PODCAST Episode 001: VALORIZE: A systems thinking lens on the value of your work.
Published 26 September 2025

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[00:00:00] If the purpose of your work is not about adding more to what is, but about creating what could be? Then typical career ladders, market fit, and industry norms will always devalue what is transformative or unprecedented about your work. For the value of your work to be seen, you first have to see the value of it, despite having interacted with systems that didn't see you.

This calls you into an emancipated relationship to your own resources, your energy, your time, your focus, your unique insights and gifts, your relationships and your sense of self. Where the future impact of your work dictates the terms, and your desired standard for how resourced you feel in doing that work, in your way, is what makes that impact possible.

Hi, I'm Louisa Shaeri and I'm on a mission to help you see the value of what you have to offer so that you can make your work recognized, sought after, and highly valued in the world. I call this 'valorize'. To valorize is to determine the value system by which unprecedented or transformative value can be recognized.

This is the underlying methodology used by visionaries, artists, facilitators, culture workers, creatives, change makers, people who successfully realized unprecedented culture shifting work. While being well-resourced in this podcast, I am showing you what it takes, how this journey feels, some of the common pitfalls along the way, and how you can move past them so that you can replicate this road less traveled, and our world gets to be transformed by your work.[00:02:00]

You might have assumed. That you going after your dream work in the world, the impact that you want to create and the way that you want to create it, the way that you best work and having that work be highly valued is a contradiction in terms. And that in order to realize the work that you most want to realize, that you'll have to choose yourself over validated paths and your fear is that you are deluded, that you'll be alone, that you won't be able to do it, that you'll fuck up, that people will judge you, or that even if you do realize it, that people won't see the value of it.

And so before I get into where this notion of valorize comes from, or who am I in talking to you about [00:03:00] it? I want to start by Disambiguating Valorize because the way that I'm going to use it is different from how it's typically used. If you check the dictionary, you'll find valorize defined as to ascribe value or validity to, so it's pointing at something and saying it has value or making it valuable in some way.

And so it's a verb, it's a thing you do, but this definition doesn't do justice if you ask me on how much the value system. So the way that we think about and perceive what holds value. The value system, how much that is responsible for the perception of value, in other words, for what gets attention, recognition or resources.

There is a brilliant book by Donna Meadows about systems thinking. In the book, she says, an important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation. [00:04:00] If you are looking at the value systems that are holding up and perpetuating maintaining the status quo, and your work is about transforming the status quo, then the value of your work will not be seen inside existing value systems.

Let me break it down. You can consider that we are living systems inside of systems, inside of other systems, and you can even think about. Your body, your nervous system, the flow of oxygen and energy and other resources around your body, the way that's designed to sustain you, to keep you alive. The self sustaining purpose of a system determines where resources go, what your attention is focused on, and the same is true of our societal systems.

Our workplace systems, our education systems, family systems, societal systems, political systems, the system [00:05:00] resources, what helps the system to maintain itself. So if you consider an industry, a field, a system in which there is a certain way of doing work. There'll be best practices. There'll be typical career paths.

There'll be credentialised, validated ways to attain success in order to benefit from that system. And so you participating in that system creates more of the same. But if you are looking at the world right now and experiencing many of our systems as broken. It also follows that many of our value systems are broken.

The ways that we think about what is important, what matters, and how to participate. And let's say that you didn't fit in a system, and let's say that what a system rewarded meant you were overlooked or unseen. What you had to bring was [00:06:00] devalued. The impact of that, of interacting with a system that doesn't see you, doesn't flow resources to you, doesn't nourish you, doesn't bring what you have to offer out of you.

The effect of that is a pressure to comply, to bend, to conform, to fit in, and to compromise the value of what you have to offer in order to survive that system. So you recognizing your own self-worth, you recognizing the value that you bring, often means you had to learn to see that system right as separate from you, so that you could no longer internalize the effects of that system as your own deficiency.

But what sometimes gets left behind is that it can seem like you have to occupy a marginal space in relationship to those dominant systems without a route to your own desires being met, without a route [00:07:00] for you to realise the value that you have to offer. If what I want means pleasing that system, then choosing myself means not creating what I most desire.

So it puts you in a thwarted, disconnected relationship to your own desires and to the level of trust you have that you can move directly towards them. And it can be easy to come to the conclusion that in order to receive more, then you'll need to extract more from yourself to over compromise more, and then you can create more.

And so even if you see the value that you bring, if you've had to adapt to a working assumption that the value won't be seen or that you are not good enough, or there's some external standard that you'll have to mimic, then it can be really hard to trust moving with all of you towards the work that you most want to create and how you want to create it, and trusting that that is going to also be seen by others.

And so there's a huge amount of energy that gets used up in that push and pull. Between what you actually want and what you have to offer, and the belief, the body-based belief system, that you don't get to do it your way, and so you never fully allow yourself to go full tilt into realising that work.

You'll spend all your energy running two different value systems, seeking validation in places that can't validate what you're about. Overworking and undercharging. Underplaying the power that your work could have, if you went full tilt into doing it. It means you wait on permission, you wait on external validation that you could create and lead on.

And it means where you are pouring your energy isn't coming back to you. You aren't being nourished, you aren't getting the feedback and fulfilment from your energy investment. You aren't receiving in line with what is costing you to do it. And so your dreams feel like you'd have to add more on top.

And so when you understand that Valorizing is about determining the value system through which the unprecedented or transformative nature of your work can be recognized. When you understand this way of approaching how work is valued, it changes everything. And the first change is in relationship with your own desire, claiming the desire to do your work in your way, to realize the impact that you most want to have, and to have that be highly [00:10:00] valued.