Finding Wholeness through Career Transitions with Dr. Wendy Tan | E6

We speak with Dr. Wendy Tan, Managing Partner of The Flame Center, Author of the book Wholeness in a Disruptive World.

Wendy shares candidly what it takes to become an entrepreneur, and the mindset shift and the skills building associated to it.

She also gives us a glimpse into the book she recently published and the very practical methodology she created to find wholeness and be present in every moment.

Connect with Wendy

Wendy’s book: Wholeness in a Disruptive World: Pearls of Wisdom from East and West, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) 

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

· Vanessa Iloste (Host)

· Vanessa Teo (Host)

· Aaron Wu (Producer)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Vanessa I: Hello everyone. Today we speak with Dr. Wendy Tan, Managing Partner at the Flame Center and author of the book Wholeness in a Disruptive World. 

[00:00:14] Vanessa T: It's going to be an incredible opportunity for us to listen to the perspective of an organizational psychologist. Through Dr. Tan's PhD work, she has done extensive research on the topic of learning agility and the impact on career transitions.

[00:00:29] Vanessa I: We will do a deep dive into two important concepts at the core of career transitions. One is learning agility and the other one, which is also very important, is expanding our sense of identity. We hope that you will get inspired as much as we did. We wish you an excellent listening.

[00:00:56] Vanessa T: Hi everyone. Welcome to our new episode of Career Transitions. We're your hosts, Vanessa Iloste and Vanessa Teo. 

[00:01:04] Vanessa I: Today, we are very excited to introduce our guest. Her name is Wendy Tan, and she is the managing partner of the Flame Center. She has also written a book, a very, very interesting book called The Wholeness in a Disruptive World.

[00:01:20] Vanessa T: Welcome, Wendy! 

[00:01:21] Wendy T: Hi. Hello, ladies. 

[00:01:23] Vanessa T: It's so great to have you here with us today. Let me introduce you to our audience. Wendy's work is about learning and bringing forth ideas to help us act with wisdom for the greater good. She has recently graduated from a PhD studies with psychology school of social science at Nanyang Technological University.

She's also an entrepreneur, a managing partner at the Flame Center, a talent development practice serving the Asia Pacific market. She's also the author of Wholeness in a Disruptive World, Pearls of Wisdom from East and West. Wendy is a certified professional speaker, a designation conferred by the National Speakers Association as the international measure of professional platform competence.

Her work has also won Inov Plus Spark and HRO Today Thought Leadership Awards. She is also a recovering tiger mom with three school going children, two swimmers and a budding chef. Wow! It's so great to have you here with us, Wendy. 

[00:02:28] Wendy T: Yeah. It's great to be with you ladies as well, and I'm beginning to have fun already.

[00:02:34] Vanessa I: Wendy, throughout your career and life, you have made some very important transition. You have been a psychologist. You have also been an organizational development practitioner, an author, a speaker, you have built your own career and you have also built your own business. I wanted to ask you, Wendy, among all these transitions that you successfully achieved, which one would you consider as the most significant in your journey?

[00:03:03] Wendy T: Thank you, Vanessa. I think the most significant one is probably being a business owner, being responsible for the likelihood to others. You know, for the longest time I've just been a practitioner doing the work that I love and then enjoy. And you know, being like a small mom and pop shop to just take care of work, our livelihood.

And of course taking care of three children felt like that's already big enough responsibility. So for the longest time I didn't want to grow the business, so to speak. And so I think that one day I realized if I stopped working, then the work stops. And I feel like I need to be responsible for the work to continue in some ways.

And therefore I really thought about how do I have the work continue beyond me? I need to build an ecosystem. I need to develop people to do the work together with me. Yeah, build the, the systems and processes. It's the shift away from just being the mom and pop shop, just being responsible for ourselves to being responsible for others.

Yeah, and I think that's a huge shift for me because it's kind of scary and I was afraid of losing my freedom. 

[00:04:17] Vanessa T: Say a bit more about losing your freedom. 

[00:04:19] Wendy T: Well, in a sense, it's like if I am just a practitioner, I do the why. If I want to, you know, take a day off or take a week off, I'll just make sure that I don't schedule work on those days.

Yeah. So that felt like freedom to me. And then I was afraid that if I were to have a team and be responsible for their livelihood, then yeah, I may need to chase numbers. I may need to make sure that we have enough, that we are sustainable and viable as a business. And therefore I would lose that freedom to just stop work when I want to.

That is the thinking that I had. So one of the key learning in this career transition is changing the way I think, and I realized that actually being a practitioner myself, I didn't have that freedom, because when I go on holidays, I would still bring my laptop around. I would still be replying to client emails because there's no one else to do all this, right? 

And last year, when I went on a holiday, I had my team to do the work. And therefore, for the first time, I kind of like realized having a team gives me freedom. So that was the reframe for me and kind of like change the way I think so that I could operate differently. 

[00:05:31] Vanessa T: You talk about quite a bit of transitions moving from a practitioner to a business owner and being really responsible for the livelihood of teams.

What was the most difficult part for you?

[00:05:43] Wendy T: I think the most difficult part for me is about taking risk. And I think as a small business, we don't have the luxury of lots of resources. We need to make decisions even when we don't know what's coming around. So, taking risks to, you know, whether it's to employ people, whether it is to take on this, a client or a project, it gives us this sense in making decisions without knowing the full outcome.

And knowing that this time around, the outcome is not going to just be impacting me, but also the team. So I think that is one of the most difficult things that I have to learn. And the difficulty is in not knowing. Yeah. And not knowing what I don't know. I was actually building a software and application.

It was challenging because I didn't know what I didn't know, and I didn't know what questions to ask. So I kind of like went meandering for about two years before the first prototype came out. In making career transitions, a huge part of it is, it's about learning. It's about changing the way we think it's about expanding how we see ourselves.

We all like, you know, from me as a practitioner to me as a, you know, somebody doing everything myself within my control to me, inviting people along this journey. So in some ways, shifting from controlling everything to giving some space. 

[00:07:07] Vanessa I: I want to thank you, uh, Wendy, for your candor and for your honesty in describing this transition because it's a lot of things that are happening to all of us, like we all have fears and we all have questions and, and we all don't know what we don't know.

So what you're describing is so true, but it takes a lot of courage to actually share it openly the way you do. I had a question around this building and changing your mindset, because this is something that as a practitioner you are doing originally with your clients, but what does it take to do it for yourself?

Like how, you know, did you create this ability to actually help yourself to change your mindset when maybe you got stuck, or maybe when the fear was too big, or maybe when you were wondering what to do next. 

[00:07:57] Wendy T: Thank you, Vanessa. That's a great question, right? Changing mindsets, changing my mind. Yeah. As I reflect back on my journey, there were moments where I feel like I've been slapped because I know I've heard this before, or I know that I have encountered this, but I still make the same mistakes.

And so that's the feeling of like being slapped a few times. Yeah, at least many of us, myself included, we're used to doing things a certain way. And I think if we're not careful, we become like autopilots. So what was helpful was being very intentional. A practice that I have is every morning to ask myself, what's my intention for the day?

And how do I want to be for the day? How do I want to show up for the day? That intentionality helps me, for example, one thing that I realized in my role is, it's no longer just about growing myself, but helping others grow. And it's in helping others grow that the team, my immediate team, the people who work with us, have more capacity to serve our clients.

So it is being intentional because I'm a practitioner myself, right? My first instinct is to go in and to do the work versus my job. Now is actually to coach somebody to do the work. Yeah. And to enable them. So instead of me like speaking a lot during the meetings, it's me keeping quiet and creating space for the other person to take the lead.

So having intentions help the clarity of intentions. And I think the second one is also having community, having mentors. So in this journey, the shift from a practitioner to an entrepreneur probably took a while. It's a journey, right? I mean, when we do career transitions, it's a journey. It's not like people say, take the first step.

And then it's not just the first step. It's a thousand steps. Right? So in this thousand steps, what helps to keep us on track? So what helped me is It's actually joining a community. So for me, I joined the entrepreneur organization. It's a peer to peer learning group. Every month we get together with a small group and we challenge and support one another.

Once a quarter, we have some learning around like, how do we build the education needed as entrepreneurs, like how to build systems, how to think about strategy, how to think about execution, about people, about finance, about operations. So part of it is education, and then a big part of it is the community.

And then in these communities, as we talk about challenges or where we have mentors, people tell us the hard truth, right? So then that's like a slap. Okay. I wake up. Okay. What is my intention? And then I move ahead from there. 

[00:10:45] Vanessa T: I really love Wendy, how intentional you are and how intentional you are, not just in doing the things that you want to set out to do, but also in building the community around you to support you.

I've been very fascinated, Wendy, about your journey. You're already a very successful entrepreneur. You run your own business, the Flame Center. And I'm sure that you must be really focused already on growing your business. So the fact that you actually are a recent graduate of the PhD program at the Nanyang Technological University actually got me really interested in understanding why you decided to do that.

Why, in spite of being so busy with so many other things as part of your life. What inspired you to further your studies by pursuing a PhD?

[00:11:30] Wendy T: Thank you. You know, it's funny because I feel like I went on both extremes, both polarities at the same time, because it was only the past, maybe three, three years, I started to build a business and I've been on my PhD journey for about four years. So kind of like both happened at the same time. And I felt like, you know, sometimes as an entrepreneur, you kind of like shoot and then you aim, right?

You kind of like take action and then you try to course-correct along the way. So entrepreneurship is a very action oriented way of operating, whereas as a researcher, You kind of like think and think and think, you read and read and read, you kind of like go deep and then you leave no stones unturned and then you, yeah, formulate and so there is a lot of analysis, a lot of thinking before action.

So sometimes in this journey, right? I, I was in our lingo, right? We say on the wrong ball. So with my supervisors, I remember a particular incident where he said that you don't even know what you're saying. And that's because I was trying, you know, as an entrepreneur spoke my way through. So the lesson learned is don't try to smoke through the academics.

And when I, with a group of entrepreneurs, and then this entrepreneur said. Why do you make things so complicated? Just keep it simple. So being a researcher and being an entrepreneur feels like it's two opposite polarities. And in this, I think I had to learn how to manage it, how to not feel this sense of fragmentation.

I'm like compartmentalized, but to still have a sense of wholeness. Yeah. And to answer your question, you know, Vanessa about what led me to want to do this, because I feel that the world is changing really quickly and with machines getting smarter and faster, how are we learning and how can we expand who we are through learning, because the fullness of our humanity, not just about, you know, machines and AI, right? So what I wanted to look into these questions. How can we bring out the fullness of our humanity? How can we learn and expand ourselves? So that's what led me to go back to pursue my PhD to answer these questions. I guess I'm also very curious and I just didn't want to accept the answers that were conventional wisdom and maybe on a practical level, it is possibly having some retirement planning down the road to be able to teach in universities down the road.

[00:14:05] Vanessa T: You're already thinking about the long game. I mean, you're pretty far from retirement. What made you think so far beyond where you're at today? I mean, what kickstarted this thinking about planning for retirement? 

[00:14:17] Wendy T: To just clarify as well, I think it's not so much like retirement in a sense of like, you know, there's a discrete ending to the work.

It's more about how I want to spend my time. And this whole emphasis was probably triggered about 12 years ago when I had a near death experience. I was in ICU for about four days and there were times where I didn't know how my life will pan out. It was a huge regret. They always say that, you know, death is the best teacher.

So when I was facing that possibility, it really led me to think about how I want to spend my time and time is really life. So I think from there, yeah, it led me to just think if I'm at halftime, how do I want to spend the rest of my life? . 

[00:15:04] Vanessa I: That's very wise, Wendy. Mm-hmm. I think we need more of this type of thinking among ourselves because most of the time we are always in the rat race and, you know, we keep on doing what we are doing.

But maybe these moments of difficulties, like unfortunately what you have experienced, are great opportunities for us to pose and to think through about what we want to do with the rest of our lives. So thank you for, for sharing that.

[00:15:29] Wendy T: I like to tell my kids that I'm so glad that I nearly died. 

[00:15:32] Vanessa I: Yes. I mean, this is maybe something surprising to them, but, uh, this is a, this is meaningful.

So when I researched on your work, I watched a couple of videos from you, which are very well done, very interesting videos. And you were talking a lot about learning agility, and this is one of your topics of research as a researcher. I was wondering if you could share with us some of the findings that you got through all these years of research that you have put into the work since you graduated from your PhD now.

[00:16:04] Wendy T: Yeah, sure. Sure. Yeah. But I think specific to a career transitions, I actually interviewed people who engaged in learning as they were rescaling or upscaling as part of their career transitions. So I find that there are three key findings that are relevant to career transitions. One is around is the technical term is metacognitive ability, which is really simply put the ability to steer one's learning in the process of making this career transition, because the career transition is not just about attending a course or a workshop is really about making a change in your career, a change in your identity, a change in how you operate, how you think and even your skills, right?

So it's a journey of a thousand steps. So in these thousand steps, how do you go about plotting your learning? How do you go about looking at, okay, what do you need to learn? What do you not know? What do you know? How do I go about learning these skills? How am I progressing in my learning? How do I know that I'm successful in this learning?

So this is really more like looking at ourselves from a higher plane, not in the rut of it, but from a higher vantage point to then be able to strategize. 

[00:17:20] Vanessa I: That's very interesting. I love this concept of metacognition. And I think that the idea of, you know, looking at ourselves while we are doing something is actually very powerful, because the moment you, I mean, the concept is quite complex.

And the moment you start thinking of metacognition, you really need to pause to think about what you are doing. So I think this is a very, very good piece of advice. You shared with us you had two other important topics you wanted to share. Wendy, what are these topics? 

[00:17:50] Wendy T: Thank you for the question. So the second key finding in relation to career transition, right?

Is it is really, when we talk about learning, it's really about expanding our identity. And the people I interview, right? Through that learning process, they have actually expanded their identity. So rather than think of themselves as I'm a software engineer. Or I am a musician, our sense of how we see ourselves expands, right?

So going beyond the job title to the fullness of who we are, for example, there was a musician whom I interviewed and after learning self learning software development, he became a software developer. So he likes to think of himself as, Oh, I'm a musician who codes. There is another person, a leader I interviewed, he was from engineering and then went into consulting software development, then developed himself as a leader.

He's also a YouTuber, a very successful YouTuber and an artist. So I asked him, wah, how do you see yourself? Right? And his reply is, I see myself as a learner. So the sense of identity is more fundamental and it is more encompassing going beyond our job title. So I think in making career transitions, one of the challenges people have is, who am I?

You know, if I'm no longer a software developer, then who am I? And I think that sometimes the struggle in going beyond our small identity prevents us from crossing that chasm, crossing that bridge to that new identity, that new career. 

[00:19:27] Vanessa I: That's very, very true, actually. And we were talking with Vanessa T yesterday about the fact that, you know, doing this podcast for us, even if it's a small project, it's also expanding our identities, also giving us something different to learn, to explore.

That is very, very true. The last one you wanted to share with us, which one was this, uh, Wendy? 

[00:19:49] Wendy T: Hm, the last one, I think I want to share this idea from the research as well, that in the learning of skills, as we look at it from a bigger perspective, we always learn the content, the frameworks, the tools, right?

So, so that's like the content part of it, which is probably something that we can get from a lot of like content libraries, workshops, courses. Yeah. So, so that is the first level of learning. And when we have these content, then we need to know how to apply it. Across different people, different situations.

So then we began to have a more nuanced understanding of that topic. With that, then the highest level of learning, right? Is if we can get to the essence, the essence of this skill, right? So for example, the three of us are in the learning and the people space, we were to ask, like, what's the essence of coaching.

We then know the essence, then we can embody it. Perhaps the specific use of any technique, any framework becomes less important because we already have the essence. So one of the people that I interviewed, uh, she went through this learning process from learning the content, the framework, the knowledge, to then learning how to apply across different people and different situations.

And finally realizing that like coaching was a skill that she was picking up. And she realized that coaching, actually the essence of it is about empathy. So when you have that in mind, then we can embody it and we can embrace that skill much more deeply. 

[00:21:26] Vanessa I: Do you think it gives us a higher sense of purpose?

Like in that particular sense, do you think the person when she knows that she's using and being the essence of empathy through coaching, do you think it's a way for her also maybe to relax more and to move away from frameworks and from maybe, you know, structure and to go back to something that is more natural, maybe more organic because she feels aligned with herself.

She feel aligned with her purpose? 

[00:21:53] Wendy T: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, this is a leader who was successful because she solves problems as a good problem solver. But then, you know, if you are going to be a really good leader, you can't just be solving problems. You need to be coaching people, connecting with people.

So I think that expanded her sense of identity. 

[00:22:11] Vanessa I: That's very powerful. Yeah, I think, I think it's very true. I mean, in my experience as a provider of career transition as an HR professional, I encounter a couple of times, you know, people sometimes stopping at the first level. So they believe that if they have attended the class, whether it's the workshop or the class online, then they should be able to do it. 

And then they realize, you know, oh, the application is difficult and it's first hurdle. And then there is this second hurdle you're talking about, which is very powerful, which is understanding the philosophy behind this new skill or the essence, as you mentioned behind this new skill.

So it's a very good thing to keep in mind when we are going through a transition or supporting someone who is having a transition to think of these three levels. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge about it. 

[00:22:57] Vanessa T: Wendy, that's really powerful what you've just shared with us. I was really thinking about the point about expanding identity and the question, who am I?

And realizing just from the sharings of your stories that who am I is not necessarily just one identity, but you can actually have multiple of these different sides of life, different sides of you and different things that you do to really make up this whole identity. In addition to being an entrepreneur, a PhD student, a mom, you also authored a book on wholeness in a disruptive world.

This book has been a really inspiring book about the why, the what, and how of having wholeness at work and at life. And I think it's really, really important, the fact that you've also explored so many different sides of your own identity. Tell us how you decided to embark on this big task of writing a book.

[00:23:52] Wendy T: Yeah, you know, when I was on the ICU bed, not knowing how my life will pan out, there was a huge sense of regret. One big one was about not seeing my children grow up, not seeing like my, my tomboy girl in her pretty dresses. Yeah, and, and I think the, the other regret is not leaving anything behind. So I think after I recovered, there was this urge that I felt that if the same thing were to happen again, I want to be sure that I have left something behind. And I was feeling really fragmented, being pulled in many different directions as a mom, as a practitioner, you know, just doing many, many different things. I used to rule my life in blocks of 15 minutes, like zipping around.

So that's when I felt, you know, really fragmented. And one day I was doing Tai Chi. There was a thought that popped into my head that perhaps the opposite of the fragmentation I experience is wholeness. And that's why I embarked on writing this book. 

[00:24:59] Vanessa I: What would be the best way for you to define wholeness, Wendy?

Because I'm very curious about this. Different people have different ways and you made the choice, which I found is a fantastic choice of using the word wholeness. Why this word and what does that mean for you? 

[00:25:16] Wendy T: To be honest, I really struggled with this because as you exactly pointed out, we all have different definitions of wholeness and who am I to come up with a definition, right?

Yeah. So I struggled with this for an entire journey of writing the book. I interviewed people who are familiar with both the Eastern ways of thinking and the Western ways of thinking. And I guess I decided. So I defined wholeness as a sense of completeness. And balance within ourselves and the world around us.

[00:25:46] Vanessa I: That's powerful to feel complete. I think this is very good. I mean, wholeness as feeling complete, having done everything that should be done and on that particular moment, that's very good. What was the thing that surprised you the most, Wendy, in that journey of writing the book? When you describe it, you have this ah ha moment when you are in the Tai Chi class or the Tai Chi session and you realized maybe instead of fragmentation, I want to move my energy.

I want to move myself into wholeness and completeness. But what was the part of the surprise that you got in writing the book? Or what do you realize through writing the book? You didn't know you knew, or you realized, oh, that was something I didn't expect I will experience. Because when we start writing a book, I think we have a certain concept of, okay, this is the type of things that are going to come in my writing.

But maybe there are new ideas, or maybe there are new things that came out of the book that surprised you to a certain extent. 

[00:26:45] Wendy T: Most people think that when we write a book, we are like the authority in that area. One of my mentors said to me that the reason why we are writing the book is because we are learning about that topic.

Yeah. So in writing the book, it forced me to articulate the ideas. Yeah. And to come to some clarity after interviewing many people. So coming to Clarity, yeah, and I wanted to find a way to make these ideas simple and easy for people to use. So I use the A, B, C pathways towards wholeness. So Vanessa would know about this.

Maybe I should quiz Vanessa. 

[00:27:27] Vanessa I: She can explain it. to me yesterday very well. Vanessa Teo, you want to be the quiz master for Wendy after following the session with her? 

[00:27:37] Vanessa T: Well, from what I've read from your book, A is really about anchoring in your purpose. B is about balancing opposing ideas. And C is about clearing and giving yourself that clarity of space, but I am definitely not an authority in this area and I have not learned as much as you have, Wendy, so please tell us a little bit more about the ABCs.

[00:28:00] Wendy T: Oh, I thought you were doing a really good job. So, A, as you rightly pointed out, anchoring, right? How does a tree grow tall and strong, right? And in a hurricane, in a swirl wind, and the metaphor of our world today is this swirl wind, this hurricane, you know, where the ground is shifting beneath us. And that's where we need to anchor ourselves.

Like the roots of a tree growing deeper and broader. Yeah. We also need to anchor ourselves. And that's to our purpose, our values, our sense of responsibility, and just knowing that our anchor is not message to our jobs, to our job titles, yeah, but more fundamentally to who we are in terms of what's important to us, what we hold dear to who we are responsible to.

And one of the things that I think I realized is in times of challenge. Who we're responsible to, it could be our parents, could be our co-workers, could be our families, actually that gives us strength, yeah, so that's, you know, beyond ourselves as individuals. And so with that clarity of our anchor, then balancing, balancing in the ways of our thinking, balancing, opposing ideas.

So I think in the context of career transitions, a powerful set of opposing ideas is about idealism and pragmatism. So it's like, you know, we've always been screwed in a thought that, okay, get your career, climb the corporate ladder, you know, just be pragmatic to provide for your family. Right. So that is pragmatism.

But I think there is space for us to be idealistic about the difference. We want to make the impact that we want to create. You know what we want to leave behind? Because it's when we have the idealism, then pragmatism comes in today and say, okay, how do we make this idealism work? Right? So it's the coming together of opposing ideas and not to live in one world.

So either or would not work, but it is the coming together of opposing ideas that give us something that is much bigger and much more sustaining. Yeah. So that's about balancing and then C is about clearing. And I realized that clearing is really important because in any particular moment, we always need to be intentional to shift. That's sometimes difficult in the hurricane of life.

And so the clearing practice is to allow ourselves to go deeper, to clear our mind of anything that we could be thinking about, almost like the metaphor that I use. When you shake a bottle of muddy water. That process of clearing is almost like the process of the sediments settling down. All right. And with that, you have clarity.

You can see that clarity. So that clarity then informs us again, of our anchor, how we need to embrace opposing ideas and what we need to do right now. Wholeness is also wholeness in the moment. It is in right now. What is the most useful, the most important thing to do right now? 

[00:31:04] Vanessa T: Maybe give us one practical example of how we do clearing.

[00:31:08] Wendy T: Yeah. And I think many people do it differently. My husband likes to say that, Oh, I am watching TV and TV actually occupies our mind space. And some people say that, Oh, you know, I do this when I go on my vacation once a year. Then I said, wow, you mean you only clear once a year? Yeah. So clearing is in simple ways.

It's something that we do every day. It could be for me, I run every morning. I do some form of exercise every morning and that is my moment of clearing. Some people meditate, some people clear when they pray, some people when they journal. Or when they are playing music. So the essence of it is the activities could be different, but what's common is what's happening in our mind, that process of dirt settling down.

So that's clarity. I think that's the emptiness that we want to have in our mind space. 

[00:32:00] Vanessa I: What I love with your metaphor as well, Wendy, is the idea that when you wait for the, the dust to settle, you allow also the particles to move. And sometimes you realize, I feel like there are some emotions that needs to be released or some parts that are not completely complete, like you feel some form of anger or some form of regret or some form of sadness.

And while you wait for this piece of sand to settle down on the sea, I think you give yourself also and you allow yourself to feel what you need to feel. And I think that what you're sharing is very, very important because, uh, as you mentioned, we are moving so fast these days, we don't have these spaces that allow us to really release some of the tension or some of the emotion that are, you know, very true to human beings and are very positive to human beings.

And by not giving that space, sometimes we make ourself feel sad or not exactly present in the moment. So thank you for, for this metaphor. 

[00:33:04] Wendy T: Well, thank you for sharing this example. I love the way you express it. 

[00:33:09] Vanessa I: It helps me as well. So Vanessa was also very eager to talk about you as a working mom, and she told me you're an incredible like, uh, working mom with three children, and she learned from you in one of the conferences you did for her company around this idea of being 100% present.

So maybe you could expand this part because this is something that we are both curious about since we are also two working mothers. 

[00:33:36] Wendy T: Sure, sure. Yeah. So I think the traditional idea of balance is like 50, 50, if your priority is on family, then you can have a thriving career, kind of like either or. So in this whole idea, this comes from the balancing idea, 100% at work and a hundred percent at home.

Right. So instead of trying to be 50, 50, I think we want, we want more than 50% at work and 50% at home, right? We want a hundred and hundred of both. Yeah. So the question is how, how then we need, do we be a hundred, a hundred? I figured that because we only have this moment now. So now I am 100% with you, right?

In 30 minutes time, I'll be 100% with my family. Similarly, there'll be times where I'm 100% at work. And then yesterday my daughter was in a swimming competition. I was 100% with her, cheering for her, you know, just talking to her on the drive there. So I think this alternating hundred and hundred allows us to be much more expansive to do well, both at work and to do well with our families.

Yeah, but the premise of this is the ability to clear. So that we are not thinking about work when we are with family and vice versa. 

[00:34:51] Vanessa T: Yeah. Well, thank you for that point, Wendy. It is so common in today's world where we're so distracted by so many things. Taking the time to really clear is I think one of, at least for me, it's been my biggest challenge to find the space to clear in order to be a hundred percent present.

And everything that I'm doing, but thank you so much for that. You know, we're all working moms here on the call, Vanessa Iloste, myself, and you. So we can definitely relate to what you're saying. If you look back through your early years as a working mom, what advice would you give to other working moms, particularly those who are transitioning into this new role as a working mom, what would you say to a younger self?

[00:35:35] Wendy T: To mums in the early years, right? 

[00:35:37] Vanessa T: Yeah. 

[00:35:38] Wendy T: I would say, you know, look at the wholeness of our life, the window that we have where the children are so little is a short window in that wholeness of life. So from that perspective, we can make decisions based on this wholeness of life and to make choices about how we want to be with them when they were young.

Yeah. And also to leverage on the whole of our resources, our network to get help. So I got lots of help. Yeah. And I think finally to just to learn from our children and just enjoy the time with them. 

[00:36:11] Vanessa I: That's very true. I totally agree with you. It's such a short window we have that we need to enjoy every moment.

So I mean, we come to almost the end of our program today. I wanted to thank you first and foremost for your precious time and also for your, talking to us. I feel like we have gone very deep in this conversation. I was wondering if you wanted to give to the audience three tips to remember, what would it be?

I mean, what are the three recommendations that you will give to all of us? 

[00:36:43] Wendy T: The first one is about learning. Learning is the pathway to any change or transition that we make. Yeah. And learning in this process, not just about skills, but also changing the way we think and learning new ways of operating. 

So I think the second one is about expanding. Yeah, the outcome of all this learning is to expand ourselves, to expand how we see ourselves, the fullness of who we are. And I think when we expand how we see ourselves, we can see much more possibilities. 

And the third one is just to really just enjoy the journey. We have so much about achievement, about going on a train and like going fast to come to an outcome. Yeah, but I think in a transition, there will be ups and downs and there will be meanders. And in these moments, just to remind ourselves to enjoy the journey. 

[00:37:36] Vanessa T: Yeah. Fantastic, Wendy. And I love how you've just summarized these three key points. I have certainly learned from you today. I certainly feel expanded in all the different nuggets of wisdom that you shared with us today.

And I have fully, truly enjoyed our time together today. Thank you so much, Wendy, for joining us on this week's episode of Career Transitions and for sharing your invaluable advice and wisdom to us. You're certainly a role model to so many of us. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:38:09] Wendy T: Thank you to both Vanessas.

Thank you very much for playing with this.