PODCAST Episode 017
Published 7 January 2026

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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:

Oh, I'm so excited to talk to you about what I wanna talk about today because, okay, so. Over the holidays, I experience what I wanna say is an above average number of interactions with the normals normal people in normal jobs with normal aspirations doing normal chitchat and a question that got asked a lot.

In those interactions. [00:02:00] By what I mean by normal is okay not being as intense and intensely streamlined in terms of what I'm focused on every day and what I'm aspiring to in a neurodivergent way, but also in a life purpose way. I'm not concerned with keeping up with the Joneses or like adjusting my expectations of who I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to want according to what is.

Socially normed around me. I've very much exited that logic. And so, yeah, it feels weird to me coming back into conversations like that sometimes where, you know, I'm speaking to people who might be extended family or neighbors, or people that are not part of my everyday world. And yeah, a lot of the conversations were things like.

Do you have any New Year's resolutions? And listen, if you have New Year's resolutions, all good. I'm all good for resolving to do new things. Um, [00:03:00] but it's not something I do. I'm definitely not in January anymore because I'm doing it all year long and I'm also doing it in a very structured way, one that I teach inside Flair House, but it's had me thinking about.

This question of deciding and following through on a big, new, bold decision, and in the last couple of episodes I've talked about the importance of deciding on the structure of your work, specifically what you are offering or inviting people into with you, with working with you, or to experience with your work as you're putting it out into the world.

Essentially creates for you your own value system, your own micro economy. Not just financially, but where your energy goes, where your focus goes, what you receive, what you give, what you're stewarding into. The world gets to be something that you are defining the value system [00:04:00] for. You are deciding what you are valorizing, you are deciding what's important, what matters, where resources go, and why.

And so for many people who work with me, this can look like reckoning with needing to come to a decision about what that is about. What is the core offer or invitation or experience that you are putting out into the world, and also building reputation for and want to be known for. Want to be recognized for, want to be paid for, be the steward of into the world, right?

And so knowing what is the core transformation that your work is about is really key. But in this episode, I want to talk about that kind of decision. In a specific way, I was going to do a podcast, and this is going to be the next one I think, on how to [00:05:00] follow through on a big, bold decision like that.

But actually I need to talk about the decision itself. The decision is a commitment. A commitment to to structure your working existence, and in fact, probably to structure your lifestyle and. How do you make that kind of decision? How do you know it's the right one? Especially when, like I talked about in the last episode, not choosing and spreading yourself too thin and doing a lot of experimenting, but not really committing, uh.

Has a cost. It has a cost to your energy. It has a cost to your reputation. It has a cost to the impact that you're able to have, and it means you're not really building, you're not really doing something that you can sustain, and you are not also receiving the kind of income that you could be having for your specific, unique point of view for the things that you bring to the table that.

Hold a lot of value that are important, that are [00:06:00] transformative, but you might not have seen it that way. And so there's a cost to not claiming the value of it and not designing a value system, a business or a way of working. A way of receiving a way of giving a way of stewarding that honors that.

There's also a cost to your sense of you having something to offer and being able to witness and experience the value of that for someone else, for other people, for the world, for culture. So committing to one. Structure, at least in the beginning, at least until you are super flush and it's not requiring a lot of you.

So in the beginning, you want to have just one, and then when that's working, you can add more. But you want your first engine, you want your first value system really working. And that takes work, that takes skill, [00:07:00] takes many skills layered on top of each other and we often underestimate that part. And so.

Constraining. Committing, choosing, deciding and defining what that structure is, is really key. And not doing it costs you a lot, but how do you do it? How do you make that kind of decision when it feels like there are lots of options or there are loads of things that you bring to the table. You have a lot of skills, you have a lot of insight.

And how do you commit when you don't know how you're going to do it, or you don't know that you are actually going to follow through and you don't necessarily trust yourself, that you can decide something as big and bold as that and then stick with it. And so I wanna talk about how do we make this kind of decision and the place that we need to make it from.

And the experience that you might have when you are making it [00:08:00] and really lay it out. Because I think there's a moment in every business or practice where in the beginning it's, it's almost playing pretend it's trying on the role. It's uh, can I be that version? And then there is the moment when you.

Really commit. And in that commitment, you're taking it seriously. You're taking seriously the amount you want to earn. You're taking seriously what you want to be known for. You're taking seriously that you are actually going to decide that you are responsible for making this happen. You are taking seriously that people are going to receive something that they've paid you for and what is that?

And making sure it's really the thing that you represent accurately. And so I feel like it's a rite of passage. It's a moment when you are moving from trying on that. This could be something that you [00:09:00] do trying on that this is who you are experimenting to really putting your money where your mouth is kind of thing.

Putting your energy and your resources to know this is a thing I'm, I'm about, so it's a rite of passage decision. What is a rite of passage decision? It's an identity defining decision. So this is how I wanna invite you to consider this decision about the structure of what you do, the structure of your offer, your invitation, the experience you invite people into, however you want to describe it when you're doing self-led work or when you are doing artistic work from an entrepreneurial or, uh, you're self structuring it how it functions economically.

Okay. You don't have an agent or someone doing that part on your behalf. This decision is an identity defining decision. If it's done right, you could make all these decisions about what you do, what you call it, [00:10:00] how you offer it, how you price it, who it's for, length of time, structure of the project. You can make all of those decisions from a very pragmatic place, and there would be nothing wrong with that.

But why I'm calling this an identity defining decision on this podcast when I'm talking to you is because the work that you are doing is about transforming the work that you're doing is about you taking something that is in you, the way you think, the way you see the things you know, and offering that and saying, and inviting people to value that.

And so for you, who you are matters in that how you see yourself is part of the equation of you making these decisions. How you see who you work with and where they are is part of [00:11:00] this. And so I want to speak to how I think about identity and then how I think about this kind of decision. So first of all.

Identity really is about the story you have about who you are, the version of you that you conform to, that you consistently imagine that this is who you are, the way that you assume people read you and see you. And I've talked about identity in this way before, but I wanna take it deeper in this episode as being about who I am in relationship to.

Something, someone. So your identity, it's not stable, right? We are not a fixed, knowable, separate, distinct self. Our identity is comprised and part of the conditions that we're in, the relationships that we're [00:12:00] in. And so that changes and. Considering that identity is who I am in relationship to something or someone, means that you can understand this identity defining decision as igniting a particular relationship or set of relationships.

So I wanna speak about what are you in relationship to when you are making an identity defining decision such that it defines and transforms your sense of self and your identity in making that decision? So I think of decisions as. A commitment to a desired outcome, a result or a future reality that requires you to put a line in the sand, right, that requires you to take actions in a way that having a priority over other things.

So a decision is already a value system. It's already saying, I value this [00:13:00] over that. So when you're making a commitment to the shape of your work. That decision is a decision that this is important, this is a priority. This is something I care about. This is something I want. And so the, the decision about the structure of your offer, imitation, the experience that people will have you with your work.

It's not just valuing something that you want. For example, being paid well or feeling aligned and congruent in the work that you do, feeling self-expressed. It's also a commitment to a valuing of what that is for someone else. So what is the experience or the impact on them? What is the transformation that they experience?

And so the identity [00:14:00] defining part is. That if identity is who I am in relationship to, it's connecting to and being in a new relationship to that eventual impact for someone else with your work. So it's saying, uh, who I am in relationship to that possibility is I am someone who can create that experience for someone else.

I can create that impact. Not only that, but I can create that while also being well-resourced myself. I can create resourcing for someone else, for a vision, for a world that I want, for a body of work that someone else will experience and will feel changed by, and I can also in offering it, receive. Be someone who is capable of stewarding that into the world and of also [00:15:00] feeling good as I do it.

So the identity that is invoked and defined in that commitment is being someone who can do that, not only who can, but who has committed and decided that it's worth it for you to try. It's worth it for you to give your resources to it. That it carries that much importance to you. And what is important is the impact for someone else.

And that how you're going to create it, because you're creating it from what feels good and true and important to you, what you actually desire giving to and what how you actually desire to receive in giving it. It puts you in relationship to that reality and. To those people who will experience your work and to that being true.

And so who you are now is already, I am the person who's creating it and that who [00:16:00] I am in relationship to the world is I am someone who gets to decide. I get to decide how I want my work to happen, the structure of it, the price of it, who I work with, and the impact it's for. And there is a self worth.

There is a self valuing that is often new and different from the versions of you that had to adapt to someone else's agenda, someone else's system, someone else's point of view, and be oriented to someone else's perspective over and above your own in order to fit in with that system and get what you need from it.

So you know, if you're making this decision because it is activating in some way and it's a decision that may take getting used to, it's a decision that is one that won't feel certain and solid yet. It's a [00:17:00] decision that is going to feel scary and alivening and okay, I'm now in the thrill of aliveness, of finding out how I did it.

It's a rite of passage in that you are changed in the decision making. You are changed because you are committing to a future reality that is different from your current one, not just for you, but for also for someone else. And so you are now in relationship to all of those things in a way that you weren't previously.

And so your identity is new. In the next episode, I wanna talk about how do you then keep that identity? How do you stay connected when life will throw a bunch of stuff to undermine [00:18:00] it.