[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.

In this episode, I wanna get into the third of three transformations involved in liberatory work, transformative work, change making work culture, shifting work. You get the idea, and this third one being what changes for your people? I actually wanna talk about it in a very specific way, which maybe it's less about your people and more about you again, but with the focus being on what changes for your [00:02:00] people, and I'm going to talk about this through the lens that is coming from Beam Up, which is one of the six skill sets I work with people on in my group.

And Beam Up is the last one. Beam Up is. What becomes possible in the sum total of the other five and in beam up. It's really taking the paradigm shift in your work, the message, the transformative lens that you are bringing and beaming that out. And what I want to talk about is how. This decision to trade transformation of systems while being in systems brings you into the mess and into the so-called arena, which is the arena of the question of [00:03:00] how do you stay free?

How do you make freedoms? How do you keep yourself in a state of choice and then have your work be part of that for someone else? Be an invitation into choice. There is a feeling of hypocrisy Instead of making an enemy of those systems, instead of pointing at the way something is done and saying that that is bad.

Is to recognize how many fingers are pointed back at us, right? We are all in these systems. We are all in and of them. And so how to be in them, and I think what I'm wanting to address is this fear of putting your work out there and being the sellout, being the grifter, being the. Opinion, ping guru [00:04:00] advice giver or perfect grid or salesperson, right?

And a fear of being that stops a lot of people from engaging in. The wrestle, it's easy to stand outside of it and point at what people are doing and take issue with it. It's much harder to jump in and wrestle with the things that are actually at stake and find and seek freedoms within it. There's a humility that comes with that, right?

Because it's not easy to not ingest. The culture of a system that you are in, and to be someone who can create space within it. And so this is why it's useful, I think, to sometimes have a chip on your shoulder from. Where engaging and being part of the system didn't give you the coordinates and sense of self [00:05:00] to know yourself and to be connected and to feel belonging.

There were conditions, there was a negotiation, there was things unexpressed, unreflected under-recognized or stereotyped, and so. That gives you a taste for seeking the freedoms of how do I, how do I navigate this and not just make more of the status quo? How do I not get caught up? How do I engage with the system and come out untouched by it?

And I guess the answer that I want to put forward is you can't, but in choosing to engage. And mess with the tools. Know what's at stake because you're playing inside. It is when you create the possibility of not being so trapped by them so that you can find where the freedoms [00:06:00] are. It's the classic Plato's allegory of the cave, right?

How do we get into the projection room? Understand what is indoctrination and what is shadow play. It is not to keep it secret that it's a projection, that there is a projector and that there's an illusion against the wall, but instead to play with those tools. And I'm drawing inspiration here from a French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who.

I really like the way in techniques and time he thinks about Charlie Parker using the gramophone, not for passively receiving and consuming music, but he used it as a tool. A tool to listen, a tool to a. Understand music, he would play things at different speeds, get inside the music. It's a precursor to what DJs did in eighties and nineties, right, with using turntables as an instrument.

The message of Bernard Steger is the way that artists [00:07:00] work with tools, technologies is to make them into an instrument to to play with them instead of be played by them. And so I want to think about what happens for your people as a result of your work, as a result of you committing, as a result of you entering an arena of consequence and putting forward A possibility is that you get in the muck of it.

You get in the mess, but it also means it's not an idealized fantasy. You are in the magic of that mess. In the magic of the re. Composting and recomposing, how reality exists and how do we exist. Take for example, the modality of coaching. It can be a tool for assimilating you into a system and being a better cog in that system, right?

Performing better for it, but it can also be used as a tool for. [00:08:00] Fucking with the technology of the body, mind, and reality, and how are you being and finding agency and choice in your own thinking, your own actions. And so you will have modalities, you will have mediums, tools that you are using, and you have a choice there about do you engage in what Angela Davies calls a constant struggle.

Freedom is a constant struggle, which is something we do together, right? You see someone who is living by a choice you didn't think you had, it makes something more possible for you. When we are all doing that, when there's a collective culturing and messing with and exchange and seeing what's possible, then things genuinely do.

[00:09:00] Change. Right? And so when you are thinking about what changes for your people as something to be obsessed by, as something to spend a lot of your time thinking about as something that you are giving your resources to within the premise of exchange and that you are also receiving in doing that, I think it's useful to have a model for how that might happen.

That isn't just a sort of intuitive, instinctive thing that sometimes you, you stumble across, but is something that you understand how you do it. The biggest piece of this that I want to get into today is you as an instigator of their awareness of the conditions. The conditions as in the instruments that are playing [00:10:00] us, right, we are indoctrinated into a reality.

Reality is what do you believe is solid ground that you can rest on? Depend on that your system, your body system adapts to, right? That it expects that is the way things are. Our social systems and meaning systems create. A dependency whereby I'm only okay if I fit in with this system. This system is what is, and this is the only system we adapt to it.

We become unaware of it being a choice. It's just the, the way things are. And so awareness is not naming those conditions so much as un identifying with them AKA un identifying with the person. The role you have to be in that system. So awareness of the conditions, awareness, meaning you are conscious and [00:11:00] sensing of a self deeper than and beyond, and underneath mediated reality.

Underneath the ideas that we share and coag agree on awareness of self that is not of. The system, and the way I wanna talk about this is through a model I call prisms, which is why you see the prism everywhere in the way I am imaging this work. Prisms are loosely based on models that you find in, in coaching, for example, the CBT model of your thoughts, create your feelings, create your actions.

For example, the model of. The life coach school. But what frustrated me with those models was the idea that the conditions are neutral and you're just responding to them. So the conditions are a really big part for me and mean that I use this [00:12:00] model in a different way and have run with it as a way to simplify a process of change.

And so when thinking about what's happening for your people as the thing that you are focused on and you are facilitating or enabling, what changes for them? What becomes more possible, what freedoms and choices are you opening up for them? Where I want to start is inviting you to think about how their awareness of the conditions is enabled in your work.

And so you in holding the possibility of someone transforming because of your work, where that begins is your own awareness of what conditions your work is operating in, in relationship to and with. Not necessarily by choice, right? So if your work is about [00:13:00] relationship, then what are the conditions that are predominantly shaping the way people do relationship?

Becoming aware of those conditions puts you in a space of choice. And awareness is not just naming the conditions, right? It's very easy to list off the conditions that we live in and to point. Again at something that is bad and say, oh, but I am good. And that puts us in that space of hypocrisy again. So it's not pointing at the conditions and saying they're wrong so much as un identifying with them.

Un identifying with the person you are supposed to be, the role that you are assigned in that system, and enter into a space of choice in who you are being. Where is your attention being directed and is that self-directed? Is it channeling your [00:14:00] energy towards what you actually value? Are your thoughts, your interpretation of what's real and who you are?

Are they your own? And therefore your feelings not something that's happening to you, but the product of your interpretation of what's happening and something you have agency over, and are your actions then coming from that place of choice? And when all those things are happening, a different outcome is produced from the same conditions.

You are opening up choice in how someone responds to those conditions. Sometimes that's facilitated by you giving them a skillset, right? A skill or a different result means that they have a wider possibility. They are in a greater level of choice. It might be that your work offers a paradigm, a way of thinking, a perspective that changes interpretation, that offers choice, that [00:15:00] opens up a different way of seeing the same conditions, the same problems, the same experiences that someone's been having, and they get a new lens on them, and that opens up their freedom to respond differently.

To choose differently. A different approach, right? A different paradigm. It might be that the conditions are somatic, that you are enabling the movement of emotion, of trauma, of responses that are conditioned and creating internal connection for someone. Your role in that transformation is you going first, you being someone who has been there, who is in the practice of taking the risks of thinking differently, choosing differently, and in doing so, you offer co-regulating, safety making for someone else [00:16:00] to enter that possibility with you.

Shame. Feeling not enough. Feeling too much prevents this self-awareness prevents this sense of choice, right? So if you are doing something that touches that material and cause a new root, causes a new possibility and says, this isn't shameful, this is legitimate, this is a way of being, then you open up and you create that possibility for someone else to let go of that shame, to feel differently, to interpret their own.

Choices and options and who they are differently. And so this is where the creativity and the imagination come in, right? Because how do you invite someone into something better, like a better experience of who they are and what life is like, while also not glossing over the conditions, gaslighting someone to believe that they don't exist.

How you do that is you acknowledge and you don't [00:17:00] pretend away the conditions, and in fact, use the fact that the conditions have worked on, you have played into the role that you are supposed to be as a site of creativity, like your role assigned to you as a site of self contamination that you are conscious of and that you are.

Working with and that you are playing with? I feel like there was a particular moment in the late nineties for me in the UK growing up in my formative years that feels really relevant to what I'm trying to describe for me, where the late nineties culture, music videos, our fashion was a commentary. On social inequity, on climate change, on beauty standards, on industrialized production.

There was this [00:18:00] dirty fuck with like, I'm thinking about train spotting, or there's an advert by Chris Cunningham for PlayStation where he took this girl speaking with a thick Scottish accent and. Made her look like an alien. Like it wasn't like what Rick Owen's called. Airport fashion, right? Where it's trying to sell you a sheen, glossy, idealized life.

And I think it's very easy to be in an industry or a field, and the version of that glossy airport fashion life is like, how credentialed are you? Or it might be like, how well can you mimic the aesthetics of something liberatory while not actually being at risk? Not actually putting yourself in the arena, not actually [00:19:00] getting in the muck and the mess.

The integrity of your work will come from you being willing to emancipate your own internal resources, your own attention, your thoughts, your energy, what you're doing from an external agenda, from being played, to utilize it towards what you value to self, determine what you are resting on as. This is the reality I want to operate in.

This is the reality I want to believe in, and this is the role I want to play. But again, not outside the conditions, not from this far off. Perfect. Idealized outside pointing fingers at what's wrong, but instead from inside and from orienting to an internal. Sense of what happens when I am not identified with those things.

What happens [00:20:00] when I am exercising choice? And then in those choices to hinge yourself. And I was saying that because the other day I looked up the word well hinge. I was thinking about unhinged and what is unhinged is often actually well hinged. It's someone who knows what they're for and. Isn't pretending otherwise, hinging yourself to it.

Putting roots down in that and building something, a system that you create a different dependency inside of that is self-sustaining, that is generative being the basis of resource and culture and meaning. Exchange as your trade, the degree of self-trust that you're operating with. As a agent of awareness and possibility and then inviting people to commit to that possibility as just as [00:21:00] real as just as possible as this is available.

This is a choice that you can make, and that being the choice that you want to facilitate and that choice is what your work ize is. It's saying, no, this, this is something that I'm for. This is something that I am creating all of my. Energy and the tension and resources and monetary economies around this being possible.

And then inviting people in. Inviting people in a space of choice, revealing that choice through revealing through not denying the conditions, meeting people where they're at and saying, Hey, wanna come this way, wanna come play over here? Want to do it this way? What if it's more fun? What if it feels better?

Like in your spirit? What stops us is what if no one will want it? What if I'm deluded? What if it's actually unsafe? What if people won't [00:22:00] pay for it? But when you understand that part of the value, part of the transformation is that you are putting that invitation out, that someone understands that that is a possibility that is available and you aren't playing a role that pleases the conditions while also trying to straddle doing something different when you have.

Played with the tools and the instruments and found freedoms within it. There's a concentrated type of value that can't be quantified, cannot be priced, that also cannot be for everyone. And so that leads you to a different approach to how do you structure an offer, an invitation, the pricing, the system that allows it to be sustainable.

There's a different set of priorities that come in. There's a different way of thinking about it, a different logic. [00:23:00] It's the logic of what I call your valorizing offer. Your valorizing offer in committing to it changes you, changes your people in the, simply in their awareness of this being possible and in them saying yes to you.

It makes it possible. That is a type of leadership that is different from standard business practice. It's the not committing though, that makes the, the thing you're trying to do, not sustainable. It's the not fully going all in on the one thing, staying in the hypothetical, like not entering and committing to a direction, a choice that.

Keeps it as a possibility and not a reality that you are actually [00:24:00] building.