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LIVE TO SPARK WITH ERICA TEO EE TIEN

Auteur(s): Erica Teo Recipient of Elite Instant Podcast Leader 2023
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  • Résumé

  • Hello and Welcome to my “Live To Spark” Podcast. I’m Erica Teo Ee Tien. For the past 15 years, I’ve been helping to empower individuals to reach their work and personal goals through sharing know-hows, lessons learnt and cultivating healthy mindsets, so that they can improve their processes to generate the best outcome. In recent years, I’ve helped mid-career women to reach their life, career and family goals by inspiring them on their journey of self-discovery so that they can become individuals that are more engaged to lead a fruitful life. In this podcast I will share tips, tools and ways to develop a healthy mindset that can help you to become more successful, overcome challenges and setbacks in life. I believe that every woman has unlimited potential to find her shine within her own areas in life. So join me in this journey, and Live To Spark together! I hope sharing my personal experiences and stories will help to inspire you in your journey of self-discovery and you will continue with me to be empowered to take on challenges so that you can work towards becoming a happier woman and be more effective in what you do at work and everyday. I help mid-career women who face challenges at work and with life (info about ideal client) by empowering them through their journey of self-discovery (problem you are solving) to become happier and more effective at work and in their everyday life (ideal client’s desires)
    Soul Rich Woman
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Épisodes
  • EP 9: My Dreams

    EP 9: My Dreams
    Feb 22 2023
    Hello and welcome to this episode. Life for modern-day women can be very tiring, and even more so as a career woman. We can be so caught up with what is happening around us, making sure everyone else is well looked after and cared for and then we lose ourselves in the process. When I was given this topic to talk about my dreams, I froze. I have been working for the past fifteen years in two very different industries and a mother for the past eleven years. I hardly have much breaks even in-between jobs because I would find my next career opportunity before I say goodbye to the previous job. Life has a way of getting to a woman, the work, the family, the children and then suddenly, like alot of women, I realised I forgot what my dreams were. Or did I have any dreams to begin with? It took a few days to recall what my dreams were. It hit me that I have probably kept my dreams in frozen storage all these while as life whizzes by.My first dream is to travel around the world. I remember I did not have my own passport until I was in university. My parents were making very low income that was hardly enough to cope with daily necessities and keeping three children in school. Although school fees were heavily subsidised by our Singapore Government, other school necessities such as stationary, school textbooks and assessment books were not. So traveling for leisure was never an option to us. I remember when I first told my mum I need to make a passport. It was for a school trip to look at a fishing village with my tutors and classmates to Kukup in Malaysia, fundamentally different from the city life I grew up in. My mum was shocked when she heard I need to make my passport and she jumped with her immediate response: are you going to elope with your boyfriend? In my heart I rolled my eyes from the front to back. It was really absurd. Now I was a rebellious kid back then, the more you don’t want me to do, the more I want to do it. I was determined to travel. So I made my own applications and got my passport. I dreamed of filling my passport pages with stamps from different customs around the world. And the traveling will not be only by flight. I dream of travelling by first class train on the Qinghai Tibel railway to a far-flung corner of the world or take all the scenic railway rides around Switzerland. I dream of traveling during the festive season, like going to the Christmas night market in Germany, experiencing the jostle, having food and drinks in the middle of winter. I dream of seeing sunrise over Ang Ko Wat on Easter morning to remind myself of rebirth and life is full of hope.You might ask me: but air travel is very common pre-Covid, flights are plentiful and why haven’t I done so? Because there was always something else that was prioritised over my traveling dreams that was always seen as frivolous. I remember during my internship year, most of my classmates traveled to Europe on a shoestring budget with whatever they made during internship. My three closest friends went to not one, not two but five European countries at one go to look at buildings, cities and worship architecture. I did not join them because five thousand dollars budget for five countries was out of my reach. It was easily five solid months of my income for my year out on internship. I wanted to save the money to fund my post-graduate study needs, like penknife, cardboard, glue, books, even my own food and drink. They say you only live once. But I was so afraid of having no money while back in school, I chose to live properly with food and drink and an occasional McDonald’s treat fo myself when back in school.But I do find comfort in visiting nearby destinations. I finally saw snow in YongPyong ski slope with my friends before I met my husband, my friends and I even went on a short trip to the de-militarised zone between North and South Korea. It was an eye-opening trip and I believe I still have much much more to see around the world.If you ask me now, do I ever regret not going to Europe during my internship year? Part of me says yes since that time other than that one study loan that was put on pause while I continue with my post graduate studies, I did not have other commitments like children, car and house mortgages. Till today I still haven’t made it to Europe to travel yet. The three years as the world battered with COVID-19, I looked back and I asked myself why haven’t I traveled more and further away. While the other part of me pulls me back to reality and reminds me of the need to afford daily expenses, savings for retirement, paying my loans, where to find the extra money to afford air tickets for three persons, accommodation for three persons, and many many other practical questions.Which is why today I am starting on my business journey with baby steps, to have a shot at making a passive income that can go towards helping to fuel the wanderlust dream in me since young. Which then brings me to another dream I had ...
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    10 min
  • EP 8: My Past Romances And What They Taught Me

    EP 8: My Past Romances And What They Taught Me
    Feb 15 2023
    Hello and welcome to this episode. Some of you in Singapore will recall the recent incident of a local busker that had gained much fame performing in open public space. He seemed to be on his way to stardom, gathering a big fan crowd and lots of hype on social media before his ex-girlfriend alleged his past wrong doings. This ignited sudden cancellations of his busking performances, fierce online debates and defences from his family and eventually his image took a hit.Past romances, whether long dating period or short whirlwind courting, do impact all of us in one way or another. Some of the luckier ones end up married and remain married, while some of us may have bad experiences, scarring us for life.I had my first date at seventeen. He was one year my senior and at that time I had not cared much about how I looked. I didn’t know how to dress up, I felt I was a plain jane and hardly stood out in appearances. My mother bought my clothes and it was usually what she thought looked nice, cheap and good for her budget as we were from low income family that time. My hairstyle was the same as Aaron Kwok’s, one of the four heavenly kings from Hong Kong pop music scene, centre parting, short to the ears level and shaved with a slope on the back of my neck. I wore big plastic rimmed glasses, hardly the concept of beauty by today’s standards.I was weak in my Physics during my upper secondary school days and wanted to look for help with my Physics homework. As finances were very tight in my family, getting private tuition was not an option. Somehow I ended up befriending one senior who was good in Physics and was willing to help me. And it was through this senior, I met my first ex-boyfriend, who was also good in Physics. Those were the days before technology of handphones and I remember we had long telephone chats late into the night using our house phone. Phone calls on Physics homework soon became dominated with other conversation topics and playful teasings.It wasn’t long before the seniors graduated and being in different schools limited our interactions to only long telephone conversations in the night to share about what happened in the day. Thankfully I finished my Secondary school education with grades that allowed me to enter the same junior college. With that we were reunited in the same school and he asked me to be his girlfriend. I was taken aback by the love interest from a guy, or even any guy, given my own self-image that time. So it was unsurprising that I agreed.With newfound freedom because I was now in junior college, hanging out together more often made me realised alot of differences we had. Fundamentally, my first ex-boyfriend had a different concept about money. His parents were not well-off, held low wage jobs and his dad was very old when they had children. But my boyfriend was blessed with a godfather that was quite well-off. His godfather owned a small store and the small business brought him a comfortable income. His godfather did not marry but had a sister with a condition that he had to take care of. Which was why his godfather had money to spare and dote on my first ex-boyfriend.My first ex-boyfriend would want the latest things in trend, be it Sega gaming machine or Nike Air basketball shoes that his favourite basketball player wore during the recent NBA games. All he had to do was ask for money from his godfather for his Nike shoes, his bag, his Sega gameset, whatever he wanted his godfather to sponsor and he was never disappointed him. To him money came so easily, he never bothered saving. He would just spend on things that made him happy. I remember I was envious but I never felt comfortable asking for money. Especially when I know my parents made very little and were often cash-strapped.In the first year I was dating my first ex-boyfriend, I often felt inadequate. He was a flirt, always comparing and measuring me against the other girls he knew around him. He would make remarks about how he cannot see my eyes because they are obstructed by my very thick glasses. He would comment about how his female ex-classmate’s breasts looked because she wore good maximiser bras, or I could look better if I applied makeup. I felt I was never pretty enough, never good enough in his eyes. He would cajole me into changing how I looked, because everything about me needed “improvement”. He would bring me to the optician so I could be prescribed contact lenses. He would say girls look better with long hair and psycho me to keep hair long. I remember a comment made by his best friend with whom sometimes we hang out together as a group of three. His best friend had told my ex-boyfriend if he doesn’t find me pretty, just breakup and find another new girlfriend that is prettier. The comment was very shocking to me because it made me feel like I was a commodity. Not happy, just change lah. There is no consideration for the bond in a relationship between two people, the feelings of the ...
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    12 min
  • EP 7: My Career Switches

    EP 7: My Career Switches
    Feb 8 2023
    Hello and welcome to this episode. As some of you listening in may be aware, Singapore is a small country and we have rapidly developed the country from a third-world country back in the 1960. Today we can count ourselves as a first-world country, with efficient public transport system, housing for both public and private sector. We have comparative medical infrastructure and healthcare system. Efforts are put in by our government to ensure core part of medical care is still accessible to the poor. Education is structured and nurture our young. I am often reminded how fortunate we are in Singapore to be taken care of, as I travel to some of the surrounding south-east asia region that are less developed.As I joined my first company after my post-graduate degree, I came to realise architecture is a sunset industry in Singapore. I was definitely late in the game, we already have pioneers in the architecture realm that have put forth master planning that shaped our country, put in-charge of key infrastructure works. These pioneers have worked hard and left the younger generations with works of monumental works. It was no surprise this is a cut-throat industry which is highly competitive among firms for the limited number of built projects in land-scarce Singapore. The hours were long, the clients were demanding and the authorities required projects to satisfy an ever-growing list of regulations. And I haven’t mentioned the legal liabilities this profession carries.As I work through the years in architecture as a consultant, there was always episodes where I experienced burn-out. The effect from working long hours snowballed as I took on bigger and more complex projects. Although I have alot to learn while I was working which kept me engaged, I was physically exhausted. It wasn’t something that could be erased if I took a couple of days off for mental wellness. But that short relief will soon be taken over by the punishing hours it wasn’t long before the exhaustion will set in again. Coupled with life experiences change, I got married, I had a new baby coming along, priorities shifted dramatically. It was no longer just about myself. It slowly dawned onto me I cannot throw my new family aside and bury myself face down into work, work and work only. What is work if it kept me away most of the time and when I come back everyone is already asleep and you don’t know what is happening to everyone in the family? Home is not a hotel like in my younger days when my mother used to complain that I only come home late into the night to bathe and sleep. Then in the day I disappear out of the door and not to be seen again until late. That repeat mode cannot be the way I choose to live my life with my family. I thought deep and hard, eventually convinced that there is the need to spend time to care for my family, to connect with them, to be there with my family.Besides, work is never smooth-sailing. We have our ups and downs in our work. There will be days we are seen doing our best delivering projects, handling everyone on the construction team with stellar outputs. On the other hand, there will be days of stress to deliver a project that is already way overdue, or we met with lots of challenges at work. These are days tensions rang high, when your client breathes down my neck constantly to meet certain deadlines. These deadlines were committed by them to their own bosses and they just stress me to deliver so that they could deliver. Coupled with limited time with stretched manpower resources that can help with the drawings, the submissions, the backend work and so on, sometimes I ask myself if my clients think I am seven-eleven. For those of you that may be unfamiliar, Seven-eleven is a chain convenience store that is open twenty-four hours a day, 7 days a week. So I feel like being treated as if my client thinks design options and proposals of materials or response to any Buyer’s request is like them walking into a convenience store where the things are off the shelf to grab and go. But it doesn’t work like that in the backend. I need to speak to my other consultants to ensure the change can be carried out, I need to get my Contractor to assess it to objectively say it can be done with no implications on their end. At times we need to challenge each other a little to stretch possibilities based on the conditions at that moment, based on work progress at that point in time. Little steps of fact-finding that take time. Because it goes against my work principles to agree to do everything at no additional cost to anyone. I learn that this would be unfair. If changes take rework, changes take compromise, I think it is only fair to talk about it openly to discuss and validate and convince and then a decision can be made whether to go ahead or not.This was one of the key reasons I eventually left my first job. Because I did not feel that my boss at that time was administering the contract fairly to our ...
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    12 min
Gestion et leadership Économie Réussite
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