Episode 135: Feeling It Out Versus Figuring It Out With Amy Eliza Wong
Most people from all walks of life tend to be dissatisfied and question the life they're leading, keeping them from living with profound happiness. That hole in their lives should be filled to help them find the path toward Living on Purpose. In this interview, Amy Eliza Wong, a Conversational Intelligence Expert, discusses her journey of being aware of the power of the mind since she was young and how her people-pleasing tendencies took her down a path she needed to recover from. She talks about the conscious versus unconscious actions we take, effort versus action to help someone in need, and releasing yourself from the "shoulds" in life that lead to unhappiness. Combining her experiences with aspects of social neuroscience, Amy brings insight to lead people back into living with happiness. So, why don't you stop figuring life out and instead feel it out? Tune in to this conversation to free yourself from the vacuum of dissatisfaction.
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Feeling It Out Versus Figuring It Out With Amy Eliza Wong
I interviewed Amy Eliza Wong, a transformational coach, speaker, conversational intelligence expert, and author of Living On Purpose. Once her first child entered her world, Amy began questioning everything that had made her who she was and couldn’t bring herself to return to what had been a rewarding career. One day, while sitting hopelessly on the floor in her closet, inspiration struck. It wasn’t about figuring it out. It was about feeling it out.
This insight became the first of five deliberate choices she discovered that one must make to lead a life of fulfillment and joy. In this episode, she leverages this philosophy in her bestselling book, keynotes, and coaching practice. During my interview with Amy, we talked about the power of the mind since she was a young child, and how her people-pleasing tendencies took her down a path she needed to recover from. We discuss in this episode the conscious versus unconscious actions we take, effort versus action to help someone who is in need, and releasing yourself from the shoulds in life that lead to unhappiness.
During this episode, we talked about eating disorders. If you or anyone you know is suffering from this condition, please reach out to someone to get help and speak up. We are here to offer this story in order for a way for us to all identify when we are in need and whatever that may be so that we don’t turn a blind eye to ourselves and not understand the effect that we’re having on the people around us. I hope you enjoy this episode, and please share this with anyone that you think would benefit from it. It is always beneficial if you share, subscribe, and leave comments on our episodes so that other people know how this show is providing value to you.
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I am very excited to be interviewing Amy Eliza Wong. She is with Always On Purpose. Amy, do you want to get started and give a little background on yourself, and then we’ll get right into your story?
Thanks for having me. I’m delighted to jump into this conversation with you. I am an Executive Leadership Coach. I partner with executives, founders, and their teams on all things growth, transformation, and flow. One of my areas of expertise and passion is communication. The reason that this is juicy is because everybody wants to get better at communication because they innately get that it’s in this medium of communication that everything happens.
When we can get this medium right, everything is possible. The way I see this medium of communication, there’s so much here. What’s powerful about this is truly, this is where everything happens because we don’t live in a vacuum. Everything is in this medium. The way I see it is it’s a great entry point for deeper work because all communication is effectual of the relationship we have with ourselves and the beliefs we hold. Depending on how deep a client wants to go, we’ll go as deep as we need to go. The way I see it, communication is a fabulous entry point.
I’m so glad to have you here. I’m excited to get right into your story and maybe you can give us a little background on where you grew up, your family, what your parents did for a living, and so forth.
I’m fortunate. My parents are best friends and are married for 50 years in November 2023, which is awesome. We’re going to have a big party. They’re so fun. They’re my favorite people. I’m very blessed. They bought a bar in their early twenties. My dad was an incredible rock and roll drummer. They toured and did cool things. My parents were super cool. I was born and raised in a bar. My parents are awesome people. They’re wise, kind, and good to each other. They’re lovely humans. My mom and grandma are very metaphysical. I was raised in a household where we were constantly talking about the power of our minds, consciousness, and conscious thinking, where we place our attention and we create. I was fascinated by this at a very young age.
That is what sparked my deep love interest in all things consciousness studies. Starting at a young age, I started reading spiritual books. I found Thich Nhat Hanh in fifth grade at the public library and started meditating in fifth grade. I was reading people like Wayne Dyer, Ram Dass, and Krishnamurti at young ages. I loved it. What do I love about it? It’s all I wanted to spend my time on. It’s like, “How are we not focused on this more? This stuff is fascinating. This idea that our thinking, minds, attention, and consciousness are powerful.”
I remember learning about The Placebo Effect when I was young. I remember thinking, “This isn’t proof that we have way more power than we realize. I don’t know why we’re not talking about this more.” I remember feeling dumbfounded at humanity for not caring about this more. A couple of things, because my dad is a musician, music is big in our house. I started playing piano at five. I’m also now a musician.
I’m super in love with the piano. I play all the time. Naturally, I think what happened was this love of music and being a musician, it’s a search for truth. It led me to the study of Mathematics. I studied Pure Math at UC Berkeley. That truly was born out of a deep interest and fascination. Many people would say, “What are you going to do with this?” I’m like, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” They’re like, “Do you want to teach?” I’m like, “I love teaching, but I don’t think I’m meant to teach Math.”
Throughout my childhood, I was very enterprising. I started a tutoring business. I had my own piano teaching business. I rented a piano studio from my music teacher at one of the biggest music stores in Sacramento. That’s where I grew up. I was bawling as a kid. I was making a lot of money. I felt like I was on top of the world.
You said young age, when did you start that?
I started tutoring and teaching around ninth grade. I’m fourteen. It’s funny I have a fifteen-year-old son.
As far as starting a business doing that, did someone ask you originally, to get help, or what made you want to do this at that age?
It’s always organic. I don’t remember waking up one morning and going, “I’m going to start a business.” It was all signs and always merged in that direction. It was effortless. I loved it. This deep search for truth and this wild obsession for Mathematics is all I wanted to spend my time with. My parents had an interesting story. They had a bar. My dad moved on from that. He’s got an incredible story himself. Long story short, it ends up at Dean Witter. It’s now Morgan Stanley. He doesn’t have a college degree.
He’s one of those incredible self-made stories that took off. He’s exceptional. He made a huge leap of faith and went from the bar business into the financial industry. My mom has started a daycare in our house. We had a lot of little kids in our house. It was loving and chaotic constantly. I also have a younger brother and sister so there’s so much going on. I am a perfectionist and a people pleaser. I am very organized and responsible. My hypothesis is that it was the combination of the chaos in our home and the insecurities I felt in middle school and high school. This deep need for control led to a horrible eating disorder. I ended up falling prey to a consuming eating disorder that changed everything. However, my deep love of Math, music, and studying were all there. I was a complete machine.
What made you insecure in middle school?
I don’t know what kid isn’t insecure in middle school. Just because of my makeup, I’ve always been way less now because of all the work I do. Back as a kid, I was such a people pleaser. I’m worried about upsetting. I didn’t want people to be burdened. I wanted to make everybody happy. I’m afraid of other people’s judgment. When you enter middle school, hormones are raging. Kids are mean. It’s a very uncomfortable time. The work that I do now has been catalyzed by all the work and all of my own personal experiences. I would not be able to do the work I do now if it wasn’t for the trials and tribulations I’ve gone through.
Part of what I teach as a leadership and communication coach, a lot of what we don’t talk about is that death to the brain is rejection. Our neurobiology is hardwired to seek acceptance, belonging, and approval. That is life. That is safety to the brain. It’s not just nice to have, but it is a fundamental and primal need. As a child or adolescent, you’re desperately craving that sense of acceptance. You want that, then I know for a fact now that I’m in high school, freshman and I feel out of place. I feel like everybody’s cool, but not me.
Living With Profound Happiness: Rejection is death to the brain. Our neurobiology is hardwired to seek acceptance, belonging, and approval. That is life. That is safety to the brain.
What didn’t feel cool?
It’s that deep sense of inadequacy like, “They’ve got the cool brands and good looks. They seem at ease. It doesn’t look like they’re worried about anything. What’s wrong with me?” That’s what’s going on on the inside. On the outside, that doesn’t show. I’ve got friends. I’m in sports. I’m involved, but uncomfortable on the inside. One day, something snapped and I remember very vividly being fed up with the feeling that if something clicked in my mind, I was like, “I am done feeling out of control and inadequate.”
I would constantly be comparing my body size to everybody else. I was very athletic. I’m not skinny, definitely not overweight. I’m thin, but I’m athletic. I’m looking at the girls that I think are “cool.” I’m like, “They’re skinny. Maybe that’s why they’re at ease. There it is. Peace of mind comes when you’re skinny.” Back in the day, Kate Moss was our idol. I snapped, made a decision, and went down that path. It was a dark period between the ages of 15 to 16 all the way up until the mid-20s. A while back, it was hard to talk about because there was a shame. Now there’s no shame. I see it with much gratitude.
Did your parents notice it was happening?
My poor parents were beside themselves. I hid it from everybody except for them. They wanted desperately to be able to help me. They threw everything they had at it. The truth was I wasn’t ready to heal. My inability to heal was not because of their lack of trying their love or their care, their attention towards it. It was that my soul and myself weren’t time. That was a journey.
It’s interesting that from a very young age, you were reading about consciousness and all of that from your mind, and then you did something that was unconscious. It seems like you are a researcher and are deep. While this was going on, did you have any conversation about this happening? Were you researching yourself while it was happening or were you letting this go? Do you needed to have a piece of you to not be perfect?
I would say yes to all of it. What was more true for me at the time was in the midst of the pain, and I truly say pain like if you haven’t had an eating disorder, an addiction of some sort, it’s hard to describe, I have a strong-rooted belief within myself that I will overcome this. I will not have this forever. I’m not sure how it’s going to happen, but I knew my mind was strong. I knew it wasn’t even a belief. It was a knowing.
It wasn’t an entirely conscious part of me, but a more maybe subconscious part of me that knew that this was on purpose. I trusted the process. On a normal waking consciousness, I was miserable and surviving. It was very challenging. I had a deep belief that this would all come together at some point. That ran in the background. Was it entirely conscious? No, but it was there I’m certain because of all of the exposure and study that I had done to that point.
That was clicking it. I talk about that with you and I go, “It’s an insurance policy. You never know when you need to click into those practices, but they come at times when you need it. You knew it.” This is important as the power of the mind because I’ve dealt with other types of abuse in my family and there’s a hard situation from people that try to support people that are in some addiction, where you feel like they could stop like, “Why won’t they stop?”
I remember being with a family member and the doctor talking to me and saying, “It’s harder than cancer because for cancer, you go to the doctor and you say, ‘Give me the medicine.’” As far as pain or anything else, it’s not someone’s mind fighting you to get the help. Addiction is a disease. It’s very hard to get someone to get the help. You can’t just prescribe the help if someone is not ready to hear it. How would you advise other people who might be reading that have someone who has an addiction or some serious condition like you went through that is something that is a power of the mind? How do you help them in that process?
This is a big answer. What I’m about to say is at all interesting to anyone. I highly recommend the book, The Myth Of Normal by Dr. Gabor Maté. He is phenomenal. First, it’s to understand that we don’t want to see addiction, or even disease for that matter, as a thing that happens to us, but instead, a process that we’re going through. If you accept that this is a process that you’re going through, and this might be hard for folks to read, before your highest health and wholeness, then it changes the game. Something is arising for us to take a look at and something needs to shift. It’s at the belief level. What Gabor Maté says, and this is going to sound pretty intense, “The personality needs to change,” because there is a significant imbalance in the entirety of one’s system and self.
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Addiction, disease, cancer, and all of these things arise when we are deeply imbalanced. It points back to the relationship we have with ourselves and the relationship we hold with the world around us. It’s always going to map back to a lack of self-love. Because you lack self-love, it’s hard to love another and feel compassion. This is a big conversation, but in short, if we can look at these very painful experiences we go through as a process that’s here to show us something and we surrender to that, allowing ourselves to open up to the idea that growth is not just possible, but is supposed to be inevitable. By releasing the resistance we have through this paradigm of, “This is unwanted,” when we can release that resistance, healing happens so much faster. It comes down to trust.
How would a person who loves that person help? Is there there a way to help that person at that time?
A lot of people want to apply effort and action to stuff that we want to fix and help when we think that it’s behaviors and it’s things that we need to do to fix and decisions we need to make. Given what I’ve learned, experienced, and researched, one of the most powerful things we can do to influence and help is our presence. When I say our presence, what we can offer is when we look upon this loved one, this family member, or friend, we see them as whole and complete. You love them unconditionally. You trust their process. The truth is who are you to say what their process is supposed to be?
This is their process. All you can do is shine the light of loving awareness towards them. When you hold them in such high regard, that starts the healing process because when you can truly see another, that’s when there’s an opening for that individual for them to see themselves. The good news is that one of the easiest things we can do is to hold them in such loving, high regard, trusting that they are on the right path, releasing the sphere, and surrendering to the process. It’s also the hardest thing we can do because we were trained to do stuff. We’re like, “That’s not enough. I need to go call this rehab center. I need to do this.” You can do that but I think where we get the most bang for our buck is in our own loving presence and the love that we offer.
It is a hard thing because someone has to be ready to help and hear it. You could say it 10 times until the 10th time they hear it. It’s like the first time they ever heard it. What was the thing for you that clicked or in your process you changed?
I write about this in my book. My book is called Living On Purpose. The subtitle is Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy. The book itself is a roadmap out of self-sabotage, a false perception, and the ways in which we hold ourselves back from truly the life we’re meant to live into a life of joy and meaning, inner peace, and freedom. I share my story because a lot of folks need to know like, “Where did this roadmap come from?” I mentioned that because I write about this.
Living on Purpose: Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy
I’m at Cal and I have this very consuming eating disorder. It’s anorexia by day, bulimia by night, and almost nothing during the day, studying, and working out twice at ridiculous intensities. I was overscheduled. I was an Air Force ROTC. I had multiple jobs that I took on. I was even in a hip-hop dance troupe for a little while and I’m majoring in Math, which is no easy feat. It was so much work. I’m doing all these things.
I am a machine. I remember there are many herbal stores on Telegraph. This was before they banned fedora. I would buy bottles of fedora. I took so much of fedora during the day to keep me awake because I needed the energy to keep me going. At night, I was spent. I would totally crash at around 11:00-ish or so. Mind you, I have a best friend. We are inseparable. She’s majoring in Math as well. We do everything together. We study together.
We go up the hill to watch the sunset every night before we go back to study. We are together all the time except for when I go back to the gym for a second time. She goes off to the Philosophy building because she got a minor in Philosophy. I’m keeping it secret from her and everybody. I am very tight-lipped. I don’t want anyone to know about it. At 11:00, I would send her away from my apartment because we’d be studying all night. She’d go home to go to sleep. I never let her spend the night. I don’t know how I managed to pull that off without it. That’s how it worked. I would crash. I would fall asleep and then my body would wake me up at 1:00 in the morning or so.
It was always in that extremely rummy, almost sleepwalking state that I would find myself in the kitchen binging and purging for hours because I was hungry and exhausted. Sometimes I would even make midnight runs. I do remember certain times I’d have to run to the store to get more cereal or something in the middle of the night, 24-hour safeway. It was horrible. This lasted for quite a few years. It was my senior year in college. My best friend and I are leaving our Abstract Geometry lecture. It’s early evening. We always part at a certain corner because she goes to her apartment and I’m going to go to my car because I have an off-campus apartment.
She says to me, “Come over. You’re coming over tonight. I’m making dinner.” I was like, “No. That breaks the rules.” First off, I never went to her apartment because she had roommates. It’s not that I didn’t like them. I loved them, but that wasn’t the thing. I had my own apartment. We go to my apartment and I always cook because that’s how it goes. Nobody else cooks for me. I was always very generous with the cooking. For her to say, “I’m cooking,” it was not for me. She kept at me. I know she saw something in me that day because I was broken, gaunt, lifeless, and tired.
She said, “You’re coming over and I’m not taking no for an answer.” I thought, “Okay.” I ended up going over to her place. We are now 21 because it’s our senior year. That’s a big deal. She had a bottle of wine. She makes veggie spaghetti and opens up a cheap bottle of wine. We’re talking and she says to me, “I have a secret I have to share with you. I’m so ashamed. It’s hard for me to say.” I’m like, “What?” She goes, “When you leave for your second workout and I go to Moses Hall, I smoke. When I got home from the day before we met up again, I smoked on the balcony. I thought I did it for fun, but I tried to quit last week. I can’t stop. I’m scared. I hate to think that I’m a smoker.”
She started sobbing. I’m looking at her like, “This is my best friend in the entire world. I have absolutely no idea,” but at the same time, I’m like, “Oh.” I held her we both sobbed for the collective pain that we’d felt. I’m holding her and I’m like, “It’s okay.” She’s sobbing and I’m holding her. After some time, I said, “I have a secret that I want to share with you too. I’m ashamed and scared.” I opened up and I was crying. She’s listening and I share for a while. After we’re all we’re done, she looks at me and she goes, “I’ve known and it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
I remember us crying. In that moment, something lifted. I’ve never felt so free. I went home that night and for the first time in six years, truly there was not one exception to this, I slept all night. My body did not wake me up. I woke up and I thought, “Wow,” because that part of me, I was terrified. It’s the reason I would never have my boyfriend or family sleepover. It was the reason I would never let her sleep at night. I was terrified of this werewolf that would come out because I couldn’t get it under control. I was free. I remember racing. We had a Math lecture that morning and I was like, “Oh my God.”
She was proud of me and I was proud of her. That was the healing for both of us. From that point forward, she never smoked again. For me, that began the path of my healing. It took a couple of years. Bulimia pretty much disappeared. It took a little while to ease into a normal diet then long story short, I ended up marrying a big restaurateur. Executive chef in San Francisco is my husband who owns a huge wholesale bakery that supplies to the West Coast. Talk about the ultimate change.
You have it in your face all the time. That’s an example of what you were talking about of how someone can support you. She waited until you were ready and she also offered up her own wants to help you to offer it up.
That’s another thing to share with folks about. If anyone is struggling with addiction or any of these things that we feel plagued and tortured by, 100%, it’s the secrecy and the shame. It’s more the shame that we feel about it that has its grip on us. In order to release that grip, we have to release the shame. One of the most powerful ways to release shame is to share. That is scary at the thought, but transformative. That’s what catalyzed that healing. There are a handful of beliefs at play that led to this point then the true metamorphosis from the old me that I am now. One of the things that I coach and I talk a lot on, I have entitled my entire chapter four to this, has to do with the word should.
I was completely brainwashed by this idea that there’s a way I should be. Even around my career and my path, there’s a way it should be. There’s a way it should go. That is the biggest trap that has us living an inauthentic life that is filled with suffering. When we are aligned with this false idea that, “There’s a way I should be, look or go,” because this whole paradigm of, “Should according to who,” was a lot of the big breakthrough.
I find that interesting because it doesn’t seem like your parents followed that path. It’s not that you had that example. They seem to very much go with the flow, at least a little bit from what you said, then switch paths when they need to. Where do you think that belief system came from?
It’s the cultural ether that we are immersed in. Our inputs very much determine our output. We have to be careful about what are we inputting, reading, listening, and watching. As an adolescent, developing teenager, and young adult, you’re going to be very much influenced by what your friends think and what’s in the magazines. We didn’t have social media or the internet back in the day, which is wild when you think about it. What’s funny is my kids are like, “There was color back in the day. You didn’t live in black and white?” I’m like, “No.”
They’re like, “Did you have working toilets back then?” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you guys.” It’s that deep neurobiological need to be accepted has us taking on cultural conversations that aren’t ours. It wasn’t my parents, but I love my parents. I’m unconditionally loved by my parents, but I was very much influenced by the world around me. I took it on.
It’s our educational system because when you think about it, you go to school and we get indoctrinated by this word should, “You should get good grades so you can make your parents happy. You could do well and you essentially can get into a good college. Now you should get into a good college so you can get a good job now. You should get a good job so you can make lots of money. You should make lots of money so that you can then be happy.”
We enter into this hamster wheel. I call it the conditional rollercoaster. It’s the unwinnable quest where we are constantly searching for the next. We get indoctrinated by this, “I should be following this path that’s been set forth for me.” We completely lose touch with what we want. We’re not even trained to tune into what we want. We are completely indoctrinated into this idea, “There’s a path that I should be following. If I follow it and I finally get to the endpoint, I will achieve happiness,” but there is no endpoint. It’s a trap and challenging but a combination of all of that that has us living by this. I think it’s the worst word in the English language personally.
You always have to watch yourself because it comes out sometimes, then you’re like, “I don’t mean that.”
It’s like, “Sorry. Let me take it back.”
How did you end up on this path to end up coaching others?
Because I studied Math, I ended up in the tech industry. I was at Sun Microsystems for ten years and I absolutely loved it. I was rising the ranks. I was doing well. I had started interning at eighteen when I was at Cal. By the time I graduated, I had pretty much a full-time job lined up. I was plugging along and it was grand. My entire identity was caught up in my work because if you’re a perfectionist, overachiever, and a pleaser, this is your life, “I’m following the should.” I had this superficial happiness of, “This is my life and I am happy. Am I happy? Yes, I’m happy. Am I happy? I don’t know, but I’m not even going to ask that question. I think I’m happy.”
I keep plugging along. It wasn’t until my first child was born in 2008. I had this massive breakdown because it was groundbreaking and transformative to have this being in the world that you end up loving so much that the entire axis of your life shifts from surrounding me to now it’s around this child. Now everything is called into question, “Who am I? What do I value? Why am I here? I couldn’t go back to work because I couldn’t, not for any logical reason.” That’s what whacked me out because I am a master of logic. Having studied Math, I am a master of logic and this was illogical for me to not be able to go back. This was a matter of the heart, but I couldn’t figure out, “What is wrong here? Why can’t I go back? If I can’t go back, then what am I going to do? If it’s not that, then what?”
It was identity paralysis. It’s what’s known in cognitive sciences. It was very consuming. It was a dark night of a soul. I had a big breakthrough at my lowest point. I was in my closet and I got this infant. I have no other words to describe it other than a divine download. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. It was in my lowest moment. The only word I have for it is surrender because I was nodded up inside. I was upset at myself for being nodded up. I’m thinking, “I’ve got a husband. I’ve got this beautiful baby boy. We’ve got a great life. What the heck is wrong with me?”
There was so much. I remember throwing my hands to the side and I looked up to the ceiling in my closet and I said, “I give up. You show me the way.” I didn’t even know who I was talking to. At that moment, I was hit with this electrifying insight and it was, “You’re going about it all wrong. It’s not about figuring it out. It’s about feeling it out.” Everything about that statement is in the entirety of its wisdom, in its divine wisdom, and in a completely floated mind system on a cellular level. I understood deeply what that meant and what needed to shift everything shifted in a moment. What came to me, and it was beyond logic or reasoning, it completely infiltrated every cell, which was, “We’re all going about it wrong.”
Why? Everything we think we want is not for the thing, title, or money. We want the feeling we think. We would have as a result of the thing, but nobody is thinking about it that way. Nobody is asking themselves what they want to feel. They’re asking, “What do they want to do? What do they want to achieve?” Therefore, we end up following the path of should to the thing oftentimes forsaking the feeling. It’s exactly for this reason that we end up with great lives on paper and we’re miserable. Everybody is walking around in a tremendous amount of pain and anxiety, midlife crises, and divorces because we are going about it all wrong. Totally, it shifted every aspect of my being. From that point forward, I committed. I’ve never looked back.
“From this point forward, my job is to only follow my inspiration, especially if it doesn’t make sense, because if I’m figuring it out, that’s the long path to what I think is going to bring me joy. If I want the path of least resistance to the path of most abundance, I must follow the feeling.” What is that? I’m following the thing where there’s relief and expansion. All the things that I had studied up to this point, the nature of duality, this existence is predicated on the expansion and the contraction like, “I see it,” there’s going to be an expansive quality to something or a constricted quality to something.
If I follow the insights, instincts, and inspiration that feel, “Ah,” versus, “Ump.” A lot of us will choose this thing because it’s like, “It sounds like such a great idea. There’s so much energy there. It makes sense. I want to do this.” That is figuring it out it’s not that that figuring it out is bad, but I guarantee you you’re not going to get the return that you’re hoping for, that you choose in the, “Ah,” the choice that makes you go, “Ah.” Oftentimes the choice that makes you go, “Ah,” usually isn’t sexy. You’re like, “Oh.” That’s not the sexy choice. It is the choice that infuses your life with joy, fulfillment, and meaning. I chose that, committed to it, and very quickly, it was almost as if my life became magical.
The amount of synchronicity, flow, delight, and then all of a sudden, there was this lit path in front of me. It’s like, “The science non-duality conference. I need to go to that. This book, I need to read this. That author, I need to research that today or tonight. He’s speaking at the church down the street and he lives in Massachusetts and I’m in San Francisco. That’s wild.” Pretty soon, the field of transpersonal psychology came to my awareness.
I was like, “What is this?” I followed my feelings. I’m like, “I must study this.” My sweet husband was like, “What are you going to do with that?” I was like, “I don’t know, but I got to study it.” I did. Little did I know that it was the synergy and the blending of this very rigorous degree, pure mathematics, and this quite rigorous degree in transpersonal psychology. A very left brain and right brain, the blending of it lands itself perfectly to coaching. Coaching found me in 2011. It’s been a dream come true.
It’s been amazing. In the process, I had my second beautiful child. I feel blessed. What I do now as a result of having been on this path and because of the teacher I know I’ve been put on this Earth with that ability is to help others break through this very insidious paradigm of should and learn to trust themselves because their feeling is right. All of us want to live a life of joy, meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. The way to do that is to wake up to how brainwashed we are to this false idea that there’s an ideal we need to align ourselves with.
Living With Profound Happiness: Everyone wants to live a life of joy, meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. Wake up to how brainwashed we are to this false idea that there's an idea we need to align ourselves with.
That’s a very inspiring story. I appreciate you sharing it. There are many great things for people to take away from it. I like to end our sessions with Rapid-fire questions. You pick a category, either family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Spiritual.
Things are actions that I don’t have that I want?
Because of my conditioning, I’m quick to invalidate my feelings and put a ton of logic, reasoning, objectivity, invalidate, and blow over how I feel. An area of growth for me is to honor that. As much as I teach it, I’m like, “I need to eat my own dog food here.”
The goal is awareness. Things or actions that I do have as far as my spirituality that I want to keep?
I feel blessed and it must be as a result of all this work and the path that I’m on in the thousands of coaching conversations I’ve had over the past. I truly see every single human as holding complete. I feel nothing but compassion for every single individual even the ones that you would think it’s hard to feel that for. That has come out of my own evolution and transcendence work. Honestly, this is what the world needs. I feel very blessed. That is a way of being and not something I do.
Things or actions I don’t have as far as my spirituality, but I don’t want them?
On the flip side of that, I don’t have the ability to judge. It’s funny because my husband is quick to judge. I’m like, “Really? Come on.” I feel like I have a hard time. I’m reminded of Henry Longfellow’s quote. It goes something like, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, then we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” I’m grateful for that.
The last one is things are actions that I do have that I don’t want.
I answered it around not honoring my feelings. It’s the old habits of pleaser in me. That’s going to be a lifelong journey. It is letting go of that pleaser.
Be aware of it when it pops up. Is there anything that you want to make sure that we didn’t talk about or that you want people to walk away from our conversation?
Remembering that you are whole. We are all whole and complete innately. What you’re after is a feeling, not a thing. Freedom comes the moment you decide that there is no way you should be, “There is no way this should be. There is no way this should go,” and to truly examine your relationship to this word should paradigm that we’re enslaved. If you genuinely want to live a life of meaning and joy, first, wake up to this word and how you relate to it then trust yourself. Trust your feelings and intuition because what you want is a feeling. Allow yourself to get clear on that. What do you want to feel and then intend to follow the feeling instead of the strategy? That is the path truly to the life that you were born to live.
Living With Profound Happiness: Trust yourself, your feelings, and your intuition because what you want is a feeling, so allow yourself to get clear on that.
Thank you so much for sharing your story and all these great lessons for everyone to walk away from. I look forward to people reading our conversation.
Me, too. Thanks, Amy.
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For my Mindful Moments in my interview with Amy, there were lots of great takeaways here. To reiterate, if you suffer from any condition, whatever that may be, it’s important to recognize it and ask for help. In this case, we did talk about her eating disorder and how much that affected her detrimentally until she was able to get the help that she needed. We want to make sure that anyone reading this identifies with whatever you might be suffering from and make sure to speak up to someone who cares or looks up on Google who can help you so that you can get started on this path.
From an early age, it was interesting that she had parents that were creative and artistic. She resonated with her wisdom. Her mom taught her the power of her mind. Very early on, she started having a special interest in consciousness and being fascinated by how powerful our mind is. For many people, we weren’t even aware of this at the age that she started reading about it and wanted to go down that path of understanding it even more.
When she started from a young age and understanding how she was fascinated by the mind, she moved into Math and was fascinated by how all of that works. Being an accountant myself and knowing many accountants, many creatives. I played music and was into art. I am also fascinated by the puzzle of Math and how it works. Maybe we don’t always identify the link between the two because many people think, “If you’re a numbers person, you aren’t necessarily creative,” which isn’t exactly true.
In her path, as her parents started growing and their careers and she started getting into middle school, she started realizing that she was very aware of the judgment. A lot of middle schoolers go through that path. We do not identify the self-talk that is happening in our heads, what it all means, what we need to do to be aware of it, and take action on it. How do we get support from the people around us or even the people around us noticing that these things are happening?
From this point, she started having this eating disorder because of the feeling that she wasn’t enough or wasn’t comparable to the other girls she was seeing. She had these feelings on the inside that she was inadequate or asked what was wrong with her comparing her body size to others and thought that peace of mind equaled skinny people. She believed that all the way into her twenties.
This is an important thing because a lot of times, we don’t even realize we have this self-talk going on inside of us. That’s where meditation can help us a lot, even when we take moments of silence. Moments of silence can happen through meditation and movement, whether it’s still or moving, but we give our mind time to disconnect from everything around us so that we can observe what is happening in our head. This is an important exercise when she’s asking herself, “What’s wrong with me?” Feeling inadequate, comparing herself to others, even the statement of thinking that the girls that were skinnier had more peace of mind.
When we are silent or in meditation, these are the times to ask those questions. If they start coming up for you, you are thinking those thoughts. It’s important to ask yourself whether that thought is true. You might think initially that that thought is true, but ask yourself again if you absolutely know it’s true. When you are asking yourself multiple times whether something is true, sometimes that helps you with questioning those thoughts that are going on in your mind and realizing, “Is that thought true?”
Her trigger, which started creating this habit or belief system was that if she got skinnier, she would be happier. She started purging and sacrificing food throughout the day and so forth. Those thoughts are a trigger to the actual habit or action that we’re taking. If we’re going to change a habit or a belief system, we have to go back to the thought that precedes it or the environment that creates for us to have that thought to see how we can intentionally change the thought that is going on in our head.
We have to be intentional about it. If we decide that we don’t believe the thought, then it’s important that we come up with what would be our new routine that we need to take in our lives to make sure that we don’t follow that action or belief system any longer. That might mean the times of day we’re eating. She talked a lot about how she would hide from people to do these things. Maybe we purposely put ourselves in situations to be around people in those times where we hide and see how we react to it so that we do eat and not give ourselves access to the same things that we give ourselves access to when we’re by ourselves. We also look to see if that is true about the belief of skinny being peace of mind.
If you do any research on the most famous people, it doesn’t mean that that equals happiness. Even when you look at people, just because they might look skinny, doesn’t mean that they feel happiness on the inside. There’s not necessarily a correlation. It goes back to the power of our mind. We talked about the conscious versus the unconscious. This is very important that we understand what’s happening unconsciously for us that’s creating these actions, thoughts, and things that make us feel sad, miserable, or unhappy. When we start changing those thoughts, we can change the habit.
I’ve been listening to some other podcasts about this as well. There are many different diet plans out there and so forth. The problem is that many of them fail because we think that’s the quick way to fix the problem, but if we don’t fix the thought and the belief system, then it’s very hard for something to be effective long-term. We have to actively tell ourselves the opposite if we’re telling ourselves something negative about ourselves. Even when it doesn’t feel natural to tell ourselves those things, we continue to keep telling ourselves the good things until it does feel natural and more normal in our bodies to think something positive.
When we talked about this, we also talked about addiction in general because I talked about. Whether it be an eating disorder, alcohol, drugs, or whatever that may be that you see in your life, there is a process that you have to go through to unwind it. There’s an imbalance in your body, belief systems, or whatever that is, but with yourself and everyone around you in order to get back to loving who you are.
I talked to her about what someone that is outside of the person that has this addiction or issue in their life because I have been that person before. The problem is that when you’re the person outside of someone that you care about, you might have someone in your life right now who is addicted to something or might have a disorder in this case. A lot of times, we go to solving the issue. We want someone to take action.
If that person hasn’t been able to get to the process to even hear us or be aware of it enough that the problem is hurting their life, they’re open to the discussion. Pushing someone into action isn’t necessarily going to be the fix nor they are going to even be open to it. What we talked about was the importance of being present with a person. You see them as whole and complete. You hold them in high regard so that you don’t diminish them or pity them.
You understand that you cannot change this person and the power is within them. What you can do is offer support. This is hard. Being someone who has supported someone going down a hard path, you don’t understand why this person can’t just fix it. You know the actions that you would take, but your conscious and unconscious are in different places. That person knows that you love them and you’re there to support them, but I do think that there is a line between taking too much on by a person who’s not ready for the message.
You can offer support, help them, and get them the help that they need, but what you can’t do as well as be taken advantage of. To the person who is supporting someone else, it is important that you keep clarity of mind and do the same exercises to truly understand, “Are you enabling the person? Are you supporting that person?” Sometimes, there are hard choices that have to be made in order to shift that. We talked about that with her best friend. It was her best friend saying that she had a smoking problem. That opened it up for her to say that she had this issue and they healed together.
They were open and honest with each other about this, but it wasn’t about shaming the other person. It was about being there to support them, but also not taking it on themselves. That’s an important thing. In this session, we talked about that in so much in life and what causes these things to happen in our life, we believe there are these shoulds, the way that life is supposed to go, and everything is supposed to be.
We aren’t living truly to who we are because we believe whatever that is. Whether it’s the culture around us or the people around us that have put this on us, we lose touch with what we want and what we value. It’s very important that we go through the process to understand what our true values are and make sure that the things that we do are aligned with those values. That goes to where we talked about feeling it versus figuring it out.
There’s the mind piece of, “These are the actions to take,” versus feeling the pain that you’re in, being able to disconnect, like my recent book talked about where you can find those moments to allow yourself to feel whatever you feel without judging it. It’s about observing it, coming out of that with research about yourself, and then saying, “What actions can I take to bring myself into equilibrium? What actions can I take to bring myself into balance so that what I’m doing is not putting something on myself that is not aligned with what I need?” It’s being good to allow that to come up for yourself without putting stress on yourself about this and being okay with allowing yourself to feel things that maybe you don’t want to feel in order to heal and feel better.
I hope this was helpful to you, whether it’s you or you’re supporting someone who’s going through a hard time. You can be that catalyst to support someone, but also be present for them. If it’s you, be okay with who you are. Everybody is a whole person. We want to make sure that we let go of those shoulds, allow ourselves to feel along the way, and see where the journey takes us. There’s no rush to the finish line.
What is true is over time, we will find our path and journey if we listen to ourselves. I want to thank you for being a part of this show. It means a lot to us for those of you who put testimonials so other people see it. The more that you can do to get the word out about this show, the better so that more people can read these stories and know these guests who are open, transparent, and want to share their stories for the better of everyone. Thank you very much and I will talk to you soon.
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About Amy Eliza Wong
Amy Eliza Wong is a transformational coach, speaker, Conversational Intelligence® expert, and the author of Living on Purpose. Once her first child entered her world, Amy began questioning everything that had made her who she was and couldn’t bring herself to return to what had been a rewarding career. One day, when sitting hopelessly on the floor in her closet, inspiration struck: It wasn’t about figuring it out, it was about feeling it out. This insight became the first of five deliberate choices she discovered that one must make to lead a life of fulfillment and joy. Today, she leverages this philosophy in her bestselling book, keynotes, and coaching practice.