Ep 52 - 5 things I wish I had learnt sooner - Dirty Chai with Chio

In this episode of the Dirty Life podcast, the host Cheo celebrates the one-year anniversary of the podcast. She reflects on how starting the podcast has allowed her to practice speaking and share valuable information. She discusses the importance of disseminating information and how it can benefit others. She also talks about the things she wishes she had known sooner, including the significance of choosing the right life partner and the impact it can have on personal and professional success. She emphasizes the importance of mutual support and respect in a marriage and encourages open conversations about what constitutes a healthy relationship. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Life podcast with me, your host Cheo. The podcast where we focus on holistic professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today's installment is episode 52. It marks a year in episodes. I cannot believe I have been doing this every Tuesday, whether I'm on the African continent or the American one, whether I am at home or traveling, whether I am in this province or that province, whether it is rainy, cold, sunshiny, winter, autumn, spring. I have recorded an episode of the podcast every week for 52 weeks. I am so thrilled with myself. Let me tell you, when I started, I didn't put a lot of pressure on myself. I was already doing Career Tuesday on Instagram, and I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed the pressure-free format of the Career Tuesday live that I would do on Instagram every Tuesday. But I also noticed that once I had put it out there, I would sort of lose sight of it. People would struggle to find it. I would get a lot of requests for direction to which episode talked about this or that. And more and more, I started to get the advice to start a podcast. And eventually I did after overcoming some severe analysis paralysis, which you would have heard in the very first episode of the podcast 52 weeks ago. And here I am 52 weeks later. This is almost second nature. It has done really good things for me personally in as far as my ability to wrap words around an idea. I practice speaking. That's part of what this is, practicing speaking on a weekly basis. I have to learn something in order to share something every week. I have something to look forward to that I do purely for the pleasure of it. So no matter how tired I am, I sit down and I start this quite like today. And my heart is immediately full because it is something that I do purely out of passion. And you will remember that I started the podcast and I started Career Tuesday long before I had the words for it. But I subsequently learned from Malcolm Gladwell's book that I am what he identifies as a maven. That is the type of personality or type of archetype that I fall into as far as his book is concerned. And that archetype is a person who loves to collect information for the sake of it and to share information for the sake of it. And I've also found that in going through my life and going through career, there were some things that I experienced or learned that I just thought, Jesus, someone could have taught me this sooner and I wouldn't have had to invent the wheel or go through all this suffering or have this unpleasant experience just to find that this is something a whole group of people knew about already. And that's what prompted me to start sharing information about career. I was plagued by a lot of insecurity, especially in the earliest days of doing the Instagram stuff and the Career Tuesday stuff on Instagram because I thought this information is out there. Why am I repeating it? Like, why am I fetching information from there and coming to say it here when people could simply go there and fetch it? But the more I've interacted with the people who listen to the podcast and thank you to each one of you. This is why I value feedback so much. The more I speak to the people who listen to the podcast, the more I realize that it wasn't just my imagination that we don't know what we don't know. So, yes, the information might be there, but a lot of us simply do not have the ability or the knowledge to go and fetch it from there because we do not know that we do not have it. Nobody has ever taught us about the art of fetching that information. If you need to invent a wheel and you've never seen a wheel before, it's not as simple as one might think. And the idea behind the podcast is simply to stop the cycle, the endless cycle of information that's already out there being hidden from or not being easily available or accessible or visible to the people who are living in the present moment. You'll find, for example, I had such a huge aha moment when I read Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth and the Power of Now, and I thought, oh, my God, where has this information been all my life, et cetera, et cetera. Can you imagine my shock when I when I read Marianne Williamson, who wrote a book in the 70s that said exactly the same thing? She wrote her book based on another book that was written a couple of decades before that that said exactly the same thing. Imagine the opportunities that we're missing out on as a species because we're not disseminating information far and wide enough, but we disseminate dance videos, which I love, by the way. I love dance videos, but I'm just saying there is so much power in sharing information. And I hope on its one year anniversary that the podcast has done something for someone some way. And if it has done this for one person on this planet, then its purpose has been achieved. Thank you to every person who has listened for the past year, who has emailed, who has DMed, who has left me a comment, who has been in touch. All of that has not gone unnoticed, and all of that has done its part to keep me going. I am ever so grateful that this small corner of the Internet is one where I can speak to into the mic from my lounge or from my floor, depending on the day. And I can have a conversation with you about the things that we all wish somebody had told us about. With this in mind, this week's installment is called Things I Wish I Had Known Sooner. It's a very interesting thing, or at least I find it interesting about myself, that I do not really have regrets. I've had a lot of hard experiences just like everybody else, but I don't have anything, things that I would go back and undo. These are things that do not plague me. But there are certain pieces of information that I come across and I think, oh my goodness. If I had known this sooner, I would have done such different things. And I understand, courtesy of The Power of Now, courtesy of Marianne Williamson, courtesy of all these doctrines that have gone before, I understand that the power lies in the moment that we have now. And I understand that the trajectory of my life going forward has been changed forever. But I wanted to specifically share these five things in the hope that someone out there then considers the things that they wish they had known sooner and shares them with somebody else. And maybe they would then give that information to that person just a little bit sooner than they received it. So number one is the Warren Buffett quote. The person you marry is the most important decision that you'll ever make. My God, I wish someone had told me this in my early 20s. Because the mistake I made was to date to get married. I thought getting married was the goal. I had been raised this way. I had been taught this. It was you date to get married. The whole purpose of the courting and courtship is to get married. And what no one taught me in all of those things was the person that you would choose, the qualities that they needed to have, the qualities that would be defining for me. Nobody taught me to figure that out. Nobody taught me to stop and consider it. And now I know better. But I did make decisions based on what I knew then. So I thought that I wanted a smart person, etc. You know the basics. Somebody who dresses nicely, looks after themselves, etc. It was only after I got married that I realized those are really the least of the things that matter to me, Chio, as a person, in a partner. The things that matter to me are kindness, consideration, feeling seen, feeling cared for, feeling safe, for example. Things that matter to me are feeling supported and understand that all the things that I am saying are mutual. So I do not expect to receive the things that I'm stating without giving them. What I did not know the first go around was that contrary to what we have been taught, it really is not the woman's sole responsibility to make a marriage work. These are the things, the conversations that I wish somebody had had with me. That when people say marriage is hard, what exactly do they mean? Because if the idea is you have to figure out how to be together because you're two different people, then yes, that's great. But a lot of the time, that idea that marriage is hard is used as a blanket to cover behavior that is actually just generally unacceptable, unhealthy, and even abusive. And those are the conversations that we should be having. So when people say, oh, the first year of marriage is difficult, or the first couple of years of marriage are difficult, let's understand what that means and what that looks like. It might look different for every couple, but the idea should be that if you are in love with someone who is in love with you and you are married and wanting to build a life together, there are certain lines that are not crossed in that difficulty. And if those lines are crossed, it is really just okay for things to end. And these conversations I wish had been had sooner. Sheryl Sandberg supports this view that the person you marry is one of the most important career decisions that you'll ever make. This is also true because if the person you're married to doesn't support you, makes it difficult for you to show up as the best version of yourself, actively discourages you, has you fighting on the home front and on the work front, your chances of success diminish dramatically. If you are in a marriage where you, and when I say you, you could be a guy or a girl, same thing. If you are in a marriage where you are carrying the entire load of something, so let's say you're doing all the parenting, or you're doing all the financial, if you're carrying all the financial obligations, or you're doing both, that is not healthy for you. Because the more you're carrying, the more weight you're carrying, the shorter the distance that you can go. And that's the same in your career, right? It is the same in your career. If you are burdened all around, you travel slower, and you are more likely to collapse under the pressure. If you are sharing the weight of the burden with somebody, you're more likely to travel further, to keep upbeat, to keep driven and motivated. So understand that the things that matter, the things that truly matter in determining who you should be married to, are really not superficial. Think of a person who you want to see and be with, not just on the wedding day, but for the rest of your life. A person who you want to manage finances with. A person who you want to raise kids with. A person who you want to show up with over and over and over again. A person who you can be sure will show up for you. A person that you will show up for. A person that you can call a true partner in both parenting and work, in life, in career, in all of it. That's what it means to do life with another person. And so many of us confuse or ignore the warning signs that maybe this is not something that you can live with for a long time, because we are aiming for the short-term goal of being married, getting married, versus the long-term goal of being happily married. Because it is also not the duration of a marriage that is an indicator of its success, but the quality of that marriage. The second thing I wish I had learned sooner is that financial literacy is everything. And you do not have to have money in order to be financially literate. Learn to understand and manage your money. Learn to understand and manage money in general. Understand the ins and outs of it. De-mystify money. Understand that in as much as most of us focus on the goal of acquiring money, you are also meant to keep it in order to close the loop. It is not purely about your ability to purchase stuff, but your ability to have options because you have money set aside. These are the things that are important. Understand how to handle the little you have, if you have a little. Understand how to handle what you have, so that you can have more. The skill set with which you handle the money you have now is the same skill set with which you handle the money that you have when you have more. So if you are bad with a thousand grand, you are not going to be magically good with a million. We would all like to believe that the cure is always more money. But the truth is, whatever weaknesses you have in relation to finances, scale with the amount of money that you make. And whatever strengths you have with the amount of money that you have, scale with the amount of money that you get. If you think about it in the context of James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, if you are off course, if you improve, which of the principles should I go for? You see, the thing with James Clear's book is a lot of his principles can be applied to a similar scenario and come up with a different result. But in this instance, let me talk about the compounding effect of small habits. If you start out with a little, so an aeroplane that is in Los Angeles wanting to fly to New York, right? If that plane takes off and the nose of the plane is three degrees off, that plane will land in an entirely different part of the country. It will land in Washington, D.C. That is the manner in which habits scale with you. So what starts out as a small issue, a little borrowing here, a little buying with a credit card here, a little this, a little that, that scales with you. And the compound effect increases significantly over time. So it starts out small, but before you know it, you've ended up in an entirely different place. Similarly, the ability to save around here and there compounds over time and maybe you end up landing in a much better place. So if you improve a little bit over time, you wind up with a dramatic improvement in 10 or so years. What is the opposite of improving? If you deteriorate a little bit at a time, you will wind up at minus zero so much quicker because negative consequences also compound. So if I would have known anything sooner, it would have been just save that one round even though it feels like nothing. It would have been while you're waiting for, let's say, a certain amount of money or whatever it is, practice managing money. It would have been understand these principles early. It would have been read the psychology of money now, not 10 years from now. Those are the things that I would have changed because I am absolutely certain that I would be far better situated had I learned to be financially literate 10 years ago. I think I was only lucky that I was left destitute soon after varsity. It sounds terrible to say lucky, but what I mean is the reason I'm not in financial trouble now is I understood what it was to be left with nothing, to not know where your next meal is coming from. So that is something I would never risk. But my financial decisions were not made from a place of literacy but from a place of fear and not wanting to go back to a place of not having. And consequently, to some extent, I was insulated from some of the worst habits that could have got the better of me. But had I actually been working from a positive place and a place of understanding, I would have been able to do more. Number three, to thine own self be true. It's funny. A university friend bought a little book for me. It was a tiny little book, maybe three inches, called To Thine Own Self Be True, and it had quotes in it. And over the years, I have thought about it many, many times. And as I'm approaching 39, as you know, my birthday is on Saturday. I don't know if I told you. I think I said it in the newsletter. My birthday is on Saturday, and I turned 39. And I am living my life as myself, truly as the truest version of myself. For the first time in my life, I've been doing this for only three or four years. Otherwise, before, I was just an agreeable person who tried to show up as the best possible version for other people. And I failed sometimes because I was trying to be something that I was not. And I was unhappy 100% of the time with myself, even though I had moments of happiness with other people. It's only in the last few years, especially post-divorce, that I realized it is futile to try and be someone else. That I came across the works of Brene Brown, which I wish I had read so much earlier, too, and understood that it is actually okay to risk showing up as yourself. And that, in fact, the greater risk is showing up as somebody else. Just be the truest version of yourself to the best of your ability. And try. And to be the truest version of yourself is not permission to behave badly. This is to be balanced with the genuine effort to try to improve yourself. The genuine effort to try and develop yourself. The genuine effort to try and be the person you would want to be sitting across from, or stuck in a room with, or stuck in an elevator with. Try and be a lovely person. But also try and be a lovely person to yourself and to others. I think what balances the idea of being maybe nice to other people is also being nice to yourself. The ability to include yourself in the pie chart of needs. And that, once you learn that you are just as worthy as the next person, your ability to show up with the belief that you are worthy to be in the room is dramatically improved. Just that power of harnessing vulnerability while also being able to put boundaries in place. While also being able to understand or grasp the fact that doing this thing, choosing to do this thing, means that when you are hurt, you truly hurt. But when you see something beautiful or you experience something beautiful, you truly believe it. Sorry, you truly feel it and you truly experience it because you cannot numb feelings selectively. That's Brené Brown speaking through me. You cannot numb a part of you because you are afraid and think that all the other feelings that you have will stay unnumbed. You don't work like that. You either are numbing your feelings or you are not. And risking feeling all my feelings has been both painful and spectacularly rewarding. And I recommend it for everybody. Then number four is that being a firstborn African daughter makes you a prime target for narcissists. And people like throwing around the word narcissist without truly understanding that just because a person is selfish or arrogant or whatever it is, doesn't make them a narcissist. Narcissism is a condition. Narcissistic personality disorder is a condition that is diagnosed by a psychologist, not by Instagram. And the people with it tend to be drawn to some of the qualities that firstborn African daughters are raised with. The fierce independence, the making a plan, the putting others first, etc., etc. This is why it is so important, especially if you are a daughter who has taken on the responsibility of others, to understand what it is to value yourself. To understand what self-worth and self-esteem are. To engage with yourself and be truly present in yourself and to truly recognize your instincts when they are telling you that something is wrong. Because you cannot stop encounters with people who may seek to take advantage. But you can recognize them. You can hear yourself when the alarm bells are ringing. You can trust yourself when your instincts are saying, not here, let's not be here. That is all you need. The rest of it is a lot of noise. But that is important. I needed, for me, a fundamental tool in getting that right was therapy. But it wasn't just therapy. It was a deep desire to figure it out. A deep desire to take responsibility for my life. A deep desire to embrace the fact that other people were deciding what needed to happen in my life and I needed to be the one deciding. I needed to have a sense of agency. To have a sense of ownership. To have a sense of understanding that it is not they who are responsible for me. No matter what my decisions are, good or bad, it is I. It is me who is responsible for me. And taking those reins intentionally. I needed to go to a therapist for years. Two or three years. Or three or four. To be taught to do this. And honestly, it's the best money that I've ever spent. I've read many books. I have shown up. I have practiced. I've done the homework. I did not half-ass it at all. If I were you and you want to start on this journey and you haven't, I would read Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle. I would read Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I would read Brené Brown's Daring Greatly. I would start there. And just work your way outwards. Because once you start consuming this type of material, whatever you need to read next will find you. Then the last item, number five, is that, and it links quite closely to this idea of agency and being responsible for yourself, that you can really just walk away from an invitation to an uncomfortable situation. You can really just say no and just not go. You can say no when a person tries to fight you. You can say no when a person tries to suck you into whatever it is, a cycle of misery. You can say no when you're invited to a party that you don't want to go to. You are in charge of your life. You're the director of your life. You're responsible for your life. No one makes you do anything. No one. And if you are in a place where you do not like your situation, do the necessary work to exit. The idea is not that you must run out of your job tomorrow. The idea is if you don't like the situation in which you find yourself, ask yourself, what is it that could empower me to exit? Is it money? Is it a promotion? Is it, let's say it's a promotion. How do I get one? Do I need to study further? If so, how do I fund it? Where do I study? Do that. Do it. Do the work and then exit. If it's a friendship and you're uncomfortable, say I'm uncomfortable. If that doesn't work out too well, then you try it and then you can just leave. You do not need to stay anywhere where you are uncomfortable. Endurance of discomfort and pain is not going to earn you a prize anyway. You will just die and figure out you wasted your life. And that is one of the things I wish I had learned sooner, but I'm ever so grateful I learned in time to have a beautiful remainder of my life. And those are the five things that I want to leave with you in this episode. That is the 52nd episode, the one-year episode of the Dirty Chai podcast with Chiyo. Before I go, let me just tell you, I named the podcast Dirty Chai initially, just Dirty Chai. And I did a quick search and there was no podcast, it seemed to me, called Dirty Chai. And I'm like, quick and easy, blah, blah, blah. And then I did all my artwork and da, da, da, da, da. And then only when I went to create an Instagram account for the podcast did a Dirty Chai podcast come up. And I thought, oh, my God, I don't have the energy to create new artwork. I don't have the energy to start over. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And then I thought, how do you even make Dirty Chai unique? And I'm like, ah, slap a with Chiyo on it. And I did. And here we are. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I am ever so grateful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please share it with somebody. Please leave me a comment. Please talk to me. And maybe we should start thinking about get-togethers, have conversations about some of these things, right? Maybe it's time. I don't know. Where do you go after a year? Thank you so much. Bye. Bye.