Ep 012 | Loosen Your Grip and Let God Move You Forward | feat. Sue-Jean Chung

You're building at a scale you once thought was above you, and still a quiet voice asks whether you actually have what it takes. In this conversation, Colt sits down with Sue-Jean Chung, who passed a pivotal architecture course with a technical C and graduated certain she would never be an architect, then went on to grow Studio JCI from three people to more than thirty-five and help build over 1,800 residential units. You'll hear why she stopped calling herself an architect and started calling herself a problem solver who just uses architecture as the tool, how she reframed imposter syndrome as an insecurity about identity rather than ability, and what she means by yielding to promotion when God pushed her toward recognition she never sought. She unpacks why submission and authority are partners rather than opposites, traces the childhood tag-and-chips memory behind her fear that people would only value her for what she has, and shares how a loss in 2025 drove her to 2,700 logged hours and the brink of burnout before she learned that rest is not the opposite of faithfulness. If you have been performing at a level that looks like success from the outside while quietly wondering whether you belong there, this one is for you.ABOUT THE GUESTSue-Jean Chung is a Founding Principal of Studio JCI, a multidisciplinary architecture firm committed to solving the housing and design challenges facing Canadian cities, which she has grown from a team of three to more than thirty-five architects and designers and whose work has contributed to over 1,800 residential units across the GTA and Greater Golden Horseshoe. A graduate of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, she has led projects on site for over ten years through every phase from tender to close-out, brings deep expertise in zoning by-laws and codes, and was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada while her firm ranks number 39 on Canada's list of top women-led businesses. Through JCI Learn, she teaches weekly modules to raise up the next generation of problem-solving architects, advocates for women in the profession, and supports BEAT Toronto, building the practice alongside her husband, Jaegap Chung, on the conviction that two are better than one and that she is a steward of what God has entrusted to her.