PODCAST Episode 012
Published 3 December 2025

LISTEN ON APPLE

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

RSS FEED


TRANSCRIPT

[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.

So in the last couple of episodes, I talked about belief and capacity, capacity being structural as well as your physiology and your thinking. And one of the first arenas, the first structures, if you like, that I address with people is actions is doing. And this is because when you are doing something new, when you are doing something extra ordinary, like beyond [00:02:00] ordinary for you or for your field.

Then there is a lack of evidence to have a strong belief that it will work. That it will do what you think it will, that this is possible, that it's possible for you. And so where you first source that belief is in your own actions. Your actions have to come into congruence and be oriented to the thing that you're most desiring to realize.

Even when there's no evidence that that's going to work. So this is really about. What you say you value versus what do your actions suggest that you value? And are they congruent or not? Are they lined up? Are they saying the same thing and often not right? Because you are human. I'm human. This is how it goes.

This is hard. And we are creatures of habit and creatures of we would like to run the same automated, [00:03:00] uh, ways of being. And so. Doing something new means, interrupting those habitual ways of being and consciously bringing yourself to do something that feels uncomfortable, strange, new, different. No guarantees, uncertain.

And of course we want to avoid that. And of course we default to not doing that. And we might call it procrastination or being lazy or undisciplined. But really it's just being human and having these unconscious patterns because the body's conserving energy and changing your habitual actions takes energy, takes conscious attention and awareness, and is also sometimes confronting with.

Our own judgments about what those [00:04:00] actions might produce. For example, failing at something. And so often what we're also doing is not just being habitual, running the same scripts programming, but sometimes we're also. Protecting ourself from something, including judgment. Judgment of other people, but also self-judgment and therefore, your own actions is the first place where trusting yourself becomes important and gets exercised as a muscle.

In doing this work of culture shifting, change making. Because you have to trust yourself not to judge yourself while also observing and seeing and accepting the fallible human that you are trying something new and trying to, at the same time, believe that this is worth doing before you get confirmation, before things start to work, before you start to build a [00:05:00] new skill.

And so. Starting is the hardest part because often, especially if you are new to running your own thing or leading yourself, you won't have this muscle yet. But also, it's not a one and done. It's not a leap of faith. It's every new level, every new aspiration, every new desire that you come to is going to come with.

New level, new devil, right? Super Mario. You get to the end of the level and you fight the boss, and then when you fought the boss and you've finally done it, then you arrive at a new level. But you're a newbie and you've never done that level, and it starts all over again. I'm about to start social media.

I've on and off, more or less, the majority of the last five years have operated what I'm doing. Without it. There's been stints on Instagram, stints on TikTok stints on other places, but more or less how [00:06:00] I have approached visibility has been through doing live events on Zoom and referrals, people knowing about me through the work I'm actually doing with people.

So I'm at a new level. There's a new skill set. There's a new challenge I'm in, and this is because valorize is something I want to make very visible as a point of view, as thinking that other people can adopt and operate with. And so that means being visible in a different way and at a different level.

So new level, a different kind of show up, a different thing I'm showing up to that I'm taking action on. And. Figuring out how do I do that and stay congruent with what I care about and how I best work and what this is for, and the purpose of it and the impact I wanna have with it. And so figuring out that is going to require some trial and error.

It's going to [00:07:00] require me being uncomfortable doing things I haven't done in a while and doing it in a new way because I'm doing it with new thinking. It requires me to bring conscious awareness to the actions I'm taking to interrupt my usual way of doing things with something new and to bring my internal resources to it because it's becoming something that I'm valuing.

It feels weird, to be honest, like coming to social media now. Mm-hmm. Actions, doing, trying, failing, going back up again. So this is really the foundation. This is one of six parts of the Flare House process that I work with people on. And it's the first one and it's the most important because without it, nothing else is happening.

Without it, everything is just theory and I call it show up. And I [00:08:00] think of show up in a very specific way. It means to. Give your focus, attention, energy, time, your internal resources to something that you value. How do your actions valorize what you're about and what you're creating, what you're wanting and your show up skill is evidence in your actions, how much your actions fit with what you say you want.

And so. This process has five parts to it. I'm gonna summarize briefly so you have an idea. First of all, you have to know what you want, right? Like what are you valorizing with your actions. You have to decide that that's possible, commit to it, and then figure out what's the very next action. Often we want to.

Know the full path ahead, know exactly how it's going to work, and then try and derive and draw belief from knowing how. [00:09:00] But that is reductive for your belief because the how you won't know because you're doing something you haven't done before. And often it's, there's a trailblazing, there's something that you're bringing that is new and different.

And so how you do it is going to have to be something that you. Feel through and you figure out and not something that you can pre-plan like a, I don't know, going and studying in a and getting a degree in the curriculum's all laid out for you. Right. The third thing is welcoming challenge. Oh, this is hard.

Often it can default us to, and therefore I'm not gonna do it and therefore I'm gonna do something else. So it's actively bringing yourself into the arena and saying like, oh no, this is challenge. I am learning something new. I am doing things that are uncomfortable. I'm doing things that I don't know will work and bring it [00:10:00] on.

Then it's about noticing, okay, I did something. Did it work? Did it do what I wanted it to do? If not, why not? Did it reflect what I value? What did I find out? And so evaluating what happened, and then finally celebrating. Celebrating is something that often people have a lot of resistance to. Because it feels unproductive.

It feels kind of pointless and maybe indulgent and weird, but I think of celebrating as you noticing that you took action and in the noticing you are actually strengthening the belief, strengthening the identity, strengthening the sense of, oh, I'm, I'm doing things and something's happening. Because your first evidence is coming from those actions, and so you want to be reinforcing that the fact that you're taking them.

And also [00:11:00] because you are often taking action from the edge of you that others might not have caught up with yet, that you, in your own idea of who you are, might not have caught up with yet. And so it's strengthening those neural pathways to say, oh yes, this is who I'm being, this is what I'm doing, even if it's not working, the fact that I'm acting on it and I'm learning and I'm figuring it out.

It is something to notice and feel good about, which is how I think about celebration. Like noticing what you're doing and and deciding to feel good about it and showing yourself why. So this is show up. I direct my focus, attention, energy, time, and internal resources to what I most value and. The challenge is often the external challenges of there being barriers, there being skills, there being things you don't know about, information you [00:12:00] don't have, experiences you don't have.

Then there's also the internal challenges of your belief system doesn't quite match up yet. Your sense of who you are doesn't match up yet your capacity doesn't match up or your skill doesn't match up. And all of those things will offer you reasons why not to move forward, reasons why not to take action.

And so it's about bringing those reasons why not that come up in you that arise and seeing them as the invitation. Not the barrier, not the reason why not like, huh, I didn't want to do that. I have loads of reasons why not to, for example, go on Instagram and be there. And so all of those reasons are often protecting yourself from the cost, the discomfort, the energy cost, the.

Social acceptance cost. The judgment cost. The judging myself cost [00:13:00] the feeling of disappointment or failure. Sometimes you'll be feeling disappointed before you've even tried, before you even know if it's going to work to protect yourself from having to feel that. So you're feeling it ahead of time. And so it becomes about reminding yourself what you value.

Like what is the delayed benefit of this short term, immediate cost of being uncomfortable, and also what would be the cost of not doing it. The cost to you. The cost to your work, the cost to the people who your work is for the cost to your loved ones, the cost to the world. If you didn't go for it, if you didn't take this next step towards the things that you most value with your work.

Often people get very excited by the idea, by new ideas, by division of something, and then when it comes to like [00:14:00] rubber meets the road, we're actually doing it. And how that feels in comparison. It can be very off-putting. And de-energize. Or you can just like three days later, forget what was so exciting and now you don't wanna do it anymore and you don't wanna follow through.

And this is just because we disconnect from the things that we are valuing, the impact of it. So again, it's bringing your conscious focus, attention, awareness, energy to what you value, valorizing it, reminding yourself, oh yeah, this is why. Yeah, there's a delay to that happening, but it's never gonna happen unless I take this next step.

Something I do with those I work with is get them to evaluate what are you showing up to? Where is your energy going? What are you paying attention to, and is it what you want? And often it's not, and that's okay. And that's to be expected. [00:15:00] But we are not doing normal over here. We're doing extra. Normal, extraordinary, and the type of self-trust that you build when you see yourself over and over.

Choosing to delay gratification, right? Choosing to delay immediate comfort, to delay immediate reward, and to gain reward instead from the feeling of. Momentum building from the feeling of seeing yourself make progress, consciously directing your life, taking command of the impact that you're going to have, taking command of the way that you get to exist in the world, taking command of how you are going to make the money you want to make.

Taking command of how you will evidence and realize and. Build the value that you're bringing, taking command of being someone who's working with people on that, [00:16:00] collaborating, connecting with people, taking command of the decision of what counts as important, what you are valuing, the feeling that that creates when that becomes who you are being is a deep level of self-trust, but also a deep level of trust in your own desires, being something that is possible for you.

Those small micro wins, the small learnings, the small insights that you gather, the small actions you take along the way start to build up energy, start to have a reinforcing loop of, yeah, I'm someone who gets to co-create my own life, our shared reality towards what you actually value. And so it starts with what are you showing up to and making that.

[00:17:00] Purpose.