Ask The Duo Podcast

For most, the perception of getting married is to do it once do it right. Especially when we’re surrounded by movies, rom coms and Disney fairytales. However, not all love stories end up with the classic ‘happily ever after’. This certainly wasn’t the case for Amelia’s dear friend Jaz. Who shares her, what sounded like a really long challenging and lonely journey through her first marriage. What m...

Having labels and identities is a difficult one. It does help others relate to you and vice versa. However, at the same time, labels can create a stereotypical view on a certain person before you fully know someone. Which is an unhealthy habit. Also, in Dr. Gabor Maté’s interview with Jay Shetty on On Purpose podcast, he mentioned that there are no healthy identifications. This is because, when yo...

Perfection, is not something we personally never strive for. Let us tell you why, if you strive for perfection, then it means you will stop growing once you’ve reached that point. At the same time, if you’re postponing and event or action due to waiting for something to be “perfect”, that day may never come and you end up disappointing yourself. Alternatively, you get it out in the world and peopl...

Paul Bloom, a psychologist who studies cognitive science mentions that  there are 2 types of suffering. There’s chosen and the unchosen.  However, today we’d like to highlight why everyone needs to put  themselves in more 'chosen suffering' or what we see as challenging  yourself.  The reason why we enjoy to challenge ourselves is because it brings so  many different...

"Oh I'm getting old" or "I'm too old for this" I'm sure we've heard these phrases at least a few times in our life. Which is what got us thinking, are people afraid of aging? Age is something we can’t control, but what we can control is our mindset and maintaining our mind and body. So remember to embrace and appreciate each day and all the things you CAN do, ev...

Did you know that it is actually said (by Judith Glaser) that 9 out of 10 people actually miss the mark in communicating their message across? No wonder sometimes no matter how hard you try to explain something, some people just don’t understand your point. This is because, everyone actually has a different way of receiving communication. This lead to us wanting to know more about communication st...

In business, they often refer to a strategic planning tool called the SWOT analysis. It’s used to assess where they sit internally and externally with other business. The attributes they assess are their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Which is something we will be apply to ourselves today, focusing on our weaknesses. We see weaknesses less of something that you’re bad at, but it...

Nothing worse than coming back from a holiday and getting married, feeling refreshed and ready to jump back into work. Just to get made redundant. However, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths” and we are big believers of everything happens for a reason! Unfortunately, for Sam this actually wasn’t the first time he’s been made r...

Halloween is coming, so of course we have to whip out the ghost stories and we can’t do it without our good friend Sam Lam (there some spooky chats in here, so listen if you dare). He has definitely had many trick or treat buckets full of stories to share around. Including this one about a friendly ghost that just wanted to have a good chat ya know. That aside, as we’re always big on bringing pers...

This conversation stemmed from a post from Angela Chang ( @angelasitan ) who is a Pro Muay Thai fighter that  talked about people are so quick to judge and thinks she has a problem when she says she’s hitting the gym every day. However, if it was about going out for drinks after work, people are okay with that. This definitely struck a cord with us and we’ve both experienced similar situation...

Have you ever had moments where you think back and you feel like you’ve over catastrophized the situation? Or you lashed out on someone at the spur of the moment then thought to yourself that you’re an idiot for replying so aggressively?  We’ve had plenty of those moments in our lives too. Sometimes the moments in our head can feel a lot more intense than the real situation. Along with that,...

Hitting off half way to 100 episodes with our first (self made) Ask the duo session. So we’ve switched up the style for this episode with 3 assorted relationship situations from online (don’t worry everyone has been kept anonymous) and we wanted to give our personal opinions on how to tackle this situation. The situations that we’ve picked our are some fairly common yet complicated relationship si...

When someone mentions the ‘head of family’ we’d typically have a male in mind. However sometimes women can also be the head of the family too. This was the case for Anita, after a quick break down in her previous episode with us on ‘keeping your family close’. Her and Sam briefly walked us through losing their dad and Anita’s challenges trying to live through her mid 20s trying to navigate taking...

Break ups are not fun and especially when you’ve been with someone for such a long time. Sometimes it’s also hard to know if it’s time to let things go. So today we’ve broken down some of our own tell tale signs that we’re not that into the other person anymore. Of course every relationship and situation is different but also remember that not everyone is made for each other and no ones is at faul...

Amelia is putting Sam and his sister, Anita in the hot seat today as Amelia interviews them on their take on the importance of family. When Amelia first met the Duong family, it was nothing like she’s experienced before. They had a close relationship with each other and they always reinforced the importance of keeping family first as you’re not promised tomorrow. This was something they really emp...

Being friend zoned is not fun, it could bring self doubt, embarrassment, anxiousness and many other unpleasant emotions. However, these experiences is what helps us grow. They say rejection is redirection and that’s exactly what we think being friend zoned is too. Everything happens for a reason and if things aren’t meant to be, then it’s just not meant to be. So let us help you shift that mindset...

If there is anyone that can do it all, it’ll be Anita Fung. Not only is she well known in the banking & finance industry currently working for Australian Unity as a state manager. But also someone that can juggle growing a family, growing her career and also be an amazing wife & all at the same time. Coming form being a Business advertising graduate to now having 20+ years experience in th...

How many times have you heard the phrase, “I'll be happy when…” or “wouldn’t it be great if we got…”. More often than not, people attach the definition of happiness to something they need to obtain. Although it could bring you happiness but it isn’t the true definition of happiness. This is why it got us thinking, should we be re-evaluating the definition of happiness? Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive p...

People can so easily be caught up in life and become so accustomed to working that they forget to acknowledge their achievements. This happened to Amelia, accompanied by a typical Asian upbringing where acknowledgement and celebrating wins is not really a thing.  When she was asked at work to write down some achievements, it hit her hard that she couldn’t write down a single thing and instead...

Wanting to move into the next stage with your S/O is an exciting moment, such as moving in together. But there is a tradition where society tells you, that you shouldn’t move in with each other before marriage. Is this tradition still a thing and are there actually benefits of moving in together before marriage? From our perspective, we definitely think there are benefits but we can also understan...

After a few heavy and serious topics, we thought why not change up the tempo and do a fun relationship quiz? We will be letting the quiz dictate what type of relationships we should be in and the result didn’t surprise us. This brings back Dolly magazine vibes (for those who grew up in Australia back in the 90s-00s will know what we’re talking about). If you’re in for a bit of fun as well, try out...

Calling for a friend here, has anyone ever had dreams where you’re talking to the real person you physically know in real life, but subconsciously. In your dream you know you’re talking to someone else? Please say you do, because Amelia doesn’t want to be the only weird one here. If you haven’t gathered already, this episode is discussing all the weird dreams we’ve had or memories of dreams that d...

We believe that building confidence is a skill you can learn as we grow and experience things in life. Today we have our friend Peter Lin, who is the buyer and seller specialist at BMW with a tremendous amount of experience in sales and retail. Since we’ve known him, we know that he is a man who has great self confidence and can easily start a conversation with anyone. But he wasn’t always the con...

We all know have goals and achievements we want to reach in life, but sometimes we get so caught up with the end goal that you tend to start questioning yourself. Things like “am I heading in the right direction, did I make the right choice, am I making any progress”. But sometimes you just have to trust the process and let the universe takes its course. Don’t always look for the instant gratifica...

We hear a lot of tips and talks around building better relationships but what about friendships? Friendships are just as important as your romantic relationships and we feel there needs to be more light on this topic. Just like every other relationship, friendships also have their ups and downs, people fall in and out of seasons with friends and some may not even survive through the whole season....