PODCAST Episode 018
Published 14 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:

when you have made the series of decisions involved in translating the core purpose and why your work matters, why it exists into a format, a structure. A length of time, an experience, an invitation to someone else to be transformed by your work. When you've decided on the structure and what you are offering people to say yes to, there is an experience that [00:02:00] happens after that decision before someone has said yes that I want to speak to in this episode because.

How you respond to that experience makes a difference on whether you follow through versus backtracking, undermining that decision and not following through. What I'm gonna talk about today is so core to everything that matters in terms of whether your work will work. This defines whether it will work or not.

Okay. What happens in the gap between you offering it and someone saying Yes? There was a piece of advice I came across the other day, which is something like, your business doesn't exist to meet your emotional needs, and I'm all for that being true and correct in many [00:03:00] instances. However, if you are creating work that is transformative, you're inviting people into something that is designed to change them in some way, to change their experience of what is possible, what is real, and if your work is coming from inside you, an insight that you have, a perspective that you have on a problem that people are facing, or a disconnect that you are looking to solve or heal.

A different way that something could be done or expressed, and you are in the work of creating your own structures for that work. You are putting your own work out that you are responsible for if someone is paying you or not, then your work can also does also exist in part to meet your emotional needs, the specific ones of meaning and connection and belonging and fulfillment.

But. [00:04:00] The nuance I wanna bring in is that the work to create that can sometimes feel the opposite of that can feel really shit. And this can be really confusing because if congruence and feeling aligned and not burning out and trusting your own body signals are values of yours, then the places where creating and building the value of that work.

The places where that feels like shit can be something we mistake for misalignment and that we use to undermine self-trust and to also undermine decisions we've already made about the form, the function that offer the invitation of our work. So in this episode, I want to speak to where to source certainty and where to welcome.

The emotional experience of uncertainty [00:05:00] and not let it be a reason to stop. To do this, I want to bring in an analogy of me changing my hair color many times over the last few years, and finally settling on blonde and long and straight. Specifically, I think it was early pandemic or before pandemic. I dyed it.

Red, like a kind of bright, brassy, bold red, and part of the reason for doing that was just to shake things up and to allow myself to enter a different experience of visibility and who I might. Be able to see myself as, and because I'd never allowed myself to change my hair color before that. So it was an experience of really changing my sense of self by changing my hair color.

And then during the pandemic, I couldn't go and get it dyed professionally, so I didn't want to [00:06:00] risk doing such a bright color at home. And so I covered it up with a shade of brown that was like a shade darker than my natural brown hair color. And then coming out with a pandemic, I spent some time considering how I wanted to look and what color to settle on and booked the appointment and it ended up being a five hour hair appointment, five hours, not just having my hair done, but going through quite a dramatic transformation.

They had to remove all the old hair dye. In order to then do the bleaching and the toning and a lot of work to take out, yeah, the cheap home dye stuff and get it to a place where it wasn't just yellow. And while I was sitting in that chair, I was like, fuck, what if this is a really bad idea? This is super expensive.

It's taking all this [00:07:00] time, and I have no idea if it's gonna look right. I dunno if I'm gonna like it. People are gonna look at me. I'm not gonna be able to just hide. I don't know what I would do if I don't like it. And after it was done, I could see that it looked good, like my hairdresser took a photo from the back and showed it to me, and I was like, that looks really good.

But looking at myself in the mirror was, who the fuck is that? This doesn't look like me. I don't like it. This feels wrong. I look like that character in The Hobbit. I just looks wrong. And it took two weeks to get used to it. Took looking at myself in the mirror, trying on different clothes, figuring out who this version of me is, and then it began to click as like, no, this is how I like it.

This is it. I'm feeling good. And after that it started to feel more like me. And now it, it really does. [00:08:00] And I think of your offer decisions, the decisions about the format and the function, and. And why your work exists. Similarly, there is a process that you have to go through that in offering your work into the world and inviting someone else to say yes, that changes you and the experience, the invitation of that change of you transforming into someone who is being recognized and valued for what you've conceived and come up with.

That means something to you. The experience of you putting that out into the world, the invitation to transform that, that represents, feels really bad, feels like a lack of congruence. Congruence is like everything is lined up, what you want, what you're doing, who you're being, how you see yourself. When you [00:09:00] change any of those things, when you make a commitment that is invoking a new version of you, that version of you doesn't feel congruent.

Your actions and who that is don't fully line up. You aren't well practiced at being that me in the hair salon. I didn't know how to style that hair. I didn't know how to just relax into this is who I am. I still thought of myself as having brown hair. I'd be surprised and shocked in the mirror. It takes time.

It doesn't feel like you, it doesn't feel congruent. The decision that you make with yourself about what your offer is going to be feels more certain than when you put it out and you invite people to have an opinion and make a decision about it. That might be a no. There is an emotional risk involved.

The emotional risk of rejection, being misunderstood, of [00:10:00] people not getting it, people not wanting it. The exposure to that that can feel deeply unsettling and emotionally difficult can represent a challenge. And if you don't know that, that is how it's supposed to feel. You can have a relationship to that gap between you deciding and someone else saying yes.

And the experience of being in that gap of uncertainty, of not knowing when and how and who is going to say yes, you can relate to that gap as something's gone wrong, something bad is happening. I'm out of congruence. I'm out of alignment, and I need to escape this feeling as fast as possible, and what escaping that feeling can look like depends on your relationship to challenge.

For some people, it's a lot of stress and activation, and I need to [00:11:00] fight, or I need to force something, or I need to overwork, or I need to compensate. I need to rush. I need to get something. And so that can have you looking for all the ways to try and get someone to say yes so that you can experience the relief or looking for what is the right strategy when really the only guarantee is repeating over and over the act of inviting people into it.

For some people, their relationship to challenges, avoid hide, disappear from it, pretend it's not there, numb out. So that can look like just coming up with an offer and then not inviting anyone, not actually putting it out there, not being in that emotional risk or backtracking and deciding because it doesn't feel congruent.

It feels like it's the wrong one. I need [00:12:00] to find the magic right. Offer the right structure in order to feel certain enough to offer it to people. Sometimes it can look like perfecting the work, trying to get it exactly right. Sometimes it can look like overcomplicating everything and trying to build this entire, fully fledged giant business that looks similar to the ones that the people that have been doing it for a long time and can handle and have the capacity for that level of complexity.

Sometimes it looks like, oh, there's 10 things I need first before I can even offer this into the world. When really it's you change your hair color, you feel different, and you're gonna feel a bit weird for a while. It's going to feel awkward. You're going to feel like shit while you wait for someone to say, yeah, it looks good.

And that's just how it goes. Sometimes it can look like being really nice and likable and trying to [00:13:00] make your work more palatable to get someone to say yes. Changing it, making it super bespoke to every single person who's even showing a remote bit of interest. Sometimes it can look like d. Energy because you are desperate to get out of this feeling and desperate to make someone say yes, even if they're not quite the right person.

Sometimes it's you saying yes to someone who doesn't fit, who won't respect your boundaries, who is difficult to work with, who wants you to do the things that are ready for them to do. And so your relationship to this experience of being in the gap of deciding what you're offering before someone says yes matters.

In fact, I would say this is the ingredient to whether or not your work will work, because when you know this is how it's supposed to feel, when you're not trying to get out of the feeling and escape it, when you are not trying to resolve it and find relief. [00:14:00] You will actually do the work that is required to close that gap and bring someone in, which is to follow through on your commitment to that decision and to who you are in offering it.

Even when half of you is screaming, what the fuck are you doing? This feels terrible. Something's going wrong. Stop. And so the transformation that you undergo in making this offer out to the world in inviting people to work with you is being someone who values the purpose and the reason of your work, like why your work exists, to the degree that you are willing to be in emotional risk to realize it, being willing to pay that immediate initial cost of feeling this bad.

For the long-term benefit that your work will provide for someone else or in the world or for the culture. So there's a [00:15:00] capacity for feeling that bad and a depth of commitment that you have to find in yourself to keep offering it and to offer it without needing someone to say yes, without needing anything from it to be only in the generosity and the act of giving.

One of the most valuable and generous things you could possibly do with your work is to offer it, to invite someone to experience it, to invite them to be changed by it. And so where I wanna invite you to source your certainty is the reason for them, what's in it for them? Why does this matter for them?

Why should this exist in the world? Why is this something you're giving yourself to? Why have you structured your livelihood around it? And when that is your focus and you're willing to be in the emotional risk and challenge that is required to keep inviting people into it, then your focus goes not on what you are [00:16:00] doing wrong, why it's not good enough yet, instead it goes to, huh?

What might they need that I'm not showing them or explaining or demonstrating or providing in order to be a yes. And so you enter into the work of developing the skill of communicating with people about what is possible when they say yes to your work, why they might want to do that, what your work is for, how their experience will be, what changes for them as a result, how might they want to think about what your work draws on.

You enter into the actual work required, which is the skill of inviting people in practicing, how do you make it visible? How do you make it noble? How do you translate something that is a not yet into something that feels palpable and tangible enough for someone to say yes to working [00:17:00] with you? There is something deeply compelling to people when they feel that energy of you being someone who's willing to.

Be in the emotional risk of offering it, of inviting people, and that you are not seeking the safety of relief from that experience, but you are welcoming it in Flare House. I teach self-coaching. The amount of self-coaching required to stay and be with the feeling of being in this gap is substantial.

But sometimes the best way to coach yourself is just to welcome how it feels to turn your face to the wind and be like, bring it on. I welcome the feeling of challenge that I'm in. I welcome the emotional risk. I welcome the emotional exposure as the signal I'm on track. It's supposed to feel this way, and until I have overwhelming proof that people really want my work and that there's much more people that want my [00:18:00] work than I can.

Work with until I have that proof, until my body has seen enough of it, this is how it's going to feel, and therefore I can take the actions required without expecting or trying to feel otherwise. There is, like I said, an energy that comes off. Someone who's willing to serve through emotional risk, who's willing to feel like shit and bear that in order to gift something to you.

I think there's an illusion that is created by. Lifestyle influences that in order to persuade someone, in order for someone to believe in you or say yes to you, that you have to have your shit together, that you have to feel calm and certain all the time, that the conviction for your why needs to also be a conviction for everything else that's going on.

When actually it's, can you find the [00:19:00] reason to serve someone even when, even when things are feeling shit, even when maybe your own life is a complete mess. Maybe you've got relationship stuff happening. Maybe this thing's going on with your kids or people that you are close to. Maybe you've got circumstantial or financial difficulty that you are in.

Can you even then find the. Like this is everything. This is why your work will work, not because you have the right magical structure or offer or format for your work, but because you're willing to be in this experience of offering it. FYI. This doesn't go away. As in there will constantly be new levels of risk, new experiences, new things.

You expose your work to new levels of visibility, and so you are developing the muscle, the capacity [00:20:00] to put yourself out there and not escape from it, not use it to undermine the certainty that comes from you, connecting to why your work matters. When you know that this is how it's supposed to feel, you stop using that as a reason to doubt the entire thing that you're doing or yourself.

And so you actually reduce the emotional rollercoaster that you go on when things aren't working, and you can locate the problem that you're trying to solve as a skill gap, as something solvable, something discreet and local, and not a question about the entire operation of what you're doing. And I can't tell you enough the relief of that.

There is so much wasted energy goes on, doubting what you're doing, doubting if anyone will want it, doubting yourself. And really it's just about committing, following through and then finding through, following through the tweaks and the [00:21:00] things that you might want to change. As a result of you experiencing what happens after someone said yes, after you've worked with them or after they've experienced what you are offering, after you have the feedback of whether your work is working the way you want it to, and then at that moment is the time to tweak and change and look at what might be improved.

So I hope that helps you. Be ready. Be in the space of commitment. Knowing that the commitment and the decisions are not designed to create relief, to create a sense of certainty, but rather the actions that follow suit from that decision is where that certainty begins to grow, as well as the purpose and the meaning that you derive from why your work should exist.

Is it working? It works. When you work it. How you work it is to feel like shit while you're working on it. [00:22:00] I hope this helps you.