Opening
Striving can carry you a long way before you notice you are running on someone else’s fuel. Achievements arrive on schedule and something essential stays missing. For Shuang-Min Chang, the gap between being admired and being known began with a hug from a stranger in Vancouver.
The idea
Shuang-Min Chang is an intuitive mentor and coach based in Taiwan who helps people move from perfectionism to their authentic selves, after 18 years as an expat across India, Italy and China and a successful corporate career in Shanghai.
The story she tells first happened in Vancouver when she was 16, at summer school, staying with a homestay mother she had never met.
“I was 16 and I didn’t remember when was the last time I was hugged before that”.
The woman cooked for her, encouraged her, and never asked about school. For a girl raised on expectations and achievement, where love and performance had blurred into one, it was the first experience of being loved for who she was rather than what she produced.
Shuang-Min spent the following decades understanding that feeling. She notices the moment it happened for strangers too, and she trains herself out of the preconceptions that travel reading hands you, because the more preconception you carry, the less room there is for a person to arrive as they are.
Everyone, she believes, has at least one story to share. At 33, on her sofa after a long corporate day running one of the biggest markets for a French company, she asked herself two questions.
She had received so much love in her life, so who was she to deserve it, and what was she doing to spread it. Her honest answer to the second question was uncomfortable enough to change her career. She also carries a small, repeatable habit for keeping people across the world.
Every year she sends a yearly update email, honest about the ups and downs, and she asks each person she meets whether they would like to be included. Perfectionism, in her telling, is not a high standard. It is a substitute for being known.
It keeps you busy enough that you never have to sit in the uncertainty of simply being with people, which is where the homestay hug lived.
What I took from it
That homestay mother asked nothing and gave everything, and it rearranged a life. I have moved a great deal and I keep meeting versions of her, people who offer belonging before you have earned it in any conventional way.
Four months in an ecovillage taught me the same lesson in a different form, that around 13 shared meals a week can do what no achievement can. Being welcomed without conditions is its own kind of curriculum.
Her yearly update email is the practice I am most likely to steal, because it solves the quiet tragedy of dispersed friendships. We do not lose people through falling out. We lose them through the absence of a rhythm that expects news.
One honest letter a year, offered rather than imposed, keeps a door open in both directions. It is the kind of small architecture I want to design more of into my own life.
Three things to try this week
- Offer one person a welcome that requires nothing of them, no update, no achievement, no performance.
- Ask yourself Shuang-Min’s second question, what am I doing with the care I have received, and write down the honest answer.
- Drop one perfectionist standard this week and notice what connection becomes available in the space it leaves behind.
Watch and go deeper
Shuang-Min tells the Vancouver story best herself, and it is worth hearing in her voice. The full conversation is in the player below.
You can explore Shuang-Min’s work at Shuang-Min Chang.
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Close
Authenticity is not a soft extra. It is the condition our research keeps finding underneath durable connection. Explore the research, then sit with the question of who in your life welcomes you without asking what you have achieved lately.