PODCAST Episode 003
Published 10 October 2025

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TRANSCRIPT

Intro

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. We'll 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 [00:01:00] 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]

We can't talk about 'valorize' without talking about 'value'. What is the value of your work? What are we talking about with this idea of value? And one way of saying it might be what do people pay you for, but also what do people seek you out for? What do people identify with about what you do? What is possible because your work exists? What becomes permissive to someone else because of your presence in doing that work?

One of the most important things right now that I think is becoming more valuable in [00:03:00] the advent of AI is being able to be human because it's your nervous system, your body, your beating heart, your creativity, your self-expression, your flaws connecting to someone else's.

And when that's not happening, we feel less alive. And literally what is the most valuable thing, if not life and feeling alive? When I first started out as a coach, my priorities in. My training and who I trained with came from, who I had chosen to coach with originally. People who were really good at being human and were not faceless corporate entities with meaningless logos, offering these laded certifications.

That just didn't make sense to me because who I'd sought out as someone who was investing in [00:04:00] coaching. Was people who knew how to be confident, who knew how to be self-assured, who were boldly going about doing their work in the world, not caring what people thought, and who also had reasons why not to be confident and who had been where I was, and could speak to that and could speak to the journey of going from not having confidence to being someone who was very confident, bold being who they are.

The same was true when I did trauma training. I wanted to train with someone who'd been through a fuck ton of trauma and come out the other side and alchemize that into wisdom and could not only show me how they'd done it and give me that experience, but could also teach me how to do that for other people, which is a tool order, right?

And it's not courses and PDFs, it's a human. [00:05:00] Nervous system and a person who's thought about their experiences to the depth to be able to scaffold it cognitively and explain it while also creating that experience for you inside. What I am speaking to is how often you see the application of, I wanna say, industrial, corporate, and capitalistic.

Notions of the value of work being applied to industries and fields that are really about being human and about people, like whether it's facilitating change in relationships and between people, whether it's creating culture and creative industries. There are people who are valuing their work according to things like time.

Which is a very industrialist way of thinking about what the value of your work is like. I'm a worker that goes to the [00:06:00] factory and I clock in and I clock out because the factory needs to measure the units of productivity in order to make predictable income for shareholders. And so I think this question of what are we talking about with value when it comes to the kind of work that you are doing, you seeing and believing in the value also means looking at what are the.

Ways in which you are building that value and trying to convey and communicate it. And it becomes particularly important because you need to be able to see that value first. When you are not seeing the value, you'll often be hiding behind the work or hiding in. Yeah. Existing old school, archaic ways of trying to present why your work matters and why it should be sought after, why people should work with you.

When you're not seeing the value, it can have you focused on perfecting the work endlessly before getting it out there to [00:07:00] anyone. It can have you thinking that you need to perform and be a certain thing in order for that value to be seen. And it can have you suppressing the human like nuanced, specific distinctiveness that makes your work your work 'cause it comes from you.

So I want to talk about defining value because. Like I said, the traditional archaic old school, typical thinking about what makes something valuable doesn't really cover it because of, yeah, this industrialist idea of measuring productivity or time for money or this traditional way of considering a job or a title and the value of it is what that title is and the pay bracket that comes with the responsibilities.

The expectations, the contract. But I'm also not fully on board with the advice that you'll find for online business or business generally, or entrepreneurship generally. And to [00:08:00] represent that, I'm going to borrow the thinking of Alex Hormozi, who is like an aggressive aggregator of online business experience and knowledge and really focused on simplifying it for the masses.

And there is a notion of value that he offers that I think has helped a lot of people, and that works. But I think it leaves out some secret sauce. So I'm going to use it as an example of very good existing business logic about what is value, and then I'm going to explain what I think is missing. So.

Moses's take on understanding how to think about value in your work is he writes it like a maths equation. So it's like a, a division on the top. You've got desired outcome multiplied by perceived likelihood of achievement, right? So there's something you want and there's a low risk to having it if you buy this thing.

And then underneath the [00:09:00] division line is delay effort and sacrifice. So, how long do I have to wait for that desired outcome? How much effort is it gonna take for me to make it happen? And what am I gonna sacrifice? And so this makes sense, right? If you're offering a product, a service, you want it to be something that people want, you want them to feel that it's going to be possible, that if they pay you money or they work with you.

Then they're gonna get what they're looking for and to minimize how long they have to wait and how much effort they're gonna have to put in. And the sacrifice, like, which could be monetary cost, it could also be psychological costs, status costs, and so on. So this makes sense, right? If you are offering.

Let's say graphic design. Then the clients that you're working with will have a particular outcome that they're trying to make happen with your graphic design. They want to [00:10:00] know that that's fairly certain that that's gonna happen, and they don't want it to take too long. They don't want it to require a lot of effort from them or to.

Cost them a lot. And so the way that you might think about conveying and presenting the value of it is less on how you do that work and what software you use or like showing all of the swanky fancy stuff that you can do. It might be more about reassuring the client that you can help them. Make happen, what they're looking to make happen.

The track record that you have, that you are someone who can turn that over quickly are very responsive, et cetera, right? But hello to you who has some extra special source that I think is really important to bring into this idea of value. And for that, I want to speak to the context that we are living in right now.

Take for example, my [00:11:00] granddad. He was a really important person in my life. When I look at what his life was like, it feels so far removed from my own. He worked for the post office for 60 years, apart from in the second World War. That job paid for a family of five. After the war, there was a shortage in houses and it was the baby boom, and he got together with a housing co-op and they built a bunch of houses, and so he lived in.

Community. They went to church, although he wasn't hugely religious, they had connection, they had belonging, meaning, familiarity, and a type of stability. So, I dunno about you, but life to me doesn't really feel like that. And. One of the biggest changes apart from the level of change and [00:12:00] instability that we're all learning how to metabolize is the lack of community and the lack of structured ways to experience meaning.

I wanna bring in another Alex. This is Alex Wolf, who's a tech philosopher. She consults brands. She's worked with the likes of Doci, and way back in the early Internets created an entirely new category, an entirely new category. That is the boss, babe Pink Online. Business phenomena, which at this point has been copied ad nauseum.

But way back then it was very groundbreaking, opened the doors for a lot of women or people who didn't identify with a very masculine and male-driven notion of what it means to run a business and on the internet. And I think Alex is right about what she describes as people. In this era are lacking connection, lacking [00:13:00] meaning, lacking community, and are seeking it in what gets called brands.

And she defines that as a set of values. Like why do anything, what is the meaning behind what you're doing? And the way that people are seeking things to identify with the, represent the values that they have, which is really the, the need for connection is not being catered for. And so it's being catered for by commerce.

And I'm not into this notion of personal branding because of how, if you are someone who's always felt that you had to perform or be something that you are not, then the idea of personal branding can feel very contrived and like the brand on a livestock like productising yourself when really what I want to say is a big part of the value of your work.

If you're doing creative or culture making or change making work. Where part of the value of it is that it connects [00:14:00] people, that it increases belonging, that it transforms how we be together, that it gives people meaning. Then you turning up the volume on who you are, expressing the values that your work prioritises.

Does that anyway, but from the inside out, and so I'm much more interested in the inside job. Like, who are you being? That means that people feel connected to something of meaning that increases the experience of belonging in a world where that is feeling much harder. And so how we might define value in this way is what is life giving like Mariah Carey said it like it's giving me life.

What gives you life to create it and offer it? To realise it is also the thing that is going to give other people life because of how they're experiencing. [00:15:00] The fact that you are pursuing that and saying it has value and offering it does things for them in their reality and who they see themselves as and what they are connected to.

So the value is what is life giving, which is very hard to measure and quantify because really it's infinite. There's an infinite ripple effect because like if you are working with someone and changing their life, if you are giving someone an experience where they feel seen in who they are, they feel a sense of belonging.

If you are offering a space where people can express parts of who they are, that don't get to be expressed in other places. If you are transforming how people relate, if you are creating a body of work that speaks to and from humanity, right? The value of that is infinite because it changes someone else and they go about their life and their relationships [00:16:00] get transformed by that, and there's a ripple effect that continues.

On way beyond the original act of what you created, and so it's infinite. It's very hard to measure and quantify. It's intangible, right? It's not a physical product or even if you are a designer, you make clothes. There's something about the value in the meaning that is imbued in that, that are intangible, right?

So contrary to Hormozi's equation, when it comes to this kind of value, like cultural value, people are willing to sacrifice a lot to risk, a lot to have a time delay, right? You wait three weeks for the self-published obscure book to arrive, right? You'll spend three hours clicking refresh on a page just so you can get tickets to their gig.

You will deep dive for hours into someone's work if it really [00:17:00] speaks to something about your own existence or what you are looking to make happen. And there is a pleasure in that, right? There's a pleasure in identifying with something, in wanting it in deep diving, in entering the universe of that, of the field, of that work, and letting it change you.

And so when it comes to thinking about what is the value of your work, you have to allow yourself to really see and believe in that being something that people want, need, desire, and will move mountains to have as part of their life because of what it prioritises, because of what your work is, valorizing and how that is expressed.

For people to recognise that value, you've got to express it. The values have to be expressed, and so your belief in the value of it [00:18:00] and expressing that belief is also part of the value. Your own belief system, your own self-expression, who you are being in. Presenting that work and offering it and creating it.

How you show up to it matters. You. Embodying and expressing the values of it is also part of the value and is often the exact same thing that you might have been discouraged from expressing or believing holds value, which makes it even more valuable. Because it helps someone else who also isn't sure that they can express it, feel seen, and feel the permission to then go and be that.

And so you being able to be someone who believes deeply in the value of what you are offering and what it does for people, the impact of it, the [00:19:00] intangible, infinite ripple effect of your work and having that be the priority. When that is what you are focused on, when your belief system supports that, when your actions then follow suit is what makes the experience for you in being highly resourced in doing that work possible.

So I'm gonna speak to how do you start this when you don't believe. When you don't have a lot of evidence, when you've experienced discouragement, when you are not sure if people will want it, if you don't know that you can do it, how do you build that belief system so that you are also building the value of it so that you are living and expressing that the impact of that work is the thing that you're valuing.

And so that you can show up to it without self-doubt, right? Or without self-doubt [00:20:00] being the thing that is using up a lot of energy and making you only go halfway in. I consider the people that you most admire and respect, they're not halfway in like you believe them because they believe them. And so this is the special source that is cultural value.

That is the value of connection and belonging of you making, meaning you creating something out of nothing. You opening up possibilities, you offering a different way of thinking or doing or relating. And it's a different type of value. It's a different value system. And your level of belief in that value and therefore ability to embody being that gives other people the permission to also believe in it, feel seen by it, experience it, recognise it and value [00:21:00] it.