Michelle:

Officially, let's get started. I bumped my microphone, so that's a really good start. Welcome to Taylor and Jeremy. Thank you so much for being here. So happy to have both of you. Why don't we just go through a round of introductions. I think a lot of people obviously don't know that you invited me on your podcast recently and I had such a great time. I wanted to return the favor. So here we are. Who wants to go first?

Taylor:

I will start. I am Taylor. I am co-founder of Married to English and the Resourceful English Method with my husband. I was a barber for 10 plus years, so I learned how to communicate with just about anybody. And I did musical theater for a long time. That's how Jeremy and I met. So yeah, from California originally, but now we live in Utah.

Jeremy:

And I'm Jeremy. I am said husband. So yeah. I'm also a co-founder of the resourceful English method. I was actually born and raised in Utah. So Taylor comes from California. I was born and raised in Utah, and I am a recovering socially awkward person. A lot of my language skills and communication skills came from the lack thereof when I was younger. And so I learned how to do a lot of things. I overcame a stutter when I was younger, and this kind of became my profession helping other people to master their mouths and communication.

Michelle:

So I actually learned more about both of you in that very short intro. I want to get to the work that you do together, but Jeremy, do your clients know that you overcame…? Do you share your personal journey? I actually think it is pretty impressive. Yeah.

Jeremy:

A lot of my clients do know about my stutter because it's still prevalent. It's still there in my life. I just have more control over it. But if I start to get upset or if my brain's just not working, that's when it starts to really come out and I need to then catch it. We do share a lot of personal stories like, Hey, when I was little, I couldn't get people to like me and it's because I realized X, Y, Z. And so yeah, it does bleed in a lot.

Taylor:

And we still have our awkward moments all the time, but that's where we like to share how we overcame the awkward moments…How to avoid it.

Michelle:

Because awkwardness is not just something that is on your end, it's also on the person that you're talking to and you really don't know in so many situations where it's going to go. I mean, we weren't recording yet, but Jeremy, you were just talking about your trip away and I was like, okay. Yeah, great. And then I'm waiting for you to finish. I'm like, oh, wait. No, you were done. So is that on me or you?

Jeremy:

It's probably me.

Michelle:

No, no. My point is… haha thank you. I'm trying to illustrate that it's so much more complicated. So why don't we get into the work that you do, your company, your initiative, your mission. I would love if you could both kind of share it because as I've gotten to get to know I guess both of you over the last few months, I am finding, I don't know, my own kind of journey with I understood in the beginning and then I was like, wait, no, but it's so great, but it's so great. So why don't you share what you do?

Taylor:

I guess I can go first.

Jeremy:

Yeah, absolutely.

Taylor:

And you fill in the blanks. Whatever I miss because I will miss things. So we have a program especially for ESL women, and we chose women in particular because we know that women tend to have a completely different unique experience in many aspects in their lives, in work, in their daily lives at the gym, in learning spaces especially. And so we wanted to create a safe space, a safe environment for them to be open, vulnerable, because when you're afraid to make mistakes, you don't make mistakes and then you don't learn. And so we wanted to foster that environment for growth, and we help them go from maybe a little bit more insecure and shy to being able to speak up and carry themselves with confidence and understand some of those cultural nuances of language and showing them that English isn't necessarily the goal, it's a stepping stone to your goal. So helping them map out exactly what they really want and why.

Jeremy:

Yeah. A funny little side story though is that appealing only to women actually came about through research and by accident. Originally, so we believe very strongly that if you have the language, but you're still not connecting with people, that's the problem. You don't know how to connect with another human being. You don't know how to connect there. So we started teaching that, and originally it was open to everyone, but in our first round when we were doing our test, basically we had six clients who signed up for the big program, our first official launch, and they were all women. We had no men sign up, so it was just six women who got in. And then as we continued doing the research, the question just popped up one day from one of our clients and said, so are you going to let guys in? We wrote, well, that's kind of a weird question to ask. Why are you asking this question? And that's when it was kind of revealed that, hey, we've actually been feeling encouraged to speak. And it's not that we hate men, it's just that when I'm here with my sisters, I feel a bit more like myself, more open. And so we then took it to the group and we put it to a vote and decided to move forward with only women.

Michelle:

Yeah, that's incredible because I actually didn't know that in the beginning you started kind of open to the masses, and then it was just through the process of being naturally the people who were naturally attracted by whatever it is you were saying, right? The messaging happened to be there even if you weren't directly and overtly saying it. That's pretty cool. Can you kind of walk us through everything that happened before, I guess pre the company, your work in the industry, your work in the field? Obviously you didn't wake up one day and you were like, you know what? Let's just become entrepreneurs. That sounds fun, right? Oh my goodness. Or maybe you did. I don't know. Let’s find out.

Taylor:

So as I said before, I was a barber. Jeremy actually went from the tech world to massage therapy. And so we were both in the industry of touching people. And then this funny little thing happened in 2020 that told us that we couldn't go to work anymore. The pandemic hit. And so our jobs, which were not protected during lockdowns, we couldn't go to work. We couldn't make any financial means for ourselves. We were stuck at home. And I feel like this is where a lot of people started fostering their work at home ideas and jumping into entrepreneurship. So that's when we started going, let's, all right, well, we got to do something. We have to bring in some sort of income.

Jeremy:

Funny thing, that money.

Taylor:

So we started teaching on a live stream app. We started teaching to the masses, just live streaming lessons. And then there became a demand for one-on-one coaching with us. And so Jeremy and I, we both started teaching one-on-one classes with people, and we both grew our clientele quite a bit. We had a lot of students. And over time we started realizing the clients that were most attracted to us and what their needs were, which helped us define what our specialties were along that fit into our own stories of growth and learning to overcome different communication barriers. And so we realized that we started to repeat ourselves a lot, the same message over and over again to the same type of person. Or I wish there was a way that we could just go and package it and be able to help find those specific people that we know… this will help them 100%. If they are the right person, it will help them. And so we started trying to attract that person. And so yeah, we found a coach for ourselves and it has been a very scary, very difficult, very fun and eyeopening experience. Entrepreneurship, the work never stops.

Michelle:

No, no. And for myself as well. Do you both have a system to manage it? Because also you work on it together. And I only recently brought Yann into this, and also Yann came into my life actually after I had already started everything with WeCultivate. So I don't want to compare, but I've had a longer relationship with this company than I have with him. So how do you both manage your kind of personal, professional work-life balance stuff? Do you have a system?

Jeremy:

Yeah, actually. (Taylor: Getting there!) As of right now, we currently play to each other's strengths because even though we do have a lot of things such as our ethics, our political views and everything like that in common, Taylor and I on the spectrum are quite different. So male, female, obviously I'm a type A, (she’s) B, I'm an extrovert, she's an introvert. And so there is that kind of balance. We actually do have a rule that we state the time when we end the day, we never stop seeing each other, right? She's my wife, she's my business partner. We never stop working together. But in order to separate that, we have to say like, “Hey, six o'clock work's done. You don't get to ask me about emails, you don't get to ask me about tasks, right? We're done. That workday is done.” And then during the workday, it's very much again, just kind of playing to those strengths because I'm extroverted, I am in charge of client outreach and leading the sales calls versus Taylor handles a lot of our content designs, the colors that we use, everything like that. And we kind of just separate for the first part of the day understanding those different tasks and then we meet back midday in order to catch each other up. So kind of a system but not super strict. There's no process to it.

Taylor:

There's one thing that has really helped us in the past two months, and it's helped us in a lot of ways because it is hard to work from home all day long. And so we don't have a lot of sunlight in the house because we live on a lower level and sometimes it's hard to break away from our routine. Sometimes it's hard to get inspiration when we're in the house all the time. That's another thing about working remotely, you tend to stay cooped up too much. So we actually started going on walks. We have a specific one mile walk route, and we go to the gas station and we get our drink, and that's what we got here. We walk and while we're walking, the juices are flowing. We are brainstorming, we're talking about our social life. But even if we have a plan to focus on our social life, it always somehow comes back to, I have an idea, oh, our next video, we need to do this. And it never feels like work. It never actually feels like work because with the way my brain works, you can't sit me down and say, let's make a plan, and what are we going to focus on? That's when my brain shuts off. But if I'm out and about, we go to the aquarium to walk around and we get ideas. Yeah, that's one thing that has helped us a lot.

Michelle:

I know you both have experiences working abroad. Would you mind sharing the whole bag? Good, bad, weird, crazy, fun, anything that you kind of want to share about this?

Taylor:

So I guess we'll start by why we moved. So we lived in Vietnam for just over a year, a decade ago or so. My dad moved there because my uncle was living there, and then my brother moved there, and then my aunt moved there. So I had a bunch of family that was always coming and going from Vietnam or just my dad has stayed there. He has not come back to the US in over 10 years. He's always been like, come stay with me. I want my daughter in Vietnam with me. He got remarried. So I have two younger siblings who are half Vietnamese and my lovely stepmom and my grandparents over there, and I wanted to be closer with them. I didn't really get a lot of time with my father in my childhood. I am a child of divorced parents. It was always either another state or another country. So we wanted to move and unfortunately since the borders were closed for so long, we had actually planned this move for a whole two years. We planned to go beginning of 2020, and then… pandemic happens. And so we finally made it over there toward the end of 2022. And by that time we had so much teaching experience from home. We had planned to work for a school in Vietnam hoping, okay, they'll get us a work permit, we'll be able to stay there with that. Unfortunately, a lot of the schools don't provide a work permit, and so we're like, okay, starting from scratch, how can we do this? So we were able to stay on a tourist visa for just over a year because we were renewing our video, our visa every month. We drove to Cambodia every single month to renew our visa. So that was just how the craziness started, but it was a lot of fun. Jeremy, do you want to mention any of our experiences there?

Jeremy:

Yeah, so now are you asking about all the things that we do culturally or just the move specifically?

Michelle:

Anything and everything that you want to add in, because I actually want to go a little deeper in this topic because I think that for two people with already different varied backgrounds going into this field, and then on top of that, I know a bit about Taylor's family background and the fact that, I'm sorry, but there is also a, I'm going to say this, there is a huge stereotype inside the US about Utah already. So you have to recognize that, right? And then also say that you didn't go to do some digital nomad…I make a thousand a week, not even a week actually, once you convert… so a day, working for some foreign consulting firm in Southeast Asia.. (I find that this) is amazing. I know a little bit about this backstory, so I would love to hear anything you have to say.

Jeremy:

Yeah, so when it comes to my first kind of introduction into culture, it was actually, I mean outside of, yeah, I had Mexican food growing up or I had a friend from China when I was in elementary school, but I'm talking when it really affected my life was when I discovered after a 23 and me test that I was actually, I was adopted by my father that I grew up with and come to find out that my roots are actually in Hispanic culture. My biological father was from Puerto Rico and grandparents were from Ecuador. And I had to go in meeting my siblings for the first time when I was like 29 without knowledge of that culture, and I had to start to adapt. And so that was my first experience leading then into teaching, which is we're getting a lot of people from all over the world having to adapt and to kind of understand the nuances there.

And then living in Vietnam, trying to understand now we're moving into a different scope where it's not just cultural sensitivity, it's assimilation, it's going into the culture, trying to live like that or to move forward like that. And I feel like it was actually very eye opening because I realized just how much I didn't know in almost every situation from my family to my clients to our living situation, I didn't realize how much I didn't know about other cultures. And it was a very eye opening experience and also a very jarring experience when you realize that people don't see the world the same way as you do. And it was very, very interesting. Anyway, so yeah, that was kind of my experience. It was very eyeopening. It was one of those moments where I was like, oh, I don't know as much as I think I know, and I don't know how much I don't know. And that building of that knowledge,

Taylor:

So many assumptions are wrong.

Michelle:

Can you both actually talk about the things you had to unlearn then, or the things that you had to broaden in terms of once you moved or once you started to integrate more there? You're like, oh, okay, I realized things. Yeah, what were some of those things?

Taylor:

So one of the biggest, I guess you could say a culture shock because different countries, different cultures, they have different paces. And as you know, Jeremy is very analytical. He likes a system, he likes a plan. Things are done very differently, or at least in our experience when we were there because coming down to even how you pay your electric bill there is so different…

Michelle

How did you pay your electric bill there?

Taylor:

There are many choices, but you do have to do things so differently. If you don't have a bank account there…

Jeremy:

Cash only.

Taylor:

Cash only, and you have to go to the WinMart and you have to pay cash. It's like a 7-11. There are so many different workarounds. A lot of things are workarounds, just a lot of the processes, a lot of the, what's the word I'm looking for? Procedures are very different. Even so much as little signals that we didn't know that we were giving off just by acting how we normally do. For example, our street, we rented a house that was five stories tall. All those stairs… all the stairs are very steep in Vietnam, but we had our gate open to let some sunlight in and we wanted some fresh air. So we opened the door. Well, turns out this is a symbol, meaning come on in, which it wouldn't be that case here. I leave my door open. They're like, oh, they must have burned something in the oven or something. And so little things like our neighbors would just kind of walk in, go, what are we doing? It's very much a take care of your neighbor type of society. And like I said, anything that I'm saying about I don't want to blanket statement any of the culture. There are so many nuances and so many differences even among the different generations. But for our experience, for example, we bought a big table and it was covered in this blue plastic wrap and it was really hard to get off. And we were sitting there trying to rip it off of this table and our two neighbors came over and walking by and they saw us and they just walked in and started ripping too. And so just little things like that and little things like, oh, our bubble space is apparently different here than it is in Utah or in America. Just little things like that.

Jeremy:

And I think that the biggest one for me at least, was learning to take a backseat. You know what I mean? It's when you're in a culture or in a society that is unfamiliar. A lot of people, or at least a lot of people in my experience, especially white people, they will want to lead. I know I've done my research, I know how they act in Japan type of thing, and that's when you get the unqualified expert and then all of a sudden you're leading with that viewpoint. While the best way, or at least in my opinion, the best way to learn is to take that back seat, let the Vietnamese person tell you how things are done. And even if it is different when in Rome you follow along, you're okay, yeah, this is strange to me, but let's do it type of thing.

Michelle:

I love both of your points so much. I think that right now, if we consider right now we're at the end of 2024. This episode will probably come out around 2025, so the beginning of the next year, I can't believe it, but it's going to be here so soon and I'm thinking about it, and it's a pretty popular time right now for people to be looking, especially those from the US dream about moving abroad and often to a part of the world that somehow it does not occur to anyone or a minority of people perhaps that there is a reason why cost of living is lower in certain parts of the world. There is a reason why currencies aren't the same. That's the reason why spending power and what you can afford with a hundred dollars here is different than there, and somehow this always is missed. In addition to everything you said, especially that point Jeremy about doing the Google research to then qualify yourself as the local expert more than the locals. That is something that I can't believe happens yet. People demonstrate it all the time. I'm wondering how local people saw you, especially given that. So someone like me can kind of just blend in actually, because we know why you guys can't as much. I'm wondering how that was handled.

Taylor:

I stick out like a sore thumb. Of course, even when we wore masks a little bit, Jeremy could blend in a little bit better than I could. I have very light features and gray eyes, but in our experience, we were received pretty well. And I think it's obvious I was always walking around with my stepmother and I was automatically assumed as a teacher in the area that we were in. People, if they didn't know who we were, they would call us teacher.

But our neighborhood specifically, I really miss our neighborhood was a lot of elders, a lot of senior citizens, and it was just pure love by most of our neighbors and taking care of us as much as we could. So we were constantly just trying to reciprocate. That was our whole thing.

Jeremy:

I couldn't say what it would've been like if we were inactive. I know that there are a lot of people who… they move abroad and then they're inactive. They're just very much like Taylor and I are really driven by volunteer work, getting out to the community, especially when it comes to helping with kids and everything, or once we established ourselves was… make a good friend, and this happened to be our neighbors next door. It was this cute little lesbian couple. We absolutely love them. We would go out on little dates, double dates with them, double dates with them, but we then made it a point to have key areas, the corner of each street, whoever was in the corner of those streets, we would then aggressively like them. We would bring them gifts, we would show them thanks and everything like that. And so what this did...

Taylor:

We had some gossips in the neighborhood!

Jeremy:

So what it puts us at these points, these certain points where a lot of traffic is going, and just like Taylor said, people talk, they see your interactions within there. So yeah, overall we were welcomed and we were invited into the community because we made ourselves known and we were open to again, letting them lead with our friends that we made. We were okay, Hey guys, we're depending on you to tell us what we need to do, teach us some things. And they were very open to that. However, I have also seen people, friends and family who have moved abroad. They didn't try to make any friends. They only stuck with the expat communities or the English speaking communities, and they didn't have great experiences.

Taylor:

A lot of times it's because they go there with an attitude that, well, I hate to say it, but well, I'm white. They're going to love me. And I hate that attitude so much. I hate it, hate it, hate it. I want to give people a reason to like me. And so a lot of times people are very much proven wrong when they go there saying, I'm going to live like a king and everybody's going to worship me. And I'm like, you are going to get shoved in the dirt so hard, metaphorically.

Because you’re not going to take care of anybody else and nobody's going to take care of you. They'll still be so nice and hospitable to you, but that's not going to be a genuine relationship. Exactly.

Jeremy:

I think that's the key too. And of course this isn't, again, I don't like the blanket statement, but within a society that is more community focused, like Vietnam, this is very different than the individualistic mindset that we have in America where it's like I'm looking out for number one, me and my family first. Over there, it's very much community based. And so we find that when people go over saying, I'm going to live like a king, I'm going to get a beautiful wife, I'm going to really show up. This is individualism versus when we're in a community-based culture, we would notice, oh, that man just went and fed that old woman and that woman just went and fed that old woman. It seems that in this neighborhood we feed that old woman. And so we got rice and we walked over to her and we went, here's your food.

Taylor:

Here's your cabbage soup once a week. And it was her favorite.

Jeremy:

And so by following the culture and monkey see monkey do basically I see them doing that. I'm going to do that. We were able to assimilate and to integrate ourselves faster than some of the expats who had been there for two or three years and they still didn't have a friend, like a real friend,

Taylor:

And they knew we were teachable. That's the big thing I think that separated us is they knew we wanted to learn and we told them we wanted to learn. Of course, we don't want to put that burden on anybody, but as soon as they act like they want to help with something or teach you something, please teach me. Please teach me. I want to be a good neighbor. I want to be a part of this community and I want to make this community stronger.

Michelle:

The fact that both of you were reciprocating, by the way, I think that's the key difference between people who just, we can take just for argument's sake, the individualism versus collectivism kind of blanket statement here and just apply it. So those who come from more individualistic societies, although we of course have to define that very precisely, they enter collectivist societies and think, okay, great, so that means everyone's going to help me. And it's like, that's not the way it works. That is no one named you king. So if you really want to understand what it is, it is not reciprocation like transactionality. It's reciprocation because that's how things work. Things work in a different kind of way. I find it kind of frustrating as a person who grew up with both east and west influencing my worldview… To see this misunderstood again and again, and especially when I lived in Malaysia and was connected to the expat community there.

And I generally have this issue with expat communities around the world. It doesn't matter which country I seem to be in, there is a very, very, very strong probability. I would say that many of the people who are weirdly enough, seeking community i.e. why you would join one of these groups, are doing it for individualistic reasons. And I really, really struggle with that. I struggle with people who can't and won't integrate because they refuse to be shaken out of their bubble or to even adopt a different mindset for an hour, let alone a day.

I think it's important no matter, whoever's listening, wherever you're from, that you just go that layer deeper and ask not only about, oh, did you learn the language or did you learn the culture? Did you Google the culture? It goes deeper than that. Did you connect with local people? Did you actually come to understand and how were you received by them? Right? Were they kind of teaching you? Were you even teachable? These are parts that I think a lot of people miss, and obviously it speaks to who you are as people were willing to make yourselves teachable and willing to learn.

I know that both of you are really involved in volunteering in your local community in Utah. Can you talk about what it is that you do and also why?

Taylor:

Yeah, so first things first, we missed Vietnam immediately when we got home, and we just really appreciate the culture. We made some friends who happened to be a higher up in one of the communities. It's called the Asian Link Project, and they are responsible for finding volunteers for all of these little organizations. Well, she's like our bestie. So

Jeremy:

We met her drinking sake at a Christmas party.

Taylor:

And so she introduced us to these few different communities, and those communities have since the VACU, they're the Vietnamese American community of Utah, shameless plug. But they have since just reached out to us personally. Every time they have an event like, Hey, are you guys willing to come this Saturday? Of course. And now the people who work for that organization, we go to these events like Lunar New Year, the Utah Asian Festival. We're usually associated with their booth. We're always there helping out with just whatever. We just kind of float and say, put us, where do you need us to sell food today? Do you need us to cook today? Anything like that.

Jeremy:

I say volunteer and people think like, oh, they're building schools or something. That's not the case. Most of ours are cultural events and community events. We do a lot with the young adults, with the University of Utah and Salt Lake Community College. We do the Tet Holidays, Songkran, things like that. And it's mainly because we believe strongly that a person's culture kind of shapes who they are as a person. And of course, not all the way, but our cultures are things that make us part of who we are. And it tells a story of our cultures, our families, from hundreds of years ago. And when you move into America, unfortunately, a lot of that, especially from the eastern world, is lost. You're coming into a place, for example, if you wore a hijab for most of your life, this is now a part of you. This hijab is part of your morality, your spirituality, how you accessorize. And when you come into America, suddenly the hijab by certain groups of people is viewed as a symbol of terrorism. And so it's very difficult to go into that. Or there are people who are complaining or that get upset because, oh, hey, you gave me St. Patrick's Day off, but my biggest holiday is the Chinese New Year, and you're not willing to give me a day off for that.

That's when I see my family. And so what we see is that assimilating or adjusting to a different culture can be very difficult. But these small community events like celebrating Chinese New Year or celebrating things like that, it brings the community together in a way that allows them to communicate and to share based on a common ground. And more times than not, it's also focused on the children, making sure that the children have a very good experience. We're telling stories, traditional dances, arts and crafts, things like that to help them feel proud about that culture. And when I see this type of thing, sorry, this is long, I'm so sorry. When I see these types of things, when we can see children getting excited about their culture, when we see people feeling like, oh, it's not an act of terrorism that I'm wearing a hijab. It's…

Taylor:

Literally just part of my religion.

Jeremy:

It kind of opens up these feelings that are so limbic that I can't even describe them, but it brings out a kind of feeling where I'm like, no, this is the work I want to do. That child who is laughing at his silly little lantern was worth any paycheck that you could have given me.

Taylor:

That was a fun event, putting together Moon Festival lanterns.

Jeremy:

And it's just through that passion of wanting to see that, I think that people also see that we have that passion for it, and it just kind of lights us up. It is a way for them to share their culture, and it's a way for us to experience the culture and blending those two worlds together.

Taylor:

A lot of these events are centered on not allowing the people to completely lose touch with their culture. A lot of people, especially in the earlier generations, were told to come here and act right, act a certain way. Nope, you are now American. And like I said, it's kind of more the earlier generations. I think it's getting a little bit more open now. Thankfully, a lot of these events are about spreading the word, teaching little things just about the culture. And I met a friend on TikTok who has a book company. She started writing bilingual Vietnamese to English bilingual children's books, because her daughter didn't have any and she couldn't find any, so she started writing them. And so I'm bringing her books to the organizations and just spreading it. And it's a lot of fun to see a culture kind of take root and spread out a little bit. And it's just a beautiful thing, especially if somebody doesn't know anything about a culture, just teaching them a little bit.