Building Bridges Across Cultures

Alana Muller 0:09
Welcome to Enterprise.ing, a podcast from Enterprise Bank & Trust that's empowering business leaders, one conversation at a time. We'll hear from different business leaders about how they found success in cultivating their professional networks and keeping them healthy and strong. I'm your host Alana Muller, an entrepreneurial executive leader whose primary focus is to connect, inspire and empower community. We at Enterprise Bank & Trust thank you for tuning in to another episode.

Alana Muller 0.40
Hello, listeners. Welcome back to the Enterprise.ing podcast. Today I'm joined by Jae Chung. Jae is a Managing Partner at Bespoke Compass, an executive coaching company where his inquisitive nature, fascination with the human experience, and lifelong pursuit of a life well-lived have converged in his passion for helping others live more fulfilling lives. Jae Chung, welcome to Enterprise.ing podcast.

Jae Chung 1:01
Hello, Alana. It's a pleasure to be here.

Alana Muller 1:03
I'm so glad you are. You have one of the most unique backgrounds of anyone I've ever had on the program. You are, just to name a few things, a molecular cell biologist. You hold a master's degree in Divinity, and another master's degree in Arts and Church History. And as if that was not enough, due to your interest in how prevailing ideas shape society, you have pursued a Ph.D. in the Intellectual History of the United States and Europe. It's unbelievable, all the things you've done. Plus, you say that you began this journey as a result of your profound curiosity about the human body. So Jae, tell us about all that and how you ended up as an executive coach today. I guess, to encapsulate it, what was your inspiration for starting the company?

Jae Chung 1:52
Well, thanks. I mean, that's a lot of stuff, isn't it? I can't believe those are the things that I was curious about throughout my life. Well, the reason — so to answer your question — the reason why I began this company called Bespoke Compass, that designs a compass to help people navigate their life better, is because I've experienced a few times in my life, particularly about six years ago, when I felt this loneliness and profound lostness. This happens to be the time when I felt I was at the peak of my success in my career. Having gone through this experience, being lost and lonely, and just trying to discover myself, I felt that many other people, many leaders, especially when they're successful in carrying the weight of it, they also go through a similar situation. I wanted to put together all the knowledge I've had and really put it into practice on me first, but also develop courses and so forth, to really bring some clarity to help people navigate their lives better, and decisions better. So that was the impetus. And I'm enjoying doing it.

Alana Muller 3:04
I love that. Well, so how were you as your own client? How did that work out for you? Were you able to hold yourself accountable? Were you able to tease out those questions that you had of yourself?

Jae Chung 3:18
I love how you asked, "Were you able to tease out the questions?" Right? I think the bulk of my journey these last few years has been trying to ask the right questions from the right perspective. Alana, really, I think none of us are masters at life. If having a mastery means doing it over and over again and gaining expertise in it, how many of us have lived this life on Earth several times? Right? We've only done it once, as far as I can tell. And so for us, we're all amateurs at this. So it humbled me that I don't even know how to articulate the right questions, like, "What's a good life?" "What does it mean to be a good human?" It differs in all cultures and those questions you ask change throughout your life. So for anyone who says, "You know, can I coach you to live a perfect life?" — that's not even a thing. We can market ourselves and make us feel like we know everything, but we all know that we all are kind of blind leading the blind. So for me, it was the humility that was the first thing — that I don't know, this is tough. Even so, with the limited, humbling experience that I went through, are there nuggets of wisdom that we can share together? Can I be a good reflective surface so that my clients can ask better questions, not perfect, just better questions? The journey these last few years has been just testing these questions on me. Do I have a better mindset? Am I getting a little healthier? Am I living a little more meaningful life? Testing it out on all walks of life.

Alana Muller 5:06
I love that. So great. Well, I really like the way you embrace lifelong learning, and that we are constantly learning. We only have this one life to test things out and to be constant students. I think that's actually a really healthy and exciting way to live. Because if we've already done it all, if we're already experts in everything, that sounds kind of boring, right? So it's nice that we have the opportunity to continue to learn. In that context, I want to ask you about your special approach to executive coaching. You have no proprietary courses; you offer one-on-one coaching, and you help clients gain the clarity and insights they need to navigate complexities. Talk a little bit about your approach and what makes your ideal client.

Jae Chung 5:53
My approach, my focus, is that I start inside out. So, if you… should we say, “inner work,” resulting in certain awareness and mindfulness, which leads to a mindset that is a precursor to all the actions we do anyway — thinking, acting and behavior that we hold. So, inner work all the way to your behavior, which becomes your destiny, right? Who you are and what you do regularly. I take clients through courses that do a great job at digging deep into their subconscious library of knowledge that they hold: their biases, their perspective, their typical approach and things like that. Starting with self-awareness, I always go from self-awareness for self-awareness's sake isn’t as much fun as connecting that to optimal performance. Are you trying to get a second gold medal in weightlifting? Or are we trying to finish well in your project? What does [the] optimal performance end goal look like?

Jae Chung 6:43
I start with self-awareness and go all the way to optimal performance through mindset exercises that are structured just for you. That's where "bespoke" comes in: custom-designed mindset exercises that are really tailormade for your way of being, your approach to self-awareness, what you bring to the table and your experience thus far. Then we set up sets and reps of mindset exercises you do every day. I check in with you on a weekly basis towards optimal performance in the field or in the office somewhere.

Alana Muller 7:39
So cool. I love that. I love the customized approach you're taking. Each individual is a unique human, which is really wonderful and indeed special. I haven't really heard that from other coaches before.

Alana Muller 7:54
You and I have talked about this before, but as you know, my own field of interest, my own field of study, is relationship building. You have this wonderful, incredible descriptor of yourself that I really want to talk about. You say that you are a bridge maker, and you say you're a bridge maker among diverse cultural groups. You attribute your approach to handling differences among people with empathy and understanding, and you strive to humanize, rather than demonize. I think that's unique, and in this world we find ourselves in today, where there's so much polarization, we could certainly use more of that humanization. Talk about your role as a bridge maker, and if you would, I'd love to hear a story or two about how you've been able to come into that role.

Jae Chung 8:47
I emigrated from South Korea to the United States when I was 11 years old. I hadn't chosen that. My parents lovingly wanted to pursue the American dream. That meant that I was taking the airplane when I was a young 11-year-old boy with my younger sister. When you land here, back in those days, there was no internet, which meant literally I was in the last group of people in modernity that actually left a country to come to another country and learn the language, but you couldn't just send a text back to your old buddies. Right? This was goodbye for good — “I'll see you in the next life,” basically. So, dropped here, learning English, starting with ABCD and then growing up in California, in a suburb that was predominantly white. I wondered, can they see through blue eyes? What does the world look like, the color, when people have blue eyes, as opposed to everybody I knew for the first 11 years who had black or brown eyes? So starting with that journey, I saw that there were norms back at home, but there was a new set of norms here. You begin to see, as a young child, that there are very different cultures in the world.

Jae Chung 10:08
Then you realize that there are first-generation immigrants. I grew up in churches that always had first-generation, second-generation and third-generation immigrants with different preferences. There's always that culture war. People talk about culture war with ethnicity and race. We are humans that create culture wars for whatever reason we want to — disability, ability, everything. So I grew up feeling tension between people groups: of people who have not, people who are educated and less educated, people who speak English and who don't speak English. There's always a million reasons to divide us and to say, "I don't get you."

Jae Chung 10:53
From that experience, to working on different continents — I think I've been to all continents thus far — for the last 10 years of work in Korea, nonprofits and churches, I've traveled to probably over 40 countries. Sometimes I've stayed extensively in those countries, like working with tribal leaders in Africa and Senegal, sitting down with a man who is a tribal leader of 3,000 people, and he had seven wives. That's a whole different world. And I get to ask, "Hey, sir, we're building a hospital here. But can I ask you a personal question? Who's your favorite wife?" And to hear his answer, actually...

Alana Muller 11:39
Right. His rationale and justification for why, right?

Jae Chung 11:41
Yeah, he was excited to tell me about it. And I just saw this whole other way of living life in the same century. And I felt like, ever since I was young, until even today, I have been given the gift to see the beautiful array of differences, the different perspectives and cultures. And what a beautiful, further gift it would be if I could help them to connect by helping one to see the view of the other. Now, if some of that happened in our politics today in the United States, don't you think we would benefit a little bit?

Alana Muller 12:18
Yes, I absolutely do. More than I can say, yes. Absolutely humanize. Well, you definitely have, as you said, a gift. I mean, it's a gift that you are able to observe and then draw connections between things, people and places that probably most humans don't have that capacity, or they don't realize that they have that capacity. So the fact that you've been able to not only recognize that gift but then to do something with it and to genuinely build bridges is very special.

Alana Muller
You mentioned that you've been to so many countries, and I know that you've lived all over the world and, as you said, spent extensive time in these places — places like Seoul and Hawaii, San Francisco, New York, St. Louis. As you've studied people, as you've made these observations, you've seen people in their places. What do you think — are their perspectives and behaviors largely the same as you've traveled place to place? Or are they very different depending on their geography? So you gave the example of the tribal leader with seven wives. But are his perspectives very different than the perspectives of your next-door neighbor in St. Louis?

Jae Chung 13:26
The incredible realization I had is that we are more common than different. But we have a tendency to emphasize differences because evolution would have it that recognizing differences is beneficial for our survival.

Alana Muller 13:43
How about that? Why?

Jae Chung 13:45
Well, we are hunter-gatherers, you want to recognize something different, immediately, so that you could go, "Hey, let's eliminate that," because unity depends on it. Someone who's not from your tribe, you want to recognize right away because he or she can be a threat to your children. You see what I'm saying? And so rather than our evolution, or just the way our cultures develop, favoring recognizing similarities, we are just conditioned to recognize differences so that we can protect ourselves and protect our tribe. Why are tribes so important? Your very survival depends on it. These days, you can be off the grid. But back in those days, you can’t be off the grid. [Crosstalk] That's the guy that's eating whatever you killed that day.

Jae Chung 14:37
And so, I think we love picking out the differences and going, "Okay, how is that a threat to me? How is that serving my survival or really attacking my survival?" And so, I get it. That's human nature. But you know what? Part of human nature is to go over and see beyond that, so that we can serve one another and fight for justice, fight for something that's common in all of us, like loving our family, loving our country, things like that.

Jae Chung 15:06
So, I feel that the more I recognize differences, the beauty of it, for one difference, there are like 50 other commonalities. If you care to look at it, it may manifest itself in these differences, but at the core of it, it's love for your family. It's the desire to be accepted, to belong, right? The tribal leader in Senegal versus a guy working in Moscow, or a fisherman in Greece, a Japanese gentleman that never shows emotion when I say anything profound, but has one tear dripping down his face. He's less emotionally expressive than African American brothers and sisters that say "Amen" to every preaching I've ever done, every other sentence, they're expressive. I feel that the desire to want to be part of something, to belong, to appreciate, to be loved, is the same. So the core things are the same; expressions of it may be different. Let's not get hung up on the expressions of it, the particularities of it.

Alana Muller 16:04
Right, and you said, the way that those expressions manifest themselves are very different, right? They're very different. And so if we can be open to recognizing, again, back to your words, humanity, we could all build a lot of bridges. Great explanation, I really appreciate that. Let's shift gears a little bit and ask you, what's something you're working on now that you're especially excited about?

Jae Chung 16:27
Yeah. Oh, of course, a few things came to my mind. I'll just talk about one. It kind of goes with the previous question. I worked for nine years with ambassadors of Korea, so some politicians and ambassadors. And as you know, ambassadors are the ones that do cultural bridging. Being in the room with them, helping them to navigate through some of these international conflict situations — North Korea, South Korea. Whenever North Korean people do something funky to South Korea, everything stops and we have to gather, and sometimes I was in that room. Just caring for people who are making decisions, advising people that are making decisions that impact hundreds of thousands of people's lives.

Jae Chung 17:13
And so, in those highly stressful situations, where one act of a wrong decision can really impact history, that's when you have to really look at what we are seeing here. What are they perceiving? What are we bringing to the table? What are the assumptions that we are unaware of? Let's get that awareness. So I'm doing that, and these are the skills I've received from that kind of work with a lot of actors and actresses, and also politicians and ambassadors. But these days, what I'm excited about is working with — I don't know if you know K-pop stars?

Alana Muller 17:41
Sure.

Jae Chung 17:42
Okay. Now they're getting a little more popular. I didn't know it would be this huge international rage, I guess. BTSs of the world, boy bands, BLACKPINK — those are people that are very famous. And I wouldn't know any of them if it wasn't for my daughter, who is a teenager that's forcing me to memorize their names and stuff. So I've been doing that because she loves them.

Jae Chung 18:13
Now, recently, I've been working with a couple of companies that are producing the next BTS of the world, partly owned by Psy, the "Gangnam Style" Korean guy that made K-pop happen. These young boys and girls are basically trained at a very early age — 8, 9, 10 years of age. They go through a lot of cosmetic surgery at a very young age, not being able to see their parents, all hoping that they will be the one that is a sought-after singer or actor. Now, that's a highly stressful situation and, to me, very dehumanizing, at times.

Jae Chung 18:55
I know it's all for the money, but I'm working with some of the companies to see. If all the NFL teams right now in America have mindset coaches since around 2020 or so, do you think there's a future for taking care of these young people's mindset and mental health at a very young age? Even in this highly competitive, dehumanizing — I didn't use that word, by the way, with leadership. In my heart, with them, I guess I'm trying to protect their assets so they can get as much out of their assets as possible. It's all bottom line.

Jae Chung 19:34
However, can we humanize each other? You have a daughter, I have a daughter. Is there any way we can produce these artists and fulfill their dream and entertain the heck out of people? Even so, can we do it with humanizing efforts to help them to thrive and love and be? You know, we're human beings before human doings. Can we do a little bit of that?

Alana Muller 19:58
I guess allowing them to still have their childhood, right? To fulfill their dreams and to still be human. That's really cool. Really cool.

Jae Chung 20:07
You know what I mean? So that the future of K-pop and K-drama, and all that stuff… can we help these young people, actors and actresses to be the source for some of the mental health inspiration and caring, the holistic care of the body and soul? Is that a future? You know, because I think it is. Maybe you can pioneer that; let me help you. So I'm talking to these leaders, I'm getting a gig to talk to these young stars in the making. And it gives me a lot of joy because these are someone's children.

Alana Muller 20:37
I love that. I love that you're using your skills to really make it a better world, not to sound so esoteric about it, but to just really improve the way that we treat each other. So that's really beautiful. You're helping so many people. I love that you're able even to help yourself. Let me ask you this question: Do you have a mentor of your own? Is there somebody in your life who's had a particularly meaningful impact on your career or your personal journey? And if so, what's some of the best advice that they've given you?

Jae Chung 21:09
I've always had mentors that are very unlikely. So one mentor I have is an English woman, June Lane. She's a 96-year-old woman. And I met her 17 years ago, first when her husband was very ill. I met her through a nonprofit organization’s efforts and things like that, and all the work they've done in Asia. So in part, I was very thankful. But she became my mentor. I talk with her on a regular basis; that's what it means to me to have a mentor.

Jae Chung 21:44
I just love so many things about her. But what I love about her is the wisdom she brings, and the perspective, the openness that she brings to the table. So whenever I bring some concerns I have, she's a very good reflective surface. She gives me her opinion without being preachy, but she just gives me her opinion. You listen to someone as beautiful as her, someone who's built many churches all over the world, and served in cultures, across cultures. I actually officiated her husband's funeral. And so, there are multi-levels of relationship-building that went on, but I just love testing my ideas and just soaking in the wisdom she has of 96 years.

Jae Chung 22:30
I have mentors that are much younger than me, who will remain nameless. I contact him because mentors come in every shape or form. The perspective he brings is so unique, so I appreciate him. He lives in Mexico. I just call him because he brings a unique set of that generation's input into whatever endeavor I do. I want myself to have the humility to always listen to the younger generation. They are the future; their perspective matters.

Alana Muller 22:59
Essentially, your personal board of directors is a global board of directors. It sounds like you have the ability to call on them when it's the right moment. And I think the fact that you have that many mentors, and that you do have that ability and that freedom to connect with them at the right time is great. And I suspect, especially in the case of Miss June, that you're important to her, too. I bet you're a mentor to her, too. That's really beautiful. Thank you for sharing the story.

Alana Muller 23:27
You know, Jae, there's one question I ask every guest, and I'm very excited to ask you the same question. And it is this: If you could meet with one person, living or not living, fictional or nonfictional, who would it be and why?

Jae Chung 23:40
I think it would be my grandfather. He passed away about 20 years ago, so it's been a while. I was so young when he was a businessman in Korea. Korea just came through two wars, including the Korean War, and was torn into pieces. I want to ask him, "Hey, Grandpa, how did you manage to kind of, stand up as a young child selling flyswatters?" That’s what he told me.

Alana Muller 24:15
Is that right?

Jae Chung 24:16
Yeah, that’s his first business. He told me this one story. The only story I remember is that he went to sell it at the age of 11 years old. He knocked on a door, and some guy opened it. It was a rich man's house, he says, “And his German Shepherd came out and bit me in the arm. My skin fell off.” And he says, "Jae, you know what I thought about?" I said, "What? That you're scared?" "Yeah, that, too. But, what I thought about is that every time there is a house with a dog, I'm going to go and sell my flyswatters." Because after his arm was bitten, the owner came out and felt so sorry that he bought all of the flyswatters he had that day and gave him extra cash. I want to ask him, "Hey, Grandpa, what was your mindset like? That you went through all that poverty, and all that war-torn Korea situation, to dream big and build a business later that would be contributing significantly to Korea's GDP at the time. And then, but live so humbly. I remember you just giving of yourself to others. And when you were dying, you didn't have much money. You just timed it perfectly so you were giving from age 20 and on until 87. How did you do that? How did you not become selfish?"

Alana Muller 25:45
Remarkable.

Jae Chung 25:47
You know, so I want to ask him, "What drove you to success? And how did you give it all away?"

Alana Muller 25:51
That's a remarkable story. I love that he was a true entrepreneur. That's great, I love it. Well, thank you for sharing that. It's been just a delight to have you on the program. So, Jae Chung, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and Bespoke Compass?

Jae Chung 26:06
BespokeCompass.com. That's the website. But yeah, so grateful to be able to share a little bit about my story.

Alana Muller 26:15
Wonderful to have you, Jae Chung. Thank you so much for being on Enterprise.ing podcast.

Jae Chung 26:19
Thank you.

Alana Muller 26:22
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