Do you ever experience so much pressure that you feel like you’re going to POP?
That’s likely because you don’t even know what’s causing you to feel so much pressure.
But for Asian-American women, there is more to the pressure than you might realize at first.
Inside this episode, I break down the three-part Asian Pressure Cycle, and the cultural conditioning AAPI women grow up with, which could be squeezing you in ways you don’t even realize.
I also share my controversial take about pressure, which you don’t want to miss!
“The pressure from family… it’s literally in the air you breathe and how you grew up… when you are growing up in an Asian culture, in a family, the collective is the value. The value is the family. The value is the whole.”
“Like a helium balloon that’s getting inflated and it’s going bigger and bigger and bigger, and if it gets all the way to its max, it’s going to pop. And that kind of is what I think everyone is afraid of.”
“We’re already living in a culture and a society that puts so much pressure on women to be a certain way. Like, you have to be the one who’s working really hard. And you’re also the perfect mom caretaking for your kids. And you’re also a great partner and you have to look good while you’re doing it.”
“Pressure isn’t always bad. It just depends on the type of pressure that we’re talking about… the pressure of growth is actually really powerful. I actually really love the power of pressure when it comes to helping me grow. And it’s literally the only way we can transform.”
“Look at a diamond, it turns from coal into a diamond because of pressure. So I don’t ever want us to demonize pressure because it’s not all bad.”
“If you are putting pressure on yourself to do more at work, to work crazier hours, because that’s the only way you’re going to get recognized or get the promotion… those are the places we’re wanting to release that pressure. How can we start to be like, wow, I’m holding myself to an unattainable standard?”
NICOLE
Hello, friends. I’m Nicole Tsong, and this is the School of Self-Worth. Today’s topic is about something I have been hearing from so many of you: pressure. Yeah, that’s right—pressure. The pressure to perform at work, the pressure to be a good mom, the pressure to be a good partner, a good daughter. The list goes on and on. I have a bit of a controversial take on it, and I’m pretty excited to share more about pressure with all of you today.
I decided to put together a really special episode around it: the causes of pressure, specifically for Asian American women, which are not the same as they are for everyone else, and the exact reason why the pressure is getting to you. So, before we get started, if you are an Asian American woman who wants to reverse negative cultural conditioning so that you can make clear, confident decisions and thrive in your life, I have something for you. Go over to my Instagram at Nicole Tsong and DM me “powerful,” and I’ll send it over to you.
All right, friends, let’s dig into this juicy, fun conversation. 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.
Okay, we are here to talk about pressure. This topic comes up really consistently, I find, for clients and women I’m talking to about where they’re struggling the most. I also hear it all the time from my own clients who are working to move past it. Whenever they’re telling me they feel a lot of pressure—pressure in general—it reminds me of a balloon. It’s like a helium balloon that’s getting inflated, going bigger and bigger, and if it gets all the way to its max, it’s going to pop. That kind of pressure is what everyone is afraid of, and it can start to bring you down this road of feeling like you really have to do something about all this pressure that you’re feeling.
The other thing to know about pressure that’s really important to understand is sorting out exactly what kind of pressure you are experiencing, because there are different types. I’m going to share with you why I actually think pressure can be good. Just like when you’re making food—if you have a frozen meal and then you make the exact same homemade meal with the same ingredients—you are going to have a totally different experience and outcome, including the nutritional value of that meal. So, we really want to understand and differentiate between the types of pressure and understand what is causing them. That’s really what we’re going to get into today.
We’re going to talk first about the kind of pressure that you probably were drawn to with this episode: the kind of pressure that feels the worst, that feels awful. It sits on your chest when you wake up in the morning. You really don’t want to look at your calendar; you don’t want to deal with anything that is on your list. This is the kind that makes you feel like you’re not doing enough, that makes you feel like you’re behind in life, that you’re not successful, and that you don’t really know how to have a balanced life where you can prioritize yourself while also still succeeding and doing really well in your work and in every other area of your life.
After working with hundreds of Asian American women, I have found that they experience three particular types of pressure. These types of pressure are really different from what other women experience. They’re based in culture and background, and I think it’s really important that these conversations are had openly so that we start to understand much more about the way we were raised and the reason we put so much pressure on ourselves.
I’m going to share with you the three-part Asian pressure cycle. This cycle, when you really start to master it and understand what’s causing so much of the pressure, is how you start to get a little bit of that air out of the balloon. You stop feeling so intense about it, and you start to understand what is causing you to feel the way that you do. So, let’s dig into this.
The first kind of pressure is the pressure from family. This one is tough because it’s literally in the air you breathe and how you grew up. When you grow up with Asian parents, I don’t like to generalize about Asia because it is such a giant place with so many cultures and countries. But one thing that connects most Asian cultures is a dedication to the collective and to the whole. This really differentiates Asian cultures and countries from the United States. When you are growing up in an Asian culture, in a family, the collective is the value. The value is the family. The value is the whole. The individual is not really part of that calibration. Everything you’re doing is a reflection upon that bigger picture of the family.
When you have parents who raise you that way, you don’t necessarily think about it; it’s just everywhere. It’s in everything that you do. Family always comes first. In this air that you’re breathing of family pressure, you should care about what the neighbors think. You should care if what you’re doing reflects well or not upon your family. This is reflected in how you perform in school, the kind of college you go to, and the kind of career you take. This is why so many Asian families pressure their kids to follow traditional pathways, like becoming a doctor or a lawyer, making a lot of money, impressing everybody, and really representing your family in a way that makes them proud.
When you start to make any decisions that are outside what they might consider right—what your parents might consider good for the collective or the whole—you start to feel stress and pressure to adhere to what they think you should do. Most of us learn to start to bucket in some ways, but when it really comes to a deeper level of doing something for yourself, it can feel incredibly difficult. I say this as someone who pivoted from journalism to yoga teaching and then to entrepreneurship. Your parents may or may not express this pressure; it really depends on your parents and the type of family you grew up with. But you can feel it.
I know that when I was pivoting to be a yoga teacher, I was really worried about what my parents would think. I thought they would disapprove and that they would say, “What are you doing? You’re going to waste your life and throw it away on being a yoga teacher?” It was constantly in the back of my mind: “You’re not pretty enough. You’re not good enough to do XYZ.” There’s a lot of marketing and messaging always telling us that we are not good enough to do the things we want to do in the world. When you start to really look at it and understand it, it’s amazing how much it is all around us all the time.
We also live in a society where there is a lot of pressure to be different than you are. America is very much about remaking yourself and being whoever you want to be. But if you don’t know who you want to be, that itself creates pressure—like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know who I am. I’m not living up to that dream,” whatever it is. We have to really understand that we’re already living in a culture and a society that puts so much pressure on women to be a certain way. You have to be the one who’s working really hard, the perfect mom caretaking for your kids, a great partner, and looking good while doing it. None of us can live up to those standards.
Noticing that this is occurring all the time is crucial. If you’re spending a lot of time scrolling or on social media, you’re probably feeling that even more intensely. You might think, “I have to do things a certain way.” I see this so much with my clients. So, notice and understand that there’s a lot of stuff out in the air that’s telling you over and over again that you’re not doing enough and you’re not succeeding. We want to release that pressure valve. It’s just like having your foot on the gas; you want to take your foot off of it.
This leads me to the third type of pressure, which is a little bit insidious for most of us: the pressure to fit in. There’s already a societal pressure to be a certain way, and then we add in the fact that you are a person of color in the United States, living in a white-dominated society where you never really fit in. You can’t, by the way you look, and by the questions people ask you—like, “What are you? Where are you really from? Your English is so good!”—you might be like me, having grown up in a really white community. You’re surrounded by this pressure, trying to figure out what’s happening in the world you’re growing up in.
You might have wanted blonde hair and blue eyes when you were a kid and wondered, “Why is my nose the way it is? How come my eyes are the way they are? Why is my hair so straight?” You never really saw examples of Asians in media or culture, especially when you were younger. Now we have this new pressure, a different kind of pressure, to be like everybody else. That’s also what happens when you’re a kid, and you’re being raised by immigrant parents who have this “work hard” mentality. You might think, “Okay, I’m working so hard, but it’s not making any difference,” because it doesn’t really make a difference in this particular realm.
We also throw in the model minority myth, where people say, “Oh, well, you’re just quiet and successful.” You go down that track, and then you’re like, “That’s not actually working for me either.” Can you notice how all these different parts of the pressures in the Asian pressure cycle can really take you out? It makes it impossible for you to step into the version of yourself where you feel most connected, most purposeful, and most powerful.
What we want for all of you is to recognize that this identification we’re going through right now is really important. For a lot of Asian American women, we just don’t always recognize what we were raised with and how everything around us causes us to put so much unnecessary pressure on ourselves. When you can start to identify it and see it—this is what I work on with my clients—you can understand how it’s impacting you on a daily basis and start to learn how to shake that off to have a different experience. That’s when they get free. They can say, “Oh, wow, I can make a choice that serves me and still also works for my family.”
I understand how to navigate the pressures in a totally different way than I ever have before. When we’re not navigating them well, we can become resentful, angry, or hold a grudge, or feel a lot of shame if we’re trying to do something outside what our family might expect. So we’re always looking at how we can start to shift this.
This leads me to my controversial take on pressure: pressure isn’t always bad. It just depends on the type of pressure we’re talking about. I was a journalist, and let’s start there. We had deadlines—extreme deadlines sometimes. I have fully written stories in 30 minutes before—600, 800 words, super fast—because you just had to. I didn’t want to, but I learned how to. Honestly, it’s one of the lessons I’m so grateful for from a decade in journalism. It taught me that I can do more than I think I can. Every time I had a story, I had all these notes, and my editors would be looking over my shoulder, saying, “Nicole, we need that story fast.” I’d be like, “Okay.” I would sit down at my computer, get super focused, and just slam that story out.
That’s the kind of pressure we want to understand—where it actually helps us. It helps us execute, thrive, and grow. We have to learn to differentiate between the types of pressure. There’s the internal kind of pressure, which is the negative type—the type where you’re being hard on yourself, telling yourself you’re not good enough, that you’re never going to succeed, that you’re never going to get recognized, and really criticizing yourself constantly. Then there’s the kind that can be helpful.
I really love the pressure of accountability. It’s the type of pressure that keeps me on track—communities, people, leaders, and mentors who support me to do the things I know I’m here to do. Some of you really care about stepping into your purpose in a deeper way, and that does require pressure because you’re going to start doing things you’ve never done before. I’m always telling my clients that we have to navigate doing new things. When you start to step into your purpose, you’re going to go outside the zone of things you know how to do, and that is a particular kind of pressure.
We have to learn how to bring in the correct things for ourselves, like community and support from others who have walked that pathway before us, so we can learn to walk that pathway for ourselves. To me, pressure for growth is actually really powerful. I genuinely love the power of pressure when it comes to helping me grow. It’s literally the only way we can transform. Look at a diamond; it turns from coal into a diamond because of pressure.
I don’t ever want us to demonize pressure because it’s not all bad. What we want to learn to do is navigate the kind that’s not serving you and step into the kind that’s going to make a difference—the kind that you actually want to embrace and take on for yourself. The first step, though, is to take the pressure off yourself around anything you’re currently doing that involves pressure.
If you are putting pressure on yourself to do more at work, to work crazier hours because that’s the only way you’re going to get recognized or get the promotion, or if you’re putting pressure on yourself to throw the perfect party for your kid, those are the places where we want to start releasing that pressure. We can start to recognize that we’re holding ourselves to unattainable standards, which is making our life force diminish.
My first suggestion for that is a simple two-step process. First, do something to help yourself chill out and regulate your nervous system. Go for a walk, take a yoga class, look outside, breathe some fresh air—just do something to help yourself ground. Second, understand the type of pressure you’re creating. Is this internal pressure? Is it pressure for growth? Or is it the pressure of, “I have to perform, I have to do things a certain way, or I have to meet a standard outside of myself or a standard that I might have just made up that isn’t real?”
What kind of pressure are you putting on yourself? How can you start to release that pressure a little bit? Once you’ve taken that pressure off, that’s when we can start to play. That’s where my clients go. Once we consistently learn to take the pressure off, this isn’t a one-time thing. You might take it off after today’s podcast episode, which is awesome, but tomorrow it might come back again.
What I do with my clients is work consistently over several months to learn how to take off the incorrect kind of pressure. Then we start to learn how to navigate through it so that we can move in the direction of growth, expansion, purpose, and power. If you’re wanting support and the exact step-by-step for how to do this every single day, to really go deeper into understanding how to stop being so hard on yourself, to stop that inner critic, and to really step forward into growth and expansion, DM me “powerful” on Instagram, and let’s chat. I really want to support you in stepping into the place that’s going to make the biggest difference for you.
Okay, friends, thank you so much for being part of this conversation today. If it resonated with you, please screenshot it, share it on Instagram Stories, and tag me, or DM me, and let’s talk about how we can make a difference for you. We’ll talk to you soon. See you next week! Thank you so much 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” on Instagram.
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.
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