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Why do people choose to develop emotional intelligence and why do they turn to Six Seconds for their path?
In “Voices from Six Seconds Network,” we introduce you to people in the network who share their experiences, personal journeys, and how they embrace EQ in different areas of their daily lives.

Voices from the Network: Pamela Chng and Suyin Tay

by Maddalena Campitelli

“The origin was: How do we use business to make a positive impact on people and the planet in every aspect of what we do?.” – Pamela Chng

Today we talk to Pamela Chng and Suyin Tay, two social entrepreneurs based in Singapore who run Bettr Coffee, and its nonprofit affiliate, Bettr Lives, a Six Seconds Preferred Partner.

The Bettr Group is divided into Bettr Coffee -running coffee bars, retail & wholesale coffee, coffee equipment- and Bettr Academy -providing professional courses and workshops, corporate programmes and community initiatives. But their real mission is to empower individuals and organizations with the mental and emotional skills to lead healthy and productive lives. At Bettr, they use Six Seconds’ tools and methods to integrate emotional intelligence into every aspect of their business, which ultimately helps everyone involved realize their full potential and live more purposeful lives. “We always tell people that it’s not about the coffee,” Pamela says. “It’s really about the emotional skills that we gain through the work of coffee.”.

How it all began

Pamela says it all started as a social business back in 2011, with a clear mission to fuel social change by tackling inequality issues and empowering marginalized groups. They simply chose coffee as the vehicle. They saw a chance to develop a viable business, an opportunity to make a positive impact in the coffee supply chain, and, of course, achieve their core mission: change lives in marginalized communities – specifically women and youth at risk. Pamela explains to me the original thought behind the project: “The key hypothesis was that if we were able to help every human being develop more emotional resilience and more emotional skills, they would then have a better chance of making better decisions, handling adversity, and overcoming whatever challenges they had to face.”

Over the past decade, Bettr has built a growing business on the premise of the social programs that they created to engage women and youth who are out of the school system. They developed a holistic training program that focuses on equipping individuals with work-ready skills in the coffee industry together with essential emotional skills. Following the mantra “a healthy mind in a healthy body”, the Bettr team builds discipline, endurance and connection through yoga, team activities and team sports like rock climbing – as well as work! Many graduates go on to work at Bettr’s coffee shops or with one of Bettr’s many external partners in the industry.

An essential part of the project is collaborating with workplaces and employers as well in order to create inclusive workplaces so that disadvantaged individuals can be effectively included into the workplace. This training and consulting passion grew and in 2019, they started a nonprofit called Bettr Lives, which focuses purely on EQ training. Bettr Lives is a Six Seconds Preferred Partner that offers many programs, including a fellowship program for social business leaders through which Bettr works with managers to build their emotional resilience so that they can learn to be better leaders and grow their teams. Another program works with schools to engage teenagers using the medium of coffee. They really use coffee as a vehicle to connect people. In one program, teenagers go through a formal 15 hour training program where they learn coffee skills and emotional skills. And in light of the growing evidence of a mental health crisis especially among young people -as also shown by this year’s Six Seconds’ State of the Heart report- Bettr’s work is more essential than ever <Download the full SOH Report 2023 here>.

Why emotional intelligence and Six Seconds?

Pamela says that when they first started the program, they worked with clinical psychologists and had a more therapeutic focus to the training. But as the program grew, they started looking for ways to systemize and scale up, and needed a structured manner to teach more people the fundamentals, which you can then level up. By then, Pamela had been following Six Seconds for a while, so she decided it was time to take the first training and she started to see how she could include some components in the project. She says one thing she loves about the Six Seconds methodology is the neuroscience focus and how it connects the emotional and logical brain, along with the fact that it is a data-driven science -which is useful in their culture which is always trying to make sense of things. She also finds extremely useful to teach the skills of navigating emotions and apply consequential thinking to make careful choices, thus shortcutting and facilitating the communication and helping to avoid misunderstandings <Learn more about how to Navigate Emotions and Apply Consequential Thinking in the Six Seconds Model of EQ>.

Bettr’s impact ripples out

Bettr sees the impact it’s making on multiple levels, and that helps them push forward in the challenging moments.

The impact starts internally at Bettr. Suyin says sometimes emotions are running really high, especially during events, but that over time she’s started to notice that people use “the EQ language” saying things like: “Sorry, I can’t have this conversation right now/I’m not in the right headspace to talk, let me take my ‘Six Second pause’ and I’ll come back to you.”. The “Six Second pause” allows one to quickly assess the costs and benefits of actions, and over her past four years at Bettr, Suyin sees this is becoming the norm: “Because we’ve been very intentional in our team training, so more and more people are actually using ‘the language’.” <Learn more about how to use the Six Second Pause tool for getting off the ‘trouble train’>.

This motivates them even more to make it accessible to as many people as possible: “You realize that it works for yourself, and that you’ve seen it work for the people around you. So you only want to do more!”. Pamela also says that is a never ending journey of growth especially for leaders: “If we don’t grow, then the people around us don’t grow, the organization doesn’t grow. So, we need to first take full responsibility for our own emotional growth, a process which I don’t think ever ends.” <Learn about our Assessments, Reports and Certification Training on Emotionally Intelligent Leadership>.

Since the founding of Bettr Lives, the impact now goes far beyond the coffee industry in Singapore. One of their focuses is with organizations where they run corporate training through a fellowship programme which brings together social entrepreneurs who use their vehicles as a force for good. Just recently, one of their fellows reached out to say that they were struggling with a mental health condition they were very afraid of sharing. But through the EQ training with Bettr, teaching what it means to be an inclusive workplace and how we can tell our leaders to better support their employees, this person managed to confront their boss and share about their challenge, being very open about how they could have been better supported to do their work.

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Bettr Lives, Bettr Academy, Bettr Coffee Website→

Bettr Lives, Bettr Group, Bettr Academy, Bettr Coffee on Instagram→

Bettr Lives on LinkedIn→

Meet Pamela Chng LinkedIn→

Professional achievements: Pamela has over 20 years of start-up and business experience, and is the co-founder of The Bettr Group, a for-profit social business and vertically integrated specialty coffee company in Singapore that aims to change lives through coffee.
Through its education brand Bettr Academy and retail brand Bettr Coffee, it empowers lives through holistic vocational programmes for marginalized women and youth, nurtures direct and sustainable trade across their supply chain, and encourages socially and environmentally conscious consumption.
Prior to founding Bettr, Pamela co-founded, ran and grew a successful web consultancy, Digital Boomerang. She was also part of the pioneer team in the web division of Singapore Press Holdings as Head of International Online Advertising Sales and Business Development.
Pamela is the Vice President on the Board of Directors of the global Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), the first Singaporean to hold a position in the President’s Council. She is a World Barista Championship Certified Sensory Judge, World Coffee in Good Spirits Sensory Judge, Licensed Q Arabica Grader and Authorised SCA Trainer.
She is also a Six Seconds Certified EQ Assessor and started non-profit Bettr Lives to attempt to address one of our greatest collective challenges in the 21st century – the mental and emotional health of people.

Favorite Six Seconds Learning Philosophy: “The process is the content” and “Emotions drive people”
Learn about Six Seconds Learning Philosophies →

Noble Goal: “To become the best version of myself so that I can give back and help solve problems and help people”
Learn about Six Seconds Noble Goals →

Her “Don’t Miss This” Six Seconds tools & courses: The Leadership Reports

Meet Suyin Tay LinkedIn→

Professional achievements: Suyin Tay is Assistant Director at the Bettr Academy, where she also drives the EQ Curriculum and programmatic strategies. Over the past decade, her work in the Asia-Pacific region includes serving as a curriculum design consultant at McKinsey’s Social Initiative: Generation, a non-profit that seeks to connect education to sustainable livelihoods.
She is an award-winning educator achieving 5 Outstanding Contribution Awards from 2015-19 at the Ministry of Education in Singapore. She is profoundly committed to the human condition and interested in how interdisciplinary solutions can generate long-term change. For her work in the region, in 2023 she was recognised as an Obama Foundation Asia Pacific Leader.
Suyin is a certified Six Seconds EQ Practitioner, Educator and Assessor, currently undergoing her EQ Advanced Facilitator certification.

Favorite Six Seconds Learning Philosophy: “Emotions Drive People” and ” Fish don’t talk about water”
Learn about Six Seconds Learning Philosophies →

Noble Goal: “To bring forth in myself and others the hope and possibility of making this world better by taking action”
Learn about Six Seconds Noble Goals →

Her “Don’t Miss This” Six Seconds tools & courses: Brain Talent Dashboard for teams + EQPC

One last impact story: From anger to insight

Pamela recalled a very significant story of a big change she witnessed in one of Bettr’s programs. There was a student in one of their coffee skills training who really struggled with emotional literacy. After doing an assessment, this teenager started raging and kicking every single door in the academy because they said they were very angry. After a debriefing, they realized that they weren’t actually angry, but they were feeling multiple emotions that they thought were anger. It came out this person was disappointed in themself, they felt like a failure, they thought they had let everybody down, and thus felt helpless. But because it felt so uncomfortable and unfamiliar, therefore negative, it felt like anger, so they reacted angrily <On this matter, results from research shows that kids who experience trauma are more likely to mislabel other emotions as anger, in themselves and others>. Together with Bettr’s staff they analyzed those feelings and this young person started to realize that it was not about anger, but rather a multiplicity of emotions hard to handle altogether. The change came from this new consciousness together with emotional literacy skills <Learn more about Emotional Literacy>. Suyin says: “Just because it’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t mean it’s negative, it’s uncomfortable because there are multiple layers of emotions we don’t know how to deal with (…) And once you realize it, the next time you feel that emotion again, you can choose to respond differently, instead of just reacting <Learn more about Responding vs Reacting>. When hundreds and thousands of people learn these skills, it changes individuals, organizations and entire communities.

Suyin’s journey to self-confidence and healthy boundaries

Her colleague Suyin joined Bettr about 4 years ago, as she only came into contact with EQ when she started working there. She frankly admitted that at the beginning she was very skeptical of the work and she was saying: “What is this ´feeling-feeling thing’? Why do we need to be aware of our emotions?”. She was very burnt out before joining Bettr and was looking for an alternative way of viewing life and how to sustain herself. She came in with a lot of skepticism, even cynicism, but once she went through the whole program she started realizing: “This is what I’ve been missing all along!” and she decided to stay. Now she’s become a big advocate of Bettr’s work because she saw how deeply it impacted her own life. Concerning her emotional journey she learned to become very communicative about her needs, with her team and with Pamela to whom she reports to. While previously she felt a lot of anxiety of showing her vulnerability to the people in the workplace, and of not being able to be good enough, so she didn’t allow herself to feel. She only now sees all the emotional work that she had to do. Now Suyin is definitely more aware of her personal emotional boundaries and needs: “I know when my cup is filled and I can give, and when I think I need to ask for help.”. She admits that she always had the feeling that she was not allowed to ask for help, so her last four years have been a lot of resetting of herself and EQ gave her the tools and language to do so. Suyin thinks the context she was raised in didn’t help as she feels that emotionally, Asian people are goal oriented and competitive, but emotionally quite stunted, not very good with the emotional language, and very poor with their literacy. Now that she is more aware and has gained EQ skills, she can still meet her goals but she knows when and at what cost. She’s in it for the long run because the work that they do is difficult, so instead of trying to achieve a short term goal and burn herself out, she now knows when and how to seek help: “ I know how to ask my team to support me, and I can openly request for emotional support whereas previously I didn’t have the language nor the tools and above all, I was blocked by fear and discomfort to express myself.”

Pamela and Suyin’s unique relationship

Suyin describes her relationship with Pam. “There were a few times this year when I had to go up to Pam saying ‘You know what, Pam? This is really difficult. What should I do?’, and I would have never done that with my previous superiors. Not because they weren’t supportive, but not emotionally. Or I would tell Pam ‘I need you as my mentor because I’m struggling with this right now’, and she would go ‘Ok, I know this is what’s happening, but I need you to navigate your emotions. Can you do it?` And I was like ‘Yeah, I can’.”.

Suyin acknowledges that it is really important that everyone in the team is aware and on the same page. More importantly, when the person in charge is aware, you can actually manage the team and share this kind of culture. Pamela agrees and concludes: “When everybody is aligned you’re able to have real and sincere conversations and spend more time focusing on understanding people and finding solutions.”

Thank you Pamela and Suyin for sharing your EQ journey with us!

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