So, Now What?
You are the first in your family to have the career, family, house and lifestyle that your ancestors can only dream of. You want to deepen your commitment to yourself and continue to make promises to be more reflective about how to spend more time and energy doing what matters to you, and not what others say you should do, but it’s hard.
Welcome to So, Now What?—a podcast that goes beyond curated images and polished success stories to explore the real conversations behind entrepreneurship, leadership, family, and self-identity.
This is for the "First Only Different". You are the FIRST in your family to go beyond financial survival and are thriving. The ONLY person that looks like you in the boardroom. You are DIFFERENT than your family in that you want to break intergenerational patterns and cycles. This is for you if you have spent years mastering the art of impression management----whether in the office, family gatherings or social media and are now wanting something different. Impression management means masking, putting up a front, people pleasing. You want to move into your ambitious but authentic era. If this describes you, podcast is for you!
Angela will focus on:
*entrepreneurship and leadership- building a career that aligns with your values
*family and cultural expectations- especially in East Asian cultures, where success is often held by external standards.
*friendship and social circles in our 30s and 40s- finding connections when priorities shift
*balancing work and parenting- managing career while consciously parenting
*visibility and representation- owning your story in personal and professional spaces
*following your dreams on your terms
Follow Angela on Instagram and TikTok
Instagram: @heyangelatam (https://www.instagram.com/heyangelatam)
TikTok: @heyangelatam (https://www.tiktok.com/heyangelatam)
So, Now What?
You Are Not Broken: The Journey to Reclaiming Your Inner Compass
Send a DM to Angela directly! Share your comments, feedback and feels.
Hi!
I’m Angela Tam and welcome to my little corner of the podcast world. This podcast is for you if you are:
The FIRST in your family to live outside of the zone of survival. You are the first to break educational and career blocks in your lineage. You are the first to marry for love and not convenience. You are the first to navigate multiple cultures and identities.
The ONLY or one of the few POC on your team, one of the few WOC on the PTA or in the boardroom. One of the few POC in your neighborhood with young kids.
You are trying to do things differently than your family did. You want to measure success by different metrics. You want question why part of you wants to live up to others expectations while other parts of you want to to say F you to all the external pressure. You want to be a conscious parent and not pass down patterns that don’t serve you. So you are going to therapy and cultivating a reflective mindset.
If you are an FOD (First, Only, Different), I’m excited to share this space with you. I am going to be your biggest fan and champion as we both define our own meaning of success.
Come follow me on instagram @heyangelatam and my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you!
You are listening to. So Now, what? This is a podcast that centers folks of color, particularly those of the Asian diaspora, who are ready, open and willing to take up space to deepen their commitment to cultivating their family legacy and be relentlessly ambitious with their pursuit of joy, wholeness as they grow into their careers. I am your host, angela Tam. I'm a career coach, entrepreneur, parent to three, partner to one and your biggest fan. Welcome to my little corner of the podcast world. I'm excited to be here and to finally debut my podcast.
Angela Tam:It took me several years to build this podcast because of my internal struggles behind visibility and taking up space. I'm still in the midst of this challenge at this very moment. What is my intention for creating this podcast? I want to inspire and encourage people to take up space, to be your unique selves, to show up just as you are, even if others won't find it totally palatable for you to be you. I want to help you uncover your own roadmap to defining what matters to you and what actually following through and prioritizing that means with everyday little habits that will eventually make big shifts. So what is this podcast about this podcast and how did it start this podcast? And how did it start?
Angela Tam:This podcast was birthed from a lot of my own personal experiences and a collection of my friends, loved ones and clients' experiences, although I won't share any of them in detail. And, as a mental health therapist for many years, I've been practicing since 2013. I've worked with people who, as Shonda Rhimes coined the term FOD, first, only different. Um, shonda says, bears a lot of responsibilities to um pave the way for others that are coming behind them, and so the way I define first only different, and how it looks like with um, with folks that I work with as well as myself, is that if you are the first in your family to navigate being multicultural, the first in your family to consider thriving and not just surviving financially, emotionally, relationally, spiritually and if you have like, you're the first to have way more earning potential. You're the first to own your own home or acquire wealth way earlier than your parents did. Um. If you're the only in your workplace, the only person of color in your workplace or in the boardroom, or you're the only multicultural family in your neighborhood, you're the only people of color in serving your school board or in the you know pta um, and maybe you're not the only, but you're one of the few people of color around you, especially in your workplace. You might be working in a very like non POC dominated workplace where you're one of the few women or or parents, or you're the only um you know person of color. That's um the only um you know person of color. That's um you know, the first in your industry, or the very few in your industry.
Angela Tam:Maybe you're in a stem career and the last is you're doing things differently. You're the first to discuss feelings in your family. You're you're doing, you're you're actually like working on emotional and relational development in yourself and in your kids and um you're questioning norms and patterns in your family. Like you know, you're asking and challenging the notion of like spanking your children and how um you want your children to question authority in a way that's like respectful, of course, but still challenging the status quo. Um you're really leaning into, um relating to your loved ones differently and not really thinking about like these external metrics that have been imposed on you that we don't even really like um of success related to getting good grades or getting all these accolades which a lot of us already have. But we're really trying to do things differently and really trying to curate our own definition of what it means to succeed, or what it means to move from impression management, or looking put together or managing perceptions, to internal metrics such as joy, fulfillment and wholeness. All of these things are confusing to people around you and maybe they're not because they're like oh, there they go again. They're like you know being different, and maybe it's also you're different because, like a lot of the people around you would approach things in a different way. They would just do things in a more traditional way, and you're maybe really being critical of that and are trying to do things differently. And even if it's from with a creative reason, like I just don't think things are working and I want to be creative with what I have and and I want to raise my kids differently or see my career differently. So now, what? So? Now what a lot of folks are asking.
Angela Tam:I have these accolades. I am first, I am only or the few of POC in my workplace. I am different, I'm doing things differently, I'm trying to do things differently, all the things that I need and want, and I have things that my ancestors couldn't even imagine. I have the house, but I don't know how to come home to myself and feel safe within it. Metaphorically speaking, I'm able to buy a literal car, but I don't know how to get from point A to point B in my career without having the joy in life sucked out of me. I have the 2.5 kids and a dog, but I don't know how to not lose my temper with my kids. I don't know how to prioritize my time with my partner and I don't really feel like anyone really knows me and I'm like really vulnerable with anyone. Or I don't know how to have really honest and hard conversations with my partner, etc. Etc. I have all the things on paper and I'm going through the motions.
Angela Tam:This podcast is from a philosophy that you are not broken. You are not someone to be fixed, improved or optimized. You are enough, you are you and our work is our. My podcast is about uncovering or unraveling more of you, so that we could really allow the you inside to shine. The version of you that is most compassionate, connective, creative, courageous, confident, curious, calm and clear is already in you, you know. I think the message out there is that in our culture is that you don't have these things, you need to get these things, when in fact, I really do believe that we already have those things, and the reality is that there are external forces that cloud us in our authenticity and unintentionally and intentionally make us small, and so, when the work is around focusing on our inner compass so that things that we care about that have nothing to do with other people think can really be centered, and in the society and our culture, there are forces that really want us to care about their metrics, other people's metrics, our company's metrics, our parents' metrics of success and career and to center our own and create our own metrics takes a lot of effort and undoing a lot of years of conditioning, and so I would love to do that work with you on this podcast, to like learn more together around how we can unravel and uncover what it is that is already here which is our most authentic self.
Angela Tam:What can you expect from this podcast? I will release episodes on a weekly basis, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on my capacity. I'll share my insights, thoughts and reflections as a person who is on their own learning path, as an entrepreneur, as an ADHD person, as a parent, as a mental health clinician, as a career coach and as a partner. Rarely, but it might happen. I might bring some guests on who can speak from their own experiences, who are also on similar journeys, and this podcast will mostly be unedited or lightly edited and very casual. As you notice, there's no intro, outro, it's just me and my phone in my office. You'll hear my kids. You'll hear stomping in the background. You'll hear, you know, my pauses and vocalizations. I'm prioritizing putting out episodes and sharing over perfection, and that's part of my journey as well. I'll be sometimes walking outside on my walks and recording some episodes.
Angela Tam:My challenge to myself is to be consistently showing up, no matter how short or long the episode is or what I'm doing at the time. I also, as you might know me if you know me personally is that I do cuss and I am an awkward person and sometimes what I might bring up or how I might say things might be really uncomfortable and sometimes maybe even offend you, be really uncomfortable and sometimes maybe even offend you. I encourage you to sit with that and enjoy the ride, enjoy the ups and downs and let me know, send me, your feedback. One of the easiest ways to find me is on Instagram. My handle is heyangelatam, and on TikTok, my handle is the same heyangelatam, and you could DM me.
Angela Tam:It's me that will respond, it's not like a bot or anything and you could also sign up for my newsletter, which I'll link in the chat or link in the show notes. I would love for you to subscribe, to rate and to review, to send a review on my podcast so that other people can find me too. I'm so grateful you were able to tune in and I really look forward to going on this learning journey together with you Till next time. Talk to you soon. Bye.