Skillful Livelihood: Resetting Purpose, Remembering Finitude
A Light Hive Collaboration with Eugenia Chiang!
Hi friends! My name is Logan and every couple of weeks I post about Dharma-inspired mindfulness. This is the first interview for Light Hive–I’m very excited to share a by-line with my friend,
!
Skillful Livelihood
This isn’t a matter of “what” you do. This is a question of how and why.
A lot of folks use “right” to discuss the eightfold path. But on the topic of livelihood, when social media impacts our brains and relationships more than many classified “drugs,” skillful livelihood isn’t just not trafficking drugs, weapons, or people (what Buddhist texts suggest we refrain from)…I think it includes how you show up to work.
Before proceeding, I must acknowledge Dharma Stack shepherd
’s notion of a “liberation-based livelihood” in Work that Matters. Duerr guides readers to align their work with their core intentions while responding to life's changes. In my sincere opinion, it is THE book to get on the topic on livelihood and mindfulness.Work is where most people spend most of their time, so what better place to practice things like metta, compassion, equanimity, and sympathetic joy toward self and (gasp) difficult people?
Eugenia Chiang has a rare combination of business acumen spanning multiple regions (Hong Kong, Canada, the U.S., Australia, China, and Latin America), a start-up background, and extensive wellness training. I’m honored to call her my friend, and thrilled to share her experiences striving and starting afresh.
Our sense of livelihood starts long before we enter the professional world. Ideas about work and money come from family modeling, cultural pressure, and history. Since so much is learned in childhood, let’s begin with Eugenia’s early story.
Learning to Achieve
Childhood is where we learn roles like doctor, police officer, fire fighter, teacher, mother, father. The early groundwork for how we show up at work is laid in these formative years.
Eugenia’s childhood and education was shaped by generational migration.
While I was born in the 1980s when Hong Kong was still a British colony with relative political and financial stability, my parents and grandparents had a different life experience. My grandparents migrated from China to Hong Kong with nothing due to poverty and instability. Both sets of grandparents managed to establish small businesses and, while not “well off,” they raised families with five and six kids. With my parents being the oldest, they understood their life purpose was to provide stable income to support the education of their younger siblings. Neither parent had a chance to attend college, nor had a chance to discover their own career dreams.
Like many Asian families, mine instilled a strong sense of financial stability and upward economic mobility in me, given their early childhood experiences of not consistently having needs met nor the freedom of preference. As such, they placed a lot of emphasis in my academic achievement.
I asked Eugenia for a follow-up about achievement. How did it connect to work?
I had subconsciously adopted a belief that my parent’s love, support and presence was dependent on my academic success. I often felt that my mom was extremely anxious about my academic performance, which may be a residual shadow of her own experience. Being the oldest in the family, she felt the pressure to pursue vocational school where she would earn income as a trainee (as a nurse) as opposed to repeating the last year of high school (which cost money as school was not free) to improve her grades to re-apply to university.
In my early elementary school years in Hong Kong, I would spend 3 to 5 hours per day studying while participating in a number of extra-curriculars. The general belief was that getting good grades meant getting options to go to “elite” schools and that meant having access to good professional opportunities that pay stable and respectable incomes.
I asked for a follow-up.
Chinese culture, and my family, are male-dominated. My dad's side of the family often tells me how much they wanted the firstborn of the eldest son (i.e. me) to be a boy to carry the linkage of the last name. So I had always subconsciously felt the need to prove that I could be as worthy as a man...and I probably got into sports in high school for that. (Little known fact: I played basketball in high school…though it's definitely not my calling, lol.)
(Dear readers, I am so sad I missed Eugenia’s b-ball days.) Still, the philosophy that connected good grades to “respectable” income…
This philosophy led to my work at consulting firms such as Accenture, an MBA from MIT, and experience with tech companies such as Intuit and Medallia, where I was on the path of climbing up the corporate ladder.
“The practice of mindfulness is one of the most powerful reset buttons we have. When we learn to slow down internally, we begin to see our habitual reactive patterns. We start to understand how fear, even on subtle levels, may dictate our choices around work.” – Maia Duerr, Work that Matters
A Turning Point
We each have one finite life. How do you want to spend your limited time and energy, and for whose benefit?
Eugenia’s narrative shifted dramatically with burnout and her father’s terminal illness.
Before the pandemic, I experienced a couple unexpected ‘crucibles’ experiences where I felt everything I had and was building toward collapsed.
For most of my early career, I had prioritized work over everything else, including my health, family, relationships, from societal conditioning that one must work extremely hard to achieve success. Being a female in a male dominated industry, combined with my innate insecurities (about having to achieve), I was constantly fearful that I wasn’t doing enough, and felt like I had to over-achieve to prove my worth at the organization.
I was unknowingly a ‘workaholic’, as I had very little self control to ‘not’ work.
Startup life can feel like a mixture of running the ship while building it at the same time. Speed and execution is everything. It's really exhilarating when you are with a group of people with similar values who are motivated by the same vision and mission because you see the collective impact.
Once you’re able to deliver results, you also get external recognition from superiors and peers, and that makes it addicting, especially for people who have not yet developed a strong sense of self and boundaries.
All this led to burnout at the startup where I had been working diligently for 3.5 years to take the company public. There were a lot of executive changes at that time which created a lot of chaos and fear, causing stress, tension and some unskillful behavior amongst the company.
As I was about to have my third boss in 1.5 years, I felt like I was doing meaningless work and was not growing. I also felt like I was doing multiple peoples’ jobs, as I felt obligated to keep the company moving (which I hear is also common amongst women) when there was a lot of turnover on my team at that time.
I made the hard decision to leave the job 3 months before the IPO. I, and my colleagues, were crying when I was about to leave because we had built such close connections as we were striving to take the company to the ‘exit’ milestone.
This was not the only challenge Eugenia faced in 2019.
My dad was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) right before the pandemic. Shortly after my dad was given the prognosis that he had months to leave, I made the intentional decision to spend much of 2020 prioritizing my family and become a caretaker to my dad with my mom.
This is a very different kind of labor. What did it feel like for you, to go from start-up burnout to caretaking?
Adjusting to the identity to be a 'caretaker' was a struggle. It wasn’t something I ‘planned’ for and ‘strived’ to be.
It came out of necessity. My mom and I–with support from my sister and my aunt–would have to help him with everything from getting in and out of bed, showering, using the toilet, eating.
At some point, I engaged a career coach, wanting to keep developing myself professionally while I was caretaking. Like many good coaches, she led me to reflect on my intent…which I then realized I was looking for an escape as opposed to confronting the pain and difficulties that I was facing as a caretaker.
Caretaking was mentally, emotionally and physically draining. My dad was a foodie. During the early phases of his diagnosis when he could still eat solid food, I would spend 3-4 hours a day cooking different recipes just so he would have some sort of joy in his life. Then during his last few months, he became immobile and could only have a liquid diet.
It was also a humbling moment. Unlike my earlier life experiences, where I believed that I can achieve anything if I work really hard, I had to learn the lesson that no matter how hard I tried, my dad won't get better as science does not yet have a cure for ALS.
That experience has made me more resilient, and more agile, as I recognize that not everything is in my control. After my dad passed away in 2021, I re-evaluated my life view and priorities. I recognized I’m on this planet for a finite amount of time. I thought about the legacy that I wanted to leave.
I hope to leave this planet in a better shape than I inherited it.
The loss of her father was a critical moment in Eugenia’s journey, leading to a reevaluation of everything from her professional goals to her sense of purpose.
On Finitude
E: “I had to overcome my own internal fear and learned to trust my own ability to adapt to whatever is needed. I had to tee out my parents' anxiety around the risk of not having a job with a stable income. I strengthen my sense of internal stability through my mindfulness practices.”
During this time of grief, loss, and confusion, I deepened my mindfulness practice through meditation and yoga to find my grounding, explored healing practices to release suppressed stress and emotions (reiki, breathwork, EMRA therapy), found self-discovery practices to evaluate my own values, purpose and strengths while experimenting a number of different career options from non-profits to health tech.
After spending many months not finding a job I felt would align my purpose, vision, and values, I decided to take small steps to test my chops as an entrepreneur by being a freelance growth optimization advisor for tech companies.
It was much of an internal growth journey to step into the role of entrepreneur.
The next phase of my professional journey is to create something more concrete, tangible and impactful, where I am testing out a few ideas to see which one would stick. I am looking to find opportunities where my cross-cultural experience, my business / startup background combined with my wellness training as well as my passion towards a more ‘just’ world would provide value in serving unmet needs for less privileged communities.
Eugenia’s Resources and Reminders
E: “My north star for ‘right’ livelihood is closer to the definition of Ikigai, and finding alignment between internal strengths, purpose and external needs.”
While it may be uncomfortable at times, confronting pain (with the support of trained practitioners) can be a source of transformation, inner strength and power. This has enabled me to identify my ‘true’ self and live more authentically.
Experimenting with new things can also align you with the purpose of your being. This means follow your curiosity, try new experiences (may it be traveling, learning new skills) or meet new people while reflecting on what’s a fit vs. not. Growth is also about meeting your internal fear, self doubt, and ‘upper limit threshold’ kindly, over and over again, in order to realize your full potential.
Getting support from peers, coaches and mentors is not a sign of weakness, but rather, a sign of humility and open-mindedness. Likewise, taking time-off to ‘unplug’ or to attend retreats is not a sign of laziness, but a much needed practice to recharge, reflect and reinvigorate yourself.
Takeaway Practice
What were you taught about money growing up?
Many of us have a felt sense of the systemic and structural forces shaping our notions of money, value, and self-worth, informed by intergenerational lessons and socioeconomic context.
To unpack your own beliefs and experiences around money, try this journaling exercise inspired by Spencer Sherman, financial advisor and mindfulness teacher. Get it out on paper. I promise, it’s useful.
JOURNALING PROMPT: What did your family teach you about money and labor? What were you taught about value, work, and worth? Are these things true for you today? Is it possible the people teaching you about money learned in a different socioeconomic context?
A couple reminders:
Adoptee Alchemy: September 15
Adoptee Alchemy is an adoptee-only space that meets for 75 minutes once a month to meditate and discuss adoption-related themes.
45 minutes will be dedicated discussion to whatever is arising for the group that can, if it arises, include the recent news about intercountry adoption. Come chat!
Creative Coalition: October 6
The Creative Coalition offers a safe space to stretch creative muscles, engage in mindful speech, work with inner critics, and practice mutual appreciation.
On October 6th, from 4:30-6 PST, we will play Takuma Okada’s Alone in the Ancient City. After a short sit, we’ll alternate between responding to prompts and sharing/appreciating.
Here’s the sign-up link! Come create with us. :)
Bio and Mentorship Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindful integration mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops. They teach at the University of California, Los Angeles and hold a PhD in Performance Studies.
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