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You Cannot Earn Belonging By Giving Yourself Away · The soulnotskin Podcast with Jen SluMac

0:00
Sunaina: Until then, I was working within the shapes that had been set for me and succeeding in those.
0:07
Sunaina: But that voice, you know, I used to lie down in bed when I was young, like little.
0:12
Sunaina: Um, there was always being I write about this a lot, this this hollow feeling in my chest.
0:18
Sunaina: And I could never understand.
0:19
Sunaina: First, I was like, is this puberty?
0:21
Sunaina: Maybe it's my boobs, you know.
0:32
Jen: Welcome to The soulnotskin Podcast, a virtual living room, a safe, welcoming place to land.
0:38
Jen: I'm your host, Jen SluMac, or as my students like to call me, it's Jen.
0:46
Jen: We talk about the real human experience, the hard stuff, the wonderful stuff, and the messy everyday growth that shapes who we become.
0:53
Jen: Real stories, real people, real insight, becoming who we are.
0:58
Jen: Settle in, and let's dive into today's episode.
1:02
Jen: Today we have Sunaina Mehta, the founder of Design Your Next, a strategic direction practice for enterprising women, clarifying who they are becoming and structuring what comes next.
1:17
Jen: She was born in America, uprooted to India at 12 years old.
1:21
Jen: She built her footing more than once across two cultures, two continents, and a life lived on her own terms.
1:29
Jen: Uh, with 25 years of global leadership across brand strategy, innovation, and human insight, including as VP, Global Head of Insights at HP.
1:39
Jen: So she hasn't had any success issues, right?
1:42
Jen: She left a powerhouse career at 50 to build something she wished had existed earlier.
1:48
Jen: Choosing yourself, she believes, is the most graceful act of rebellion.
1:52
Jen: And I am just so excited to hear her story.
1:55
Jen: So, Nana, I'm gonna turn it over to you.
1:56
Jen: Would you share with us what shaped you as the woman that you are today?
2:00
Sunaina: What shaped me, well, let's say initially, what shaped me were all the structures and systems that were in place that prescribed to me what success needed to look like.
2:10
Sunaina: Uh, but deep within that, what shaped me was my drive to prove to myself and the world that I could be better at anything and successful.
2:22
Sunaina: But it was within circumstances that began with throwing me in at the deep end as a child when I moved uh first from Dayton, Ohio to New Delhi.
2:32
Sunaina: And yeah.
2:35
Jen: That's a big move.
2:36
Jen: It's a big move.
2:40
Sunaina: It was a very big move at a time when India was still um mostly government regulated and run.
2:47
Sunaina: Um so prior to McDonald's, let's say that, entering the country, um, two television channels versus what cable over here, right in the 80s.
2:59
Sunaina: Um the decision within my peer groups in school that I was too American or I was kind of like the outsider in my own skin color.
3:08
Sunaina: I was an outsider.
3:09
Sunaina: Um, so learning how to belong and adapt within a culture by earning belonging, not really being who I might have been all by myself.
3:18
Sunaina: So I'd say what shaped me is the drive to was the drive to win within the context and structures that were put upon me, societally, culturally, familially, organizationally.
3:31
Sunaina: Um and that continued on, and it got me a lot of success.
3:37
Sunaina: Um, that that sort of drive of I can do this and I can do it better, anything you can do, right?
3:43
Sunaina: Um, the competitive streak.
3:45
Sunaina: Um, but I wasn't really truly what has shaped me.
3:48
Sunaina: And I'm reading I'm writing my memoir, I'm daring to go there.
3:52
Sunaina: And what is I'm seeing is the desire to earn belonging and giving myself away was a lot of what shaped me.
4:00
Sunaina: But then at the same time, here's the thing the the desire to not follow convention, the voice inside, kept pushing me out of those those circumstances and pushed me away from walking away.
4:18
Sunaina: I would walk away.
4:19
Sunaina: So I have disrupted my life circumstantially and deliberately, multiple times, because what was inside, the voice inside, wasn't comfortable.
4:31
Sunaina: And I listened.
4:32
Sunaina: I would listen delayed for a long time.
4:36
Sunaina: Today, right, I listen right away.
4:39
Sunaina: Well, and see, that's a learned skill, right?
4:41
Sunaina: I mean, that's something that we learn through a lot of trial and error, at least in my experience, of actually listening to ourselves, trusting ourselves, believing that that is really what we're thinking, and that it's not some distortion of what we're experiencing, right?
4:54
Sunaina: Took me a long time to hear my inner voice.
4:56
Sunaina: Can we can we start back a little bit in you're 12 years old, you're in the United States, and what why do you go to why do you uproot and go to New Delhi?
5:08
Sunaina: And this is the first time you'd been to India, is that right?
5:11
Sunaina: Well, I've been for vacations trips, but I did not speak the language.
5:15
Sunaina: I did not understand beyond some Bollywood movies that my father would play.
5:20
Sunaina: I was a white girl from Dayton.
5:23
Sunaina: I was.
5:24
Sunaina: That's I mean, my friends were all white.
5:27
Sunaina: We were very low, lower middle class, right?
5:30
Sunaina: And from an income perspective, I I I was not, I was, yeah, it was um so what the reason we moved was my my father lost his job, and my mother really wanted to go home.
5:49
Sunaina: For her, that was that was home.
5:51
Sunaina: And I'd say she made us go, honestly.
5:54
Sunaina: And my father was on the spectrum, not that he was diagnosed, but he was, and so he wasn't the best husband.
6:01
Sunaina: Um, and he also didn't he kind of followed leads, right?
6:05
Sunaina: He didn't necessarily make his own decisions, he also turned to alcohol, and we just went.
6:12
Sunaina: Mom said, This is not a place where we will live.
6:15
Sunaina: We will live like kings and queens in India with our people.
6:21
Sunaina: So here we go.
6:22
Sunaina: And we got on a plane and we packed up and left.
6:25
Jen: And is that what you found when you got there?
6:27
Jen: Living like kings and queens?
6:29
Jen: Not at all.
6:31
Sunaina: Tell us about what we were the lesser cousin, we were the family that was dysfunctional.
6:37
Sunaina: We were the family whose father was an alcoholic and a bit off his rocker, and my brother had a spurgers, so he was also, you know, not a fit.
6:49
Sunaina: And we lived within a two-bedroom tenement above this market, market and restaurant in a in a building that was, I call it the makeshift, the makeshift flat.
7:02
Sunaina: Um, you know, everything was different.
7:05
Sunaina: Um we had three toilets, let me just put it that way, in a flat that was tiny, and two of them were Indian style with holes in the ground and no no sinks.
7:15
Sunaina: And the other was this one bathroom that was just cold and gray.
7:20
Sunaina: I'm just giving you an example of sensorially.
7:22
Sunaina: It was cold, gray, it was dusty, there were lizards.
7:26
Sunaina: It was would flood a flat.
7:29
Jen: Yeah, glad there were lizards in there.
7:31
Sunaina: Oh, yeah.
7:32
Sunaina: Firstly, because in India, house lizards are very common, but in our home, because there were so many open windows and cracks and things just weren't working right, they, you know, they came in more easily.
7:43
Sunaina: Um, you know, I I I have a phobia now.
7:47
Sunaina: I'm a I'm freaked out, I freak out when I see a lizard.
7:51
Sunaina: Um, but it was we were the lesser then, even though my family, our families didn't necessarily say that.
8:00
Sunaina: I felt it.
8:01
Sunaina: Um, everything in our home was hand-me-down, everything.
8:04
Sunaina: Mom used to ration cookies, you know, between me and my brother.
8:08
Sunaina: Uh this is these are just examples.
8:10
Sunaina: I mean, we weren't poor, but we weren't we weren't kings and queens.
8:15
Sunaina: We weren't even any of that.
8:19
Jen: Um, so it was your mother disappointed?
8:21
Jen: Was the dysfunctional household sort of exacerbated by mom's disappointment?
8:26
Sunaina: Oh no, mom was happy.
8:28
Sunaina: Mom was happy.
8:29
Sunaina: Mom went back to her mother's her family life, her her family, right?
8:34
Sunaina: And her people.
8:35
Sunaina: Um, and the rest of us adjusted around that.
8:38
Jen: So, what did that teach you about yourself?
8:43
Sunaina: Well, it taught me, first of all, that when you have no choice, you have to be strong.
8:49
Sunaina: And so it taught me self-I I don't like to use the word resilience, even though I'll say, Yeah, they demoted me in school.
8:56
Sunaina: You know, they they're it, you know, I was straight A student.
9:00
Sunaina: That was it taught me the words my mother said when I tried to run away from school one day.
9:08
Sunaina: You have no choice, you have to be strong.
9:12
Sunaina: And she walked out.
9:13
Sunaina: And I'm crying in the principal's office.
9:16
Sunaina: It taught me that I had no choice and that I would win within the circumstances I was given, and that nobody would make me second to anyone else.
9:25
Sunaina: Um so it taught me how to do that, made me tenacious.
9:29
Sunaina: I gave up sports, I became very, very academic, very studious, very polished.
9:37
Sunaina: It leads to what we would expect, as a psychologist would say, overachieving and perfection.
9:43
Sunaina: I did a lot of that and I won.
9:46
Sunaina: I I graduated second in my class, they would rank us in India out of 40, right?
9:51
Sunaina: Um, admired by most people on the merit board when I left.
9:57
Sunaina: Um, Miss St.
9:59
Sunaina: Mary's, which is the equivalent of the prom queen.
10:02
Sunaina: And you know, like all the things, all the things.
10:06
Sunaina: Um, uh, but but after school, then again, it was it was confusion.
10:10
Sunaina: But um I I compartmentalized home and the the shit that was going on there, and I performed and outperformed in school and gained everybody's admiration, including my family's, through that.
10:27
Sunaina: But even then, I'll tell you, Jen, it's like even despite that, I remember when my when when I did really well in school, my grandfather came to me, my pay matriarch, my mother's grandfather, uh uh father, and he's a he's an authoritarian.
10:44
Sunaina: Like he was somebody we were all scared of.
10:46
Sunaina: He was the patriarch and and you know, impressed very, very hard to impress him.
10:51
Sunaina: Um so I did well, and and he came and he gave me a gift.
10:55
Sunaina: He he gave me a towel, a bath towel.
10:59
Sunaina: Um, it's this green and white striped fluffy bath towel.
11:04
Sunaina: And I was like, this is a weird gift, but I was grateful and I was so happy because it was an acknowledgement of me.
11:10
Sunaina: And then my my cousin, and I adore my cousin, boy, um, not so good in school compared to me.
11:19
Sunaina: He looked at him and he said, You know, when you do as well as her, I'll give you anything you want.
11:25
Sunaina: So I also, no matter what I did to achieve, to be, the one I wanted to impress, my pseudo-father figure in a way, right?
11:36
Sunaina: The one everyone wanted to impress, still saw me as lesser than.
11:40
Sunaina: So I started to notice that no matter what, you can achieve as much as you want, be as perfect as you want, but you're not gonna necessarily get the approval that you're dying to have for validation.
11:54
Sunaina: You'll get it, but it will be lesser than.
11:57
Sunaina: Um, and that was because I was a girl and I was the daughter of another of a someone who wasn't in the matriar in his family, right?
12:07
Sunaina: Like I see his daughter's daughter, my grandfather's daughter's daughter, right?
12:14
Sunaina: That's not status, right?
12:17
Sunaina: I can't change that, right?
12:20
Jen: And that's the thing, right?
12:21
Jen: We are born as we're born, and then we have to navigate the world, you know, and that's why I like to do these stories because some of us will never walk in each other's shoes.
12:30
Jen: We'll never see the world the way that we have seen it, that different people have seen it.
12:34
Jen: And I think if I can bring stories together and give people the opportunity to meet different folks, then you know, we'll start to see how much we have in common.
12:43
Jen: Right.
12:44
Jen: I mean, for instance, the uh the the achieving and the perfectionism in order to try to get the attention you wanted from your uh you know, father-ish figure and your grandfather, I can relate to that 100% of my dad after the divorce, right?
13:00
Jen: Nothing I nothing was got the re got the response that I wanted, right?
13:06
Jen: I've since learned that having expectations is is perfect inverse to serenity, right?
13:12
Jen: So I've got to stop having expectations of how I want the world to respond.
13:17
Jen: But as a little girl, right?
13:19
Jen: So here you are in India, you're 12 years old, a little bit more than that now, because you've been going through school.
13:25
Jen: You've disappointed grandpa.
13:26
Jen: You got a green and white striped towel.
13:28
Jen: Did you ever get to the bottom of that?
13:30
Jen: Like, what inspired that gift?
13:31
Sunaina: I have a feeling.
13:32
Sunaina: So there's this big company called Bombay Dyeing in India, and I think he must have gone and bought a big whole state, like a bunch of towels from there and thought, hey, this is new.
13:42
Sunaina: It's it's an occasion, let me give her this.
13:45
Jen: That was awesome.
13:46
Sunaina: I remember celebrating my achievements too, with it was that gift.
13:50
Sunaina: That's that's the only thing I remember.
13:51
Sunaina: You know, so we we remember those things, those things that in our brains.
13:55
Sunaina: Absolutely.
13:58
Jen: So, what happened next?
13:59
Jen: So you were in New Delhi for just a time, and then where did you go after that?
14:04
Jen: And what inspired that move?
14:06
Sunaina: I was in a new I was in New Delhi for 12 years.
14:09
Sunaina: I believed at the time that that's where I belonged.
14:14
Sunaina: Um, I grew my hair, got a no like a traditional nose pin, you know, wore the Indian clothes, very ethnic, and I still love all of that stuff.
14:24
Sunaina: Um, but then at I I graduated as an architect um from uh in college.
14:32
Sunaina: And then my friends were either, this is 12 years later, either getting married or going to get their master's degrees from abroad, most of them, you know, it was one or the other.
14:45
Sunaina: And I didn't have the money to go abroad, so I said, fine, we'll get married, I'll get married.
14:52
Sunaina: And I didn't have a boyfriend, so we went through the arranged marriage, you know, um, which is very common and accepted and normal, right, in in India through that process, and I selected a resume after putting an ad in the classifieds for myself, my parents, my mother did.
15:14
Sunaina: And ultimately picked a guy who brought his family and his sister over, and we had a big thing in my grandfather, again, my maternal grandfather's home.
15:23
Sunaina: And um he wasn't again, this is he he just wasn't doing it for me.
15:29
Sunaina: And he asked me, What do you do in your spare time?
15:34
Sunaina: And I said, Well, I'm an architect, I have a business in this and handmade stationery, I blah blah love Indian class and blah blah blah blah blah, and all the families looking and and he's like, so you have no spare time.
15:47
Sunaina: Like, what did you want me to say, you moron?
15:50
Sunaina: Did I knit?
15:51
Sunaina: Like, what did you want?
15:53
Sunaina: And then his sister came up to me and and and and sidled up to me and said, So, you know, I was very impressed you're an architect, so tell me, and she's probably my age, right?
16:03
Sunaina: So tell me, so what do you what do you do?
16:05
Sunaina: What are your hobbies?
16:06
Sunaina: So I tell her, well, I blah blah blah, I do this, I do that.
16:11
Sunaina: And and she she says, what about the kitchen?
16:14
Sunaina: And I'm just like, what do you mean, what about the kitchen?
16:17
Sunaina: You know?
16:18
Sunaina: Um, so so I was very diplomatic.
16:21
Sunaina: It's like, well, then the mother is my mother is the queen of her kitchen, and when I have one, then you know, I will cook.
16:28
Sunaina: Whatever.
16:29
Sunaina: Um, so they all leave, and there was also this moment of where my grandfather and the guy's father went outside to talk about magic.
16:39
Sunaina: Sure.
16:41
Sunaina: And yeah, and they came back, and you know, I can imagine that conversation.
16:44
Sunaina: I can imagine them saying, the girl's father, you know, he's not in the picture.
16:49
Sunaina: We are we were separate, mom was separated by then.
16:52
Sunaina: You know, he's he is so it's it's just that, but I can I can also imagine him saying, you know, she's a US citizen, she has a passport, you know, like I can imagine that this might have been the conversation.
17:04
Sunaina: And at this point, all my whole energy had been to make myself fit in in India and be a part of the culture.
17:13
Sunaina: And when that family left, and and my grandfather came to me and to to my uncles and aunts, my grandmother and my mother there, and said, you know, they want to they want them to go out for it, like let them go on a date.
17:27
Sunaina: And I'm like, I don't want this.
17:29
Sunaina: This is the first time I was like, no, this can't happen.
17:32
Sunaina: And it was my grandmother who said in in Punjabi, she said that you cannot put a frog in front of a princess.
17:41
Sunaina: You can't do that.
17:42
Sunaina: No, you know, and my grandmother never speaks up.
17:45
Sunaina: My mother, grandmother never says, like, in the sense of like, yeah.
17:49
Jen: So she was hitting your back.
17:51
Sunaina: Yeah, she was my hero.
17:53
Sunaina: I'd say if there's a hero, she was my hero, and she's had a tough life.
17:57
Sunaina: He had a tough life, you know, under the heavy thumb of uh a mother-in-law, and you know, and I said, I'm not going, and and I'm not gonna go on this date.
18:07
Sunaina: And and he my grandfather said something to the the tone tune of, you really don't have a choice.
18:14
Sunaina: I mean, look, you've got a bad background, like your family is like screwed up, right?
18:19
Sunaina: So, again, here it keeps coming back.
18:21
Sunaina: She does not have a choice, she does not have a choice.
18:24
Sunaina: You have to be strong, you have to go through this.
18:26
Sunaina: I was like, this time it's not happening.
18:29
Sunaina: I said, I'm moving, I'm moving to America.
18:31
Sunaina: I'm going.
18:32
Sunaina: My mom's like, Where are you?
18:34
Sunaina: Where's the money?
18:34
Sunaina: My mother wanted me in India.
18:36
Sunaina: My mother has her own little, you know, desire to keep us all in her orbit.
18:39
Sunaina: You belong here, why don't you go there?
18:41
Sunaina: She had basically told me to reject my Halloween, my Easters, my Christmases, my my American life and my green grass and my biking in the suburbs, right?
18:52
Sunaina: For for this culture that I do respect and admire in many ways, but telling me how to live my life for 12 years and me still being told I'm not enough was not okay anymore.
19:07
Jen: Right.
19:08
Jen: Well, and I can appreciate mom's uh desires, right?
19:12
Jen: I think my mom also, just when my brothers and I moved to different states uh away from her in the United States, uh, she was very, very sad.
19:21
Jen: You know, she was sad that she didn't have her kids close enough to just stop by for lawn and short.
19:27
Jen: You know, so I can appreciate your mother's desire there to be by her family.
19:32
Jen: And I mean, that's one of the things I think that mothers cherish the most is having their family around, right?
19:37
Jen: Um, but I also appreciate your ability to say, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
19:42
Jen: Wait a minute.
19:44
Jen: What about me?
19:44
Jen: You were about 24, 25 at this time?
19:46
Jen: Four, 23, 24.
19:48
Jen: Okay, so you go back to the United States and what do you do there?
19:53
Jen: Like, how does that play out?
19:55
Sunaina: So to go, I had to make my own money, which was next to impossible, and she knew it.
19:59
Sunaina: I was working as an architect, but did not have the safe I there was no way.
20:03
Sunaina: We made like 5,000 rupees a month as an architect.
20:06
Sunaina: That was under $100 in the US, and the ticket for one way was $55,000 to the US.
20:12
Sunaina: So there was no way within, but within months, I started a business.
20:16
Sunaina: Ironically, in wedding cards, I sold wedding cards to big fat Indian wedding families, and I made the money in two months.
20:24
Sunaina: And I came back and I'm like, here we are.
20:29
Sunaina: I'm going.
20:30
Sunaina: And she couldn't stop me because then my grandfather said, let her go.
20:34
Sunaina: Let her go.
20:36
Sunaina: And I said, Fine, I am going.
20:38
Sunaina: And I just got on a plane.
20:40
Sunaina: I had one suitcase, and my mom gave me a thousand dollars, which was my dowry money, which I have to tell you, I was so scared.
20:47
Sunaina: It was um, I it was a check that my aunt from America had written.
20:51
Sunaina: My mom had exchanged with with aunt, you know, traded rupees.
20:55
Sunaina: And I hid it.
20:56
Sunaina: I was so scared of traveling.
20:58
Sunaina: I hadn't traveled alone.
21:00
Sunaina: I hadn't been on a plane in 12 years.
21:02
Sunaina: And I was afraid I'd be caught from money laundering because my mother exchanged rupees and dollars with my aunt.
21:08
Sunaina: I hid it under a clean pad in my underwear.
21:13
Jen: That was fantastic.
21:15
Sunaina: I'm scared of what I here I am getting on a plane, going to God knows what.
21:19
Sunaina: Mom said you'll be flipping burgers.
21:21
Sunaina: Someone else said, what it this is the challenges.
21:24
Sunaina: Someone else said, Your father did nothing there.
21:26
Sunaina: What are you gonna do?
21:28
Jen: You know, and I think expectations are high, right?
21:32
Jen: People's people's hope for you to succeed in America are far from uh high.
21:38
Jen: Yes.
21:38
Jen: Everybody expects you to just crash at burn when you arrive.
21:42
Sunaina: Yes, they wanted me back.
21:43
Sunaina: She wanted me back, and and that's all, right?
21:46
Sunaina: Like, and um, so I hit the the the check in my underwear under a cloud.
21:52
Jen: That's fantastic, by the way.
21:53
Jen: Great, great story.
21:56
Sunaina: I got on that plane and went.
21:58
Sunaina: And what did I do there?
21:59
Sunaina: So I pounded the pavement.
22:01
Sunaina: I took a map of Chicago.
22:03
Sunaina: Um a lot of people are like, oh, you must have gone to college, or oh, it must have been easy and it pisses me off because you're a US citizen.
22:11
Sunaina: No, I didn't have a college to go to.
22:13
Sunaina: I didn't have a job.
22:14
Sunaina: I barely had any money.
22:16
Sunaina: All I had was access to the United States.
22:19
Sunaina: I took, I took, uh, I just punted the pavement.
22:23
Sunaina: I hunted.
22:24
Sunaina: I would I wouldn't stop within two months.
22:26
Sunaina: I landed a job as an architect in downtown Chicago.
22:29
Jen: Wow, that's incredible.
22:31
Jen: That's incredible.
22:33
Sunaina: It was lucky.
22:33
Sunaina: I mean, I was not an art I would I had not been trained in America.
22:37
Sunaina: You know, I thought there was a different circumstance as an architect, but when you work, when you make your own luck, things happen.
22:46
Sunaina: Things happen.
22:47
Sunaina: Somehow the university yields something for you.
22:50
Jen: Sure.
22:51
Jen: Well, I think they say uh in order to meet luck, you have to get off your ass and go find it.
22:56
Jen: Go to the something like that.
22:59
Jen: You know, you have to get out into the world for luck to find you, right?
23:02
Jen: You can't sit on your couch and hope you get lucky.
23:05
Sunaina: And you have to be willing to notice it.
23:07
Sunaina: You have to be able to do that.
23:08
Sunaina: Yeah, that's big.
23:10
Jen: Good point.
23:10
Sunaina: Luck passes you by.
23:12
Sunaina: You don't you don't even notice it if you don't pay attention.
23:14
Jen: Well, and Sunaina, wouldn't you say that that part of that is what you discovered in saying yes to yourself?
23:22
Jen: Like, at what point did you it sounds like it started at 24 when you're in New Delhi and you're like, okay, I'm done with this?
23:30
Jen: Um, while you've come to appreciate love, the culture, and and all of the things that your family uh traditions bring to you from that, you're like, I can't do this.
23:42
Jen: Right?
23:43
Jen: So you come to the United States, it probably began there, but at what point did you really feel like you had agency over yourself and that you were willing to listen to yourself?
23:54
Sunaina: Then it was then.
23:55
Sunaina: Until then, I was working within the shapes that had been set for me and succeeding in those.
24:03
Sunaina: But that voice, you know, I used to lie down in bed when I was young, like little.
24:09
Sunaina: Um, there was always being I write about this a lot, this this hollow feeling in my chest.
24:14
Sunaina: And I could never understand.
24:16
Sunaina: First, I was like, is this puberty?
24:17
Sunaina: Maybe it's my boobs, you know.
24:19
Sunaina: What is this feeling?
24:24
Sunaina: I would lie down at night next to my mother because we shared a room.
24:27
Sunaina: And I would feel emptiness, and I didn't know how to explain it.
24:33
Sunaina: Was it the tether to going back to America where I had the memories that really made me feel like I belonged, the place I felt like I belonged?
24:41
Sunaina: Was it just that I wasn't didn't feel seen in India in a way that made me, you know, in you know, part of it?
24:49
Sunaina: I never belonged.
24:50
Sunaina: I never belonged there.
24:52
Sunaina: Um, but yeah, I I used to lie in bed throughout those 12 years and actually envision my life in America as a grown-up, fully independent, self-sufficient, financially on her own with the job, with a boyfriend, probably, but myself 100% independent.
25:11
Sunaina: That I think is was always it always was there.
25:15
Sunaina: But at 24 is when it would not, it could not be ignored anymore.
25:20
Jen: I wish I'd learned to listen to that voice at 24.
25:23
Jen: I think that's remarkable.
25:24
Jen: I think there's something in your spirit um that is remarkable to be able to uh no, that's a lot to have two places that that you've lived by the time you're 24.
25:38
Jen: They're so absolutely different.
25:39
Jen: I mean, even the language, you had to learn the language when you went to New Delhi, yeah?
25:44
Sunaina: I had to learn the language from the from ABC.
25:47
Sunaina: And I would that's one of the reasons why they demoted me from seventh grade to sixth.
25:50
Sunaina: Um I double promoted myself, by the way.
25:53
Sunaina: I got back up there.
25:54
Sunaina: Of course you did.
25:56
Sunaina: I've got to do this.
25:58
Sunaina: Um, but I also had to learn Sanskrit, which is the ancient language of India.
26:03
Sunaina: And that was the the base of that is Hindi.
26:06
Sunaina: So I had to learn both.
26:07
Sunaina: Um I couldn't even pronounce the names of the the rural the emperors or the the anything, the geography, physics, chemistry, bio like all well over all much harder um over there.
26:26
Jen: Um yeah, yeah, I did.
26:30
Jen: Well, so you go through those things and then you finally find uh that you can trust your voice at 24.
26:36
Jen: I think that's exceptional.
26:37
Jen: It took me considerably longer.
26:39
Jen: Um so now you're a successful architect, you're in Chicago, you're doing your own thing.
26:46
Jen: What happens next?
26:48
Jen: I fall in love.
26:50
Jen: Yay! Well, I'll say yay later.
26:53
Jen: Is this a good thing?
26:55
Sunaina: No.
26:56
Sunaina: I mean, yes and no.
26:57
Sunaina: Yes and no.
26:58
Sunaina: I you know, at the time it was a good thing.
27:01
Sunaina: Hindsight is shows you otherwise, right?
27:05
Sunaina: Um, I set myself up, gotten an apartment, went back to Dayton, did my reunions, was living that dream, that vision, and I had decided I would go back to school because architecture doesn't pay.
27:17
Sunaina: And I had fallen into that, oh, it's terrible.
27:21
Sunaina: I mean, it's not a great tape pay master.
27:23
Sunaina: Um and I I'm ambitious, and for me, I'm still proving, I'm still proving that I can have my own independent, soul, you know, fully fledged, fleshed out life on my own.
27:35
Sunaina: So I decided to go to business school.
27:37
Sunaina: But, you know, within the process, within so I I reached Chicago in April of '98, and I met my first husband in September of 98.
27:48
Sunaina: And right away I fell into a pattern of wishing for, you know, that family and that love that I really never had in my own life, but I saw always, I was always on the outskirts of families and that those environments where it was happy and joyful and everybody shared and connected.
28:07
Sunaina: And I meet this man from India who has a textbook perfect background, and nothing like the frog, you know, from before.
28:18
Sunaina: And uh, I fall in love with him and the notion of that family, and the notion of being that daughter-in-law or daughter to a family, and his father embraced me as well.
28:30
Sunaina: Like he treated me like a daughter, it felt really, really good.
28:33
Sunaina: Family was in India.
28:34
Sunaina: Um, and um, so I ended up getting married two years later.
28:40
Sunaina: So in July of 2000, I was married.
28:43
Sunaina: It happened really fast.
28:45
Jen: Were you also in school?
28:46
Jen: Were you also in business school?
28:48
Sunaina: I started school in 2000 September, so two months after, three months after I got married.
28:55
Jen: So you continue to pursue yourself as well.
28:58
Sunaina: This is where I bifurcate, where there's two parts of me that are yearning.
29:02
Sunaina: There's two parts of me that keep the engine going.
29:05
Sunaina: And so my career continued to take its shape.
29:09
Jen: Okay.
29:10
Sunaina: And I continue to be ambitious.
29:12
Sunaina: And my husband was always for that.
29:14
Sunaina: Like I think if that was something he wasn't for his family, uh, that would have tripped up the marriage.
29:19
Sunaina: But they supported that, right?
29:21
Sunaina: Um, being self-made is extremely important to me.
29:25
Sunaina: And even though my husband was from a well-to-do family, he was self-made in America.
29:29
Sunaina: There were lots of little red flags even then.
29:31
Sunaina: I remember one moment where he's he accused me of maybe wanting him for his money, for example, right?
29:38
Sunaina: There was always like these little tests and red flags, Jen, that I should have caught, but I did not, right?
29:46
Jen: Right.
29:46
Jen: Yeah, we don't.
29:47
Jen: We rationalize them.
29:50
Sunaina: Exactly.
29:50
Sunaina: So so here's the thing, here's here's what I have learned looking back, and this is the premise of my memoir, story of my life.
29:57
Sunaina: You cannot earn belonging by giving yourself away.
30:04
Jen: Ooh, say that again.
30:06
Sunaina: You cannot earn belonging by giving yourself away.
30:11
Jen: Yes, ma'am.
30:13
Sunaina: I wanted to earn belonging into that family, and I adapted and gave myself away to fit in that mold, knowing that there were red flags.
30:27
Sunaina: Um, and these are like minor red flags in the in the Indian context of life, these are not vices, okay?
30:32
Sunaina: These are just not.
30:33
Sunaina: This is you have to fit in our culture.
30:36
Sunaina: I mean, there was a point where he actually told me because of my brother, and I was afraid to have a son, because genetically, boys pick up those genes faster.
30:45
Sunaina: I didn't have it, my brother did.
30:48
Sunaina: And uh he told me before we married on vacation in Las Vegas, he says, You need to ask your mother to get a gene test done of your brother, a DNA test, so that tomorrow when we have children, you don't we don't you don't have one with that gene.
31:06
Sunaina: These are things that were said to me before I married him.
31:12
Sunaina: Explicitly articulated.
31:14
Sunaina: He wasn't pretending.
31:16
Sunaina: He was who he was.
31:18
Sunaina: He told his father at the signature room at the John Hancock, you know, the signature lounge or whatever it is, John Hancock once upon a time.
31:26
Jen: Yeah.
31:27
Sunaina: And he told his father when they were like doing a father-son bonding thing in front of me and my friend, he said, Daddy, if you had not approved of her, I would never have agreed to marry her.
31:39
Sunaina: I would never have chosen her.
31:41
Sunaina: And still I married him.
31:44
Jen: I get it.
31:44
Jen: Hindsight is something else, isn't it?
31:46
Sunaina: I would, I compromised my my my own self to belong to that family.
31:52
Sunaina: Absolutely.
31:53
Sunaina: But I didn't let go of my career.
31:55
Jen: Well, and you know, this is what it costs us to grow up, right?
31:59
Jen: I I think a lot of times we have to do this uh transactional, you know, we have to learn our lessons, right?
32:06
Jen: We have to, and they have to hurt, or else they don't stick.
32:10
Jen: You know what I mean?
32:10
Jen: I feel like this is just uh sort of how we're crafted, and it's it's tough, man.
32:16
Jen: It's tough.
32:17
Jen: But I mean, you had to have that experience and to really see that, to really understand yourself and what like I had to go through a lot before I recognized or until I decided what were deal breakers.
32:30
Jen: Yes, you know, I don't care how cute you are, I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how ambitious you are, if there's this, this, or this, it's not happening.
32:40
Sunaina: I'll tell you though, the blind spot, we are destined to repeat.
32:45
Sunaina: It's it's um, I was dating someone recently for a few months, and I I I still was finding my pattern, right?
32:56
Sunaina: I was I the pattern was there.
32:58
Sunaina: And um, one day he breathed breadcrumbed me for two days, and this time though, I was like, we're done, no more.
33:05
Sunaina: Like there with it.
33:06
Sunaina: Basically, breadcrumbing the influence.
33:10
Sunaina: So before that.
33:12
Sunaina: So when you start to just like reply sporadically, and so you you lose a consistency, and it's like you're just keeping me on a hook.
33:19
Sunaina: Oh and it in 48 hours I went from oh, he doesn't like what's going on, to fuck you.
33:28
Sunaina: Sorry, am I allowed to say that?
33:29
Sunaina: It's like fuck you, this is over.
33:31
Jen: You just did, you just did.
33:33
Jen: We're good.
33:34
Sunaina: Go ahead.
33:35
Sunaina: So so I broke the cycle because but I could see that I could go have gone right back into it.
33:40
Sunaina: It is a blind spot in me.
33:42
Sunaina: And I know psychologically, I think it's Diane um uh Daniel Kahneman who says that we are destined to repeat our blind spots, so we need people around us to point them out.
34:29
Jen: Um ideally, we should have people to point them out because people do it again.
34:33
Jen: Yeah.
34:34
Jen: Well, and I think that's exactly it.
34:36
Jen: And that's a lot of the work that I do too.
34:38
Jen: Um, I've got a course, a workshop that I that I do in a workbook that goes with it called Heal What Raised You.
34:45
Jen: And it's all about um becoming aware of the blind spots, right?
34:51
Jen: Doing our best to sort of self-report on certain questions and prompts to really start seeing that like it's more than our parents that raised us, it's environments, it's systems, it's you know, all of these different things so that we can hopefully sort of notice the root of stuff and pull out our patterns and try something new, right?
35:12
Jen: Because we will likely, just like you said, we'll repeat them until we're fully aware of them.
35:18
Jen: Right.
35:19
Jen: And we we become aware of them by repeating them, by the way, unfortunately, right?
35:26
Sunaina: Yes, and and but our bodies, our bodies, we are it's it's what's the unconscious mind, right?
35:35
Jen: Absolutely.
35:35
Sunaina: It's it's deeper than it's it's lizard brain for us to repeat.
35:41
Jen: Absolutely, yeah.
35:42
Jen: Uh meaning go go to the uh the most emotional, like uh survival type of amygdala brain, right?
35:50
Jen: Out of the frontal cortex.
35:51
Sunaina: We're not getting that acting.
35:53
Sunaina: That ingrained into us is we are we are encoded.
35:57
Sunaina: What happens to us in childhood is encoded, and and it's very difficult to break the cycle, which is for me, like my mission though, is like how do I break that, not just for women who are going, you know, now, but even younger women in their 20s, their teens, how to help them see it before it's they become, you know, go through the whole process that I went through or you went through, right?
36:21
Sunaina: Like, how do you see it?
36:23
Jen: Well, and that's I think you know, I wanted to do that so bad too.
36:27
Jen: It's keep people from having to go through what I went through.
36:30
Jen: But what I've learned, especially I've got a son who I can't tell him anything.
36:34
Jen: I'm like, look, I did this, it was horrible, don't do it.
36:38
Jen: And there's no, you have to experience how miserable something is before you're gonna listen to it, especially when you're listening to somebody who's old.
36:47
Jen: Yeah.
36:47
Jen: She doesn't get it.
36:48
Jen: Yeah, she's totally out of touch with my world and everything that I'm dealing with.
36:52
Jen: She doesn't get it, she doesn't know what she's talking about.
36:54
Jen: And then one day it's like, I remember calling my mother multiple times in my 30s and 40s and just saying, Mom, I'm so sorry.
37:00
Jen: I was such a goof, but I had no idea what you were talking about could have saved me so much drama, but I didn't listen, you know?
37:10
Jen: Yeah, like we have to grow up to see it.
37:13
Jen: But the work that you want to do that's really, really important.
37:16
Jen: And women who are ready to do it will show up, right?
37:20
Sunaina: Women who are exactly you have to be ready to do it to show and show up.
37:25
Sunaina: It's it's aligning with knowing who you are, even though that itself is a journey.
37:30
Sunaina: Knowing who you are fundamentally, like what is inside that whispers to you that we tend to call imposter syndrome or we tend to suppress our vulnerability, our creativity, our intuition.
37:42
Sunaina: We suppress them in order to fit these molds.
37:45
Sunaina: Can we at least notice and hear what those things are and follow those more when we are younger rather than later when I wake up and say, Well, as you can see, I've woken up multiple times in the process.
37:58
Sunaina: Sure.
37:59
Sunaina: Um but yeah, um, you don't when you're in it, like I didn't see it.
38:05
Sunaina: I didn't, I didn't have enough self-respect for myself at that point, like of for for what mattered to me, to know that what I was doing on the marital side was wrong for me.
38:18
Sunaina: Sure.
38:19
Jen: Yeah.
38:20
Jen: Sure.
38:20
Jen: Well, I think if we don't have a strong foundation in the family of having ourselves poured into and uh have it reflected back to us that we are valuable and that we are fun and that we are smart.
38:35
Jen: If we don't have some of this, you know, foundational consistency that feeds into us as developing children, then we spend our life chasing what we think will give it to us.
38:45
Jen: Right.
38:46
Jen: And so you you've you've described that with the perfectionism, with the achieve, achieve, achieve.
38:51
Jen: And I'm familiar with those things too.
38:54
Jen: But did it ever get exhausting?
38:56
Sunaina: Now, again, when I look back, I mean, the things I did to hold up both worlds.
39:02
Sunaina: Um, yeah, absolutely.
39:04
Sunaina: I mean, when my son was born, my husband was still who he was.
39:07
Sunaina: I was running the home, I was taking care of running my career.
39:14
Sunaina: I was when he moved to in, you know, we when he moved to India, like the whole what the United States was my issue, like everything.
39:24
Sunaina: And yes, the answer is it it got exhausting, but at that time, I saw it.
39:31
Sunaina: I don't know, was I trying to be noble?
39:33
Sunaina: I don't know.
39:34
Sunaina: Um, probably.
39:36
Sunaina: Like I can do everything, I can, you know, I can make it all happen.
39:40
Sunaina: So it didn't feel exhausting in the in the way it looks now when I look at it.
39:46
Sunaina: Sure.
39:46
Sunaina: Then it was just like I have to do this, it's hard work, I'm capable of hard work.
39:51
Jen: And I will do it.
39:52
Jen: Yeah, I was I was gonna say you you sort of set set the tone early in this conversation about how you decided, young, that you were going to succeed in whatever cis situation you were placed in.
40:04
Jen: Like you didn't have a choice.
40:05
Jen: And so maybe that just maybe that core of your identity sort of showed up there too.
40:10
Jen: Yeah.
40:11
Jen: You know, this is another situation, and I just have to do it, and I can.
40:17
Sunaina: Exactly.
40:17
Sunaina: And and and asking for help wasn't in me, which is something we need to be willing to do.
40:24
Sunaina: You know, it's like, and I think this might be, I don't know if this is for men as much as it is for women, and I can only speak from my own.
40:32
Sunaina: It's like asking for help means that I am not enough.
40:37
Sunaina: And so I have to keep proving in this world that is very dominated by aggressive power, that if I if I ask for help, I'm not strong enough, and then I'm less worthy, you know.
40:52
Sunaina: So I didn't ask for help.
40:54
Jen: And I think that's one of those things that develops when we're not uh given that sort of solid foundational consistency of being poured into as a child, right?
41:04
Jen: We make up meaning to that, we create meaning around if I'm not able to survive in what we can look back on and say is an utterly resourceless environment, right?
41:16
Jen: Um then asking for help irritates people, which teaches me, don't ask for help.
41:22
Jen: Right?
41:23
Jen: Do it.
41:24
Jen: Yeah.
41:25
Jen: And so then well into your adulthood as a woman, you find yourself saying that if the same meeting that you had attributed to it as a child, if I need help, I'm not enough.
41:35
Jen: I'm not good enough.
41:36
Sunaina: Yeah.
41:36
Sunaina: I mean, growing up in in Delhi and all the studying and everything, my mother, my mother was the center of my world, and she would not help me.
41:44
Sunaina: Was not should not help me.
41:45
Sunaina: Nobody, nobody helped me.
41:47
Sunaina: So sorry for that.
41:49
Sunaina: They were all busy with my father, my mother had other issues, my son, my brother, finance, like whatever.
41:57
Sunaina: No help, right?
41:59
Sunaina: Um, whatever else was going on.
42:02
Jen: So yeah, um, do it yourself.
42:04
Jen: And so you did.
42:06
Jen: And so bring us a little fast forward through you had uh some other wonderful adventures.
42:12
Jen: Tell us about some of those.
42:14
Sunaina: Yeah, fast forward.
42:16
Sunaina: So um we moved to India again, I moved to India again, um, because my husband wanted um to join the family business that was there, and there's a whole thing of legacy and duty and you know, filial responsibility, and he was very much first his father's son, and so he wanted to go back.
42:37
Sunaina: So, so despite that itself is a long story, but we went back to India.
42:43
Sunaina: We've a lot, a lot of years here.
42:46
Sunaina: Um, so that's a long story.
42:48
Sunaina: We went back to India.
42:49
Sunaina: Um, my son was three at the time.
42:52
Sunaina: That's when the next disruption happened.
42:54
Sunaina: I got fed up.
42:56
Sunaina: I couldn't stand the way I was being again required to behave, to be part of the family, was curtailing my own independence and not in bad ways.
43:06
Sunaina: These are not vicious ways, these are passive, aggressive things.
43:09
Sunaina: I just want to be clear that culturally this was what was expected, right?
43:14
Sunaina: So um I I drew a line and I um asked for a divorce.
43:19
Sunaina: Uh it got too much, it got too much on me.
43:22
Sunaina: Um, and I got, you know, polysistic overfeas.
43:25
Sunaina: I started breaking out, I couldn't handle it.
43:29
Sunaina: I started seeing someone.
43:30
Sunaina: I mean, an affair started.
43:33
Sunaina: Um, and I I hate saying that publicly because, you know, because I am who I am, there's still some guilt to it.
43:39
Sunaina: And um, but it didn't, I didn't keep in it long.
43:43
Sunaina: Um, it just crystallized, it precipitated how much this was not working.
43:50
Sunaina: And like this, suddenly I'm in love with my husband, and suddenly I wasn't anymore, and I could see him.
43:58
Sunaina: Like my mother says, your God has feet of clay.
44:01
Sunaina: You know, there's a saying, I guess, this you know, in the Bible, your God has feet of clay.
44:06
Sunaina: So there's a statue of this pet on the pedestal of stone, but and he was a he's very much of stone, um, but his feet are breakable.
44:14
Sunaina: Right.
44:15
Sunaina: So you got you know, the thing is, I had pedestalized my husband.
44:21
Jen: And the moment you have some good words, girl.
44:23
Jen: I just gotta tell you, you said one earlier, too.
44:26
Jen: I don't remember what it was, but all right, so pedestalized, carry on.
44:31
Sunaina: And and I had done that, and I I I could him clearly.
44:38
Sunaina: And it happened.
44:39
Sunaina: It was 180.
44:40
Sunaina: Like I'm not saying that this was a long thing of I'm I'm falling off.
44:44
Sunaina: I still believed I loved him.
44:46
Sunaina: That's why we moved to India.
44:47
Sunaina: That's why I continued to fight the quote unquote good fight to be this great daughter-in-law and wife.
44:53
Sunaina: And my career continued because I wouldn't let it go for various reasons.
44:58
Sunaina: I almost did.
44:59
Sunaina: But I'm like, no, my career stays.
45:01
Sunaina: My career took off even more in India.
45:04
Sunaina: It actually really, and um, and so I I I had an affair for two months.
45:11
Sunaina: And then I'm like, I can't do both of these things.
45:13
Sunaina: I'm not a cheater.
45:15
Sunaina: So I asked for a divorce.
45:17
Sunaina: And um the reasons were not the affair.
45:20
Sunaina: The reasons that was the lens.
45:22
Sunaina: But but I didn't, you know, I asked for a divorce.
45:27
Sunaina: I was a single mom in India.
45:29
Jen: Um in New Delhi How is divorce viewed in New Delhi?
45:33
Sunaina: It's better now.
45:34
Sunaina: I mean more open now.
45:36
Sunaina: But back then it was 200 um eight nine 2009 um it was like I mean the family basically said divorce does not happen in this family.
45:46
Jen: Right.
45:47
Sunaina: Like that is a stigma.
45:48
Sunaina: We do not do that here.
45:49
Sunaina: And and and my husband obviously he was angry and I understand that.
45:53
Sunaina: And he's like yeah going in your mother's footsteps are you?
45:56
Sunaina: You know like because he you know her life was what her life was.
46:01
Sunaina: And but he always made us feel inferior.
46:04
Sunaina: He, you know, when we were on our honeymoon he would not talk to me for two days just as an example just a quick example.
46:11
Sunaina: Two days why because he didn't like how plumsy my brother was during the wedding rituals in front of his family.
46:20
Sunaina: So this was something that just kept I mean it was going to happen.
46:24
Sunaina: But 10 years later I decide enough is enough.
46:28
Sunaina: We're getting divorced my mother my grandfather they all had an intervention with his family tried to stop me.
46:36
Sunaina: My grandfather said get out of my house same house like the same wear the towel like the same place and I said fine I stood up my mother said yes get out get out get out my mother threw me out too she sided with them I turned and walked out I'm like you know what I can't explain to you why this no longer can happen this has to stop.
47:00
Sunaina: I will be a single woman with a child in the rape capital of the world rather than stay here.
47:08
Jen: And so then I left where's the rape capital of the world New Delhi I didn't know that that's what they call it yeah so then you move to the United States again?
47:20
Sunaina: I marry the man I was seeing so I always believed he would marry me.
47:25
Sunaina: It felt like it was a real thing right so um he married me in 2011 I kept so it was um and you know my my I wanted my son to be close to his father.
47:38
Sunaina: I didn't want that to break and it was hard again it was very hard but so he married me in 2011 I got pregnant in 2013.
47:47
Sunaina: My career is I'm like working at the best ad most admired ad agency in the world as the head of strategy at this point Wyden Kennedy um and I get pregnant and I lose the baby at 24 weeks um premature in an incubator for two days four days and that is also a story but suffice it to say just to make it faster I'm like I can't be here anymore.
48:14
Sunaina: This the city does not work for me.
48:16
Sunaina: I can't keep trying this is not happening.
48:19
Sunaina: So I found a job they relocated me to Boston as head of strategy for Mullin Lowe, which is another very big ad agency.
48:26
Sunaina: And I got my husband at the time second husband a green card asked permission to bring my son to America which thankfully my first did agree and we moved to Boston.
48:38
Sunaina: From there I got a job at Hewlett Packard in San Diego as the Global Head of Insights and I took it that was two years after that.
48:47
Sunaina: And then everything blew up during COVID um I discovered that my second the one I had literally ripped heaven and earth apart to be with had serious immoral I I immoral we use it loosely right we can all decide what morality is um but had been not I think cheating is a very light word for it.
49:16
Sunaina: He had been up to a lot of very a lot of things a lot and it wasn't just recent it was the whole time the whole time from falling in love to marriage to the baby to here.
49:33
Sunaina: So during COVID I basically discovered all this stuff and prior to that just prior to that thankfully I had initiated a postnuptial agreement with him so that my son would inherit should I die.
49:50
Sunaina: You know we were all thinking about dying at that time right fatalities and all that was going on so I had genuinely wanted to separate assets because California if I died would have given him everything right my my second husband um and he agreed he loved my son so he agreed to that and just right around that process towards the end um he signed I could tell he he was unhappy and I was trying to help him he was a writer so I went onto his laptop to pull a script of his that he was writing so that I could maybe help him and I saw and discovered a lot of very bad things um that were open on the laptop they were there.
50:36
Sunaina: Yeah and um it's just absolute luck that that postnup had been signed.
50:42
Sunaina: And I threw him out of the house during COVID.
50:47
Sunaina: And uh that led to other issues work-wise where I was accused of not having empathy at work and I was on the track to become the an SVP.
50:59
Sunaina: So the whole thing was like shocking and it was kind of funny because a company that doesn't exactly live you know corporations don't have empathy.
51:08
Sunaina: So to accuse me of of being a part of the system you know felt like a ploy and you know I mean it just is that's just what it's it's felt like a ploy.
51:18
Sunaina: So I I walked out of HP I I called I they told me on Friday I don't have empathy on Monday I called my boss and said I'm done I'm burned out I'm I'm done this isn't working anymore and they let me go gracefully they did um and I never came back I never went back and since then I've completely changed my life I have a delayed reaction to what's not authentic.
51:45
Sunaina: I keep trying to fit I keep trying to earn belonging keep trying sure yeah maybe I'll get it one day who knows what are you doing today and what have you learned along the way that you feel like is actually in place that you actually use to navigate your life I first of all I notice and listen to my to myself a lot more I now know that our feelings and our sensations in our bodies are signs and signals and they are telling us something I've learned to get out of my intellect I live here my whole life has been my intellect I my success has been my intellect and it is good right my superior quote unquote intellect right um I have learned that that is not how I can live I have to live in in my body in senses not summaries not descriptive oh wow yeah what a great description you have to live in your senses not in summaries I have learned that we already have the capacity and ability to build what we believe in if we recognize that it's coming if if we can only recognize that's already inside us.
53:07
Sunaina: So who we are matters more than who we're told to be and I will always follow now who I am in order to build what I believe in.
53:16
Sunaina: Who are you today?
53:17
Sunaina: That's a great question now you're making me think I'm like almost can you help me brainstorm on that who am I?
53:23
Sunaina: I'm kindly formidable.
53:25
Jen: What does that mean?
53:26
Sunaina: I care I see and understand and empathize with not only myself but I see and understand and empathize with what is invisible in you like what you can't see I can see and help you articulate I am a fiercely independent woman who will not compromise her boundaries in order to fit into someone else's world I will create my own signal my own self because I'll tell you that doesn't make you alone that calls your tribe when you know who you are when you walk away from something because you know who you are or understand yourself people show up I can't tell you the number of people who have showed up in my life in the past two years the most amazing people who have done hard things and are standing even stronger in themselves because they have I don't live in a cushy let's empower women world I want to live in a world where we create change because of who we are and therefore our agency is what's making more people who they are too so systems can change right that's societal like that's who I am is how can I enable more women to exercise their agency and create societal change as creators that's why I call it beautiful power.
54:48
Jen: What is beautiful power you said you want to turn that into a studio what tough what is that just wrote this the other just like literally and I have to look it up well what beautiful power is well first of all from a programming perspective it's not coaching it's co-design it's not about a job it's about acts of creation it's not about hierarchy it's about expansion it's not about more stuff it's about more you it's not about compliance it's about agency okay I've uh I've written a little small manifesto which is a work in progress folks power has consequences right we take responsibility for ours we refuse to hide in someone else's shadow we refuse to spend our lives overriding what we know we choose the unknown we choose to be seen we build what moves us more of us we are women in expansion what's possible expands in our presence we change the world through acts of creation through us beauty delivers its power make beautiful power visible that's where I am I love that I love that and boy are we lucky to have you find your beautiful power in this world and your desire to help other women find theirs thank you this is what we have to do this life is about experiments pushing our boundaries and yes do many things suddenly one of them is going to open something that's gonna land and guess what that's gonna open even more things so the many things is never gonna stop yeah and that's where I'm at today you know doing these stories and introducing people to folks that they otherwise wouldn't meet allowing folks to walk in the footsteps of somebody else's journey all of this is where my heart is so I'm really grateful.
56:46
Jen: If you were to say one thing to leave us on an inspirational note what would you say to the audience today?
56:54
Sunaina: The power isn't outside of you it's in you already I mean you have to make it visible make your power your power will grow when you make it visible when you start to do things out loud take them out of your head put them in the world and make them visible the most powerful wonderful women I've ever met are the ones that you just look at them and they're like gravity.
57:22
Sunaina: You can be gravity if you make it visible.
57:25
Jen: On that note Sudanna I gotta tell you that's the way to drop this you just dropped the mic on that thank you so much for your time thank you it was great I really appreciate it.
57:36
Jen: Take care.
57:37
Jen: You too bye bye if this conversation sparked something for you or if you want to dive deeper head over to soulnotskin.com and take a look around.
57:50
Jen: Grab a copy of the book Soul Knot Skin, free resources or get on the wait list for our next workshop.
57:56
Jen: I hope you'll pull up a chair next time to hang out with us again.
58:00
Jen: We're figuring out this world and ourselves at the same exact time growing as we listen to the stories of others.
58:08
Jen: Let's keep getting to know each other.
58:10
Jen: After all we are in this together see you next time