Tell me about your vision.
My vision is that all people can feel connected, heard, understood, and appreciated.
It's my mission statement in life.
I want to help people make more meaningful relationships
in all areas of their life, personal and professional, families, business, coworkers.
We should not feel like we are lost and no one understands it appreciates us.
Tell me more about that.
Well, in my own personal journey, I struggled with making those connections.
And because I felt so lonely for so many years,
I thought that there was something wrong with me.
Because if I look around, I would see everyone else out there
seem to have their own relationships.
They seem to have their friend groups, their families were intact.
And I was like, well, what does everyone know that I don't know?
And I would go and try to ask them, try to get some information.
Like, okay, you know something, I don't.
And I can never really get a clear answer about that.
And so I think a lot of people are struggling and they're feeling the same way.
Like, how can I get these kind of relationships that I see on TV
or that I see on Instagram or that I see on other social medias?
How can my relationships be like this?
I'm just not getting an answer.
And those people might think that there's something wrong with them.
So I want to dispel that idea that there's something wrong with them.
It's just perhaps they don't know what they need to know. That's all.
Oh, that's a very simple vision and it's very profound.
You kind of already shared where did this vision come from.
But do you have any stories behind the why of your vision?
Well, like I said, I struggled with making those meaningful relationships.
And I started to believe that there was something wrong with me.
And I would just not pursue any kind of real connection.
I would hide myself from essentially hiding how I felt about things so that I can fit in.
Because I thought, well, that's what everyone else is doing.
So I need to hide myself to fit in or I need to not share when I'm struggling with something.
And it came to a head many, many times in my life.
But the one that I can think of in particular, when I was 20 years old,
I had a really bad stomach issue for a couple of days.
And I thought, it's not a big deal.
I'm just going to take some Tums and drink some Milanta and I will be OK.
I will eventually recover from it.
But it was worse than I had thought.
And I had actually went to seek medical attention and they said, look, it's your appendix.
Your appendix could rupture.
And I was so surprised by this and didn't tell anyone that I had this real connection.
I had this real bad stomach pain for a couple of days.
Even though I was in a relationship, I didn't tell anyone.
I didn't tell the people that I call my friends because I thought that they didn't really care that deeply for me.
They wouldn't support me if I needed it.
I didn't even know how to say this.
Don't open up.
As soon as you open up, they're going to leave you.
This is what I thought.
And I don't want people to think that.
It could have been a really catastrophic situation.
But I went to the hospital and they took care of me.
I had surgery and everything was OK.
Even then, I barely talked about the fact that I had surgery to my friends.
I just kept myself hidden.
And there are so many of us just suffering because we're hidden like that.
What would you say that was the cause or the reason behind your feeling you needed to hide your feelings?
Oh, certainly because they were never seen and appreciated.
They were never they were not appreciated.
And unconsciously, I received all that information sharing the things that were joyful and fun and interesting to me.
And people would say, oh, that's stupid.
Oh, get a hobby.
Oh, get a life.
They would laugh and make fun of those things.
And so if I like Pokemon or if I like Sailor Moon, you know, when I was a kid, it was just something that continued to happen.
Anything that was joyful and important to me was downplay.
And so I thought, well, people really don't care.
I took that with me into adulthood and continued out for the rest of my life until I discovered not the rest of my life.
I'm here saying something different, but it impacted me for several decades.
Wow. You lost a lot of time and emotions, I'm assuming, during that time.
Well, I I'd like to say that I learned like it was a learning process.
I wouldn't be able to tell you that story today if I hadn't gone through the process, gone through this process.
So I helped people go through the process a lot quicker.
I learned a whole lot of things about myself along the way that I can reflect on today.
Like, oh, this is another experience that I've had and I can make an opportunity or now it presents an opportunity for me to change it.
So no longer will I feel like I can't share.
I just open up and I tell people what's on my mind because I know it's important not to feel that that pain of being misunderstood more so than it is to be rejected.
I can handle the rejection, but I don't like the pain of being misunderstood because I didn't open up.
Wow. What what have you experienced since you started opening up?
Oh, lots of rejection. But it's a good thing.
That's a good thing. I operate with this belief that the world and the universe will continue to present things to me.
And I get the opportunity to decide whether or not I want them.
And if I get rejected by somebody or something, it's a sign that it wasn't for me and I didn't want it in the first place.
They'll give me a reason eventually.
If it's a person and they reject me, well, I always want to be around people who want to be around me.
So I'll share a super quick story. Is that OK?
Go ahead.
All right. So I'm transgendered female to male.
And when I was working through this and learning more about being vulnerable, opening up, sharing my feelings, I thought that is the key for me not for me to make meaningful relationships.
That's why I'm not making connections because of the shared with my story.
I didn't open up when I needed help, so I need to open up sooner rather than later.
So I decided I would open up and I would talk about being trans because I wanted to talk about something that was deep and important to me.
I thought that was the key move.
So I had this mindset where I was going to go to a comedy club, positive intention.
I'm going to make a friend.
I look for someone and be intentional to talk to. I found this guy. Let's have a conversation.
We're talking and it seems really good. And I want to talk about me being trans because I thought in my mind that is going to help us make a meaningful relationship.
They need to know that right away. Don't hide anything, Lee.
You've got it. So I feel a little bit cautious about just saying it right up like, hello, I'm trans.
That's wild. That's weird. That's a little too much.
But I use something called strategic vulnerability where I open up the conversation a little bit.
And I talked about LGBTQ stuff and they were like, yeah, I'm fine with that. Not a big deal.
And then I talked about trans things and they were like, oh, I have a problem with trans people.
I've never met one before, but I don't have a problem with it.
And I thought, oh, perfect. I'm going to tell him that I'm transgendered and I'm going to fill that curiosity gap for him and then we'll be best friends.
And so I did. And the guy was just like. And he froze. It's like a glitch or something.
He froze and then he just left. He didn't say anything else to me in the conversation.
He just left. And I'm sharing the story with you because I want to be around people who want to be around me.
And although I was really devastated and hurt by that situation, I did not die.
What I learned is that I need to be a bit more intentional about sharing the deeper things about who I am.
Still, vulnerability is the key. But sharing those deeper parts of who you are, not everybody wants to know them and not everybody can understand them.
You're absolutely correct. Not everyone wants to know them and not everyone wants to understand them.
And they have the capacity to understand them.
Right. A lot of that also comes with what people hear around in culture and what they watch on social media and what they follow.
And it's very unlikely nowadays to find or you see someone and you don't have a perception in your mind automatically when you look at them or you see them.
And when it comes to transgender people, I think that would also be very likely when people say, oh, I see a transgender person.
Oh my gosh. You know what I mean? I've got to protect myself.
There could be a lot of, I'll say, fuzz in there that necessarily might not be correct.
And I thank you for sharing that.
Yeah. And one of the bigger takeaways, I know that I'm trans and this is my experience, but I'd like to equate the transness.
The idea with the idea of the fact that we all have something that's deep and important to us that other people just cannot understand.
And so knowing that about ourselves and knowing who to share it with is going to be very powerful to make the right kind of connections.
Who can handle the capacity to know you?
We go around and discover who that is rather than just hiding it and saying no one will ever understand me.
But if you're paying attention, if you're intentional, you're strategically vulnerable about what you share, you'll discover that.
That is profound. I haven't had an experience like that yet because I have not been intentional like that.
But you have. So I commend you for sharing that.
That is absolutely correct. Instead of sharing it with everyone, it's more important to share it with the right people.
Right.
A lot of things I can't share with my mom because my mom wouldn't understand the same way.
Same way, right?
Yeah. And that's very powerful. Thank you for sharing that.
Well, our next question for you, Coach Lee, is what is your goal for being on the show?
My goal for being on the show aligns directly with the vision of helping people feel heard, understood, appreciated and accepted.
I want to reach as many people as I can with this information about being yourself.
There's an idea out there that says you have to love yourself first.
And I want people to know that, of course, we need to love ourselves first.
Loving ourselves really means to understand us, what's important to us, what values we hold, how we're going to be in spaces with people we don't like,
how we're going to be in spaces with our family members, people we do like, all of those things.
We need to know more about ourselves.
And there was great confusion for me with the idea of loving yourself first.
And my goal for being on the show is to help people understand that loving yourself first is spending more time with yourself,
understanding yourself, appreciating, accepting that person that you are.
And how was that experience for you?
Oh, it was wonderful. It continues. It continues. It continues, it continues, it continues.
I learned something new about myself every day.
And it's a journey that feels good because I'm delighted in what I discover about myself.
Even when I reflect on things that I've done in the past, I'm like, wow, look at me, I've changed so much.
So it's a delightful experience to learn more about me.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.