What's In The Name?

Rise From Ashes with Carol Gockel

Key Points

- What Gockel means, history of the surname

- Traditional person

- Relationship history

- The difference between the two cultures

- Communicating Challenges

- Being understanding and patience

- Lessons learned from past relationships

Book a clarity call with Carol at http://bit.ly/BookCallCG

Ep 2. Why do women change their surname with Carol Gockel

Burned, crashed, reduced to dust then rise on the ashes. In this episode, we have a very special guest whose dream is to inspire and empower people around the World.

She is a confidence coach, speaker, author of the book Breakthrough with the legendary Les Brown, I’m a mum of two, a loving daughter and a devoted wife. A model woman can juggle life, work and have it all, you too can have it all.

Welcome to Rise From Ashes Hi I’m Carol, in this episode, I’ll be sharing about my surname.

The traditional way
Carol shared the history of her husband’s surname and why she made a decision to use it:
(00:42 - 1:24) So what’s in a name? What does Gockel mean? Gockel is actually a German surname. Now, the history of how surnames came about in the German history is, related to the profession of the person. So Gockel actually means cockerel in other words, it means rooster. So somehow, the ancestor of the first person who has gotten this name is actually or was actually a rooster breeder, pretty funny right? So think about it Carol Gockel, Carol Rooster, so that’s exactly what my name meant.

(01:50 - 2:00) So why did I decided to take on my husband’s surname as you can guess,the reason is because I’m a bit of a traditional person or a traditional girl at heart.
Career over relationship

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to build yourself first before entertaining someone who wants to be more than friends with you. A relationship should not be rushed. This was Carol’s experience:

(2:23 - 3:06) And as fate would have it, we met on the very first weekend when he got here to Singapore. That sparked of our friendship. It worked well for me because I had just been divorced and I wanted to have some kind of a distance. So a friendship was formed, and because of our distance gave me a lot of opportunity to really find myself after being in a 10 year marriage that didn’t end well.

(3:27 - 3:58) I wanted to concentrate on building my career at that time, I wanted to be self-reliant, sufficient, so the distance really helped and really helped me to actually build this foundation of a friendship and to know this other person more deeply. Most importantly, I want to be able to present myself to him, as who I am, not the person that has, that was shaped, not the person who has got previous baggage in her life. And that really gave us a lot of opportunity and space for growth.

(3:59 - 4:06 ) So we ended up having a long distance relationship for about a year and a half.
The journey towards marriage
All relationships require a certain degree of commitment and commitment might sometimes require sacrifice. But you will both sort it out to make the relationship work. When faced with the choice on where they should reside, this was what Carol decided:
(4:07- 4:50) so when he finally proposed to me on our one year anniversary, we had to make that decision, a decision whether if I move or he move to Singapore. After a lot of deliberation, I realized that I can’t speak the German language and I was still building my career and is going very well, I didn’t know if I was able to find another job and I never wanted to start a new all over again, especially for a female who’s in her thirties and my husband, he wanted an opportunity to work and live overseas so the decision was quite clear for him to come.

(5:30 - 5:58) So instead of allowing my in-laws to sort of like lose a son in a way, cause they won’t see him as often as they want, I wanted them to know that I am marrying into the family, and commitment to the family, to my husband. And at the same time that they have gained a daughter instead of losing a son, so that was a decision of me taking on the surname and of course subsequently, after I found out that it would be much easier if I should take on the surname.
Different cultures

Marrying into a different culture has its ups and downs but it’s not impossible, here’s what Carol experienced:

(6:21 - 7:13) So this journey was also a little bit, has its ups and downs I would say, one of the big major thing about relationship is I have never dated someone outside of my own culture and race, not my ex or no ex-boyfriend, rather as well, that they were all Asians, they were all of Chinese origin, so in terms of culture, we knew each other in a way, right, being all Asians, there’s no introduction, there’s really nothing to think about and when he came into my life, there’s was a lot of things to, for him to understand about the Asian culture, about the manners and then there’s a lot of tradition and things that his culture that I have to get to know as well.

(7:13 - 7:57) The first big major difference were actually food, so if you think about it, you know, for this common conception of food, for German cuisine has been sausages so there was what I was exposed to and I was actually being exposed, introduced to a whole different culture besides sausages that’s quite interesting, something that I’ve learned and for him was the discovery, the discovery of spicy food in Asia, the famous Laksa of Singapore, he fell in love with it the moment he took a sip of the beautiful, wonderful, fragrant gravy.

(7:57- 8:47) So we were able to actually marry both cultures and become a part of our lives as well, well of course this whole union wasn’t without any challenges, first of, that English wasn’t his first language and English is somehow my first language in school but back home I speak Mandarin with my parents. So for him communicating with my parents was a little bit of a challenge and in the beginning of our relationship there was a lot of things that I would say that he really didn’t understand, so there’s a lot of clarification, there’s a lot of simplification and because we were doing long distance there was a lot of writing back and forth, there’s a lot of waiting and that require a lot of understanding.

Love is what’s in a name

Taking on her husband’s surname was more than just Carol being traditional, it is her being committed to her new life with a man who gave her a new beginning. This is what she shared:

(9:48 - 10:11) One of the lessons learned from past relationships is actually open communication and that was also something that we discussed with regards to me taking on his surname because it’s not a surname that is easy to pronounce in the Asian arena, Gockel.

(10:42 - 11:21) That also become part of our open conversation in terms of what is the repercussion of an Asian woman adopting a foreign surname in Singapore kind of a little bit of a no no, more like a bad connotation, it's like when an Asian woman marry a foreigner or a cacausian in particular. If y...