Come Alive

Live a Life with More Meaning and Joy

Yu Dan Shi

• Publisher: Discover Your Inner Genius
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780648548997
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Salud mental y bienestar

Do you feel trapped in your work and life?

Do you feel empty and unfulfilled?

Do you see happiness as something you will achieve “one day”?

The sad truth is, achieving society’s definition of success – an impressive career, status and wealth – can be a hollow victory.

Yu Dan Shi knows this all too well. A lifetime spent chasing endless goals and the appearance of success came at a huge personal cost: a punishing workload while raising a family, a daily battle devoid of meaning, failing health and misery.

Facing the truth was a painful yet life-changing experience. It had been a long, difficult journey from her underprivileged beginning in remote China. But the void Yu Dan felt at the height of her corporate career was a gift. With a new vision of success and clarity about what truly mattered to her, she transitioned to a path of passion, joy and meaning. Her book will show you how you can do the same.

Change doesn’t have to be daunting. You don’t have to upend your life and throw away everything you have achieved. In this transformative book, Yu Dan explores the conflict faced by the high achievers and guides you through her four proven and research-based principles, giving you the practical steps to make real, sustainable changes to your life.

You can be happy now. You can transform your life. You already have everything you need to get started, right now.

So, are you ready to come alive?

PART I

THE PARADOX OF SUCCESS

1

Hollow Victory

If you work hard enough at it, you can grind even an iron rod down to a needle.

CHINESE PROVERB

Remember the adage, “You can be anything if you put your mind to it?”

For me, this wasn’t just a saying. This was my core belief, which I held onto every day of my life. Work hard, study hard and you will achieve greatness. Guaranteed.

As a child growing up in a poor village in China, working and studying hard was more than a pathway to becoming anything I wanted. It was my only means of escaping the poverty and hardship I experienced every day.

I embarked on my ambitious journey at a very young age. I started school at the age of four. When most children were playing with mud in my village, I was buried in textbooks. But my hard work was rewarded. At just eight years of age, I was accepted into high school. You might think I was a child prodigy. I was bright, sure. But I also wanted to grow up quickly so I could provide for my family. I desperately wanted to alleviate the financial pain my mum went through every day, and desperation can push you to do anything. I never slowed down and was always learning on a rapid and steep curve.

I graduated from university when I was 17. I started my corporate career in Shanghai, then moved to Sydney to study my MBA at age 21. I came to Australia with two suitcases and a winter coat stuffed with dry food to save money. Like many immigrants, I found adapting to a new country a long and difficult road. I studied my MBA full time while working as a waitress at night.

Once I secured a job in Australia, my progress continued rapidly. Then, at the aged of 31, I became a Chief Marketing Officer for the Australian arm of a global tech company. To me, it was more than a job. It was an immigrant dream come true. But that was really no surprise to me – after all, if you worked hard, you could be anything. I had proven this core belief of mine to be true.

I never questioned the path I was on until one day when a defining moment changed the direction of my life. At the time, I didn’t know how it would change or where it would lead, but I remember that day so clearly.

The paradox of success: Winning on the outside, losing on the inside

It was the spring of 2007. My office had a spectacular view over Sydney Harbour. It was simply breathtaking. It was the perfect postcard image, one I had seen as a young girl living in China. In fact, it had inspired me as a wide-eyed 21-year old to leave my life and family behind in Shanghai, filled with hope that this city would be the beginning of a new adventure and a better life.

Imagine me, a young Chinese migrant, the daughter of poor academics, born in a remote village in China, 10 years later having an executive role in a leading Fortune 100 technology company, with a view of one of the most iconic harbours in the world from my desk? It was as if a Hollywood script-writer had written my story.

That day, I turned away from my mountain of work to look at the view. Like every other day, the harbour glittered magnificently and white sailing boats glided through the water. As I looked at the harbour, a strange feeling came over me. It was a feeling completely foreign to me, a void, a sense of emptiness.

There I was, trapped in a boxed office, poring over endless spreadsheets and charts, enduring mind-numbing boardroom meetings, discussing things I didn’t even care about, while that world-famous harbour was right there in front of me. I wanted to walk in the sun and enjoy the beautiful day outside, but I was trapped, as I was every day, with endless work, not knowing when it would end.

This feeling hit me by complete surprise. I’d had many ups and downs in my life, many struggles and hardships, but I’d always had a fire in my belly. I had always been full of zest, energy and action, forever on the go and excited about opportunities and possibilities. Life felt full. I felt full. Yet, as I sat in my office overlooking the dazzling Sydney Harbour, I felt lost and empty.

For as long as I remembered, I always had a clear direction. I’d always been a goal-setter and had written my annual plan religiously since the age of 15. I never get lost. How could you feel lost when all your visions and plans were beautifully mapped out and reviewed every year?

On the surface, I had everything. I was the opposite of empty. As an executive of an innovative global tech company, I had a great job with a salary to match. I had ticked every life-goal box: a family with two beautiful children, houses and lovely cars. I was told this was success and happiness. So why, after all these years of hard work and success, did I feel this way?

The feeling persisted. It was suffocating. I had always been so positive and passionate. What had happened? I felt burdened and stressed. The work was sucking the energy out of me.

For the first time ever, I didn’t have the energy to face my work. I knew I had been pretending to love my work and inspire my team. But how could I inspire anyone when I didn’t want to be there? I felt like a fraud.

Suddenly, everything around me in the office felt like a circus. I was putting on a show. I smiled at people all day long, put my best foot forward. I was hard-working and dedicated. It was easy to fake it.

I had the urge to walk out of the office, into the sun and be free. “I can’t do this anymore. I will quit my job and find a job I will be passionate about.” I swore to myself.

Looking around me, everybody was in the thick of action, oblivious to what was going through my mind. There were piles of documents to be reviewed, emails to be replied to and reports to be generated. All this needed to be done by 5pm before I rushed out the door to beat the traffic and pick up my daughters from school and daycare.

On the way home, reality sank in. “I can’t just walk out of a job without a plan,” I told myself, “I have a family to support.”

What was I going to do anyway? Corporate marketing in the technology sector was all I knew. Starting again was totally impractical. I had a family to support and a mortgage to pay. It had taken me 15 years to be where I was, I couldn’t afford to invest another 15 years into pursuing a different path. I didn’t have the time nor the energy. I couldn’t pursue my happiness at the cost of my children’s future.

That evening, after I put my kids to bed, I sat down in my study to try to catch up with my mountain of work. But I struggled to stay focused. My thoughts went back to what had happened that afternoon.

“I shouldn’t be feeling this way,” I thought. “How dare I feel this way, even for a moment?” Everything I had was a world away from my impoverished childhood. I had worked hard for so long to get to that point. The last thing I wanted was to feel hopelessly lost. I should have felt the opposite – utterly and eternally grateful.

Fear of failure and being a “disappointment”

Noble goals and actions, such as striving for success and financial security, are often driven by internal fears.

Life in China was difficult when I was growing up. I was the child of two parents who both went through the Cultural Revolution. At 18 years of age, shortly after being accepted into university, my parents had to leave their home and live on remote farms for 10 years, in the prime of their lives. Instead of pursuing their dreams of study and careers, they worked as hard labourers, lived in shelters and could not visit their families. Those 10 years were tragic. The darkness, the loneliness and the emotional pain they had to endure were immense.

Many people from that generation did not survive the ordeal. The survivors, like my parents, carried their psychological scars with them for the rest of their lives. The next generation of children, including my brother and I, suffered greatly because of that. As our parents’ dreams had been lost, we became their only hope.

What my parents went through altered the course of their lives. Their unfulfilled hopes and dreams were inevitably projected onto me, their eldest child. They wanted a better life for me, a young girl with my future stretched out before me. I knew my parents made a lot of sacrifices for me. I always felt I owed them a debt of gratitude for whatever opportunities I was given and I could never fail to meet their high expectations. This was a huge burden to carry and I never realised how profoundly it would influence my life.

My childhood was underscored by constant anxiety about our family’s financial situation. We spent many years apart. My father studied in Shanghai, 200 kilometres outside our hometown, Chongming Island, in the hope of getting a degree and a better job to support us. There was no money for travelling expenses, so I only saw my father twice a year during the first few years of my life. My mother had no choice but to give up her dream of going to university to take care of my brother and me.

I grew up in a mud house with brick walls over a mud floor. It was always wet and dark, especially in the winter or rainy weather. There were no electric lights and no windows. We had a bed, a table, some stools and a chest of drawers. My brother and I studied under an oil lamp. The light was so dim, we couldn’t study for long and would go to bed before 7pm as it hurt our eyes.

At the age of four, I had to walk to school by myself in icy-cold winters. My ears and fingers felt frozen, but I never felt defeated. I would hold my little head high, walking into the wind, not allowing myself to cry. The more pain I felt on those icy mornings, the more determined I became that my future would change for the better.

I watched my mother get up at 4am every day and spend hours just to make a thin porridge, coughing as the smoke from the big, black oven filled her lungs. Every day, I watched her count every cent we had and I would hear her cry in the middle of the night, worrying about our future. I wanted to help but I was just a child. I dreamt about buying a big house for my parents so they would never have to worry again. In fact, when I was nine years old, I told them that was my plan. I swore that one day, we would live in a place so safe and secure, nobody would cry over money or worry about the future again.

Then, my mother started to struggle to raise us financially. She was forced to make a very difficult decision and sent my brother away for several years. It wasn’t safe for a girl to be away from her parents, so I stayed with my mother. To survive, my family was broken and separated. It took 12 years for us to finally reunite and move to Shanghai after my father eventually got his lecturer post at a university after he solved a significant mathematical equation.

As the eldest child, I carried most of the burden to fulfil my parents’ lost dreams. I tried my best to reach whatever heights I could to make my mum happy. I couldn’t wait to grow up so I could make everything right, so I could make all those dreams happen.

What’s your anchor?

There are many anchors that hold us back in life. It’s hard to see how deep they go when we are in the thick of it. To be free, we need to let go of these traps. Being aware of what our anchors are is the first step. Financial security has been my biggest anchor and has heavily influenced all my life decisions.

I never worked for status. I worked because I wanted to provide a better future for my family and myself.

I remember when I was 15 years old, I told my parents I wanted to be a writer. It created such tension in my family. My father, a mathematician, gave me all the facts and reasons why this was such a bad idea. I would be a poor artist living on the streets. Most writers could barely make a living; it was an unsafe route. I quickly forgot about my silly dream of writing. Instead, I studied computer science, a safe choice with job security and career potential. I hear the same stories from my clients all the time no matter which culture they were born.

Even if you don’t share my upbringing, you can probably relate to this.

Abraham Maslow described the motivation for safety and security in his hierarchy of needs theory. As humans, Maslow explained, our motivations are focused on our basic need to survive first. Then, as this need is met, our motivations turn to the next level in a hierarchy, from safety, belonging and love, to esteem and self-actualisation.

Achieving a state of financial security is the primary concern of many of the people I meet and work with. It consumes us. However, instead of moving up the hierarchy, we tend to get stuck at this lower level of the hierarchy of needs because greed, debt and status drive us to focus on earning more, having more, and being more in order to feel safe.

We start this habit young, during our school years, when instead of learning for joy and personal growth, we learn how to graduate with good marks. We are more concerned that our education leads us to bigger and better things, rather than appreciating the knowledge we gain or the passion we discover along the way.

When we apply the same principle in adulthood, life becomes a game of chess: each move is a stepping stone to get us to a stronger position. Unfortunately, for most of us, no stepping stone is ever enough to make us feel secure. We want more material wealth, so we take on more debt. We work even harder to get a rise in salary and position, hoping one day life will be easier – when the mortgage is more manageable or when the kids leave school and there are no more school fees. We work harder and harder, always imagining a future where we don’t have to work anymore.

First taste of freedom

Having a computer science degree and above-average English skills was a killer combination in 1993. Foreign companies had just started t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The Paradox of Success
• Part II: A New Approach
• Part III: Four Practices
• Parting Words
• Daily Practice Checklist
• Next Steps
• Acknowledgements
• References
• About the author