A long time ago when I first started this journey in speaking a very good friend of mine told me this. He said: “Peng Joon, if you want to speak internationally, you need to get an english name, because no one in the US, the UK, Australia is going take a name like Peng Joon seriously”.

I said “What? That sounds ridiculous. I have never heard of something like this before.” and he said “Think about it. Think about all the big name celebrities that has made it internationally and that the one thing they all have in common is that they all have an English name whether they work in Hollywood or whether they are in the speaking industry, if they are speaking in US, UK or Australia and they are worldwide, 100% they have an English name.”

So I thought to myself, that kind of make sense. And then he told me this, “Think about this, if you were in Australia right now or the US, they can’t even pronounce your name. How do you expect them to remember your name if they can’t even pronounce it in the first place?”

So I felt a little defeated so what I did was I asked my parents. Mom dad apparently I can’t make it internationally if I don’t have an English name.. And so do you mind giving me an English name? Can I have your blessing? And they said, “ Give me 24 hours and we will come back to you and after 24 hours they came back to me saying, Peng Joon, we thought of a really good name, How is the name Penn, like Sean Penn? So I said, Okay… I think being an internet marketer, the first thing I would do is I went online and I typed in the words Penn Chan.

I wanted to see if PennChan.com is available and that I realised that Penn Chan actually meant that it was edible cannabis. It was like weed online. So I told my mom that apparently the name Penn Chan has got a totally different meaning online and that is not going to work. My parents sat me down and asked “ Why don’t you just use the name that we gave you?.

Now this was a long time ago, about 7 years ago, fast forward today, now that I have spoken in more than 20 countries around the world in London, Amsterdam, Germany and Australia. I realised at the end of the day, what it really was just a limiting belief, a self-limiting belief. A limiting belief that I told myself long time ago and somehow it was true for me at that time. Now I would like you to ask yourself, is what is that self-limiting belief that you have in your life right now?

Many times people tell me this. They tell me all these different reasons and justifications, things like; I am too young for this or I am too old to do this. Think about this, if you constantly tell yourself, I am too young to do something eventually what is going to happen? Eventually, you are going to tell yourself, I am too old to do this. Now all these different reasons, think about what is the self-limiting belief that you have in your life right now that is holding you back from where you are to where you want to be.

Because at the end of the day, what is the difference between a belief and a fact? Is that a belief is not universal. That may be true for you today right now but it may not necessarily be true for somebody else. That is the difference. Think about what is your self-limiting belief and think about how you can break that limiting belief by breaking a pattern and doing something different.