V A L O R I Z E
VALORIZE: How to believe in your work
PODCAST Episode 004
Published 14 October 2025
LISTEN ON APPLE
RSS FEED
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]
How to believe in your work and specifically believe in the value of your work, right? If you don't believe in the value of your work, if you don't know deeply that what you are doing has meaning and matters and does things for people in the world, then what's really happening is that your. Body-based belief system is not fully supporting the idea that your work holds value and that your work could be valued by others, right?
It means that your beliefs, [00:03:00] belief system, what your nervous system feels as a truth that is solid, that you can put your full weight on. That is like the most reliable, predictable reality. That in that reality, your work holding a lot of value doesn't feel true, and that can come because maybe you don't have enough evidence yet, right?
You haven't got enough experience, you haven't got enough proof to show yourself that that is something that you can believe and trust as real. Or it might be that you have a lot of evidence to the contrary, maybe there are things about you, things you've experienced. That as you've been navigating your life or in the world or a profession or a field have been devalued or you haven't had good feedback, or you've experienced failures and setbacks and so you're not sure, right?
Or it's because [00:04:00] it's not socially safe for you to act on the belief that you do have. There's a perceived risk or potential consequence that is currently in your way to you actually allowing yourself to follow through on the internal confidence that you have. The belief that you do have that what you are doing or what you could be doing matters is significant and is important enough for you to do it, to choose that to be your work, but really doing it.
Going full tilt into doing it on your terms in the way that you would most be excited to do it, and the way that would have you believing in it has something about that that doesn't feel socially safe. And it's likely to be a combination of these, right? If you're not believing in your work, it's either.
You don't have enough evidence or you have contradictory evidence against believing or it's, it's not socially safe to follow through on [00:05:00] your belief. And I want to speak to the third one in this episode, even though it's probably likely a combination of all of that. And the reason I want to speak to the third one, the not being socially safe to follow through on the belief that you.
Have is because that is so often the case for people whose work is confronting an existing reality for other people in some way, right? Whether your work is new or it offers a different point of view or paradigm, or there's something about the cultural location that you're speaking from that contradicts stereotypes that doesn't fit in a box and that can't easily be slotted into what already is, or maybe.
You are inviting people into a process of transformation, and so you are inviting them to question something about the way they're doing things and what their reality is, or you're embodying or creating something that is designed to move people, to make people feel or to move their culture, to [00:06:00] enliven people, to challenge them.
Or it might be because the strategy for how your work best exists requires you to offer something you've invented or a new solution, a new category. And so your boldness in doing that is crucial. Your confidence means more, right? You're not just baking bread and offering it, and people taste it and they know what bread is.
You're doing something that confuses people all. That demands an added layer of confidence in you. Maybe you've got things to say. You've got a message, you've got a way that you want to do your work, and it's going to stand out. I. And the other reason that I want to speak to this idea of it not being socially safe to follow through on the belief that you do have is because when you're not following through and yet you do believe in it, or there's enough of you to believe in it, that you are wanting and you're trying to move on that [00:07:00] belief, and there's another part of you that's fearful that's holding back.
That isn't fully trusting, going with your both feet forward into it. There's a huge amount of energy that gets used in that push and that pull, and it's also the hardest to solve, right? When you don't have a sense of social safety to show up all the way to your ideal dream way of working. Because you've got past experience or a story or a lack of experience, and your body's bracing against that, against the risk, against the, okay, if I, if I move forward, I'm standing on uneven, unsafe ground.
That's something that not everyone is having to deal with. So for example, if your dream work is designing accessible underwear, but your upbringing was a religious household. And the association with like creating underwear will have family members twitching or taking issue with that. Or maybe you were bullied for how you [00:08:00] spoke.
This is me, but you have shit to say. Or maybe the way that. You were taught. Dance also came with a, a level of self suppression. But your dance work now is about throwing that off and self-expression. Maybe you learn to do corporate, but your soul is yearning for making a mess, making play. Or maybe you being yourself and representing your work also means you being seen.
And visibility is something that you associate with people devaluing what you share or stereotyping you some kind of negative experience. And so maybe there's an edge that you know that you could have, right? Maybe there's an idea. There's like something that really excites you about the work that you are doing or want to do.
But you aren't really fully going for that because there is this feeling of who asked you like, who gave you permission? This is not okay to do. This is not, uh, a safe thing. [00:09:00] This is not a socially approved, like everyone gets it thing to be, so you're not doing it at full beam. Right? And so what can be present for you alongside.
What is already a challenging thing to do, right? Running your own thing, stewarding your own work into the world. What can be added into that is a type of self doubt that has you looping in a lot of circles and going nowhere very fast, right? Starting projects, not finishing them, staying in the fantasy or the possibility without really following through with your actions or your actions aren't working.
That's putting you off or you don't have a clear model or example to follow, or you're trying to force yourself past all of these feelings of self-doubt and that force is exhausting. Or you are, yeah. You're [00:10:00] experiencing the, the, the degree of risk and the potential of failure or rejection or disappointment or judgment as something that keeps.
Bringing you back to where you currently are. And so the, the power that your work could have, the ideas that you have or the insights that you have aren't really being fully realized in the fullest expression and therefore aren't really having the impact that they could have, and therefore you aren't getting the kind of affirmative feedback and experience and evidence that would help you.
Build that belief. It can also have an impact on what you are imagining your work could become, or how you're dreaming about your work or what you are envisaging as like the long-term possibility in it can make that really hard to name and to go for, right? There's a kind of [00:11:00] inner discouragement of what you actually deeply most want.
And so all of this can mean that you end up giving yourself to maintenance, and you're in this holding pattern of, I'm not ready yet. It's not working yet. I don't believe in it fully yet. And that quite often means that your energy is going to things that you don't fully believe in, either from a values perspective, or you believe it pays the bills, but you're not sure that it's a thing that you wanna be doing forever or it's.
Costing you things that are like a form of ethical distress, or it's not you in your strengths. It's not you doing the thing that lights you up. And so there might also be this added sense of overwhelm, right, of being stuck. Another way this can look is that you're not doing the work that you are doing already in the way that you would [00:12:00] most respect and value it.
And so there is a, a feeling that your work is not of the value that you want it to be, and so you are devaluing your own work and then undercharging other people or overgiving, which leads to a kind of financial instability or you not holding the boundaries and the standards and the terms with which you most want to operate, right?
Which actually allow you to do that work in the best way. And so what happens with a belief system that is not solid and congruent, that is pulling you in in different directions that isn't all lined up with the impact that your work could have, is that your own is actions will conform to that push and pull, and to that doubt and to confirming.
What already is, right? What you currently expect is [00:13:00] the most predictable result. You will just recreate more of the same. You will recreate the conditions that reaffirm your doubts. Maybe it's not for me. Maybe I am too much, or I'm not good enough, or I'm never gonna be able to do this, or people won't like it.
I'm gonna be rejected. Uh, people are judging me. This is not really working. It's not feeling like I am succeeding at this thing. And where you will try to solve for that is either by trying to work harder or giving up or distracting yourself with lots of fake work. In like, yeah, you might be doing a lot, but you're not doing the things that would actually make a difference or, or have you trying to change something about what you're doing.
Like perfect the work, thinking that you are not ready yet, or, or you are not the person to do it. [00:14:00] And so. You are here to do important work. Like there are people who want it. There are people who are waiting on your idea. There are people who are needing the transformation that your work represents. And so we don't want you stuck here, right?
And so knowing how to build your own belief in the value of your work is crucial. And when you recognize that your belief system is not fixed, you can change it and you can build a belief system that supports what you want your work to be doing and that you are the person to do it and that people want it.
Then where you will go to problem solve is not imagining that you're not good enough. Where you will go to solve for that is in. Your belief system. Your belief system is like the thoughts. You think a lot the, it's the, the reality that you are operating from, right? What feels like [00:15:00] the most real, the most predictable, and it's what your body has adapted to your homeostasis seeking nervous system.
Body-based systems are. Adapted to as the most predictable reality, right? So your belief system lives in your body. It's the reality that you are adapted to. It's the unconscious norm. It's like the furniture, it's the wallpaper. It's what you just expect without thinking about it. And so your body based belief system is not something that you are consciously choosing.
It's something that you are just operating from as if it's already a given. And so if you have a desire to make more money from the work that you're doing, or you want to feel more of yourself and have more choice in the kind of work that you do, or if you want to be more visible in your work, you want to expand the reach of your work.
If your body's not on board with the idea that you get to have that happen, [00:16:00] or that you are someone that will be okay moving into that, you will reject that experience when it comes. You might want and be doing the actions to create it, but when the consequence of that arrives, you will push it away as something that is not safe.
You will unconsciously make it something that either you don't even see as available as there, or it'll be something that feels incredibly risky and unsafe to be in, and something to sabotage. Or it creates a, a reaction of shame or fear in you. This happens to me. Every time I hit a new revenue level or a new level of visibility, there's a feeling in my body that someone's gonna come and tell me off.
And it also happens when I experience quote unquote, too much joy above what my current belief system can support is something that I can handle feeling right as my [00:17:00] normal. So your belief system is what's normal for you. And so your ability to author to like get under the hood of the coding of what your belief system is and re-encode it, is a kind of freedom.
It's a kind of freedom to be in integrity with what you actually most value. 'cause if your belief system is congruent with that, then your actions will follow suit. Then how you are perceiving what is possible and what's happening will align with that. There's a freedom to decide what you want and then go create it because you know how to move your belief system into one that is matched with the version of you that's already done it.
And the things with beliefs is it's not just what you're thinking, right? You can't just CBT or thought work or read theoretically your way into a different belief system. [00:18:00] You have to work with your body, and so the place to start is awareness. The place to start is recognizing that your actual beliefs, the negative ones, the ones that are unhelpful, often feel unpleasant.
They're often things that you don't actually allow into your conscious awareness because of how shit they feel, right? They feel like self-judgment. They feel like self abandonment. They feel like shame. They feel like recoiling. So it's making friends with the experience of allowing shitty feeling, thinking to come up into your awareness along with the discomfort of how those beliefs and thoughts feel in your body, so that when you are doing things that confront the belief system that you don't get to do that you want [00:19:00] bracing against those feelings that are triggered in you by that action.
Are actually welcoming them in as like, oh, cool, look. Look at my response. Look at my learned response for what's happening. When I'm trying to show up to my work, my body thinks this is super unsafe. My body thinks I'm going to be judged. My body thinks that this is a reason to run and hide. So it starts with awareness of what are you actually believing and what allows you to confront.
Work on and exercise out of you. The beliefs that aren't helping you is deciding what you most want. Trying that on, trying on the idea, taking the next small step towards it, and then working on whatever comes up, whatever is flush to the surface in you, whatever is coming up as a reason why not you, and then being willing to feel as uncomfortable as [00:20:00] fuck as you do it.
Everything that you want is the other side of feeling uncomfortable as fuck. And that is not just the uncomfortableness of disappointment and failure and frustration, it's also the uncomfortableness of things. Working people, looking at you, people responding, people wanting more of your work. People signing up, people saying, yes, right?
Oh shit, oh my God. So making your belief system conscious is key. It's the process of cleaning the lens or the prism through which you interpret your reality and through which you see yourself. And also what is possible and available for you to be and do and have. This is why the podcast image has a prism in it.
This is the core symbol of valorize because how key your belief system is, right? It's literally the [00:21:00] interpretation. It's the structuring of your reality. It's how you see the world. It's how you see the value of what you do. It's what reality that you are expressing as most real to you. And this is a practice I teach inside Flair House, which is where I do this work with people, and we do this belief change on a deep level.
But there's three specific beliefs that I want to share with you from Flair House to focus on when it comes to you feeling a deep conviction in the value of your work to be. Connected to what that work is going to do for other people or is already doing to then be courageous enough to go and communicate to others about it.
So what I'm calling courageous, contagious conviction. This is the triple threat to devaluing beliefs that you may have ingested. And the triple threat is [00:22:00] you developing, building a belief system where you have a high level of belief in three things. One is belief in yourself. The next is belief in the value of your work.
And third is the belief that other people will see the value. When you have all three at a high level, then you operate in a way that expresses that belief to a degree that other people can feel it, right? It means that you are lined up with what you're here to do and there isn't this sort of scattered push and pull confusion and self-doubt.
There might still be self-doubt there, but it's not the thing that is driving you. There is a. Congruence in how you are going about your work, your presence, the energy that you admit that people feel. And so the more you increase your belief in these three areas, the [00:23:00] more that you experience your work as having value in the world, as having meaning and connecting you to people through that work.
The more you feel like you have a vehicle for your own self-expression, and it doesn't just change how you feel about your work, right? It changes what becomes possible in your field. In your connections in the culture you are working in, in your industry, right, because of how you show up differently when you believe these things, when you are claiming the value of something even ahead of others.
Seeing it without diluting it, without being half in is you being someone who can create and steward and beam out the uniqueness and the transformative value of your work on your terms. So your people can find you. So people get excited about it. So people feel the resonance [00:24:00] with what you are believing in that is also true for them and can act on that.
And like I said, this doesn't mean you don't have bad days, right? Or it doesn't mean that there isn't self-doubt or anxiety or nerves. It doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you or is into what you're doing. But it means it functions in a way that means you can operate on your terms. So you can hold a standard for, how does my work feel for me?
How much does it support me being in my strengths? Me having energy, me feeling fulfilled, me working with the people who most want what I'm doing. Understand it, get it, appreciate it. And so the place to go for. When you can't find the same energy for your work, when you feel stuck, you wanna hide or you are embarking on taking your work to a new level.
Where you go to is working in your belief system. [00:25:00] So in the next three episodes, I'm gonna talk through those beliefs one by one.
© SOLA Systems / Louisa Shaeri 2025
Open License ▷
V A L O R I Z E
VALORIZE: How to believe in your work
PODCAST Episode 004
Published 14 October 2025
LISTEN ON APPLE
RSS FEED
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]
How to believe in your work and specifically believe in the value of your work, right? If you don't believe in the value of your work, if you don't know deeply that what you are doing has meaning and matters and does things for people in the world, then what's really happening is that your. Body-based belief system is not fully supporting the idea that your work holds value and that your work could be valued by others, right?
It means that your beliefs, [00:03:00] belief system, what your nervous system feels as a truth that is solid, that you can put your full weight on. That is like the most reliable, predictable reality. That in that reality, your work holding a lot of value doesn't feel true, and that can come because maybe you don't have enough evidence yet, right?
You haven't got enough experience, you haven't got enough proof to show yourself that that is something that you can believe and trust as real. Or it might be that you have a lot of evidence to the contrary, maybe there are things about you, things you've experienced. That as you've been navigating your life or in the world or a profession or a field have been devalued or you haven't had good feedback, or you've experienced failures and setbacks and so you're not sure, right?
Or it's because [00:04:00] it's not socially safe for you to act on the belief that you do have. There's a perceived risk or potential consequence that is currently in your way to you actually allowing yourself to follow through on the internal confidence that you have. The belief that you do have that what you are doing or what you could be doing matters is significant and is important enough for you to do it, to choose that to be your work, but really doing it.
Going full tilt into doing it on your terms in the way that you would most be excited to do it, and the way that would have you believing in it has something about that that doesn't feel socially safe. And it's likely to be a combination of these, right? If you're not believing in your work, it's either.
You don't have enough evidence or you have contradictory evidence against believing or it's, it's not socially safe to follow through on [00:05:00] your belief. And I want to speak to the third one in this episode, even though it's probably likely a combination of all of that. And the reason I want to speak to the third one, the not being socially safe to follow through on the belief that you.
Have is because that is so often the case for people whose work is confronting an existing reality for other people in some way, right? Whether your work is new or it offers a different point of view or paradigm, or there's something about the cultural location that you're speaking from that contradicts stereotypes that doesn't fit in a box and that can't easily be slotted into what already is, or maybe.
You are inviting people into a process of transformation, and so you are inviting them to question something about the way they're doing things and what their reality is, or you're embodying or creating something that is designed to move people, to make people feel or to move their culture, to [00:06:00] enliven people, to challenge them.
Or it might be because the strategy for how your work best exists requires you to offer something you've invented or a new solution, a new category. And so your boldness in doing that is crucial. Your confidence means more, right? You're not just baking bread and offering it, and people taste it and they know what bread is.
You're doing something that confuses people all. That demands an added layer of confidence in you. Maybe you've got things to say. You've got a message, you've got a way that you want to do your work, and it's going to stand out. I. And the other reason that I want to speak to this idea of it not being socially safe to follow through on the belief that you do have is because when you're not following through and yet you do believe in it, or there's enough of you to believe in it, that you are wanting and you're trying to move on that [00:07:00] belief, and there's another part of you that's fearful that's holding back.
That isn't fully trusting, going with your both feet forward into it. There's a huge amount of energy that gets used in that push and that pull, and it's also the hardest to solve, right? When you don't have a sense of social safety to show up all the way to your ideal dream way of working. Because you've got past experience or a story or a lack of experience, and your body's bracing against that, against the risk, against the, okay, if I, if I move forward, I'm standing on uneven, unsafe ground.
That's something that not everyone is having to deal with. So for example, if your dream work is designing accessible underwear, but your upbringing was a religious household. And the association with like creating underwear will have family members twitching or taking issue with that. Or maybe you were bullied for how you [00:08:00] spoke.
This is me, but you have shit to say. Or maybe the way that. You were taught. Dance also came with a, a level of self suppression. But your dance work now is about throwing that off and self-expression. Maybe you learn to do corporate, but your soul is yearning for making a mess, making play. Or maybe you being yourself and representing your work also means you being seen.
And visibility is something that you associate with people devaluing what you share or stereotyping you some kind of negative experience. And so maybe there's an edge that you know that you could have, right? Maybe there's an idea. There's like something that really excites you about the work that you are doing or want to do.
But you aren't really fully going for that because there is this feeling of who asked you like, who gave you permission? This is not okay to do. This is not, uh, a safe thing. [00:09:00] This is not a socially approved, like everyone gets it thing to be, so you're not doing it at full beam. Right? And so what can be present for you alongside.
What is already a challenging thing to do, right? Running your own thing, stewarding your own work into the world. What can be added into that is a type of self doubt that has you looping in a lot of circles and going nowhere very fast, right? Starting projects, not finishing them, staying in the fantasy or the possibility without really following through with your actions or your actions aren't working.
That's putting you off or you don't have a clear model or example to follow, or you're trying to force yourself past all of these feelings of self-doubt and that force is exhausting. Or you are, yeah. You're [00:10:00] experiencing the, the, the degree of risk and the potential of failure or rejection or disappointment or judgment as something that keeps.
Bringing you back to where you currently are. And so the, the power that your work could have, the ideas that you have or the insights that you have aren't really being fully realized in the fullest expression and therefore aren't really having the impact that they could have, and therefore you aren't getting the kind of affirmative feedback and experience and evidence that would help you.
Build that belief. It can also have an impact on what you are imagining your work could become, or how you're dreaming about your work or what you are envisaging as like the long-term possibility in it can make that really hard to name and to go for, right? There's a kind of [00:11:00] inner discouragement of what you actually deeply most want.
And so all of this can mean that you end up giving yourself to maintenance, and you're in this holding pattern of, I'm not ready yet. It's not working yet. I don't believe in it fully yet. And that quite often means that your energy is going to things that you don't fully believe in, either from a values perspective, or you believe it pays the bills, but you're not sure that it's a thing that you wanna be doing forever or it's.
Costing you things that are like a form of ethical distress, or it's not you in your strengths. It's not you doing the thing that lights you up. And so there might also be this added sense of overwhelm, right, of being stuck. Another way this can look is that you're not doing the work that you are doing already in the way that you would [00:12:00] most respect and value it.
And so there is a, a feeling that your work is not of the value that you want it to be, and so you are devaluing your own work and then undercharging other people or overgiving, which leads to a kind of financial instability or you not holding the boundaries and the standards and the terms with which you most want to operate, right?
Which actually allow you to do that work in the best way. And so what happens with a belief system that is not solid and congruent, that is pulling you in in different directions that isn't all lined up with the impact that your work could have, is that your own is actions will conform to that push and pull, and to that doubt and to confirming.
What already is, right? What you currently expect is [00:13:00] the most predictable result. You will just recreate more of the same. You will recreate the conditions that reaffirm your doubts. Maybe it's not for me. Maybe I am too much, or I'm not good enough, or I'm never gonna be able to do this, or people won't like it.
I'm gonna be rejected. Uh, people are judging me. This is not really working. It's not feeling like I am succeeding at this thing. And where you will try to solve for that is either by trying to work harder or giving up or distracting yourself with lots of fake work. In like, yeah, you might be doing a lot, but you're not doing the things that would actually make a difference or, or have you trying to change something about what you're doing.
Like perfect the work, thinking that you are not ready yet, or, or you are not the person to do it. [00:14:00] And so. You are here to do important work. Like there are people who want it. There are people who are waiting on your idea. There are people who are needing the transformation that your work represents. And so we don't want you stuck here, right?
And so knowing how to build your own belief in the value of your work is crucial. And when you recognize that your belief system is not fixed, you can change it and you can build a belief system that supports what you want your work to be doing and that you are the person to do it and that people want it.
Then where you will go to problem solve is not imagining that you're not good enough. Where you will go to solve for that is in. Your belief system. Your belief system is like the thoughts. You think a lot the, it's the, the reality that you are operating from, right? What feels like [00:15:00] the most real, the most predictable, and it's what your body has adapted to your homeostasis seeking nervous system.
Body-based systems are. Adapted to as the most predictable reality, right? So your belief system lives in your body. It's the reality that you are adapted to. It's the unconscious norm. It's like the furniture, it's the wallpaper. It's what you just expect without thinking about it. And so your body based belief system is not something that you are consciously choosing.
It's something that you are just operating from as if it's already a given. And so if you have a desire to make more money from the work that you're doing, or you want to feel more of yourself and have more choice in the kind of work that you do, or if you want to be more visible in your work, you want to expand the reach of your work.
If your body's not on board with the idea that you get to have that happen, [00:16:00] or that you are someone that will be okay moving into that, you will reject that experience when it comes. You might want and be doing the actions to create it, but when the consequence of that arrives, you will push it away as something that is not safe.
You will unconsciously make it something that either you don't even see as available as there, or it'll be something that feels incredibly risky and unsafe to be in, and something to sabotage. Or it creates a, a reaction of shame or fear in you. This happens to me. Every time I hit a new revenue level or a new level of visibility, there's a feeling in my body that someone's gonna come and tell me off.
And it also happens when I experience quote unquote, too much joy above what my current belief system can support is something that I can handle feeling right as my [00:17:00] normal. So your belief system is what's normal for you. And so your ability to author to like get under the hood of the coding of what your belief system is and re-encode it, is a kind of freedom.
It's a kind of freedom to be in integrity with what you actually most value. 'cause if your belief system is congruent with that, then your actions will follow suit. Then how you are perceiving what is possible and what's happening will align with that. There's a freedom to decide what you want and then go create it because you know how to move your belief system into one that is matched with the version of you that's already done it.
And the things with beliefs is it's not just what you're thinking, right? You can't just CBT or thought work or read theoretically your way into a different belief system. [00:18:00] You have to work with your body, and so the place to start is awareness. The place to start is recognizing that your actual beliefs, the negative ones, the ones that are unhelpful, often feel unpleasant.
They're often things that you don't actually allow into your conscious awareness because of how shit they feel, right? They feel like self-judgment. They feel like self abandonment. They feel like shame. They feel like recoiling. So it's making friends with the experience of allowing shitty feeling, thinking to come up into your awareness along with the discomfort of how those beliefs and thoughts feel in your body, so that when you are doing things that confront the belief system that you don't get to do that you want [00:19:00] bracing against those feelings that are triggered in you by that action.
Are actually welcoming them in as like, oh, cool, look. Look at my response. Look at my learned response for what's happening. When I'm trying to show up to my work, my body thinks this is super unsafe. My body thinks I'm going to be judged. My body thinks that this is a reason to run and hide. So it starts with awareness of what are you actually believing and what allows you to confront.
Work on and exercise out of you. The beliefs that aren't helping you is deciding what you most want. Trying that on, trying on the idea, taking the next small step towards it, and then working on whatever comes up, whatever is flush to the surface in you, whatever is coming up as a reason why not you, and then being willing to feel as uncomfortable as [00:20:00] fuck as you do it.
Everything that you want is the other side of feeling uncomfortable as fuck. And that is not just the uncomfortableness of disappointment and failure and frustration, it's also the uncomfortableness of things. Working people, looking at you, people responding, people wanting more of your work. People signing up, people saying, yes, right?
Oh shit, oh my God. So making your belief system conscious is key. It's the process of cleaning the lens or the prism through which you interpret your reality and through which you see yourself. And also what is possible and available for you to be and do and have. This is why the podcast image has a prism in it.
This is the core symbol of valorize because how key your belief system is, right? It's literally the [00:21:00] interpretation. It's the structuring of your reality. It's how you see the world. It's how you see the value of what you do. It's what reality that you are expressing as most real to you. And this is a practice I teach inside Flair House, which is where I do this work with people, and we do this belief change on a deep level.
But there's three specific beliefs that I want to share with you from Flair House to focus on when it comes to you feeling a deep conviction in the value of your work to be. Connected to what that work is going to do for other people or is already doing to then be courageous enough to go and communicate to others about it.
So what I'm calling courageous, contagious conviction. This is the triple threat to devaluing beliefs that you may have ingested. And the triple threat is [00:22:00] you developing, building a belief system where you have a high level of belief in three things. One is belief in yourself. The next is belief in the value of your work.
And third is the belief that other people will see the value. When you have all three at a high level, then you operate in a way that expresses that belief to a degree that other people can feel it, right? It means that you are lined up with what you're here to do and there isn't this sort of scattered push and pull confusion and self-doubt.
There might still be self-doubt there, but it's not the thing that is driving you. There is a. Congruence in how you are going about your work, your presence, the energy that you admit that people feel. And so the more you increase your belief in these three areas, the [00:23:00] more that you experience your work as having value in the world, as having meaning and connecting you to people through that work.
The more you feel like you have a vehicle for your own self-expression, and it doesn't just change how you feel about your work, right? It changes what becomes possible in your field. In your connections in the culture you are working in, in your industry, right, because of how you show up differently when you believe these things, when you are claiming the value of something even ahead of others.
Seeing it without diluting it, without being half in is you being someone who can create and steward and beam out the uniqueness and the transformative value of your work on your terms. So your people can find you. So people get excited about it. So people feel the resonance [00:24:00] with what you are believing in that is also true for them and can act on that.
And like I said, this doesn't mean you don't have bad days, right? Or it doesn't mean that there isn't self-doubt or anxiety or nerves. It doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you or is into what you're doing. But it means it functions in a way that means you can operate on your terms. So you can hold a standard for, how does my work feel for me?
How much does it support me being in my strengths? Me having energy, me feeling fulfilled, me working with the people who most want what I'm doing. Understand it, get it, appreciate it. And so the place to go for. When you can't find the same energy for your work, when you feel stuck, you wanna hide or you are embarking on taking your work to a new level.
Where you go to is working in your belief system. [00:25:00] So in the next three episodes, I'm gonna talk through those beliefs one by one.
© SOLA Systems / Louisa Shaeri 2025
Open License ▷
V A L O R I Z E
VALORIZE: How to believe in your work
PODCAST Episode 004
Published 14 October 2025
LISTEN ON APPLE
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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]
How to believe in your work and specifically believe in the value of your work, right? If you don't believe in the value of your work, if you don't know deeply that what you are doing has meaning and matters and does things for people in the world, then what's really happening is that your. Body-based belief system is not fully supporting the idea that your work holds value and that your work could be valued by others, right?
It means that your beliefs, [00:03:00] belief system, what your nervous system feels as a truth that is solid, that you can put your full weight on. That is like the most reliable, predictable reality. That in that reality, your work holding a lot of value doesn't feel true, and that can come because maybe you don't have enough evidence yet, right?
You haven't got enough experience, you haven't got enough proof to show yourself that that is something that you can believe and trust as real. Or it might be that you have a lot of evidence to the contrary, maybe there are things about you, things you've experienced. That as you've been navigating your life or in the world or a profession or a field have been devalued or you haven't had good feedback, or you've experienced failures and setbacks and so you're not sure, right?
Or it's because [00:04:00] it's not socially safe for you to act on the belief that you do have. There's a perceived risk or potential consequence that is currently in your way to you actually allowing yourself to follow through on the internal confidence that you have. The belief that you do have that what you are doing or what you could be doing matters is significant and is important enough for you to do it, to choose that to be your work, but really doing it.
Going full tilt into doing it on your terms in the way that you would most be excited to do it, and the way that would have you believing in it has something about that that doesn't feel socially safe. And it's likely to be a combination of these, right? If you're not believing in your work, it's either.
You don't have enough evidence or you have contradictory evidence against believing or it's, it's not socially safe to follow through on [00:05:00] your belief. And I want to speak to the third one in this episode, even though it's probably likely a combination of all of that. And the reason I want to speak to the third one, the not being socially safe to follow through on the belief that you.
Have is because that is so often the case for people whose work is confronting an existing reality for other people in some way, right? Whether your work is new or it offers a different point of view or paradigm, or there's something about the cultural location that you're speaking from that contradicts stereotypes that doesn't fit in a box and that can't easily be slotted into what already is, or maybe.
You are inviting people into a process of transformation, and so you are inviting them to question something about the way they're doing things and what their reality is, or you're embodying or creating something that is designed to move people, to make people feel or to move their culture, to [00:06:00] enliven people, to challenge them.
Or it might be because the strategy for how your work best exists requires you to offer something you've invented or a new solution, a new category. And so your boldness in doing that is crucial. Your confidence means more, right? You're not just baking bread and offering it, and people taste it and they know what bread is.
You're doing something that confuses people all. That demands an added layer of confidence in you. Maybe you've got things to say. You've got a message, you've got a way that you want to do your work, and it's going to stand out. I. And the other reason that I want to speak to this idea of it not being socially safe to follow through on the belief that you do have is because when you're not following through and yet you do believe in it, or there's enough of you to believe in it, that you are wanting and you're trying to move on that [00:07:00] belief, and there's another part of you that's fearful that's holding back.
That isn't fully trusting, going with your both feet forward into it. There's a huge amount of energy that gets used in that push and that pull, and it's also the hardest to solve, right? When you don't have a sense of social safety to show up all the way to your ideal dream way of working. Because you've got past experience or a story or a lack of experience, and your body's bracing against that, against the risk, against the, okay, if I, if I move forward, I'm standing on uneven, unsafe ground.
That's something that not everyone is having to deal with. So for example, if your dream work is designing accessible underwear, but your upbringing was a religious household. And the association with like creating underwear will have family members twitching or taking issue with that. Or maybe you were bullied for how you [00:08:00] spoke.
This is me, but you have shit to say. Or maybe the way that. You were taught. Dance also came with a, a level of self suppression. But your dance work now is about throwing that off and self-expression. Maybe you learn to do corporate, but your soul is yearning for making a mess, making play. Or maybe you being yourself and representing your work also means you being seen.
And visibility is something that you associate with people devaluing what you share or stereotyping you some kind of negative experience. And so maybe there's an edge that you know that you could have, right? Maybe there's an idea. There's like something that really excites you about the work that you are doing or want to do.
But you aren't really fully going for that because there is this feeling of who asked you like, who gave you permission? This is not okay to do. This is not, uh, a safe thing. [00:09:00] This is not a socially approved, like everyone gets it thing to be, so you're not doing it at full beam. Right? And so what can be present for you alongside.
What is already a challenging thing to do, right? Running your own thing, stewarding your own work into the world. What can be added into that is a type of self doubt that has you looping in a lot of circles and going nowhere very fast, right? Starting projects, not finishing them, staying in the fantasy or the possibility without really following through with your actions or your actions aren't working.
That's putting you off or you don't have a clear model or example to follow, or you're trying to force yourself past all of these feelings of self-doubt and that force is exhausting. Or you are, yeah. You're [00:10:00] experiencing the, the, the degree of risk and the potential of failure or rejection or disappointment or judgment as something that keeps.
Bringing you back to where you currently are. And so the, the power that your work could have, the ideas that you have or the insights that you have aren't really being fully realized in the fullest expression and therefore aren't really having the impact that they could have, and therefore you aren't getting the kind of affirmative feedback and experience and evidence that would help you.
Build that belief. It can also have an impact on what you are imagining your work could become, or how you're dreaming about your work or what you are envisaging as like the long-term possibility in it can make that really hard to name and to go for, right? There's a kind of [00:11:00] inner discouragement of what you actually deeply most want.
And so all of this can mean that you end up giving yourself to maintenance, and you're in this holding pattern of, I'm not ready yet. It's not working yet. I don't believe in it fully yet. And that quite often means that your energy is going to things that you don't fully believe in, either from a values perspective, or you believe it pays the bills, but you're not sure that it's a thing that you wanna be doing forever or it's.
Costing you things that are like a form of ethical distress, or it's not you in your strengths. It's not you doing the thing that lights you up. And so there might also be this added sense of overwhelm, right, of being stuck. Another way this can look is that you're not doing the work that you are doing already in the way that you would [00:12:00] most respect and value it.
And so there is a, a feeling that your work is not of the value that you want it to be, and so you are devaluing your own work and then undercharging other people or overgiving, which leads to a kind of financial instability or you not holding the boundaries and the standards and the terms with which you most want to operate, right?
Which actually allow you to do that work in the best way. And so what happens with a belief system that is not solid and congruent, that is pulling you in in different directions that isn't all lined up with the impact that your work could have, is that your own is actions will conform to that push and pull, and to that doubt and to confirming.
What already is, right? What you currently expect is [00:13:00] the most predictable result. You will just recreate more of the same. You will recreate the conditions that reaffirm your doubts. Maybe it's not for me. Maybe I am too much, or I'm not good enough, or I'm never gonna be able to do this, or people won't like it.
I'm gonna be rejected. Uh, people are judging me. This is not really working. It's not feeling like I am succeeding at this thing. And where you will try to solve for that is either by trying to work harder or giving up or distracting yourself with lots of fake work. In like, yeah, you might be doing a lot, but you're not doing the things that would actually make a difference or, or have you trying to change something about what you're doing.
Like perfect the work, thinking that you are not ready yet, or, or you are not the person to do it. [00:14:00] And so. You are here to do important work. Like there are people who want it. There are people who are waiting on your idea. There are people who are needing the transformation that your work represents. And so we don't want you stuck here, right?
And so knowing how to build your own belief in the value of your work is crucial. And when you recognize that your belief system is not fixed, you can change it and you can build a belief system that supports what you want your work to be doing and that you are the person to do it and that people want it.
Then where you will go to problem solve is not imagining that you're not good enough. Where you will go to solve for that is in. Your belief system. Your belief system is like the thoughts. You think a lot the, it's the, the reality that you are operating from, right? What feels like [00:15:00] the most real, the most predictable, and it's what your body has adapted to your homeostasis seeking nervous system.
Body-based systems are. Adapted to as the most predictable reality, right? So your belief system lives in your body. It's the reality that you are adapted to. It's the unconscious norm. It's like the furniture, it's the wallpaper. It's what you just expect without thinking about it. And so your body based belief system is not something that you are consciously choosing.
It's something that you are just operating from as if it's already a given. And so if you have a desire to make more money from the work that you're doing, or you want to feel more of yourself and have more choice in the kind of work that you do, or if you want to be more visible in your work, you want to expand the reach of your work.
If your body's not on board with the idea that you get to have that happen, [00:16:00] or that you are someone that will be okay moving into that, you will reject that experience when it comes. You might want and be doing the actions to create it, but when the consequence of that arrives, you will push it away as something that is not safe.
You will unconsciously make it something that either you don't even see as available as there, or it'll be something that feels incredibly risky and unsafe to be in, and something to sabotage. Or it creates a, a reaction of shame or fear in you. This happens to me. Every time I hit a new revenue level or a new level of visibility, there's a feeling in my body that someone's gonna come and tell me off.
And it also happens when I experience quote unquote, too much joy above what my current belief system can support is something that I can handle feeling right as my [00:17:00] normal. So your belief system is what's normal for you. And so your ability to author to like get under the hood of the coding of what your belief system is and re-encode it, is a kind of freedom.
It's a kind of freedom to be in integrity with what you actually most value. 'cause if your belief system is congruent with that, then your actions will follow suit. Then how you are perceiving what is possible and what's happening will align with that. There's a freedom to decide what you want and then go create it because you know how to move your belief system into one that is matched with the version of you that's already done it.
And the things with beliefs is it's not just what you're thinking, right? You can't just CBT or thought work or read theoretically your way into a different belief system. [00:18:00] You have to work with your body, and so the place to start is awareness. The place to start is recognizing that your actual beliefs, the negative ones, the ones that are unhelpful, often feel unpleasant.
They're often things that you don't actually allow into your conscious awareness because of how shit they feel, right? They feel like self-judgment. They feel like self abandonment. They feel like shame. They feel like recoiling. So it's making friends with the experience of allowing shitty feeling, thinking to come up into your awareness along with the discomfort of how those beliefs and thoughts feel in your body, so that when you are doing things that confront the belief system that you don't get to do that you want [00:19:00] bracing against those feelings that are triggered in you by that action.
Are actually welcoming them in as like, oh, cool, look. Look at my response. Look at my learned response for what's happening. When I'm trying to show up to my work, my body thinks this is super unsafe. My body thinks I'm going to be judged. My body thinks that this is a reason to run and hide. So it starts with awareness of what are you actually believing and what allows you to confront.
Work on and exercise out of you. The beliefs that aren't helping you is deciding what you most want. Trying that on, trying on the idea, taking the next small step towards it, and then working on whatever comes up, whatever is flush to the surface in you, whatever is coming up as a reason why not you, and then being willing to feel as uncomfortable as [00:20:00] fuck as you do it.
Everything that you want is the other side of feeling uncomfortable as fuck. And that is not just the uncomfortableness of disappointment and failure and frustration, it's also the uncomfortableness of things. Working people, looking at you, people responding, people wanting more of your work. People signing up, people saying, yes, right?
Oh shit, oh my God. So making your belief system conscious is key. It's the process of cleaning the lens or the prism through which you interpret your reality and through which you see yourself. And also what is possible and available for you to be and do and have. This is why the podcast image has a prism in it.
This is the core symbol of valorize because how key your belief system is, right? It's literally the [00:21:00] interpretation. It's the structuring of your reality. It's how you see the world. It's how you see the value of what you do. It's what reality that you are expressing as most real to you. And this is a practice I teach inside Flair House, which is where I do this work with people, and we do this belief change on a deep level.
But there's three specific beliefs that I want to share with you from Flair House to focus on when it comes to you feeling a deep conviction in the value of your work to be. Connected to what that work is going to do for other people or is already doing to then be courageous enough to go and communicate to others about it.
So what I'm calling courageous, contagious conviction. This is the triple threat to devaluing beliefs that you may have ingested. And the triple threat is [00:22:00] you developing, building a belief system where you have a high level of belief in three things. One is belief in yourself. The next is belief in the value of your work.
And third is the belief that other people will see the value. When you have all three at a high level, then you operate in a way that expresses that belief to a degree that other people can feel it, right? It means that you are lined up with what you're here to do and there isn't this sort of scattered push and pull confusion and self-doubt.
There might still be self-doubt there, but it's not the thing that is driving you. There is a. Congruence in how you are going about your work, your presence, the energy that you admit that people feel. And so the more you increase your belief in these three areas, the [00:23:00] more that you experience your work as having value in the world, as having meaning and connecting you to people through that work.
The more you feel like you have a vehicle for your own self-expression, and it doesn't just change how you feel about your work, right? It changes what becomes possible in your field. In your connections in the culture you are working in, in your industry, right, because of how you show up differently when you believe these things, when you are claiming the value of something even ahead of others.
Seeing it without diluting it, without being half in is you being someone who can create and steward and beam out the uniqueness and the transformative value of your work on your terms. So your people can find you. So people get excited about it. So people feel the resonance [00:24:00] with what you are believing in that is also true for them and can act on that.
And like I said, this doesn't mean you don't have bad days, right? Or it doesn't mean that there isn't self-doubt or anxiety or nerves. It doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you or is into what you're doing. But it means it functions in a way that means you can operate on your terms. So you can hold a standard for, how does my work feel for me?
How much does it support me being in my strengths? Me having energy, me feeling fulfilled, me working with the people who most want what I'm doing. Understand it, get it, appreciate it. And so the place to go for. When you can't find the same energy for your work, when you feel stuck, you wanna hide or you are embarking on taking your work to a new level.
Where you go to is working in your belief system. [00:25:00] So in the next three episodes, I'm gonna talk through those beliefs one by one.
© SOLA Systems / Louisa Shaeri 2025
Open License ▷
