How to Unlearn Asian Guilt

• Understanding how guilt drives decision-making and limits self-worth [00:00:00]
• Recognizing cultural conditioning and guilt tripping in family dynamics [00:03:02]
• Identifying when you’re being guilt tripped versus self-imposed guilt [00:03:34]
• Gaining clarity on your desired relationships to combat guilt tripping [00:05:49]
• Learn the two-step process to release guilt [00:08:09]
• How to reclaim power and self-worth by practicing non-attachment in work and life [00:10:36]

“Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like to live a life without guilt? I mean, would that be a game changer or what?”  

“The reason the guilt tripping gets you—it hooks you—is because you haven’t spent any time getting clear on the kind of relationship and connection you want to have with your family.”

“You need to know what you want in order to be able to handle the guilt.”

“This is more about—we are worried about: this has to be a certain way. And we can start to detach and say, I’m going to just give it my best effort and see how it goes. Then that is when you really bring back your own power.”

“When you can start to do that and understand you are a human who gets to take time off, who gets to relax and that you’re worthy no matter what happens at work, that is when we really start to let the guilt be something we put to the side.”

NICOLE:

Hello friends. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong. Today, we have a big topic on tap—one I could talk about for a really long time. But I’m going to try to keep it succinct for you because this is a huge one that comes up all the time for my clients: feeling guilty and how that guilt drives their decisions and affects their ability to live their lives with worthiness, value, and power. 

This is something I usually only discuss inside my course, Your Clear Calling, but I didn’t want to gatekeep this topic because, honestly, it’s too good. So we’re going to get into it in just a moment. If you are an Asian American corporate leader ready to reverse the cultural conditioning keeping you in hiding at work and step into a visible, thriving life where you own your authentic voice, DM me ‘visible’ @nicoletsong on Instagram because I’ve got something over there for you. 

Okay friends, let’s dig into this topic.

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. Each episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.

Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like to live a life without guilt? I mean, would that be a game changer or what? If you’ve never considered that question, this is such a good episode for you. Because I know that whenever I feel guilty, it’s always a sign that something is crashing my brain and my system, and I immediately want to right the ship. I don’t want to hang out on that guilt pathway any longer than I have to. 

So today, I’m going to share a special two-step process for how to give up the guilt. But first, we have to talk about where we learned it in the first place and how to start untangling ourselves from that feeling of guilt. If you have Asian parents, you might have had guilt baked into your existence. Like, “If you loved me, you would do this,” or “You must not love your mother,” or “I am the worst mother to raise an ungrateful child like you.” I’m being a little dramatic, but it might feel a little too real for you. That is basically guilt-tripping, right? 

So there’s that piece of it, and then there’s actually feeling guilty. It’s helpful first to know if you’re being guilt-tripped. I’ll talk about that part first and then I’ll discuss when you do it to yourself.

If you are being guilt-tripped, the first thing to recognize is that it is happening. The most essential thing to remember is to not get caught in the trap. Let’s give another example: if your parents live far away from you and they say, “Oh, you never visit us,” which may or may not be true. I have a feeling you probably do visit them, but maybe not as often as they want. Or, “You’re only going to stay for three days? It’s so far; you should stay longer.” 

This is what I call a game, and you are being played because you get to decide what works for you. Does it work for you to visit them considering your life, your finances, and what you want in terms of connection and relationship with your parents? You need to know what you want in order to handle the guilt. The reason the guilt-tripping gets you, hooks you, is that you haven’t spent any time getting clear on the kind of relationship and connection you want to have with your family. Until you figure that out, it’s honestly easy to guilt-trip you. 

What happens next? You spend more time and money than you want to, and now you resent them. You’re kind of pissed about it, even though you secretly do want to have a good relationship with them. But you can’t get over the guilt-tripping. You really have to spend some time understanding what causes you to give in to the guilt trip and take a step back to learn how to have clarity for yourself around the relationships you want. 

That’s one example that comes up a ton with my clients, and we often spend quite a bit of time starting to separate out what that relationship looks like. It can become really loaded if you’ve had a lot of past negative experiences with them. So getting clear on the relationship you want with them would be the first step. If that’s something you’re interested in, we work on this a lot inside Your Clear Calling. 

You might think, “Wow, I thought we worked on getting promoted and having our own visibility and voice in Your Clear Calling.” We do all of those things, and family is part of that. Part of the reason we don’t speak up and own who we are is because of experiences like this. When we feel guilt-tripped by our family, we give our power away by giving in to what they want. That behavior also shows up in your workplace.

So, all of this is linked together. It’s really important to address that first thing and just say, “Okay, how do I actually reclaim my own power with my family?” That’s one kind of guilt. There’s another type, though, which is when you guilt-trip yourself. Who does that, right? This one is so sneaky. You feel guilty about something, and no one has said anything to you, but you’re the one causing it and creating it. 

Let’s go with a work example because this comes up a lot. You feel guilty, let’s say you decide to take a week off of work because you’ve been working really hard, and now you feel guilty about taking time off. Even though this is part of what you’re paid for—they give you time off. They pay you to take time off! Your boss might even tell you to take time off if you have a good boss, and yet you feel bad when you actually do it. 

Not only do you feel bad while you’re taking time off, but this affects the trip or the time off that you do have. The whole time, you’re thinking about work, worrying about projects you didn’t finish before you left, and feeling guilty that whole time. This can be a key reason you don’t enjoy your vacation. Then there’s the guilt that happens when you come back because you don’t know what was happening while you were gone. Unless maybe you did hop on your email, but even then, you’re trying to catch up on big projects and things that were moving forward while you were away. 

Now you’re in this deep level of worry, worried they’re going to think you’re not carrying your weight, that you’re not that bright, or that you don’t deserve your position because you keep leaving. 

So now we have the guilt of being away and then the guilt of returning. Has anyone ever been there? Right? This can get pretty deep and profound for people. The first part of the two-step process I’m going to discuss today will help you understand this. 

The first step is to recognize that you feel guilty. You have to identify it and allow yourself to say, “Wow, I am feeling really guilty about all of these things.” You also need to understand if this is something you learned growing up. Like the examples I gave earlier with your family—especially with Asian parents—you might have learned that you should put your family before yourself. 

Putting yourself first might have been frowned upon. That’s just what often happens in Asian families: families first, the whole is first. So you always prioritized what they needed. Now, as an adult, you’re probably doing the same thing by prioritizing your work over your own personal needs. But we know the cost of that is high—you’re exhausted, burned out, and you’ve put all your worth and value into your job. 

Can you see how deeply entangled guilt gets in there? We have to really understand first, “Did I learn this growing up?” Yes. “Is that why I feel guilty all the time?” Yes. “Maybe someone is guilt-tripping me again. Is that possible?” Am I falling for it because I already feel guilty? 

Now that we’ve thoroughly identified the guilt, we see it permeating different parts of our lives and disrupting our vacations. It’s causing us to feel less than at work. This leads us into the second step of the system, which is probably the most challenging to do. It sounds really easy in theory, but the actual application takes some effort and work. This is why we work on it so much inside Your Clear Calling. 

This step is to detach. You need to get really detached from your work and your job. You might say, “Well, Nicole, I don’t want to detach from my job because then people will think I don’t care or that I’m not doing a great job.” But detachment has nothing to do with your performance. 

Detachment is everything to do with how you feel about your relationship with your job. When you can detach your value from your work, that’s where the magic starts to happen. That’s when we can start to unlearn guilt, release it, and enjoy our vacations. When you’re attached—when you’re worried about what people think of you, whether they think you’re doing a good job, or if you’ll get promoted—that’s when you’re in worry and guilt. 

When you’re detached, you’re not worried about what people think because you trust that you’re performing to the best of your ability and doing what your job asks of you. The likelihood that you’ll feel guilty goes down significantly.

Let me give you an example from one of my clients. My client Allie did this two-step process recently when she had a week off. Instead of worrying that people thought she was dumb or didn’t understand things after taking a week for herself, she trusted that when she came back, they would fill her in. Imagine that! People saying, “Hey, this is what we worked on. I wanted to keep you apprised of the situation.” She remembered that she was smart, effective, and that anything she needed to know, she would find out. 

Instead of feeling guilty and scrambling to catch up when she returned, or checking her email on Sunday night to avoid dealing with what would happen, she just thought, “It’s going to be fine.” It’s not that she didn’t care or wasn’t passionate about her work; she just detached the idea that her worth or value was contingent on knowing everything, being totally up to date, or how much she worked or didn’t work while on vacation. 

What she did was not work, come back, and remain detached. And guess what? Everything was fine. 

Think about this: if you have a coworker who goes on vacation, when they come back, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I’ll just tell them what happened. I’ll update them on the significant steps that occurred.” Or, “This didn’t happen; we were waiting for you to get back.” That doesn’t have to be something you feel guilty about, right? Or guilt-trip someone else for. You can just say, “Hey, we’re adults. We all need breaks.”

I know that when someone on my team goes on vacation, I think, “They’re going to be refreshed, creative, and have the energy for what they want to do.” That’s what happens for me when I take time off. 

So how can we start to change this conversation around guilt and see that it’s an attachment issue? It’s more about being worried that things have to be a certain way. We can start to detach and say, “I’m going to give it my best effort and see how it goes.” That’s when you really bring back your own power. 

Working without a break is just not possible. In the United States, we work way more hours than is healthy for our brains. Time off is essential. Your brain is a muscle; it cannot work 24/7. It needs breaks and time off. 

The next time you feel guilty about taking time off or needing to do something for yourself—moms, I’m looking at you!—remember that the way to feel free and reclaim your power is to recognize that you are a multifaceted human being with many interests and ways you are valuable and loved in the world. 

You can take a vacation, work, hang out with your family, and do things for yourself. All of that is about detaching your self-worth from any one thing. When you start to do that and understand that you are a human who gets to take time off and relax, and that you’re worthy no matter what happens at work, that’s when we really start to let guilt fade into the background.

This conversation is vast, and it’s something I love sharing. So just remember this simple two-step process: notice the guilt, recognize its depth, and see where it’s playing you. Then, the second step is to detach from the outcome—whatever you’re attached to. 

We can cultivate non-attachment. Just say, “I’m going to do my best in my life right here.” That’s when you can start to open up to what else is possible for you—to live a life without guilt. I teach this process and so much more inside Your Clear Calling. 

If you’re a high-achieving Asian American woman who wants to permanently reverse the cultural conditioning causing your guilt so you can step into a dream career full of freedom, DM me ‘reverse’ on Instagram @nicoletsong, because I’ve got something over there for you. 

All right friends, thank you so much for this deep conversation. I can’t wait to see you next time.

Thank you for tuning into today’s episode. Before you go, don’t forget: if you are a high-achieving woman who wants to uncover your biggest blind spots preventing fast, intuitive decisions, I’ve got a 72-second assessment for you. Make sure to DM me ‘quiz’ @nicoletsong on Instagram. 

Thank you for being here and for listening. We read every note we get from you about how the podcast is making a difference in your life. Please know how much we appreciate each and every one of you. Until next time, I’m Nicole Tsong, and this is the School of Self-Worth.