#148. Yimin Wang: The Personality Trap
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But I would caution, right? Because what if we do the thing and then all of a sudden we just get along perfectly? Then the show ends. The show sucks. The show ends. There's no show anymore. We want to keep the show. So for the sake of the show, I should just keep not liking you. Yes. That's right. That's right. I guess. Yeah, we're not going to do the test. All right. This is an assessment, personality assessment I took last week. And man, it was just so revealing.

And I felt so accurate, like beyond any other personality assessments I've taken in the past. Yeah, because the premise of this is like, you understand yourself in enough granular detail that you understand like the sharp edges that you have when you interact with others that you, people that you treasure, right? As Yiming was saying, that you actually end up hurting them. I mean, it really does kind of boil down to this big bucket of self-awareness. It's like analytics for your personality. A lot of learnings come from that.

I want to learn more about it, for sure. All right. Our guest is a professional and personal development coach working with all types of people, including the highest level executives on areas such as self-improvement, emotional intelligence, and resilience.

He also specializes in helping people learn more about themselves using a unique personality assessment tool called Lumina Learning, which helps empower the individuality of people by revealing a more accurate portrait of our personas, qualities, and temperament to help us both in life and at work. So without further ado, please give it up for Yiming Wang. ♪ I just wanna see you ♪

It's a lot of pressure, though, to be the ban zong. I had some bad experience. I talked about that during my speech. I shared with you this little speech. It was a bit traumatic, actually. How so? Well, I think I was promoted to a big captain. You know, big captain. When you were little. Wait, hold on. Can you just explain it to us? What age does this start?

when you were grade two, you got the opportunity to be elected as a, the, like a captain, you know, it's like the highest ranking, you know, among the students. How many are there? There's only like five or six for the entire school. And how many people are in the school? A couple of hundreds. Right.

So you were like the leader of your class, like the whole class? The whole school. The whole school. The whole school. So all grades. All grades. Across all the grades. So it's even bigger than the class president. Like in the US, we have a class president, but that's only the class. Yeah, it's bigger. It's the school level, you know. But I didn't know what my responsibility was. And I didn't know how to do my job properly. For example, there was a...

in meetings, right? I supposed to go to the meeting and pass on the message to my teacher. I never did that. They didn't tell you? No one? No. There was no JD. Nobody tell me what to do. Or communication. Yeah. So I was demoted very soon. And up till the time I was promoted, demoted, it was a big shock because I was demoted two grades down. Da Duizhang, Zhong Duizhang, and Xiao Duizhang.

I've never been a Xiao Diuzhang in my entire life. I started as a Zhong Teichang, which is like... You started up there. So it was a bit humiliating. I tried to put on a face, put on a serious face, try to maintain my cool. But it was pretty traumatic back then. How old were you? It was like seven years, eight years. But after that, my entire life, I tried to avoid the leadership roles.

Oh, that's pretty sad, but it's been my theme. I try to be, try not to be the number one. For example, president, I was the vice president, you know, like school, you know, like ban zhao, I was the vice ban zhao, you know what I mean?

So you weren't like front, front, but you were close enough. I was afraid taking the number one position. You know, if you look at my life, it has been like that. Wow. Yeah. I didn't realize after many years. But then isn't that ironic that now you are a leadership coach and you're teaching other people in part of what you do to be leaders? Yeah.

Well, as a coach, I'm still a second one. Because you're always at the back of some star. I actually feel quite comfortable when I was a coach. But up till I took up the Lumina learning business, then I was forced to be at the front line. Even my nickname changed. I used to call myself Wang Xia'er because my last name is Wang. Xia'er is like the servant. In Chinese, you go to a restaurant, Xia'er is a servant.

So I feel comfortable being called the Wang Xiao'er. I'm also number two in my family. I have an elder brother, right? So it just fits nicely, Wang Xiao'er. And then when I took over the Lumina Learning business, I had to be the number one. And over the years, my staff and my practitioners started calling me Lao Da.

I wasn't comfortable at the very beginning. Now I feel comfortable because I have to be the laoda. It's been like the dragon inside the whole time, just waiting to get out. Something like that. Eric's always the laoda in his mind. So he's very comfortable with it. But that was a traumatic event though in your head. Back then, it was a humiliation and I tried to climb back. But looking back today...

I think it was a traumatic experience. I didn't realize that up to many years after, which is also a good thing. Otherwise, it would be doing damage all my life. I think that's something I'm starting to realize now as well. Traumas, you don't necessarily always know in the moment that that's a trauma. It takes a lot of time and reflection to realize how it's actually impacted the way you think, the way you behave, etc.

the way you feel. And sometimes it just takes a long time. You mentioned Lumina, right? Lumina Learning. Yeah, Lumina Learning. And I want to get into, I want to set some context for our listeners and even for Howie and Eric here because I haven't even told them. Lumina Learning is like a personality assessment tool

kind of to put it simply. And I did it last week. And we had a call last night where I kind of like briefly went through my own assessment. And I have to say, it was, honestly, it was shockingly, I felt it was shockingly accurate and revealing. So at first, to be honest, I was kind of like, okay, maybe this, I've taken personality assessments before.

It just feels like maybe this might be the same thing. But once I got my results back, it was more detailed and with so much higher resolution than anything I've ever seen before. And not only that, everything we were uncovering just really resonated with me. It really hit home. I'm like, oh my God, that really is how I am. But before we get into all of that, I want to hear from you first in terms of

Your idea on why you got into Lumina in the first place and this concept of labels that we talked about before in terms of everyone is putting these labels on themselves. I am this. I am this way. My personality is like this. So therefore, that will dictate kind of like what I do in my job, in my life, so on. What are your thoughts on that kind of mindset?

Well, I guess you actually asked two questions. First is how I got into Lumina Learning. Can we even start even earlier than that? What is Lumina Learning? Yeah, yeah. Well, he'll explain it. Oh, okay. Why get into Lumina? Just keep us in the dark, dude. I know. What the fuck, man? Like, Howard and Eric won't know this, but I'm just going to, like, you guys can just walk off. You're Googling.

More will be revealed. Well, as Justin was saying, Luminar Learning is based in the UK and they develop psychometric assessments. Psychometric? Psychometric assessments. There are actually six tools so far. The one you did last week is our flagship product. We call it Luminar Spark.

Okay, so just want to clarify, when I say Spark, it's the assessment you use. It's our most famous assessment for personality traits.

How I got into it, that was 2015. I was a freelance consultant. I did coaching and leadership facilitation. I actually quite enjoyed my work because I got a chance to go to different parts of the world and delivering workshops and coaching. And after that, I would go traveling with my wife. That was my lifestyle back then. Cool. And in 2015, I went to Hong Kong to learn Lumina Spark.

I want to get qualified in order to deliver another leadership program. I went there without too much expectation because I've learned several different kinds of psychometric tools before, but it hit me, like you said, it hit me and I couldn't sleep the first night. What I did was I wasn't drinking, right? But I was just writing on the pads, you know, what this thing could be doing in the future. I wrote all kinds of possibilities and it couldn't stop.

So I feel like it was quite a unique experience because I can always fall asleep no matter what happened. So that night was quite unique. So I think it was like, I don't know, heaven or God or whatever sends me a message. I think I got to grab this opportunity. So the next morning I talked to the instructor. I said, can you introduce me to your founder and CEO?

I said, you have no representative in China. I can be that person.

So long story short, I had an introduction with the help of the instructor. I talked to Dr. Stuart Dyson for a couple of times. Back then, there was no Zoom. I guess we used that one by Microsoft. So we chatted for a couple of months, and I decided to take over the business for the mainland China. I think Lumina Spark solved a lot of my puzzles when I was doing the psychometric assessment and leadership coaching.

There's no labeling. It has high resolution of your personality trait. It hits you. It is a much deeper conversation you can have with your clients. It pretty much resolves all my questions that I encounter with other psychometric tools. So I feel excited. What were those questions that you had with the other tools? What's psychometric tool? Psychometric tool basically just tells you who you are, what your preference is.

For instance, we always say, "Oh, you're an introvert or you're an extrovert." That's actually one way of describing people's personality.

So I'm curious, and also just for the listeners, it sounds very compelling. What are the dimensions? Because introvert, extrovert is quite a common one. But what are the different dimensions that would be interesting for people to know? Well, depending on what kind of theory you're using, the most dominant and authoritative theory is called the Big Five.

It's basically measuring five dimensions. To keep it simple, we use the acronym OCEAN. O-C-E-A-N. O is openness. C is conscientiousness. E is extroversion. A is agreeableness.

And the N is neurotism. - Neurotism? - Neurotism. - What does that mean? - Neurotism means- - Crazy? - Something like that. - Like neurotic. - Neurotic, yeah. - How neurotic are you? - How neurotic are you? Are you more of a calm person or very easily excitable person?

So, 5 Ocean, Big 5 is basically the most authoritative series for the last 60 plus years. And Luminous Spark is based on the Big 5 series. What about MBTI? MBTI is not based on Big 5. It's based on... Because the MBTI has the introversion thingy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. MBTI...

It's based on Young theory, Carl Young. So it's like different... Different... School? Yeah, you can say that. MBTI is... We call it types. You know, you have type A, you have B, and C, and D. That's types. We are out to its traits. So MBTI, is that more like the...

The more well-known, a lot of people use like, oh, what are you, ENFT or ENTP? Yeah, I took the MBTI. That's MBTI, right? Exactly. The four characters describe who you are. Well, this is the perfect kind of segue to kind of this little anecdote or this...

Your comment last night about people kind of like signing off on their name cards even now with their MBTI. - Yeah, a lot of people do that. - Yeah, I think it's very interesting phenomena, if you will. For the last few years, MBTI is very hot, very popular. And I noticed that many people, especially young people, starting off with the introduction is, "I'm an I person, I'm an E person."

And some people even have the type put in their WeChat signature. Do you think that's good or bad or neutral? I think it's a neutral. The good thing is people start to realize there's many tools around. You can do self-exploration.

What's not necessarily bad is you need to realize there's always a downside of everything. For tools like MBTI, you just put yourself in a box. Statistically, there's more than 7 billion people in the world, right? Imagine you're only one of 16 types. Anybody can realize that it's impossible. - It feels limiting. - It's extremely limiting. - Yeah. - Because we've all changed significantly.

like what we were when we were the "da banzang" or "xiao banzang", then I mean, like that would limit our potential. - Especially if you like buy into like your personality profile and then you're just like, well, throw my hands up, that's the way I am. And you know, this is how I'm gonna act. - It's limiting for, especially for young people. They feel like I'm like this. - They buy into it. - They buy into it, they fix to it. They'll just take on the road, whatever it is, right or wrong. That's actually a bit concerning to me.

It seems like it would not be, it comes into conflict or tension with like the growth mindset.

- Exactly, growth mindset versus fixed mindset because you're fixed in a box. Growth mindset is you can always grow. It doesn't really matter how old you are. That's what growth mindset is all about. - Well, what about the Luminous stuff? How is that different? Is that more growth mindset based? - Definitely. Even in our formal introduction, we said that we're based on big five. We have this growth mindset.

within and we believe in you know everybody is unique and uh you know you have a right you know you have to develop your own self so yeah we truly believe in that we always try to live you know by example yeah and even without taking like personality assessment tools um we now i feel like we naturally our tendency is to want to label ourselves anyway um but

What I learned yesterday, at least just on the surface, was that the idea of there's paradox within all of us. And just because we're one way and maybe our strengths lean more towards one direction, that doesn't mean that we're weak or necessarily weak in the opposite direction. We can be strong on both ends. And I think the traditional assessment tools are

like you said before, were just like, oh, you're this one way, therefore you are weak in the other direction.

And that's not necessarily so, right? Yeah. I mean, you might want to explain paradox to your friends. Well, that's why you're here. Well, I think yesterday when I was... It's becoming a personal coaching session that's continuing on. Are you charging him for this, by the way? I'm charging him for whiskey. So I think what do we mean by paradox is, you know, you can be both, not either or.

That's the general concept. Like both extroverted and introverted? Yeah. You can be both. Whoa. In Justin's case-

Oh, yeah, Howie. Yeah, because he used to brag to me, because he's pretty smooth. I mean, like, he's gone- When you say he, you're referring to Howie. Howie, yeah. Howie. He's gone downhill in recent years, but there was a, yeah. Yeah, anyway. What the fuck? It's like, what the heck, dude? You are, bring pronouns. Bring pronouns into this one. He's a shadow of his former self, but he actually used to be-

Much more than he is now. But he would always brag that he's an introvert with extroverted skills. See? See? See how he probably will behave differently depending on whom he is with, right? Exactly. Yeah. And over the years, you're getting comfortable with both. I'm just guessing maybe in essence, when you're with yourself or your friends, you're more introverted. I don't know.

- Well, can you elaborate more on this idea of paradox? - Well, paradox, yeah. I mean, just using Howie's example, he can be both. Maybe, I take one example, not Howie, because I don't know Howie at all. We always come across with many great salespeople in our organization, and in private life, they're very introverted.

But in their work, they're very extroverted. They interact with their clients very well. And they do a lot of social networking. So actually, these are the typical introverted person learned how to be more extroverted skillfully. Okay. And that's very interesting. What is an example of being introverted in your personal life?

What does that mean? For example, if you go home after work, what's your typical behavior, Eric? So I go home and I hang out with my wife. Yeah. And like we just pretty much chill out. Yeah. I mean like at least the last couple of years. Yeah. So does that make me introverted? What do you usually do with your wife? Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.

Well, we're pretty tired when we come back, right? But like if it's like the weekends, we'll do stuff. We'll try to like I always want to get out and do stuff. And then the weekdays because we wake up pretty early. So we don't do a whole lot. Like we'll go for a walk and do some stuff, you know, if the weather is nicer. But we don't do a whole lot. And occasionally like we'll have some social stuff. But I just I always want to be sharp in the morning.

Do you notice the vagueness in his response? A little bit. You noticed that, right? Yeah. No, what do you mean? But I try to understand what he does together with his wife. It seems like we enjoy with each other's company. Yeah, he would love it. You don't go out with friends and having big parties and something like that. Not on the weekdays, just on the weekends. But on the weekends, do you try to do that every weekend? Big parties? No. No. So I was just- No, I'm probably introverted. Probably more introverted. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, because imagine if you go, if you, even if you're tired, some people like to go out. - Yeah, 'cause they feel like they need to go out. - They get energy, you know, interacting with people. I once had a two English, I think from UK, I partner with two facilitators from UK. The gentleman is very introverted, the lady was very extroverted. So we had a dinner together and the lady says, "Should we go to a bar?"

And the gentleman says, "It's enough. "You see, we are both tired. "Yiming is tired, I'm tired. "Shall we go to the room?" So it's obvious there are two different types of person. The lady feels more energetic, maybe do some bar hopping. So how about you two compare yourself to Eric? I think he's more of introverted person, depending on how he described right now. - Yeah, I think there he definitely has introverted qualities. But in terms of extroversion, I think out of the three of us,

he is by far, he can turn up that extroversion switch much stronger than I think the three of us can. I mean, he's a great networker, socializer, you know, he can talk and engage with people. And when he's in that mode, it seems like he gets a lot of energy out of it and he's really good at it. Um,

It feels like it's less draining for him to be in that state than it is for me and Howie. That's a nice word of a draining. Just imagine yourself. If you feel drained when you socialize with a lot of people, you're definitely introverted. You know, I got drained, you know, quite often. Yeah, my battery runs out quick. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, interesting. That's probably one thing. You guys have this intimate, you know, talk show. Yeah.

Because this is more like, you know, you get energy from having a deep, intimate conversation. This is the only way I like to talk to people now. This is on the podcast, honestly. Exactly. So you can imagine that, you know, when I go out, especially in my early life, I did a lot of leadership facilitation. Usually it was three days or five days. I was so tired. I even went to my home. I went to my room during lunch break.

I need a quick charge battery. This is interesting, though. And I think we're probably all on that introversion side. But I think there are different facets as well. Because I love...

certain types of social gathering. And I actually really love public speaking. Yeah? But it's weird because I'm just thinking about the times where I'm like public speaking. I get excited. But if you tell me go to a bar and it's all noisy and there's a lot of people I don't know and like it's hard to have a conversation, I don't like that anymore. But if it's in an environment where...

You're in control. Everyone's watching you. Yeah, yeah. Public speaking. We can chat and do stuff. Like, yeah, it's pretty cool. So is that an example of paradox? Yeah, I don't know. Like you're both- I think so. Like you can be strong in both directions. You can be both. And he feels comfortable at both sides. But I don't know. I want to kind of talk about other traits too because introversion, extroversion, obviously like that's like very cliche. Everyone talks about it. Right. It's like the most kind of obvious to talk about sometimes. Yeah.

But there were other ones that I feel like were really, really crazy, like empathy versus logical and how those are kind of like on opposite sides of the spectrum. There is also- Eroticism. Accommodating versus tough. I feel like these are, at least for me, they resonate with me in terms of how I struggle in my own life with these feelings and these temperaments. Which one do you struggle with the most? Yeah.

I think accommodating versus tough is something. And like we talked about yesterday, last night, I think it directly ties into my strength for empathy. So just to give a little bit of context, and I don't want to make this all about me, but the assessment I took, it gives you kind of a word cloud of

And the biggest word right smack in the middle of the word cloud for me was empathetic. And I 100% agree with that. But I feel like empathy, my natural state is to be empathetic to a fault where I feel it's counterproductive for my own needs. Yeah. Yeah.

To a fault of your own fault? No, no, not like fault as in like, this is your fault. Okay. But to a fault where it starts hurting me instead of helping me. Oh, I see. I see. So that probably it's on a verge of overextension because if you are being overly, you know,

empathetic, you become emotionally stressed. - Well here, before we get into that, just so people can understand what we're talking about, let's dive into this assessment and what it actually does. I think a big part of it is that once you take this assessment, it breaks down all these, I think it's 24 qualities in total. And each quality has three personas.

Right. Right. Can you, can you kind of explain that? Yeah. Three personas. First one is underlying. Basically just understand that in a way that you're most comfortable with, you know, underlying, you know, situation, if you will. And the second one is everyday, everyday persona.

Every day usually is the way you are in a work or in a social setting. Like how people usually will see you. Usually will see you. Like outwardly, how does the public see you, right? Yeah. Underlying is more your natural state that kind of is hidden and more private. Yeah, sometimes. People may not know. People may not know and you may not want to show some of it to the public, right? So every day is like your public image.

Overextended is like you're overdoing. We sometimes will say too much of a good thing. That's three personas. So we actually had a very deep, I would say, analysis of each quality. Well, also, I want to elaborate on the overextended part too because you were also telling me overextended is when you're under pressure.

Or when something unplanned or unexpected happens. Right. You're a part of God. Yeah, like how do you just react when you're under the gun, right? Right. So to speak. Exactly. That's the overextended persona, right? So there's the underlying persona, the everyday persona, the overextended persona. You got it, Justin. Yeah. And that to me was...

it feels like, yeah, that's how it should be. Right. Because I feel like how we are, you know, we come across these moments in our life and in our behavior where we're like, man, that wasn't me. Like, why did I act that way? Like, that's kind of weird. And we reflect back on it. But that is you. That is you. That's just a different persona of you as a result of the situation you're in. Yeah. Right. So I like how these three different personas kind of correlate to different, different,

different situations you might find yourself in, we all might find ourselves in. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it really helps us to understand ourselves and it helps us to understand why I snapped. I didn't know what happened to me.

And you look deeper. Oh, that's why. Something triggers me. Because I was overextended. Yeah. And that was my overextended person. Or somebody was triggering me. Well, it happened. It happened, right? We are all human beings. But sometimes when it happens, it actually hurts your relationship with other people. That's very important, especially when we do executive coaching and leadership development.

You want to be seen as a consistent leader. You can't just snap all the time. I remember I used to teach a female leader and her inclination is she was upset very easily. She would shout at her subordinates, not for bad reason, because she was not happy with the performance.

She was a high achiever, but that actually hurts her relationship with her people, her team. And the company wanted to promote her

And they thought it's necessary to have someone else to talk to her. So I was introduced to her and the boss, and they felt I was the right fit. So I had coached that lady for about 18 months. And over time, she realized that she needed to adjust the way she treats her teams.

Yeah. It was an amazing journey. So fascinating. Yeah. It was an amazing journey for her. And she actually was over years, she was very relaxed. Yeah.

Well, so how, like, can we shed some light on that journey? You know, it doesn't have to be specifically hers, but anyone's journey once they go through, like, kind of this assessment. Like, how do you use the data to start guiding somebody to go through and develop themselves or improve their behavior? Oh, I see. Well, to be honest, if you ask any leadership coach, they will say, I can do it without an assessment. Right.

Everybody will have to give you a CMS. I would do the same thing because we do not rely on assessment tool.

But my personal experience is assessment too is actually a very efficient way of starting off the conversation and dive into what's necessary for the person. It's the efficiency that counts. So from an organizational perspective, they want to see some results pretty soon. That's why we introduce assessment too as part of the process. So it's not absolutely necessary, but it makes the process more efficient. Exactly. Go ahead. Yeah. So...

When we had a, let's say you are my coaching client, Justin, I will probably, you know, do some inventory, you know, with you. By my inventory, I mean, I need to understand who you are, how you were brought up and what kind of person you are, what you believe in. And then I will suggest maybe you do a disassessment so we can have this conversation going.

It really helps for us to focus. You also have a visual thing to use, a reference point to use with your client, right? Yeah. It's the same framework. People can't see it here, but there's all these graphs and charts and percentages. It's so detailed, but it's not detailed in a necessarily overwhelming way. Once you start looking at it, it's pretty...

And it's done in a pretty user-friendly way, I think, where you can start really understanding all these nuances and all the different qualities in your character. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Why don't you paste this in the show notes, Justin, your assessment. This is, it's pretty revealing. It's like, it has like one final word that describes him. Monster. But, but even, so it's like calculating, calculating, processing, monster. Subtype asshole. But, but,

Okay, sometimes we get like a health check or like you might go to the hospital, you might get a physical check or something like that. Like, is there any, I guess, what does it assess, right? Like you mentioned those general big five sort of categories, but let's say the average, like what kind of person would want to do this? Is it someone, it's only people that like work or it could be like a student or...

Who does it target? - Well, when Dr. Danson started this business, his primary target was professionals in business. It is designed for business setting. But over the years, the tool is so fascinating. We have taken participants aging from 14 up.

- Yeah, a friend of mine actually sent, gave away two gifts during the Chinese New Year. His son is 12 years old and also some relatives. Kids nowadays are very mature, so they actually can take this at a much earlier stage. So I think 12 is now quite acceptable. So kids start to realize who they are in a very early on stage.

So that's why we are also doing to-see business as well. We started off with to-be business. We talk to corporate clients. They use our tool in leadership development and so on and so forth. But over the years, we see so many opportunities. For example, high school students understanding themselves better,

having a better communication with the parents, they probably become less rebellious after they really understand who they are and appreciate what their parents are like in terms of personality. And in terms of career coaching, we've done many brilliant cases. People are hit war in their middle age. They want to make sure if they can take the right step, you know, whether they continue to work or they start up their own business. And, uh,

Many students overseas want to come back to China to work. They also wanted to understand the interview process. We help them to understand how to best assess your interviewer and adjust your behavior on the spot and how to write resume based on our assessment tool so they stand out. - What I like about this because we can use my own assessment as a starting off point to talk about bigger principles. Again, I don't want to make this about me.

And like we said, the biggest thing, my biggest kind of quality is being empathetic. I agree with that. And what I really like about this assessment is that it also, it curated two quotes that might inspire me, right? And when I read these two quotes, I'm like, that is exactly it. Do you mind reading that quote to us? Yeah, so I'll read it. I got it up here. The first quote is...

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. That's a quote by Bonnie John Wasmond. So I feel like that really resonates with me.

The second quote is by William Shakespeare, and it is, society is no comfort to one not sociable. And if you listen to our show frequent enough, I think I echo that sentiment religiously.

How I'm not comfortable with society. Maybe starting off with this idea of empathy versus logic. I think that's probably something that's pretty general and relatable to a lot of people. Where does empathy sit in the hierarchy of things generally?

to excel at life and work for you? Like where would you put empathy on that hierarchy? - I would say very top. - The very top? - Not the very number one, but I-- - Like top five? - Top five. - Top five? - Yeah, at least top five, yeah. 'Cause I was growing up, I had no social skill. I had no empathy.

And it took me many years to understand what empathy is, probably up to the time when I started learning coaching. So I started to understand what empathy is and start practicing being empathetic. And when I started coaching people, I realized how important it is.

If you look at all the recent studies, whether by some consulting company or leadership company, or even by, I think, by UN, I think one of the top 10 leadership skills is actually emotional intelligence. The same thing. And if you look at a corporate, you guys all work different capacities. If you look at the corporate or any organizations, the

The more in hierarchy in your organization you are, the less, I guess, hard skills you need, but more soft skills you need. And emotion and being empathetic leader is actually the soft skill. It is extremely important. How do you define empathy?

- Well, basically it's several dimensions. One is understand myself, how I feel. The second is understand how you guys feel. And then the third thing is adjust my behavior so we can work together better. - Do you feel empathy is a prerequisite or necessary to have good social skills? Like, can you have good social skills but low empathy?

You can still have a very decent social skills if you have no empathy. But I think if you want to build a deeper connection with people, you got to understand how empathy work. Even if you're not...

with empathy. For example, me, just compare you and me. Underlying, my empathy was very low, like 12 or 13 percentile. But you will say, this guy is no good. Wait, hold on. Let me go back to your, I want to go back to your definition. Right. Because I think we have this

you know, this, we all, we each have our understanding of like what empathy is, right? I mean, but it's like that human understanding people in general. You said understanding how I'm feeling, how others are feeling and then being able to adjust. So if your natural underlying empathy is generally maybe lower, right? I'm curious one of those three pieces, which one is,

if you don't mind sharing, is missing? Is it like understanding yourself, understanding others, or being able to adjust your actions? - Oh, I mean, to me, I'm still learning because I still have a very small amount of vocabulary of, you know, empathy. Sometimes I feel difficult to describe my feeling. I think, you know, one thing is I was brought up in this environment. I was brought up in China.

In school, we never had such- - We don't talk about that stuff. - We wouldn't talk about that. And so I don't have the sensitivity. That's first. Second, I was not wide. I was not born with empathy. - Oh, some people are born with it? - Yeah, yeah. Born. - I agree with that. Some people are just born with empathy. - Exactly. Some people are naturally, they can feel your pain.

They can naturally feel your pain. My twins, one of them is very empathetic. You feel my pain? Why do you treat me like shit all the time? I choose not to feel your pain. I choose to be the creator of your pain. But I agree with this idea of being born with empathy. Look, I'm not trying to paint myself like a saint here. But I remember very clearly my parents would tell me growing up when I was very little, right?

when they would take me walking on the streets and we would pass somebody that was homeless, I would always cry like hard for a long time. Every time we pass someone that's homeless. Yeah. And I remember when I got old enough where I still remember those memories, I did that. And I hated it because it was such a terrible feeling for me because every time I'd see somebody suffering on the street like that,

I felt a sense of suffering myself to a point where I couldn't control it emotionally. And I would just break down. And for a large part of my life,

I saw that as a huge weakness. It's nuts. Because my dad was almost like, you got to be tougher. You got to toughen up if you want to survive in this world, right? And I believe that. It's a eat shark world out there. And if I'm breaking down and crying at every little thing and everyone's being too empathetic and thinking of the other person all the time, how am I going to get ahead? And so, yeah. So that was a struggle for me growing up in terms of

trying to find some productive balance in that. Yeah, that's a great story because some people are born like that and it becomes a hurdle for you because you don't know how to adjust that.

So in a way, you need to be a bit cold-hearted in order to bring that down. You're even easily taken advantage of if someone wants to take advantage of your empathy. Right. Yeah. People will ask you for a favor. You will say, oh, I can help him. Then your own work suffers. It feels like you have to calibrate too, right? Because it's like your pain threshold. Like you don't...

So, like, we have nerves. And when you injure yourself, there's pain. But the pain is literally generated by your own brain, right? To tell you that something happened. Now, you would never want to be someone where, like, someone cut your hand off and you didn't feel anything. Because that would be bad. Then you would never know. At the same time, like, you don't want to just get a small little cut and be like, it feels like your hand was cut off. Yeah. So, it's a signal. Yeah. You know? And then I think, like...

your thoughts trigger your emotions because when you saw that thing, it was your thought that then triggered like the reaction and then you felt really bad. So it almost feels like mindfulness would help too because like we all have something where a thought comes and maybe it's like seeing someone homeless or it could be like something else. It could be any thought basically and then it translates into some emotions and then each of us have like an oversensitivity to something and then how do you train yourself to let go, you know? Yeah.

It's tough. How are you? You were trying to say something before about people who are born... Oh, yeah. I was just going to say that we recently had...

And I have a set of twins. Okay. And one of them is, thank you. And one of them is very empathetic and the other one is a little less. And it was one of those things. How can you tell already though? They're not even true. Their facial reactions to the way you interact with them.

One of them is very cognizant of how you are and how to manipulate you and how to like react to how you're feeling. The other one is just la-di-da-di-da in his own world. And so to me, it's just so interesting that two human beings... With the same genes. With the same genes, but without, you know, we're treating them the same, but they come out differently. So it just shows that you definitely are born a

a certain way with certain qualities and certain traits. And the environment that you are raised in will only further hone or maybe guide or skew a little, you know, one direction or another. But you are set in a certain base. I don't think you're set. I agree with you. You're not a white piece of paper, blank piece of paper. No, I think like if you just very generically said the ratio of

I don't think it's like 90-10, meaning 90 nature, 10 nurture. I got to think it's more like 50-50 or something like that. And then the 50 itself is like, I mean, that's a huge...

Like you can transform yourself in a sense. You know what I'm saying? But you have to work really hard. - Yes. Well, what do you think of the nature versus nurture debate, you mean? - Well, yeah, I agree. I mean, there's nobody can win, you know. Basically, we always talk about like one third, one third, one third. One third is your nature. One third is how you were brought up. And the other one third is your personal development.

So, you know, nature and, you know, it's important, but it's not a deciding factor. But nurture is also important. If there's no nurture and, you know, even you have a lot of talent in nature and you got to waste it. But what's interesting is just by what you said right there with the three, nature, your development, and your personal experiences. Two out of those three are out of your control.

Yeah, but I don't look - like I think that's not the right way to look at it. I think that like there's no cap on each of these sort of three buckets and their impact. You're looking at it like a fixed sort of formula, right?

For instance, you can have someone that has very mediocre athletic talent become like probably Olympic and you can have someone that was born with the genes of Michael Jordan and just be a couch potato. So like you're looking at it like there's a very, very fixed thing. But if you completely maximize that one third, the sky, like, I mean, you're like literally 100 times better than the average person, right? Each of these three things. So if you're born like Michael Jordan, right? Like,

then like you're pretty much like, like you're, you're already like in the top 0.1%. But if your parents just completely like trained you Tiger Woods style, um,

you would be there as well, right? It's not like each of these buckets is really, really limited. Each of these buckets is almost infinite, especially the personal development category, I would argue. Yeah. I mean, a human being has unlimited potential. You got to believe in that. And if you set a cap on your own, set limitation on your own, you're basically limiting yourself. Okay, so wait, hold on. But let's get back to this idea of empathy just for a second on this chart. Why...

According to the Luminous Spark assessment tool, empathy sits on one end. Why does logical sit on the other end? When we talk about 12 qualities, it's actually 24 qualities. It's actually 12 pairs of qualities. And we put them side by side. On the left side is empathetic. On the right side is logical. And there is...

Many ways to explain that. One thing is actually we do a lot of fact analysis and it proves that these are the opposite pair, if you will. And the other thing is just by our, how can I say, normal people's thinking. Imagine one side is empathetic, the other is logical. It actually makes sense to me.

One side, for example, you can feel other people's feelings. On the other side, you only focus on rational. You don't think about emotion as well. Like a robot. Like a robot. Yeah, of course. Some people are both. You are a very good example. You can be both logical and empathetic. Recently, we had another guest. And...

She's a real estate agent from China. And we're talking about some cultural things, differences, and the whole zhennan thing, right? And then the zhennan is basically like they're logical, but then they lack the empathy. So then they're very logical. Like, why wouldn't my wife enjoy... I gave her a coupon for her birthday, but then she could save 30% on her Mezback or something like that, right? That sounds oddly specific. Is that something you do? No, it's like super zhennan.

where we would prove that no I am very loving to you know but Jun-An feels like

it's on that spectrum somewhere. Yeah, you actually give a very good example. You know, 30% coupon sounds perfect for a gift from a gerund's perspective. Yes, exactly. I would do that. But, you know, you're taking out the empathy equation, you know, out of the equation. What about your wife? What about your girlfriend? You know, if your girlfriend is also a ger girl, that's fine. Right. Right? Right. Because they both like coupon. Yes. They both think it's a brilliant... It's cost-saving. Darling, that's a brilliant idea. I love you. Yeah.

But if the other side, you know, is like, oh, how does that make, how does that make me feel? Right? Yeah. And if the girlfriend is more empathetic, then there is a fight. Yeah. So, so like what you were saying and these factors like that, like, or empathy in general, which is like,

you know, both sides, if they don't adjust for one another and it doesn't match, then there's conflict. Exactly. Multiple, what are they called? Factors or dimensions or what are these things? Qualities. Qualities. Yeah, we call them qualities. So imagine, you know, Justin is now a host and he can, if you are very flexible, you know,

you know, moving to the empathetic side and the logical side when you see, you know, fit. That makes you a brilliant host. And he is. Right? So, if you can do that very fluidly, then you're brilliant. So fluid. The,

- He's so fluid. - So fluid. The challenge is, Justin, the challenge is- - The sarcasm in here. - Yeah, the challenge is if you are drawn to one side, you do not come back. For example, if you feel the story about your guest and you got so emotionally attached and you forgot about the logical side and it become a story sharing and maybe cry and laugh and all together, it's very emotional.

- But maybe you need to do come back to the logical side. - Yeah. - Tough questions, you know. - Brilliant. - Things like that. - That's a great point because I have, according to the assessment and personally, I think from my own experience, I would agree. But I think if I have high potential to be both empathetic and logical,

It's also a matter of alluding to what you just said is also the pendulum, right? And just because I have the potential for both, that doesn't mean I'm always balanced in that. So sometimes I'll swing way logical. Like let's say if I'm having a fight with my wife,

And I'll swing like way logical and I'll just argue the reason behind my argument. And I lose all empathy. And then that's when the fight gets, it goes nowhere, right? And it just gets worse and worse. Sometimes I'm overly empathetic and I don't remember to swing back to the logical realm. And so there's also that, I guess that's a skill over time to try to learn how to

how to move and dial yourself in on the spectrum as well. - Exactly. - Is that the point of like Lumina, right? Is like, so that you have the awareness and then when you get too far on one side or the other, then that's damaging potentially? Like is, does it help with that? - And ideally, you know, you control the damage before it happens. Before you snap, before you argue with your wife, you realize, gosh, what's the point of arguing with my wife? I gotta calm down for, you know, a little bit.

Maybe just, you know, take a walk and come back. So this is actually, you know, a homework for every person. Take a walk. Take a walk or do something else. Just, you know, do not do that, you know, when you're on the edge of it, try to realize it. Nothing good can happen when you're on the edge. Like, I mean, like we know that. I mean, it seems like a simple concept, but...

when you do this assessment, it breaks it down so clearly where it really sticks in your head is the idea of like being aware. Yeah. Right. And even if you don't agree with everything on there, at least it brings, it brings in the discussion in your own head about it.

And so the awareness of it sits in your mind. So next time you are behaving a certain way or you find yourself in a certain situation, you have more awareness of maybe what's happening here. And then once you have that awareness, then, only then, can you start adjusting. It sounds like it helps you see the patterns because if you were to go back and be like, every time I get an argument with so-and-so, whoever it is,

right? Even us. And you were to go back, there's like a pattern. It's not random, right? The pattern is based on the interaction of the qualities. And so like, if you were to sort of understand, okay,

The last 10 times that I got really pissed off at such and such a person was because of this particular reason. Maybe that would start helping a little bit. Well, Yiming, I want to ask you, if empathy is, let's say, in your top five most important things, is there any good advice for somebody maybe that's listening right now or any of us to improve our empathy?

What can we do about it? Well, basically try to, as I mentioned earlier, try to build a vocabulary of emotion, try to describe your emotion correctly, and also practice, you know, understand the other side's emotion.

How do you do that? What's this vocabulary? Oh, there's a bunch of online resources. For example, how do you describe yourself right now? You've got to build that vocabulary to describe our emotions first. And it's probably, and I'm assuming why we would start describing our own emotions is because that might be

the thing that we're most, that might be the easiest way to start. - What's the controllable thing? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Right. - You can't control someone else's. - So once you're able to describe your own emotions, you're building that skill to understand other people's emotions, right? - Yeah, that's a starting point. And then I think trying to appreciate what's happening in other people's heart.

We talked about yesterday, you were quite measured. You don't show your emotion quite easily. But if I'm very empathetic, I can probably feel what's happening inside your heart. That's what I'm trying to practice. I don't get it right all the time, but I'm trying to keep practicing that. So that way, actually, people can feel that you're feeding their emotion.

And we got a deeper connection. When I first started coaching, I had this challenge of understanding the other person's feelings. My approach was more direct, more logical, more clean cut. I tried to analyze things. But sometimes you don't need to do that. They are better at understanding their own issues. Your job is to feel them.

That's why sometimes I was frustrated by myself. I was frustrated by the progress we made with my client because I was usually probably using half of my potential as a coach, which is not good enough. So as a coach, you gotta do both.

You need to be both empathetic and logical. That's so interesting. You mentioned the word potential, and we were talking about that one-third, one-third, one-third. And it just seems like there's so many things holding us back to our full potential. And we know it. If you ask anyone, what percentage of your potential do you think you've met? And most people would be like, I don't know, 20% or 30%. And it's like, why? And our assessment can help you to find...

probably help you to find your potential because you don't have all the potentials, but sometimes you can focus on one or two potentials and you see results quickly and you feel so excited. And for instance, we talk about that, the underlying is longer than every day. Remember that one? Underlying is longer than every day. That's where the potential is. So when we do leadership development with high potential young people,

we try to guide them to say, you can't focus on everything. But if you focus on one or two things that matters to your job, just keep doing at it. And you should get results quickly. - I just wanna elaborate on what you just said in terms of explaining when you said underlying is longer than every day. So in terms of like the chart and the assessment,

Remember, we have three personas, underlying, everyday, and overextended, and you have different percentages in how you exhibit these qualities depending on those personas. So what you're saying is when your underlying persona and you exhibit, let's say, a high degree of

of a certain quality in your underlying persona, but you exhibit that quality as a very low percentage of your everyday, that is an opportunity for growth to bring that out into your everyday as a strength that you exhibit on a public basis. Brilliant. Thanks for that explanation. Because if you look at your imaginative, Justin,

underlying 85 percentile, everyday 8 percentile. If that's true, you got a whole lot, you know, potential to develop. And you can easily to develop that because you have that in you, right? Like it's there, I'm just not showing it. And so the process of showing it in my everyday behavior is a huge potential to grow on that front. You can show ideas to how to, you know, I don't know, franchise the honest drink business.

how to make it even bigger, 10 times bigger, because you have that quality in you, right? Keep throwing ideas to your existing ideas, right? That's why I would no wonder you came up with the name. Well, according to me, I came up with the name. According to you.

Eric and Howie might beg to differ, but I want to get to a different, another quality I think might be relatable to a lot of people. And that's really interesting to me. And I'm very unbalanced in this. So I swing heavily one way on this one is the spectrum of accommodating versus being tough. Okay. Right. I think that's, that's interesting to me. I think that's something a lot of people struggle with. Well, we can ask Howie and Eric, you know,

What do you see, Justin? Is he a more accommodating person or more tough person? Accommodating. Accommodating. For sure. Yeah. Eric?

I think he is accommodating, but he will put his foot down on certain things. Okay. Yeah. So by and large, he's more accommodating. When do you put your foot down and try to make your stance? When I'm overextended. Sometimes? Yeah. When overextended. I think when something unexpected happens or I feel like I'm under some sort of pressure. Yeah.

I feel that's when it comes out. But let's, can you define tough then? I mean, let's define that. - The easiest thing to understand tough is you're comfortable with conflict. If you're comfortable with conflict, your tough is usually a long bar there. And for example, let's say, are you a tough negotiator when you're doing business? Are you comfortable with negotiating with people?

Are you comfortable arguing with other people? Are you comfortable dealing with authority? Things like that. So Shanghai Ais should be really high on toughness. Shanghai Ais. Shanghai women in general. That's funny. You speak from experience. I love my wife. He has to say that, right? He has to say that.

No, but see, I think that ties into... I mean, because I think a lot of these different qualitative spectrums, they're connected in a way, right? Because I feel like I am not usually tough at all, and I'm very accommodating. So I agree with this...

this particular assessment right and um i'm not comfortable with conflict okay i am not so therefore i am not tough and i am more accommodating and i think that is also directly connected to my higher level of empathy because i am empathetic i avoid conflict because i don't want i'm uncomfortable with the other person feeling uncomfortable

Yeah, that's a brilliant point. You're actually connecting all the dots now because this is an entire assessment about your own person. You do not look at only just one spectrum and one spectrum. You make a brilliant point because you do not want other people to feel bad.

So you intentionally, you know, choose to be accommodating. Yes. Make sense? Yes. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. So they're related. Yeah. I mean, not like... I think they tie into each other. They tie into each other and like some are more related to others then.

- Yeah, sometimes if you look at, there's all kinds of, I think of one example for you guys. It's not about accommodating, it's about results driven. Once we had a class, there's a female CEO and we asked her to give an example about family trip. And she says, "I have a meeting

Ask my family, I asked my husband and two kids, what's our takeaway this time? We all laughed. Wait, what did she say? What's our takeaway? What's our takeaway this time? Oh, after the trip? No, before the trip. She always has a- Before the trip. That's like so badass. It's like, you haven't even had the trip. What's your takeaway? She always has a goal for everything. Oh, like what's our objective for this trip? Even for family trip. And we all laughed. And we look at her profile. She's like-

you know, like super results driven. So I make a, you know, a detailed, uh,

like trip thing for every trip and then like i always start off like oh we'll just be chill right but then like by 3 p.m i'm like no we gotta go see this we gotta go and i'm literally like dragging people along like you're checking things off yeah and then i feel so bad like a to-do list yeah like at the end of the night then i'm just like why can't i just chill out and i'm like there's something wrong with me but once i get into that mode i cannot stop myself i'm just like i go mental yeah there's definitely something so you are very structured person

And people like you always plan ahead. They have a checklist. I have a friend, every time she goes out, she has one Excel sheet for every day. Oh yeah, me too. I could imagine. I like Excel sheets. Well, that's another quality analytic you have in the assessment is,

flexible versus structured. Right. Right. And I think that's what we're talking about. So if you guys, you know, go to travel as a pair, we would kill each other. We would kill each other. This is just for a two day trip. On my assessment, I'm like all the way flexible. Every trip. But very little structure. Exactly. Every trip. No, and we've talked about this in some of our episodes where we talked about like trips and vacations, right? And we didn't have this

level of understanding behind it. But we were just verbalizing it in a way where, you know, you have people who like to- Very slowly, that episode. Yeah, very slowly. You have people who like to vacation in different ways. And when you vacation, let's say you go on a group vacation with another couple or something. And their mentality towards vacationing

is like, hurry, hurry, hurry. We have deadlines to make. We got to go see these sites. By 3 p.m., we have to have seen this site and bum, bum, bum. There's a whole schedule, right? Versus me where I'm like,

The whole point of a vacation for me is that we have no agenda. If there's an agenda, it's not a vacation for me anymore. And so if I ever go on a vacation with that type of couple, there will be conflict. And inevitably, it'll end up just like, okay, you guys do your own thing. We'll do our own thing. And then it's like, why are we even out here together then? So my wife, I think...

and for the things that she needs to do is like super results oriented, like no bullshit and very efficient, but not overbearing, but she just, she knows what to focus on. But like during vacation, she's like the opposite. She's like super chill. So what explains that? - Well, Justin can answer that question now. - Paradox. - No, it's your underlying and your everyday. That's also a paradox. - So her underlying is actually chill.

very comfortable, go with the flow. But at work, she has her own agenda. - Her work persona. - Her work persona is I'm a driven executive. I wanna show those behavior. This is what I believe in. - That's why I like this so much is that- - That's cool, I like the three personas. - Yeah, it accounts for your different situations and different modes that you go in. And to expect that the way we are in the privacy of our own home,

is the same as when we're out in the public working in the office. To expect that to be exactly the same is ridiculous, right? That seems like the flaw or the lack of nuance in the other models. Yeah, and that's the reason why we shouldn't dump ourselves in a particular bucket or label.

because it does, like, you have so many different variables. - So how many qualities are there? - 24. - 24? So 24 meaning it's like 12 spectrum, or 12? - 12 pairs. - 12 pairs. - Yeah, 24, 12 pairs. And if you times three, because there's three personas, basically we're measuring 72 data points. If you think about a statistics, you know, nobody will be the same. No two other people will be the same, right? So yeah, that's the beauty of it. Yeah.

So one thing I'm just curious, because I haven't taken this test. I'm just learning about it right now in real time, just like the listeners. For me, if I've taken the MBTIs and other things like those type of assessment tests, usually my takeaway is understanding or further backing my gut feeling of who I am or what my characteristics are. Reinforce that. Yeah, reinforcing my characteristics. And...

And then I toss it away. And that's it. When Justin came in and said that after taking this test, this assessment, and understanding the nuances that it has, the details it has, what's your takeaway?

Well, in terms of what you just said? Yeah, just what you're taking. My takeaway is that it definitely reinforces certain things I felt I already knew about myself, like being empathetic, but it brings a lot higher resolution in terms of how that actually works. And again, going back to the three personas, the other thing that it does is

is that it challenges some of my assumptions. So because I know I'm highly empathetic, but if I look at a different persona, I can be very like, let's say logical in a certain situation. And I wouldn't have thought that before. I would just think like, okay, I'm empathetic, overly empathetic. Okay, that's it. End all and be all, right? That's where it ends. Yeah. But to understand that it's like this whole spectrum and that there is this idea of paradox where I can go on both ends of the spectrum for some things, but

That reveals so much to me. And when you start thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense. And you realize, yeah, well, I'm not always that way. And sometimes I'm like the complete opposite. So what explains that?

And it accounts for your different personas. It accounts for different things going on in your life and different mental states you're in as well. So it challenges some of your assumptions about yourself and it forces you to look at it and assess it to see, like, number one, do you agree? And if you do agree after doing some self-inflection, then it gives you opportunity to kind of like –

play around with it in your own behavior, which is fun because now you understand that my behavior is more malleable and more adjustable than I might have previously thought. Do you think that after taking this test, it helped answer some of the questions you had from previous episode when Justin was bringing up how

you know, does anybody like me and woes me? We actually never published that. Oh shit, that's right. We didn't publish that. Thanks for bringing that up. Oops. That's an unpublished episode. We have an unpublished episode where...

Why? Why? Basically, I'm like breaking down and asking these guys, like, I feel like no one likes me, right? And then they don't, they're not really, they weren't very supportive. But now, I don't know. I don't know if that has anything to do with this. You know, that was just some internal shit going on. But like... No, because one of those three assessments, one of those how outer people view you, outside people view you. Yeah, that's your everyday persona, right? Right.

Yeah, exactly. So does that bring clarity to you in terms of maybe some of the personality traits or aspects of yourself that you were kind of being inquisitive about in the previous episode? I think too, like what Yiming was saying earlier, it puts vocabulary, at the very least, it puts a vocabulary behind it.

Meaning that why do I feel so misunderstood all the time? And that's because I might be very inclined one way in my underlying persona, but in my everyday persona, I might be very low. And so I

I think that will cause a lot of misunderstanding because naturally you feel a certain way very strongly, but you might not exhibit it every day. And then if you're not aware of it, you question, well, why do people not understand me for it? Oh, I see. I see. Yeah. We talk about being measured yesterday. I'm also like you. I'm very measured. I don't show my expression on my face easily, even if I hit a jackpot.

So the... Good poker player. Yeah. You know? That's what you said yesterday. That's what I was saying about Justin. He could be a good poker player. I can see that. I don't know. Avalon? Yeah. But the issue is people do not understand what's going on inside. Right? That causes misunderstanding. Yeah.

He could be a CIA spy. Yes. How do you know that I'm not? Why do you think I'm in China? Or P space L spaced. So I guess, you know, Howie, to address your question, some of the assessment is fun to have.

you know, reinforce your understanding and it just, you know, and you move on. But some assessments, I like to think our assessment helps you to explore more and understand yourself better and creates all kinds of opportunity and possibilities. Yeah. So that's, you know, exciting. How many questions are on this test? 144. Dang. And how does it, how do you answer them? Is it a scale of one to 10 or? One to five. One to five. Yeah. Yeah.

To, you know, like standard, like strongly disagree to strongly agree, right? Was it hard to choose? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes. Because, again, and it kind of ties into this idea of paradox and this fluctuation in our things.

In some situations, I might strongly agree with the statement. And in some situations, I might strongly disagree with the statement. And so those questions, I was sitting there for minutes just like, okay. Really? Yeah. How do I? And then for those type of questions, I tend to just go right in the middle. Okay. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up because I want to ask you, when taking these type of strongly agree to strongly disagree type of questions and these type of tests, what

There are, for me, I'm always stuck on certain questions because to me it's so nuanced. It's like, it depends on the time of day, depends on how do I answer this? I don't even know how to answer this. I have no idea if this is a question on a test, but I just imagined if there was a question about, oh, when you are in an argument with your spouse, you are the first one to say sorry. Do you strongly agree or strongly disagree? If that was a question on it, I would be like,

Like I would, it would both happen. It really depends on who's right or who's wrong. You know what I mean? Start breaking down all the situations. Yeah, you start overthinking it. You overthink it. That's how I am, right? I'm always overthinking things. Yeah, that's a good one. It also, you know, the way you address the questionnaire also shows your personality. Right?

For example, from one to five, some people always choose four or five. So they have a very clear inclination. Some people will say, ah, three, ah, three, and then you always have three in the middle. But I think that's maybe where these assessment tools might be lacking, is that there's no way for...

the assessor to know how conflicted you were over a particular question, right? There's no way for it to know, like, you spent 10 minutes trying to answer this one question, right? Exactly. But if it knew that, maybe it can add some more light into like... Yeah, there could be more reasons behind that. Exactly. So, because it just takes that one data point, like, what did you answer? But it sheds no light on how conflicted you were when you answered that question.

we don't have that technology yet, but I think it's possible. Maybe in the future, people will say, oh, Howie takes three minutes to address just one question. The other, on average, he only takes like 30 minutes. But maybe he was just making a sandwich. But Justin, I agree with you. These are the little nuances that maybe in the future, when technology gets to a certain level,

Or something. Or like AI, like there's a facial camera. Like facial, exactly. So it detects like your emotions when you're answering the question. Yeah. He's sweating. Yeah, he's sweating. Yeah, there's actually different ways of assessing people. I mean, this assessment, if you look at the validity and all that, they are not very high. We have a practitioner who is a...

you know, has a master's degree in psychology and she used to be the general manager of a psychometric assessment company. And she said she was hoping to develop a new type of way of assessing people a couple of years ago. But I guess it was a pity she did not get the funding from the corporate. I believe in, you know, AI, I mean, micro-expression,

Maybe an AI talking to you for five minutes. They monitor everything happening to you and they see the big data. They will just come up with a much more accurate, even more colorful portrait than we have now. Yiming, let me ask you, in your experience coaching all these years, going along with this conversation, are there anything that you see routinely that people are struggling with? On top of my mind, several things. One is

Why paradox? Because there is two forces. They're fighting with each other. It happens to a lot of people. It doesn't mean you are very comfortable on both sides. So people always struggle. And they try to understand what's happening to me. Why I'm flip-flopping.

Well, I think paradox by its very nature is confusing. Yeah. And people, you know, actually after understanding that, the assessment, they at least come to peace with some of the paradox. And then they know where to take a stand depending on situation. So that's one theme. The other theme is, I think, couples' relationship issues.

Because it's interesting, you know, we're always attracted to people who are different from us. Yes, we have to coexist and live together. Once I had a sharing with some young entrepreneurs. There's one young couple who just got married. And the husband is a bit more like Eric, very organized, you know, very, you know, disciplined.

And the wife does not like to organize things. For example, she will just put her clothes everywhere, you know, and they just had a fight. You're talking about me yesterday with my wife. Oh, really? Like literally the day before her birthday. I'm like...

We had a little bit of an argument. Oh my God. Yeah. So this happens to, especially for this young couple, they were just pointing fingers, right? But I tell them, it's not about who's good or who's bad. It's about your preference. Right. You can't force people to have it. Well, I think there's two things when I reflect on it. It's like at least two aspects and not speaking to the model because I don't know it. But one of them would be this

kind of thing. And then the other would be like this more like dominant kind of thing. Right. So if you're like really structured, but like you're not super dominant and you're accommodating, then you might not get an argument. But it's like, I'm both structured, but then I have to make other people do things a certain way. And those two things came together. You have been controlling. But then I'm empathetic. So then later on, like I,

I'm like, you know. Let it go. Yeah, let it go. And then I'm like, oh, or I'll like, I'll take the hanger. I'm like, okay, I'll help you do it, you know. But I still have to kind of get my. So, it's funny how all these things, once you're aware, you can lower the temperature very quickly because once you understand why, you don't get as mad anymore. Because you, because the other thing is we have negativity bias. So, when you see the behavior, always assume the worst. That's actually the, probably the biggest trigger is that, oh, that other person's messing with me. Yeah. Yeah.

So you actually escalated the situation.

At the very beginning, it's about people's preference. And then, as you're just saying, Eric is saying, you're just starting pointing fingers and you ask these things and you start a fight. So the second thing I was talking to earlier was how to deal with people we treasure, right? Your husband and wife, your partners, because they're important person in your life. You got to understand they're different people.

from you and you appreciate that. And that's one thing. The other thing is, if you extend that to the working relationship, depending on which organization you work for, some organization will actually advocate friendship among colleagues, some do not.

But either way, if you're in a team, you have to work with people with different personalities. And we always see that people will judge others by their own standard, which is totally against our principle.

- Well, isn't that the human condition, right? We're always judging people based on our own standards. - But it's naturally, there's nothing wrong with that. I have been an executive recruiter for many years. And when I started my business, I tried to hire a few interns from my grad school. And I interviewed a bunch of Chinese students. I couldn't decide who to choose because they're so brilliant. I followed them. And I went with my gut.

And I realized the two interns I hired had a very similar personality with myself. That's the unconscious bias. So this is very, I think, critical for many leaders. You tend to hire people who are like you and you lose creativity in the team.

In a good time, you can still survive. But nowadays, things are not great. You gotta be more creative. You have more collaboration. - More diversity. - More diversity in a team. You need to be consciously looking at people who are different.

At the very beginning, it's very struggling because you have to adjust to people who are not like you. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the challenge for every leader. Yeah. Yeah. But I...

I also think, and I could totally see that tendency in myself, but I also think that I really appreciate people that have skills that I don't. Because I think the three of us, I know I am very self-critical as well, and I'm always trying to get better. And sometimes I put on this negativity bias on myself, and then anything someone else does is better.

But I think the virtue of that is that then you start seeing people's strengths. So if you can start looking at everyone's strengths, right? And then say, hey, this is something that I struggle with. I've just not, it doesn't come easily to me, but it comes so easily to Howie that I want someone like that on my team. And in fact, like, like, you know, I think I've dated in the past, I dated people that were similar to me and it never really worked out. And what I love about like, you know, I'm married now and then, you know, I'm,

been with, you know, my current wife, like we've dated, we started dating like eight years ago, got married a couple of years ago. And I just really, although we have conflict, right. When, when we butt heads on certain things, but the reason that we're together is that when I see her do certain things, I'm like, wow, that's awesome. Like I wouldn't,

I wouldn't have thought of doing it that way, you know? And like, I really appreciate that. And then I think you have to lean into those things. Yeah. It's a brilliant, Eric, because, you know, you love your wife, you know, you appreciate, you see that. You hear that? No. Yeah. But in the daily work, sometimes we can't love our colleagues because we are confined to the working space. Maybe, you know, you're a, maybe you're a jerk.

You just joined our company, I have to deal with you. So from that level, people sometimes will say, hey, how can I work with these people? This person is so difficult. But I guess if you look at personality, you might start to appreciate why people are doing things differently from you.

In general, I do not assume people are ill-intended. People always want to do good things. They always want to contribute to the organization. So if you have that assumption in mind and try to understand why they are behaving differently, using this assessment tool as a guideline, you see actually lots of misunderstanding will go away.

Easily. So kind of once you're aware of all these different qualities and how they work and all these different personas, and you understand yourself a little bit better, it helps you now understand other people who might be difficult to work with. It gives you at least a framework. Exactly. It's easier for you to understand people. And then you know how to adjust to your behavior because you can't always use the same behavior to interact with every single person in your life. You can probably work 50% of the time.

So you got to be very, you know, agile so that you can influence the other person to work for you or work towards the same goal. And that's not as... Like, I don't think that's as hard as it sounds. Like, for instance, like when you're dealing with kids, like let's say you meet a five-year-old. You're not going to talk to the five-year-old the same way you're going to talk to like a 35-year-old. Like, I mean...

And the fact that our profiles have so many different dimensions means that like we're actually quite adaptable and flexible. Like we already have it in us. We just don't like, you know, know sometimes like when to apply like the certain, the right skill because we get caught up in our own worlds. And it's interesting when you talk about the,

the work aspect. Cause there was, I learned about a framework called the competing values framework. And it comes from some people from university of Michigan, the leadership world, but essentially like the way, because when you're at work, that everyday persona in some ways, it's less flexible because you got to get shit done. We all got to get stuff done. So it's very like results driven, but there was like, I think in general, like different dimensions. And once you understand like how these things compete,

Because some people are more results and outcome oriented. Some people are more relationship. But it sounds very similar, this competing values framework. And once people understand that, then you know, if I have a team of X number of people that lean in certain directions, then you can be like very intentional. Even up front, you can actually come up with this common language and say, okay, I'm more like this. You're more like this. These are situations we need to just be aware of. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing that. This is the first time I hear about competing value. But I think from the way you describe it, you can combine our assessment with the competing value because in a corporate environment,

As a large organization, you have a big goal. But when it comes down to different functions, sometimes because your KPI is different, you start to compete with each other. Marketing versus sales, they're different. Their KPI is different. So how can you make sure people are working together well enough? I guess the competing value is helpful for us to...

understand why do we have differences? What drives us? How can we work together better, especially across different functions? We are now doing some family business, meaning two generations coming together. We have three to five families

That's very fun. You know, their parents are usually corporate executives or, you know, are intrapreneurials. The kids are similar age, like 15, 16. We're starting to do that right now. I think that can be very useful here in China. Oh, wonderful. You know, that's why I think there's an unlimited possibility for our business. Especially because like, uh,

It feels like in China, like, we don't talk about our feelings as much. Like, we had a guest who works in this field of psychotherapy. His name is Steve, like Steve Shua. And he's pretty well-known in China. And, like, I just thought of that example where, like, you know, one –

when Chinese New Year's he goes home and then his dad like he had like a rough relationship and then remember he got the hongbao and he just threw it in his dad's face he threw the money in his dad's face yeah because he comes from like military family and it's just like

Really, really, really crazy. It's like he's since figured it out. That was his overextended persona. Yeah, that was his overextended. I feel like Justin could be a good coach. I know. But I think like every family, it's like group therapy because it's generational trauma. It's like the gift that keeps giving. Yeah. Man, that could be so healing for families. Exactly. So healing. Because you have sort of this third party thing.

Breakdown, right? Because when you're in a family situation, everybody has an emotional stance. And with that, you also have historical baggage.

So when I combat with my sister, with my mother or whoever, it's the combat. It's like this fight of 40 plus years of our – you know what I mean? That's all truncated in that one moment. But when you have a third party person or service that can come in, that's what therapy is sort of meant for, right? Yeah.

That's sort of unbiased, just taking everything what it is and giving an assessment. But this can break it down really deeply where it's like, okay, wow, you're coming from a very emotional response as opposed to a logical response. And that's where our conflict is coming from. Yeah, it's granular enough that it's the actual actionable piece. It's not just like there's something wrong. For those who like...

it's kind of like money ball for your personality, right? Yeah. For school, you know, obviously, you know, students have to, you have to see the parents and even for single executives, you know, you work in a system.

So we always want to understand their partners who are important stakeholders in the organization. And same thing applies to every single person. We are all living in a system. Your stakeholders play a strong role in how you are today. I want to ask you, and this might go against the whole kind of concept of labels, but if you had to pick one quality that you felt

was the most important for the most amount of people, generally speaking. Could you pick one out?

That's a tough one. Maybe I would not choose the quality. I would choose the big dimension, which is introversion. Introversion? Yeah. Why is that? Well, because depending on where you grew up, you guys grew up in the US, and you probably heard that there's a book called The Power of Introversion. It's actually wrote by, there was an author. She used to be a lawyer, and she also had a very famous TED Talk.

The basic story is growing up. Oh, Susan Cain? Susan Cain. Yeah. Basically, she's growing up. She was highly introverted. Whenever she'd go to summer camp, she would bring her book. And the counselor would say, go out, go out. You should go out to mingle with your friends and so on. And she was growing in the U.S. culture, if you will.

And then later on, she realized she's so introverted. She wanted to understand how she is. So she actually quit her job, become a TED talker and also a speaker. And if you look at in the Asian world, there's a lot more Asians, introversions.

And even though people still think extroversion is better than introversion. So what I'm trying to say is I see a lot of people like myself, you know, being born or being brought up very introverted, but want to fit into the world and start to develop the extroversion skills.

This is like a theme for many introverted people. Even we were actually looking at our services, we once were thinking about why don't we have an introversion, you know, how can I say,

going from introversion to extroversion learning camp. Because that's what many people want. And that's what actually brings benefits to their working relationship. - Well, they probably wouldn't attend that camp in the first place 'cause there's other people there. - But if you look at, and you're not talking about anti-social. - Oh, yeah. You're taking it to the extreme, buddy. - But if you look at lots of the book club, reading club, there's so many introversion people.

They are introverted. They want to learn in a group, but they may not enjoy the social part. These would be our ideal clients. Yeah. Because reading a book in itself is a very introverted activity. Yeah. It's interesting that...

You said something that you don't read. Yeah, it's just surprising because I'm so introverted. Audio books. I just stare at the wall in my room. Pencils start flying from, like landing from nowhere. So I don't know if this is a stereotype and you just said something. And I wonder how true it is.

is that, and I feel the same way, but I don't have any numbers to back it up, that introversion exists more as a percentage in the Asian population. But that could just be a stereotype, right? Because when I think of the stereotype- That's the nurture piece. That could be the nurture piece, right? It could be the cultural piece. Or maybe it's just untrue, but it seems like more Asians are introverted. If you compare culture by culture,

That's true, because you obviously see more introverted person in Japan than in the US, statistically. But if you look at each country, there's still a bell curve. You see my point? So things that bring that point, I actually come across a few people, you know,

who are from the US, who are highly introverted and move to Japan. They feel very comfortable. Seriously. - Well, can introversion be a strength? Like you said, we often associate with extroversion as a strength in comparison to introversion, right? - That's a perception, you know, because if you look at the corporate, there's so many introversion leaders.

Steve Jobs, for example, right? - He was introverted? - Of course. I think there was one side research showing the people's personality and their correlation with their performance. Guess what? Not the most extroverted person brings out the best results. It's actually somewhere in between.

People who are not so introverted, not so extroverted, bring out the best results. So back to my earlier point, I wasn't advocating that extroversion is better than introversion. I don't want to give the audience that impression. Actually, on the contrary, Luminar Learning believes so much that we should look at introversion and extroversion equally.

That's why we measure by giving you two sets of questionnaire. We ask you a bunch of questions on introversion. We also ask you a bunch of questions on extroversion. We truly believe there's a virtue on both sides. And we use our methodology to that. We call it directly measure.

In many other assessments, they don't directly measure. They just ask the questions on the so-called good qualities. For instance, some questionnaire only adjusts to extroversion because in the traditional world, extroversion is a good quality. You know, if Howie says no to the extroversion and the assessment says Howie, therefore, is an introversion, which is totally wrong. Mm-hmm.

So we actually highly, highly focusing on, you know, measure both sides. Like the strengths or the properties that show up in that particular area. And then you measure that particular thing rather than just the absence of the opposite. Exactly. Exactly. I think if there's kind of one thing you would want to leave somebody listening with,

in terms of maybe their own situations in life and at work in general? I know it's a very broad question, right? But like if maybe there's one message you would want to leave people with or that you typically like to leave your clients with, what would that be? Well, I think just do not put yourself in a box

In life, you have so many opportunities and so many possibilities. Do not put a cap on that. Do not put yourself in a box. Get out of the box. I think that's beautiful. You mean if people want to find you, where can they find you? Well, the easiest thing is probably through our... We have the same name for our WeChat, our Shipinghao.com.

And also our xiaohongshu, it's Lumina Learning. Lumina Learning. Lumina Learning, yeah. If your friends want to reach out to me, you can use my personal WeChat. We can connect. I welcome all kinds of business opportunities. I welcome people who want to learn about Lumina Learning and what we believe in.

I just truly hope that more and more people will understand who we are. I want to have as many people as possible to learn our philosophy and share our philosophy and create a more diversified world. - One last question.

Can you think of like one thing that Lumina has brought you personally, like not the business itself, but just as a, you know, as a customer, right? As an individual, like how has it allowed you to step outside of your box? For me, I'm a quite private person. If you look at my WeChat, I never show where I go for vacation, never show my personal life. But in terms of philosophy, I have moved from, you know,

When I was in corporate, I believe in work-life balance. And later on, I don't believe that. Now I believe in work-life integration because you can't really separate those two. So for me, it's try to lead a healthy life, try to have a marathon instead of a sprint. I never think about retiring. I just think about being physically, emotionally strong

and bring more energy to people around me and that that definitely seems like a learning curve because i think as you stated in the beginning of the podcast when you were younger that would have been hard for you to do is to bring energy right people around you right right yeah yeah even today it's difficult for me you did a good job today yeah i felt the great job actually

Thank you so much for coming here and spending the time with us. I should have some drink. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Here we go. All right. Well, cheers, Iming. Cheers. That was amazing. Thanks. Cheers. Like that time went by so quickly because like sometimes it goes by slow and you see me like looking at the watch. Yeah. Which guest went by slow for you?

Say it on air. Yeah. Name names. Name names. Full names, please. All the Ha Ha Monster episodes. Especially the one-on-one sessions with you. Those are interminable. They're absolutely interminable. Anyway, that was Yi Ming. I'm Justin. I'm Howie. And I'm inspired by Lumina. All right. Be good. Be well. Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace.