Radically Authentic with Nicole, part 3

• Learn practical steps to calm your nervous system and be present (9:40)
• Explore how emotional reactivity prevents you from being authentic (10:29)
• Discover the power of intuitive decisions (12:42)

“People are going to say whatever they’re going to say. They don’t actually have insight into what’s happening on the inside. The internal place for you and I have discovered over time in life, is that that is the place that actually matters. So why not just be yourself anyway? And that really is the point of this series radical authenticity. What does that look like? What are the biggest things that get in the way, and what does it look like on the other side when you really are stepping into it?”

“The programming of “not enough” is that internal wiring that gets you to work insane hours, to try to prove yourself to people who might not believe in you to begin with. There are forces out there that just do not want you to succeed. These are the forces that get you to sacrifice yourself, to never make choices that work for you, for your family, and for your life. And so it’s this programming that has you fixating on seeing yourself as not valuable as needing to prove yourself rather than seeing the truth, which is that you are worthy as you are, and you are valuable the way that you are. The sooner you can make a shift to being someone who is super worthy simply by breathing and being alive.”

“Taking back your worth and your value from what you do is truly a game changer for being your superpowered and most authentic self.”

“When you start to really lean into intuition, you can free yourself and have so much more space, so much more energy. And on top of that, you actually really learn to trust yourself on a much different level. So if you’re not making intuitive decisions, now is the time to start to look at what would it take for me to start to make intuitive decisions?”

NICOLE

Hello, friends. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, and I am super excited to be back here with all of you today. Thank you for the amazing, amazing response to the first two episodes from the series Radical Authenticity. My biggest teacher in life truly is the journey that I get to be on, and these last few weeks have surely been a massive jumpstart in growth for the start of the year. So I am so grateful to all of you, and today is the final episode of the three part series Radical Authenticity for Asian American Women Leaders, and we’ll be talking about the four main blocks to your superpowered, authentic self.

This is something I cannot wait to share with you. There’s so much richness in this episode, so make sure you stay tuned, and if you know it’s time for you to master intuitive leadership, dm me super on Instagram. I have something for you. Let’s get into this amazing conversation today.

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 best-selling author of three books and work/life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfilment and radical joy. Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insight 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.

And we are back, friends. I am so, so happy to be here with you, and am truly so grateful for the responses I’ve heard from you. For any of you who have been out there listening to this series, for someone who’s in a podcast role, it feels sometimes like we’re just here, we’re talking to the mic. And yet, I do know, I hear from all of you what is happening when you receive the information that I am sending across the interwebs to you. So thank you so much for any of you who have spoken up and shared, and even if you haven’t said anything to me for receiving what I am here to teach, what I am here to share with all of you,  I still always feel like if my podcast touches even one person, I know that it is worth it, honestly, as a teacher and a leader.

So thank you all so much for being here and listening, because here’s the truth about radical authenticity:  it is not easy for anybody, and it takes a lot of practice, and I feel like in this day and age, it can feel even more challenging to really be yourself. There are so many worry spirals that you can fall into, whether it’s what other people think of you, you might be worried about their judgement. You could be worried about being cancelled. You could be worried about being ignored. There are so many places that your brain can go, and it’s so easy for that to happen, even if you’re not someone who’s public.

I often tell my clients that you can worry about it, but people will think whatever they’re going to think anyway. They just do, and here’s an example…. So say that you are feeling pretty repressed in your life. You’re following the things that people have always told you to do. You follow the ladder that society says is the way to success, and then you’re actually utterly miserable. But people are out there saying, “Oh, wow, you’re doing so great.” Your life seems so amazing on the other side. You could be someone who is following a nontraditional path. Like, you’re doing things your own way. You’re actually really happy, and you’re really into what you’re doing. And people are like, what the heck is she doing anyway? So when I think about it that way, I’m like, why not just do it your way anyway? People are going to say whatever they’re going to say. They don’t actually have insight into what’s happening on the inside. The internal place for you. And I have discovered over time in life, that that is the place that actually matters. Why not just be yourself?  And that really is the point of this series, Radical Authenticity. What does that look like? What are the biggest things that get in the way, and what does it look like on the other side when you really are stepping into it?

In the first couple of episodes, we covered me being radically authentic in the very first episode, the second episode, we talked about what it looks like to leverage who you are, your identity as a superpower, and then today, we are getting into the biggest blocks to being your superpowered, authentic self, specifically the four main ones for Asian American women leaders, and this is the stuff that creates pressure. I know whenever I experience pressure, it feels very intense, and it makes you do things that you’re not aligned with. It starts to make you think things that feel very stressful, and it makes you hold back from stepping into your actual, authentic self. These are the things that make you wake up with anxiety, then that anxiety keeps you from making the decisions that will actually alleviate the anxiety. I know anxiety is so tricky like that. So this is the place for us to talk about it.

What are the things that are stopping you in your tracks, keeping you in that anxiety spiral, in emotional reactivity, rather than the calm, grounded, present place that allows you to be in expansion? You are designed for growth. It’s the truth of any human. And when we are in anxiety and stress and overwhelm, it’s just not possible. We are not in a state of growth. We are in a state of contraction. My goal in my life is to always be in a state of growth, and then to support you, to be in the same place.

That’s how these four blocks came about. They’re from experience in my own life and from what I see in my own clients, and they’re from what I see from people in general, in the world that we live in today. So if you’re doing any of these, here’s the time for us to start to make the shift. And the cool thing is, the identification is how you start to make the change. So let’s dig in.

The first block is believing the identity of ‘not enough’. Look, I know a lot of you out there are the workhorses. You get stuff done. You are so efficient. You are so effective. You can get things done faster than other people. And people often come to you because you are so effective. And then that sometimes means you’re juggling five projects at the same time at work, like, you’re the one that people are coming to for this. But what can happen when you’re in this identity of ‘not enough’, is that you never get recognized for anything, outside of that. You never get recognized for the deeper skill sets, the deeper gifts that you truly have.

And when we look at being efficient and effective, and look, I love to be efficient and effective, I am also that person. But when you look deeper at it, what is actually causing you to run that all the time? Why do you always have to be so efficient? Why do you always have to be so effective? And what is that deeper cost to you personally? For many of you, it’s the programming of ‘not enough’. It’s that internal wiring that gets you to work insane hours, like up till midnight. And then it gets you to try to prove yourself to people who might not believe in you to begin with, because the truth is that there are forces out there that just do not want you to succeed.

These are the forces that get you to sacrifice yourself, to never make choices that work for you, for your family, and for your life. These are the forces that keep you scrolling on social media and comparing yourself to other people. And these forces are at play in your corporate job. They’re at play in every email you receive. They’re at play with the leadership where you’re working. They’re at play with your team. They’re at play with the people that you know in your life. It’s this programming that has you fixating on seeing yourself as not valuable; as needing to prove yourself rather than seeing the truth, which is that you are worthy as you are, and you are valuable the way that you are. The sooner you can make a shift to being someone who is super-worthy, simply by breathing and being alive, there’s nothing to prove, there’s nothing to earn, the sooner you can make the shift to living from a place of deeper authenticity.

The second block that I see come up for so many women, is nervous system dysregulation. So our nervous systems are designed around two types, and one is really designed to be our main one, the parasympathetic. To be calm, to be grounded, to be present. And then there’s our fight or flight, which is only supposed to be the exception. But for most of us these days, we’re living in the exception. We are living in the activated fight or flight state. And if you are not prioritizing calming your nervous system consistently, you are also going to be in a state of constant reactivity, and when you are in an activated reactive state, it is literally impossible for you to be your superpowered, authentic self. It doesn’t exist in that place.

Emotional reactivity is wound up. Emotional reactivity is not giving you clear answers. It’s just keeping you fixated on this ‘not enough’ state. And how can you expect to stop emotional reactivity if you are not present? So the first step here is to understand and assess your anxiety. Understand if it’s constant. If it is, then your goal is to start to feel calm, grounded, and present for at least a few minutes per day. Over time, you start to learn that you can actually feel that way all the time. Even if you get an unexpected project at work, or if you get a surprise text from your mom about some emergency that she didn’t tell you about, learning to be calm, grounded, and present is really an essential place to start, to even begin to feel a little bit like your superpowered, authentic self, so this, to me, is always the highest priority to start at. If you’re not doing it, that is definitely blocking you from taking that next step.

And then here is the third block. The third block is outsourcing your self-worth to work. This is you tying your worth, your value to the things that you do, how successful a work project is, how it’s received by leadership, the feedback that you get, whether you’re getting promoted or progressing and advancing at work, the size of your body, how much you weigh, how strong you are, how weak you feel, whether you’re going to yoga consistently, how far you’re walking, how good a mom you are, whether you’re spending time with your kids or not spending time with your kids, are you actually spending time with your partner? Are you seeing your friends? So when you’re continually believing that your worth and value is limited to those things – how much you produce at work, the things you get done, whether you made a good dinner for your family – you will never break the cycle. You’ll keep saying “yes” to all the meetings. You’ll let other people’s needs come first. You won’t set boundaries, and you won’t actually ever take the time that you need for yourself. On top of this, you’ll actually keep letting other people define success for you, which means you’ll never feel successful on your own terms. So taking back your worth and your value from what you do, is truly a game changer for being your superpowered and most authentic self.

Okay, so here, this leads us now to the fourth block, to being your authentic self on every level, and this is not making intuitive decisions. So smart women tend to use logic. It’s just the nature of things. It’s the system that we were brought up in, the framework you learned at school. It’s how your workplace functions. It’s very logical. It’s probably very spreadsheet-oriented. It’s very numbers based, and it’s how you got to where you are. And isn’t being logical basically how you advance in this world, especially in the corporate world? What I know is, that you’re definitely smart. You’re not just a little bit smart. You’re a smarty pants. You’re super smart, no doubt.

But I also bet that you are exhausted by how many decisions you’re making all the time, for your team, for yourself, whatever that looks like. And then what happens is, you also stay up late, thinking about some of the decisions you’re trying to figure out, even the decisions you’ve already made. Maybe you’re second guessing some of them, or you’re waking up with anxiety because you’re trying to make a big decision, and it really falls on you. What if you could actually stop using your brain to make decisions? Okay, hear me out. Your brain uses 20% of your energy all day, passively. Like, you don’t have to do anything, and your brain is this huge organ that is taking up a ton of energy, and that’s actually how we get decision fatigue, because your body is trying to save energy and keep your brain from making decisions.

When we go into decision fatigue, this is when you start buying things at the checkout aisle at the grocery store, because you’re in decision fatigue. You’re in the checkout aisle and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll get a little gum, a little candy,” et cetera. But what if you actually leaned into a more powerful tool than your brain for making decisions? That is your intuition. It’s a deeper intelligence, and when you really start to access it, you finally get freed from making decisions all the time with your brain, and you can start to lean into knowledge. You can start to lean into wisdom in a much deeper level. This is where we start to really get free, the place where you’re starting to get on the other side of who you truly are, being the superpowered, authentic version of yourself. And when you can lean into intuition, that’s the one that’s going to help you decide. Do I stay at my job? Do I go? Is this the place I need to be? Does my family need to stay here? Do we need to move somewhere else? Any of those really big things that can drain us, because it takes so much energy to make that decision.

When you start to really lean into intuition, you can free yourself and have so much more space, so much more energy. And on top of that, you actually really learn to trust yourself on a much different level. So if you’re not making intuitive decisions, now is the time to start to look at what would it take for me to start to make intuitive decisions? And if that is something you’re interested in, that is what’s next. How do you start to do that? So I have many episodes talking about intuition, and if it’s something where you actually want to engage with me, you can dm me. I have an intuition check, which is where we have a quick chat and brainstorm on intuitive communication patterns and putting them into action, in a way that’s fun. If that’s something you’d like to learn more about, dm me intuition on Instagram at Nicole Tsong, and let’s chat.

Okay friends, it has really been a pleasure having this incredible conversation with you and the arc of this series. I feel very deeply moved by what’s been occurring here and grateful to be able to share all of this with you, and to be stepping into being my most authentic self with all of you. So thank you so much for all of your insight. If this resonates with you, please screenshot it, share it on social media, put it on your insta story and tag me and let me know what resonated with you. Okay friends, thank you so much. See you soon. Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode.

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, so make sure to dm me quiz on at Nicole Tsong at Instagram and thank you for being here and for listening. We read every note that 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.