Working Towards Our Purpose

00:00:00 - Gino Cordone
Joining me today on the podcast is Shirley chock, who is the owner of I Ping Tai Chi school in milford, Connecticut. She's known as the stress bender. Before being a business owner, she had a very successful career in finance and was the director of finance training and development at Yale university before she walked away from a high paying job, a pension, and benefits to take over owning a Tai chi school. When the pandemic hit, she shut down when the pandemic hit and shut down the world, she took what seemed like an in person studio's worst nightmare, but turned it into something that could reach even more people. By bringing her classes online, she became the twitch's first affiliate to stream international martial arts, has 55,000 followers on TikTok and over 100,000 followers on Instagram. On top of all that, she is also a mother. She's won multiple awards and accolades, but I don't have time to list them all in this intro, so just get right to the interview. Shirley, thank you so much for being here.

00:00:56 - Shirley chock
Thank you so much, Gino, for having me. It's my pleasure.

00:01:00 - Gino Cordone
So if we could start by giving a little bit more about yourself and telling us in your words who you are to give everybody some context.

00:01:07 - Shirley chock
Yeah, absolutely. Now, I did not plan on being a Tai chi teacher or a content creator was something that happened by surprise and because that was the life circumstances that led me there. So it just goes to show that you really don't know where your life is going to lead you. So I have always lived my life by following my gut to go do the things that felt right, to choose the things that I really wanted to do, and that has been my career. And I had a really wonderful finance career. I thought that I was going to be a finance professional until I retired. I have an economics degree and I pursued a career in finance, doing really interesting jobs along that career. My first job was actually for the city of New York parks and recreation in their revenue division. I don't know if people know that a lot of the businesses that operate on New York City property actually operate on New York City parks. So Yankee stadium was actually my project when I was 22. I was the project manager for New York City, and we spent every month with Yankees operations to talk about the things that needed to be addressed from an operational perspective. So that was my first job and it was a lot of fun. Then my job after that took me to Sotheby's, the auction house, because my family business, my parents actually had a jewelry business. So jewelry was in my blood and a position opened up at Sotheby's that was really interesting. So that was where I learned my accounting and financial reporting and got my job training in finance because my degree was in liberal arts. Economics doesn't actually teach you accounting or finance or how to do anything in real life really. So it was on the job training at Sotheby's that allowed me to learn about accounting and financial reporting and from there it was just kind of the right time to have a finance career and it also goes to show the power of networking. It was@the.com Wave, the first dot wave when there were a lot of startups that were forming and my husband's, coworker's husband had launched a startup. It was two CEOs that launched a startup and they needed someone they were growing really fast, they were getting a lot of investments and they needed somebody to be in charge of their finances so that they could focus on business development. I was brought on board to be their controller because they knew my work ethic, because they knew me and we had gotten to know each other really well over the years from hanging out together. They had seen me grow in my career and they trusted that I would be able to do what needed to be done to get them through this growth stage. Even though I wasn't technically qualified to do that job because I didn't have a CPA and this was a controller position but they knew they had faith that I could do it. So I was the controller for that media startup and then I came to Connecticut because my husband was here before we got married, I moved to Connecticut and then that was when I started my career at Yale University and I grew into different positions at the university including being their director of Finance training and development. That was a position that they actually created for me because I was the unofficial trainer. Yale finances are very very complex and they really didn't need a role that focused on helping to train people so that it was particularly the financial planning and analysis analysts, it's elite team of analysts that really needed to come in, hit the ground running. So I became the trainer for them and I also launched a finance leadership development program and that was what I was doing at Yale and I thought that I would retire. I loved my career at Yale, it's a wonderful place to work and I was accruing wonderful benefits. I thought I could retire at age 55 with full pension, full benefits, they pay for a child scholarship benefit. I had this huge bank of sick days that they would pay out 50% if you retire with that bank of sick days and I was all set with this amazing plan but amazing plans never work out because you don't know what's going to happen with life. While I was advancing my finance career, I was also training very seriously in Tai Chi which is an internal martial art. I had been studying martial arts for my entire adult life. When I moved to Connecticut, I found Grandmaster I Pingchang and I was studying under her and I was competing. I led our competition team. I actually am the US. Women's Champion. We competed nationally and internationally, and I was also her assistant director at school. And my original plan was when I retired with my full pension at age 55. At that point, I would take over the Tai Chi school and teach Tai Chi as a leisurely activity because it is something that really did drive me. I love doing it. It benefited me in so many ways that I knew I wanted to teach it eventually. But then Master I Ping daughter, decided to settle in Texas. She then had children, and so where your grandkids are, you tend to wind up going. So Mastery Ping and her husband, they move to Texas, and a decision had to be made. What happens to the school, the school that has been part of this Connecticut community since 1996? If you have any interest in Tai Chi or Chinese martial arts, you would know about our school. It had such an impact on so many people. What do we do about it when she leaves? There were two options. Either I took it over and continue its legacy, or she would sell it to someone who was interested in purchasing it, who had no connection with our legacy. And so I had to make a decision. And that was when I thought about just all the benefits that I personally gained from the Taiji practice in my life and how I really felt like it was a secret. Scroll in helping me to navigate life's conflicts. There are so many things that I could see around me where my peers, it seemed like they were having so many uphill battles and they were getting really exhausted and burnt out by work conflicts, life conflicts, challenges that came up, changes that come up, unexpected obstacles, people who don't cooperate with you. All of these things that really make it exhausting to live in our modern society. And just the amount of stress that people had and not that many effective stress management tools that people had to alleviate that stress. And that's when I realized that it was my Tai Chi training and the techniques that I learned that helped me be able to navigate life in a much easier way, because I had energy to sustain me. I didn't feel like I was getting beat up every day, exhausted at the end of the day. And my career was able to advance in a very organic way. And that was when I realized that this is what I need to bring to the world, because I didn't see other people talking about Tai Chi in this way. When you see people teaching Tai Chi, it's always in the realm of the movements for exercise and health, or it was for older people to improve their balance and regain strength. And I wasn't really seeing it addressed in the way that I felt was the most important, the most beneficial is how do we help people change their mindset and learn a set of techniques that makes life easier to live? And so I decided to give up my finance career to take over the school. And I always had the intention of growing it into something bigger than just a school. But when you're operating a business, you're so caught up in the everyday tasks that need to be done. It's very hard to implement something new when you have to operate the business. So it actually wound up being a blessing in disguise for me when COVID hit and everything came to a stop. And that actually allowed me that time to think about how to grow my business and my brand in a way that I wanted to, when I didn't have to. Just do that churn that you do when it's that everyday grind of operating the business. I actually had the opportunity to think about how do I bring this in that new direction that I knew I wanted to, to bring it and then having that time to experiment and explore different things and try different things until I found the formula that was right for me.

00:13:43 - Gino Cordone
Yeah, you said something earlier that you've always kind of done something where it felt right or you could feel it in your gut was the right decision. So was it difficult for you to make the decision to leave your job and those benefits and the pension and everything? Or did it you felt it was the right decision and therefore it was a no brainer?

00:14:06 - Shirley chock
It felt right. But I didn't do it based on a hope and a prayer. I am a finance person. I had to make sure that financially I could make it work because I did have a family and I have kids and a house and I wasn't going to bet the farm on a brand new business model that wasn't proven yet when I didn't really know exactly how it was going to work. Because a new business needs the financial resources to sustain it. And when you're trying to create something new with a new business model, you need to preserve the money. Like when the money runs out, your new business is done. So I think that that is something that a lot of new entrepreneurs, they are not really financially prepared for how much longer it actually takes to get there and how much more money than you think it will take to get there. Because you're going to make so many mistakes. And those mistakes cost money and those mistakes cost time. And time is money. So I knew it was right. I had faith that I could figure it out. But I knew I needed to have enough financial resources to support me because I didn't have investors backing this. I didn't have business partners that were funding it. Was all myself self funding. So when I left the university, I actually thought about how can I secure my exit in a way that would give me a financial exit ramp that would allow me to be able to figure out the business side. So I changed my position into a position that had an end date that would have a severance at the end. So I exited with a severance package, and I was very transparent with everyone about my goals and where I was going. And the position actually was a position that I was very suited for in that job. It was a really important job that I was the right fit for it. And it just so happened that we were able to negotiate a severance package that would go with that. So I was able to have that financial exit ramp to help me then figure out my business model for the business.

00:17:16 - Gino Cordone
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts to that and kind of thinking about how I left my corporate job. And it was a very not similar thing. I didn't tell anybody, and I wanted to keep it all a secret and stuff like that. And looking back, if I was a little bit more transparent with what I was trying to do, I think the assumptions that I made that people wouldn't be okay with it were probably not right, and I probably could have gotten some sort of situation to maybe help me make the transition a little bit easier. But lesson learned. And I also agree with what you were saying, that it definitely takes more time than you would think. Me being so naive, I was like, I'm going to take a year. I got myself a year runway. I'll be fine by the end of the year. I'll be making just as much as I need to and then realizing, like, oh, maybe it doesn't work. Like I would envision it in my head. And fortunately, I don't have too much overhead with my business, so I can therefore take more of the profits. But when you have a physical space, you don't really have that luxury to do that. Paying rent and stuff like that.

00:18:20 - Shirley chock
Yeah, that's right. It does. It really takes longer than you think, and it's going to cost more than you think. So when you're a new entrepreneur, just factor that in, you have to give yourself a cushion because the last thing that you want to do is to give up before you had a chance to even get off the ground. And so many new businesses fail before they ever take off because of the lack of planning. Because I think that another thing that is important. And I know you and I, in our prior conversations, and I know when you have talked with other people, you've talked about purpose and pursuing your purpose. And this is something that I always counsel new entrepreneurs and especially people who are transitioning from mid career to become entrepreneurs and business owners. One of the things that I always hear from people, they're telling me how I inspire them to pursue their passion. Me quitting my finance career to pursue my passion really inspires them. And I actually always correct that thinking and tell them that it may just be semantics, but I think the semantics is important. I'm not actually pursuing a passion. I feel like I am fulfilling a purpose. For me, passion is something that is associated with a high and passions have an emotion that's attached to it with that high. And there are a lot of lows when you're pursuing your business that there may be times when the lows are going to be far more than the highs. And it is something that is going to feel like it's painful at that point. But if you feel like it's a purpose that you're going through, then it gives you that drive to get through the lows. If you're only trying to pursue that passion, feeling like it's going to be that high all the time, then you're going to wind up getting discouraged. And for me, it really is more than something that I feel passionate about. It's almost a compulsion. That's what I tell people. It's almost like that thing that you just can't stop yourself from having to do. It's almost like when you're playing a game, I'm a gamer and for me it's really similar to that game that drives you crazy. You hit certain spots that just suck because it isn't fun anymore. But you have to keep getting back to it because you have to get through it to go on. And that drive to keep going on is almost like a compulsion. And that for me, is what I look for and what I choose to do. Like if I don't feel that drive to do that thing, then it's not worth me doing that's for all of my life's choices.

00:22:37 - Gino Cordone
Yeah, I 100% resonated with that. That's why even the name of this podcast, I have purpose in it because I struggle. I like the word passion, but to me it is more of a, I don't know, self centered sort of word where it's like, I get enjoyment out of this. But purpose, it has a further meaning of like there's a bigger reason as to why I'm doing it. Not just because it's fun to me, but because there's other reasons that help support. So then when, like you said, you do get to those low points, it's not just, well, this isn't fun anymore, I'm going to give it up. It's well, I'm doing this for people, maybe outside myself. So that way I need to show up for them and that's what's going to keep me going through. So I love the way that you articulated that.

00:23:20 - Shirley chock
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that is and if we go a little bit more philosophical, I really do believe that that's why we're here. Why do you exist? Why don't I exist? Why do we exist? If you think about what is that chance that you exist as you, it is so small. The fact that you exist, it's such a small, tiny percentage of possibility. And so why are we here? There's a reason, and that's what we're trying to cover. And that reason can't be told to us. We have to find it. And that's our life pursuit, is to figure out why were we here. And it's definitely not what your parents tell you you should be doing for your career.

00:24:33 - Gino Cordone
Yeah, I would agree. So I guess maybe somebody could say, how do you know that? Or how do you listen to that voice? Because from personal experience, I would say you can hear the voice, but sometimes you don't listen to it. How would somebody more tune into that voice in their head and to be able to listen to their own thoughts and their own ways of thinking and try to block out either the learned patterns from whether it's parents or schooling? How would you go about trying to listen to yourself more? Does tai chi help you with that?

00:25:08 - Shirley chock
Yeah. So that is why I think that Tai Chi is really the secret scroll, because it is not about listening to the voices in your mind. Your mind is the biggest trickster. Your mind is such a manipulator. And if you listen to your mind, you will keep getting led down these paths that are not where if you listen to your senses, you'll be able to feel the path. Because our minds will build defenses and they will rationalize things for us to protect ourselves from fear. Like when we feel fear and we don't want to do something because we fear, then our brains will come up with all of these thoughts to rationalize why not to do something. And if we actually listen to what our brain is telling us, then all we're doing is just keep being kept hostage to our fears. So our senses actually are so much stronger and more accurate and faster than our thoughts. And this is scientifically proven that our senses are actually faster and more accurate. So if you can actually learn how to listen to your senses, which live in your body and get your brain to match what your body is feeling, then you have an internal compass that is very strong. So that is what Taiji training is about. You can't think the movements. You have to connect your whole body to feel the movements and do it all together. So you have to get deep, deep within the senses of your body. And you also learn if you're tensing up when you fear, you tense. Once you tense, then you disconnect your ability to tap into your body's senses. That's when the thinking comes in, the fear takes over. So if you can actually get yourself to come into your body and stay relaxed, even in an uncomfortable situation, then you can actually tap into your senses. And what we're trying to do is bring everything together to focus in one direction, think, feel, act altogether in one direction. So often people wind up just getting in their own way and causing themselves a lot of confusion and stopping themselves from actually achieving success because split in their intentions, thinking one thing, saying something else, doing something else, it's all scattered, putting you in all different directions. If you can always think, say, do the same thing all the time, then how powerful will that action be? But we don't do that because we fear. We're afraid. Well, I can't say what I really think. That's not okay, well, I can say something to this person, but I won't actually do that because I don't really want to do that. I'm just going to say it, but I'm going to do something else. So it's just all of these scattered intentions that prevent you from bringing it all together. When you can bring it all together, then you have an internal compass.

00:29:47 - Gino Cordone
Yeah. Wow, that makes so much sense to me. And definitely as somebody who lives in their head a lot and is trying to get back into their body, I don't know, that just made so much sense to me. Makes me want to sign up for a class immediately.

00:30:05 - Shirley chock
Yeah, that is why. So my purpose is to share these mindset ideas and to also bring it beyond just learning Tai chi for the internal martial art. The internal martial art is how I got to this understanding. And I think that to really be able to fully utilize these ideas into techniques that your body can understand and feel, that's the path to pursue. But a lot of people can benefit from just changing their mindset to start thinking about how are they making their decisions and are they disconnected from their senses? And what are some ways that we can tune in to our senses? More especially in our modern society where everything just leads us further and further away from our own senses? We rely on technology to live. Now, I know people who can't eat a meal without their phone app because they have to log all their nutrition information and they're doing these keto and they're doing all of these things that they have to track these facts in their intake and they aren't connected to what their body is telling them. Our bodies tell us what we need way better than what any app does. So that's a lot of what my Instagram content is because Instagram is where I have the biggest reach and you have the most people coming in and it's like short tidbits. Right? 90 seconds. What can you really convey in 90 seconds? You can do little tips that are more for the general public. And I've been trying to do more to just allow people to learn how to come into their own bodies, to feel what their bodies are telling them. Our bodies are telling us things all the time. It's just we aren't listening. I Equate it like if you have a toddler, like if you have a kid, maybe not a toddler. If you have a kid and you tell them to do something, and they ignore you, and you tell them again and they ignore you, the only way you can get them to hear you is if you yell. Right. Then you yell at them, and then they respond, well, that's us and our bodies. Our bodies are telling us things all the time, but we're not listening. It's when it gets to that point where it has to yell at us. Like, the pain. You've been in a bad posture all day, hunched over, and now your neck is in pain, and then you finally pay attention to it. Right. These are things that if you can settle into your body and feel what your body is telling you, you become more aware to your senses. You connect your senses more, and you allow that to actually become stronger. And then you realize that if you trust the body, then the brain actually will you'll be able to tell when the brain is just trying to manipulate you? Because our brain are our biggest manipulator. We are our own worst enemy.

00:34:19 - Gino Cordone
Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. So I do want to get more into talking about your business, too. And I know that you've basically put content as the forefront of your business model now, and I wanted to ask you, was there any mindset shift that you had to overcome to be able to value that? Because I think a lot of business owners will be like, oh, that's just like an extra thing you can do if you have time for it, and then you never have the time for it. What was the thing? I mean, I know having a break and being shut down, but what was the shift in your mind to be able to to value that and to still do it today even though you're back open?

00:34:58 - Shirley chock
Yeah. And this is definitely something where I think you can't undervalue luck. Like, luck also comes into play. And I feel like the pandemic, it provided an opportunity for me to just test a lot of things. I'm not really a big social media person. The school didn't have an Instagram until the pandemic, actually, and social media was not where I was putting any attention in the beginning. When the pandemic hit, we had to make all movement instructors had to figure out, how are we going to make money? We can't hold our in person classes anymore, which is what was making us money. So how do we make money in this pandemic environment? So that was where I was thinking, okay, I have to be able to monetize very quickly. I need to have a very seamless way where I can provide value that my students will come online, because, of course, it has to be online. If it's not in person, has to be online. So I have to come online, and I have to provide something that still provides value that they will pay me for, and what can that thing be? And I made a very quick decision that Zoom classes were not the way to go. For me, it works for yoga, but for Tai Chi, where you actually have to follow movement, where you have to step and turn, and you're moving one arm up. If you're doing a zoom, and it's the mirror reflection, like, if you're supposed to step right and bring your right hand up, and I do this, when you do that, you're doing the opposite. You can't really follow me well, right? So if I continue to go here, and then I got to go here, and I turn around, that way, you can't follow that. Well, in this Zoom view, I can do the mirror image, and you follow along, and that works if we're just kind of in this two dimensional space. But once we start moving around in circles and start stepping and turning, that gets confusing as well. And Zoom has very little reach, right. You have to make sure that the people who you want to come have that zoom link before they can come into your class. So I was thinking, well, what would I want to have as the experience as a student? Ultimately, I'm a student first. I'm a teacher, but I'm a student first, and I want everything that I do to provide the best value for me as a student. Like, surely the teacher has to provide value for surely the student. So putting my student hat on and also just knowing what I know about technology and the different platforms that are out there, I was actually thinking that the viewing experience that I want people to have is actually what the gamers the gamers set up for their Twitch streams. That was the viewing experience that I wanted people to have. Twitch was it gives you this view where you can have a full screen of a like, they play games, so that's what they have in that capture of the screen, and then they have, like, a live camera, right? So you're watching them play video games. Well, I saw that as the experience I wanted people to have with a recorded video. So I recorded a lot of content in my school in front of the mirror with the camera behind me so that the viewing experience is like, if you were in class at the school, because that's what your experience is, you would be behind me. I would be in front of you. There would be the mirror in front. You would see my back. We would. Be moving exactly in the same, exactly the same, but then you would see what's happening in the front with the mirror. So that was the vision that I had as the best learning experience in an online experience. So I started a twitch stream. Twitch also allows you to monetize very quickly. So if you subscribe, first you need to be an affiliate. Once you're an affiliate, then you can actually have subscribers. The subscribers actually pay a monthly amount to subscribe, but then you can also have a donation link that you put into your channel, into your stream chat. And that was what I told my students. Classes have moved on to Twitch and it's donation based, but if you can afford to pay for class, then here's the link. And a lot of my students actually paid for every class that they attended. I followed my same class schedule. So if we were supposed to have class at the school, I would have that class online. And that was how I started it. In the beginning I had class and then people who were out of town then had an opportunity to learn with me. So we have a community. Since we've been teaching in Connecticut since 1996. There are a lot of people who have moved away and they may not have found the Tai Chi school in their area or they also shut down, right? Like everybody was shut down. And because I gave this better viewing experience, better learning experience, then they tuned in and they also donated to contribute to the class. And then I built some subscribers. And then I also saw this is valuable content. Every time I went online and taught, this was valuable content. So I saved. I actually first I downloaded the Twitch streams because Twitch allows you to download that. And then I realized that I actually needed a better recording. So I started downloading it from my streaming software that I recorded all of my streams. And then once my Twitch stream actually started growing, because then once you're on Twitch, that's the beauty of Twitch that people stumble on you. You have new people that come in and it kind of grew to the point where I couldn't treat it as a class anymore. But by that point I had accumulated so much content that I was able to package all of the prior classes into online videos that you can then subscribe to, or now you can also just download them without subscribing. So even now those early classes, I'm still monetizing now because people subscribe to them and watch them for instruction. And then I was able to grow my Twitch channel into more what you would think a Twitch channel to be grew. My online community started a discord for the online community and started having this global community. Then after I stopped streaming, the community was still there. And so when I went and started Instagram and TikTok, then the community went there. And then of course, once you start becoming once you go viral on TikTok and Instagram, that it just increases your reach so much more. So that's how it started. But I didn't think, I never ever thought I'm going to have 100,000 Instagram followers. Never in my wildest dreams even occur to me. And that wasn't a goal. That was never a goal. My goal was reach. So the thing that I'm really proud of is my videos, my instructional videos have been viewed in all six continents.

00:45:01 - Gino Cordone
Wow.

00:45:02 - Shirley chock
And then my brand has actually also reached Antarctica because one of my students actually did an ecotourism trip to Antarctica and she wore her I Ping Tai Chi shirt and snapped a photo in Antarctica.

00:45:19 - Gino Cordone
That's amazing.

00:45:21 - Shirley chock
That to me is important because that's engagement that's people who are interested in what I'm doing, having a lot of people who may not be so engaged, that isn't as important. The engaged followers is way more important.

00:45:44 - Gino Cordone
Definitely words of advice to people who are striving just for the numbers. Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time here, but I did want to ask one last question. If you like class or online community, share it. Where can they go? And then don't forget to subscribe for more episodes.

00:46:05 - Shirley chock
Yeah, my hashtag or my my tag. My handle is ipinktaiji A-I-P-I-N-G-T-A-I-C-H-I. My website is Ipinktaiji.com. So definitely come and learn more about our offerings and our programs on the website and on social media. What's next for me is building out my personal brand, that Stress Bender brand, that is gaining a lot of interest and momentum. And that's really where I'm going to be focusing more on how do I take these techniques that have helped me with my life and communicating that to more people outside of the context of studying Tai Chi for the internal martial art, which is still something that is super important for me, because that's why I took over IP Tai Chi. I made that commitment to my master that I'm continuing that legacy and we're going to still do that. But to bring this into a greater population where some of these techniques, beyond Tai Chi specific techniques, but mindset some of these tools to help people manage their stress better, those can help many more people and that can also lead more people into the practice of Tai Chi as well. So that is what I'm focusing on. You'll be seeing me more on social media with a little bit more lifestyle content.

00:48:12 - Gino Cordone
Well, that's really exciting and definitely looking forward to see what you come up with next. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom and I hope that everything that you envision comes true.

00:48:26 - Shirley chock
Thank you so much, Gino, and best of luck with you as well. And I'm looking forward to seeing you grow your business as well.

00:48:35 - Gino Cordone
Thank you.