PODCAST Episode 014
Published 17 December 2025

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TRANSCRIPT

Intro:

[00:00:00] People pleasing, hides the actual advantage you have. You are here to give something that people don't know they want until they experience it as a culture creator or change maker. Your recognition comes when you turn up the volume on your specific, unique point of view. Holding back from fully leading from that point of view means you waste so much energy and compromise the impact that your work could be having.

Validation as a strategy might have worked before or maybe never did, but where you are going. It's about having the guts to go to new unvalidated places on your terms and bringing people with you. This is not a normal [00:01:00] career ladder, but that's exactly why you wanted it, and valorize is the skill to blaze that trail.

I'm Louisa Shaeri. Join me every week when I'll be talking about how to make the uniquely transformative point of view at the core of your boldest work viable. Visible and valorized.

Main:

So I dunno about you, but I am feeling tired and a lot of people I speak to are feeling tired. I'm using that word on purpose because I think there is a tendency to make a molehill out of the mountain of uncertainty that everyone is collectively [00:02:00] experiencing. That even though we are entering the holidays, right, entering what is supposedly a time of rest of having a break, we are collectively carrying this uncertainty without the conditions that would lead us to feel respite, to feel like, okay, there is a solid, stable ground I can land on.

I can rest and. Instead, there's just a whole lot of question marks about what 2026 is gonna look like. And so for you doing your own work, being in a form of leadership, even if it's you leading you in determining what you're working on and how you're working, but also you in. Being someone who's either working with people or working with and creating for audiences or both, [00:03:00] you are also likely communicating with people and their nervous systems in that state of numbed out overwhelm.

So I want to do an episode today to resource you in that experience and to resource you for how to respond to this collective uncertainty in a way that is you determining where certainty might be sourced and being someone who can be a source of certainty for your people. And therefore there is movement and there isn't this numbing out and this overwhelm.

And. Things get to happen, right? It's really easy, I think, to kind of crash into the end of the year and disassociate and disconnect and feel like, fuck, I just need a break. Let me shut it all off. And, but what [00:04:00] happens is then you wake up in January and you're like. Having to pick up the pieces again and reorient to what your work is, but with the added pressure of, okay, I'm in a new year and I've got this runway in front of me and I need to make something happen and I can't remember who the fuck I am and what I'm doing and what's the point.

And then that takes a few weeks, and then suddenly it's the end of January and nothing's happened, and your confidence is then depleted. No, no, no, no. Nah. I want to gather you right now, mid-December and prepare you for a 2026 that's not gonna feel like that. To know exactly what you're doing and to have a frame for how you can meet the degree of uncertainty that we're in with.

Certainty with clarity and with the internal connection to [00:05:00] your work, that means that you are not doing all of what I've just described. Okay? And just to be clear, this is not me saying work all the way through. Definitely not. You'd need a break. But what allows the break is you having some certainty and knowing what your year ahead is gonna be like, and having the internal structure.

Within which you can find that solid ground and feel that certainty and therefore land in January knowing exactly where you are and who you are and what you're doing, but also that the people that your work is for experience you with that degree of stability and certainty. There's a such a service and a gift in that, and I want you to be in a position to offer that and to give that to people.

I wanna tell a quick story. 2005 is when I started doing [00:06:00] sound art gigs like live performances, experimental music with my laptop, often with other musicians and sound artists, and basically low or no pay gigs. But doing it because I was exploring that as a medium and. Really interested in improvisation and what can happen in a room with live people and sound.

So I was doing these gigs all over the place, mostly in London and a lot of them at Cafe Otto in East London. Cafe or toe is, it's almost like a gallery. Actually, I haven't been there for a couple of years. It might be different now, but back then it was like a big white room with concrete floor and sometimes there would be folding chairs out and sometimes not.

And what I would observe over doing lots of these gigs was something that really fascinated me about the audience and how every [00:07:00] single time. The audience would all do something collectively together about how they would decide whether to sit or to stand, where to stand, how to kind of be with the experience.

They would all do the same thing, but the thing that they would do would be different every single time. So on some gigs, they'd all sit on the floor and be silent. Sometimes they would be milling around and having conversations the whole time. Sometimes they would all collectively gather in the middle, all facing the musicians, and sometimes they'd kind of filter in and and gather around the edges and no one wanted to be in the middle.

And I was really curious about why that was happening and what led to the decision collectively for what the audience was going to do. And I started to observe that what was happening was that there would be someone in the audience. Maybe a group of people [00:08:00] that would act with a high degree of certainty and go and set the tone, and then everyone else would just follow suit.

It was like a herd mentality would latch onto that certainty and believe it. This is such an important lesson when you think about conviction, right? Conviction in your work, but I think it also offers us something right now when we are in a. Collective experience of a high degree of uncertainty, which is that in the response to uncertainty, whether we realize it or not, what we are looking for is who is certain and following them, right?

We're looking for that. We are looking for who is on stable ground that I can be with, that I can, they obviously have something that they're trusting. Let me latch onto that and so. Selfishly, I want you in your [00:09:00] work to be that source of certainty because of what the work you are doing is. I want you to recognize the role that you could play in this moment for setting the tone of how do we respond to the world that we are in right now so that other people can experience and trust that and move with you.

Feeling tired is like making a mole hill out of a mountain. I wanna talk to the mountain right now. Mountain pile, like compounding layers and layers and layers of the world not feeling like it did of an unprocessed pandemic. Like we, I don't think, I don't think we've made sense of the pandemic yet. Then we've got the humanitarian crises that have come out of genocides, conflict, climate [00:10:00] and environmental breakdown, economic breakdowns.

We've got the typically stable economies. Now experiencing a level of destabilization or mounting debt. There's a global restructuring of how resources are flowing, trade. There's a geopolitical fragmentation and then there's also a social fragmentation whereby we don't have right now. I think the experience that can often help people collectively move through change of having a shared narrative, different generations are having a completely different model worldview of what is happening.

I think we're all reckoning with the impact of social media on political fragmentation. On our attention spans, on our sense of how connected we feel. I think we are looking at the tech billionaires that are, well, it feels like making [00:11:00] wildly unhinged decisions to stay ahead and compete on this global stage of ai.

We've lost trust in institutions. I think we've also lost trust in a lot of the kind of entrepreneurship, hustle culture. The cost of living has gone way up and doesn't look like it's gonna come down anytime soon. Wages have stagnated. People are dealing with real, tangible problems that are in their every day.

That make aspirational or, or long deep work feel out of sync with the urgency of the everyday. I think people are questioning the meaning of their work and yeah, AI is having an effect that we don't know where it's gonna go. McKinsey's calling it the break or break year. There's the economic bubble, but then there's [00:12:00] also the destabilization of mediated reality.

We're not gonna know what's real. Capitalism, as in owning the means of production is giving way to not even having to own the means of production. Just having to have an algorithm that can match the data of what people want to a product that someone else is producing and not having to actually fulfill that.

Just connect the two. We've been inside this already as producers of data offering up our technological data as a form of demand and supply information. So this picture is easy to get overwhelmed about and doesn't include what might be going on for you on a personal level, or the ways in which your connection to these global experiences might be landing for you and your own life, or the people in your life, either because it's happening to [00:13:00] you or because it's triggering things that have happened to you before or that have been part of your lineage.

So this mountain of uncertainty is all speaking to structure, the structure of our existence, the structure of how do we know what is real? How do we like experience that there is something solid to build on to, to lean on, to sleep on, to rest in. So how to respond to that. Is to consider that what we're responding to is structural change.

Like the very structures of our shared existence are undergoing this reorganization, crumbling, disintegrating, and emergence of something else for which we don't have the cognitive grasp of to make sense of [00:14:00] it yet. And so the response to structural change that I want to offer you is to exercise choice in the structures that you are now building.

And one of the pieces of that is considering that what's happening right now is a reorganization of how we understand value, specifically the value of labor. What activities and labor holds the most value? Now, which roles are gonna be consolidated or will disappear? How the ways that we think about work are undergoing a complete reorganization and restructuring on the back of the impact that the pandemic had on our attitude to work and our relationship to time.

And so exercising choice [00:15:00] in the structures that you are building is also about exercising choice in what you determine as having value that feels reliable and true enough for you to structure your work around it. What is the value you want to offer? And then building a structure for offering it and also receiving the decision of what that should be.

It doesn't make sense anymore to base that decision on adapting to an industry structure because those industries are undergoing so much structural change. It doesn't make sense to base that on your past or your training or what your qualifications prepared you for. And it also doesn't make sense to base that structure on, feels like it will work because of the degree of choice we have [00:16:00] now for how we make things work.

Given that the internet has become a means of trade, that can support your own connection and insight to a very niche specific problem, and offer something towards that in a way that doesn't need. Mass market approval, but can make like a boutique micro business make sense? In other words, you have a high degree of choice right now to determine what world your work is building, contributing to by meeting the actual core needs of people like out of this crumbling, shifting, changing.

Destabilized sense of what is can emerge these new seedlings of what could be that are benefiting from the [00:17:00] fact that those restrictions, those structures, those um, past sources of stability are no longer the thing that you have to contend with, that you have to make sense with. And so if you are someone who is offering something sourced from in, you, sourced from an insight that you have.

You are offering it directly to people. You have something that is a source of certainty where all of the previous sources of certainty are no longer solid, and where you source that certainty is coming from your decision about the purpose your work serves and how. That is a really unique position to be in that you might not know you are in and that you might not have noticed and that you might not have seen as something that is like, oh fuck, this is good for me.

This is my time. People are underserved right now for their core [00:18:00] human needs. And what I mean is like connection, belonging, meaning there is a widespread vacancy. In leading on those things. Leading on what does this moment mean? How do we collectively come together and meet it? How do we make sense? There is a vacancy.

There is a wide open crack gap in your opposition to take up that space to be in leadership. This is when you step up and show people away. It comes from you being super grounded and clear and connected to the purpose that your work serves and how, and so on a backdrop of what might be doom and gloom, fatalism, end times fascism, distraction, the [00:19:00] delusions of continuous normal.

You have an opportunity to be someone who is collaborating, who is communicating the purpose of your work, and who is building from that purpose. Building with the certainty that that purpose offers and structuring how you offer it according to the purpose of that work, rather than something else that you need to fit in with that takes you away from the agenda of that work.

Let me recognize what I bring to this moment as essential, as non-negotiable as a source of certainty. This matters. This is what I'm about. This is the point. Join me, come with me. So the the Cafe Otto for you is that open space of uncertainty and you being the person who decides, okay, this is how we respond.

You with your people, right? [00:20:00] And as I'm saying that, that might feel intimidating because it's a responsibility. It might feel like, oh, there's, there's a version of me that I'm supposed to be in order for people to trust me, to follow me, to believe in my work, to say yes. And the image I want to paint is no.

Imagine that there's like hundreds and thousands of millions of people like you that each in their own role, each in their little me, human, fallible, vulnerable, me believing that this matters is enough. It might have you drawing on ideas that you think. You need to replicate about what it means to be a leader, what it means to be professional, what it means to be certain.

That have come from a hierarchical way of thinking about leadership and thinking about power and thinking about responsibility where you have it because you are the boss or [00:21:00] you have it because you have a certain job title and instead to imagine that no, you in your fallible humanity that is. True leadership and that you can be that right now as you are without having to change yourself.

And just to determine and decide for yourself what matters, the purpose of your work, being the source of certainty that other people can gather around, and that you can bring people with you, but also to recognize the value of that in times like now. In a later episode, I'm going to talk to how do you create the structures underneath that purpose.

But now I just want to invite you to marinate in the idea that this is the perfect time for you. This is like ideal conditions for why your work matters and why people want it, and. Why to stop [00:22:00] doubting.