Dr. Hank: “In this talk show, we will discuss a set of five values that can serve as a compass to live a life of purpose, fulfillment and joy.  GRACE is a framework proposed by the New Moon Foundation and be implemented at the Youth Leadership camp delivered by VCSA. GRACE stands for Gratitude – Respect – Accountability – Courage and Engagement, each value needs to be honored and all these five values need to be integrated into one’s daily life to live an actualized life.

Please join Dr. Anhlan Nguyen, Director of Development at Institute for Civic Education in Vietnam to discuss GRACE and learn how to use it to develop successful habits for your life.”

Click here to listen to the full interview!

In the dead of night, a rickety boat teeming with people tried to make its way from the coast of Vietnam to international waters, where they hoped to find freedom.

Sixteen-year-old Anhlan Nguyen and her family were on it, fleeing their home after the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War. The boat was intercepted and returned to land, and those onboard were jailed. Nguyen and her siblings were even prohibited from attending school.

“I loved to study, and I was the best student in my class,” said Nguyen, who now works in IT at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and is a devoted philanthropist and volunteer. “My mother saw this and saved money to try and help me escape one more time.”

In her second attempt, she and 300 others were on a 40-foot boat that sank near the coast.

“I nearly lost my life. It was the most traumatizing thing to happen to me,” Nguyen said. “We almost made it to international waters when our captain said we had to turn back because the boat was going to sink. When we were close to the coast, the boat sank. A lot of people didn’t know how to swim. They drowned.”

The experience impacted Nguyen deeply. “It shaped who I was to see those people die in front of me,” she said.

Her father tried to escape several times and, on his ninth try, made it to safety and then found his way to Canada, where he could be a sponsor to bring over other family members.

She was 22 when she was finally able to leave Vietnam.

Compelled by the horrors of her life there, she immediately began working to help other refugees and enrolled at the University of Toronto, from which she graduated with honors.

Nguyen has been honored for her efforts to engage Vietnamese youth, receiving the “Local Hero” award given by the Bank of America in 2006 and the Women’s Empowerment Leadership Award in 2011.

She also has received national attention. President Barack Obama appointed her to the Vietnam Education Foundation board, which strengthens U.S.-Vietnam relations through education initiatives.

“Each of us, when we’re born, we’re born with a gift, even if you don’t know it,” Nguyen said. “Find your passion. There will be a lot of noise from parents and others. Ignore it.”

When Nguyen arrived in Canada, she spoke some English but found conversation difficult to follow.

In time, her English-speaking skills improved, she graduated from college with honors and got a job right away. She met her husband in Canada, and the couple moved to Houston in 1994.

She arrived knowing no one but quickly networked her way through half the city, said Michelle Tran, who has been mentored by Nguyen. The two met in 2009 through Len Duong Camp, a youth-leadership camp Nguyen founded.

“She’s that person who’s commenting on your Facebook wall about anything you’ve done,” Tran said. “She knows everyone, what they’re up to and accomplishing.”

Her passion also has inspired her to lead multiple humanitarian efforts on behalf of flood and hurricane victims, most notably those of Hurricane Katrina.

“Sometimes I’m surprised she has a full-time job with all the work she does in the community,” said Cindy Dinh, another woman mentored by Nguyen. “She has a tireless dedication to civic engagement and empowering young people.”

The two met when Dinh was honored in the Youth Excellence Recognition Program, which recognizes local high school valedictorians and salutatorians of Vietnamese ancestry.

“I felt compelled to do something when I first came here,” Nguyen said, “I was blessed by all these freedoms. I wanted to be an advocate for students.”

Nguyen credits her philanthropic spirit to a passion for helping others, even when her family told her she should do less in order to focus on her own studies.

“The best way to live your life, to live any life, is to align what you love with what you do,” Nguyen said. “That is happiness, and that is what I do.”

Emotional Intelligence (EI) became a popular concept to help corporation to boost up performance, improve their employee engagements and develop top performers (Goleman, 1995). As studies have shown, 90 per cent of top performers have high EQ (Emotional Quotient, which is the measurement of one’s emotional intelligence), and EI has been one of the key indicators for success not just for improving professional life or business life but also to personal life.

Healthy relationships are important for living a happy and healthy life. A famous longitudinal study conducted by Harvard University on 268 of the university’ male sophomores in 1938 produced a profound finding that there was a strong correlation between these men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends and the community. People live longer when they are happy in their relationships and have less mental and physical decline the study found.

How can we use emotional intelligence to improve our relationships so that we can live a good life? This is a topic professor Robert Waldinger at Harvard Medical School outlined in his TED talk “What is a good life?” Emotional intelligence is an array of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills and behaviors that determine how well we understand and express ourselves, understand others, relate with them, and cope with daily demands, challenges and pressures. Among these competencies, inter-personal skills are among the most important to help a person to connect with others and establish long-lasting relationships. In order to develop this skill, one needs to practice empathy and active listening. It starts with trying to understand the other person’s perspective and the feeling and emotions they are experiencing. You need to feel what it would be like to be in their shoes.

Practicing empathy is what Steven Covey states is to “Seek first to understand before being understood.” Each of us has our own bias that was shaped by our thinking, culture and background. We normally tend to look at things through our own lens. To practice empathy, we need to be mindfully aware that each person is unique and special in his or her own right with his or her own feelings and emotions. For the best connection with the other person, don’t use your head but instead open your heart and connect with a loving intention and the willingness to accept differences. Practicing gratitude and respect can lead to empathy and allow us to connect at a deeper level.

Active listening is another EI skill that we need to develop in order to establish and develop strong relationships with other. You listen deeply, with the intention to feel and understand the other person, and don’t just respond to what the other person has to say. When we open our heart and listen with intention and attention, the other person can pick up that positive energy and feel the warmth and the caring attitude from us. As a result, a true connection is established. Empathetic listening and active listening are key strategies to enable us to develop a strong relationship with others.

Relationships are important in our lives. By setting the intention to practice empathy through gratitude and respect, and active listening using your heart instead of your head, emotional intelligence will help establish mutual satisfying relationships with your family, friends and colleagues. Each of us has the power to choose our intention and attention to make this happen.

For more information, you can come and join the Lyceum team on June 15 to learn more about how to improve relationships through emotional intelligence.

By Dr. Anhlan Nguyen

Today we’d like to introduce you to Anhlan Nguyen.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Anhlan. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
2017 was a year of transformation for me as I changed my 25-year career as an IT Portfolio Manager to become an ICF certified Professional Life Coach, specializing in Emotional Intelligence and Coaching for Transformation, established a social enterprise called Lyceum and started my speaking career. I did all of these while coping with my most difficult challenges as I lost my parents within six weeks from each other, with my husband’s being hospitalized and as I went through all the professional training to achieve my new credential of a professional life coach and a professional fundraiser and built a start-up at the end of the year.

Here I am at the end of 2018, a year full of actions and new energy. I learned to transform the pain of my grief into a source of incredible energy not only to sustain myself but also to uplift me to the next level of my life. God gave me this gift of pain and sorrow so that I can be connected with whom I will serve to help them transform their pain to something that enriches them. I never feel so much alive, living on the fast lane, aligning all of my actions and work with my passion of human development, helping others to be connected with their own best version to become better, happier and be the best they can be. I was very fortunate to be appointed by President Barack Obama from 2012 – 2016 to serve on the board of Directors of Vietnam Education Foundation and had the opportunity to be connected with educators from across the country. My passion has always been in Education and Personal and Leadership Development. With Lyceum, I hope to serve not only young adults but also professionals and entrepreneurs from all walks of life who want to achieve their goals to live a fulfilled and happy life with success both in professional and personal life. I found my purpose of serving others with the focus on their emotional intelligence and promoting the values of GRACE (Gratitude – Respect – Accountability – Courage – Engagement).

As I delivered in the acceptance speech for the “Americanism Medal” awarded by the Honor Society of American Daughters of American Revolution (DAR) in 2017, it has been a tremendous blessing to live in America and living the American Dream, it is truly an honor for me to love, to serve and to give! I would like to share with you the short poem I created as a refugee/immigrant to this great country which I call home in the past few decades.

I was a refugee
Escaping during those days after the Vietnam war
Freedom is not free
In Vietnam, we paid by risking life at sea!
Out of one million who tried to make it
Only one third made it to America!
I consider myself the lucky one,
Who arrived and made a new life here.
I am a proud Vietnamese – American
My motherland gave me birth and identity,
But it is America who gave me freedom and opportunity
To blossom and to be the best I can be!
Now as the citizen of this beautiful country
It is my privilege and honor
To volunteer, to serve and to give!
Thank you, America!

I look forward to serving you!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Life cannot be always smooth, let alone the fact that when you started something new. I stopped working in the corporate world which gave me a very comfortable 6 figure annual income to dedicate full time as a Non-profit Director of Development which reduced my salary to nearly nothing, plus I also started up a new business on coaching, training, and development with basically nothing. However, the most important thing is that you know who you are and you have a burning desire of accomplishing some lofty goal and the tenacity and resilience to work tirelessly until you achieve your goal. For young women who just started a similar journey, here are what I would like to recommend:

1. Solid understanding of who you are and always working on developing and becoming the best version of yourself in term of skills and attitude. What story you are telling yourself about you? If it is not a good story, change it and stick to the good one that lifts you up.

2. Determine what do you want to do in life, focusing on those that make you feel so much alive, your passion will be the fuel for you to continue when things get tough. You have to solidly clear about the WHY of everything you do.

3. Maintaining a positive attitude toward life – You have the power to control your mind, if you do not control it, it will control you. Feed your minds with positive thoughts, focusing on the future and the vision you have drawn for yourself.

4. Work relentlessly, I meant relentlessly, to refine the skills needed to be successful in whichever you determine. Learn, learn and learn and practice, practice, practice… until you master your craft! Failure is necessary to achieve success, so fail fast and learn from them.

5. Try your best and then let faith lead you to maintain your inner peace. After all, you have done your best in your own circumstances and God will arrange the rest. Accept whatever challenges come your way and knowing that you do have the inner resources to cope with them regardless.

Good luck to all!

Alright – so let’s talk your work. Tell us about Lyceum – what should we know?
I am a community builder, a social activist, and an educator.

In 2005, I worked with a few others to establish a coalition of community of colors (Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native Americans) to work on a campaign for the smoking ban in the City of Houston, and after three years, we achieved the goal, it was the most uplifting experience I had seen the whole community coming together for a worthy cause, which is establishing a policy to protect the issue of second-hand smoke in the restaurants and all public workplace.

In 1998, I started a youth leadership development camp for young adults (age 18 – 35) called Len Duong camp for Vietnamese youth from across America. The camp has lasted in the past 21 years, developing more than 5000 young leaders for our communities across the United States and Canada. Youth leadership Development is my passion and the most rewarding experience is seeing your mentees becoming the best version of themselves. This path has enabled me to choose the career of coaching that I currently have.

My specialty is coaching for transformation, providing leadership development training focusing on emotional intelligence and how to improve your life both professionally and personally. I have delivered a speech at conferences, or different groups such as the Google employee network, the Canadian Lady Bosses, or the Vietnamese Canadian Professional Network event, etc. Since I was working with my doctoral dissertation on Emotional Intelligence, my interest shifted to human development and now I am a certified Emotional Intelligence coach and frequent speaker on EI and EQ topic.

Lyceum is a brand new organization specializing in professional development training both in the workplace and for entrepreneurs. We are a team of seasoned professional trainers and coaches who are passionate on helping others to achieve their full potential, to live a much happier, healthier and more productive life and also enjoy their ride through this life. For more information, please contact us through info@lyceumglobal.net for more information. We also develop customized training to address your own company’s needs on employees development and employees’ engagement.

Do you feel like there was something about the experiences you had growing up that played an outsized role in setting you up for success later in life?
I grew up in the war-torn country of Vietnam and witnessed deaths on a daily basis as a child. This taught me the value of life and the blessing of just the fact that you are alive! After 1975, my family tried several times to escape from Vietnam. In one of these failed attempts, I was put in jail when I was only 16 years old. I also had an experience of an escape that failed, I was on a 15-meter boat that carried 300 people on several layers. The boat was leaked as we approached the international border, it had to come back to the shore and about 300 meters from the shore, the boat sank! Half of the people on that boat died while I tried to swim toward the shore fighting for my own life. This experience taught me so much about the price of freedom, the blessing that I currently have that hundreds of thousands of other refugees couldn’t have since they died on the high sea. It shaped my characters of endurance and perseverance, never taking “No” as an answer and never quit once you are on a journey toward a goal you have chosen. All the challenges are only the “blessings” to teach me to be better, more resilient and more ready for the ultimate success.