One of the great things about coaching is how it helps us see beyond the surface and unearth the things inside us that we never thought were causing us stress or even pain. Coach, leader, and visionary Sook Yee Tai is all about helping people see the world from a different lens, leading them to a profound way of seeing themselves and the world. Prior to this extraordinary mission, Sook Yee was on a remarkable spiritual journey that enlightened her about the power of her mind and faith. In this episode, she joins Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner to share this with us and the amazing wisdom she earned along the way. She reflects on her upbringing as a Malaysian and third-generation Chinese, where she learned to integrate her Confucian background with her Christian faith, as well as her career path as a woman leader in a male-dominated field. All of this led Sook Yee to her passion for coaching and nurturing young executives. Find out how her spiritual journey influenced her coaching system and earn key insights on mind-body alignment, healing, and transformation.
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The Magic Of Coaching And Spiritual Awakening With Sook Yee Tai
With us we have Sook Yee Tai who’s a coach, a leader, and a visionary who is sharing with us a little bit about her spiritual journey, which began very early at a tender age. She experienced then how her mind can influence events and other kinds of experiences, which seemed to take her to places and see things that were not in our dimension. She attended a missionary school. She also has a deep Confucius upbringing. In 1997, she chanced upon transcendental meditation and began to experience a shift in consciousness. Sook Yee grew up in a culture that places great emphasis on Chinese traditions and received education in the Commonwealth system.
She qualified as a professional accountant and can boast 40 years of illustrious career where she has recorded a few groundbreaking milestones for Asian female leaders. However, she sees that all these come to pass, and what is more significant is being enlightened in her role in business and the role of business and society. Humanity, everywhere, anywhere, anytime, has the same purpose of life to love and to be loved. Being part of the Global Consciousness Institute and the Octave Institute is her offer to add value to this global transformation journey. Welcome, Sook Yee.
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It’s so good, Sook Yee, to have you with us. I was reflecting a little bit on this show and the time we would spend together, and I thought, “What better question to start with where Sook Yee’s energy is and who Sook Yee is who brings this energy to the world?”
Thank you, Ina. It’s a pleasure. It is great to be on the show. The energy is calm, collected, and ready to go into this conversation. My heart is racing a little bit now as I’m speaking and bringing out the excitement about what coaching can offer and what it has brought to me. Here’s a little bit of background about myself. I’m Malaysian. I’m based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I’m a third-generation Chinese outside China. There are some roots about me that are very related to my race, yet my Malaysian culture and where I was born have brought another level of consciousness of what culture and tradition offer.
I have been a corporate executive for most parts of my life. I am an accountant and a finance person by profession. What brought me into coaching is a journey through my career learning about human connections. There are different points in my life when I learned about human connections and the impact of the work that I do on the people who listen to me and also buy my products when I was in the capital market. It brought me into this consciousness that relationships don’t go to one level where I write the product. It goes much further than that. People believe in what I write and then invest.
There are a lot of repercussions as a result of that. It brought me into the first level of consciousness about integrity and responsibility and also made me make some very drastic decisions about not wanting to be in the finance sector anymore. I moved on and brought myself into the business world. While I was in the business world, it always brought me back to people.
In 1997, Malaysia and Southeast Asia were going through a massive financial crisis. The Thai-Viet economies were collapsing. On the 1st of July, the currencies were collapsing. I was going through a tremendous amount of stress at that time. I remember a friend of mine at that time told me, “Why don’t you try meditation?” I was like, “I don’t have time for this.” However, he signed me up and paid for my program. It was the first time I was introduced to and tried transcendental meditation, and it was profound. It didn’t change the things around me, but it brought my consciousness and my mindfulness level to a different state. I brought that to work.
The next level of a very different leap in my life in my spiritual development was when I joined a family business years ago. The entrepreneur who owns a family business brought me on a life spiritual journey. What has been important for me when I am in the business world has always been about mentoring and nurturing. Maybe it is something about women. I was in a male-dominated industry, yet that ability to nurture and bring people together appealed to me. It’s what gives me energy and a lot of life.
Over the years, I have had the benefit of being coached by a life coach, using that, and also bringing that back into my company as manager and coach never in a formal way. I always wanted to explore a little bit about what coaching means and what it does. During the pandemic, lots of things changed. I decided at that time, “It’s time to get myself organized into a coaching practice and what I wanted to do.”
I will close this part by saying that instead of getting myself certified as an individual coach, I got myself certified as a team coach and then as a wellness coach not because I love certifications. You get into this addiction. I got on this big journey, and it has been very fulfilling. I’ve started formal coaching and also used that to go back and do consulting for the company that I used to work for to build a coaching system. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, but that’s a little bit about myself and my journey.
Bonnie, if you don’t mind, I want to do a quick follow-up. I would love to talk more about coaching and what you’re doing more with that. I was very curious, and I don’t know if this takes us in a different direction. You said that years ago, you were working with this family business, and your boss at that time helped you get on a spiritual journey. I was curious to know what that meant. What was the spiritual journey?
Before you answer, I also picked up on that because I thought it was super interesting that you were talking about how male-oriented your business was, and you felt a need for nurturing, yet it was a male who brought you into the spiritual journey, which is very nurturing.
Let me take the first part about what I mean by spirituality. I am a baptized Christian brought up in a Chinese family, which is Tao and Confucianism based. The roots of my culture were something that I rejected for a very long time because I looked at Taoism and Confucianism as other religions. It was in conflict with what I thought was the way, which I still believe. That spiritual journey opened up a different part of my perception of Tao and Confucianism.
Tao and Confucian, to me, became a way of life. It was a practice, a culture, and a tradition. As a Chinese, I still feel rooted and engaged in it. I don’t reject it. I embody it. It helps me to deepen my Christian faith and my practice. I found that there was no conflict. That spiritual journey began to open up my ability to lift and begin to look at things around me in a much bigger way.
I always believed that yin and yang or the male and female in this business world were a dance. I’ve always tried to dance with my male colleagues. One of the things that I learned is that there are things that they do well, and there are things that I do well. Even though I may be an MD of a company, I don’t have to fight with them and be with them to take over their roles. I could still be a very strong power that supports them when they are out there in the marketplace. That’s how I worked.
That is how my male colleagues and I danced with each other. It was beautiful. I have good friends and customers who became partners and clients. They would tell me, “It is because of your ability to connect with us. That’s why I will give you a job because you will give us the type of partnership and service that we want.” This continued. I met my ex-boss who is my current client. His name is Fred. When I met Fred, I used to think, “This is a businessman. What he’s telling me about what consciousness and coaching and what is needed to transform the business world is unreal.”
They want to make money, but there’s something about the resonance that he left in me that said, “Never mind. Give him a chance. Stay for two years and then see what happens.” I’ve stayed with him for sixteen years, and I’m still a consultant working to help him so that we together can bring this up. It’s quite an interesting journey. He helped me to understand that the young energy that I am bringing up doesn’t have to be a strong young energy. I can leverage the young energy from my male colleagues. He has a nurturing energy, which appeals to me. I hope that gives a little bit more clarity behind that.
I have a couple of things I’m super curious about. It’s the same thing. You’ve described a process wherein you had a very certain idea about something, and you changed your idea. First, it was about your origins around Taoism and Confucianism, and the second was around Fred and thinking, “Why is he talking to me this way? He wants to make money.” You’ve moved. I’m curious to know. What allowed you to be open to seeing something new and exploring something new?
In simple terms, it’s my gut. With Fred, it was a resonance after I met him. The things that he said from a rational point of view can be real, but there was something resonant in my gut that said, “There is something here that is worth giving a chance.” As for my belief system, I’ve always had a particular attraction and interest in my origins or my Chinese roots, whether that is a lineage in my DNA from my generational work that is coming through me or whether it is a bit of curiosity. I’m not sure, but there has always been something very curious about that.
There is something that I feel is deep yet at that time, my mind was telling me, “This is what the institution of the church says about holding the chopsticks and eating food which has been offered to idols.” Here I am at home. My family is Taoist. How do I balance that? I always find that somehow, I feel that there is a way to merge it together. It then became clear to me. It was not about balance. It was not a compromise. It was integration. When that enlightenment came, it wasn’t a gradual process. One day I woke up and said, “I can feel it. It’s hard to describe, but I can feel the whole thing inside me. I’m comfortable.”
It’s part of the gut, but I hear also this curiosity and willingness to explore. I’m curious. Change is so much a part of all of our conversations these days. We need to change things about how we interact with the planet. When we’re coaching people, they come to us because they want to change something in their life. How do you work with people to be so explorative in their lives as you have been in yours when you’re coaching?
Let me first explain a little bit about how I see it and then the modality that I use. I always believe that everything starts from the inside. Coaching needs to allow us to listen behind the externalities that are affecting us as to what is inside us that is not aligning and that is causing the stress. When we begin to go deep, everything that we think is a problem is only the surface. To help the person look behind what’s the meaning and how we see the world is a way of changing my observer lens.
I started observer practice and mindfulness in 2010 when I first started having my life coach. It was profound because I’ve had experiences where in meditation, I’m in the corner of my room looking down at myself. I’m there in stillness. That profound way of seeing myself helped me to open up, hear things, and see things in a different way. The modality that I use is to shift our inner consciousness because that helps to express that inner space.
In ontological coaching, which I’m trained in virtually, I’m looking at using our body, emotions, and language to shift the observer we are. Only when I shift the observer and the being of my clients were they able to decide and make choices to have different outcomes. To me, that is the most powerful. More often than not, the shift in the observer in my client is not something that I expected. The biggest shift often comes when I’m surprised at what comes out after allowing in the presence.
A lot of corporate executives tend to shy away from that because they feel that this is too spiritual for them. I need to be able to engage them first in the language so that they can trust me, and then I can bring them into the somatic experience. The somatic experience is the work that I have been deepening myself. I’ve attained my level of calmness and stillness. If you’ve known me years ago, people can’t believe the change that is in me now. They can’t imagine the energy and explosive power I used to have.
Some of my clients who have known me before say, “I want to try to make that shift myself because what you have shown is possible.” From a coaching perspective, I spend more time nowadays nurturing young executives and middle managers. I found that’s where my passion is. That’s what enlightens me. First of all, they are the future. Secondly, they are so open to try new things and discover things. I love working with people in their 30s.
I also coach some who are coming up from universities and wanting to find their way in the world, “What do I do? How do I do it?” Those are the two areas that enlighten me and give me life. In the corporate world, what also brings me life is team coaching. Team coaching has such a big impact. When I started, it was a little bit difficult to get into the team as one entity and one unit, but once I got into it, I loved it. I love the energy, the movement of the different members of the team as one, and the way they come up to see the worldview from a team’s perspective or how they see the world.
I had a team. It was after two coaching sessions. I was so shocked when the team leader came and said, “I finally realized that my team’s worldview is nothing that we ask is going to be possible. Therefore, we behave that way. We know that’s not true. We can make requests. That will shift the entire team so profoundly.” The progress that they made after that was purely exponential. That’s what gives me light and life.
You light up when you say that. I could feel the whole resonance in my body. I was getting the little truth bumps in my skin as you said that. You could truly feel it. I’m curious. What I heard in what you say is that in the work as a coach, you have the audience identified, and there is a calling in you that you are expressing through your work, but I also heard a lot of deep commitment and continuous development on yourself. That is such a core thing.
You did your certification, but then you continue to build your practice and grow. I heard that in what you said. I’m also curious. You spoke earlier about the coaching work you’re doing now and building a coaching system. You’re working with clients, but you’re also building systems around it. Can you say more about that and how you’re putting this vision to work?
That probably takes me into expanding the team coaching work that I do. First of all, let me preface by saying that I believe that coaching as it is understood and defined is narrow and can be widened. Healing and trauma are something that coaches never wanted to touch on. I’m working on the being of people. That is something that inevitably coaches begin to know. We need to know how to touch, how to close the gap, and how to move forward with those that can move forward.
Coaching as it is understood and defined today is narrow and can be widened.
If I expand the coaching system, that encompasses coaching of groups for awareness, a-ha moments, individual coaching, or even team coaching for shifting of consciousness, but shifting is still a moment of experiencing, and then after that, a support system to help transformation through a process of shifting habits, and then sometimes and very often also another system that supports healing because that opens up another part. That’s something that I experienced myself.
I’ve always thought that I was very successful until I realized that I have a deep underlying trauma. My teacher brought me into a healing process with a healer. After that, my ability to open up my heart was incredible. I never believed it until I experienced it. This is a coaching system that cannot be done by one person. It stretches all the way from an awakening to transformation and healing, but on another level of a coaching system, we work with self, which is already our mind and our body.
I will not touch on the spirit because I believe that mind and body when alignment will have a spiritual enlightenment and awakening, but at the next level of the system, we also need to start to work on families, organizations, and teams as a system. At any point in coaching, people may be coming in with a whole lot of things. We open one window or door and enter, but we do need a support system to come in where needed so that someone else may be able to go through the healing first before they come back to coaching.
In the past, I used to learn that we need to maintain a network of people that we can refer to. However, I feel that this is not a network. This is a team of people with the same focus and the same modality that we are using. When I’m talking about modalities, I’m not talking about the types of protocols and the process. I am saying that coaches, healers, as well as facilitators, and learners alike need to develop one common platform of presencing. We need to have a presence. Learning that presence is holding space for my inner space, my outer space, and my secret space. The more complex the system we get into, the more we get into the secret space, which has a bigger impact.
In the coaching system, I believe that it is a group of people and a group of coaches that believe in a common presence and consciousness dancing together in this world. I liken it to a team of doctors that might be trying to nurse or heal a patient. You will have people who are doing cardio as well as neuro and stuff like that or coming together. They know the different systems and needs that need to operate together as one integrated system or the holistic well-being of one individual, one system, one family, or one organization. I hope I didn’t make it so complicated.
I like the expansion of the definition. Bonnie and I talk all the time about the narrow definition of coaching. I’m curious though. You talked about the doctors. Can you give an example of a client or someone who worked in using the systems approach that you describe?
I will keep it as simple as possible. I do have a couple of clients, but this client stands out because she’s in Europe, and she came to me. It started by seeking to be coached because she had been displaced from her base in London, got married with two children, went to Europe, felt very lonely, and wanted to see how she could coach and find a coach to help her. I spent about six months with her, and that opening came to a point where we were doing a lot of somatic coaching. She’s open to the soma, the body, and listening to her body. It came to a point where it was her relationship with her husband that became strained and the support system that she was looking for.
This was still a network, but it was a network of people that I worked very closely with. For her individual healing, she worked with a real energy and body coach, and because she is in Europe, this work had to be done with somebody who was based there. She worked with a body coach. Concurrently, she was working also with a couple’s therapist in terms of her marriage.
This system eventually brought her back to me after she finished her somatic work. She said that she feels that she’s ready to come back into the coaching system with me because she feels that she has healed and cleansed her body. She has better clarity, which allows her to have a very different perspective working with her husband. Her husband eventually also wanted a coach. I recommended a person who works on the male systems. She has found a new lease of life. I’m not coaching her anymore, which I’m happy to say because she has found a way out for herself. She has a very successful career now. She still chats with me once in a while and tells me how things are. That’s an example.
What I’m helping Fred build in Singapore is coordinated and a more structured way of bringing this into one system. I’m going to be working and onboarding about fifteen coaches all coming from different modalities, some bodywork, some executive coaching, and some life coaching, and bringing everybody together so that we explore what presencing brings to our individual work and how that brings to life a different level of coaching, body, and life.
It sounds like you were building that support system for the client. What I heard you describe is following very good ethics around coaching and the boundaries around it because there’s a process where coaching can be useful. There’s a process where another aspect of healing could be useful or therapy. There are boundaries around that. Bonnie and I had this conversation with the class. You need to have a referral system in place to understand the needs of the client, not just the referral but also the system itself and what the needs are. That’s fascinating. Bonnie, I took too much space here.
Not at all. I have one question that was on my mind from even reading your bio as we were preparing for this conversation. You work at the AITIA Institute.
AITIA Institute is now known as Octave Institute. We got rebranded.
When I was looking at the literature there, one of the things that was interesting to me was this movement from individual to family, family business, and then business. I find this insertion of family business and the importance that’s placed on families creating business together super interesting. I would like to hear you speak to that for a moment and why that’s relevant.
Let me backtrack and go back into the currently known Octave Institute. Previously, it was known as AITIA Institute. One of the things that Octave Institute in Singapore is focusing on is to make an impact in shifting global consciousness through business reforms. We believe that business is the most efficient institution to serve economies. To shift and tilt the ethics in the business world and what is it serving, the shift in family businesses through reforms is going to be the most impactful and effective.
The shift in family businesses through reforms is going to be the most impactful and effective.
If you take family and business and start looking at the dynamics, you can’t separate the family from the business. First of all, family businesses contribute to about 60% to 70% of the global economy. It’s tremendous. On top of that, for many years and until now even though the lifespan is shorter, family businesses last longer than corporates. There is something about family businesses holding family businesses together for sustainability. It is the family, legacy, relationship, and what it means for a family’s relationship versus a family’s entitlement to wealth. It’s a relationship to wealth, and that’s a shift of consciousness.
Octave Institute focuses on and wants to be able to make an impact in that area. Coaching is a very big form of support system for that transformation because at the end of the day, if I want to shift a family business as an institution, I cannot run away that business leaders in a family business will need to untangle and also heal their traumas, origins, and family traumas. Businesses also have traumas.
This entire system of shifting consciousness is the focus. The family business is the entry point because we feel that when we get through the family business, the impact is going to be the biggest. We’re trying to build that. We talked a little bit about critical yeast. I’m trying to build that critical yeast. We believe that family businesses will provide that critical yeast. I hope I’ve answered your question, Bonnie.
You did. It’s an important area of impact for intervening in shifting consciousness and also strengthening what is a very core unit, 65% to 70% of the economy. A certain amount of agency and coherence that can come from families having their business has long been an interest of mine. For our audiences, I wonder if I can ask you because you’ve used the phrase global consciousness a couple of times. How do you understand that? What does that phrase mean to you?
People have asked me to define consciousness, and I always say that I can’t define consciousness in words properly purely because consciousness to me is not language. When I look at global consciousness, the only thing that would probably be as close to the scripture as possible is to bring our living systems into oneness. To do that awareness that we are a collective system and we impact every system, the next biggest system that we are living within is going to be the consciousness that we need to awaken to so that the actions and choices that we are making in terms of the purpose for why and what we are doing needs to be collective, but actions need to come from individuals.
We all have our unique gifts, and these unique gifts contribute to that global purpose. As long as we hold that global purpose of unity and oneness and the collective well-being of my next system to be well, then I would be able to be satisfied, happy, and at one with everything. Consciousness, awareness, and oneness are probably a couple of keywords that I would bring up.
We have been divided into Eastern and Western systems, male and female, the rich and the poor, the educator, the old and the young, and so forth yet when we look at it, the Western systems have such a strong language behind the science, the statistics, the research, as well as indigenous and different perennial wisdom. The Eastern systems have always been until now very communal. It has always been about family. It has been a lot more about collective systems as one.
For me, it’s a colonial system. It’s the Commonwealth. I’m educated in the British system yet that part about me that family is very important as part of the Chinese tradition lives inside me. Both are needed. They’re not mutually exclusive. When those two integrate to become one, the world will be able to maintain its uniqueness and be in harmony. That’s what I mean by, “The world is awakening to this need.” That’s the global consciousness I’m referring to.
As we close, I would love to invite you to offer any last words or any particular practice. We love practices or invitations for the audience.
My personal practice is prayer. It’s a fundamental practice. I always believe that the morning time for meditation and prayer is super effective. I believe a second practice that is very important and key to us as executives moving in the world is moving meditation or moving stillness. I do Qigong. Qigong to me is so profound. I’m moving yet I am at one with my movement, the air, and everything around me.
That practice is something that keeps each day to be reborn anew. I love that practice. That is something that if I don’t do for whatever reason in a day, my day never gets off as well as what it can be. In closing, let us give our minds and bodies a chance for alignment. We have been using our minds so much. It’s about time we begin to allow our bodies to speak to us. This mind-body alignment is going to be the magic that we will be experiencing if we allow it to emerge.
That’s beautiful. Thank you so much, Sook Yee. It has been magic to be here with you. Thank you.
Thank you so much. It is a pleasure.
Important Links
About Sook Yee Tai
Founding Steward, Global Consciousness Institute
Advisory Council Member, Octave Institute (S) Limited
Advisor / Senior Coach / Facilitator, Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT) Independent Non-Executive Director of Malaysia Listed Entities