This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Big Trust Energy: How to Build Self-Trust When Self-Doubt Won’t Shut Up with Dr. Shadé Zahrai | 380

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

If you’ve ever waited to “feel confident” before you take the leap… congratulations, you’ve been scammed by your own brain. In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole Kalil goes full confidence-nerd (with the occasional rant) with Dr. Shadé Zahrai—behavioral researcher, peak performance educator, and author of Big Trust—to expose what confidence actually is, why self-doubt doesn’t disappear, and how to build real self-trust that holds up when life gets messy. What we get into: Why confidence isn’t the opposite of self-doubt (and why that myth keeps you stuck) The thing you actually need first: self-trust / Big Trust—backing yourself before the outcome is guaranteed How “failure” can build confidence if you stop making it mean you are a failure The self-image trap (including a wild scar study that proves your brain will invent reality if you let it) The Four A’s of Big Trust: Acceptance, Agency, Autonomy, Adaptability (aka the internal upgrades your confidence has been begging for) The 4 Inner Deceivers (and the bonus villain): The Classic Judge (never impressed, always loud) The Misguided Protector (aka fear dressed up as “logic”) The Ringmaster (grind culture’s toxic BFF) The Neglector (everyone else first… until you break) The Victimizer (outsourcing your power like it’s a hobby) If self-doubt is showing up, it doesn’t mean you’re broken—it means you’re human and doing something that matters. Build Big Trust, take the step anyway, and let confidence catch up like it always does. Thank you to our sponsors! Get 20% off your first order at curehydration.com/WOMANSWORK with code WOMANSWORK — and if you get a post-purchase survey, mention you heard about Cure here to help support the show!  Sex is a skill. Beducated is where you learn it. Visit https://beducate.me/pd2550-womanswork and use code womanswork for 50% off the annual pass. Connect with Shadé : Website: https://www.shadezahrai.com/  Book: https://www.shadezahrai.com/bigtrust?utm_source=chatgpt.com  IG: https://www.instagram.com/shadezahrai/  LI: https://th.linkedin.com/in/shadezahrai?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shadezahrai?lang=en  Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/shadezahrai  Related Podcast Episodes: VI4P – What Confidence Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters (Chapter 1) | 168  197 / Fear & Failure (Part 1) with Amy Green Smith Confidence Isn’t Born, It’s Built — Lessons from the Cockpit to Real Life with Michelle “MACE” Curran | 343 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today with confidence and the occasional rant. And today is definitely a confidence and possibly more than occasional rant kind of day. Because if you're a regular around here, you already know that I have a stalker-like obsession with confidence. I study it, research it, write about it, talk about it, dissect it, even argue about it. We're talking, restraining order levels of fixation here because it matters. Confidence, and when I say that, I mean firm and bold trust in self, is the power behind every one of us redefining success

and woman's work on our own terms, which is why I get irrationally irritated, fine, enraged, when I see confidence misrepresented, misunderstood, or packaged like a serum, Sephora is dying to upsell you on. Don't even get me started on. on the ways that brands and social media profit from selling us a story they know we're desperate to believe. Buy this, follow that, manifest harder. And like some sort of magical spell, you'll never doubt yourself again. It's what I call the confidence con and it's everywhere. And it scares the hell out of me for us, for our daughters, for anyone trying to grow up in the algorithm era without losing their sense of self. Because after being sold to,

a thousand fixes and five-step hacks, none of us are becoming more confident by trying to outrun doubt. And that's why I get unreasonably excited when I find somebody who isn't selling confidence but actually studying it. Someone whose work feels like another breadcrumb on this path we're walking together, a path toward grounded, resilient, evidence-backed trust in self. Dr. Shaday Sarai is a behavioral researcher or winning peak performance educator and one of the world's leading authorities on confidence and self-doubt. A former corporate lawyer turned psychology-driven performance expert, she's designed programs for Fortune 500 heavyweights like Google, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, and McKinsey. She's one of LinkedIn's

top voices for career development, has taught over 7 million learners on LinkedIn learning, and her TEDx talks and viral videos have racked up more than 300 million views. Her new book, Big Trust, distills that expertise into practical research-backed systems for rewiring self-doubt and rebuilding unshakable trust. So Chaudet, clearly, I'm excited to have you here. And I wanted to start by asking you to define what you mean when you talk about confidence. I have my, like, personal definition. When you think about confidence, what is it that you're talking about? So I think we need to take it a few steps back and consider that when we ask people on the street, what do you think the opposite of self-doubt is, we get around 95% of them saying confidence. And when we speak to leaders,

when we're running trainings, it generally stands true. 95% think the opposite of self-doubt is confidence. Then you might have a few saying clarity or self-belief. When we actually look at the literature, when we look at the research, that feeling of confidence that we're waiting for, it actually does not come before we take the action. And so by waiting to feel confident, we're giving ourselves this impossible standard that we never reach. And so we're perpetually waiting and preparing and researching and planning without taking the first step. When we look at the literature, what we find is that you have to actually take the step, do the thing, start the thing, to give your body, your brain the proof that, hey, I'm doing the thing. You're developing the skills,

you're developing some competence. It increases what is called yourself, efficacy, which is the belief that I can do this. And then that is what increases your confidence. So confidence is actually the result. It's not what comes before the action, which then means, well, what are we waiting for? And fundamentally, what we need before the action is self-trust. We call it big trust. It's backing yourself when it counts, not knowing what the outcome is going to hold, but believing that you have the worthiness, the skill, the capability, the ability, the ability, the ability to influence the outcome, and then taking that first step. So confidence is the outcome, self-trust is what you need first. Now, does that align with your view of confidence? It's interesting. It

definitely does, and it may be semantics, but I think I've sort of meshed the two because I went to the etymology of the word confidence, like how it started and how it's translated in all different languages, and the word most closely associated with confidence is trust. And faith and belief pop up a lot too. So the way I frame it, at least in my mind, is confidence comes before and after. And it's like this sort of self-feeding thing, right? We choose big trust or firm and bold trust and self,

and that has us get into action. And we agree completely there. Action builds confidence, overthinking derails it. And then by being in action, we reinforce the trust and the confidence. So I think I've sort of collapsed the word into being the same trust and confidence. And I don't by any stretch of the imagination disagree with separating them. But it's interesting because I do think a lot of times we think of confidence as something we want as opposed, like something that's coming on the other side of something. So that resonates with me.

Any thoughts or reactions to what I said? Yeah, I think you're right. A lot of it is semantics. I mean, it's just, it's a word, but the word embodies a feeling. And that's what we think about when we're thinking of confidence. And I love how you went to the origins of the word confidence, because it does come from the Latin con and fidere, which means with trust. Right.

And so that feeling of trust, it's almost like confidence is the feeling of trusting yourself initially. And then confidence becomes the proof that you can do it at the end of that, which then fuels that feeling of trust. So yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so what would you say to the person who I'm sure you've experienced this? I know I have where you do something with big trust. And it doesn't quite go the way you wanted it to or you don't get the outcome that you want. How does that still or does it still build our confidence? Because I have this belief that just because you do something with confidence doesn't mean that it's going to work out magically and beautifully. in the end. Your thoughts? Agree entirely. So when you approach anything with big trust, part of that requires you to hold yourself in such a high esteem that even if things don't work out and we know life, we know reality, a lot of things don't work out. They may fail. There may be a setback. It might be a result of your actions or inactions or an external factor. Regardless, not everything works out. So having that big trust is also holding yourself in that esteem so that no matter what happens,

you don't internalize it at the end. If it was a failure, you don't say, I am a failure. You say, it failed. What can I learn? How can I apply the learning so that it doesn't happen again? Again, you are trusting your capacity to grow and to bounce forward when you hit that roadblock. So again, a big part of it is acknowledging that nothing in life is certain. Even though our brain is wired to seek that certainty and that predictability, it's a prediction machine, nothing is certain. And so when you fundamentally trust yourself, when you show up with big trust, you need to acknowledge, not everything may work out, and that is okay. How will you pivot? How will you use that as your next stepping stone? I'm curious to your thoughts on this. I've always felt like the deepest level of trust that I can demonstrate or have for myself isn't the trust that everything will work out or everything will be the way that I want it to.

the deepest level of trust, big trust, is trusting that I'm valuable and all be okay no matter what. Thoughts. Agree again. I feel like everything, I want you to argue with me though, because you did say in the introduction, you're like, sometimes I like to argue about confidence. Let's have an argument. No, big trust really is, again, not internalizing what happens as a verdict on who you are or your potential or your worthiness.

It also extends. It's not only about taking the action. It's also in our relationships. You know, if a relationship doesn't go well, if there are conflicts in the relationship, you don't immediately self-blame and internalize it and think that that's all you. So it's this separation between us and what is happening to us and acknowledging that we are fluid. We can adapt. We can grow.

We can evolve so long as we acknowledge that we can do that. And then we take the steps to actually put that into practice. How are we going to, again, learn from every experience, keep refining? That said, we do know when things don't go well, we tend to take it personally. It tends to affect how we see ourselves. It leaves an imprint on what's called our self-image. And your self-image, in fact, I want to share with you a study from the 70s, which is fascinating. But the idea of self-image is that it creates the blueprint for your entire life

because it determines what you pay attention to because of how our brain is wired. Let me quickly take you through this study because it's fascinating. So in the 1970s, a psychology professor by the name of Robert Cleck at Dartmouth, he conducted this study to basically see how people responded in conversations. Let me explain how he did it. So he brought people together. He split them up into groups. Now, one of the groups, for one of the groups, he drew a scar on their face,

from their right ear to the side of their right mouth or the right side of their mouth, big, ugly scar. He let them see themselves in a hand mirror for a moment, and then he sent them into conversations. Now, one of the other groups had no scar. They just went into a conversation with a stranger. So they're all having conversations with complete strangers. After the conversations, they came back and reported how they felt.

Now, the group with the scar on their face overwhelmingly reported that they felt that they were treated differently because of the scar. It was tense. The other person was cold. It was uncomfortable. Which is what you might expect when someone has... I mean, well, actually, we shouldn't expect this because we shouldn't be discriminating. but in any case, that's what they found. Now, here is what's really interesting. If we rewind a little bit, before those participants were sent into these conversations, so right after they saw that they had a

scar on their face, the researcher applied moisturizing cream and said, this is to set the scar so that it doesn't crack. But what they did is remove the scar entirely. So now these people have no scar. They're going into these conversations believing that they have a scar and expecting that they will be treated differently, and that is what they experienced. They had created a reality, not based on objective truth, but based on how they saw themselves. It's called expectation bias. And so when we think about confidence and self-doubt and how we see ourselves and how we're showing up, it all comes down to self-image, our self-image of ourselves. And whatever your self-image is, I guarantee you you will create that in your reality because the brain is wired through things like confirmation bias by confirming existing beliefs, through selective attention, by selectively attending to information that it deems as important, you will notice these things even if they don't exist. So back to your question, Nicole, around, you know, if we experience a failure or a setback, a lot of the time, if our self-image is fragile, if we fundamentally don't accept ourselves,

which is the first pillar of big trust, that's when we internalize the failure and make it mean something about us. That's when we internalize the relationship breakdown and conclude, I'm not worthy of happiness. And that's where the damage is. Yeah. It reminds me, I've actually forgot about this.

I haven't said it in a long time, but I had this sort of working definition for myself of confidence, that confidence is when you know who you are, own who you're not, and choose to embrace all of it. And it was this creating intimacy with self in like, who am I? What do I know to be true about myself?

What do I want to be true about myself? And like we are the authors, but then also accepting that we're not meant to be all things to all people all the time. And perfectionism is the enemy of confidence and all that. So this owning who we're not, understanding that we're not meant for things or people and things or people are not always meant for us and that that's, okay. But I find that study fascinating and couldn't agree more that how we perceive and see ourselves makes all of the difference in the world. How easy or hard is it to change how we see ourselves,

how we change our perception of our self-image? So for a very long time, there was a belief that, so, okay, let's rewind again. Self-image fundamentally also relates to your personality. It's personality traits that for a very long time, for decades, were deemed to be stable across the lifespan. So they form in your earliest years, your belief about yourself, your subconscious beliefs. Generally, they say up to the age of seven is when they're really forming and then they just become reinforced throughout your life. And then that's just who you are. And that gave people an excuse to say, well, this is just who I am. I'm the kind of person who can't handle pressure. I'm the kind of person who doesn't deserve love. I ruin every relationship. We keep going into these

same patterns because we assume that we cannot change. But we also know that if we cannot change, then there'd be no need for therapy. There'd be no industry for self-help. And so what very recent research in the last five or so years has found is that you can fundamentally change yourself image. You can fundamentally change your personality. But there's one important step here. You have to intervene consciously. What does that mean? You need to apply proven principles and techniques that have been shown to actually change your personality. Because what is personality? A big part of it is, of course, our biological wiring,

but then an even bigger part of it is essentially just repeated patterns in the brain. Repeated patterns that shape how we respond to the world, how we interpret things, how we show up, how we, again, attribute meaning to what's happening to us. And if that's just a repeated pattern of thought that has created a belief, we can overwrite that thought. And so self-image, when we look, okay, so this brings us to an interesting point.

When I was doing a lot of research, deep diving into this research on self-image, I kept asking myself, we know that self-image is important, but what actually is it? If I were to ask you, Nicole, describe your self-image, you might have a vague idea, but until we can measure something like this, it becomes really difficult to know that that person's self-image, what they're talking about is self-image, is the same as this. So this idea of measurability is really important in research. I wanted to figure out how do you measure self-image. I did a deep dive over the last 50 years,

and I found that there was a concept called core self-evaluations, which was discovered in the 80s and 90s. And it provides us with this framework of four personality traits that when combined shape your evaluation of yourself, which is your self-image. and I found that fascinating because it exists as a way to measure it. And so these four personality traits are self-esteem, which is your sense of worthiness, self-efficacy, which is your belief that you can do the thing, locus of control,

which refers to where do you focus? Do you focus on things you can control or things that you cannot control? Because that shapes how you feel. And then the fourth one is what's called emotional stability or neuroticism, which is how stable you are emotionally. So I started running a lot of programs, helping people understand therefore traits that shape their self-image,

but then people were saying, oh, but personality, this has been shaped from so long ago, I can't change this, and even though we said to them, no, no, research demonstrates you can, there was still this block. And so we have decided to change that underlying framework to talk about not the personality traits that underlie it, but the trainable capacities, the trainable attributes that allow us to actually change these things.

And that is the four-part framework of self, of a big trust. And so the very first one is acceptance, which is described as a habit in the research. Do you accept yourself for who you are, or do you outsource your worth? Do you need other people to accept you first? So that's the first one. The second one, which relates to self-efficacy, is what we call agency. do you believe that you can take action amidst uncertainty and that you can learn what you need to and apply the skills? The third one is autonomy. So this is around choices. Do you focus on the choices

that you have power to make? Or do you focus on things that you have no choice over? And then the fourth is adaptability. Can you adapt to your emotional state and harness your emotions? So bringing us back now to this question of how do you change your self-image? How easy is it? It comes down to focusing on those trainable attributes of acceptance, agency, autonomy, adaptability. And it's not an overnight thing. As you said, I love how you said earlier that we live in a world of quick hacks and immediate fixes. Yeah, this is not one of those things. This takes time and effort. And I have, in big trust, what I seek to do is simplify that and give people the tools and the frameworks to help them fundamentally change that self-image with specific actions they can take. But you've

can do it. And in fact, in my own research, we found that you can fundamentally change that personality base within six weeks. Wow. And that was just with 10 minutes of effort a week and then thinking about it and applying it for that week. So yeah, it can be done, which is incredibly empowering. We can fundamentally change who we are. I promise I'll get you back to the good stuff, but supporting our sponsors is what makes the good stuff possible. Here's my hot take. What if we all gave the finger to resolutions about losing weight and focused instead on gaining pleasure. This year, instead of another resolution that quietly dies by mid-January, more women are choosing something different. They're having better sex. Beeducated is an online platform with over 150 courses

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developed. It's not fixed. I always say you weren't born with confidence or born without. It is a teachable, learnable skill. And it's also a choice back to agency that I think any one of us can make, but that data and research to back it up is super helpful. Now, one of the things I talk about, I identified five things that I think are doing an abnormal amount of damage. They're destroying and chipping away at our trust and self. And I know you have what you call the four inner deceivers. I would just love to see where the overlap is. Talk to us about the four inner deceivers and how they show up.

Well, why don't we hear yours first? Because I feel like I just did a lot of talking. Let's hear what you've identified and then I can come in with the inner deceivers. So the lens is a little bit with women in mind, though I do you think that they're gender neutral, but the five confidence derailers that I identified. The first one is perfectionism, this idea that we're sort of. supposed to be all things to all people all the time. The second is what I call head trash. You could call it negative thoughts or inner critic or doubt or whatever, but it's the voice inside her head that says

things to us about us that are never kind, very rarely true. Comparison and judgment when we pair our behind the scenes to somebody else's highlight real and fall short. The fourth one is overthinking. Obviously thinking is not a problem, but the overthinking that leads us to be in inaction, As you said earlier, action is such a necessary part. And then the fifth one is seeking confidence externally, which you already talked about as well. It's outsourcing our confidence as if someone or something out there is going to come along and give it to us. So those are the five derailers I identified. I know some of them correlate with your four A's and much of what you've said so far.

But I'm curious about your four inner deceivers and where they overlap or not. No, this is perfect, and I was taking some notes on that one. So with the four inner deceivers, how I essentially uncovered them, this is back right before COVID started, maybe two, one or two years before COVID started. And then also throughout COVID, I had conducted hundreds of informal interviews. I've been passionate about understanding the voice in our heads for a very long time, well over a decade. And so I was conducting a lot of informal interviews. And then I had a number of clients who would also reveal that they had this kind of inner critical voice in their heads. And as I was then collating all of these client notes and these interview notes and doing

thematic coding, I actually discovered, yes, every single person I have spoken to has some kind of negative trash talk in their heads, this criticism, this very pessimistic view of themselves in the world, and they would hear it as a voice. What I also found out, though, is that this voice wasn't the same for everybody. This voice took on different, it almost had a different personality or a different archetype depending on what it was focusing on.

And so what I identified is there were these four overarching archetypes. There were actually five, but I don't so much talk about the fifth one because it's one that people struggle to identify in themselves. I'll mention that right at the end. But let's focus on the four.

So the very first one, which actually aligns most with the head trash, The first archetype or inner critical voice is what we call the classic judge. It's that inner voice, the inner critical voice that judges you endlessly for what you did, what you didn't do, what you should have done, nothing satisfies that voice. This is just that incessant. It's also driven by a lot of overthinking that turns inwards. It's just that incessant voice that is never happy with you.

And a lot of the time this has been, well, when we look at research, we find that all of these voices, which we call the inner deceivers, because they're trying to deceive you into believing something which is not true. They originate early in life, usually, based on your relationship with your parents, caregivers, peers very early on, and then again just gets reinforced. So that's our first one, classic judge. It's kind of the default inner critic that we have. The second one is what we call the misguided protector. Now, this is the voice that wants to keep you safe. It's primary role is to protect you from the risk of failure, rejection, criticism from other people. So how does it protect you from that? Well, it protects you by magnifying everything that could go wrong.

Because if it magnifies all the risks and highlights all the ways that you will fall short, you're not going to do anything, are you? You're going to stay safe by not taking action, but you're also completely stuck. And that's why we call it the misguided protector, which very much aligns to perfectionism, which is saying. setting these impossibly high standard so that you either shrink and don't do it, or then you just attack yourself. The third voice is very common in high performers. I think a lot of women resonate with this as well, especially women who are balancing both careers and family life. We call it the ringmaster. This is the voice in your head that keeps pushing you. It tells you

to work harder, to push more, to sacrifice your sleep, to keep going even when everything in your body is screaming for you to stop and take a break. It's the voice that makes you feel guilty when you're trying to rest. If you're not being productive, it says, well, you're not working, therefore you're worthless. Keep pushing. So the ringmaster is very common in, again, high achievers, a lot of entrepreneurs, people who have a desire to do a lot. It pushes them to set a goal, reach the goal, feel satisfied maybe for a couple of seconds, and then think, no, what is the next goal? Because we're constantly chasing this feeling of enough,

but then it never comes. So that's the voice of the ringmaster. I'm curious your thoughts on this, because we get a lot of advice as entrepreneurs or as in business about grit and grind and hard work and never give up. And I think it sort of feeds this ringmaster. It supports it.

Any advice on, on how to balance out the two, because I do think, especially when you're early on in an entrepreneurial journey or early on in your career, there is an element of grit and grind and saying yes and showing up and all of that that does have to happen. But how do you keep it in a healthy place versus letting the ringmaster take the wheel?

It all comes down to what's driving it. So when we hear a lot of this push harder, keep doing it, there's a lot of it on social media. It's very much, look, it can be a healthy thing, so long as you're not being driven by a feeling of a lack of enough. If you do not feel like you're enough, you feel like you must keep pushing in order to feel like you're of value. And that's where it's damaging because you end up sacrificing so much along the way.

But if you're instead driven by a sense of impact, by a sense of service, by a sense of wanting to be a great role model for your kids or your community or something other than that lack of acceptance, that's when it's actually a healthy thing. That's also when you can take a break and you don't turn that self-criticism inwards. You don't feel guilty or unworthy or lacking in value. You just say, okay, I need to take a break. So it really comes down to what's called role identity fusion. If we fuse our identity with what we are delivering, this is damaging. Because then if something doesn't work out, we take it personally. If we take our foot off the pedal, we feel like we are worthless. We're falling behind.

So that's the key. It's reminding yourself, you are not your work. You are so much more than what you're delivering. That's just a facet of you. But you need to bring it back to who am I? What are my values and how do I align behind my values? Right. Okay. And then the fourth one? Fourth one. Fourth one, very common in women. We see this much more frequently in women, especially women who tend to be in nurturing type roles. So women who are parents, women who are carers. We call it the neglecter. It's the voice in your head, which makes you neglect what you need, what you want, to make sure everyone else is happy. It makes you feel like you are not valuable enough to have wants and needs and desires, and therefore you seek satisfaction by ensuring everyone

else is happy with you. So this aligns with your seeking confidence externally. You seek confidence based on the validation and the approval that others are giving you. You outsource your worth. And so it leads a lot of women to completely overwork, completely overextend themselves, say yes to every opportunity to help others, which in itself is not a bad thing. But when you're doing that to your own detriment, that's when it can lead to things like burnout to emotional exhaustion and feeling like your entire worth hinges upon how much you're able to serve other people. And I think if you go back and look through each of the four, I think it's pretty clear how this chips away at and does damage to the trust that we have for and with ourselves.

In different ways, but at the end of the day, it's doing the same thing. What about the fifth one that you said? The fifth one, I love that you remembered it. So the fifth one was an interesting one. It's we'd hear it in people who were constantly complaining, who were very resentful of others, who would also dwell on everything bad that had happened to them, all the times they'd been wronged. And they would blame other people for everything. They would never take responsibility.

We call this voice the victimizer, and it victimizes you into believing that you have no power. It victimizes you into believing that your life is more difficult, than everyone else, that life is inherently unfair, that nothing ever changes. And that actually links to a lack of autonomy, which is that third pillar, because autonomy is that belief that I am personally powerful. My actions make a difference in my own life and the life of other people. Some people have been in positions where they have unfairly experienced injustice, discrimination, prejudice. And we're not talking about that here because that can lead to something called learned helplessness where you have genuinely tried so many times and you are just hitting a block.

Now, of course, even in those situations as unfair as they are, we still have a choice. We can play the victim, complain about everything, blame and be resentful, which is actually not going to help us. Right. Or we can choose to shift to, okay, well, what can I do? Can I change the way that I'm showing up, the way that I'm interpreting this? I'm not saying that that situation is right. in terms of the injustice they're experiencing, but still, there is a choice. Victor Frankel is a perfect example, prisoner of war for many years. He found that the people who survived that incredible treatment during World War II as prisoners of war chose to think about the meaning in their suffering

and chose to think about something beyond themselves. So again, even in that environment, we have choice. But for the rest of us, who more or less have choices about the kind of work that we do, how we're showing up each day, we need to remind ourselves, or rather, whenever we think, why me, why do I have it so tough, we need to instantly shift to, okay, what now? Yes, this is my reality. What now? What am I going to do about it? Right. And that allows us to shift from an external locus to an internal locus. When we're in that state of complaining, feeling like we have no power, when we look at neuroscience studies when they've done scans of the brain, the prefrontal regions,

the ventromedial prefrontal region of the brain is not highly active, which means that we have activation in other parts, the emotion centers, the threat centers, which also means that we're not able to think rationally about ways to get out of it. But when we shift to what now, what next, what can I do, we're re-engaging the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to access not only rationality, but problem solving, solution finding. And again, we feel more personally powerful because when you focus, on what you can do, you're more likely to find things that you can do and then take action. In fact, I recently came across a study literally yesterday because I was looking at some previous

research in the space. One of the things that your ringmaster will get you to do, your classic judge, even the victimizer, is highlight all the things that you should have done. Or even the things that you should do, but that you're not going to do, and that makes you feel compelled. Oh gosh, I should be doing this. I should do that. And then we have this what's called reactance, where we feel like we're being told to do something, but we don't want to do it, even if it's our voices in our head. Language of should, whether you hear it from your head or someone else, it doesn't make you feel empowered. But when you shift to could, what could I do, suddenly you're able to see more options. You have more divergent thinking. And they've even found in

groups, when you start asking, okay, well, what could we do? They're actually able to make more morally aligned decisions behind what's right. So that's a really little hack. If you ever feel like you have no power, I call it the I could and the I will list. Grab a notebook, write down everything that you could do, given the current circumstances, everything that you could do. You're not committing to it, so don't worry, what could you do? Then your next step is to grab a highlighter or a different colored pen and then circle from your could do list, what are the three things that you will do? And then you write them down. I will take a step to reach out to that person. I will update my LinkedIn profile. I will set a boundary and tell this person that I'm not available

after 6pm. You write it down, you take action on it because the fastest way to silence these critics is to take action anyway. You're essentially reminding yourself you don't have to believe everything you think, you're also giving yourself proof and evidence that I can have this voice in my head and I can still do what is aligned with what I truly want and what I need. And the more you do that, you create that psychological separation. I am not my thoughts. I can take action that's aligned with me. Yeah. I wish we had more time. I could go back to so many things and say like how much it jives with my experience and how much it aligns with the mission of this show. I'm choice, all of that. But because of time, I want to ask you, and I don't think we're going to

argue about this, but it is something where we could have different perspective, and I'm really curious about yours. There are two things that I think pop up when it comes to confidence that feel, I don't know, challenging for me. The first is, and I know you've built a huge following on social media, and I will tell you that I've personally made the decision to step away from social media because for me, it's very hard to hold on to my confidence when I'm on the platforms. I find it being messed with pretty easily. So my question for you is, how do you hold on to your confidence while being engaged in social media? And what would you say? I often say confidence doesn't live on social media, at least not for me. So this could be a different perspective. I'm curious about

yours. Confidence in social media. How do they work? Firstly, I want to acknowledge that you have made a choice which is perfect for what you need, right? So you acknowledge that when you're on social media, the validation aspect is just too strong. And so you've made that to it. And the comparison. Yeah. And these platforms. So sorry, I just wanted to acknowledge, well done to you for pulling back from that because

that would have been a big decision that you had to make. And so well done for being true to what is important to you and what you know that you need. You know, I think one of the most empowering things to acknowledge is, that we can make choices. If something is not working for you, you don't have to be in it. You can choose to step back. And of course, that would have had implications for you from a business perspective, from a growth perspective, marketing, but you have made the choice that is aligned with

your values. So well down to that. And I think all of us listening need to honor that we can make choices. Few things, yes. Social media. So I struggle the most with acceptance of these four pillars, which is accepting myself. And it comes from early years. I come from a Persian family, beautiful, supportive family.

So it's odd that I struggle with acceptance. But because they were so supportive, I felt like I was indebted to them. And I wanted to make them happy, which made me internalize this belief that I needed to perform and please them and be the best little girl that I could. And now I'm still trying to shake that. That was so heavily challenged when I went on social media because suddenly you're creating content that is going to be seen by many, many, many people. And 5% of all people who see you will just not like you, not like your message, not like your. not like your eyebrows. My eyebrows are very controversial online I found. So there's a few things we need to acknowledge. These platforms are designed. They hire entire teams who understand human psychology,

human behavior to make them addictive. And how they do that, in my view, is by attacking your four pillars of self-trust and self-image. Because the worst you feel about yourself, the more time you spend scrolling. This is not me just saying that. This is shown in research. Social media use and self-esteem are inversely correlated. When you struggle with self-acceptance, you spend more time there. It could also be that the more time you spend there, the worse you feel about yourself.

So whether it's causation or correlation, it's there. There's two things that I've had to do. The first thing is I've had to set very clear boundaries about what I will use social media for and what I will not use it for. I will use it to post content and I will use it to look at videos of dogs because I absolutely love dogs.

Same. That's all. the pug thing. It's so weird. Anyway. Oh, we have to connect on that offline. Yeah, love dogs. Love what we see there. So for me, that's it. And I will set a timer. Okay, I'm going to be on for 10 minutes, or I'm going to do my posting because sometimes I'll open the app to post a video because we do everything in-house as in ourselves. We don't have a team that writes our posts and posts them. It's all us because integrity and authenticity is so important. Sometimes I'll open the app to post something. 20 minutes later, I'm scrolling. And I'm asking myself, why did I open this app? That's a

right? I was meant to be posting something and I forgot. It's designed to hook you. So I've got very firm boundaries. The other thing that I do, and I have to do this every single time I post, I will literally say to myself, care less about what people think. Care less. So I have this careless mantra in my head every time I post, which reminds me to separate my worth from my identity, creating that psychological separation. My husband then the other day said, okay, well, it's great that you have a care less, but what's your care more? What are you caring more about? I thought, that's genius. So now I'll say care less about what other people think, care more about having an impact, care more about being of value, being of service, positively impacting somebody. And that

reminds me that it is not about me. If I'm posting anything that is about me and doesn't meet that criteria of care more about that, then I don't post it. That's why I don't post photos of my gym workout or what I'm eating, maybe in my stories, but I wouldn't post that because for me, that's not aligning behind my care more. So that process of careless care more can be an incredible pattern interrupt that allows you to separate what you're doing from who you are, but it's really difficult. When you struggle with acceptance, how you feel about yourself will entirely be determined by the likes that you're getting, the views that you're getting, the comments that you're getting, and that is a very dangerous place.

to be because you're not demonstrating big trust. Thank you for going through that. I love the care less. I mean, I'm going to say that to myself in a lot of different situations. You started by saying, and I kind of teased out the episode about the relationship between confidence and self-doubt. And I think a lot of times it's positioned as when you're confident doubt is eliminated. And my experience is they kind of go hand in hand.

To close out our show, is there any condescending? advice or thought about how self-doubt and self-trust what the relationship is and how they work together. Absolutely. And before I share that, I do want to share two other very quick tips for anyone listening just because they're so important and I think they're so valuable, especially for people who do struggle with that sense of acceptance. So I'll quickly share them, Nicole, and then I'll dive into this question, the relationship. The first one is, if you tend to say yes compulsively, because you want to help people and you don't want to let them down. This is me.

You know, raise your hand if you're listening and you do this. Yeah, and Nicole. Because we generally don't fundamentally accept who we are and we want other people to be happy, but again, this can cause all sorts of problems. A really, really simple approach is what's called intentional delay. Researchers found that if you can delay a decision, an important decision, by just a matter of milliseconds, you give your brain more time to make a better decision. So instead of immediately responding with yes, the way that we implement this is reply with,

thank you for thinking of me. I'll get back to you by the end of the day. Give yourself buffer time. Thanks for coming to me with that request. Let me run it by my husband, my kids, make sure it fits with my schedule. I'll let you know tomorrow. So two things, you delay it, you give them a deadline of when you'll let them know. Right.

What that gives you time to do is reflect on, okay, do I actually want to do this? Do I have time for this? Does it align behind my values? the answer might be yes, but the answer might be no. But you've allowed yourself that time to think, and then you get back to them and say, thank you. I would have loved to have been involved, but I'm not able to. I hope you find someone else. Simple. So that's the first one, intentional delay. The second one is to acknowledge that when we're feeling insecure, when we're doubting ourselves, our bodies will respond in tune, right? So there's this remarkable

connection between our brain and our bodies. It's called embodied cognition. Our thoughts shape what our bodies do. Naturally, when we're insecure, when we're doubting, when we've got the head trash, those inner deceivers, the body's going to want to withdraw. So we slouch, we look away, we look down, everything contracts, which is reinforcing to our brain that we are insecure, we're in danger, we need to protect ourselves. So in those moments, something really simple you can do is to do the opposite. It's called opposite action. It's so simple. When you notice yourself contracting, catch yourself out and sit upright, strong posture, raise your gaze, take the deep breath in, allow the expansiveness to remind yourself, hey, okay, brain, I see what

you're doing, but I'm okay, I'm safe, I don't have to listen to you. And it is a remarkably impactful strategy, especially if you're in meetings and you're shrinking, if you're meeting someone new and you're shrinking, about to go on stage and you're shrinking, do the opposite. Now we get to that question that you asked me, Nicole, which is around the relationship between self-trust and self-doubt. In our experience, 95% of people experience self-doubt, and it doesn't go away. It just scales with responsibility. So the more you achieve in your life and your career, the more self-doubt you experience, it just evolves based on what you're doing and where you are and how much more of your reputation is at stake. Those who truly succeed don't have to eliminate the doubt. They don't have

to silence it, they don't have to never acknowledge that it's there. Instead, they show up with big trust energy, which means that they're detaching the self-doubt from their sense of who they are, and instead they lean into those four parts of themselves. It's almost like a checklist, acceptance. I accept who I am. And what I think of myself matters more than what they think. Even if it doesn't work out, that's not a verdict on me, right? That's acceptance. The second one is agency. I can do this. I can apply the skills that I've developed and I can learn whatever else I need to. And again, if things don't work out, I will just bounce back. Right. Again, I have choice and evolve. Exactly. I have choice. Yeah. The third one, right? The autonomy. I have a choice. What choice am I making right now?

How do I focus on what I can control? And then adaptability, which is the emotions piece. My emotions are important. How do I honor them, but not allow them to completely derail me? Let me take the breath. Let me call someone to talk it through. When you show up with big trust energy, you can hear the doubt. You can acknowledge it. You can process it rationally, but you don't become it. And that is the key. Shadei, I don't know that I've ever heard of an all-day podcast, but if there was one, I would want to do it with you. And we could just talk all day. Let's look it in. Thank you for being our guest. Thank you for writing this book. Again, for you, the listener, the book is big trust. Go get it. Wherever it is, you get books. Let's keep our local bookstores in business. And you can find Shade a variety of places. we're going to put all the links and all the ways to find and follow her in show notes. But Instagram, LinkedIn, and her website is shadayzari.com.

Again, you can find it all in show notes. Shaday, thank you, thank you, thank you, for being our guest today and for your incredible work. Thank you so much, Nicole. It's been such a treat. Absolutely my pleasure. Okay, friend, if there's one thing I hope you're taking from this conversation, it's this. Self-doubt isn't the enemy. The lies we've been told about self-doubt are the idea that confidence

is the absence of doubt that strong women don't wobble, that trust in self is something you earn only after you've proved enough, achieved enough, contorted yourself, performed enough, or feel ready enough. All of that is a hard no. Big trust, firm and bold trust, is often built alongside our doubt in the mess, on the other side of failure.

It's built when the noise is loud, when the stakes are high, while your brain is offering every possible reason to shrink or stay small. And you get to do the opposite. because trust isn't what happens once you've arrived. Trust is how you get yourself where you want to go. And maybe the bravest thing any of us can do is stop trying to eliminate fear and doubt and instead grab it by the hand.

And then grab courage, confidence, and hope in the other and start walking. Doubt and confidence hand in hand toward what matters most because that is woman's work.