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As you explore alignment in business, it’s also important to examine the worldview biases you bring to your work. In this episode, leadership expert Jessica Chung leads us through expanding our perspectives to better engage with difference in our businesses.

Jessica is a Minnesotan alcohol ink artist, calligrapher, and bullet journaler. Through art and teaching leadership at the University of Minnesota, she hopes to encourage everyone to embrace their innate power and potential.

Website // Instagram // YouTube

The episode:

Katrina Widener: Hi, everyone. It's Katrina here with the new episode of the podcast. Today, I have Jessica Chung of Pretty Prints and Paper on, and I am so excited to talk with her today. She is not only an upcoming group coaching expert, but she is also a former client of mine and is absolutely brilliant in everything that she does. She's a Minnesota alcohol ink artist, calligrapher and bullet journaler and I love her dearly. She is also a leadership teacher and that kind of weaves its way into everything that she does. So thank you so much, Jessica, for coming on here. I'm so excited to talk with you today. 

Jessica Chung: Thank you so much. Katrina is awesome.  Exactly what she said. I'm local to Minneapolis. I started sharing my journey with art, getting back into more of my creative side when I started working full time and I wanted something for myself. And then of course, like every millennial just turned that into a side hustle, but I infuse a lot of that personal development and leadership stuff into everything I do.

Everything becomes a metaphor for teaching me how to live my life in a more intentional and a beautifully messy way. And just trickles into everything and  I get to teach leadership to college students by day. And then when I'm not grading, I like to do some art and blogging and stuff on the side. I've learned a lot over the years.

Katrina Widener: So one of the things that I absolutely love about what Jess does is she works with these two seemingly very different mediums: art and teaching. When really she's able to marry the two in a way that's so uniquely beautiful and is able to incorporate the idea of leadership within everything that she does, and honor the leadership in everyone that she comes across.

So I don't know, Jess, if you want to talk a little bit about that and what that has been like for you. But I would love to hear your thoughts. 

Jessica Chung: Oh, thanks. I can make a leadership metaphor out of anything. And I think there's so many things like, for example, if you don't know, bullet journaling is basically like you build your journal or your planner as you go and I think through that process that has taught me a lot about how it feels to lead your own life and how a lot of the pre-structured planners are things that you feel like you have to follow, things that someone else thought would be really good for you. And instead bullet journaling allows you to turn the page and it's blank and you design the structures that you think will benefit you the best.

And honestly, what a metaphor for living your own life. You have to design your own structures and have the confidence and trust in yourself to be able to do that without feeling so much, or maybe despite all the doubt that you feel about yourself, based on what other people are doing. And it's so tempting, always to do what other people are doing.

And I find myself drifting all the time because you see on social media people looking like they have their shit together using this particular system. And then you spend all your money buying all the parts of that system. When I don't actually want that system, I want the piece that I perceive that person to have by using it. And that kind of transcends just that planner metaphor right into how you live your life, the timing of things. And that has been really powerful for me to reflect on. 

Katrina Widener: Yes, I get so nerdy when it comes to things like alignment. It's one of the things that really makes me as a coach super, super happy. And it really is so important because exactly what you were talking about when you look around you and that this person's doing this or that person's doing that, and you're trying to base what you're doing off of someone on Instagram or a competitor, you're really trying to buy into the feeling that you feel when you see it.

And it's not even necessarily like how that person is feeling or how that person sees what they're doing, or even if they enjoy it. You see it and you get this idea that, "Oh, my gosh. They're so put together or they're doing everything right." Or, "they're so successful". And behind the scenes, they could be a trainwreck, honestly, but you don't see that.

 I think of when people in the entrepreneur industry go on social media or go in their marketing and they're like I did this six-figure launch and use my technique to get yours too. When they don't really even mention actually my six figure launch was because I spent five figures, multiple five figures on Instagram and Facebook ads. 

That's one of the reasons why for me as a coach, when someone comes to me and they're saying, Hey, can you teach me how to do this thing? Can you teach me how to do that thing? Whether it's marketing or copywriting or whatever. My question is always well, is this the thing that you should be doing and not should, based off of the shoulds you put on yourself or the shoulds I put on you or the shoulds that the world puts on you, but what is truly aligned with who you are?

Jessica Chung: Oh, wow. I think that's so true. It's like we jump right into doing the work when we don't really ask ourselves if that's the work that is the right work. And we spend all of our time, energy and resources as if not that I know from personal experience or anything, but yeah, we just spend so much energy doing these things because we think we're supposed to do them.

And I learned this alignment lesson all day, every day, over and over again. No matter how many times we've talked about it. I think what is hard is if we deviate from the dominant narrative, I think it's very hard to give ourselves permission or validity to how we feel. And when we talk about alignment, it really resonates with me a lot because even as a teacher, when I learned how to be a teacher, I was watching people who are my mentors and friends and I was thinking, wow, I can't do that. This is part of my teacher training, observing like really amazing teachers. And I'm just like, I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I can teach this way. And then it wasn't until I started teaching by myself with my own class. That was the first time that I felt like. Oh, maybe I could do this after training and teaching and co-teaching for a year and a half, two years.

And if you are part of groups that aren't represented or commonly talked about, it's hard to remember Oh my way is valid too, until you see it or live it, or have some other affirmation of it. Because we're constantly being told that this other ways, the right way. And over the years, like learning more about my own identity and my own values.

It explains why I have such resistance to like status quo advice or what is alignment for me. And being able to surface some of those things has been incredibly helpful in having more confidence in doing the things that are in alignment.

Katrina Widener: I think that's so powerful because we oftentimes, especially in the creative entrepreneurship world, look around us and we see all of these white women cough, Jenna Kutcher, cough, Marie Forleo, cough, and that's what everyone says the norm is especially in this industry. And that's what everyone says you need to aspire to be like this, or you need to operate like this in order to find this massive success that they've found. When really it's about turning it inside and saying, who am I and how do I want my days to look? And how am I different from other people? And how can I capitalize on the things that make me different instead of trying to shove them down and hide them away? And I see this all the time in marketing, and it's the idea that someone might purchase from you for the first time because they like the message that you're selling to them and they like the idea of what you've told them that they'll walk away with. But the reason why someone's going to subscribe to your content, decide to follow you as opposed to one post, or purchase from you time and time again is because of who you are. And because of the uniqueness that is you and you can't replace that. And you can't hide that because people will know if you're being inauthentic. 

Jessica Chung: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You just you have to believe that it's valuable. I think that's, what's really hard is if you're told in the world that it's not valuable, or this is not going to be the way that gains mass appeal, then you feel a little scared to do it.

Katrina Widener: This is something that I could talk about all day, but one of the important things to know is that alignment is within yourself, but it's also recognizing the uniqueness in other people and not judging them. Directing them to be exactly like you. And I think that this is a wonderful way to bring in the idea of what Jessica is going to tell us a little bit more about today. And that's really intercultural competency and really looking at different cultures and recognizing the differences in them and what makes them unique and uniquely valuable and bringing that into our everyday businesses and our everyday lives. 

Jessica Chung: Oh, I could talk about this for hours, but obviously this has been really in the focus in the last year, given all of the uprisings and stuff in response to the murder of George Floyd and more, right?

And one of the models we talk about in our program is the Bennett model of intercultural sensitivity. And I like using this model because it applies to a lot of different things. I'll give you a quick rundown of it. It is five stages and it looks like it goes in linear order where you start off with the denial stage and it sounds much more active than it actually is, but denial is basically just an unawareness.

Imagining that you're growing up in your home culture, and this is just the way the world is. And you're unaware that anything else could be different, that anybody could be doing things differently than you. And so you're in this safe place, like you really feel comfortable there and then when you finally encounter difference for the first time and you notice it, the first step of that journey is that you judge it.

So this creates this "us and them" -- either you are super defensive of your own culture and critiquing the other, or you are super critical of your own culture. And in, in like adoration of another culture, a lot of times that happens when people go study abroad and they come back and they're like, Oh my God, if only we could do everything like France does. And we're like okay. A lot of, I think, white folks who are doing anti-racism work right now might be in that stage of reversal where they're super critical of their own culture and really affirmative of others. But then you move into the biggest stage, which is the minimization stage.

And this is where, because it's exhausting to live in a state of polarization. That's that second stage polarization. And you move into minimization where you minimize the differences and focus on the commonalities and we're all human and everybody is valuable and all everything's valid. This is that middle space.

And this is where most people and organizations are at because it's a one size fits all universal thing. This will work for everyone. And I think this is where a lot of business advice lives is minimization. And for people of color, minimization is actually a really great tool for survival because they want to minimize what makes them different in order to get along and move along in the world. 

And then eventually when enough work has been done, you move into the acceptance stage where you are curious about difference and you notice it, but you're not seeing it as a threat. You're seeing it as a potential for goodness and enriching the experience. And this takes a lot of work because you are aware that there's different ways of doing things, but you're not exactly sure on an embodied level what those differences are.

And then you have the adaptation stage, which is the last stage where you get so familiar with difference in this particular way that you can code switch and you can adapt your behavior without feeling like you're compromising your values. This is a very hard stage to get into for anybody. But in this stage, if you're a marginalized person, you actively choose to be strategic about the way that you show up without feeling like you are cutting off parts of who you are.

So that's like that crash course, you move through all those stages in every single difference that you encounter. And I like that model because I see it as you're not just in one stage you are in any of those stages on any given day about any particular difference. Even as simple for me as going through denial about how people engage with the world, cause I'm an extrovert, and then when I was dating an introvert, you come across wait, what? You do things this way. You don't need comfort from other people when you're sad, this is weird. I mean it takes hours and hours of engagement with difference for you to actually move through to a place where you are really able to be fluid about it.

And I say this because this can be a helpful guide for us to be able to understand where our reactions and things come from because polarization, that us and them stage, is so common that when we encounter a difference in our reaction is, Oh, that's weird. Or, Oh, that's kinda messed up or what the heck? Why would you do that? That is a sign that we are judging that difference. And we need to look inside ourselves to figure out why we're doing that and then make that a more conscious thing.

And this is so true whenever we have an offering, because if we don't know that's what we're doing we're making an observation of a behavior or a belief and we are interpreting it as weird or strange, we are only perpetuating some of that othering, and really limiting what we're able to offer and do. And more dangerously, if we don't acknowledge that, then we are just trying to coach people into being us. And that is terrifying. 

And I realized I did that with students for years. I was coaching them into being middle-class white businessmen. What was I doing? And when I realized like, Oh, I was interpreting someone being quiet as not being a leader. It pains me to even say that. But when I could dig through my own stuff around that and understand that there's different values, there's different strengths at play, my interpretation could change. And it's also why business advice has never really worked for me. When people tell me just be more assertive about what your offerings, Katrina, you know this, you know this is not me,like you would never tell me to do that. But if you understood like my cultural context of being an Asian American woman, you would never tell me that because you understand that there is this layer of, I respect my elders. There's modesty programmed into every cell of my being and we have indirect communication styles. And so you would never tell me just to be super assertive about what it is that I'm doing. And so we have to start looking around at the different ways that are also valid, also powerful, and we need to do that research. We really need to engage with that so that we can validate that in other people. 

Katrina Widener: And this is something that I see all the time in the creative entrepreneurship realm. And the truth is that's not how the world works. Like it's not some cookie cutter advice that you can pick up and apply to no matter who you're talking to. It is something that's very specific to that one person and their experience, and to try to essentially smooth over all of the other experiences out there, it makes everything harder for everyone around us.

And I think it's important to note that our cultures are going to be different and our experiences are going to be different. Our family dynamics are going to be different, but also just like who each person is individually, their personalities, that's also different. And we can't expect to treat every single person the way that we want to be treated.

It's the difference between the golden rule and the platinum rule. The golden rule is treat others how you'd like to be treated. And the platinum rule is treat others how they would like to be treated. And we don't oftentimes do that. 

Jessica Chung: Exactly. And why I think so much of the coaching out there if there's not that open commitment to diversity and equity really just doesn't resonate with me because I'm like, they're not going to give me insights that I'm actually going to connect with. They're just going to tell me how to be a middle-class white lady and that's great for them, but it will seem so weird coming from me and learning to just understand  where my preferences come from and being able to put language around it has been so powerful and being able to say yeah, you know what, I'm good. This is my path and I'm figuring it out. And that's what I say about leadership, too, is that it's not sexy, it's lonely and charting out your own path is really full of a lot of doubt and second guessing. And, Katrina, I fill your DMs with all my doubts sometimes. And you're like, you're fine. Every other day, go rest. But yeah, it's so hard to go against that like otherwise societal conditioning of you've gotta be this way.  There's more examples now, but until then, it's just hard to realize that there's nothing wrong with you. 

Katrina Widener: You're totally right. And this is the thing that makes me so sad as a coach, because the truth is that every single person is uniquely designed for the life that they want. If we think about like an introvert versus an extrovert, I would never tell an introvert to go out and show up in the world the way that for instance, I would. I love networking events. I love talking to a million people. And if I were to force someone and say, "Hey, the only way that you're going to be successful is if you go to a networking event and you introduce yourself to 50 people tonight", or whatever it is, I'm not honoring the part of that person that makes them them. And it's so hurtful. And honestly, that's what a lot of coaches do. If I am giving cookie cutter advice to every single person out there, then that's not honoring who they are and what they need. What it really is doing is trying to assimilate everyone to who I am. And that's just not, that's just not okay. And that's just not what's going to be best for their healing. We're not honoring the differences in people. And it's particularly important to talk about that when it comes to different cultures. 

Jessica Chung: Yeah, and I think more and more there's like those icebreaker questions that reveal to us just how different, for example, like our family lives are. And you never consider that anybody, their family operates any differently than yours. But when I learned, for example, that not everybody has dinner with their family, not everybody celebrates holidays, a certain way. Gifts are approached differently. Conversations are approached differently. And how you might feel when someone when someone deeply understands some of those nuances. And that's what we're trying to get at. With understanding difference, whether it's understanding ability differences, or racial differences, or ethnic differences it's all of that exposure and education and experience that's going to get us to a place of actually having effectiveness and empathy for the ways that other people want to do their stuff. And that it's valid and beautiful and it's the world that I want to live in. And I think understanding that day to day and applying it more and more is going to be our path there.

And I talk to my students all the time and they have such a deeply embedded idea of what it means to be a leader and they would not describe themselves. They discount themselves constantly because they don't see themselves as someone who is at the front of the room, initiating things, deciding things, and facilitating the task or whatever, but they're doing beautiful other things like supporting in the chat or checking in on people and how they're doing, or bringing brilliant ideas, asking excellent questions that make us go deeper or to question what it is we're doing.

And the fact that they don't see that as gifts and then they don't see that as leadership also is assigned to me of how much work we have to do. And part of being a leader is to allow yourself to be seen, bring your gifts to be seen, but then also be able to learn how to see other's gifts. And if we don't get there, we're just going to coach people into being more of us.

You don't need 50 quarterbacks on a team. We need the difference for our team to function. And I think then people are able to define that for themselves. That for themselves and then bring that more confidently into the world. Again, though, that's the world I want to live in where people feel like they can bring their gifts to the table and feel like their gifts.

Katrina Widener: And honestly, like that is a huge part of why I tried to create group coaching in the way that it is because selfishly I get to learn alongside of my clients when I bring a diversity equity and inclusion expert in talk to the group coaching members. Yes. They get to learn about their businesses. They get to understand not just intent, but also have more of an impact on the people around them and on their clients and on the people who come into contact with their brand. But I also then get to learn more. I also get to think about my business differently. I also get to try to figure out ways that I'm still learning and that I need to make changes because that's a huge part of what I want my business to be. And I know that I'm not there yet. The thing is that at the end of the day, it is a lifelong devotion to learning and to honoring the differences in everyone and not just saying, Hey, let's fit into this cookie cutter picture of what a creative entrepreneur is. 

Thank you so much for coming on here. I feel like I could talk to you about this topic for probably another three hours, because I think that it's so important. And I know that there's just so much more to this conversation to say. And I know, I always feel like I fall short when we have these sort of conversations. So I really appreciate you coming on here and sharing with us your expertise and the information that you have to share. You are always a brilliant person to learn and listen from. And I love you. 

Jessica Chung: Ah, thank you. I appreciate you too. Thanks for having me. 

Katrina Widener: And on that note, I cannot wait for you to come and talk to group coaching and share all of this delicious information with them, because this is really the true way that we start to make a difference in this industry.

But anyway, to finish things off, Jess will you let us know how we can get in touch with you later and how everyone listening can follow along and get into your realm a little bit more. 

Jessica Chung: You can find me on my Instagram at pretty prints and paper. Most of the time, I also post on YouTube and a little bit on Facebook, but day-to-day, I would love to see you on my Instagram. I love interacting with people. And then I also have a website where I have a blog and a shop if you want to support me in that way.

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