Two years ago, I imagined I would one day reach 100 episodes.
But I didn’t really think it would look anything like this!
Creating and launching the School of Self-Worth was a massive dream come true, and I had the best time coming up with the appropriate way to honor this milestone.
Which is to CELEBRATE.
But wait!
This isn’t celebrating the way you normally would. I didn’t just toast this moment; I took time this episode to look back at the moments when things were NOT going well.
Because when you have big dreams, big things can go sideways!
And those were the times when I learned the MOST about myself.
So buckle up, friends, for this SPECIAL 100th episode of the School of Self-Worth!
Psst: don’t miss the moment when I share my very FAVORITE episodes!
“Once I started to celebrate, that’s when expansion became possible. That’s when I started to recognize my own gifts, who I am in the world, to step into a deeper identity of myself.”
“When you really let go and you allow people to expand and grow, then they can show you what’s next.”
“Instead of always having the answers… if you start asking your employees, the people on your team, what do you think? What are your recommendations? They are going to start to step into a different level of ownership and leadership within themselves.”
“The more I am in that world, the more I can really appreciate for myself the courage it took… to go deeper into my own challenges around being authentic about who I am and my culture and my background.”
“I’m so deeply honored that this is my job, that I get to change lives every single day, impact women, and make such a big difference.”
“I love to play in the podcast world because it allows me to tell stories, hear stories, and I really have connected with so many cool women who are out to change the world.”
NICOLE
Hello friends. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong. Today is a super special day. We are celebrating the 100th episode of this podcast, and I’m going to take a little bit of a look back today behind the scenes. I’ll share how we came up with today’s topic and my very top favorite episodes from the last 100. So stay tuned; you do not want to miss what we’ve got in store for you today.
Let’s do this! Welcome to the School of Self-Worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life. Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success, and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a bestselling author of three books and a work-life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfillment and radical joy. Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insights about what it takes to be brave, joyful, and authentic every day. Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.
First, I can’t even believe that we are here—100 episodes! We started this podcast in April of 2023, and it’s now winter of 2025 when this comes out. I can’t even believe this is the journey we’ve been on for two years. If you had told me two years ago I’d still have it in two years, I probably would have believed you, but I don’t think I would have believed all the twists and turns that have happened along the way. I was getting married in April 2023; by the way, I do not recommend launching a podcast and getting married in the same month. But I was doing that back then, and there’s just been so much that’s happened in business and in life since that time. I’m really excited to share with you a little bit more from behind the scenes of the podcast today and to talk to you about some really big turning points I’ve had in running this podcast, and hopefully, that resonates with you and supports you in some of the shifts and changes you’re making in your own life.
Before we get into this topic, I will be sharing my top favorite episodes at the end of this episode, so make sure you stay tuned to hear exactly which ones I’m going to call out. They are so good! It was so, so fun to put that list together. Now we’re at the question of how do you even start to celebrate 100 episodes? I decided to pull all of you on Instagram, and hilariously, what most of you wanted was bloopers. I was like, wow, I guess we need to do more with bloopers. We are not doing an episode on bloopers, as fun as that might be. And I’m totally down for fun; maybe we’ll do a bonus episode of bloopers one of these days. But it was really helpful to hear that you wanted bloopers because what I heard in wanting those bloopers—the mistakes, the funny things, the things that people don’t see—is that you wanted to hear a little bit more about what’s behind the scenes, what’s really going on. It can’t always be the perfectly curated presentation that we put out there. I’m not saying we are perfectly curated, but there is a lot of effort and work that goes into putting the podcast into the world every week. Thank you to everyone who voted; you helped me see what to really do with this episode, and it showed me that we needed to spend some time celebrating.
I have learned in my life as an adult to celebrate milestones in a big way, not just the big milestones, but any little to big milestones. I grew up not celebrating—like, we celebrated my birthday, but I don’t think I ever got a celebration for a good report card. And my report cards were good! You know, as an Asian kid, I came home with A’s, and it was like, oh, okay. I didn’t get a special dinner; I wasn’t taken out; I didn’t get anything for that. We did have a party when I graduated from high school, but other than that, there wasn’t really a whole lot. I didn’t have this culture of celebration. What I did have was a culture of being hard on myself, trying to make my family proud by performing. I spent most of my life doing that. I used to think this was the way to grow—by being hard on yourself and saying you had to do better and striving for more. I was so hard on myself, but what happens when you do that is it holds you back. It made me so self-critical; I couldn’t see any possibilities outside of what I was working on at the time. I couldn’t see what else I could do—my talents, my skill sets, my strengths. But once I started to celebrate, that’s when expansion became possible. That’s when I started to recognize my own gifts and step into a deeper identity of myself. So today’s celebrations are really around understanding what has been so great in this podcast, but also to celebrate the challenges and see how those challenges helped me grow as a leader, as a person who speaks to all of you in the world, and as a coach.
These celebrations today are actually ones that most of you probably don’t know about. Some of my clients might know a couple of these, but most of you probably have never heard them. I’m excited to share these celebrations with you. The first one I’m going to share is relevant to any of you who manage a team. If you manage a team or anyone reports to you, this is a super important one. I don’t get on here a lot and talk about managing people because it’s something I share with some of my mastermind clients, but it’s not something I tend to put out there on social media or in the podcast. However, it is something I personally work on all the time and has been a really big journey for me as an entrepreneur. I’ve been with many different managers and experienced many management styles—mostly micromanaging, some managers who are a little more hands-off. I’ve had a lot of variety in the types of management styles I’ve experienced. I really wanted to shift that in my own business, and I’ve put a lot of effort and energy into looking at this differently and seeing how I can manage effectively.
So let’s get into this first celebration. I was four years into my business when I started my podcast, so I had already been doing a lot of things at that time. I learned enough to know I did not want to do it myself. I was like, this is going to take too much time; it’s going to take at least 10 hours a week, especially during the launch. I really wanted to hire it out, but I wanted to do it in a special way because at this time, I was trying to transition myself as a manager to giving people more independence. I wanted someone who would take big ownership of this project, someone who would develop all of the different pieces of it, do all the research, and really take it on as I would. I did not want a professional podcaster; I wanted someone dedicated to my mission and growth. When I met Julia Kwan, I knew she was the right person for this. She was coming off having her first baby and was excited to take on a project. She didn’t really have experience in the entrepreneurial world either, but I said, all right, I want you to do what I would do, research how to start a podcast, and figure it out. This was such a big growth journey for both of us. I’m not going to speak for her, but I’ll say for myself, handing over a big piece of my business to someone to create it was significant.
I gave her six months. She went online, started researching, downloading things, looking at all the software, and figuring out all the pieces it would take to put a podcast into the world. I can tell you, and I can stand here two years later telling you all, I don’t actually know how this podcast gets onto the Internet. I don’t edit it; I don’t load it. I don’t know all the different steps along the way because I did this. It’s important that I did this because it saves me so much time. I don’t have to know those things; other people can know those things. When you learn to give up major pieces of what you’re doing and allow other people to grow and thrive, you empower them. I remember when we finally launched the School of Self-Worth, Julia said, ‘This really feels like my baby.’ And I was like, perfect! That’s exactly what my intention and goal were with her. Now, this podcast comes out every week, and it was really Julia’s doing.
One thing I learned is that when I trusted her and gave her feedback, it gave me so much space. It expanded my life, my business, and my time. I will say this: At the beginning, it was really hard for me because I knew this podcast would reflect on me, my business, and my brand, and I wanted there to be no errors. I had grown up feeling like everything I did reflected not just on me but also my family. My perfectionism runs really deep—like, really hardcore most of my life. Here I was, fully giving up a project to someone else. But I also knew if I wanted to grow the podcast and myself and my business, someone else had to do it. I had to learn to ask her, ‘What do you think we should do? What’s your recommendation? How would you fix this?’ instead of jumping in constantly to fix it myself. If you are a manager, I highly recommend doing this ASAP. Ask your employees, ‘What do you think?’ instead of always having the answers. You might have preferences or ways you want things to go, but I promise, if you start asking your team for their recommendations, they will step into a different level of ownership and leadership within themselves.
What happened? Julia produced the most extraordinary podcast. We had an incredible launch and amazing guests. We’ve made some shifts and pivots along the way, but overall, it was such an amazing experience. I’m so proud of both of us for getting to this place where we’re now 100 episodes in. Honestly, it’s felt very seamless in many ways until the second celebration I’m going to share with you. We were doing great, the podcast was doing well, and we were all really happy with it. Then Julia got pregnant with her second child. I remember when she told me, ‘I’m pregnant; I’m going on maternity leave.’ These are behind-the-scenes things you all didn’t know about. Her going on maternity leave was a big shift in the business. We had to figure out how to manage this without it turning into more work for me. She wanted to take four months off—well deserved! She could have taken more if she needed to have her second baby. This was a new level of trust. I had handed it to her, trusted her, and now I needed to trust her to hand it off to others on my team.
I had some assistants who took over the whole thing. Julia figured out how to transition everything she did in her job over to different people on the team and had systems in place so that it ran smoothly. If you didn’t notice, that was our plan. This happened in early 2024 and probably started to affect episodes a couple of months later. If you didn’t notice, I’m like, yes, that’s exactly what we were trying to do. But again, I had to keep trusting that when unexpected things happened, I wanted her to have a baby and be happy, but I was also concerned about my business. These are things we don’t always recognize about ourselves, and we have to sort out what’s going on and why when presented with unexpected challenges. That was my second big celebration: the business was not dependent on any one person. The business could move, shift, and change, and I could adapt based on that. The system she put in place still exists to this day; it’s how we’re putting out this very podcast. Julia stepped into a new role in the business when she came back, and I am so proud of that. When you let go and allow people to expand and grow, they can show you what’s next. I feel really proud of that growth of the business and the capacity to allow her to expand.
Now, my third celebration is when I shifted my focus to Asian American women. If you go back and listen to episodes 45, 46, and 47, they’re called ‘Radically Authentic.’ Those episodes detail my experience making the shift, how I heard to make the shift, and putting my focus into Asian American women. I had a really big journey of imposter syndrome at the time. It was a significant pivot because the podcast was central to me sharing this with the world. This wasn’t something I felt I could really write in a newsletter or put on social media. I mean, I could do all those things, but I felt I shared the truth and who I really am through this podcast. Those episodes were probably the scariest for me to put out, aside from the first one, because I was sharing parts of myself I had never shared before publicly. I had only admitted it to myself maybe a month or two before that. It was terrifying to say, ‘I don’t feel like I’m Asian enough. I don’t feel like I should be the person leading other Asian women. I have imposter syndrome. I’m terrified of what this means for my business.’ I really celebrate that I put in the effort to have a platform where I could share my voice and my story in a much deeper way. The podcast gave me that platform and space. I don’t think I could have pivoted that way and felt as good about it if I didn’t have the podcast available to me at that time.
The truth is, for the business, we suffered a little bit after that. We lost listenership; people didn’t all move with me as I shifted my focus to Asian American women. While that was a little difficult at first, it showed me why it was important to do it. Honestly, there are not enough people who focus on Asian American women. I’m not just talking about coaches; I’m talking about affinity groups and just in general. The more I’ve immersed myself in different Asian American groups this past year, the more I see this huge gap and need to support Asian American women. The resources available to us are so much less than to everyone else. People love to lump us in with other high-achieving women and not give us our due around cultural conditioning and what we experience with our families. No matter what you say about us, we are treated differently because of how we look. If you haven’t walked in our shoes, you haven’t walked in our shoes. The more I’m in that world, the more I appreciate the courage it took for past Nicole to come forward and say that and to not only say it but to actually do the work to go deeper into my own challenges around being authentic about who I am, my culture, and my background. I’m also supporting other Asian American women to do that same process of exploration, understanding identity, and owning their voice. I am so grateful for that learning curve this past year, and I’m incredibly proud of myself for that. That’s also a reason it’s so important for us to celebrate—because we can come forward and say, wow, that allowed me to expand myself. That was such a big expansion.
Okay, this leads me to my last and biggest celebration, which is tied in with my very favorite episodes because now I get to celebrate some pretty special people—my clients. I’m doing a big shout-out to those who came on and shared their stories on the School of Self-Worth. Unlike most of our guests, my clients, for the most part, don’t speak regularly. It’s a big deal to come on and talk about your life and the challenges you faced, having the public know about those things. For some of them, I was their very first podcast ever. Those episodes resonate the deepest; you really love hearing their stories because their personal transformations have been tremendous. Some of these clients still work with me today, and I love seeing their growth. These episodes capture a moment in time for that growth when they recorded the episode. I’m so deeply honored that this is my job—that I get to change lives every single day, impact women, and make such a big difference. Then that difference gets to come on and share with all of you, making a difference in the world through their stories. I’m celebrating all these incredible women and all of my clients, whether they’ve been on this podcast or not.
If you have listened to any of these episodes or have any episodes to listen to, go back and listen to these episodes, and you will be amazed at how much you learn. I want to share which ones I want you to listen to:
– Episode 9: Sarah Castle. She left her job as an Amazon executive to be a college professor, coach, and speaker. She’s rocking it in the world! Go listen to Sarah.
– Episode 10: Sydney Ratukulu. She manifested her twin daughters, who are now three, and so much financial abundance, and continues to develop her own business. It’s incredible to watch her growth and hear her story.
– Episode 38: Carla Drumbeater. Carla moved from being an army veteran to a respiratory therapist to running marathons, which helped her recover from diabetes. She was featured in Runner’s World and is now a Thai yoga bodywork teacher and a coach for indigenous youth in Minnesota. She’s done so much in the world and is speaking at a yoga conference in Minnesota soon. I’m so proud of Carla!
– Episode 76: Kim Moy. Kim pivoted from a corporate job to running a dream business supporting caregivers. She’s a caregiver to her own husband and now supports other caregivers to feel grounded and centered in their lives. I’ve loved seeing Kim grow from her corporate job to being in my mastermind. She did all the work to see clearly and take that leap to running her own business. If you’re thinking about taking that corporate leap, definitely check out episode 76.
– Episode 80: Ali Ghostanian. When we started working together, she was in journalism, and we have that background in common. She was ready to leave and figure out what’s next for herself. Through our work together, she pivoted to getting her master’s degree, opening herself to what comes next. It’s been powerful to watch her journey.
So check out those episodes. If you’re going to go back and listen to any of those, those are the ones I want you to hear. I want you to hear what is possible. I really hope you see yourself in these women, then you can see what could come for you as well, really, through being supported, not doing it alone, reversing the cultural conditioning and moving forward on your own journey for yourself and seeing what opens up. And then finally, I really want to celebrate all of you, those of you currently listening, anyone who’s ever listened to any episodes of the School of Self-Worth, any guest who’s ever come on. I am celebrating all of you. I know that this podcast is not about me. This is about all of you. And it is really supported and lifted up by everybody who listens, everybody who’s come on and shared their story. We have so many. If you haven’t been catching up, listen to the last few episodes.
We also have some really remarkable guests coming that I’m so excited about. I cannot wait to share with you. It’s so rich. I love to play in the podcast world because it allows me to tell stories, hear stories, and I really have connected with so many cool, cool women through this who are out to change the world. And I love being around women who are out to change the world. So go listen to all those episodes. Listen, and then just also celebrate yourself for investing time and energy into listening and into hearing what’s possible for yourself and seeing a new way forward, because that’s really what the school of Self-Worth is about.
So I am celebrating 100 episodes! I am so grateful for all of you. Thank you so much for being here. And if you’re an Asian American woman who really wants to step into that next level of purpose and manifest your dream life, DM me “dream life” on Instagram @nicoletsong and let’s chat. Thank you all so much for being here. I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode.
All right friends, thanks so much for joining us for this week of the School of Self-Worth and I can’t wait to see you next time. Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode! Before you go, I want to remind you that if you are a high-achieving woman looking to uncover your biggest blind spots that prevent fast, intuitive decisions, I have a special 72-second assessment for you. Make sure to DM me the word “quiz” on Instagram @nicoletsong. We truly appreciate your presence and feedback. We read every note we receive about how the podcast is making a difference in your life. Please know how much we value each and every one of you.
Until next time, I’m Nicole Tsong, and this is the School of Self-Worth.
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