Two Years in 30 Minutes

It's been two years since the last episode, and we're back with Liz's insights since becoming a mom, turning 40, writing a new book, and generally, living through an unprecedented era of global chaos. 

This episode is for old and new listeners alike, but special gratitude goes out to all the original Reset listeners who made this such a beautiful journey. 

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:03

Welcome to the Reset Podcast. After a two-year hiatus, we are back for a special five-episode drop, perhaps more. As always, the goal is to explore your inner world, embrace who you are becoming, and to support you in reaching your greatest potential. I'm Liz Tran, and I am so glad you are here. Hi everyone. I am honored to be back here with you recording the podcast. I went back and I looked at the whole archive, all the 80 episodes that I had recorded over the past few years, and it brought up so much for me. For those of you who are just tuning in, long story short, I started this podcast in 2020, and it was after a pretty grueling road of leaving my career in venture capital that I had worked really hard for over a decade to get to this place where I felt like I had arrived. I didn't feel it. It actually felt more meaningless to me than I had expected. So in 2019, I left my job. I started a studio about meditation and about finding the self where people would come and gather. That studio was a struggle. I invested a lot of money into it. And then I had to shut it down in 2020 with the pandemic. So that thrust me into this very confusing period of time where I was navigating this colossal financial failure, this reckoning of the self and a journey to figure out who I was becoming and where I was going over the three odd years of recording podcast episodes. That was the topic of interest for me. When people ask me now what the podcast was about, we're like, oh, I've heard about your podcast. What is it about? I never know how to answer it, but in hindsight, now that I'm looking back on the episodes, I would say that this podcast is about me on a personal journey of learning how to figure out who I am, how to love that person, and then find that person's purpose in the world. Who am I? How can I love that person? And how can I put their greatest gifts and their greatest potential into the universe in a way that matters? During that time that I was recording the podcast, I got a book deal, I wrote a book, I put a book out into the world, I got married, I went through a years-long fertility struggle with IUIs and IVF and just a lot of disappointment and depression and feeling like I would never have my own family. Then I got pregnant and I had a kid. And that's really where the podcast ended was two years ago. It was my last episode I recorded just a couple months before I was about to have a kid. What I want to talk about in this episode today, not to go too much into the past, but just to catch you up on what I've been thinking about and what I've been doing and also why the podcast has been on hiatus. I've heard from so many of you saying, Is the podcast coming back? Is the podcast coming back recently? I ran into a listener on the subway, and it was so nice to connect with her. And it just reminded me of why I love this podcast so much and also why I haven't been recording over the past couple of years. So I'm going to fill you in on all of that in a pretty succinct fashion. Okay, so let's start off with the first question that I get a lot, which is why did I stop recording the podcast? Especially because the podcast has always been such a labor of love for me. I've never wanted sponsorships. I've never done it to make money. I've always just done it as a way of processing and making sense of all of my own internal struggles in hopes that they would be of service and beneficial to anyone out there who was trying to figure out those three things. Who am I? How can I love this version of myself that is true and authentic? And then how do I take that person and live my best life out in the world and operate at my greatest potential? I always thought of that as work that doesn't just benefit people who listen, but has also been hugely beneficial for me. I made this podcast originally for myself, thinking that no one would ever listen to it. And luckily, people did. And it's actually how I got my first book deal was through the audience, this amazing reset audience that I am so grateful for today. So the question is, why stop doing something that has been this incredible, meaningful part of my life? And the answer is that I was just moving into a different period of time. There is an old adage that says there are years that ask questions, and then there are years for answers. And I think a lot of this podcast represents the years where I was asking a lot of questions of myself and of my life. And I stopped it because I was moving into a period where I had to answer the questions. I became a mom in January of 2024, so almost two years ago. Suddenly, it became less about yearning for a different type of life to pivot my business, to have a family. Suddenly, I had all of those things, and I had to figure out how to be good at them and how to do them well, how to be a really good mom, how to take care of a newborn, how to be a person in the working world who is balancing breastfeeding and coaching and working on my second book. And so, just from a tactical perspective, there just wasn't a lot of time for the podcast. I started working at six weeks postpartum, not full time, but I was coaching again. And at three months postpartum, I started working on my book proposal for my second book. When I was six months postpartum, I sold that book and I suddenly had six months to write the book. So it was go, go, go. I was navigating, breastfeeding, weaning sleep changes, sleep training, trying to have my next kid, having a miscarriage, figuring out what my relationship with my husband looked like in this new era where we had to rely on each other logistically, operationally, so much more than we ever had before. And we suddenly had this huge responsibility to split. And most importantly, thinking about the overall architecture, spiritual support and pedagogy of this little soul that was now my responsibility to protect my daughter Taya and how I could make sure that she felt all the love and support and unconditional acceptance that I never felt as a kid. I wanted to take all of the energy that I had invested in this podcast, in my writing, in myself, and I wanted to put it into her because I wanted to make sure that the first couple years of her life were so intentional and thoughtful. And obviously, there's no such thing as perfect when it comes to parenting, but I wanted to be present and I wanted to be spiritually aligned with being the type of mom that I always wanted for myself. And I think that I succeeded, not to toot my own horn, but my daughter's about to turn two. And she is confident, she is loved, she's brave, she's completely fearless, she has a million words that she's saying. She's very ahead in terms of her language and development. And I just know that she has a very healthy attachment style. It's something that I really intentionally try to cultivate with her. And I'm really proud of us. I'm really proud of us as a family. And my husband and I have come to a place where it's been hard to figure out who we are in this new era and what our relationship looks like. And we've come out on the other side. It has felt like this two years has gone by in a blink. And at the same time, I have also finished writing my second book. I am now onto promoting it. It's going to come out in two months. I finally feel like I'm in a place where I can take some of these learnings of the past couple of years and step back and see how I can package them up in a succinct and entertaining way. And then hopefully give you something that is helpful, supportive, beneficial. So that's what I've been up to. I honestly have felt like at moments I didn't have very much to give all. I had a lot of questions about where I should live in the city, what kind of mom I wanted to be, if I should start a new business or not. I just felt like with all that swirling, I wasn't able to give it the intentional processing and the time needed to do a podcast. I've always done this podcast by myself. I've always recorded myself, edited myself, promoted it myself. And it's a lot of work, especially because it's not my core profession. My core profession is as an executive coach. I've also had more clients than I've ever had before, just purely by accident. I have a very long wait list right now, and I have to turn down clients all the time, but I accidentally brought on too many. So I've been really busy with that. And then obviously with the new book coming out, I'm also starting a new business, which we'll get into later. It just felt like there wasn't enough time and energy to give back. And I don't know if you can tell in my voice, but I've also been sick for the past three weeks. And this is actually the best that I've sounded. I actually blocked off in the calendar that I was going to record three weeks ago, essentially the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, but I was so congested and then I lost my voice and my sore throat. And I'm still congested now, but at least I think this is baseline fine to record. And I wanted to get something out. I wanted to share more with you. Now that I have caught you up on some of the logistics of what's happened, I am currently almost seven months pregnant too. So that was also a big thing that I went through is I had a miscarriage about a year ago, and then I was working really hard to get pregnant again. This will be our second and final child. And so it feels like there's a completion that's happening here that's really beautiful. I'm having a little girl, very exciting. Now that I've talked about some of the logistics of what has happened over the past couple years, I just want to share three insights that have occurred to me over the past two years. And they are all connected to the earlier nature of the podcast, but are a broadening or a continuation now that I am older, wiser, I hope, and in a very different place. So insight number one is that there is no arrival. There is no finish line. There is no horizon to reach. Even though over the past five years since I started this podcast, I have gotten everything that I've wanted on paper. I wrote a book that I loved, and I'm writing a second book. These were all things that were on my manifestation list when I was 35 years old that I wanted by the time I was 40. And I got them all. And at the same time, my big realization is that there's not an end. You don't just check everything off your list and say, okay, I did it. I'm happy now. You are always changing. I am always changing. The work doesn't stop. And I hate using the word work because it sounds like work. So maybe I'll rephrase it and say the joy doesn't stop. Do you remember when a lot of this journey started for me? I had gotten divorced when I was 30, 31, something like that. I was really confused about what I was doing with my life. I felt like such a failure. I felt behind all of my friends. And I went to an astrologer who is still my astrologer. She's been in my life for almost 10 years now. And she said, You're like a caterpillar in a chrysalis. And you are going through a process of metamorphosis, and it's painful. But you're going to come out on the other side a butterfly. And I said, What is that going to feel like? Am I going to be a totally different person? And she said, No, you're going to feel very much like yourself, but just lighter. And now that I look back, that process was very long and very grueling. As you know, from listening to the podcast, it involved a lot of therapy, a lot of ayahuasca, a lot of mushrooms, a lot of self-help books, a lot of mistakes, a lot of failures, a lot of trying things to see if they fit or not, and finding out that they did not fit for me, and a lot of career struggles, dating struggles. And the thing is, I am past the sort of day-to-day tumult or day-to-day questioning. My life is articulated and cemented, especially because I have a child and about a house and I'm really planted where I am. But none of that matters because we are always becoming. Research shows that we actually change as much in our 60s and our 70s as we do in our 20s. But most of the time we don't let ourselves change because of something called the end of history illusion. And the end of history illusion is when we believe that we have become our most articulated selves and there is no more changing that is left to be done. And this bias makes it true. Because when you think you are done changing, then you resist changes like going to therapy, introducing yourself to new experiences, like trying to make new friends, trying out a new career path, because you think you're done. So you self-select yourself out of anything new. But what I've realized over the past couple of years is that even though on the outside it might look like I have quote unquote arrived and things are set in stone, the interior work is always still happening. And maybe it's even happening more because I have the stability and the safety to explore it. And I think the empowering spin on this is not that the work doesn't stop, which I think can maybe feel demoralizing or depressing. But the reframe that I will share now is that you are not a passenger in your life. You are the pilot. You are the person behind the wheel. Even if it feels like that plane is on autopilot, and even if it feels like you are not steering, you have all the control. You are actually steering. And if you are not doing anything to change your life, if you're not actively involved and engaged, then you're not choosing it. So that is my insight. No matter how cemented or rigid your life seems, you are always in flux. We are always in flux. And that is the beautiful thing about being human, is that we are meant to be adaptive. We are meant to be agile. We are meant to be learning and growing all the time, which is why we have these big, beautiful brains with these huge prefrontal cortexes. We are equipped to do that. And even now, I'm on the precipice of launching my second book. So it's a little bit old hat at this point. I've done it before, but I found myself in search of some tools for being in the right mindset and for embodying the abundance and spirit that I wanted to have during this book launch. And what I found was a manifestation journal that I made for myself five years ago, actually more than I think it was six years ago when I still had my studio before it shut down during the pandemic. I taught this money manifestation class. And there were 12 people in it. It was tiny. We met every week for three weeks, and I made these journals for everyone. And they were beautiful. It was a way of me helping myself be in the mindset of being abundant, of getting what I wanted. I rediscovered this journal that I made for myself five years ago, and I've been doing it religiously for the past week, and I feel so much better already. So, how beautiful and amazing is it that my five years ago self, my earlier, younger self, created this beautiful work that I now in my present moment am benefiting from. And everything structurally in my life has changed. But internally, I am still that same person who is always growing, always changing, always becoming, and we all are. So let yourself feel that. Okay, insight number two. I turned 40 one almost one year ago. To be honest, it was a little bit of a mind fuck for me. Just thinking about okay, what do my 40s mean? What does it mean to be 40? What does it mean to no longer be young anymore? To never be young ever again, to be a mother and a matriarch, to embrace a really, I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but I think it's just true, like a sacrificial way of being in the world where truly everything is for my daughter and everything is for my second daughter. But what I realize is that in many cultures, 40 is not old. It is truly just the beginning. Your 20s and 30s are seen as a time to have experiences and to accumulate wisdom so that you can take all that richness of resources and of knowledge that you have and plow forward to experiment, to push boundaries, to take risks as you would when you were 20, but you're more equipped for them now. And I see this with my friend group where if I'm 40, then everyone I know is 40. I've been friends with a lot of these people for 20 plus years, have seen the long arcs of their careers. Honestly, not a lot of people are continuing to push themselves. The people who I still feel most drawn to are the ones who see themselves as changeable and see the potential that still exists within their lives, the potential for more, the potential for change. So that is insight number two. No matter how old you are or how young you are, age is just a number. It is all a mindset. For me, 40 is just as good of a time to start a company as is 25. So those are my thoughts. Okay, and then finally, my third insight, which is related to one and two, is that crashing and burning is just a part of life. I feel like I have come to great acceptance in my older age that hitting rock bottom is just a part of being a human, and there is no way. To prevent it from happening. If you know me, you know that I'm a planner and I like for everything to be perfectly mapped out and then for that map to be executed in the most accurate way possible. I like for everything to go according to plan, the way that I have intended it to be. And when that plan goes off course, it really throws me for a loop. I get upset, I get overwhelmed. But what I've learned is that the more I can accept that things are not going to go my way, I am going to be disappointed that all my best laid plans will get off track, then the happier I am. Instead of seeing these moments where I'm crashing and burning as a failure on my part, if I can just accept them as an inevitable part of life, then I will be much, much happier. To give you an example, I really wanted to record this podcast. And I had put it on my calendar for three weeks in advance because I've been extremely busy with work and I didn't really have a lot of time for deep work, sitting down, recording a podcast, writing newsletters, et cetera. And in early November, I said, okay, I'm gonna block off a few days during this two-week period at the end of November, in early December, and that's when I'm gonna do all of my deep work. And this gave me a lot of solace, knowing that no matter how much I was traveling or how busy I was, I still was gonna have this time later on. I had it all mapped out. But of course, this time arrived and I was so sick. And then because I'm pregnant, this cold that should have taken me a week max to shake took me three weeks to get over. And then once I was done being sick, then Taya's nanny got sick. And thus my husband and I were on childcare instead of working. So we lost more deep work time. Then my husband had to unexpectedly leave town for work. So not only was I desperately sick, the nanny was sick, Taya was sick, my husband was sick, he was also out of town. I was solo parenting. I came downstairs after putting Taya to bed one night and grabbed my dog, Grover, and I just cried into his fur for 45 minutes. And I was just like, Grover, my life is unsustainable. It is such a struggle for me to keep all these plates spinning. And the second one plate stops spinning, then all the rest fall down. And I can't do this. I am not capable. I am not strong enough. I'm not organized enough to handle these moments when the unexpected happens and ruins all my plans. And then I called my husband and I cried for two hours. And where I netted out on that was that these moments are gonna happen. They are always gonna happen. Instead of trying to prevent them from happening, I need to become the best, strongest, most resilient, most adaptable person I can be so that when these moments inevitably happen, I have all the inner and outer resources to handle them. And what's ironic is that's what I've been thinking and writing about for the past two years almost, is this topic. I have a book coming out in February 3rd. It's actually available for pre-sale right now. It is called AQ, and it stands for the agility quotient. This is a new intelligence. It's a third form of intelligence, like your IQ or your EQ, but it involves your capacity to handle change, uncertainty, and the unknown. That is your AQ. If you are a high AQ person, you can roll with both proactive and reactive change. And if you are a low AQ person, anything unexpected, anything that changes undoes you. And that's really hard. What they say is that as authors, we write for ourselves. We write because this is the message that we need. This has very much been the message that I've needed. And I think a lot of us do in this post-pandemic world. We learned in the depths of the pandemic that things are going to surprise us. They're going to shock us. And the same has held true with our climate, with geopolitics, with our domestic politics as well. We are not the best at predicting what's going to happen to us, and we are often thrown curveballs every day. Think about how many times in the news you read a headline and you just cannot believe it's true. So, anyway, I started thinking about this book. I was still writing The Karma of Success 2022 and finally got down to working on it in 2024. I think it's coming out at the perfect time. I'm going to share more about it in later episodes and more about what your AQ is, how to find out your archetype. So you're either an astronaut, a firefighter, a novelist, or a neurosurgeon, what that means, how AQ shows up in your career, how to future-proof yourself when it comes to work. And then finally, to share actual real AQ stories of people who are really going through the ringer. And I feel so strongly that our world is so polarized. Obviously, we're polarized from a socioeconomic standpoint. We're also polarized from a political standpoint. But the greatest gap that we are experiencing is psychological. And the world is falling into two camps of people, especially with this new technology revolution. Either you are someone who has the capacity to thrive in a changing environment, or you are the kind of person who is completely undone by it, who gets overwhelmed, cannot succeed, cannot be happy, cannot find meaning. My book, I hope, gives you all the tools to be in that former camp, someone who thrives in uncertainty, unknown, and unpredictable situations. So we'll talk more about that. But those are my three insights from the past two years. One, there is no arrival, there is no finish line, there is no horizon. Two, your self is fluid, changeable. 40 is just the beginning. 50 is just the beginning. You are always young. Especially if you assume the mindset that you're not just a passenger in life. You are the pilot. And finally, three, crashing and burning is a normal part of life. And the secret is just to get really good at those cycles. It's not to prevent them from happening, but just to embrace them. My friend Pierre shared something recently. It was something that she read on X or Instagram. And it basically said that when you start looking at situations that you formerly were a little annoyed by and now start becoming a little amused by them, then you're entering God mode. I do think that's true. If you can reinterpret the happenings of your life that frustrate you into things that are actually a little funny and are amusing, then that is the highest AQ stance that you can take. So anyway, thank you everyone for listening. That is my past two years in a nutshell. It's funny because I just caught you up on two years in less than 30 minutes. So it feels like maybe not that much happened. But I promise you, a lot happened on the inside for me. And I'm sure a lot happened for you too. Thank you all for listening, especially if you are re-listening and you are an OG 2020 podcast listener. I thank you for being here. And I'm excited to keep talking over the next few episodes. Oh, I forgot. I always used to end the podcast in the exact same way. So just for old time's sake, let's do it now. Thank you for listening. And just as a friendly reminder, listen to yourself, love yourself, and say yes to life. So life can say yes to you. Thanks, everyone.