Ep. #1: Welcome to the Unleash Your Inner Power Podcast!

Welcome to the first episode of Unleash Your Inner Power Podcast!

In this episode, I tell you my story, my journey, and how I arrived at life coaching. I talk a bit about what thought work is and how it's closely aligned to Buddhism and Eastern thought. I also talk about how it complements my the field of anthropology and social science theories. Ultimately, it's a transformative tool that will help change women's lives. 

Transcript

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Welcome to unleash your inner power with Dr. Janny Chang, the podcast that helps women from all walks of life use thoughtworks research and storytelling to help rewire your brain and kick ass in your personal and professional life. Hi, friends, I am Dr. Janny Chang, I am a life coach, I help women unleash their inner power and kick ass in their lives. I am so glad you're here with me to join me on this journey. I see it as a journey that we take together and we learn from each other. And about thought work and about ways that we can empower ourselves through choosing thoughts and feelings that serve us. This is my first official podcast. So I am so so excited. I literally spent time googling for the best and affordable mic I should get. I even have a ring light, even though I don't need it. I'm also literally editing this podcast and putting in the intro and outro myself. So it is very much DIY, but I'm just I'm happy. I'm happy to be learning. And I'm just excited to be here. I wanted to introduce myself in this podcast and talk about how I came to coaching and specifically thought work. Just so you know, I am going through the certification program at the Life Coach School. And I arrived at that program actually through the clutch, which is a feminist self coaching program started by Carlo and file. And I just I love being part of that group. It's an amazing group of women, and we learn thought work and help coach each other and learn the techniques of self coaching. And that's why I wanted to continue this because it really transformed my life. But I wanted to talk more about what that journey looked like, and how I came to coaching. And also, I just wanted you to know as well that I'm gonna include a little bit of theory later on. Because, you know, I, like a lot of my training was in academia. And so the theory is, is is an important part of my journey. But you know, the main thing is that is that I am here to tell my story. And I just want to thank you for being here and for listening. And I'd also love to hear from you all. So first, I just wanted to tell you that coaching has been in my blood from day one. Like Were you ever that friend on the playground, like when you were little just giving your friends advice. I was that person, but also exploring the deeper things in life. Did you do that when you were young? For me small talk and chit chat was was kind of hard growing up. I remember I loved talking to my best friend in high school for hours upon hours about life. Its deeper meaning what kind of life we wanted how to live from the heart. And yes, I also consumed an insane amount of Oprah back in the day. Oh, I loved her breath. And I also read, I was probably one of the few teams that was exploring self help books and just deeply interested in literature and philosophy, and any ideas that taught me about how to live a good life from within. And college, I became a little obsessed with Tony Robbins, yes, that walking on coal thing. Got me. And then not long after I explored all kinds of religions and just continue to coach my friends and also work on myself. I knew that I had a lot of healing to do. And I did it by reflecting and meditating and therapy. But deep down, I always had this underlying truth, that what I was seeing in the world was filtered through my own lens. I just knew intuitively, that I couldn't believe all my thoughts and that some of the thoughts that I had were not empowering me. It wasn't until I got introduced to Tibetan Buddhism, from the intellectual level but also I had grown up with my grandma, my grandmother, my mom's side, who was Buddhist and I this this undercurrent in this practice of being aware of our own thoughts and feelings and being curious about it, and not identifying with them because that's what causes so much of our suffering that undercurrent has always been in my heritage. You know, Buddhism has been around for over 2500 years. So that's definitely part of my heritage, and also in my grad school education. So thought work in its roots have always somehow foregrounded Life. But I will say that this practice was challenged and also strengthened and reinforced again, when I went to grad school to become trained as an anthropologist. So what is anthropology I get asked this a lot. So I'm gonna explain a little. He's a big part of who I am in my training. It's the study of what makes us human, in the broadest sense. But also, it's a holistic study of cultures. And I put that in quotes, cultures, because culture is not a static thing. It's it's constantly changing. And the context of a society's history, the power dynamics, traditions, gender relations, economics, all aspects of society, contribute to our understanding of culture and change. I got an apology, actually, by way of volunteering in the continent of Africa, right after college, I became very interested in, you know, different cultures and languages. When I was I was living in the Gambia at the time. But I think that is the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. And I also came to the US when I was five years old, I was deep down already an anthropologist, because I was constantly comparing different cultural practices in my life, and mainly for survival purposes, trying to fit in, right. Like, I thought to myself, why can't I speak Mandarin in public places, or bring food that looks and smell different than what my classmates were bringing? For fear that they'll make fun of me, for instance? Or even when it came to language? Like why were there certain words in Chinese, that wasn't translatable English? or Why did my parents celebrate Chinese New Year, but my friends at school didn't. So in my own mind, I was comparing different cultural practices as it's done in the field of anthropology. And it was something that I had done from a very young age, just by virtue of coming here when I was five years old, of course, having parents that did not grow up in the US. But how it's tied to thought work is that this kind of comparison, in my own mind was actually practice and training to start analyzing, and question the kinds of thoughts and practices that some people might accept as reality. But for me, I knew it wasn't all reality, because people did things differently, right? Like, I could see that there were different ways to express yourself. I mean, for some people, the like, their own language, the words, they use mannerisms, that was their only way. That's all they could see. And that's what they believe. But that was their reality, right. But for me, coming from a different background, where I was bilingual, and bicultural, and I, you know, would see the differences in how I help school was run versus how life was at home, I knew that there were these differences that I compared, and that it really forced me to be an observer of my own mind. And that my mind was the filter through which these experiences were mediated. Now one of the challenges that I found, in this one I'm going to get to a little bit of theory is that when I went to graduate school, when I was trained in the social sciences, we talk a lot about structure versus versus agency. So it's really just a framework at looking at the world like structure has to do with constraints and forces that influence our actions. agency has to do with individual choice. So as an individual, we have the choice to make certain decisions. But within the confines of structural forces, there's always a tension between the two structure and agency. And when you're social scientists, you do research and you focus a lot on one or the other, or the tension between them. But so you can see how this is a bit of a challenge to the idea that we are totally in control of our thoughts and feelings as if we are not bound by any societal structures. But let me just add to that, though, that I think that thought work itself is based on the idea that there are societal constraints, right? And even just like we talked about the 5050 concept, life is, you know, 50%, you know, full of adversity and we're only human we we have negative emotions, and we deal with things that are that can be challenging in life. But rather, the emphasis though, on what empowers us. That's where it's so key for thought work is that despite, or because of these structural constraints, we still have the choice to choose Our own thoughts and feelings. So I don't think that work is necessarily in contradiction with the framework of structuring agency. I think it actually complements it pretty well. But it says that, you know, let's focus on individual agency on choice because that's where empowerment lies. And I would, I would fully agree with that. I think if you go back to reading, like Viktor Frankl Search for Meaning, that's exactly even when he was in a, you know, in a, in a camp, that was, you know, Nazi camp. I think Viktor Frankl showed that he could still choose his own thoughts in his feelings. And that's where the power lies. And that he could always be on the search for meaning find and make meaning quick meaning from such a horrendous experience. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a future podcast, because I also don't want it to sound like I'm saying that, you know, people should go and seek adversity on purpose, right. So it's kind of a slippery slope. But for the sake of this intro podcast, I did want to talk about that a framework structure versus agency, because it's definitely informed a lot of my background and my training, and it's made me who I am today. And that it is not contradictory to thought work. The other piece of being trained as a social sciences and anthropologist is that there is this assumption that emotions are a universal phenomenon. And by that, I mean when we look at thought work, and we do the models of like, their circumstances that are neutral, we will get our emotions there. There is a sort of assumption that, you know, anger is the same that translates across cultures. But it's back to anthropology. We believe that emotions are culturally constructed. And so that means that is not experienced the same way cross culture is actually quite different, even just when it comes to language, and what it means and how people experience it. So for example, I was reading a Smithsonian article that said that out of a database of 100,000 words, from 2474 spoken languages, they found that the feeling of surprise was often linked with fear in austronesian languages. But it had elements of want and hope. in languages spoken in Southeast Asia. There's also all kinds of nuances of anger, which can be associated with anxiety in an indo European languages, and includes more grief or regret in languages in Southeast Asia like Vietnamese. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, I think that anthropology, being trained as an anthropologist and social sciences definitely informs my understanding of thought work. It doesn't contradict it. In fact, I think it just complements it. And so the idea that we make meaning of experiences, how we interpret emotions to describe them, and the context in which our emotions and thoughts are understood, are variable across cultures. They differ from culture to culture. Another good example of this, I'll give another example is even the idea of the mind and body separation, which has its roots in in western thought, right? So you may have heard of Rene Descartes, you know, I think, therefore I am. This idea actually goes all the way back to Plato, and to Greek philosophy. And it's the idea that we have souls, that due to sensuality, ignorance must be inhabited in material body. So already you see that separation between mind and body. And that this also takes this form and in Protestant and Christian thought, the idea that the body is sinful, but the soul and the spiritual world, that's what's good. So you see that separation. And this duality, you know, as I said, is seen by anthropologists, as more anchored in Western tradition. And my heritage, the eastern tradition, is quite varied in their beliefs. I mean, there's no doubt that duality definitely exists in some of those beliefs as well as Mind Body duality. But I think, by comparison, the mind and body are much more united when it comes to Eastern thought. So in Buddhism, for instance, you meditate or you become more self aware, I mean, the whole process of reaching Nirvana for instance, is to unify the consciousness and the body, and that this consciousness is primary Right. So the mind body duality isn't is, I mean, I'm sure it's prevalent in some places, and even in sub Eastern thought. But I think by comparison to say, you know, Western, traditional thought. And also even in Protestant religions, I think by far the mind and body, in other cultures are seen as more united and more as one, or at least that's the goal is to unite the mind or body. And we'll talk a little bit about this also, we, when we go through thought work in future podcasts, because we do a lot of that what emotions we question what emotions are, how do they feel, and we try to get in our body to understand where the motion is located. Right? So I don't know if you've been to a massage, but you're like, Oh, I have tension in my neck, or, you know, it feels like anxiety is lodged in my, you know, shoulders, right. So, I think that there's something to the point of just being an American society, you know, where, where I think that duality the mind and body separation is something that is kind of dominant, that we actually have to, you know, learn to breathe and do yoga, or learn meditation or learn techniques, and even like thought work itself, is so helpful for us to get into our body to understand where those emotions lie, and what thoughts are causing those emotions that get lodged in our body. So I think even like thought work itself, the aim is to unify the mind and body. Right. And that has its roots I see. In in eastern tradition, like in Buddhism, Buddhist thought, and Eastern traditions, where it's like the mind and body are more seen as one and not separate. Okay, so now, how all of this relates to my journey, I promise, there's a point to all this is that I was trained as an anthropologist to look at the context, our conceptions of self and cultural variations of emotions or thoughts in our models of them. So, but thought work is very complimentary, I mean, it can be modified within each culture. And the bottom line is, I have found it to be incredibly useful and a tool to understand myself and the world in which we live in. It complements my training as an anthropologist, because I've been taught to be a participant observer in other cultures and societies as an anthropologist, and I use that very same technique to observe my own thoughts, and participate my emotions in thought work. And, you know, without getting to the debate of structure versus agency, whether people do have the choice to believe or select certain thoughts and feelings. I do believe that as women, it serves us better to believe in our agency and act on it to know that the power has been inside us all along, that regardless of societal and cultural conditioning, we have the choice to choose our thoughts, and discard others and to choose to continue certain cultural traditions that we were brought up with, while discarding others, across cultures and societies and around the world, women are better served, I believe, by having thought work at our disposal to us to take control of our lives. And that's my ultimate belief. And that is why came to coaching because I found that work to be so transformative in my life. And it's helped me so much in a way that therapy couldn't help me. I mean, it did actually, I did go through therapy first. But thought work itself, I think, is his was the next level, you know, I had operated now from a certain baseline, and I wanted to uplevel. And so thought work really helped me with that the way of doing thought work models and the way I'm more self aware of my own thoughts and feelings, in choosing my own thoughts. So that's just completely transformed my life. years of therapy, mentoree and natural coaching, that I did informally, day in and day out, taught me the power, of believing in our ability to create the experiences we want in life, and in our families and in our societies. When I discovered thought work, it changed my life. But the undercurrent was always there. The mindfulness practice I grew up had grown up with the belief in my own agency and ability to create my own experiences with my thoughts. That's a strong undercurrent in my childhood in my life. And so I want to coach women, because I know how much has changed my life and unleash my own inner power. And I want to help other women do the same thing. There was a time in my life when I was just feeling depressed and irritable and angry and just kind of blah. You know, I don't know if that's that. motion that we can put down there. But thought work has just helped me in all areas of my life. And it's not to say that things are perfect. I am most definitely working progress. But you know, I think that it's just shifted everything 110% and more. And it continues to improve my life on a daily basis. And so I know it will have the same power for you. And that's why I want to continue to do this kind of coaching and carry on that legacy, and change your life in the same way that it has helped change mine. as your coach, I will be your biggest cheerleader. And I'm going to ask you the tough questions that take your life to the next level, my techniques or combination of thought work. I also include research and storytelling that's using some of my anthropological training, and anything that I find that I think would be the best suited to your situation, and your story. And most of all, I am here with you by your side, I see this as a collaborative journey that we take together. I see us as becoming friends and learning from each other and improving our lives and empowering ourselves through these different methods and just through our stories and and being there for each other and also strengthening our power as women. This is my story. I can't wait to hear yours and see how we can work together unleash your power and our powers. Thank you so much for joining today. Until next time,