Adapt to others while staying true to yourself

This essay is adapted from a keynote speech delivered to Ascend Seattle on May 22, 2024 in honor of AANHPI month. @Ascend is the largest global network advancing Pan-Asian professionals in the workplace.

There I was, at my family’s Vietnamese newspaper. I had just kicked a hole into the thin wall of the inner office.

I was so mad.?

My parents and I were fighting about what to do with one of our newspaper advertisers, a local restaurant owner. She hadn't paid us in over a year.

I told my parents, “We need to pull her advertising. She’s taking advantage of us. B? m?, Father, mother, you are letting her take advantage of us!”

My father told me, “Con, Dear child, I think you should take care of the American advertisers and let us take care of the Vietnamese ones.”

“American” meant anyone who was not Vietnamese.

My parents had been running the newspaper for 22 years; I had been there for five months.

I was so frustrated because my parents’ leniency challenged all my expectations of how businesses should run in America.

To give you some context, this happened 15 years ago. Times were tough. Stress was high.

We were deep in the Great recession and the start of the global decline of the newspaper industry. I had just returned to Seattle after being away for a decade.?

I had just earned a PhD from Cambridge, so I thought I was pretty smart. I soon realized how much I still had to learn. I found out this restaurant owner wasn’t alone. Most of the Vietnamese small business owners who advertised with us paid late. I suggested requiring prepayment and imposing late fees.

My parents thought I was being too aggressive and pushy. We eventually got to a solution that allowed us both to do what we felt was right. I will share that solution later.

As Asians, we are the minority in America. That means to succeed, we have to fit in. Yet we’re also told we need to stand out to be leaders. Working with my parents in our Vietnamese newspaper taught me I could adapt to others while also staying true to myself. This has helped me fit in and stand out wherever I am.?

Now, as with many Asian American immigrants, I was brought up with a strong work ethic. And to work hard, to work long. So I know how we feel at work bleeds into every other part of our lives.

That’s why I decided to start my own company, CuriosityBased, in 2021, to help people practice curiosity at work.Because learning feels good. Being respected also feels good. Yet many people talk about feeling disrespected at work.

Based on my research, I don’t think we need to learn how to be respectful. We need more curiosity around respect. In this talk, I will share just three key insights from my research and relate them back to what I experienced at my family’s Vietnamese newspaper.

Insight 1: Respect is relative?

In my research, people talked about respect as if we share the same definition. So, if they weren’t getting respect the way they wanted to get it, that meant they were being disrespected. They defined respect as an “either or”, respect vs disrespect.? Yet, when I asked people to describe respect, different people had different interpretations of the same behavior. Just like I had with my parents.

By American standards, I was being respectful by enforcing payment with our advertisers. By Vietnamese standards, I was being disrespectful by enforcing payment with our advertisers. We were both right. I learned that respect is a “both and” , not an “either or.” Respect is relative.

Insight 2: It’s hard to change people’s minds

It took me over a year of frustrating mistakes and long hours of working hard but not smart to realize I wasn’t going to be able to change my parents or our customers’ expectations. That’s because our expectations are rooted in our experiences.?

Having grown up in the US, I really appreciated having rules. My parents, on the other hand, having grown up in Vietnam, were more flexible about rules.? It was hard for either of us to change our minds.

Insight 3: Practice Curiosity?

One way to move through this conflict is to practice curiosity about how we individually define respect. We often define respect in terms of how we should treat others, like the golden rule or the platinum rule. I want to introduce another way to think about respect. It's what I call the rubber band rule.?

The rubber band rule acknowledges that we are all capable of stretching and flexing.?

Do you know what happens when we stretch a rubber band too much? We eventually snap and break. The rubber band rule is about knowing our breaking points. That day I kicked a hole in the wall, I discovered my breaking point.

Sometimes our rubber band has to break for us to acknowledge what our breaking points are. Through getting curious about myself, I realized procedure and rules are still important to me. When people don't follow the rules, I get annoyed.? When we learn what our breaking points are, we learn how much we can stretch before we snap.

Earlier, I had promised I’d reveal what we did with the newspaper.?

Our newspaper had two editions, a weekend and a weekday. Before, both editions served the same mix of advertisers, both American and Vietnamese. Neither set was being served particularly well. My brother and I took over the weekday edition of the family newspaper.? We primarily focused on American government and corporate advertisers. My parents stayed in charge of the weekend edition. They focused primarily on Vietnamese small businesses.

Our Vietnamese readers still got the same news content, whether they were reading the weekday or weekend edition. This wasn’t just a compromise. We actually found a more effective, more efficient way of doing business. Our solution was greater than the sum of our parts. It was 1 + 1 = 3. We never would have thought of dividing up the newspaper this way if we weren’t trying to find ways to both adapt to working with each other while staying true to ourselves.

The strategy can be used in all kinds of work settings.?

To succeed as Asians in America, we need to fit in yet stand out.?

To succeed, we can stretch without snapping.

Check out the CuriosityBased 2024 AANHPI Authored Leadership Book List

I’m Dr. Julie Pham and I founded CuriosityBased to help people practice curiosity in the world, starting in the workplace, because that is where we spend most of our waking hours. Subscribe to the CuriosityBased YouTube channel for more helpful communication tips and to our weekly newsletter.