Episode 122: How to Embrace Your Authentic Self (Shamelessly)
In this episode of the F*ck Saving Face podcast, Judy Tsuei discusses the importance of empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color.
She shares her journey of overcoming challenges through mindset shifts and manifestation, emphasizing the need to break free from traditional expectations and embrace one's true self.
Judy highlights the significance of self-discovery and the power of community support in navigating life's complexities. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to engage with the podcast and support her upcoming book.
Want to support my Kickstarter for “How to Disappoint Your Parents in 10 Shameless Steps: A Modern Asian American Guide”?
Takeaways
Empowerment comes from breaking through taboo topics.
Mindset shifts can help overcome personal challenges.
The model minority myth can be limiting and harmful.
Self-discovery is a journey that requires courage.
Embracing one's presence is essential for personal growth.
Community support plays a vital role in healing.
Grief is a natural part of navigating life changes.
Kauai serves as a powerful backdrop for self-reflection.
Understanding your true self is key to living authentically.
Engagement and support from listeners are crucial for growth.
Episode Highlights
00:00 Empowering Voices: Introduction to the Podcast
01:53 Overcoming Challenges: Mindset Shifts and Manifestation
06:00 Breaking Free: The Journey of Self-Discovery
12:10 Embracing Presence: Walking Loud and Unapologetic
17:50 Conclusion: Support and Community Engagement
Transcript:
Judy Tsuei (00:02.668)
Welcome to the F*ck 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 Tsuei and I'm the founder of Wild Hearted Words.
My Kickstarter for how to disappoint your parents in 10 shameless steps, a modern Asian American guide is live. And I hope that if you haven't yet supported it, you will consider supporting it. You can go to bit.lyshamelessbook. That's bit.ly forward slash shameless book. And you'll be able to see a video that I made with my daughter. That really was just the most heartwarming thing that I've experienced because my daughter was reading actual lines from journals that I wrote when I was her age. And this whole book is for today's overperforming, overwhelmed and over it woman of color, male of color, black sheep of the family.
anybody who's tired of the model minority myth and immigrant parent expectations and how do we move past it? I am finishing my neuro -linguistic programming coaching certification. I'm already a master practitioner for the mental and emotional release technique for neuro -linguistic programming, but this is the year -long certification program that I'm doing in addition to being a divorced mom.
Judy Tsuei (02:17.89)
having my own business, now bringing in two new partners to rebrand my existing branding and marketing agency. I then launched my own personal website, judytsway .com, where I am coaching with NLP and focusing on working with women of color. We also work on building your thought leadership and your personal branding. And in addition to that, this podcast is live. So there are so many things that are unfolding. And in human design, I am a generator.
which is, it means that I am in flow state when I'm creating, creating, creating. When I'm presented with options and it feels like a hell yes, then I know that this is right for me. Well, that's the blueprint that I was born with. And I just sent out a newsletter about how we each have this blueprint where we are 100 % valuable, 100 % safe, 100 % worthy. And yet the family that we're born into or the culture that we're born into or our gender or whatever it is,
that this home can be built using that blueprint, but not to our benefit and not to our advantage. And in fact, the structure that gets built upon it, we might start living in it as though that is our home, but it's not. If we tore everything down and started anew, you can read the book by Dr. Larry Farwell called The Science of Creating Miracles. It's all about neuroscience, quantum physics, and this idea of how do we tap into the power of the universe truly from a science
scientific perspective and utilize that to create a life that we love. And so he talks about this blueprint, similar to the way in human design. I've been using Jenna Zoe's app and I've recommended it to a client who then told 17 other people about it. I've added different people into my app so everybody else in my close circle can see what their blueprint is, how they're designed and
everybody who I've shown it to, who's taken a look at it, they're like, my God, this is totally me. How does this thing know that? And I see everything from laughing to, you know, screenshotting and sending it to themselves, because it also tells you what your gifts are. So this step one of how to disappoint your parents in 10 shameless steps is all about walking loud, talking loud.
Judy Tsuei (04:36.682)
thinking out loud, being loud, and how to embrace your presence unapologetically. For so many of us that were raised in Asian American households with traditional authoritarian tiger parents, we were not given that freedom. We were actually told to be submissive, to defer to our elders, to think about the harmony of the whole rather than just this individualistic mindset and culture.
And there's so much now that I've done my healing work, that I've done my NLP work, that I've reprogrammed my unconscious and my subconscious mind to have a very lovely relationship with my parents. It does not mean that everybody has changed and evolved and adapted in profound shifts, but it does mean that I have. And so my take on things is very different than they used to be. Where before I was told all of these things, you walk too loud, you talk too loud, you laugh too loud, you...
Just everything was too much. And if you're listening to this podcast, you probably relate to that feeling of being too much. So what do you do? How do you navigate that? How do you not hate yourself and have the sense of self -loathing or feeling like you don't belong? In previous years, I shared the story from this book called Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And it's this missing zygote story.
where in this fable, we as a little zygote were in this basket getting ready to be delivered to our family. But we were so excited that we were bounding up and down in the basket that the stork was carrying. And so we fell out of the basket and we arrived at a home and a family that wasn't built for us. So throughout our lives, we kept feeling like this black sheep of the family and that our actual family
the people who were built for us, who we were designed for, was maybe just a few miles down the road. When I heard this story, it felt like it was speaking to my soul, like someone had actually taken my lived experiences and just somehow beautifully verbalized it for me to feel seen and heard. And that's what this whole book is about, is that I hope in my sharing my experiences, you will also feel seen and heard. You will feel less alone in what you are going through.
Judy Tsuei (06:59.702)
And I know that any time that anyone has been able to express for me those feelings, it's almost like I can just sigh with relief, like, okay, I get it. And so I'll also tell you the next book that I wanna write after this one is I Believe in Magic because there has been so much serendipity and synchronicity that has happened in my life that is beyond just pure coincidence.
And when I used to teach yoga, one of the things that people really liked is that I bridged that gap between super woo and, you know, people being able to see colors and spirits and all of that other stuff with the very left brain, very pragmatic, rational, you know, does this actually make sense? How can I explain this? And I was basically that bridge or the doorway through which someone could walk because my experience is
were believable and yet they also included this essence of, but that just can't be coincidence. It has to be guided by something greater, a greater force. It has to be not preordained, but that there's a helping hand out there. And so I will tell you a little bit of that story with this one of the book, Women Who Run With Wolves is this huge, thick black tome and in it are all these
stories from around the world throughout generations about the wild woman and this archetype and how we are built to know ourselves, to know nature, to be nurturing, to be strong, to flow, to have magic, all of these things. And that's not what I was taught growing up. So when I moved to Kauai, which is still to this day, my favorite place on the planet,
In fact, I recently had to give up my Hawaii driver's license because it expired and I got my California one in the mail just yesterday. And there was a bit of heartbreak. I spoke to someone recently who's a tarot card reader and she's writing her book and she was asking me about the publishing process. And so I got on a call with her and in exchange as a thank you, she offered to read my cards. So I wanted to ask her about two specific things. I wanted to ask her about this Kickstarter campaign as well as how will my family handle it?
Judy Tsuei (09:22.614)
other people have asked me that who know me very well. And I wanted to ask about potentially buying a home. And so one of the things that she said to me in regards to the latter is the first car she pulled was, do you have grief around this? And I absolutely did. said, yes, my dream had always been to move back to Hawaii before my driver's license expired. And it is still my dream to have a home there, to spend.
half to a majority of the year there because that is my spiritual home. So for me to think about buying property in other places, whether that's an investment or somewhere that my daughter and I are going to live, it involves grief. It involves a constant understanding of the pivots we're asked to make in life and how we're showing up now with the information that we have now. For those of you who are on my newsletter that I send out every week called The Heartbeat,
You will see that in the latest newsletter I shared about what I did and what would you do when your child calls another woman mom, not stepmom, not bonus mom, not mom, whatever the other person's name is, but just mom. And we're just not taught how to handle that grief. And so this book is also designed for you to navigate through all of that, through the parts that are messy, through the parts that are not what you thought.
and how can you still shine and show up in your core values? So when I moved to Kauai, the island can put you through an initiation phase. People think that living in paradise is really easy for anybody who's lived on the islands. I can probably guarantee that they will tell you that's not true. For Kauai especially, it's a very small island with one road that has one lane going in each direction.
and doesn't even circumvent the entire island because the Nepali coast on the North Shore cuts it off. So driving on the island, I would see my friends driving in the opposite direction. You I could recognize all the cars in the parking lot. It's a very small place. And things close early. So I discovered after I moved there that some believe that the Hawaiian islands correspond to the chakras and Kauai sits at the third eye point. So
Judy Tsuei (11:40.566)
the third eye is designed for greater wisdom, self -reflection, that kind of elevation of consciousness. And so there's very few distractions there and a lot of time with yourself. So it's an invitation to really get to know yourself. And I think because the veil between here and everything that we cannot see with our five senses is thinner, then
there's so much more magic that can unfold in a very rapid amount of time. Even though the time moves slowly in some ways, it also moves really quickly in others. And so at the time after living there, after going through my initiation phase, I went to a barbecue, met this guy, he asked me out on a date, we went for a walk along Secret's beach. And Secret's beach is difficult to find if you don't know where the starting point is.
You got to hike down and then it's beautiful peachy sand beaches for a very long stretch. So he and I were walking and talking and we maybe saw two other people the entire time that we were there. And I did notice that there was something perched on a rock on our way walking out on our way walking back. No one was there anymore, but that book was still there. So I walked over, we realized that it was a book. And when we walked to it,
The book was Clarissa Pincuola Estes' book, Women Who Run With The Wolves. And when I saw it, the guy that I was with was like, well, that's obviously for you. That book has traveled with me everywhere that I've moved since then. And I've moved into a camper van. I've moved to Austin, Texas. I moved to Taiwan. I moved in a couple of places in San Diego, and it has been with me and it sits on my bookshelf now.
I think learning how to embrace your presence unapologetically involves knowing yourself and knowing what the risks and the rewards are. Originally, I had anticipated drafting up a sample chapter so you could see what was going to be in the book. And in future steps, I will do that. I have some that are much more flushed out. So I will definitely do that. But in the meantime, in this one specifically,
Judy Tsuei (14:06.24)
The reason that it's number one is because it's taken me a long time to get to a place where I feel I can be myself. And I'm still learning how to do it. In the book, The Science of Creating Miracles, he talks about this exercise that you do. And I will read it to you. And once you do this exercise mentally, the next step
is that you need to take the actions of who you truly are. And that part involves speaking your truth. It involves making decisions where you're a priority. It involves having those healthy boundaries where you can set parameters and say no. In my house growing up, we weren't allowed to close the door, much less lock them. So we had
no filters and my parents fought openly and there was no space to feel safe. So let me share with you this exercise that you can do on your own. And because my book is a prescriptive memoir, it's designed so that you have tools that you can use to apply to your own life and that you can see for yourself whether or not it makes a difference because what is designed for me may not be designed for you or even
at different phases of our lives, what worked now or what worked then may not work in the future. And so when I used to teach, also used to say, if it fits, try it on and try it on for size. And if it doesn't just let it float on by. So here is Dr. Larry Farwell's exercise to encourage and inspire you to find that blueprint.
The real you is the one who's 100 % valuable, 100 % powerful, and 100 % safe. Your true blueprint fully and accurately reflects who you really are. This mantra comes from the transmutation trigger technique that Dr. Larry Farwell describes. And here it goes. Hello, higher self. I am infinitely valuable, powerful, and safe. I like myself.
Judy Tsuei (16:24.96)
I love myself. Everything I think, do and say is in accord with my highest nature, with the enlightened being I truly am. My life is an expression of myself, the real me, the real, and then insert your name there. I spontaneously create a life where everything resonates with my true nature. So he encourages you to try this on for size.
to shorten it, to use your own words and have that essence. And the thing that I've started asking myself is what would the real Judy do? And the second that I asked that, the energy within me shifts. The real Judy would think this way. The real Judy would choose this. The real Judy would show up in this way. It's helped me show up differently in business situations, in my relationships, being able to speak.
greater truth, not worrying about people pleasing and making someone else happy. And it's definitely made this subtle yet profound transformation or as he would say transmutation within myself. And then the next step is taking the actions, bringing it to life, making the choices that are aligned with the real you. So when it comes to this shameless step, one, walk loud.
Talk loud, think out loud, embrace your presence unapologetically. I invite you to reflect upon what that means for you. And in the upcoming episodes, I will be interviewing different people who will share their take on the step. And I will continue to share stories with you from that. So again, if you haven't yet supported the podcast, you can do so by sharing a review. And if you haven't yet supported the book and you'd like to,
any amount helps, and if not, if it's not a monetary thing, just even energetically or sharing it with your network or on your social channels would be the most meaningful gift to me, and I deeply, deeply appreciate you listening. So I will see you in the next episode.
Judy Tsuei (18:41.336)
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 wildheartedwords .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 week. Aloha.
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Keywords: Asian American mental health, empowerment, mindset shifts, self-discovery, breaking taboos, women of color, personal branding, emotional health, overcoming challenges, community support
