself in trying to fit into a mold that was never yours to begin with.

Speaker 1 (00:30:16) - So I will tell you that you know, I have many, many close friends and they have read my work, they have read my social posts, the things I put on LinkedIn or Instagram, and pretty soon I'm moving into TikTok. And you know, I've told them stories from my upbringing, but they've always told me that they don't realize the depth from which I came to where I am now. Because the way that I speak about it and the way that I share about it, you know, feels like I've metabolized it into something that does serve me. And it's not until I really open up and I share a chapter of my manuscript or something like that, that they come back to me and they're like, what the fuck? I knew that you went through things but I didn't know you went through these things. And I'm saying this because you can rise up that the environment that I grew up in primed me to have, you know, very little self-worth to keep seeking answers outside of myself, to keep looking to other people, to validate whether I was right or whether I was wrong.

Speaker 1 (00:31:22) - Cuz I just wanted to find that sense of safety. And because of that, it primed me for the relationship that I would eventually move into, or the many relationships that I got into with partners. And then the one that I eventually, you know, called my marriage and how much I was willing to sacrifice of myself, how much I was willing to, you know, basically put up with, because I was making excuses that the family dynamic was so much more important than whatever I was. But as my therapist would say, you do not want to be that Chinese woman martyr. You don't wanna be the person who's resentful and angry and all that anger comes out sideways because you're trying to fit something that is not the right fit for you. And so it is a bold and courageous act to not just put yourself as a priority, but to decide just to simply decide that you deserve more, that you are allowed to have more, that you are allowed to put down what is hard.

Speaker 1 (00:32:20) - And you know, the analogy that I use is, uh, my family created this backpack for me, stuck a bunch of bricks in there for me. And unbeknownst to me, I just kept carrying that backpack around even though I could take it off at any time. Instead, I kept carrying the backpack, I kept putting more bricks in because that's what felt familiar to me. So it is a radical act of love and self-acceptance for you to take the backpack off or at least start taking bricks out of the backpack. That's so, so important. And you know, to find the right support, whether that's a professional therapist, whether that's a community, whether that's like a group coaching, a whatever it is that's going to look right for you, where the facilitator or the mentor definitely has your best interests at heart and understands you know, where you came from and where you are looking to move into when you decide things shift tremendously.

Speaker 1 (00:33:17) - So I decided that it was time to leave my marriage and things shifted for the better. I was able to find a divorce coach to help guide me through navigating my, both my emotional state, but also the logistical legal things that I needed to do and to be even be able to help me create responses to my ex-husband when I was getting emails that, you know, just were not helpful. And so she was there to help me with that, found a mediator, you know, did all of the things as I decided, and it was a lot of putting one foot in front of the other. But in my business, I decided that it was time to exponentially increase my rates, that I was offering so much value that I had tested it out, you know, with different clients that I saw how much money I was generating from my clients, I saw how much value they were getting from working together with me and that it was no longer serving me to play small.

Speaker 1 (00:34:10) - So I decided that it was time and then increased my rate so much that a VP who I'm friends with at a former company, and I got together over coffee and he was talking about the consulting work that he was doing, and he told me the rate that he was charging and how, you know, that was high in the industry. And then I told him what I was charging, which was like 150 bucks more than him. And he was like, what? That is wild. And so it just goes to show you. And what was great about that scenario as well is that as you live your life and you live into your light, you inspire other people to do the same. So when I relayed that story to my therapist, she said back to me, do you know what you also did? You woke up in him in awareness of what else was possible.

Speaker 1 (00:34:52) - And so I think we forget how often our living our lives doing the things that light us up, you know, doing the hard work that goes along with it. When I say manifesting, I mean that you get the power of the universe behind you. You take aligned actions, you do things so that it's not just busy work, but as my friend Deb would say, it's really moving the needle. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that you just sit there and you know, I think that magic and flow absolutely happens. It's happened to me a bunch, but I also believe that luck favors the prepared. So I think we do our due diligence and we get the power of the universe behind us in our power of believing. And that everything unfolds at a more rapid rate, at a more exponential kind of magnified outcome.

Speaker 1 (00:35:40) - And it gets to be so much more fun. The results that I've achieved, the biggest opportunities being able to attract clients who are royalty, who are founders of iconic brands, who are social media influencers with, you know, over a million followers, all of those came through word of mouth just through my living my life. And you can also do that. You can create and reach those results in much more. Basically gentle kind of riding the waves ways as you decide. And then start to tune into your intuition and start to listen to your infinite guidance in your wisdom and let go of how things have to be, how things you've told should be into how you'd like for them to be giving yourself permission that I get to have a really fun life. I get to make a lot of money doing what I love to do.

Speaker 1 (00:36:28) - I get to create time freedom. I get to make a positive impact. Everything can flow to me with ease as I continue to refine and develop clarity for what it is that I love and who I wanna become. So I'm gonna close this episode by reminding you that so many of us compare our insights to someone else's outsides. But when you peel back the layers and really see what's going on, not only is this, you know, story and lesson that I learned in yoga where if we took all of our problems and we were in a room together, we threw them all on the table, we would gladly take our own problems back because you get to see what other people also actually have to deal with. But then you also realize that so many of us are not starting at the same points. If you are a female entrepreneur and you are a female entrepreneur of color, you definitely have not started at the same point as a white male counterpart or as even another woman in your field because of the different mindset things that you've had to overcome.

Speaker 1 (00:37:26) - So, you know, being of Asian culture, I was taught to be quiet and fall in line. But in marketing and branding and in sales, you've gotta talk about yourself. You've gotta talk about, you know, your what, you are able to offer your value and you've gotta be able to allow yourself to be seen. So that in itself is a mindset hurdle to overcome. And it's something that I'm going to, you know, be mentoring people on in a future accelerator program. But it's important to remember that you are enough right now, that you have enough knowledge to move you forward in the direction of your dreams. And if you are unclear of what those dreams are, that's also okay. It's important to live your life and know what you don't want as much as what you do. And we are all works in progress. As Jess Sims on Peloton, who I love would say you can be a masterpiece and a work in progress at the same damn time.

Speaker 1 (00:38:22) - So to sum it all up, wherever you came from, there is an opportunity for healing and growth. There are opportunities to reflect upon the narrative up until now and to shift your story so that it positions you as the true heroine or hero that you are. Once you acknowledge that and do the work that you need to do to get those foundational elements in place, you also get to decide. And when you decide and really commit to that, then things start to open up. Things start to flow, and you start to move in the direction of manifesting all of the things that you wanna create. So to support you in your journey to committing to your dreams and the person that you are evolving, learning, growing scaffolding into. I'll share this quote by Johann Wolfgang Gerta, until one is committed, there is hesitancy the chance to draw back concerning all acts of initiative and creation.

Speaker 1 (00:39:25) - There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves. Two, all sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events, issues from the decision raising in one's favor, all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius power and magic in it. Begin it now. I will point out that Gerta lived in 1749 to 1832. So the fact that this German poet, playwright, novelist, scientists, statesman, you know, amateur artist, he was considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. That back then he understood that this is, you know, the power that we can all tap into. I think that that is remarkable. All righty, I gotta sign off to go get my daughter ready for school. So I wish you a wonderful week wherever you are in the world, whenever you are listening to this, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to support me and this show, please go to iTunes and leave your review. It means so much to me and it'll help others find this podcast. I'll catch you in the next episode. And if you'd like to stay in touch between now and then, please visit wild hearted words.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter. I've had people share with me that it's the best thing to arrive in their inbox all