This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Like A Wave, We Break: How Falling Apart Builds Confidence with Jane Chen | 388

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick pause. We expanded to YouTube because we keep hearing, I needed this 20 years ago. And the next generation shouldn't have to wait. So tell the young women in your world who are scrolling and watching to subscribe to This Is Woman's Work on YouTube. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And if you're a regular listener, you know that redefining women's work, and building women's confidence are deeply linked for me. I've spent years trying to figure out what actually builds our confidence and what destroys it. I was tired of the empty advice, like, just be confident or fake it till you make it, or the almost universal suggestion that the way we become confident is by looking confident first. So I researched, studied, observed, and identified five confidence builders. But one of the five took me a really long time to identify and an even longer time to accept.

Starting point is 00:01:12 And that's failure, that thing that we've been taught to avoid at all costs, that we wrap in shame or embarrassment and silence. But I've come to understand that failure and fear and doubt and all the things that make us feel like we're falling apart are the very experiences that make us stronger, more human, and ultimately more confident. because it's not perfection that builds firm and bold trust in self. It's the failure and the recovery. It's getting back up after you've been knocked down, dusting yourself off, and getting back into action towards what matter most. As our guest today points out, like waves, we rise, beautiful, powerful, full of momentum, and we also crash. We hit the shore, the wall, our limit. And for most of us, that breaking feels like failure, like something to hide, fix, or feel shame about.

Starting point is 00:02:08 But what if the break isn't the problem? What if it's the point? What if every collapse, every loss, every unraveling is actually the moment when we meet what's real? The point where perfection ends and authenticity begins because the breaking doesn't destroy us. It reveals us.

Starting point is 00:02:27 Our guest today, Jane Chen, knows this journey well. She's the co-founder of Embrace Global, a nonprofit that's helped save over one million premature babies with its groundbreaking portable incubator. She's been recognized by President Obama, funded by Beyonce, and featured in the New York Times, Forbes and Newsweek. Her memoir, Like a Wave, We Break, explores what happens when our success shatters and how that breaking can become the beginning of something truer, deeper, and more whole. So, Jane, welcome to the show. because we don't often get to hear people talk about their challenges, obstacles, and failures out loud.

Starting point is 00:03:06 I'd love to start there. Can you share a little bit about losing, Embrace, and how it forced you to reevaluate, I'm sure very many things, but also who you are? Sure. And thank you so much for having me, Nicole. Embrace started when I was a graduate school student at Stanford. I was doing my MBA at the time, and I took a course there that was all about creating low-cost technologies for people living on less than a dollar a day. So I got with a team of graduate

Starting point is 00:03:34 students and we invented this technology that it was an incubator to help the 15 million preterm and underweight babies born every year around the world, many of whom live in remote parts of the world and can't have families who can't access stable electricity. And so we ended up creating a technology that was portable that could work without constant electricity and cost just a fraction of the cost of a traditional incubator. And so with that, once we graduated, we turned this into a company. I moved to India for the next four years, where over 40% of the world's preterm and underweight babies are born.

Starting point is 00:04:10 And I just poured myself into the work. I made the work my life. And so it was something I cared about so deeply, and we could dive into why. You know, I started to unpack what was driving me much later on, but that work consumed me. And so I was working 80 to 100 hour weeks. I never took a weekend off, and I worked like that for many years. I lived in India for four years, moved back to the U.S. and just kept pushing, pushing, pushing, even though I knew I was exhausted.

Starting point is 00:04:39 Meanwhile, we were facing countless setbacks doing this work, you know, from manufacturing to distribution to funding challenges, like every challenge you could imagine came our way because we were trying to do something very, very difficult here. So 10 years in, we had to shut down the company. And that felt like the ultimate failure, right? This thing I'd poured my soul into for a decade shut down. And I didn't know who I was anymore. My whole identity was so wrapped up in my company and my, you know, my job title, my achievements that I really didn't know who I was anymore. And so that set me off on a healing journey, right? And I felt like it was a matter of survival at that point,

Starting point is 00:05:25 because I was like hanging off of a cliff. That's what it felt like. And through that healing journey, we can dive into that a little bit more later, but I started confronting some really challenging things that I hadn't looked at carefully before, namely that I had grown up with domestic violence. And I hadn't connected the dots until that point

Starting point is 00:05:48 that feeling so powerless throughout my childhood, that's what had driven me to help the most power. powerless people in the world had given me that fuel. But it had also driven me to work in such unhealthy ways, right? And again, I felt like, you know, I cared so much about our mission, but I also believed that my worth depended on what I achieved. And so as I did this healing work, and, you know, it took me years to come out the other side of that, I began to learn self-compassion. And it's interesting because for the longest time, most of my life, I thought resilience meant pushing harder.

Starting point is 00:06:30 If I was tired, I kept going. I didn't take breaks. You know, if something was challenging, I found a way. And through this experience, I learned that actually self-compassion or resilience is about self-compassion. Yeah. And you talked earlier about the importance of failure and recovery. Well, when we have this inner sense of self-worth,

Starting point is 00:06:51 then we can take risks and fail and get up and brush ourselves off and know that we're going to be okay because it's not about success or failure. That's not what defines us, right? It's growing in the process. Right. And then through that process of experimentation and failure, like then becoming who we've always meant to be. Yeah. So you said many things in there that I think we can all relate to. But one of the things I want to hone in on is this thing that I think a lot of us unconsciously feel, and that is that our worth is connected to our achievement, to our results, to our output, to our accolades, I mean, the list goes on, right? We've sort of outsourced or externalized our worth and our value. And my question is twofold.

Starting point is 00:07:45 First, any insight, ideas, tricks, or tips of how you connect to your value and your worth without tying it to all of those things. So let's start there. Any ideas on that? Absolutely. And this is one of the things I talk about often. What I learned is that outcomes can be arbitrary or dictated by things outside of our control. Right. Look what happened during the pandemic.

Starting point is 00:08:10 turn upside down and everything went. You're right. Nothing went according to plan. And so if we define ourselves by only the external, then our sense of self becomes so fragile. And frankly, I worry with the rise of social media, right? Now our self-worth is defined by how many likes we get on social media. Yeah. And so the way I've learned to separate my worth from the outcome or just the success or the failure is really focusing on what I can control, which are my values. Right? So am I acting with love every day? Am I giving to others? Am I growing? These are all things I can control. And so if I'm living my values day in and day out, that is success, not necessarily the outcome itself, right? Which I don't have full control over.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And that's not to say don't have goals. Yes, that is important. But even when things don't go your way, it doesn't mean that you've failed. So this is about redefining success. Yeah. And I think in that redefining, knowing that failure challenge obstacles are part of it. It's not even separate from. I think sometimes we think of them as separate events as opposed to they're completely linked. Oh my gosh, completely linked. And I think back to that moment when Embrace Failed, which was like, it felt like the worst moment of my life. And now I look back and I think, what a gift. What a gift. Because if that hadn't happened, I would not have gone on this. healing journey, I would not have learned all the things I needed to learn to become a more grounded,

Starting point is 00:09:42 happy person, right? And that frankly led to like the purpose that I now want to devote my life to. Yeah. Okay. So all of that brings me to the next question and I'm going to try to frame this in the best way I can, but it's that knowing when to give yourself grace or when to keep pushing, when to start listening or stop resisting. I think we all have experienced this feeling of if we just keep going, if we just stick with it, and there's some truth to that. But then there's also the like never quit. Okay, but yeah, we should quit when it's not serving us,

Starting point is 00:10:21 when it's doing us harm. So I guess my question is, when do we know which direction to go? I love this question, Nicole. and I have two answers to this. First, I think it's really important to just pause for a moment and reflect, right? Why am I doing this? Is it because I truly feel called to

Starting point is 00:10:42 because my heart is telling me to, right? This is fulfilling me in some way? Or is this coming from fear? Is this coming from a fear that I'm not worthy or I have to prove something? If something's coming from a fear response, that is a clear indication that you might not be wanting to do that, right?

Starting point is 00:11:01 And one way to gauge that is when you start to think about this in terms of, oh, I should be doing that, instead of I want to be doing that. Once we get into that should category, it's a moment to pause and say, okay, what are my motives here? And is this truly aligned with who I am? Right?

Starting point is 00:11:20 So taking that moment for yourself and asking these critical questions. The second thing I often advise people, and this is something I didn't know how to do until I went on this healing journey is to listen to the wisdom of your body. Right? So tune in. Again, take that moment to pause.

Starting point is 00:11:39 What is your body telling you? Earlier when I was like exhausted, as I said, I did not listen to my body. And I would just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, to the point where I had a full breakdown at the end of that decade period. It took me over a year to recover. And I didn't even know that that could happen, you know, and that happening to me was so scary because I thought I was just invincible up until that point. And it's because I didn't listen to any of those cues. And so one of the things I've learned from my teachers that I now coach others on is what is a whole body yes, right? And that means when is your head, your heart, and your gut all aligned? So think about a time where you really wanted to do something. Maybe it was a friend you wanted to see or a trip you wanted to go on or, even a food you wanted to eat, right? Like, what did that feel like in your body?

Starting point is 00:12:32 Right? And take a note of that and then map that out. Now, as you're making decisions, if something doesn't feel like a whole body yes, then pause and just reflect, do I really want to do this, right? Or if your body is telling you, you need to take a break, honor that, honor that.

Starting point is 00:12:48 Because when we care for ourselves, that is not weakness. That is what allows us to create sustainable impact over the long term, right? So invest in that and listen to the wisdom of the body. As you were talking, it seems to me that there is a measure of self-awareness that we're talking about in all of this. And you gave some examples, and I think it's important for each of us to know, how does that feel for us? How do we experience those feelings? Because I do think we have a tendency to default to certain things. So like, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:23 you talked about things where you know you're not doing it for the right reasons. For me, it almost always falls under the frame of trying to prove myself. That's usually when things get heavy and hard and I'm not coming from a good, healthy place. I'm trying to prove myself to myself and to everyone else and all that. You talked about, you know, knowing how it feels in your body. When something feels right for me, I feel excited, nervous. Like it's a, it's a combination. It's never 100% excitement. It's never 100% nervousness, but it's a little bit of both. And I feel it like in my stomach. When I push too far or when I'm doing things from an unhealthy place, I actually become completely disconnected from my body. I'm

Starting point is 00:14:08 like not even in my body anymore. I'm numb. And so those are like some clues for me. What I was thinking as you were talking is to you, the listener, what are your clues? How do you know? when your body is telling you something, how do you know when something feels authentically good and healthy and right? And when it doesn't, when you might be coming from a not so healthy place. Yeah. And just one more note on that, Nicole, is like some people will say to me, well, I don't know, I don't have that awareness. And what I respond is it can take time to develop. Yeah. And taking the moment to pause for five minutes and to sit with yourself and to notice, you start to develop and hone in on that over time. You start to develop that awareness.

Starting point is 00:14:50 And so just look for those subtle cues and then you'll be amazed that as you develop that, you can really tap into the wisdom of that and that can guide good decision making. Every January, women feel pressure to fix themselves, be smaller, be better, be disciplined. Why isn't more pleasure ever the goal? What if 2026 wasn't about shrinking your body but expanding your pleasure? Because here's the truth. Good sex doesn't just happen. Sex is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and improved without shame pressure or awkward Googling.

Starting point is 00:15:27 That's where Bejicated comes in. They have 150 online courses on sex and intimacy designed for women who want more connection and, yes, more pleasure. You can start by taking their quiz, which gives you a personalized roadmap to sexual happiness, all in a safe, private space at your own pace. So this year, skip the bullshit resolutions. Click the link in show notes and kick off your pleasure journey by taking the quiz. Get your personalized roadmap to sexual happiness with Beducated. Thank you for saying that because I think it's important that we know that these things take time and that we give ourselves grace and that we be patient with ourselves.

Starting point is 00:16:12 I often think like it took us however many years it took us to be this way, thinking that transformation is going to happen in a 24-hour cycle seems fairly unrealistic. So that leads to my question of when we talk about transformation or transition or recovery, from your experience, what are some of the ways that might show up? What are some of the things we might experience like this few steps forward, a few steps back? Talk to us about that period of time where you went from a moment where you're you feel like you failed to today. Yeah. Well, it is not a linear process. And that is one of the things I really wanted to show in my book that progress is not about point A to B to C. And there are many points in the

Starting point is 00:17:00 journey where I took two steps forward and then one step back. And I think the key to all of this and what I advocate the most is being kind to ourselves. Right. And that in that those moments know exactly what you said, like change isn't going to happen overnight or in a week or sometimes even in a year. but it's allowing ourselves to to continue growing. And when we have setbacks to kind of really take that moment to be kind to ourselves and then to keep moving forward and to reflect. And one of the things that I actually have found the most helpful at my self-growth process is something called parts work or internal family systems, right?

Starting point is 00:17:39 And this is a framework that's based on the premise that we all have different parts of ourselves. So Nicole, you might have the overachiever, the control freak. I might. You know, the perfectionist, the inner critic. You also might have parts that carry feelings that are really painful, like the part of you that feels rejected or abandoned or really lonely. Right. And so the goal of this practice is to rather than shame or banish each of these parts, to relate to them with love and compassion. and to see the rules that all of these parts are playing in our lives, whether, you know, to protect us, to keep us safe, and so on. And so this is a practice that's been absolutely groundbreaking for me. And what I learned through that process was when that part, that inner critic comes up, that's like, no, you failed or do better, like, okay, this part is here to keep me safe, to keep me feeling like, you know, I failed or rejected. And so thank you for playing that part.

Starting point is 00:18:45 But I can show myself that love and care, right? And so that is just, it's a beautiful practice to practice that self-combatan and just notice when these voices come up. Yeah. And can sometimes be, you know, I don't want to say like toxic, but they can, they're not necessarily healthy voices for us. And so just, again, this comes back to building awareness and then treating ourselves with kindness. And that is really what's allowed me to like get through this healing journey. So we recently recorded an episode with a woman who talked about this. It's like listening when parts speak, right? Yes. And it actually was perfectly aligned with my next question, which was knowing that you look to a lot of different modalities, that might be the answer to the question, but were there any that were really impactful or really surprising to you that were helpful or any other modalities that might be of interest? as any of us go through failure, challenge, transition, whatever we experience. Yeah, I'll talk about a few. And the book was fun to write from that perspective because I literally

Starting point is 00:19:55 went out and tried every modality I could find around the world. You know, and I kind of put my CEO hat on. I had a whole spreadsheet of all the different things. If something didn't work, I'd quickly pivot and try something else, you know. And so I got a good taste of many of these modalities. But I would say a couple of things. one, and this is less of a modality, but just a practice, and I've already been talking a lot about this, but it's the importance of pausing to feel, right? And I think many of us, especially as overachievers, we get caught in our heads, in our analytical brain, right? But there is something that is so important about tapping into our feelings to process difficult emotions in particular.

Starting point is 00:20:39 And for most of my life, as I said, I disconnected from my emotion. to survive, to keep going, right? But part of this failure that kind of forced me into my body, and that's the beauty of hitting rock bottom, I was forced to feel and to sit with that. And instead of like escaping, I just let myself feel sadness. I let myself feel heartbreak. Right? I let myself feel the anger or the fear or whatever came up. And the thing about these difficult feelings is you can't think your way out of them. You can't work. your way out of them, you have to just take that moment and really feel your way through it. And I think that happens both through pausing, but through the power of community as well.

Starting point is 00:21:23 So whether that's your friends, therapists, healers I've worked with, they created a safe space for me to go there. And so that's something I value so much about my community. But when we have that safety, then we can allow ourselves to go there. One of my greatest teachers, she always said to me, are you willing to feel your heartbreak? And we live in a society that doesn't encourage that, right? We live in an escapist society. When we feel painful things, we turn to social media or alcohol or working or whatever it might be because we don't want to deal with that. Right.

Starting point is 00:21:58 And so what happens is when we suppress those emotions, they resurface more intensely as anxiety, depression, or burnout. And that's why it's so important to just pause and sit with and be with our feelings. That's the first thing. Second, I talked about IFS, actually on my website, which I know you'll direct people to. There's a free exercise I've developed that gives you a taste of parts works. If you guys are interested, please download that. You could try that on yourself. Psychedelic journeys, we could talk about that.

Starting point is 00:22:25 But that's been, you know, an important part of my healing process. And then- I'm wildly curious about that, by the way. That's coming up a lot in my, you know, I feel like the universe is sending these messages. I'm curious about it. But I've also literally never done a drug in my entire life. So one of the turning points in my journey was learning about the science of trauma. And I came across a book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which many of you

Starting point is 00:22:53 are probably familiar with. And through that, I learned something really surprising. So most of my life, I thought trauma is something that happened in the past. Just leave it in the past, right? I've got my life. I've got my career. Why deal with that? What the science shows is that trauma actually rewires your brain.

Starting point is 00:23:09 and your nervous system. So it's the way you bring that past into your present. And it affects every part of your life, right? And if you don't recognize it, then you can't appropriately deal with it. And so I think this is something, that was something that was really valuable for me to understand, okay, this is how I've been affected, you know, by these things from my upbringing. And the way it was showing up in my life was just this sense of hypervigilance right, not not feeling safe, the need to prove constantly, I think achievement itself can be a trauma response. When we don't feel enough, then we need to do more and prove more constantly to feel like we are worthy of love. And another interesting about trauma is it's not stored in our thinking

Starting point is 00:23:59 brains. It's stored in our limbic systems. The part of our brains responsible for feeling and connecting, right? And so you can only process trauma at that level. And that's why modalities like Parts Work or IFS have been really helpful for me because there's a somatic element to it and it really gets you kind of outside of your thinking brain. Right. So the same thing goes for psychedelic journeys. It kind of gets you kind of again into your body and into deeper levels of consciousness. For me particularly, MDMA was the psychedelic that helped me the most. And the studies on this have been just remarkable. So there have been phase three clinical trials showing the effects of MDMA on PTSD with veterans.

Starting point is 00:24:47 And in a guided setting with a therapist within about three sessions, they're able to get many of these veterans off the PTSD scale, which is remarkable. Yeah. And so, you know, for so many years, there's kind of been the sense that drugs are taboo and all of that. But the science is showing something very different and showing the power of these medicines for healing. And so that has been the medicine that has been most helpful for me. And what it's really done is just allow me to, again, safely process some very difficult emotions and to have compassion, like, both for myself and for my family system. You know, and for my family system. You know, and for. others around me. And so I've been able to access those emotions, but be able to kind of see them through a different lens, you know, almost holding myself through the process of that. And just being able to see myself in a different light, you know, and those experiences, you know, I did my first journey years ago and that's really stayed with me on a day-to-day level. So there are, again, so many things that you said jumped out at me, but I think a lot of times when people think

Starting point is 00:26:00 about going back to trauma or how you were raised or what you learned from your parents, there's this sense of like, oh, it's always your parents' fault. And what you said there, I think was so important is that it creates compassion over blame for ourselves and for the people involved. There is the opportunity. And you can go back and understand your experiences without putting blame on someone else. And in fact, I would imagine that that's an integral part of the process is moving through that. I also want to reiterate what you said, this is not my area of expertise, but every person who it is their area of expertise says the same thing. Undealt with trauma, pain, feelings, get stored in our bodies and resurfaces in some way

Starting point is 00:26:50 and usually not in a way that we would want it. And then you said this earlier, and I want to talk about this a little bit, the power of community, it aligns with my experience. Every time I'm feeling guilt or shame or embarrassment, I've found that the best tactic for me is to put words on it, to share the experience with somebody I trust, somebody I love. It takes away its power. And we talked a little bit about social media and like it's easy to default to go there, but I haven't experienced community in the way that we're talking about it there. I've experienced it more, you know, in close relationships. How important, how necessary is it that we connect with people in our hardest, darkest,

Starting point is 00:27:38 most challenging times versus just when it's good and we have good news to share and everything is working, you know? Oh my gosh. I think it's so important. And it's exactly what you said, right? It's putting words to it. Because when we have that shame and we're not expressing it, it grows. And we bottle it up.

Starting point is 00:27:56 It keeps growing and growing, right? And it's, you know, this is what you talked about in the power of community is one of the reasons I think chatbots can't replace humans, at least not in their current form. Right. Because something called empathetic resonance. And it's when you are speaking to someone and it's a simple look on their face or a gesture or something that shows you they care and they are empathizing with you. seeing you. And that in it of itself is so healing. Yeah. One of the things I didn't, I didn't mention earlier was after I read The Body Keeps the score, I became so obsessed with it that I stalked the author Bessel van der Kolh until he agreed to become my therapist. And so I've had

Starting point is 00:28:36 the great fortune of working with Bessel over the last couple years. And as I was writing this book, I went back and I looked through dozens of our video therapies. It's horrifying, by the way. I do not suggest like watching your therapy videos, okay? Like it's not a fun experience, but for the process of, you know, my writing, I had to do that. But what was really cool about it was I started to see what was happening over time, right? And this goes back to like, this doesn't happen overnight. This happens over time. But I would see how I'd express a difficult story.

Starting point is 00:29:13 And Bessel would just pause and take a deep breath. And it would force me to pause and take a deep breath and to realize, oh, that was sad, right? Because typically I would just kind of power through it and move on to the next thing. But he created that space for me. It wasn't just him, but other teachers as well, just created that space for me to pause in that moment and to access some difficult emotions. And so I saw how this happened more and more over time. And then as time went on, I was able to go there on my own, much more easily, right?

Starting point is 00:29:50 And so it's like, it's about healing happens together and it happens when we hold each other. It happens when we allow ourselves to be held. Yeah. Right? And that comes down to vulnerability. That aligns completely with my own experience, both with a therapist, very glad those are not recorded

Starting point is 00:30:08 that I can watch back and, you know, just in experiences. The amount of times somebody else has reacted to something that I said that I'm just like mowing through. And it forces me. me to go, you know what, that is bigger than I'm pretending it is, you know. Okay, my last question is around this transition of your journey, at least to my understanding, from achievement to authenticity. Talk to us about where authenticity matters, especially like in our professional worlds, I think sometimes we're told, you know, authentic at home is fine, but come polished and

Starting point is 00:30:48 buttoned up to work. And I said that was going to be my last question, but it just triggered another one. So answer that. And then I'll ask my final one. I have a little fly going around. No, no, that's such a beautiful question. Yes. And I hear that a lot again in my leadership coaching. Well, what do emotions have to do with work, right? Like, I can display my emotions at home, but in the work, it's a different thing. And I used to think that as a first time CEO, I thought I'd be so buttoned up and composed all the time, you know, and I never showed people how I was actually feeling.

Starting point is 00:31:20 But the work we were doing was inherently emotional and very challenging, as I said. So I remember when I lived in India, one day I was so overwhelmed. I started crying in a team meeting. And afterwards, I was mortified, just mortified. You know, it was all men reporting to me at that time. But afterwards, my head of operations came to me and he said, thank you so much for being vulnerable. Because when you're vulnerable, it gives us permission to be vulnerable to. Right. And I really started to understand that leadership is not about being so composed.

Starting point is 00:31:56 It's about authenticity. Right. It's about that connection. And the more vulnerable we are, the more we can create safe spaces for our team. So there's a lot of research now on this concept of psychological safety, that that's the number one most important determinant of the highest functioning teams. And that's the ability for people to show up as their full selves at work so that they can take risks, right, without fear of failure. And my question for folks is, well, how do you create psychological safety for others if you don't have it for yourself? And that's why this inner work is so, so important. And authenticity means it's not, you know, some of what we've talked about, it's not just about successes or failures, but it's about living

Starting point is 00:32:40 in alignment with our values and listening to who we are and being kind to ourselves. And the more we have that compassion for ourselves, by the way, the more we're able to extend it to others. Right. And so the way that shows up in my life now, even leading up to the launch of this book, of course I want the book to be successful and there's all these people whispering in my year, like, you know, got to make this a bestseller and do this and that and whatever. I remember kind of just feeling overwhelmed.

Starting point is 00:33:06 that. And I'd already, you know, really given my whole soul to this book. And so about a month before the book came out, a friend came out to Honolulu, where I live now. And we did a little ceremony. And I only had one copy of the book at that time. And I threw it in the ocean. And it was just this beautiful act of surrender, you know, that like, yeah, I put my soul into this. And now I'm going to let the wave take this message to where it needs to go. And so it's kind of that balance between, you know, that's, you know, know, having goals, but also surrendering, right? And not being so focused on the outcomes, but being focused on, I think, the impact instead. And so that's what's kind of allowed me to really step into my most authentic self. Yeah. Well, I, for one, love the title of your book. It

Starting point is 00:33:54 jumped out at me right away, like a wave we break. And as you were talking, you know, we all break. This is not a gendered thing. It's a human thing. And for anyone, listening who might be in the crash or the break or the failure or the fear right now, what would be one last piece of advice or message to them before we wrap up? That I think what I discovered in my process is our biggest breaking points become the most beautiful breakthroughs, right? And if we can ride the storm and treat ourselves with compassion through that process, you will find freedom on the other side of that. So that's what I would say. Amazing. Jane, thank you. And listener, I can already report that Jane's book is a national

Starting point is 00:34:50 bestseller, which is very exciting. Again, the book is like a wave, we break, available, Amazon, wherever you buy books. Let's keep our local bookstores in business. And Jane mentioned this earlier, but her website has a resource. It's janemariechen.com. We will put all the links and all the ways to find and follow Jane in show notes. Jane, thank you for being our guest and for sharing your wisdom and your experience.

Starting point is 00:35:17 Thank you, Nicole. So great to be here. My absolute pleasure. Okay, friend, like a wave, we ebb and we flow, we rise and we break, and we know that it all serves its purpose. And in the ebbs and the breaks, we can trust that the flow and the rise are coming.

Starting point is 00:35:37 Because learning to trust that rhythm is the quiet kind of strength that doesn't always get celebrated, but it always transforms us. The world tells us to keep rising all the time, to hold it together, to power through, to stay strong no matter what. But maybe the real power lives in remembering that the breaking is sacred too. that falling apart can be its own kind of becoming. We don't just ride the waves. We are the waves.

Starting point is 00:36:05 And the beauty isn't just in their power. It's in their rhythm. And knowing when to rise, when to rest, and when to begin again. Because confidence, authenticity, and leadership, none of it means never falling apart. It means trusting that we can and we will rise again. And all of that is woman's work.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Like A Wave, We Break: How Falling Apart Builds Confidence with Jane Chen | 388

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