Leadership is hard and it is not for the weary.
Leading myself and others in the face of injustice while also staying aligned to my integrity and values has required an immense amount of courage, clarity, confidence—and a lot of deep breaths.
In times of conflict, my ability to stay aligned with my integrity and core values has often been a reflection of the inner work I have done to tolerate criticism, backlash, conflict, being misunderstood, and losing support/business/followers.
Words like ‘integrity’ and ‘values’ can become nebulous and lose meaning when not backed up by consistent—though imperfect—action.
Leading, living, and being human continues to be an ongoing and imperfect process. My desire to seek accountability and justice in the world has required me to swim in the deep end of grace and strive to live this grace.
Allowing myself to take imperfect action has been immensely uncomfortable but rewarding. It has been what I needed to maintain the ongoing process of unburdened leadership.
I’m thrilled to welcome my guest today, J.S. Park. His vulnerability along with his gift of communication is an example of unburdened leadership. J.S. reminds me that we are not robots and how our emotions, if not addressed, can end up overwhelming us, taking us out, and moving us away from what matters most.
J.S. is a hospital chaplain, chaplain for the homeless, 6th-degree blackbelt, ex-atheist, skeptic, son of immigrants, and author of his new book, The Voices We Carry: Finding Your One True Voice in a World of Clamor and Noise.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- The burdens J.S. carries that encouraged him to become a chaplain, how the work has been healing to him, and how it’s also been difficult
- How depression has impacted J.S. and why he decided to get curious and feel the pain instead of bypassing it
- How J.S. has been—and still is— impacted by intergenerational racism
- What inspired J.S. to start what he calls typewriter therapy
Learn more about Pastor J.S. Park:
- Facebook: @Pastor J.S. Park
- Instagram: @jspark3000
Learn more about Rebecca:
Transcript:
JS Park: I find it hard to find grace dealing with someone who has a lack of grace. And so, if someone is infringing upon or impeding on my own story or I see them do that to others — and we see this now politically, religiously, socially, all kinds of different ways — it just infuriates me.
[Inspirational Intro Music]
Rebecca Ching: Leadership is hard and not for the weary, and leading yourself and others in the face of injustice while staying aligned to your integrity and values requires courage, clarity, confidence, and a whole lot of deep breaths. In times of conflict, your ability to stay aligned to your integrity and your core values is often a reflection of the depth of your inner work to tolerate criticism, tolerate backlash, tolerate conflict (I know many people avoid that one), tolerate being misunderstood, tolerate losing support, business, followers, and not making everyone feel okay.
Now, words like values and integrity can become nebulous and lose meaning when not backed up by consistent, though imperfect, action. Unburdened Leaders are able to dig deep and do the work to support their values and discomfort of imperfect actions because they committed to and are doing the work to respond to strong emotion so the burdens in their story do not continue to keep them down or burn them out. They don’t stuff their pain to keep it cool and keep up appearances in the name of comfort and status quo. They tap into feeling into their strong emotions and are not overcome by fear of pain but find inspiration in it. Unburdened Leaders are not focused externally on what others think and are more worried about doing what is right. And when comparison and focusing on others distracts them, they catch it quickly and circle back to what matters most.
2:04
Leading, living, and being human is an ongoing and imperfect process, and as we desire and seek accountability and justice in the world around us, we have to swim in the deep end of grace and live this grace towards ourselves and others.
I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with leaders whose burdens have inspired their life’s work. Our goal is to learn how they’ve addressed these burdens, how they rise from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.
[Inspirational Intro Music]
Swimming in the deep end of grace and taking imperfect action may sound good in theory but can still be immensely uncomfortable. But it is required to maintain the ongoing process of unburdened leadership. If you move too quickly through tough times, you’ll miss the gold and the teaching moments along with the richness of what pain and heartbreak and despair can teach you. Bypassing strong emotions will only compound your pain while decreasing your capacity to move through discomfort with integrity and intention and then leaving you feeling reactive, defensive, and exhausted.
When I first read Rising Strong by Brené Brown, she quoted neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and this quote has had a profound impact on me, and I repeat it a lot. He said, “Humans are not either thinking machines or feeling machines, but rather feeling machines that think.” And Brené further elaborated noting just because you’re standing in your office or your classroom or your studio doesn’t mean that you can take the emotion out of this process. You cannot.
The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the years of my career had three things in common. First, they recognized the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stayed curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
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Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And third, they have the ability and willingness to lean into discomfort and vulnerability.
My guest today, JS Park, lives with all these tenants Brené listed with power, humility, and grace. Along with his incredible typewriting skills inspired in his Typewriter Therapy he shares on Instagram, JS is a hospital chaplain, chaplain for the homeless, sixth degree black belt, ex-atheist, skeptic, son to immigrants, Korean American, and someone who loves Jesus. And he’s also author to his new book The Voices We Carry: Finding Your One True Voice in a World of Clamor and Noise.
JS’s vulnerability, along with his gift of communication, is an example of unburdened leadership, and our interview is a reminder to us all the importance of not neglecting emotional aspects of being human and being all in with leading and caring deeply. JS reminds us we’re not robots and our emotions, if not addressed, can end up overwhelming us, taking us out, and moving us away from what matters most.
Pay special attention to when JS talks about his own confrontation with despair in the face of rejection and how that led him to a deep awakening and journey into the generational burdens in his family of origin. Also note how the fruits of that time awakened a world that was bigger than the one based on external validation. Notice how he rumbles with culture and the lessons he learned staying too long at a job and how not settling in his pursuit for meaningful work opened him up to his career as a chaplain and passion for writing.
6:04
We’re seeing the legacy of racial burdens and the importance of Black Lives Matter come to the surface globally. Doing the work to build the capacity to humanize our pain and, most importantly, the pain of others, builds the capacity to do the work to dismantle the generations of systemic racism and detox from breathing in the insidious impact of white supremacy. Listen with care and respect the intergenerational trauma burdens that JS and his family have experienced and are still carrying today.
You are listening to The Unburdened Leader with my guest JS Park. JS, thank you so much for joining me today!
JS Park: Hey, thank you for having me! I appreciate you so much.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, I have been an internet Instagram fan of your writing (I think I’ve seen you on Facebook too), gosh, for maybe a year or two now. I feel like I read your words and I feel a little more known and a little more validated and also, as a veteran psychotherapist, so grateful that other people are seeing what you’re writing as you rumble with matters of mental health and faith and family and culture in a way that I think is so relatable. So I am so excited about our conversation today! So thank you so much for being here.
JS Park: Likewise, Rebecca. Thank you! Thank you for that affirmation and encouragement. I appreciate that a lot, a lot, really.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
So we’re gonna dive right in. You have been very, very open about your struggle with depression.
JS Park: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: So I’d love for you to share the first time you remember feeling overcome by depression.
JS Park: Yeah, you know, I think even in recognizing that first time, I probably didn’t have a name for it when it was happening.
8:02
So looking at hindsight, I look back and I go, “Okay, I think that time I was overwhelmed and overcome by depression.” I would say this is sort of an embarrassing story to share only because sometimes when I share with other people that have experienced depression, it seems like there’s a lot of things around it that make it sound like it wasn’t that. But when I had this really, really bad breakup back in 2004, I just fell into a really, really bad spiral of depression, anxiety, panic, shame, embarrassment.
My girlfriend, at the time, she had cheated on me, and so, I thought it was the end of the world. It was a really, really awful feeling. And so, from that, I tried to take my own life, ended up Baker Act-ed. For listeners who don’t know what Baker Act means, it’s a mandatory 72-hour hold. The state of Florida has enacted that. I’m sure many other states have as well. And so, if you have thoughts of self-harm or harming others you get (it’s used in verb form, I guess, by medical staff) Baker Act-ed. So I tried to take my life with a bottle of pills of acetaminophen.
And so, the reason I feel like that story’s a little embarrassing is because there was a level of codependency and attachment that I had like wrong attachment that I had to the idea of this relationship, and when it fell apart, I felt like I couldn’t live without her anymore. And so, I know that people who struggle with mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and other things like that, it’s more so because of other traumatic factors, biological factors, things like that. For me, sometimes I tell that story and there’s a look like, “You did that over a girl. Period,” you know? “You did that over a breakup when you were in college. You were college-aged when that happened.”
10:01
And so, looking back though, I think there are parts of that that are valid, like yes, it was “just a breakup” but then there are other parts of that, that when the breakup happened, it opened up something in me that I realized was always there, that depression had been long festering.
And so, I think that was my really first big encounter or you could say confrontation with understanding what I experienced, the feelings from that was a disproportioned response and probably not “normal.”
Rebecca Ching: Yeah, “normal.”
JS Park: What is normal, right?
Rebecca Ching: Yeah. How did your pain — because it sounds like — and these are my words, but it sounds like your protective response to experiencing immense betrayal trauma and fused boundaries and your sense of where you end and your ex-girlfriend began, how did your response — your depression, your desire to not live, how did that impact you on the other side of this and those around you?
JS Park: Mm, you know, I think in that time there was deep shame in my interaction with other people, and I think there was something that was indoctrinated in me early on in that it’s probably cultural. In fact, I would say a large part of it is cultural: me being Asian American, me having an Eastern upbringing. There’s a lot of boot-strap type of philosophy. There’s a lot of we don’t talk about pain and trauma. There’s a lot of you can just get over it if you try hard enough. There’s a lot of strong, strong — and this sounds stereotypical, but it was true in my family that there’s a strong work ethic, and then if you’re not healthy in your mind and your body that you must be doing something wrong.
12:00
And so, I felt a deep shame and embarrassment when I went to the hospital when I was Baker Acted, when it was over, you know, “just a girl,” right? There was a lot of shame in talking about it, and at the time, I didn’t have a healthy space to be able to freely say, “This hurts like crazy, the breakup does, and underneath that, there is just a lot of stuff breaking and bursting out of me that this is touching on.” It hit a raw nerve that was super raw.
So yeah, yeah, I think to answer that question, I would say the impact that it had was, gosh, feeling afraid and almost silenced, like I didn’t have a voice to give the things that I was experiencing, to be able to say, “This really, really hurts.” There’s just a silencing and a shame around that.
Rebecca Ching: So how have you rumbled with that shame and that experience of silencing?
JS Park: Hmm, yeah, I would say looking back now, I recognize that the breakup as maybe we were just puppy love or however you want to call it. But recognizing that no matter what age and no matter how insignificant it may look on the surface, any kind of loss is painful, and recognizing that pain was valid.
There is a thing I believe called The Fallacy of Relative Privation, which means that if you tell somebody who doesn’t finish their food, “Well, there are people starving in the world,” what you’re really saying is, “You need to finish all your food because there are people hurting over there,” and then sort of the fine print under that is, “Your pain isn’t real. Those other people’s pain are.” And so, we’re sort of comparing pain subjectively.
14:04
What I’m starting to recognize is that someone starving, someone who experiences depression, someone who has student loan debt, someone who has lost their job recently, all of these things are painful, and to sort of set them up against each other is completely unfair.
And so, looking back, I think in hindsight I had to recognize that pain was real. That really hurt. So it wasn’t just I had to recognize there was depression, there were mental health issues underneath all of that that was kind of the throughline or thread that I had to unravel myself. But also that the pain of breakups, the pain of loss, a breakup can be just as much grief as actually losing someone. There was a lot of pain around that that I had to acknowledge and say, “No, my pain is real, and I wish you would hear that and hear me.”
Rebecca Ching: There’s so much there, JS. It sounds like what you were experiencing was comparative suffering on steroids. It wasn’t just putting your pain against someone’s pain and rank ordering it. It was everyone else’s pain is more important than yours, and you really don’t have pain, it’s just about them. There’s almost this alienation experience when it’s like a shell. If we can acknowledge the suffering of being human, which is part — if we dare to love, we will have our hearts broken.
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: It’s just part of the gig. But to not have a framework for that — and I think this is really important because many people feel very invisible in their despair, and they don’t have language or structure or permission, and I think it can be especially scary and dangerous when we don’t have that permission from those closest to us, even when those closest to us think they’re trying to protect us and they’re doing their best.
JS Park: Mm.
Rebecca Ching: So yeah, can you speak some more to that?
16:07
JS Park: Yeah, you know, one thing that I’ve been learning how to do, and this may answer a part of the question, is when I speak up — I had to learn to speak out loud, “This is what I’m feeling.” I had to learn to name the feeling and whoever it was, whether it was elders who would not understand (and I use that word elders very specifically in a very cultural way) whether it was people who were sort of inundated by or indoctrinated by the boot-straps philosophy, I had to just say out loud, I had to claim for myself, “Here’s what I’m actually feeling.” And then once I started naming what I’m feeling, I had to find, not that it was my responsibility or necessarily burden to do this, but I had to draw from my faith. I had to draw from within myself the grace to be able to understand that a person is not going to understand what I am saying about my pain in the first or even tenth conversation. It’s gonna take a lot.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
JS Park: It’s gonna take a — it’s like running through an iron blanket. It’s gonna take a lot to get through this web of what this person understands mental health is about. And at first I was infuriated like, “Why can’t he just get this? Why can’t he just believe me? Can’t he just take me at face value?” There was a lot of a flipping-table-type feeling. “I’m telling you this is real for me. My pain, it hurts. Can’t my pain also be your pain a little bit? Can’t you hear and see this?” But recognizing that there are blinders on all of us, we have blind spots in all these different kinds of areas, and so, I’m trying to have grace for that. And everyone’s depression can be different enough, and maybe there’s not enough language to even dig into what depression is like. But even someone who has been through it themselves, two people talking, we’re still trying to find shared common language.
18:09
And so, I’ve had to learn to slow that down and hit pause and sort of work through a person’s initial reaction. When I tell them these things and there’s disbelief, I’ve almost come to expect it, and that sounds cynical, but there’s a grace there. There’s a mercy there where it’s like, “Okay, this person –,” it’s like breaking them into a whole new world. It’s like that scene in The Matrix when Neo finds out that he’s not in the real world, and then he just throws up, right? It could be nauseating and disorienting for people to discover that, yep, sometimes people can just hurt without cause. That’s just what’s in their brain. So I’ve had a lot of grace for that, which is difficult to find but I feel like is the way to get through for connection.
Rebecca Ching: I love how you framed this because I didn’t take it as cynicism. I took it as being realistic on expectations, which sets you and the person you’re speaking up with for success. And you talk about grace, and for me, I understand grace is the undeserved gift. And I’m wondering, can you operationalize your grace, your practice of grace when you are trying to communicate your story to somebody else?
JS Park: Yeah, so I talk a lot about non-negotiables. I learned this from somebody else. My chaplain supervisor several years ago asked me what my non-negotiables are, and for me they were grace, justice, and creativity. And so, for me, grace would mean that I do my best within my God-given capacity to understand the whole story. So there are stories underneath stories that every person is living through. Stories that we ourselves may not even know about within ourselves.
20:04
And so, in having grace for someone else, I’m trying to understand there’s a reason why there’s a story why this person can’t understand we’re seeing, we’re hearing the thing the way that they’re seeing or hearing it. And so, I heard a pastor once say, “Everything that everyone does makes sense to them,” right?
Rebecca Ching: Yeah.
JS Park: And so, if I grew up with that same worldview, that same upbringing, that same family of origin and trauma and culture, I may believe exactly what that person believes has chosen for themselves. And so, there’s something about grace where I’m trying to see past the edges of trying to see past just what this person is saying and doing in front of me and trying to understand the whole story because, really, when we talk with someone or see someone in action, we’re seeing, what, .001% of a person’s life in motion. And so, there’s a lot under there, and then even then my version of a person is gonna be different from maybe what they really are, and then there are hundreds of different ideas that we have of different people in our lives that are probably not very accurate at all. And so, grace is to have a very wide berth for that, a very wide lens on a person’s story.
Rebecca Ching: When is it hard for you to have a wide berth for someone else’s story?
JS Park: Oh, gosh.
Rebecca Ching: When is that in question?
JS Park: [Laughs] You know that maybe the simple answer for that would be I find it hard to find grace dealing with someone who has a lack of grace. And so, if someone is infringing upon or impeding my own story or I see them do that to others, and we see this now politically, religiously, socially, all kinds of different ways, it just infuriates me, right?
Rebecca Ching: Yes.
JS Park: It’s just the bigotry and prejudice that we see, hate crimes, the hateful rhetoric, anything like that I have a lot of trouble understanding and having grace for, and I think that’s why we need to balance that with justice. Justice is seeking remedy or healing in situations that are broken or hurting. And so, I think if we just run all the way with grace and love, that can go towards pampering and enabling, and that would be very harmful for all involved, right? So I think there’s got to be a balance there with justice.
22:27
And so, to answer your question, I just find it so difficult. I’ll swing all the way over to justice when I see someone lacking grace.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
JS Park: [Laughs] And that’s probably not the solution. I think justice and accountability is something we need when we see that first, but that has to be underguarded by grace as well.
Rebecca Ching: I’m glad that you got the word accountability in there because I think, at least in American culture, we love our justice. We love justice, and we love our own personalized form of it, of justice. [Laughs]
JS Park: M-hmm. Mm.
Rebecca Ching: And I think, too, there’s been such a pushback on grace or empathy and compassion because there’s this fear of not having justice, and I think we need to have accountability and we can hold space or having compassion for someone who made a choice that’s horrible or that we disagree with and sit with what someone else is feeling, having empathy for their struggle but still have accountability. And I think that we have a hard time right now as a culture holding space for both of them. And there’s an expectation of if I’m showing you grace, then you’ve got to give me grace, and there’s a lot of entitlement around this. So I appreciate you unpacking that.
I love your non-negotiables of grace and justice but tell me a little bit more about creativity. How is that showing up in your life as a non-negotiable?
JS Park: Yeah, so, you know, making room for all the ways in which each of us can express ourselves, whether that is through art or our particular voice. I heard someone tell me this a long time ago that really shaped my theology. This person told me that God made you the way that God made you because God wants to say something through you that God can’t say through anyone else.
Rebecca Ching: Whoa.
24:21
JS Park: Yeah, I didn’t make that up. I heard that from someone, and it just stuck with me, right? So if you work that out, if you get to the end conclusion of that, each of us in some weird way, we are our own extinct species. It’s weird to say it that way, right? But here’s the individual —
Rebecca Ching: Or our own specific messengers.
JS Park: Yes!
Rebecca Ching: We’re our own messengers, and I think regardless of your worldview, believe to claim that agency and that uniqueness of what we can offer the world no one else can.
JS Park: Exactly.
Rebecca Ching: Ah! I love that.
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah, and so, non —
Rebecca Ching: That feels sacred.
JS Park: Yeah, it is sacred. I think that the non-negotiable for me in that is that there is so much stifling and strangling and holding down of individuals’ voices, that how can we make room for each individual to be heard, to have a vote, to be able to speak up without fear of retribution or being outcast or rejected, and it’s difficult to find room for everybody in that. But one of my non-negotiables is as a chaplain, when I enter hospital rooms, for example, sometimes you’ll have several different people in a family, and they’re making healthcare decisions for their loved one who is no longer able to communicate for themselves (someone, for example, in a coma or something like that).
And so, I was in a patient visit once, and I’m changing details just to preserve HIPAA and confidentiality.
Rebecca Ching: Absolutely.
JS Park: Yeah, I was in a patient room once where there were many, many brothers and sisters deciding for their loved one, and out of let’s say seven siblings, six of them were speaking up, one of them was kind of a leader, but the seventh one didn’t get a say at all in the thirty, forty minutes that I was there.
26:19
And so, my non-negotiable being grace, justice, creativity, or you could say having a voice, at the very end of this meeting that we had, I turned to the seventh person, and I asked that person, “Do you have any questions right now or discomfort that you’re experiencing that you’d like to express? And that seventh sibling was able to say everything, how he or she was so uncomfortable with all the decisions that were being made.
And so, it was kind of just keying in, tuning into what this person was thinking and feeling watching their facial expressions. And that doesn’t at all make me a hero. In fact, my goal, my hope is that I am making this person, this unheard person the hero in their own story. My goal is never to be the hero on my own. And so, how can I cheerlead?
Rebecca Ching: I want to jump in there —
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: — because I find this profound that you dial in on the person in the room that doesn’t seem to have a voice. You are so attuned to that yourself. You are very sensitive, from what you shared with me, to not having a voice for so many years, not having language, not having space. You walk into a room that is so intense and emotionally volatile, making decisions around a loved one’s end of life, and you hone in on the one person not speaking. That is one of your superpowers. Wow.
JS Park: Thank you. Rebecca, do you think I’m projecting when I do that? [Laughs]
28:01
Rebecca Ching: I mean, I think we all are sensitive to things that are connected to our own wounds and our own burdens.
JS Park: Wow. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: So it’s a no brainer. The projecting feels dismissive, you know, to me. And to me, I think it’s a superpower because you are looking for the voiceless. You are looking for those — you have a way of seeing those that don’t have language yet or space, and you are cultivating that, and then that heals systems because then the echoes. Tell me about what happened in that room after the silent sibling was no longer silent.
JS Park: Mm, so again, changing the details a little bit, but after that sibling was able to speak up, he or she still ended up going with the collective decision of the family. But I could see almost like an unclenching of the shoulders and teeth, almost like a, “[Sigh] I got to say what was on my mind. I was heard. I felt listened to. Someone advocated for me and paid attention to that tension.”
So, again, these are not things that necessarily that person said. You can feel almost that anxiety in the room be given space and then there was breathing room after that. And so, again, I hate to sound like, “Oh, I do that all the time.” I know I’ve missed moments that I know I haven’t paid attention to that all the time. But that time that that happened, I saw the value of that, of being able to give voice to someone.
So, absolutely, that story of course had a very sad ending because, you know, there’s still the matter of the person who’s in a coma. But at least the good that we see in that, sort of what we say, we try to find the resurrection in every story, right, in the hospital. The resurrection in that was being able to see these siblings come together and feel closer and more united in this hard decision that they had to make.
30:07
Rebecca Ching: Yeah, I love how you identify even the non-verbals, right? What the energy was in the room, the collective shift, though. And I get a sense there was even a little bit more of a togetherness in that difficulty. And there’s something when we can be a part of someone else’s healing or someone else’s success or growth, then that, in turn, can have a little bit of healing on our own burdens that we carry that sometimes we can feel a little bit of that bounce back and we have a little bit — because we have a sense of that meaning and purpose in our own life too.
So yeah, hero’s an interesting word. That’s an interesting word. Let me rumble on that. You touched on something else about missed moments too. And yeah, tell me a little bit more about that statement: missed moments. What comes up for you?
JS Park: Hmm, you know, there are a lot of times I feel like I didn’t give room for this person to say the thing they were going to say or I didn’t leave two or three seconds of a space of silence, and we moved ahead in the conversation, and it went towards something else when there was maybe more that this person wanted to say. So I’ll give some context to that.
One of the roles of a chaplain as we visit patients is to offer spiritual and emotional support, and a lot of times we are just a — not just but we are a non-judgmental, non-anxious, comforting presence. So the difference between me and a minister is a minister —
Rebecca Ching: Wait. Just a second. I’ve got to pause.
JS Park: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: Because let’s just say a non-judgmental, non-anxious presence.
JS Park: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: That’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to be it.
JS Park: Yep.
Rebecca Ching: As someone who is deeply human and has been in a psychotherapy chair for 17 years, tell me more how you navigate and strive to maintain being both non-judgmental (holding space without judgment) and keeping yourself in a place of calm versus anxiety.
32:19
JS Park: Oh, gosh. Yeah. Yeah. You know, earlier you mentioned about facial expressions. I guess to tie into that a little bit, when I am asking a person what they’re feeling, what’re they going through, naming emotions, there is a way you can be with someone in your face or in your demeanor that communicates to the person you’re judging them or there’s a lot of energy happening behind the eyes, a lot of activity, right?
So, Rebecca, you know, and I are talking right now. Your listeners can’t see that we’re on a video. One of my things is, as much as possible, I keep eye contact with patients that I talk with if they’re looking at me and even if they’re not looking at me. Eye contact is a really big thing. If, let’s say, we’re like this, right, and I look away for even half a second when you say something (just like that), there’s something about that, even just that half second where the other person goes, “Oh, my gosh. Did they just silently judge me for the thing that I said?”
So there’s a lot of discipline and being engaged in what is happening when I’m with a patient visit that is gonna go a long way towards being non-judgmental, holding a lot of space for their story, which I know that’s a catchphrase, that’s a catchphrase that I wish would catch on, wink wink.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
JS Park: And then being that non-anxious where I’m sitting still, there may be doctors and nurses going back and forth, their machines beeping. There’s a lot of activity happening in the hospital room.
34:01
But being able to just be that center and being calm while there’s a swirl of chaos happening, how can I be the center of comfort and even the way that I have to de-escalate my voice, the way that I have my pacing, slowing down, making sure that I’m being as disarming as possible. There are all these things where, you know, when I tell someone what I do for a living and they say, “So you just listen? You just sit there?” And I’m like, “Gosh, I wish I could tell you how hard and easy it is all at once. Like it sounds so easy but it’s super, super difficult to have that sort of discipline.” And when I’m with a patient, I listen to a hundred percent of everything they’re saying, and I can never tune out.
And so, there’s a lot that goes into being non-anxious and non-judgmental, and a lot of it is loving the patient in the moment. So if they say something wild like the reason that they got into the hospital room is because they were running from the police and carrying black tar heroin and they were just on, you know, this kind of spree or that. Whatever they say, I am loving that person in the moment, no judgment at all, and that will come across. People can read people, and I think we don’t give enough credit to that. Whether they’re consciously or not doing that, they can.
Rebecca Ching: So I’m with you on that, and I’m offering that kind of love and compassion for someone when they don’t think they’re deserving of it is powerful. I also know that we can’t give what we don’t have. So how do you show that love and compassion towards yourself so you can sustain what you give others?
JS Park: Wow. Yeah. You know, Rebecca, I want to give a moment now to give a big shoutout to all my fellow chaplains who we, between visits, will process with each other and affirm one another and be able to talk about those “missed moments.”
36:09
We love on each other in a way where we get it. We know what the work is. We know how hard it is. We know how crazy the whole thing is. So there has to be a space where I find another chaplain, I find someone where I process things out, and that is a way, I think, with other people to be able to experience that love and affirmation that I needed for the visit because sometimes I’ll miss it. Sometimes I’ll have a visit that was very brutal and extremely tough and they just kind of vented and I was a bucket for that patient, essentially. So I need to create some room to be able to process that out with another chaplain and not just run to another visit.
So my mistake early on in chaplaincy, four or five years ago, was I would do, like, ten visits in a row, and I would leave no — yeah, which as I say that you’re already like, “Oh, my gosh,” you know? [Laughs] We need buffer room, but me with my work ethic, I just thought, “No, I can handle this. I’ll be fine. I’ll find the chaplain after the eighth visit or so. I want to make sure that I get through all these orders.” You know, I thought I could do it, and it just caused a major internal meltdown, and I was taking on too much secondhand grief and vicarious trauma. And so, there had to be room for me to be able to say, “Nope, it’s okay to not see a patient right now and take care of myself and go find someone.”
And then, you know, there’s all the other self-care things that we need to do, being able to say no, being able to say, “I can’t right now,” being able to say, “Can you ask another chaplain to go to that code or to go to that death or to go to that trauma that just came in?” There were a lot of things like that where I had to learn not to people-please, to be okay with disappointing someone. There’s a lot of that in me where I want to make everyone happy all the time. There’s a part of me that needs to serve my elders and things like that. So taking care of myself meant learning how to say no to those things knowing that I only have so much to give.
[Inspirational Music]
Rebecca Ching: Swimming in the deep end of grace and taking sustained imperfect actions involved nuance, effort, and action. Unburdened leadership does not happen in a vacuum, so finding a place to reflect on questions you may have on leading, especially in today’s dynamic world, is essential.
38:28
My new email The Weekly Rumble is a resource where leaders, business owners, and entrepreneurs join me in unpacking the complexities, nuances, and latest research on what it means to lead and be deeply human while making a big impact for the greater good. You’ll find support as you dare to put yourself out there and try something new or take a bold stand that is aligned with your values but goes against the status quo. And now as we move through two global pandemics (COVID-19 and systemic racism) the burdens we carry can get in the way of our desire to lead boldly. Do not go it alone.
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[Motivational Music]
Rebecca Ching: So we started off our conversation where you dove in talking about one of the most tender and painful times of your life —
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: — where lost, not wanting to live, betrayed to now you are a non-anxious, non-judgmental presence for folks at some of the most difficult, painful, scary times of their life. What inspired you to become a chaplain and are there any other additional burdens that fueled this particular career path for you?
40:06
JS Park: Mm, well, you know, I first entered pastoral ministry, and I did youth ministry (youth group) and then college and young adults for a while, I would say a total of about seven years. And when I got called into ministry, I think there was something earlier you said about we find our way through wounds or there’s something about through our wounds that we find our calling. I’m kind of botching a little bit, but you said something like that where having grown up the way that I did with extreme trauma. On the ACE score I was like a nine out of ten.
Rebecca Ching: Really?
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah, which I didn’t even find out until a few years ago. But there was something about, you know, how could I bring healing to people, the kind of healing that I didn’t get to have? How can I be a voice that I needed when I was younger and didn’t get to have? So that was a huge part of my calling. In pastoral ministry, I did okay but I always felt like an oddball, always felt weird in it. The Evangelical mainstream church, there’s a lot of good that’s being done. There’s a lot of not good that’s happening, and once I entered it, I was wide-eyed and entered with big dreams and hopes and thought, “I can do it!” And then you get behind closed doors and there’s bureaucracy and back-biting and gossip and the leadership was not — and, you know, I’m saying this to myself too. I didn’t feel fit for it, and there were a lot of things in my own life that I knew, “If I keep going through this it’s only gonna get worse.” I would not find myself or be able to express my calling and use my gifts through this.
So having left that — a very painful decision; I absolutely loved my church at the time when I left — I looked for something for a while, and thank God for my wife, she just kind of said, “Don’t settle. Do something that you know you feel called to.”
42:03
So I heard about chaplaincy from this ministry that I did with ex-convicts, and I remembered chaplaincy, and they were like, “Yeah, chaplaincy is basically just like being a pastor but in a place where there’s extreme crisis all the time,” whether that’s a police station, a hospital, a fire department, a medical examiner’s office, military. So I entered in, and Rebecca, in the first week it was so hard. I saw, for the first time, a person die right in front of me on the operating table.
Rebecca Ching: Wow.
JS Park: And there was something that was so sobering and saddening and hard and shocking about it, and I knew I belonged in that room.
Rebecca Ching: Wow. That’s a powerful word. “I knew I belonged.” Belonging in this career. How has that been healing for you to find this profession where you feel like you belong?
JS Park: Hmm. You know, I’ll say this in a general way and then maybe more specifically for me. In a general way, of course, we all want to belong. We all want to find, “This is the place where I know that my gifts will be used, my voice will be heard, my hands are offering hope into this place. There’s healing work being done. Broken things are being restored.” I mean, all of that. All of that, right? We need belonging. We need to look to the left and right and say, “We are doing this work together, and we are on the same page, and this adventure that I’m on is bigger and more wonderful than any conflict or tension or drama underneath this.
So when the adventure outweighs the “drama,” I mean, that’s the place that we belong, right? And I feel spoiled all the time because I’ve been a part of toxic workplaces and now having been a part of the hospital and the homeless shelter where I work at both places, I feel so spoiled and so blessed because I feel like I found paradise. I’m not saying the work is easy, and I’m not saying we don’t ever bicker. But absolutely I feel like these are healthy places where I belong and good, real, divine work is being done.
44:24
So I think I found healing in these places, and for the first time knowing that the statement that I said earlier, that the mission that we’re on, being on the same page is bigger than any kind of bickering or complaint or conflict that we have with each other, and of course those things need to be worked out, right, in any workplace and any environment. But we look at each other and we go, “We’re here for a mission, for a purpose,” and it’s so clear and there’s clarity around that and there’s direction.
So the reason why we would want to work through whatever we’re working through is because we have this mission. And I never had that before. I’m surprised to say that because I went years, decades working in places where that wasn’t happening, and I think on a side note, just a side note, there are people called to those places that are broken and make waves to make changes, and some people are called into those abusive places because they’re gonna change it from the inside, and I did try so hard to do that, Rebecca. I tried so hard from inside the church, but there is a point when the toxicity and abusiveness of a workplace can be too much and then it’s time to go.
Rebecca Ching: Absolutely.
JS Park: Yeah, and I stayed past my expiration date still trying, and looking back I wish I would have left sooner.
Rebecca Ching: Mm, many, many can relate with that statement. Sorry to jump in.
JS Park: Yeah. No, no, no, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Ching: But I expect many people can relate to staying in a toxic work environment or a toxic relationship past its expiration date.
46:04
And so, it’s just there’s this element too for people wanting to try, you know? And I also think the healing — I’m hearing this internal and external healing, right, when we’re in a place that has really strong leadership —
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: — when we’ve never experienced that systemically, and that can offer calming to our own internal system, and we can relax, and we can do a deeper level of our own work in that container. And so, there’s nothing for — I mean, I’m a raging extrovert, and so, I love working on a healthy team. When things are flowing on a team, I think that’s one of my heaven-on-earth moments. People think that’s odd but that flow and, like you articulate so beautifully, the shared mission that the little disagreements and mini conflicts they pass because everyone’s aligned.
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: That is so powerful in healing internally and externally. So thank you for putting language on that and sharing a window into your very important, very, very important work.
I want to shift gears briefly to a post that you wrote on Instagram since I follow you on Instagram. You just leave these beautiful nuggets of wisdom, these bombs of healing. [Laughs] But this one was different. It was a picture of, I believe, the director of the movie Parasite.
JS Park: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: And it stood out to me for a variety of reasons. I don’t know if you have your phone nearby, but I’d love for you, if you’re comfortable, to read from that post because you share your experiences of watching the movie Parasite and the joy that you had, but behind that joy I was moved to tears and horror reading these different ways that were violent and violating that you experienced and that you and your family endured because of your ethnicity.
Are you comfortable reading maybe the first couple paragraphs of that February 10th post on Instagram?
48:19
JS Park: Yeah, absolutely comfortable, and feel free to jump in at any point.
Just so your listeners are aware. There is — I blanked it out but there is a racial slur used against Asians in this. I’m gonna go ahead and skip that word I think just for myself and also for your listeners.
Rebecca Ching: Okay.
JS Park: Yep, but just letting you know that that’s coming, so kind of as a protective warning. Here we go. And Rebecca, by the way, thank you for letting me read this. I appreciate that a lot.
Rebecca Ching: It’s an honor.
JS Park: Oh, yeah, yeah. Thank you.
“I saw Parasite (Gisaengchung) in a packed theatre with a diverse crowd. I never imagined a day in The States when such an audience would watch a movie in my language with my people telling our stories. It really meant a lot to me. I have to tell you why.
I remember in middle school when someone assaulted me while yelling, ‘You C-H-… yellowbelly.’ Someone yelling go back to where I came from, multiple times someone squinting their eyes at me, having to endure that scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and told it was art. Someone in my college history class telling me that Korea needed to be nuked and it doesn’t matter which one. When my dad’s business was spray painted with a swastika and a kid yelled, ‘Your dad killed my dad in the war!’ and his dad picked him up after detention.
50:00
Art, music, film, books, they have the power to take away our fear, our bigotry, our assumptions. They turn masses into individuals. They turn cartoons into real people. For someone like me, I have to prove daily I’m a real person. For art to put my story in the public consciousness is allowing me more room to breathe, to exist.”
Rebecca Ching: Can we pause there?
JS Park: Yeah, of course.
Rebecca Ching: How was it reading those words aloud right now for you?
JS Park: [Laughs] Rebecca, pretty rough, to be truthful. I think I tend to feel or over-feel everything all the time, [Laughs] which I’m sure is a thing that only happens to me. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: That’s sarcasm in there, right? [Laughs]
JS Park: Yeah, that is. Yep! Hashtag sarcasm. Yeah, reading that stuff I still remember what it feels like, Rebecca. I still remember, you know? It’s not a feeling that — you know, we learn to manage and cope with those things, but those voices we hear, the words that people say, the feelings that we experience, I mean, that can be managed but I still remember I still feel them. So yeah, it’s rough reading that. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Thank you for going there right now. I know that wasn’t easy. I just did not feel comfortable reading your story of that, so thank you. Can you talk a little bit more about the burden of racism and how it’s impacted and continues to impact you?
JS Park: Yeah, so specifically for me, and I don’t mean to speak for everyone, but I know in my own experience growing up as a second-generation Asian American, there is a certain sense of being invisible, unseen, and sub-humanized. And what I mean by that is there is almost not an outright hate towards Asian and Asian Americans but very often there is a neglect or almost like a, “We don’t see you and we don’t hear you and you don’t count. There are a billion more where you came from.”
52:16
And oftentimes the message that I’m receiving from people is, “You are a foreign, naïve, innocent tourist with no hopes or thoughts or dreams, and there are a billion more where you came from, inscrutable robot. Just kind of a happy-go-lucky, can’t quite comprehend everything that I’m saying to you,” is the message that I’m getting.
And so, whether that’s at the cafeteria or at Starbucks when someone speaks slowly to me, or whether that’s in traffic when there is a very specific particular kind of road rage kind of aimed at me. Or one time, and I talk about this story in my upcoming book. I’m sorry to shamelessly plug it that way, but there is a story that I tell about —
Rebecca Ching: Plug away!
JS Park: [Laughs] There is a story that I tell about how someone in a parking garage opened their door on me and turned to their friend in the car and said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a Chinese guy.”
So, yeah. Right? Saying that even right now brings both anger and sadness rising up. And so, there’s something about how Asians are still the last susceptible punchline and punching bag in our Western culture. That says to me it doesn’t matter how much I speak up for myself, I’m not gonna be seen or heard.
So it’s a different form of racism, which is why I can’t speak for others’ experiences but speaking for my own, it feels like I’m shouting from the bottom of a well and no one is hearing me.
Rebecca Ching: It still feels like that today?
JS Park: It often does. In fact, with a lot of the hate crimes happening around COVID-19 blaming —
Rebecca Ching: Yep.
JS Park: You know, I understand. I understand that the Chinese government maybe could have done more. I understand that. I know that there’s accountability that needs to happen there.
54:16
But to equate a Chinese or an Asian individual, blaming them, calling them things like they’re dirty or the hate crimes we’ve been seeing from name calling all the way to physical assault.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah.
JS Park: We’re still Asians, and Asian Americans are still feeling that today, like our pain doesn’t matter, like they could just take it. “They’re not really human.” I see that in the hospital. I see that in politics. We’re seeing it now with COVID-19. Yeah, it’s scary, and I know that we’ve made advances with movies like Parasite, with movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Asian Americans being more exposed or seen. You know, and I’ve seen that in advertisements. Every time I see in a commercial an Asian or an Asian American, I’ll turn to my wife and go, “Hey! There we are! Isn’t that great?” And, you know, it’s become kind of an inside joke. But at the same time, as progress is being made, there are still these moments of pain where I’m reminded this is sort of the predominant attitude towards us.
And one of my fears is that — this is a really extreme nightmare-ish-type fear — is that I’ll be walking my dog, and I may, let’s say, get a stroke or a heart attack and fall over, and no one will help me. Like, they’ll just look at me and say, “Oh, he’s not one of us,” or “He doesn’t count,” or “It’s just a Chinese guy,” and there’ll be no help coming. That is one of my fears and it sounds extreme.
Rebecca Ching: This is a present —
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: — a present fear of yours right now?
JS Park: Absolutely. I mean, yeah, my wife is a nurse practitioner. She’s on the frontlines right now, you know, as this pandemic is happening. I’m so proud of her. I’m so scared for her. I’m praying hard for her all the time. And I worry for her as a nurse practitioner who is also Asian American, the sort of lightning-rod situation that she’s in, and I worry for her as she is a smaller person carrying around medical supplies, carrying around masks and hand sanitizer. I worry for her safety.
56:30
I mean, that’s true for a lot of our healthcare workers but particularly for her, and the fear that she must experience when she — she does wound care for patients homes, so she’s going into their houses.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, wow.
JS Park: Yeah, and her patients, of course, are absolutely wonderful. But I worry about neighbors, I worry about, you know, as she’s going from place to place, in between travel, and I’m just so worried for her, and there’s that extra layer of fear. And she’s had friends that have experienced racism, people yelling “coronavirus” at them or “Chinese virus” at them.
And so, that level of fear is something that now is more palpable to us and tangible than ever.
Rebecca Ching: Oh. [Sigh]
JS Park: I know that’s a lot, that it’s a lot, Rebecca. Yeah, a lot to sit with.
Rebecca Ching: I don’t mind a lot. I just don’t want to rush into more questions and really want to respect the power and the tenderness and the concern of what you just shared. So just taking in that and honoring it. I’m never afraid of a lot, never afraid of a lot.
JS Park: Thanks. You know, can I tell you something?
Rebecca Ching: Please.
JS Park: This is coming from a — so I don’t want to sound angry or like I’m entitled. Anytime I post about this on my social media — I write about all kinds of things: trauma, mental health, I try to write inspirational stuff.
58:01
Anytime, though, that I post about my Asian American identity and feeling invisible, for one, those posts definitely don’t get as much attention. Sometimes it’s ghost town, which, again, I don’t mean to sound angry or entitled. But I’ll get at least a couple comments or direct messages talking about, “That’s what everyone goes through,” or “That’s not just for you. It’s all people who experience that,” which, hey, if I’m connecting in some way with everyone’s universal experience that’s great, but I think I understand what that person is saying, their intention, like, “Yours doesn’t matter that much because everyone is –.”
Rebecca Ching: The all lives matter.
JS Park: Right.
Rebecca Ching: Yeah, the all lives matter — yeah.
JS Park: Exactly. Yeah, and I’ll get posts like, you know, “You’re making it up in your own head,” “You’re fabricating that,” or “You’re playing the victim,” or “Why can’t you just…” right?
And so, I don’t post much about my Asian American struggle or identity because of those kinds of comments and messages and the fact that it becomes ghost town. When I write about that — and I should keep writing about that regardless. But I’m just letting you know and your listeners know that anytime I talk about this, it’s like people tune out and their eyes gloss over, and I don’t know why exactly, and maybe that’s proving the point of what I’m saying. But it’s hard. It’s really, really hard to talk about it without feeling like I am ostracizing or alienating people or I’m saying something that’s so completely not relatable that people just check out.
Rebecca Ching: I wonder if it’s because it goes so deep and that, first, we have a dehumanization epidemic in Western culture.
JS Park: Wow. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: And if we were — and part of that, I don’t know if you’ve read Brené Brown’s book Braving The Wilderness?
JS Park: Yes. Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: I keep that right by my Bible. [Laughs]
JS Park: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: I feel like I vacillate between the both of them, much of her work. [Laughs] And she talks in there about intellectual bunkers and that just continues to stick with me. And then I think of the term belonging, and if we step out of our intellectual bunker, we might risk not belonging. So I just think from a trauma-informed perspective, from a Systems Theory perspective, if I have a certain worldview, and I were to step out of that, I might lose what’s so precious to me and so much of that’s probably not even conscious because that takes a lot of insight and emotional bandwidth to even get there.
1:00:42
And so, what I make up about what you perceive as ghost town is this is so big, i.e.. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, which is often what I rumble with as a white girl from Minnesota. [Laughs] So — or this reflexive response, when we hit a trauma point or a deep vulnerability point of dismissing because, “I can’t go there, and people maybe aren’t even noticing it.” And then you have the folks who offload pain, which is what you talked about you get in the comments or in the DMs of offloading their pain, which comes across as entitlement and trying to normalize. Again, I suspect these are people that are white, people in power saying, “Just join my club! Just join my club! Let’s have you blend with me versus me get uncomfortable.”
And so, that’s kind of how I am processing that experience, and I so hope you keep writing about these issues, and I know the vulnerability and the risk, emotionally and physically, that that puts you in, but I really — we need to continue to hear more from you on these matters, so please, I hope you keep writing and sharing.
1:02:09
JS Park: Yeah, thank you for affirming me on that and giving that boost of bravery. Yeah, yeah. You know, if I am to have grace for those who find that uncomfortable, you know, use words or phrases like offloading pain and things like that, or even just as we become aware of how we fall in short, there’s often kind of almost a self-disdain or resistance to that idea that I’ve somehow been part of this or responsible in this or didn’t do enough. I guess there is going to be almost like an initial strong reaction that probably won’t always be healthy, and maybe that’s what I’m experiencing, what we’re experiencing. That could be a grief of an idea, that, “Oh, I thought I was a person who is compassionate, but I’m actually taking part in this dehumanization somehow.” I don’t know. Am I being —
Rebecca Ching: I guess what I want to — no, what I would put out there is we need to make room for righteous anger and using a powerful spiritual metaphor is Jesus in the temple trashing it.
JS Park: [Laughs] Yeah!
Rebecca Ching: And I think there’s something around anger for women, for different races, ethnicities, I think there’s a place for righteous anger, and if we don’t release that righteous anger it can become toxic anger and then diminish our capacity for grace. But I think there’s gold in our righteous anger. It is the place where we know boundaries have been crossed, dignity has been diminished, and dehumanization is happening. It’s where our non-negotiables have been crossed.
So I think we have to hold space for that flash of righteous anger. There’s powerful data there and having spaces like you talked about with your colleagues, to share and speak the pain, speak the shame, speak the fear. So, I mean, that’s how Brené Brown’s — one of the key components of shame resilience practice — their speaking that, I think, is essential. So I don’t know if that lands.
1:04:21
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: But I feel like I want to distinguish righteous and toxic anger. When you have been violated, it is absolutely freaking okay to experience, “Oh, hell no! That was not okay!” [Laughs]
JS Park: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] “No! That was not okay!”
JS Park: Yeah! [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: That’s my lens on it, and I’m wondering what permission, as we’re talking, do you want to maybe rumble with about giving yourself to communicate more about this experience being Korean American?
JS Park: Yeah, you know, I think there’s a part of me that is so scared of (I used a word earlier) alienating people where if I say too much of this in a hard way, that I will be perceived as “Angry Asian Man,” which is a great blog, by the way.
Rebecca Ching: Ahh.
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
JS Park: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: Is there a blog? Is it really a blog?
JS Park: Yeah, there’s a guy, his Twitter — I follow him. He’s fantastic.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
JS Park: Yeah, you know, he’s an Asian and Asian American rights activist. He’s just wonderful.
Rebecca Ching: So you’re editing yourself to not be perceived in a stereotypical way?
JS Park: Yeah, because it’s almost like I want a person to feel like they’re welcome into my painful experience without feeling like the entrance fee to this painful experience is you have to be under my wrath or under all the pain that I’ve experienced and I’m somehow taking it out on you, now you can share it with me. I don’t want anyone to feel that way, and maybe I’m putting it in a really heavy way, but there’s something in me that is not good and that I’m people pleasing and that I don’t want anyone to feel alienated.
1:06:13
But also I think there’s a legitimate or valid thing in that if I speak too much on it or in a way that’s too extreme or too alienating that it’s not gonna be spoken in a way that can be heard at all, and the righteous anger, I absolutely 100% agree with, and I don’t think we should edit that at all. And then there’s that other part of me that wants some kind of civil discourse or some kind of entry point to, “Here’s my pain and what I want to share with you.”
And so, yeah, that is a (to use your word) rumbling that I’m still in the process of trying to understand and figure out. I have had several people of color message me and say, “You’re obviously editing yourself,” or “You’re obviously toning it down, and there’s something about that that you need to process,” and I don’t think anyone should have to take their anger and make it palatable for anyone. If you’re angry, you’re angry, right?
Rebecca Ching: I agree.
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Because I want to jump into the people pleaser protectors in you.
JS Park: [Laughs] Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: That if you let them relax and help them relax a little bit and let those of us flounder with our discomfort, then we can probably move to the place that we need to move to versus keeping us comfortable. I don’t think we need more comfort right now.
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s something about I want to communicate in this level-headed way and then maybe I’ll be heard. There’s this sort of conditional thing that I’m still wrestling with and trying to take more risks and not being too worried about, “Oh, I’ve got to sound levelheaded and take a little bit of the anger out of this,” and, you know, just kind of mellow it down a little bit.
1:08:06
There’s something in that that I know isn’t healthy and I know won’t help and I know that if I speak in a way that is harder, it may lose more people but at the same time, it will speak to the seriousness of what is happening and is more authentic and true to my experience.
Rebecca Ching: But what I suspect if you’re able to edit less and maybe the metrics reflect that in some way, people will still pay attention, and your consistency over time is what will be the onramp versus moments of immense discomfort. We all need to do a better job of sitting with difficult emotion and not offloading onto others or ourselves with that.
And so, I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m also feeling a part of me wanting more of this unedited.
JS Park: [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: I’m agreeing with those who have written you, and I’m so curious to see that. But I know it’s one thing to say it; it’s another thing to do it. So let me shift, then, a little bit. We’re talking about what you write about.
JS Park: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Ching: You have been doing what you have dubbed Typewriter Therapy for some time now on social media (Instagram and Facebook). What inspired this practice and how has this process led to your own unburdening experiences?
JS Park: Yeah, so, you know, I bought a typewriter almost ten years ago from eBay just on a whim and didn’t even start using it ‘til maybe two or three years ago and just started writing little sayings here and there, thoughts on my mind, feelings that I had. One of the reasons that I wanted a typewriter so bad — so Rebecca, one of the weird things about me is that I absolutely love 1940s black and white noir films.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
1:10:01
JS Park: Like The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, anything with Humphrey Bogart, Key Largo, all those kind of films where there’s the, you know, bar of light over somebody’s eyes as they’re talking, and they’re wearing the fedora hat and the trench coat, and there’s a lot of like, “Hey, see?” in the Transatlantic accent. I don’t know what it is about those movies. I’m so drawn to them, and there was a series that I watched called Mad Men which I just loved. This is something I haven’t really talked about out loud very much.
Rebecca Ching: I love Mad Men. I used to work in advertising in New York.
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: So that was next-level awesome.
JS Park: Oh, my gosh —
Rebecca Ching: Oh, Don Draper. Oh Don Draper.
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: I digress, though, now I’m like, “Squirrel! Don Draper!” All right, back to you! [Laughs]
JS Park: [Laughs] He was a fascinating and flawed character, right?
Rebecca Ching: Deeply human.
JS Park: Yeah, deeply human. I didn’t root for him most of the time, but I looked at him and I was like I think we’re all looking at a mirror a little bit.
Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]
JS Park: [Laughs] But yeah, there was something about the typewriter that was so — if you’ve ever used a typewriter, it’s really loud, and there’s a lot of response to it. There’s just this kind of tactile, even as I’m telling you this you can just see my face and my hands. I’m doing a lot of motions. [Laughs] There’s just something so powerful and punchy about it.
Rebecca Ching: I’m a Gen X-er, so I did have a typewriter!
JS Park: Yeah. [Laughs]
Rebecca Ching: So I totally know what you’re talking about! [Laughs]
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah, and so, I had never used one before I bought one from eBay. And so, I started using it, and I was like, “Gosh, I just love this,” and then I wanted to start sharing it with people. And if you look at my very first one from, like, a few years ago, they just look so strange to me now.
But yeah, so over time there’s something about it that is therapeutic and punching the words, I just love doing that. So sometimes I’ll just do it and I won’t even post them. I’ll just do it for myself. But I thought why not share these with people, and it seemed to really catch on, and I’m so grateful that it has.
1:12:12
Rebecca Ching: It has, and how has that been healing and helped you unburden some of the burdens you’ve been carrying in your life?
JS Park: Hmm, you know, I think it first started as a way to be inspirational and encouraging, and there’s a lot of blogs like that out there, and I think they’re all wonderful. But it eventually turned into almost like a real therapy session, like I’m cathartically doing a self-exorcism of the deepest stuff that I’ve experienced. It turned into almost real therapy, and so, a lot of the posts have been, whether it’s anchored by a story that I went through, a conversation that I had, fears and anxieties, things like that, it’s been healing in that hearing people’s feedback and them saying, “I thought I was the only one, but you too.” There’s been something extremely therapeutic about that.
So, for one, there’s a part of myself that’s able to express very freely with the kind of tactile punchiness of the typewriter. There’s something very therapeutic about that but also sort of the feedback and dialogue that I’ve been getting. And then I think there’s something about just the typewritten text, the aesthetic of it, just almost the plainness of it that is very raw and unfiltered, you know?
There’s something about the whole package of it that I find so healing but it’s really a lot of the conversations that I’ve gotten out of it. And so, yeah, I’ve absolutely loved doing it, and I think there’s something about the way that the typewriter text is written that it’s almost like a reverse rorschach maybe where people when they just see the typed text, there’s no pictures or anything like that, there’s not other much visual medium, they can kind of read into themselves what they’re feeling and experiencing as they read it. Does that make any kind of sense?
1:14:21
Rebecca Ching: No, it’s almost like this three-dimensional experience, right? There’s the tactile way of getting it out there for you.
JS Park: Yeah.
Rebecca Ching: Then there’s the visual of it. And then there’s the way others are experiencing it have all been very therapeutic for you. That’s what I’m hearing.
JS Park: Yeah. Yeah, and maybe there’s something — I’m going way deep into the woods now.
Rebecca Ching: Let’s go.
JS Park: But there’s something culturally ingrained about typewriter text where there’s a very detective, kind of cold, rainy night-type of feeling. You know, walking in from the rain and, you know —
Rebecca Ching: Love it.
JS Park: — you can hear the trumpets and the horn playing in the background, that sort of thing. So there’s very much that noir quality that I love so much in that text. And so, there’s a connection almost with it right away. So I love doing it, and I’m so glad for people who have messaged me, who have shared it, you know, dozens if not hundreds of times. And so, yeah, it feels like a way for me to, without my face, without any kind of visual precursor or priming, “Here are my thoughts and feelings and here’s how we can share together in a very raw and unfiltered way.”
Rebecca Ching: I love it. JS, this conversation has been a pure delight. As someone who’s been following your work for a while, to be able to jump in and talk about the hard things so quickly and freely has been such a gift, and I know so many people are gonna benefit from hearing from you. How can people find you if they want to connect with you?
JS Park: Oh, yeah, thank you! I’m on Instagram. It’s @jspark3000. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Twitter, my blog, and I do have a book that’s coming out May 5th called The Voices We Carry, the subtitle: Finding Your One True Voice in a World of Clamor and Noise.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh, that sounds so good! Oh, thank you so much for joining us today, JS. I hope this is the beginning of many powerful conversations to be had in the future. So thank you for your time and thank you for your voice. It’s needed, it’s necessary, and it’s medicine.
1:16:40
JS Park: Rebecca, much love to you, appreciate you, and much love to all of your listeners. I just hope that if there was even one sentence that was profound and impactful that they would take away with that and become more whole from it.
Rebecca Ching: Oh, thank you so much, JS.
JS Park: Thank you.
[Inspirational Music]
Rebecca Ching: There are many echoes still stirring in me after my conversation with JS. I hope that’s the same for you too. We can all learn from the example of JS’s steady curiosity about his pain instead of bypassing it. Now, bypassing is protective, and while it has good intentions, it allows us to tap out when we need to stay engaged, and now we need to stay engaged.
So instead of bypassing, JS chose curiosity to heal from the lives of shame and the stigmas around struggle instead of living from them as if they were true. He modeled the impact of developing emotional literacy, building practices to feel through strong emotion instead of just thinking them through. And building emotional resilience is intentional work that is a lifelong practice, not a quick hack or a quick fix.
So my questions for you are how are you gonna stay in curiosity instead of bypassing or just thinking through your pain? And how will you stay engaged instead of tapping out of discomfort? And how can you move to compassion instead of judging struggle, whether it’s in yourself or someone else?
1:18:11
When leaders like you cultivate spaces that do not bypass pain or intellectualize pain but normalize struggles of all kind, it will not only improve performance, retention, and bottom line, it will most importantly save lives. JS generously invited us into his journey through depression, the trauma from generational racism, and the windy journey to come home to his current work and calls us up to the opportunity, actually the responsibility, to feel through our pain while swimming in the deep end of grace again and again. His generosity and sharing in this episode is a gift not to be wasted, as these conversations are tough but absolutely necessary now more than ever.
Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader. You can find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources, along with ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com.
[Inspirational Music]
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