PODCAST Episode 016
Published 24 December 2025

LISTEN ON APPLE

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

RSS FEED


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 this is part two to last week's episode. I'm gonna dive straight in and I want to talk through. How being in the authority and the identity of someone who can be in charge of the decisions around what you offer, how you offer it, and I wanna invite you to get excited because this, this is valorize, this changes everything.

I have clients that I've worked with that are [00:02:00] now living the life that they designed, and they designed it by getting super, super clear on the one decision that makes all the other decisions make sense. But first I wanna talk about what might be happening when that one decision hasn't been made, and therefore all the other decisions about what you offer, the structure, the pricing, who it's for, how you invite people in.

All of those micro decisions when they're not cascading from the central logic of valorize, when they're not cascading from the one decision about what is the thing that your work is here for? What do you most value creating? A okay. What transforms for someone or in the world or in the culture when you do your work?

When you're not clear on what that is, it makes all the other decisions really hard, and essentially it makes them hard because you haven't self-appointed yourself as the person who is leading and operating a [00:03:00] particular perspective or worldview or paradigm or transformation that your work is responsible for, and therefore you are handing over your authority.

To other people, to strategies and tactics that don't fit your work or logics that don't apply, it doesn't really matter what you're handing it over to. It matters that you're handing it over. So here's how it can look and listen. If you recognize yourself in any of these, it's okay. Just know that many people are also figuring this out.

And also there are people who don't have to because they're just doing things that you can just follow a tactic and a strategy, and great. Good for them. So don't judge yourself. Don't make yourself bad when anything that I'm saying feels true for you. This is not coming from judgment from me. I want you to win and this is how.

Okay? So how this might show up for you is number one, never committing. [00:04:00] Hear that word committing. Commit, committing when we are not decided. When we're not committed to the one thing that we're we're about and how that therefore translates into the structure of all these decisions, what happens is we keep our options open.

Too many offers, too many experiments. Spaghetti at the wall. Let's see what sticks. Let me try this. Let me dabble over there. Let me not have to commit, but therefore I'm spread too thin. This really matters in terms of you valuing your own energy, your own time, and recognizing the amount of work and skill and thinking required to just get one, one offer.

One. Micro microsystem working really well, sustaining itself, [00:05:00] providing a good income. Doing one of them really successfully. When you're trying to do many, you end up exposing yourself to, to trying to build too many discreet bespoke to that offer skills all at once. AKA. Exposing yourself to a whole bunch of failure all at once.

You are not building because you're always in re reinvention, you're always in startup mode. You are always starting from scratch, and so you're not building reputation. You're not building the assets of your work or your intellectual property. You are always in perpetual beginner mode. And so what happens is you are not getting the feedback of this works.

People really want it. Uh, people find out about it without you having to tell them that your reputation just spreading. You are not getting the feedback that this is [00:06:00] who you are. So the identity piece that I talked about in the last episode doesn't get to strengthen in you as something that is unshakeable.

Sometimes when we're trying on a new identity and we're building a new identity of, yeah, this is possible for me, I can do this, I can be this person in the world. When it's shaky, we look outside of ourselves. We look to is it working? We look to whether we are taking action or not. We look to our people responding.

We look for proof that that's who we are, instead of just trusting and knowing and believing and acting from, no, this is who I am. And so your identity doesn't get to grow into the person who can build a whole unique body of work and be known for it. And be recognized for it. Alright? So that's what happens when we're not committing.

We spread too thin. Your energy's going everywhere. Your reputation's not building and your body of work is not building. It feels like sometimes it is because you're getting [00:07:00] to exercise the muscle of invention and creating and listen. I get this. I love coming up with new ideas, but there's a discipline to knowing that coming up with tons of ideas and half making them can't be the thing that you are valuing above.

Having one thing that work really well. This is a bit like being an artist and. Making a whole body of work, having one show and then moving on to the next body of work, and then that work that you made just sits in storage and doesn't get to have its own life, and then no one sees it, and then you don't get the reputation build, and then you're still a beginner, right?

It's the same. The second way that this can show up is because you're not in your authority to make these decisions. You hand over those decisions to what you think. We'll give you that authority, AKA legitimacy from outside, permission from outside [00:08:00] handing over that authority to, for example, peers, people, friends, people in your industry or your field, and wanting their respect.

People that you respect and that you admire their work. To look at your work in the same way and to give you the thumbs up of approval. And I see this so much when you are in a particular like. Cultural space where you are doing things that are edgy or that are radical, or that are new or that are challenging to a system or a way of doing things, and your peers are helping you have the courage to do that.

The issue becomes that stepping outside of what everyone else in your little bubble is doing feels like something really difficult. And so your work starts to narrow to the lens of your peers and what they might think of it instead of the people that you might directly be working with or for, or your audiences [00:09:00] that you're building.

And you have to decide, right, are my peers. Paying my bills are my peers, my audience are my peers. The people who are at the end of the day going to make this work. Sometimes not. And sometimes the thing that you are here to offer might deviate from what your peers understand immediately. And so I think there's a different relationship that we can have, which is more co-conspirator.

So breathing the same air co conspire, allowing each other to be in a sparring game of. Okay, how? How big and bold can we dream? How much in integrity can each of us be, rather than us all be the same rather than us all look to each other for how to make these decisions? How can we each be in our own leadership and be examples for each other of that?

Sometimes people hand over authority to standard practice and industry models and norms and what looks professional, and again, [00:10:00] this is that group mentality, group think. You see it in the coaching industry. So like five, six years ago there'd be a lot of people, and even now people were suddenly all getting photo shoots done in bright colored blazers and holding coffee mugs and sitting in front of their laptop.

And you know that being what makes you look legitimate as a certain type of coach, there's a lot of things that different industries can do where they need to look like a corporation or it's like having a very. Particular style of logo and the consequence of this is that everyone ends up blanding out.

The very thing that makes your work stand out Blanding, if you dunno this word, I love this word named by Tieri Bruford and Tom Greenwood in 2018 in an article that they wrote about how design and logos and architecture and interior design choices all seem to be amalgamating [00:11:00] into looking very, very similar.

So one of the examples was. Fashion brands and how each of them slowly got rid of the distinctiveness of their brand logo and they all started to look like they were using the same font. So I think that's not happening so much now, but there's a kind of tactic strategy like, oh, how did they look? What's the aesthetics of how I'm supposed to do this?

I also see this in. Certain realms of facilitation work that is informed by social justice, where there's a particular style of images that get used, colors that get used a certain type of language. And so we have to be really careful that we are not adopting these things because we think they're the things that work.

Or we think that they're the things that that kind of signal the virtue of our work, that signal the moral high ground that we want to take up. That we are using them as sources of legitimizing [00:12:00] instead of really trusting. No, I can have the authority to design this in the way that actually is congruent with the transformation that my work is here to have and who it's best for, and that might not look the same as what my peers or my industry or the credentializing or legitimizing structures seem to model.

I've always been someone who. My work does not look like anyone else's work. I like to think and it means that I really enjoy that part of it, and you couldn't mistake me for someone else. You want to be deciding from your own inner permission, not from external legitimacy. And listen, there is a place for that.

There is a place for, I'm not saying rebel or wholly reject. How things are done. Often there is a a logic and there is something useful and there is a reason people do things in a certain way. [00:13:00] Like for me, starting out coaching, I was like, okay, people seem to do a weekly thing and I had a few experiments like, oh, what happens if I do it every two weeks or every once a month?

And the experience of it was that people between those sessions would, the thread would get lost and every session then became about gathering them back into focus. And so the decision to coach Weekly became the decision because it was in congruence with the impact of the work I was doing. Like it was for the people I work with.

Not because everyone else did it. So in the beginning, sometimes we just need to borrow, okay, they're doing it for that reason. But what happens when I try that and trusting your own assessment and judgment of it. And the third way this shows up is when you are making these decisions and keep changing the decisions or make them bespoke to every single [00:14:00] different person who en encounters your work.

So this can look like if you're someone who works with clients, making a bespoke offer for every single client being reactive to clients or to audiences or to. Basically changing your decisions every time someone has a problem with something, and there's a kind of people pleasing that happens with this, where instead of deciding once and then holding your decisions as a standard and a boundary and the way that you best work, it's this idea that.

It seeps in that maybe that's not good enough and that you need to compensate and make it good enough. And the logic of where that then is sourced from is when someone has a complaint or your clients want a a specific thing done just for them, and then you adapt to that. And so this is a, a different flavor of having too many offers, which [00:15:00] is that your one offer gets.

Tweaked and changed and adapted and reinvented every time that you have a new person or every time that someone wants it done a certain way, and it's really you not seeing the value that you bring, not seeing. Why your work is good enough and therefore not holding the standard and the boundaries around you being in the authority that you actually know what's best.

You know what's best for your work. You know what's best to create a certain result for clients. If you work with clients, you know how you best create. And you have the authority to determine that that is something that you protect and that you guard closely. And that how you design the structure of what you do has to be in service to that, not to the whims of this person versus what that person wants.

And sometimes this can come from being afraid to commit and hold a [00:16:00] particular standard and boundary because. You are not trusting that you can actually fulfill and deliver on it. And so this is where identity comes in. Again, the identity change that's possible when you commit is often a commitment to your own transformation, to you being someone who has the agency to create something of high value for someone else.

And I need to do another episode on how we think about what value constitutes in your work. Like what is value, but the identity of being someone who can deliver on the thing that you actually are, are most desiring to create often is inviting out of you, a different version of you, a version who has more authority, who has the authority to bring a paradigm or a category.

A transformation about by doing it in [00:17:00] your way. And so there is an identity transformation that happens for you when you actually commit to your dream work, like how you would most get excited and be motivated and. Alive about working and what you'd be working on. That is often something that you don't know for sure that you can do.

And so sometimes an making an offer towards that is in of itself an identity invocation. Flair house was this for me. I had got to a point where I knew and I trusted myself, I can get people results. So then the question became, what am I most excited to help people create? And when I identified what that is, it asked of me to be a different version of me, to be [00:18:00] an evolved version of me to be someone who is more grown in their self authority.

The identity piece of this is that sometimes when you identify the one main core heart of your work, and that will be some kind of transformation. It could be a paradigm shift, it could be a new category that your work embodies, or it could just be that it's new for you, new in your lineage, new in your cultural location, new in amongst your peers.

New in your family. This can also come from an income level, right? When you identify and design from the position of what does my work valorize, what is most important, what is the thing that I'm about, and therefore. The structures and the systems underneath it to support that being real, which often means doing the sums and working out how [00:19:00] much money that would be and what you would then be earning when you identify that income amount, there is then an identity shift that that invokes in you.

This was the case for me with Flare House. I knew I could get people results, and so the question then became, what result am I most excited to help people create? When I identified that, when I got clear on the one thing, it invoked in me a different version of me and a different set of standards, a different set of boundaries, and committing to that meant that all the other decisions underneath it just flowed.

The hesitation came when it came to visibility. Why? Because a new identity being made public is where it gets tested, right? Also, we believe if we're historically oriented to our safety, comes from being watchful and, and vigilant on what is other people's [00:20:00] viewpoint. Embodying a newly formed identity and exposing it to other people's worldview that aren't people who've already said yes to your work feels like the most vulnerable thing.

I'll talk about that in another episode. But let me get back to the main thing that I want to impart you with, which is when you've made that one decision about what your work is entirely for and about, when you've made that commitment to that is who you're being, and you take up that authority to make all of the micro decisions within that, you make them once and it's done.

And this frees up all your energy, all your head space. All the bandwidth you need for actually building the skills and building the body of work and inviting people into it. Building your reputation, building the clarity that other people need about what you do, right? Confused people don't buy. I think this is so true.

There's no confusion. People [00:21:00] get what you you're about because it's so abundantly clear, because everything is pointing to it, and you can focus on stewarding your work. You can focus on building the unique universe of it. And because you've made those decisions and you are now focused on enacting those decisions and operating the value system that you've designed, you are then in the place where you can actually build predictable, stable income and the system that can support the work that you most want to be recognized or valued for that happening.

Now people are scared to commit because it feels like constraint. It feels like then there's no space for creativity. And I have to say, being someone like, listen, I love coming up with ideas. I love inventing. I love starting from scratch. I don't like finishing. I don't like sticking to one thing, but I have to say me sticking [00:22:00] to the one thing, I'm about me enacting everything I've talked about in this episode in the last one.

I would credit with why my work is working. It is also why the creativity that I have, I can bring to things like the actual inside of Flair House and what that looks like. I can bring it to how I tell people about it, how I invite people in because I have the, the structure within which I can feel safe to play and safe to create.

And I'm not worrying about is this working? Will this work? It's working, and now I get to play. People are also afraid to commit because they are afraid that it won't be understood. This is part of the process. This is part of it. Thinking that the value that you actually bring and that you most value doing won't be valued, is just a consequence of times when you weren't seen, you weren't valued, it wasn't recognized.

[00:23:00] Those don't apply to you in your work. Now, that's just a hangover from. The past. So it's going to feel confronting, it's going to feel like something you can't trust, and that is the point. And that is also why it's so powerful and so impactful and such a form of value and leadership. When you take up that authority and you say, no, yeah, this, this matters.

This is what I'm about. And then people are also afraid that people won't pay for it. Sometimes you'll design a structure, a value system, and there is the fear that no one's gonna pay for that. How much should I charge, or how should I think about pricing? This is something I'm also going to address in what I want to talk to you about next, which is rather than.

You just take my word for it. I want you to actually experience this, and so I want to invite you to join me in a workshop [00:24:00] where I'm actually creating, I'm thinking of it like a decision making environment. You enter this environment and it's highly attuned to making this commitment and all the other decisions that sit underneath it in one go.

So it's done. So if that sounds interesting to you, if you want to come into a workshop where you stop copying strategies, legitimacy, trying a bunch of stuff, and you commit, and then you are led through a process where you make every single decision that comes underneath it about the value system or the structure of how you design your offer, send me a DM or an email with the word workshop and I'll send you the info.

And I'll see you on the [00:25:00] workshop.