Sara Tang opens up about finding the confidence to quit the corporate world and talk openly about sex as a coach and the host of podcast Better in Bed
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It’s hard to imagine now, but Sara Tang had a very sheltered childhood as part of a culturally conservative Chinese family in Singapore’s Methodist community. She felt the impact of that repression when she first became sexually active.
“I made extremely bad decisions and felt very alone because I was too ashamed to buy condoms or talk to anyone,” says Tang, 42 and based in Hong Kong. “Those experiences really shaped my eventual motivation to become a sex coach.”
For many years, Tang worked on and off in sex education, largely as a side hustle while her day job was in brand marketing and strategy. It took some soul searching and courage to commit herself fully to being a sex coach—owning that profession when she introduces herself at dinners and airing personal stories publicly on her podcast.
If you need a thick skin to work in the sex industry, you can expect a sense of fulfilment in return, according to Tang. “It’s a privilege when people let me into their intimate lives, and it lights me up when I see them make transformations around how they view sex or their sexual confidence.”
Learn more about what it's like to be a sex coach in Tang's words below.
On realising that sex coaching can be an actual job
Studying at Stanford in the San Francisco Bay Area, people were very open with their sexual identities and, at 18, it blew my mind. I took a class in human sexuality, but just as an elective. Back in Singapore, I started doing erotic writing and sex researching and blogging; I met a lot of interesting people, and it opened me up to talking about sex.
When I moved to Hong Kong in 2008, I befriended a woman Heather who was studying to be a sexologist, and I shadowed her for a few years. She mentored me in how to talk to people about common sex questions, and she was running a sex toy online store and party business on the side—we called them Tupperware parties, but with a different kind of plastic.
It wasn’t enough to say, “here’s a sex toy, want to buy it,” because people had so little education about sex and anatomy. So the mission became much broader than selling toys, and through hosting these parties, I realised what I really enjoy is talking to people about sex and their intimate lives. When Heather moved back to the US, I took over the business and ran it as Passionately Yours from 2011 to 2015.
What I learned from burning out with my first business
My primary job was in brand and marketing strategy, and for the first two years I did Passionately Yours as a side hustle. It was very labour intensive. I’d bring the toys and a few educational tools to people’s hotel rooms or homes and I burned out from running so many events. I think I did all of the typical things you do with your first business. I threw my heart and soul into it and wasn’t efficient with my energy because it meant so much to me.
When you're starting out, you do often have to do everything. But to scale the business, one of the things I wished I had done earlier was to empower other people to do the parties for me. I wanted to do it all because I had extremely high standards and for the first time my work felt so aligned to my purpose.
See also: What Is Burnout: Expert Advice On How To Manage And Prevent It
