Zahra Ciardi - The True Self, Limiting Beliefs & Why Photographers Crave Validation, E118

Matt talks with psychologist Zahra Ciardi, founder of Ascendant Bali, to explore the inner life of the creative person: why so many photographers feel their work isn't truly theirs, the limiting beliefs that keep artists stuck, and how to put your work into the world without being ruled by validation.

By the end of this episode you'll understand why your photography stops feeling like yours, and what it takes to create from your true self instead of your need to be seen.

Zahra works in trauma recovery and peak performance, and she breaks down the psychology of high achievers, the anatomy of avoidance, the inner critic, and how childhood shapes the way we create as adults.

Other things discussed:

• The "bus" model of the self and why the inner critic ends up driving
• Highly sensitive people and why creatives feel everything so intensely
• Over-diagnosis, self-diagnosis, and the bigger problem of under-treatment
• Self-neutrality as the realistic first step before self-love
• Graded exposure for photographers afraid to share their work
• Using social media intentionally instead of being used by it
• Whether healing costs you your creative edge
• How childhood memory is stored in the body, not just the mind
• The single values exercise Zahra says works every time

Zahra's links:
www.ascendantbali.com
www.zahraciardi.com
https://www.instagram.com/zahra_ciardi/

____________________

Transcript

When Making Becomes Mentally Hard

Zahra 0:00

Lots of artists, really creative, incredible people who've created magic in the world. They find themselves incredibly stuck at some point. And when we're in that space of going, I what brought me here is not the thing that can sustain me, that's where people begin to ask for help.

Matt 0:16

This is Zara Ciadi, a registered psychologist and founder of Ascendant Bali, a high-end mental health program for leaders, high achievers, and entrepreneurs. Zara specializes in trauma recovery, addiction treatment, and peak performance, combining evidence-based therapy with holistic approaches. Her focus is on helping clients break limiting patterns and unlock their potential. My conversation with her is for anyone trying to make something. And finding the thing in the way isn't the camera or the canvas or the page, it's the mind holding

Zahra 0:50

it. If we could all just do things, then we would, and my job wouldn't exist. My job is to break down the anatomy of doing. What is the belief? Because that's the weed in the garden. I can mow the lawn and it looks okay for a temporary time, but the weeds are there. They're just going to keep growing back. Or I can go in there and grab them from the roots and pull them out.

Matt 1:11

Zara has spent her career inside the human mind. What she sees there is what most of us have been taught not to look at, and what every creative person eventually has to face if they want to make work that means anything.

Zahra 1:46

And so they're overcompensating through perfection, through output, through results and outcomes. So you always have a choice. Yes, you can operate from the belief system that you're not good enough and therefore you need to overcompensate, or the fact that you are whole and you love to create. So I always use that analogy of how far do you want to go? Because you can really launch yourself forward. And that's your decision.

Matt 2:25

Zahra, welcome to the show.

Zahra 2:25

Thank you, glad to be here.

Matt 2:25

Uh we obviously know each other, but for listeners who may not know you and probably wondering why is this person on this mood podcast, photography show, art show, give us uh an introduction to yourself as well as, you know, why you think you're here today to talk to me on the show.

Zahra 2:45

Uh my name is Zara and I'm a psychologist. I run my own business in Bali called Assert in Bali, and we work with clients in a rehab or mental health setting that's inpatient or residential. We work quite deeply and intensively to support people to move from the life that they have, which might be problematic, to the life that they want. And I'm just glad to be here. I'm happy to talk about whatever you'd like to talk about. So bring it.

Matt 3:14

Yeah, we're gonna try and like revolve a lot of the conversation, certainly when it comes to psychology and mindset towards the, I guess, creative outputs and creative industries, um, just to keep it a little bit more aligned with what I'm interested in as well as what the audience is interested in. But this the this type of um conversation is overdue. But we talk a lot about this in certainly in the photography world, where I'm kind of embedded on a daily basis and in terms of not so much the the technique anymore and the the output, just more the person behind the camera, essentially. So I want to dive into a little bit about that.

From Refugee Childhood To CPTSD

Matt 3:52

But before we do, tell us about kind of the provenance of your story and how you got into psychology yourself.

Zahra 3:58

Yeah, I think whenever you meet someone who's in the healing or recovery industry, we're all in some sense, you know, coming with our own history. Um, majority of us have lived experience, and I myself do as well. When I was uh in my 20s, I was exploring what I wanted to do with my life. And I'd been studying medical science at the time, but I hadn't really honed in on what I wanted to do. And I was also going through a really difficult situation at home. So growing up, you know, we came to Australia as refugees. Um, I grew up in a family that was trying to assimilate in Australia, but struggling to find a place for themselves to belong. Um, the rules of the East were being applied to now a context of the West. And as children, we're trying to figure out how to fit in within our school, within our friends. But then we go home and we're being told to operate and, you know, work differently. And so this push and pull of identities that I had to navigate, as well as, you know, challenging circumstances at home and domestically violent um upbringing, um, meant that by the time I hit my 20s, I was experiencing a lot of symptoms that I couldn't explain. At the time, I just thought it was who I was. You know, it's it's this is me. Surely everybody feels the way that I did. But I was chronically anxious, I was very insecure, I was not sure of my place in the world and who I am, how I fit into, I guess, uh, this community and any community. Um, and by the time I left home, which I thought would be the end of my troubles, that's actually when everything kind of fell apart. Um, I was finally diagnosed with complex PTSD. And then that began my journey through treatment. And of course, at that point, I realized I really want to help people. I want to help people in my situation. I want to, but I also didn't recognize at the time that ultimately what I was doing is helping myself because being a psychologist has probably benefited me more than anyone, even though I've helped so many people, I can confidently say that. Um so yeah, fast forward, what is it now, 13 years since beginning my studies and you know, years of practice in the military, in private practice, in hospitals, uh, with early psychosis programs, and just seeing a variety of clients from across the lifespan and in different presentations, um, landing in Bali and choosing to do ascendant Bali and focusing on the trauma aspect of things has been really great. But like you were saying before, you want to focus on, you know, the specific person that would be watching your podcast. And interestingly enough, this generally is the kind of person that comes through our doors as well. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of musicians, actors, yes, artists. Lots and lots of artists, really creative, incredible people who've created magic in the world, but they find themselves incredibly stuck at some point. And when we're in that space of going, I what brought me here is not the thing that can sustain me. Um, that's where people begin to ask for help, which is really wonderful.

Matt 7:16

Yeah. And I think one thing that struck me there when you're telling your own story is the diagnosis part or the the realization, should we say, that you need help. And maybe for you that was um, you know, an event in itself when you you moved away and you realized, oh my goodness, I'm not well. Tell tell me about kind of the importance of because we we can self-diagnose quite easily. We're inundated with information coming of our ears every day at our fingertips, which I want to talk about later in terms of being quite overwhelming and how we can really like pass through that type of information. But it's also important to educate ourselves and realize when we actually need help, if we do need help. So for you, when was that kind of a seminal moment where you realized, okay, I need to go and get the diagnosis or go and see someone or go and get help? Because there's so many people that don't know that yet.

Zahra 8:14

Yeah. You know, that they're stuck in the trenches, and you see people after that certain point where they realize, okay, I need to go and get help, I'll go and find a Zara or someone else to really help me. But I'm I'm I get I think a lot about the people who are stuck in the mire, stuck in the mud, but they don't quite know it yet. So first of all, how did that happen for you over kind of that period of time? And what would your advice be to people in who may not know that they're quite in that state yet?

Treatment That Actually Changes Patterns

Zahra 8:46 Zahra 8:46

Yeah it's a great question because at the time that I was diagnosed, information was accessible. You know, we are a millennial. Um, I believe you are. Yeah, we're the same age. 30. And um You know, we we grew up in the age of the internet, so information became a little bit more accessible. Exactly. Very slow, but we could get that information if we really needed it. But it would it still wasn't to the extent that we have it now. There's information overload now. All you have to do is pick up your phone and speak to your AI, and the AI will prompt you as to, hey, this thought process is interesting. You might you might want to check with, you know, a therapist, or they might provide some guidance. So I think as the years have gone past, as the decades have rolled, we've got a greater capacity for awareness around what's going on for ourselves. And this is why we're seeing much higher access to supports like psychology and and and different resources. At the time that I received help, you know, I had already enrolled in psychology. I didn't know, I didn't know what was going on for me. I I knew that something wasn't right, something didn't feel good. I was having all sorts of issues. But I was assigned a task in university, and it was to watch a documentary and then to write an article about it. And I watched the documentary, which is supposed to be about borderline personality, and I remember just looking at it and going, what this is like my life. What is borderline personality? Borderline personality is a personality that can form after being exposed to chronic invalidation or abuse from childhood. It's usually a highly sensitive person, usually creatives are HSB, which is 20% of the population. But HSBs have, you know, the only way I can describe it is it's almost like we were born with skin that's incredibly sensitive. Imagine having uh third-degree burns and somebody touches you would be agony. But if you had regular skin, a touch would feel okay. Highly sensitive people were born with this really, really sensitive skin. And so our capacity to feel things is very intense. On the pro side, you can feel things, which means you can create, you can express, you have greater levels of empathy where the healers, artists, musicians. Um, but the disadvantage is that if you grew up in an environment as a HSB that was chronically invalidating or abusive, you were very likely to develop chronic um emotion dysregulation as an adult. That means you don't know how to manage your emotions, everything feels overwhelming. You never learned the skills, the tools, the co-regulation that was supposed to be a received trauma caregivers that helps you develop your internal resources. So having grown up in the home that I did, unfortunately, both my parents didn't have those resources. Um, being traumatized refugees themselves, they weren't able to pass it on. And in fact, they passed on a lot more, unfortunately, in a negative way. And that meant that I developed these personality traits. Um, we now know I prefer the the um diagnosis complex PTSD because it's a bit more humanizing than borderline personality. Um, CPTS. CPTSD, yeah. And you know, all it took was that one task, and then I booked my psychiatrist appointment. I got a really good one. I was so lucky because I've heard horror stories of going people going to psychiatrists and the treatment that they receive. But the guy that I got, oh, he was amazing. And he described to me, it's not borderline, it's complex VTSD. You don't need medication because medication's not been shown to be effective for this. You need these specific types of therapy. He sent me to a therapeutic group. Um, uh, and for about 18 months, I was there every Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with seven other traumatized women. And we would sit, we would share, we would learn new skills. Um, and that made the greatest shift in my mental health. Um, going from a childhood where I didn't learn all of these tools and supports to 18 months with these incredible people that were previously strangers that had become my family. But that was like round one of treatment. There were so many more loops around the recovery journey in order to, you know, rise to to I guess where I am now. And I think we don't stop really.

Matt 13:20

Um there's always more to do. There's there's always without making a project out of it. I think with with creatives as well, they worry about losing their creative edge. Yeah. So I I meet so many people that me included in in parts, I think, well, I I need to be a little bit damaged sometimes so that I can create something that's a little bit unique and a little bit edgy, which is a complete misnomer, of course. But we think about the, you know, the big famous artist, there's always been like mental health issues, or there's always been something perceived to be like wrong with them, or it's certainly a rough edge to them. So I always kind of think about that a lot, and people certainly artists who think I don't need to go down that route because if I heal, then maybe I'm gonna lose my artistic edge or or skill, which obviously is is not true. You just may become a slightly different type of artist.

Zahra 14:18

I agree with that.

Matt 14:19

Sorry to cut away from the episode for a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly. Now, I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography. That if you were serious about the work, you did it alone. You'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful. And it sometimes did. But mostly I was just alone with my doubts and no one to push back on them. What changed things for me wasn't a course or a workshop. It was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did. The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and I felt more okay with them. They got named. That's what I'm building with The Mood Insiders. It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions and of course your half-finished ideas, and where someone will actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly masterclasses, Q&A sessions, and of course the weekly book clubs and direct sac direct access to me and my team because you don't have to do this alone. So the link is in the show notes, and hopefully I'll see you inside.

Labels, Therapy And Taking Action

Matt 15:42

Do you feel like there's a um a case for over-diagnosis a lot, certainly self-diagnosis, people finding something that they want to attach a label to, so therefore, they can potentially either victimize themselves for it and bring themselves attention or go and find some kind of healing method that they might think will fix them. I think in today's world, it's very easy to watch a podcast or listen to a podcast or read a book. I've got that. I've got that. I mean, ADHD is a a really good example that it's a it is an actual condition, of course, but I would argue that there's a percentage of ADHD people that aren't actually ADHD or that have self-diagnosed as that because they're just on their screens too much. Do you do you feel that like in your experience as a as a psychologist and the people that you see and just how you move through the world, do you think that's a problem in today's society with overdiagnosis?

Zahra 16:39

It's interesting because I think I don't think it's a problem necessarily. I think underdiagnosis and under um, you know, underutilizing services is the genuine problem. On the other end of the spectrum, yes, there are moments where we are overdiagnosing, um, but I don't think it's as grand a problem as the lack of help and the underdiagnosing that's going on because stigma has always been there for mental health. We are normalizing mental health slowly and gradually. And I think that's what you're experiencing, that it's being spoken about more, that it's more front of mind. People are, um, especially the younger generations, you know, it's now cool to see a therapist. Yeah. Um, you know, we're that's a problem in itself, isn't it? Well, I don't know if it is, because therapy is is is not only for when I am ill, it's also for my ability to work my way through. It's the it's the mentor that stands by my side to walk with me. Um, I can either do it alone or I can have that support. I can have it informally. But if I'm someone who's carried so much throughout my life, having that formal support with me through chunks, maybe only short periods, or you know, for some people it's a little bit longer as well, it's really beneficial. I can get the maximum out of my life. Why wouldn't I? You know, we we have this one short life, and and I think it's okay for us to have that permission to be able to access the resources to get the maximum that we can from it. Um, and I think for especially us high achievers, we what about to be able to, you know, I think some of our biggest fear is mediocrity. This I hear this all the time from creatives, from high achievers. Um, and and so it's like that becomes a really big support in going, how can I be my full potential? Um, but it can also be problematic on the other side. Having said that, I agree with you, things like ADHD exist on a bit of a spectrum. You know, on one end of the spectrum, we have a what we call a disorder. It's it's causing problems, it's impacting my functioning. On the other side, it's more gentle sort of symptoms that everybody experiences. We all misplace our keys, we all, you know, forget appointments. Um, but it's like, where do we draw the line between what is actually a diagnosis um and and what is just human? Yeah. Yeah. And and that's the job of a psychologist, not AI or me self-diagnosing um myself, right? So

Matt 19:13

I think I see um a lot of people pushing back. Certainly, you know, we were talking downstairs, a difference, difference, good differences between male and female, and talk about that a little bit, but also the the the yin and the yang and the the the desire for the universe to always be imbalance. So every action has an equal equal and opposite reaction, right? So if you go far this way, there's gonna be a a counterfair, and we see that in society these days generally, and we're not gonna talk about politics, but I think when you have this good movement, generally good movement, shall we say, of mental health being a little bit more normalized, less stigmatized, the older generations who don't necessarily, you know, the stiff upper lip generations dying away and the younger generation coming and normalizing, which is fantastic. That can also lead to a lot of procrastination. And you you see like a lot of the people on the other side of that fence saying, just just get on and do stuff, right? I was reading, um, can't can't can't remember the art uh the writer's name, but The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Have you have you read that? The subtle art of not giving a fuck uh with Mark Manson. Yeah. And uh he was um talking about uh when he was fat, he used to be really fat. Yeah. And he would read so many books about workouts, about calorie deficits, about the science behind weight loss, weight gain, biology. He read book after book after book, but remained fat. Eat pizza, smoke, drink, it didn't really work out. And when he finally made that decision, it's very similar to mental health, but he made the decision to get a personal trainer, started going to the gym, he would question everything the personal trainer was telling him to do. It's like, yeah, but I read that this re this amount of reps was better for this muscle group and would be this and the personal trainer was like, you just need to go, you just move. You're fat, just move and eat better. Like I think we can get really kind of caught up in the weeds with this type of information, especially when we're doing ourselves and not outsourcing it to professional. My point is I think sometimes a lot of the the people on the other side of this fence might just say, look, just stop wasting your time, just go and do just go and do something rather than procrastinating and doing your therapy and doing your personal development. And I'm not talking from my experience because I do all that or I do enough of it. But I can see the other side of the the view where it's look, we just need people to go out and do stuff and not be fanning around, and this is where the term snowflake comes from. It's like just stop procrastination. Fascinating, we need action. Do you see that in your experience as well? Do you see much of that rhetoric, or is it just me kind of making stuff up?

Zahra 22:08

No, I I'd love to break that down because what you're speaking to is if we could all just do things, then we would. And my job wouldn't exist. My job is to break down the anatomy of doing. Okay, what why is it that I know I I should stop drinking, but I can't. I know it. It's in my value system, but I'm not doing it. I know I need to lose X amount of weight for my health because my heart is now impacted, but but I'm not doing it. So it's it's about understanding what is it underneath that is impacting our capacity to take committed action towards our values. Because we can look at someone and label them snowflake or lazy or victim, that none of those actually leads to change within our society and the people that we care about. So what we do, and it amplifies stigma because then people start to have this feeling of shame. So if I, if it was that easy to just do things, then why can't I do it? Then therefore there's something wrong with me. And this this becomes a shame-based identity of I'm bad. There's and so inherently there's something wrong with me. If it was that easy to go from A to B, and there's something that's that's not working. That is where I come into the picture, or people like myself, and we break down the anatomy of how to get from A to B. What is holding you back internally that is stopping you from being able to do that. And a lot of the time, you know, what brings people to us is I can't stop arguing with my partner, I can't lose weight, I um, you know, I'm unemployed, um, whatever it might, I can't stop drinking. That brings them through the door. And then my job is to help them see that that's what's on the surface. Let's dig a little bit deeper because something is at the core of this that's holding you back. When you know what that is, you can do something with it that gives you agency. And the previously lazy person becomes someone who has a capacity. So I think we have to see it for the complex. Um, it looks simple on the outside, but it's actually incredibly complex to support people to make change. Laziness is a really good thing I want to double-click on because I always shame myself for being lazy for certain things. And like the old me and people, I guess in our generation and older, who say, just do it, just quit. Like what you know, just do it. And then so you think, well, why can't I do it? I'm just be it is la you're just being lazy because you can't put enough effort and willpower into quitting something or the opposite of do or doing something. How much of that in your experience comes back to nature versus nurture and upbringing and childhood, you know, parenting and childhood experiences or trauma in in extreme cases? So much of it. So much of it. Again, what we see on the surface is never really the reality of what's happening underneath. And when somebody comes to us for help around these things that, you know, I'm I'm just I'm not taking action. I'm not living the life that I want to live. I'm engaging in really toxic behaviors. We begin with an assessment, a really honest conversation about what, you know, what what is your life now? What has it been like in the past? What is your environment like? Who were the most influential people for you as a child? What were they like towards you? Did you feel safe, loved, connected? Did you have opportunities for play, spontaneity, autonomy? Did you have limits that are healthy? All of these things are what we call basic human needs. They don't stop. You have them from when you're born, you have them till the day you die. And if those needs in childhood are not met consistently, predictably, reliably in childhood, what we end up forming is a set of unhelpful belief systems about myself. So if I my need for love and safety was not met consistently, I might develop a belief that people will abandon me. If my um need for validation and being seen is not met, then I might believe, I might develop a belief system that I'm defective. There's something wrong with me. Why the people that should love me the most are the ones criticizing, hurting, and not loving me. Therefore, there's something wrong with me. So defectiveness can form. These are just some examples.

Validation Seeking And The Shame Loop

Zahra 26:37

Can we jump on the validation and being seen? Because this is so prevalent in today's world. We were just talking about your recent trip to Miami and how you know a lot of people there, and that's just a microcosm, but um, you know, going back to my world and the audience that I've got some questions from the audience that we're gonna like, I'm gonna kind of interweave into the conversation. But one of the most popular ones is like, how do I get away from creating to be seen? You know, and I teach this all the time because that used to be me. It's like, you know, I want to take a photo so that I can get validation for it. Either a pat on the back going, Matt, that's amazing, well done. Or the digitized version of the likes and the follows and the that that traction, right? Certainly in photography and visual arts, that's such a common thing. And so people start asking themselves, once once we get to that point where they realize that they're creating for the algorithm or they're creating for validation, and vice versa, if they don't get that validation, they can spiral or they give up, right? So I how do we how do we break through that? And why, what is the most common cause of wanting that validation and material success, should we say, in whatever we do, it doesn't have to be photography, but it's we see it everywhere, right? We're all human in in that respect. We want to be loved, we want to be understood, we want to be hugged, and in a in a healthy way, that's good, but in an unhealthy way, that can really lead to hatred, depression, anxiety. What do you what do you see as the most common cause for that? And if you were to like, if I was to really distill it down into like a little, you know, nugget of knowledge that you might be able to offer someone who knows that that's a problem for them, what would you say? Yeah, I think you've summarized it really well. Firstly, you're human. Your need for validation is always going to be there. But like all things, it's a spectrum. There's a healthy branch of the spectrum where validation seeking is um supportive and it's it's helping your function. And there's the other end of the spectrum where it's now defining you. You're you're choosing to see whether I receive validation or not as a definition of who you are as a person. And that's where it becomes really problematic. It's a really good segue to what we were talking about because if I already believed myself to be defective, then seeking validation becomes a remedy to that. So my belief system is defectiveness. I learned really quickly that if I get validation, I get a temporary high and a relief. So if you feel that you are finding yourself addicted to validation and seeking that from others, whether through your work or social media, whatever it might be, I want you to pause and ask yourself what's underneath that. What is driving that? There's a hunger there. And when you define what that hunger is, then you can feed it internally and effectively, either through your own self-validation or through being able to resource yourself or request it from others in a really healthy way through relationships that matter to you, as opposed to strangers on the internet. But every time we look at certain behaviors that are causing us some trouble, all we have to do is dig a little bit deeper to find a core belief, you know, a downward arrow of questioning that allows you to come to terms with there's something deeper within me that maybe has been here for decades, maybe my whole life, because some of our beliefs are pre-verbal. Before we could even form words, I've figured out that, you know, the people that love me will leave me, you know, and so on. So really dig a little bit. Yeah, so abandonment especially, um, and other attachment type issues, they they tend to be developed even before words, which is really interesting. So when you try to do therapy with someone who's got pre-verbal beliefs, they have no words. So they're like, I I don't I don't know. I just know in my core that I'm unlovable or that people are gonna leave me. And it's not always on, but it turns on when they're in a relationship and they start dating. How does that manifest? So let's say, for example, you know, day-to-day, because you know, you have a a self that goes on with normal life. You know, you you can function, you can do whatever you need to do, and then you get into a relationship, which is now your biggest trigger because your your trauma is relational from childhood, and therefore the trigger turns on certain belief systems and activates them. And the belief system might might be, you know, I'm unlovable, this person's gonna leave me. Yeah. Because that's happened to me in the past. Yeah. It's important for me to continue to believe that because my system wants me to stay safe. So if I preempt you leaving me, I can protect myself. And so the belief system is persevering for that, for that reason, for survival. However, we have to teach the adult that the childhood experience is over. That was then, this is now. And the adult self is much more resourced and can be even more resourced if we choose to make it so. So helping people in therapy becomes about supporting them and emotionally growing within the therapeutic process, healing the inner child wound of abandonment or defectiveness or whatever the belief might be, and being being able to come back to the adult true self more readily. Because the true self, the version of you that is the truest version of you, is the one that is the wisest, the most compassionate, the one that is the most creative. It can drive the car, right? Or the bus, as I like to say, with all the passengers. Yeah. So um, I don't know if that answers the question, but yeah.

The 'Bus Model' For Inner Parts

Matt 32:18

Jump into the bus analogy for us.

Zahra 32:20

Yeah. I love the bus analogy because it it helps people see that they're not just one person. You are multiple parts. And if you imagine the bus, you've got all these passengers. The true self is is the truest version of ourselves, the one that we want. And these annoying, pesky passengers, one might be the addict. So every time you go out with friends, suddenly your desire to use drugs or alcohol increases because the addict sugar, um, sex, porn, you name it, you know, and the addict grabs the steering wheel, pushes the true self off, and starts riding the bus. This is why the next day you sit in regret and going, why do I do that? Like I don't want to do that. But that's not, but yeah, the true self doesn't want to do that. But your addict part certainly does. And the addict part is has formed through decades because it's it's shown you how to find relief in soothing yourself with different types of substances. And maybe as a child you went through so much pain or discomfort or needs gone unmet that you learned that sitting in front of the TV for hours, eating sugar was helpful and you get moments of relief. Just describe me. Every night TV pudding. Yeah. Exactly. And it's isn't it resourceful that a child figured it out and you did it unconsciously? You didn't go, I'm gonna now watch TV because that feels yeah. It just happens. But how do you so how do you turn it because Fee and I'm um for those watching my wife, Fee and I talk about this all the time. She's always uh trying to give me space to love myself more and not just but it's you know, as soon as you catch yourself because you do catch yourself like want either wanting it, whatever your thing is, right? Doing that thing and it becoming a habit and maybe an addiction. How do you not criticize yourself in that moment? Because that will only make things worse, right? It's gotta somehow come back to self-love, but then you think, well, how do just it comes back to me being that rational person and probably a lot of people are there, just just stop it, just you know, having that conversation with yourself, just stop being lazy and just don't do it. Yeah, how do how do we turn that around from first of all, awareness is so important, and let's skip past that for the moment, but just like spotting yourself being having that issue or whatever we want to label it as this thing, this passenger on the bus that has that is the addiction side of us, whatever it might be. How do we go from awareness to self-love? Yeah. And you know, um maybe I I want to say this to you and the audience is let's not aim for self-love if I'm here at self-loathing or criticism. Okay. Let's aim for self-neutrality. Okay. Because even that and going, oh, here I go, I'm terrible at this too. There's another thing that I can't do. You know, it seems to be so accessible for everyone else. But what if the next step was neutrality and so on? So one of the pa one of the most insidious and difficult uh parts in the uh bus is the inner critic. And the inner critic is generally the part that I have to work with first with my clients. Because if I don't, they will criticize the therapeutic process, they will criticize the between session activities they do, they will narrate the the client's life, and they will stop them from making progress. So, first order of business is to the meet what uh some of the passengers of the bus. And that passenger might be first the inner critic, and we have a conversation with that passenger.

Matt 35:54

They're on the back seat, they're the back seat crew, the inner critics. Yeah, they think they're cool, thinks he's cool. Yeah, fuck it. He's one of those guys. Shouting from the back.

Zahra 36:02

Yeah. And then he sometimes comes to the front and grabs the steering wheel, which is why you end up in criticism because he's like, let me drive, and pushes the true self. So you and most of the time when we meet clients, they're there all the time. The inner critic has been driving the bus the whole time. They get moments of breaks where the true self emerges, but the true self is in the boot. And it's like, no, we need to we need to create some level of integration between our parts within the bus. That's the work in therapy. It's about getting to know your parts, understanding how to work with them, negotiate with them, meet their needs, because each part also has a need. At one point it helped you. Even the inner critics supported you because you learned that through criticizing yourself, you could do a little bit better. You could do a little bit better because that slap on the wrist made you perform. But now decades of that has burnt you out. It's impacted your sense of self-worth, and it's no longer working. Yeah. So we have to acknowledge the history of every part. And in doing so, we build compassion for each one of our parts, even the ones that are trying to hurt us, even the ones, the parts that are suicidal, that are actively trying to kill us, are not actually bad. None of our parts are bad. That part is trying to actually give you relief because in death, it feels that's the ultimate relief. So what we want to do is be able to negotiate and understand these parts and have the true self drive because the true self knows how to get relief. It knows how to build a life worth living without having to rely on these old coping mechanisms that were once helpful but no longer um supportive.

Matt 37:38

How do we know? I guess there's a two-part question, but how do we know what the tr what the true self is? And how do we, without putting you out of a job, but how do we prevent ourselves from getting to the point where we go, fuck, I need to see someone, right? So what are the how can we kind of fit not figure this out ourselves because I think we all need help from other people, whether that's just in natural relationships or you know, professionally? How what kind of little bits of um you know practices that we that you would recommend without kind of going into the biohacking world, but certainly personal development world? How do we know what the true self is and how do we kind of realize that and be able to kind of prevent do some preventative maintenance before we get to the point of coming to see someone like you?

Zahra 38:25

It's it's a bit of a process because let's say different people have different experiences. If I've got CPTSD, my true self is is almost unknown to me. I've never really got to meet that part of me. It's in the boot. If I've had a fairly stable childhood and upbringing and environment, maybe I don't have too many parts that are driving the bus and the true self is a bit more in control. My rule of thumb is the truest version of you is compassionate, it's kind, it's patient, it is wise, um, it knows how to, it knows, it understands uncertainty, it's effective, it use, it uses skills. You would say this for everyone. Yeah. So the the it the self is is that part of you that can function incredibly well in society. It is the true trueness of of humans. Um but as we've gone through life, our identity has fragmented into different parts because of different experiences that we've had. So we've had to do these things where we create parts to support us. I grew up in a childhood that was unstable. I needed to develop a part that was really angry, yeah, so that I can push people away because you can't hurt me. If you get, if you get disclosed, I could get into pain. Because gosh, my parents were the ones that hurt me. So I'm not going to trust a stranger. So the angry part formed to protect me. The attic part formed to soothe me. The dissociative part formed so that I would just disconnect from all of this internal pain. So I just shut it off and I can just sit there like a zombie. And and so on. So the more integrated you are, the more stable your childhood and upbringing was, the less these things have happened, the more tumultuous your past, the more parts we have to work with, and the more fragmented your sense of self is. So you you have to work with what baseline you've got. And I think the it's important that you do it with a therapist or a or a support person because I use the analogy of the octopus. You're too close to your own stuff. You've got an octopus, yeah, you can see some things, but you can't see at all. Yeah. Yeah, put your hand on your face, you can't see much. Yes. And so it's like, yeah, sure, you can try to, but you're you're limiting yourself. And so being able to have somebody go, okay, let's have a look at it together. That is important. Um, and then the maintenance can happen from there because you learn, you you get the supports that you need through that.

Matt 40:56

Now there comes a point in every photographer's journey where gear or technique stops being the question. You've learned your camera, you can read light, you know how to edit, how to produce, what a good frame looks like, and you can probably make one on demand quite easily. But something is still missing. The work feels good, competent, maybe even pretty, but it doesn't quite feel completely yours. It doesn't really say anything that couldn't have been said by someone else on Instagram with the same camera. That's the moment most people get stuck. Not at the beginning, but right here, right there, somewhere in the middle of it, in the midst of it, where you have all the tools but not really any of the language. And the reason it's so hard to move past is because nobody can teach you your voice in a tutorial or a silly little YouTube video. Because it's not a setting on the dial. It has to be drawn out of you slowly by methods and introspections that actually allow you to look at yourself and your work and challenge you with the harder questions, all in order to draw out your unique and photographic voice. That's what My Voice Alchemy Mentorship Program is. It's an online container for photographers who really already know how to use their camera, but want to use it to say something that's more meaningful and that actually matters to them. Personalized strategy, honest feedback, and the kind of work that builds a body, a voice, and a brand that actually gets noticed. It's not a course, it's just the thing I always wished I'd had. And it's the thing I now spend most of my days doing. The link is in the show notes. So if something in this is calling you, hit the link and we'll see where you're at. Before we move on. Just give me um give me an insight into your the not your issues, but the the struggles that you once you kind of made that step and you started the journey on your healing process and you mentioned your addictions and can you give us a a bit more of an insight into your own battles with certain parts of the passengers on the bus?

Zahra’s Healing Path And Therapist Empathy

Zahra 43:10

Yeah, absolutely. I think um it's important that clinicians speak about this, that that to some degree we humanize ourselves, not within the client-clinician relationship, because I want to be a blank canvas for my clients. I don't want them to necessarily carry my stuff. Um, but healthy disclosure in conversations like this, I think, is really powerful. Um, for me, the the journey began with complete emotional dysregulation. I didn't know what I was feeling at one point. I was exploding or imploding. Because the emotions were so chaotic for me in my early 20s, I found myself then resorting to things like self harm, or I would fantasize about suicide for days on end, not not because I genuinely wanted to die, but because it would actually give me a sense. Of relief that there was a way out if I really wanted it. And so when I would be feeling distressed, sometimes I would be on my phone and just kind of reading and reading and researching. And I know this sounds really dark, but it was a fantasy that was relieving for me. And that was how I was caring for myself. If it wasn't that, it was self-harm in various ways because I could focus on the physical pain as opposed to the emotional pain. It would give me a break from what was happening and brewing inside. And for some people, it makes no sense when they go, why would people do that? But you had to imagine the gravity and the intensity of the pain that would make you go, I would rather cut myself. I would rather burn myself. I would rather hit myself. That's very intense. And that was the first round of treatment to actually be able to come through that. And I know not many people, not many, but not a lot of people will be at that extreme. But this is also important to mention because some people are suffering in silence and they need to hear that this is part of the journey. And then came the next layer of I can't hold down a relationship because I'd have no skills for communication. And I also felt that my partner needed to be my parent, my therapist, my brother, my father, my everything. And to put that pressure on that person was incredibly cruel. But because I was developmentally still at about five or six years old, even though I was at a 25-year-old's body, it was really difficult for me to navigate that. So when love came along, I reverted to my child self and I wanted daddy to love me. I wanted mommy to comfort me. And so the next stage of therapy was about meeting those parts of myself and helping them grow. The therapist relationally supported that growth because they emotionally care for you, they co-regulate with you, they support you. You end up building this incredible, safe relationship with another person that maybe you've never had before. And that goes on into the next stage of therapy, which is now more refined. I want to be able to focus. I want to be able to follow my dreams. I want to know what my values are, what is, I want to self-actualize. And when you look at the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, in the base, you've got safety. Yeah. And you shelter in the essentials. And then you can do, you know, things like social and and and relationships. And then after that, you can do self-actualization and being able to understand where do I fit into the world? What is the meaning that I want to create? What's my purpose? But you have to sort of follow it in that order as well. You can't be looking for purpose when you've got complete crisis and being able to know your path through recovery by prioritizing those things first.

Matt 46:53

Now, when it comes to photography, the whole infrastructure of the internet rewards speed. Post more, post faster, be first, be everywhere. The algorithm doesn't care whether you went deep. It cares whether you showed up yesterday. And I guess that's not photography specific. Now, for me, I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand something fully than go fast and understand probably nothing. That depth is not a liability, that the work you make when you take your time is categorically different from the work you make when you're chasing the feed, maybe, or chasing the algorithm. Now, the Mood Insiders is built on that same bet. It's a private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work. We have monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking. We have a weekly book club, monthly QA's. We have the podcast, of course, but ad-free with bonus content. And we have direct access to me and my team. It's not another newsletter you'll forget about, not a Discord server full of noise. It's a room with a small number of serious people and a very clear and supportive focus. It's just $19 a month. The link is in the show notes, and I really hope I can see you inside. You find it's made you a better psychologist having been through a lot of, you know, the really difficult times that you have been. Is it, you know, seeing kind of both sides of the experience has made you better at your job?

Zahra 48:24

100%. Yeah. Oh my gosh, I'm I'm so grateful for it. I remember being in clinics where people be like, oh my God, I've got this client which is borderline. I don't like working with borderline. Nobody knew I had complex BTSD with borderline traits at the time. Yeah, they'd be like, oh, like it's the tough client. It's the one that worries me. I was like, send them my way. Like this is the dream client for me because I get them to a certain level that maybe others don't. And I appreciate that they're not being difficult, that this is the hell that's within themselves is torturous. So what I, what you experience as a clinician as a result of your interaction with them is a fraction of what they're feeling inside of themselves. So it made me have capacity for dealing with all sorts of presentations and not shying away from clients that were challenging. Those, because when you're in therapy, there's a push and pull dynamic with your clients. Some clients will challenge you, will want more from you, will break your boundaries. Well, but this is relationally, that's important because they're testing the relationship. And if they haven't had a relational safety in the past and you can be that rock in that moment and show them healthy boundaries, show them validation, unconditional positive regard. It's incredibly healing.

Matt 49:42

Yeah, and empathy is probably the most powerful is it an emotion, I guess, or a connect connective tissue, I guess, in in the world. When someone kind of leads to understanding, when someone really understands you and has empathy for your situation, there's you know, it's just a hug, isn't it? It's just saying like I see you, I hear you, I'm here for you. So I think like having having someone who can relate to that through personal experience, it must be you know so beneficial for your clients.

Social Media Boundaries And Sharing Work

Zahra 50:13

It really is.

Matt 50:15

How um how impactful is or how effective should I say on our mental health is social media? We talked about um, you know, creating for validation and and success and trying to discern the difference between actually knowing what what you're creating for. Certainly in in my world, people creating whatever they're creating, they won't like I I need to think about whether I'm doing this for the right reasons. And that's a whole kind of inner conversation with yourself and that's a process to really understand. I talk about a lot about creating or what you create is just an expression of what you're feeling and who you are at that time, but you can't really create meaningful work without truly knowing yourself. And when we think about social media and all those projections, you know, social media is just one big project projection of what people want to put out there. Again, I'm asking to generalize quite a lot, but in terms of mental health, what can we how can we best practice this thing that is social media that's gonna be around forever? Um, throw in AI, different conversation, but how can we healthily use social media to our advantage without causing us anxiety, distraction, depression, et cetera?

Zahra 51:36

It's such a difficult topic, isn't it? Because social media by design is addictive. It's designed. I don't know if you saw the recent case that was one against um Meta and YouTube. Yeah, which uh which was uh, you know, incredible because it was a moment where we were able to say that this child, who's now an adult, has been, you know, incredibly impacted by what happened to them. And it was a moment where we could see that this has been developed purely for um financial reasons and profit. It was never designed with the person in mind. Um, and it was by nature designed to be addictive, the whole algorithm process. So it's almost like you're you're asking, well, how can we use heroin responsibly? You know, sometimes I think about it.

Matt 52:25

No, no, I want to push back on that because I although I I agree with you and I I get a lot of stick for um certainly in the photography world in terms I don't get a lot of stick, but people aim a lot of criticism of social media towards me when when we talk and we meet up. And I kind of find myself defending it a little bit, even though I I just I agree with everything, you know, the facts. The fact I hate it for that reason, but business owner, business owner, fing need it. Yeah, like you you it has to be an essential part of your marketing model. It and if it isn't, then good luck. So we it's kind of like this necessary evil. So we have to figure out a way to use it responsibly and with ethics and without getting pulled into that, without that that social media passenger on the bus, but or that addiction passenger on the bus pulling us into so correct. I I I agree with everything you're saying, but we still need to find a way to use that heroin responsibly, whatever that might look like.

Zahra 53:23

Maybe we'll say alcohol, heroin might mean too extended. And I and I do agree with you, but I think it's important to zoom out and see the system and then zoom in and then put the responsibility on the person. I agree with that. You're someone who's who's very much like the individual has got to step up. And I and I believe that, that we have to have a sense of responsibility and accountability over our own lives. And I also believe in in looking at the bigger picture of what, and this is where the compassion can come from, where we can quieten the inner critic by going, this is a really difficult thing that I'm trying to embark on. And I'm human and I'm gonna mess up. And um, this is uh by nature a messy process that I'll figure out as I go. Um, however, as you said, it's it's something that we can navigate cautiously. It's it's about, again, like any other addiction, it's about minimizing how much it occupies our day. Um, it's about having really clear intentional goals about accessing social media. If you don't have intentionality within that process, if you don't have a set of goals that you want to achieve within this system, it can be troublesome because it will use you, you won't be using it. Um, because it's it's making money off you too. This is a system that's definitely profiting off your attention. You're trying to profit as a business owner, but you have to then come with a great level of self um boundary and limit um and intentionality. And even then that will be really hard to do.

Matt 54:56

Yeah, um very hard. I don't think any of us have cracked it, but I think um I I find myself sometimes I'm not a doom scroller at all. I you like I've always very been been very fortunate to have a distance from social media in that I will go on to post a specific set of images or a reel or something to get a specific outcome, right? Whether to sell something or to get people into you know, business-wise. And I can just go on post, come off. Sometimes when I'm feeling low, I will watch funny videos and I'll go funny video, funny video. Even though deep down I know that's escapism, but it's I feel like it's making me feel better. Is that uh a false, you know, reality or is that

Zahra 55:42

no, no, not at all. You're you're right in that going, you're not thinking black and white. We need to move away from black and white. Is it good or is it bad? It's always a spectrum. Yeah, but give me the answers, alright. And so if the it's a spectrum, like if I engage in it within that lower end of the spectrum and it's not in fact impacting my function, it's not coming in the way of my relationships, my work, my life, my sense of self, then that's okay. But if it's on this end and now it's impacting my, you know, my you know, self-image, uh, I'm developing body dysmorphia or I'm eating less. Um, it's controlling how I dress, how I move in the world, how I see, you know, all of those things, it's impacting function. Where I always say that the rule of thumb here is look at your functioning. How is that behavior impacting your ability to be you, to function within the world that you're in, to engage in value-based action, to be in line with your purpose and and and life mission. If scrolling for 15 minutes to make yourself giggle and distract yourself from a little bit of pain is is is this just that temporary moment, it's not destructive. I I don't want to be feeling 24-7. You know, we're getting into society where it's like feel your feelings. Yeah. But it's like exhausting. It's okay to have distract part of you know therapy is also learning some tools to sit with feelings. Some of them are about distracting from them when we need to distract, just temporarily. But we have to then be very artful with knowing is it just temporary distraction or is it complete avoidance? And that's where you need to ask yourself the genuine question am I avoiding or am I intentionally engaging in this for some distress tolerance?

Matt 57:23

This is perfect because um, you know, making it applicable to photography specifically. I have so many um community members and clients that just have a real issue with putting their work out there into the public. Social media, yeah, that's kind of like the main thing people think about. Oh, I don't know whether to post. But even in our closed private community that no one else sees unless they pay to get in, they st a lot of people still find it difficult to go and put so just what maybe just one image or a few images, say, like, this is my photography. People find it really kind of daunting and difficult thing to do because it's a little bit of vulnerability. I come from the um because I know how that feels. Uh I don't have a problem with it now, but I used to, and I was, you know, learning photography a little bit more because you don't feel like you're complete in your art. And this can be representative as you as a human, of course, as well, and we can go deeper metaphorically, but just with sharing one image, I remember how that feels, but I'm not a therapist and I'm I'm there to hopefully help people, but I my gut instinct is always to tell people just fucking post it. Like what um I always go to the the other end of the spectrum and say, What's the worst thing that can happen if you post it? Usually the answer is I don't get any feedback or any likes or any comments or any attention, right? So again, it's like this this inner need of just wanting to be seen, and we use the camera to try and be seen, basically. So when you talked about facing that, you know, knowing when to confront it, confront your feelings, confront the what's going on there, and another time to basically use tools to break away from it and maybe distract yourself temporarily from it.

Zahra 59:12

Yes.

Matt 59:13

How do we if people have this problem with putting themselves out there with with images, what would again, I'm jet I I'm asking you to generalize, I understand that, but it's gonna be different from person to person. But how can how can we help them be more comfortable with that vulnerability of sharing their work?

Zahra 59:33

This is such a great question because when we look at that behavior of I don't want to put my work out there, we're going into at a deeper level of, is there a feeling of shame? Because shame at a lower level is like embarrassment or fear of judge. There's a fear of judgment, but there's also a shame around that. If I put this out, does the tribe ostracize me or alienate me for my work? It goes down to your biological drive. Evolutionarily, we're designed to be tribal. So I'm gonna do everything that I can for social acceptance. And so if I'm creating this thing that is a representation of me, because people go, this is birthed out of me, this is me, you know, in art form. What if I put it out there, it gets rejected, therefore I'm rejected, therefore I'm bad, therefore I don't belong, and deeper and deeper and deeper. So what you're experiencing is on the surface, they don't want to put their work out there at a deeper level. There are patterns playing out so strongly. So, how do we manage that? We work with helping the person see that there's an emotional reaction internally and a belief system that's fueling it. And being able to then break down that belief system that's, you know, superimposing itself on this experience. Maybe at some point I believe that I'm defective or there's something wrong with me, or I don't belong. But in this moment right here, it's stopping me from engaging in what I need to engage in, which is being uh, you know, the best version of myself. So we we go into that belief and we figure out when did you begin believing that about yourself? We go to those memories and work with them. And then what you end up seeing is that the person's beliefs start to loosen and therefore the emotions around it start to loosen, and therefore they don't feel as much distress about doing the thing that they want to do now and they can do it more readily. We'll also do, you know, in psychology we call it graded exposure. So if a client is feeling shameful about or embarrassed or whatever it might be about sharing their work and might go, okay, what's step one? If that's step 10, if you posting online your work is step 10, then what's step one? Okay, step one, maybe I can just briefly show it to a friend. Step two might be I might show it to my coach who then shows it to other people feedback. Step three might be that I find a really small community and then I show it to them or talk about it. And it's like this graded hierarchy, and you rise through that until you build capacity and tolerance. You're expanding your own tolerance. But when we tell our client to go to step 10, you know, it's a huge jump. So, how can I create a graded exposure for them and get them to step 10? Because that's more effective. And this is something that we see with like phobias. I'm scared of spiders. I'm not just gonna throw a spider at the client. I'm gonna be like, well, here's a picture. Tolerate. It's too flooding for our system. Our nervous system gets flooded, we get overwhelmed, it might reinforce old beliefs. It actually cements people in avoidance and inaction instead of getting them more comfortable in taking steps forward. So then I might go to the client, here's a little picture of a spider, a video of a spider, a little toy spider, we're moving. And it's the same thing because you know, showing my art is just a version of a spider, right? If you fear of spider or whatever it might be. So that could be a really good trick to try.

Limiting Beliefs And Healthier Ambition

Zahra 1:03:11

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Matt 1:03:11

So I think the other thing I see that uh people struggle with, certainly when sharing your work or putting themselves out there, shall we say, is limiting beliefs. And so many people, I think all of us on this planet, we struggle with certain limiting beliefs. And um we could spend a lifetime trying to battle through them, right? Um, and beliefs form all of our perspectives, you know, they're really kind of the underlying thing that forms everything that we perceive to be true or not true, or things that we, you know, act upon in the world when we think about finding purpose and meaning and what we think is right and wrong. When it comes to art and creative outputs, so many people struggle with I'm not good enough, um, I don't think I can do this, what will people think? And they tell the themselves these stories. I'm interested in in um your your own belief system around the power of thoughts and the power of like identifying those with those thoughts. I mean, no, you meditate, I meditate a lot, and I think without getting too Buddhist on us and really diving into how we can be so tethered with our thoughts that aren't actually real, they're just another appearance in consciousness. How do you go about kind of deciphering how to deal with limiting beliefs? Certainly as artists and and creatives who want to kind of break through that so that they can excel. And especially as business people as well, where we feel a lot that we can't do something or we hit a challenge, so yeah, I knew it, I knew that was gonna happen because you know I'm not gonna know. Again, very general stuff I'm asking you to talk about, but give us some tips on how we can disidentify with thoughts in that respect and what kind of practices we can do, and how we can potentially understand what our limiting beliefs are and how we can act upon kind of breaking those down. Yeah. Go. Your big questions.

Zahra 1:05:13

Your beliefs, you know, you have so many different beliefs, right? You've got the positive ones, neutral ones, the ones that get you going every day, the uh the ones that hold you back. By being able to understand what are the set of beliefs that guide my life, you're able to see how they influence the more surface thoughts that you have. So thoughts are what you're experiencing every day, and they're quite automatic. The belief systems are um, you know, at the core of that. They're they're at a layer below that. And if they're not addressed, they're the ones influencing your thoughts. If I have limiting beliefs and I have um a set of schemas, which is a pattern of thinking, feeling, behaving that's that's holding me back, the nature of my thoughts is going to be more negative. Um, so what we We want to be able to do, especially in a therapeutic relationship or a coaching relationship, is go, what is the belief? Because that's the weed in the garden. You know, I can mow the lawn and it looks okay for a temporary time, but the weeds are there. They're just going to keep growing back. Or I can go in there and grab them from the roots and pull them out. And that's the nature of limiting beliefs. We have to go in to the actual depth of that belief and pull it out. So actually, I'd love an example from your audience. What is a common limiting belief that some of your audience experience, especially from a creative perspective? Was it I'm not good enough? Yeah, it's just I'm not I'm not a good enough photographer to be in the same room as these people or to be putting my work out there and getting feedback. Let's say you say that to me, for example. And I'll and I'll my initial question is when did you start believing that? When what's the earliest memory that you have of believing that you're not good enough? Since I started learning photography ten years ago. Yeah. And I would even say, when did you start believing that before photography? Um I mean, I didn't in some aspects of my life, but I did in others, I guess. I'd certainly labeled myself good at some things and bad at other things. Yes. Yeah. And so you and I would create a map. We go back, and then some people tell me something that happened the other day, and then I go go further, go further, go further. And we sometimes even create a map of experiences and memories where that belief was actually cemented. And if we can go to a touchstone memory, like an initial experience where I remember this experience with my father, and I brought my report card and he yelled at me. And that was a moment where I was like, I'm just not good at this. Um then and so I started to overcompensate because I believed I'm not good enough. So I was working extra hard and I developed unrelenting standards to cope with the limiting belief that I'm not good enough. And then I wore that I'm not good enough lens over my eyes because it's a belief that was cementing. And so everything that I saw in my environment, I was filtering in a distorted way information that only confirmed what I already believe. So limiting beliefs form at a very young age, more often than not, sometimes, you know, in adolescence and adulthood, but majority of them, especially that I'm not good enough, um, I'm, you know, shameful, I'm bad, I'm all of those things tend to be quite young and they're very vulnerable. And as time went on, they just kept getting cemented and cemented. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if I'm filtering what's happening to me through that lens of I'm not good enough, I'm only picking up on all the negatives. I'm not seeing when people compliment me. I'm not hearing it when someone says, that's pretty amazing. I'm like, We hear it, but don't believe it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, but yeah. Yeah. And so because the lens is so strong that it doesn't allow you to see it. It makes you dismiss the positives and disqualify your your positive qualities and your strengths, and makes you hone in on the negative, because that then you can do something with it, then you can improve, then you can optimize, then you can buy your hack or you know, hack your way through that. So perfectionists are like that. Exactly. This is why we form n negative beliefs, because uh exactly perfectionism then comes as a remedy to support you with that belief of I'm not good enough. Because if you're not good enough, the perfectionistic part stands up on the bus and says, Well, hey, I can help. If we're super perfect, then maybe we can get some immediate relief from I'm not good enough. And if I get this award, this accolade, I can get the temporary high. But it's never sustainable because the weed is still in the garden. I still believe I'm not good enough. Is that the main reason we're all so status driven? Well, I say we, we collective we were so status-driven and materials and money correlated to the definition of success, rather than just maybe an small element of it. Majority of high achievers have a deep belief that they're not good enough. This is why they're striving so intensely, sometimes to the cost of their own bodies and their health, to achieve.

Matt 1:10:13

But isn't that fuel of the capitalist world that we live in? Isn't that like a good thing? Because we want people to be progressing and getting better. Yeah. We do. And the other side, oh, well, you don't just want to settle and go, oh no, you're great. It's okay.

Zahra 1:10:27

Yes. And that's the high achievers trap. The high achievers you just described it beautifully, because they believe that if I actually um sit in my true self instead of the intense, unrelenting standards part of me and the perfectionistic part, then I'll live a mediocre, boring life and I don't achieve anything. Not realizing that actually, no, I'll achieve, but I'll be using a different fuel, a fuel that is healthier for me as opposed to one that's being driven by I'm not good enough. So the high achiever, when I first meet them, they've been working their asses off because they're trying to escape I'm not good enough. And so they're they're compensating overcompensating through perfection, through output, through results and outcomes. Whereas when we get them to the true self who's driving the buffs, they start to do it from a healthy ambition. They start to do it because it's from purpose. They do it because they love the work, um, as opposed to wanting to feel less of what they already feel, which is the not good enough feeling, the the belief.

Matt 1:11:30

A short note before we close. For a while now, the first thing I've done most mornings before the camera or any other work or before the coffee, before the endless tabs, is sit 10, 20, 30 minutes just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does. It hasn't just made me calmer in the way people imagine, it's made me more honest, more mindful, more compassionate, and more free in more ways than I could even describe. And that honesty and introspective clarity, more than any lens, workshop, or book, is really what changed my photography. The work I make now comes from a quieter place with more clearness and calmness. I notice what I'm reaching for, and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing. The inner critic still talks, still exists. I just don't believe everything he says anymore. The app I've used for most of this is Waking Up by Sam Harris. It's the one tool I've genuinely kept returning to all this time. This is not a paid sponsorship from them. However, I am an affiliate partner, and for good reason, I believe that this app is worth it more than any other. What's kept me there for years is that it's not just one thing, is a guided daily meditation, which is the spine of it for me, but there are also short daily reflections, a daily quote that tends to do its own quiet work in the background, and these little moments, they call it, of awareness you can drop into during the day. Two-minute resets when the head starts running. There's also an entire library of guest series with teachers I'd never have found on my own, and a lot more besides that. It keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine. So a link sits in the show notes for a free 30-day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions. If you want the longer story, though, of how meditation reshaped my work, there's also a piece linked through my Substack page called There's No Self-Development Without Self-Awareness. Anyway, hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening. What are the cues or heuristics that you can maybe offer people that can start to break down limiting beliefs and start to kind of think in a healthy, purposeful mindset rather than a I'm not good enough and you kind of get into that, the weeds as you put it?

Zahra 1:14:02

You should never have to do it alone because it's really difficult. And if you can get a coach or a therapist, amazing. If you can't, I would say sit with yourself and really think about when did I begin believing this? What are the experiences in my life that shape that? And a therapist actually helps you resolve those experiences. That we go back into the memory, we might re-script it using EMDR, which is a specific treatment that helps us process. It's incredible, yeah. Or I might use imagery rescripting where we visualize the memory and we rewrite it. We actually re-script it. And there's all these different techniques that we use where we resolve situations that are in the past. You know, we can't actually go into the past and change it, but we can change the way it's stored within our brain. And when we resolve them, we end up with more positive or neutral beliefs as opposed to the negative, which means that my limiting belief is less strong. It's less, it's it's it's less, it's got less control over me. And therefore, my tendency, my ability to stay in my true self is stronger. And therefore, I can access better fuel for my ambition, better fuel for my output. So you always have a choice. Yes, you can operate from the belief system that you're not good enough and therefore you need to overcompensate, or the fact that you are whole and you love to create and you love. Yeah.

Matt 1:15:24

It's wonderful you talk about this, because, You can probably sense some of my questions a little bit cynical, but I get a little bit cynical with always pulling everything back to childhood trauma. Now, I would argue that the majority of people in this world have had traumatic events in their childhood because parents aren't perfect and life isn't perfect and we're all human. But like focusing on, you know, if I think about my childhood, yeah, I had some seriously traumatic events, but generally speaking, my parents loved me, looked after me, I was safe, secure, and had a generally good upbringing. But if you were to ask me, like, where's this coming from? And we talk about memories, I will immediately go to the negative memories. Right, I'll go to the parts where I felt unsafe temporarily, or I felt unloved temporarily, or I felt, you know, anger against me, or whatever those traumatic events were. So I I feel sometimes we can go straight to the negative without thinking about uh either reshaping that or thinking about the positives that surrounded it as well. And I guess like, you know, we have to deal with both and we have to recognise both. But I think um one thing we can always we can try and forget is or I I should ask you this really, like, is there such a thing as good and bad? And what I mean is like when we talk about photography specifically, and we think about people who aren't don't feel like they're good enough. And I always talk about the analogy analogy of um whichever country and like pop idol, American Idol, or X Factor, you know, these these talent shows essentially, and they always make like the early episodes about the really bad singers that come on and think they're really good. But the fact is they're shit. Right. So my my point is that there is how do you go from fueling someone's unrealistic belief that they are good at something? Because it can easily turn into arrogance or it can turn into um dysmorphia and sense of like what they can actually do and what they're good at and what they're bad at. So I guess I don't really know what I'm asking, but is there such a thing as there surely has to be a a a line between good and bad. So if someone has a limiting belief that they're not good enough, sometimes that's true.

Zahra 1:17:40

Yeah. Yeah. So at a at a specific action, yeah, possibly. But if it's an overarching belief that's limiting you from operating and functioning in the world in the way that you want to, that becomes a predictor, not your output, if that makes sense. So yes, I can and and by the way, art is so subjective. You know, it's it's you know, it's uh what I think is beautiful and amazing and lovely, it may not be to you. Singing is is a separate thing. You kind of know. Yeah, but I still argue, I still argue that there is such a thing as a good photograph and a bad photograph. Yeah. It's majority of it is subjective, of course. Once you get to a certain level, it's all subjective. Yeah. Yeah, technique and even even the narrative behind it. And yeah, but I I'm not gonna get into the weeds of that, but just before move on to kind of like final question, um, do you do you work with people that have lost a lot of their memory, certainly in childhood because of PTSD? I mean, you you when people ask me about something, and and I wouldn't say I have PTSD with maybe I do that I haven't acknowledged again. Maybe I'm trying to find something that isn't there. Me personally, I can only talk from myself, of course. I have a lot of my childhood memory, just I just can't like if you were to ask me questions about when I was six, I just I don't know. I can't remember. No idea. Such a common experience. And people, yeah, very common experience where chunks of childhood is missing. Yeah. And, you know, we have to work with the body experience as opposed to the the memory experience in terms of well, when we think about memory, people think visual. They think it's stored in my head in like video or in like images. But memory has three components. It's stuff that you can see, the content, who, what, when, where, it's body sensation and emotions. So it's what you experience here, and it's beliefs. So if I let's let me give you a random example. 12 years old learning to ride a bike, fell over. My dad was in there to protect me. He was supposed to be watching me, but he was on his phone. So I formed a belief, that's the the who, what, when, where. I, the emotion is pain, anger, um, and frustration or whatever it might be. And the belief is I'm not safe. I can't trust anyone. So memories are stored in really interesting ways. So when we're exploring them, if I can't remember, I might ask your body to remember. I might ask you, what belief do you have about yourself, about the world, about others? And we go from there and we work with that. So you don't have to have the visual for us to do something with it. And that's the power of therapy. The other thing that you were saying is, again, a very high achiever mentality of my life was good, Sarah. Like it was, it was, you know, it was fine. And in in having that, you know, you might invalidate some of the experiences of the child, because what's traumatic to you, what's traumatic to a child is very different things. A child whose parent is drinking and not giving them the attention, the eye contact, the warmth that they need is actually a form of what we call a small letter T trauma. Because to be invisible for a child is almost like death, because my survival depends on that parent continuously being available to me, well, not continuously, but predictably, reliably, consistently being there for me. So the adult self will go, well, that's fine. To the child, not so much. And so if I'm chronically in this low-grade activation of, you know, unpredictable parenting, or, you know, the parent that was absent, the parent that was showing, wasn't showing as much love. They never hugged or gave warmth, uh, that that never encouraged play, or maybe I'm using the word never too much, but that didn't do it consistently. Um, I might actually then be in this low-grade activation. And when I'm activated, the part of my brain that's retaining memory is also impacted, which is why a lot of the time we have chunks of our childhood missing, because to some degree, that was us in distress. We just didn't have a label for it. Yeah. And as adults, it's our responsibility to time travel back into the past, give that child validation, you know, words to their experience and empower that inner child to move through. Not because we want to live in the past and we want to, you know, be a victim. That's not the truth of it at all. Going into the past is literally pull it pulling the arrow back so you can shoot it forward. If you just let your arrow sit there, you're not going to get very far. So I always use that analogy of how far do you want to go? Because you can really launch yourself forward and that's your decision. So high performers go, no, no, but it was fine, it was fine. I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm sure there was periods it was fine. Even in my childhood, which is already does, there was chunks of warmth. There was times where my father was, you know, encouraging or rewarding. But how consistent, predictable, and reliable was that, you know?

Matt 1:22:43

Interesting. A couple of very quick fire. So answer's gotta be short here because we've we we've got to get

Values, Success And Recommended Books

Matt 1:22:50

going. But um, how does And I'm gonna ask probably the details? What is the meaning of life? Yeah. For those that are lost out there, and me being one of them, you know, only maybe five or six years ago, I'd probably spent most of my life not really understanding or knowing what my purpose was. And we can throw this word around because it's a little bit cliche these days, but if someone's lost and they're not quite sure why what they're meant to be doing and why, and they don't have necessarily like a real drive or passion or something that they can can really attach meaning to, what's the first thing they can do to just start that journey to find purpose or meaning or what they you know really want to

Zahra 1:23:33

Look at your values. What are your we all have values, we're just not really connected to them. Sit down, grab a piece of paper and pen, and write down the things that are important to you. What are the things that you value? Commitment, wealth, ambition, um, health, family, helping people, contribution, just write and write and write. And I remember this exercise that I once read about and I did it, and it's like, don't stop writing until you start tearing up. And that's what you're supposed to be doing. If I were to just give you a very short answer, that's what I would do.

Matt 1:24:04

Well, that's also gonna answer my next question would be what's the first thing someone can get up and do tomorrow to start their journey towards being better or finding purpose or personal development? And I think that's a great answer. Right until you start tearing up.

Zahra 1:24:19

Literally don't stop. And it usually within 20 to 30 minutes, most people are in tears. That exercise works every time.

Matt 1:24:27

What's your definition of success?

Zahra 1:24:31

Being able to access my true self as much as possible within a modern world that's pulling me away from it.

Matt 1:24:37

Wow. Last question. What book would you recommend people read?

Zahra 1:24:45

Oh gosh, that one's a tough one. I would probably recommend Oh, I've got a few. Can I can I do a couple? Yeah, okay. Um I would definitely recommend The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkock. That's almost our Bible when it comes to psychology. Okay. Um, but it's always the cliche answer. Um I would recommend for relationships attached. I forget the name of the author, but attached. Yeah, it's attached is an incredible book for relationships. For PTSD survivors or childhood survivors of trauma, I cannot recommend this book enough. It is incredible. It's called Complex PTSD from surviving to thriving by Pete Walker. I highly recommend that book. Cool. Um, and then the last one for meaning is Victor Frankel's book. Um, the name of it just escapes me. Um, he uh is a survivor of the Holocaust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um I haven't read it, but I've heard it so many times, people referencing it. Yeah. Yeah. We'll look it up, we'll put it on the screen right now. Please do.

Matt 1:25:53

Zahra, thank you so much. Um, we could talk for hours, and we have done before. We're friends, so yeah, it's such a pleasure to to have you here, and hopefully we'll do it again. But thank you for your time.

Zahra 1:26:02

I'd love that. It's been amazing. Thank you.