Change Your Life with Dr. Amen Kaur

Click here for the quiz: amenkaur.com/quiz
A difficult boss, a toxic relationship, or people who never saw your worth can leave you doubting yourself, even when you know you're good at what you do.
So when someone finally praises you, you brush it off. Or it makes you want to cry. The problem isn't that you can't take a compliment. It's that difficult people chipped away at your sense of your own value, and your brain is still predicting from that old map.
In this episode, I share five lessons to help you know your value again and take back your confidence:
Why deflecting praise is a signal, not a flaw
How judgment and shame keep good things out, and why the people who can't see you may not have the capacity to
Why comparing your weaknesses to other people's strengths hides your real value
How self-compassion gets your problem-solving brain back (the one most people get backwards)
Why your value grows as you express it

Along the way, we look at the brain as a prediction machine, a famous experiment with kittens, and what the research says about judgment, stress and self-doubt.
Know your value. Express your value. Receive your value.
Take the three-minute quiz to see what's holding you back and where to start:
amenkaur.com/quiz
Want to work with me? Book a career diagnostic: https://amenkaur.typeform.com/diagnostic
Research mentioned:
Baumeister et al. (2001), Bad is stronger than good
Tangney, shame and guilt
Blakemore and Cooper (1970), visual development in kittens
Festinger, cognitive dissonance and social comparison
Dickerson and Kemeny (2004), stress and social evaluation
Gerber, Wheeler and Suls (2018), social comparison meta-analysis
Vazire (2010), self-other knowledge
Arch et al. (2014), self-compassion and stress
Crocker and Wolfe (2001), contingencies of self-worth
Vallerand, harmonious and obsessive passion
Arnsten, stress and the prefrontal cortex
David Linden, Johns Hopkins, and Lisa Feldman Barrett on the predictive brain

Find out where you are being held back. The quiz takes three minutes: amenkaur.com/quiz
You have been trying harder than you have ever tried, and it is not working. This episode looks at what actually happens to your sense of worth when you lose the thing you had been proving it with, why affirmations can make it worse, and two things that genuinely help.
Underneath most people-pleasing there is one thing going on. We are trying to prove we are worth something.
But proving your worth and feeling your worth are two different things, and one does not lead to the other.
In this episode I look at what actually happens when the thing you had been proving yourself through is taken away. Why effort stops working at exactly the point you need it most. Why the advice you have been given, including affirmations, can make it worse rather than better. And two things you can do this week that actually restore something.
I also share what happened in my own working life, a client of mine who went from being made to feel less than to thriving in a different environment, and a wasp at my daughter's window.
In this episode:
Why losing a role can feel like losing yourself
What the pursuit of self-esteem actually costs you
Rigid persistence, and why trying harder is not the same as trying well
What stress does to the part of your brain that makes decisions
Why affirmations backfire for the people who need them most
The open tab, and why unfinished things drain you
Two things that give you your capacity back

The research referenced:
Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe, Contingencies of Self-Worth, Psychological Review, 2001
Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park, The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem, Psychological Bulletin, 2004
Robert Vallerand and colleagues, on harmonious and obsessive passion, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003
Amy Arnsten, Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009
Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee, Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for others, Psychological Science, 2009
Kitty Klein and Adriel Boals, Expressive writing can increase working memory capacity, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2001
Gabriel Radvansky and David Copeland, Walking through doorways causes forgetting, Memory and Cognition, 2006
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, Give your ideas some legs, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2014

Find out where you are being held back. The quiz takes three minutes: amenkaur.com/quiz
If this episode landed, rating the show is the single most useful thing you can do to help someone else find it.

Take the Quiz : https://www.amenkaur.com/quiz
You get close to the thing you want. The promotion, the business, the conversation you've been meaning to have. And something in you pulls back.
That's not weakness, and it's not a mindset problem. It's an old map doing its job.
In this episode I walk you through the exact five-beat loop your self-sabotage runs on, so you can catch it happening in real time. Then I show you how to break it, working backwards, starting in the one place most people refuse to start.
I also run my own through it. The boardroom, the seizing up, the boss who'd put his neck out for me, and the rule underneath it that I didn't know I was following.
What you'll take away:
The map you were handed early in life, and why self-sabotage is what happens at its edges
The five beats: want more, trigger, the body reacts, escape, relief, shame, and why the relief is what makes it sticky
Step one: start at the shame, and why love is the only thing that stops it fueling the next round
Step two: go back to the trigger and listen, with a short practice you can do while you listen
Step three: give your body one new experience, and the trick I stumbled into when I couldn't do it for myself
The deeper layer: what the Bhagavad Gita, the first letter of John, and the Guru Granth Sahib were pointing to long before the neuroscience caught up

Your next step: You now have the method. What you don't know yet is which of your five systems is holding the edge. Take the three-minute quiz at amenkaur.com/quiz and find out what to focus on first.
If this episode did something for you: Rate the show wherever you're listening. Share it with the one person who came to mind. And if you have a minute, a few words in the reviews about what shifted. I read every one.
Research mentioned:
Neff, K. (2003). Self-compassion: an alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity.
Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind. Constable.
Kirschner, H. et al. (2019). Soothing your heart and feeling connected: a new experimental paradigm to study the benefits of self-compassion. Clinical Psychological Science.

Texts mentioned:
Bhagavad Gita 6:5 to 6:6
1 John 4:18
Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 441

This episode is for reflection and education. It isn't therapy or medical advice.

You know roughly what you want. You still can't make yourself do it. This episode explains why, in plain pictures, and gives you one small thing to do this week that your body will actually let you do.
If you've been laid off, divorced, lost someone, lost a home, or had an ending you didn't choose, and it's months or years on and you're still in the parking lot, this one is for you.
Five lessons. It was never a clarity problem. Your brain is driving on an old map. You're not lazy, you're on 8% battery. You cannot be told your value, you have to experience it. And you redraw the map one short drive at a time.
With the stories of five women who did exactly that: a book, a podcast, a sideline business, a job that trains for the next thing, and a job that finally fits her family.
Find out which of five patterns is stopping you. Three minutes, ten questions: https://amenkaur.com/quiz
In this episode
Why "I need more clarity" is the wrong problem to solve
The satnav that has the destination and won't start
What a loss actually takes from you (not the building, the road)
Why your brain pulls over after a loss, and why that isn't weakness
The 8% battery: why courses and advice don't land when you're running on empty
Chargers and drainers: the people who fill your battery and the ones running in the background
You cannot be told your value, you have to experience it
The singer, the applause, and where worth actually lives
Small drives in daylight: how the brain redraws its map
Fuel on the garage floor vs fuel in the tank

The one thing to do this week
Write down the rough direction you already know. One sentence. Notice how fast it came.
Take the quiz https://amenkaur.com/quiz
Science mentioned
Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made / Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. The predictive brain, the body budget, prediction error.
Peter Sheeran, Intention-behavior relations (2002); Sheeran and Webb, The intention-behavior gap (2016). Inclined abstainers.
Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy (1997). Mastery experience.
Jamieson, Mendes, Blackstock and Schmader (2010). Arousal reappraisal.

Keywords starting over, loss, layoff, divorce, stuck, motivation, self-worth, nervous system, identity, career change after 40, women, coaching, self love, value,

Click here for the Free Quiz
You've done the courses. You've read the books. You've done the therapy work. And you're still sitting there thinking, why can't I move?
That isn't a knowledge problem. You already know the direction you need to move in. Something is stopping you from acting on it.
In this episode I make the case that when something big goes, a marriage, a role, a title, a business, a person, what you actually lost was your container. That identity was doing a job for you. It was holding your emotions in place. And when it went, the emotions didn't go anywhere, they just lost their anchor. Which is exactly why it feels like a confidence problem, and exactly why treating it as one doesn't work.
I share what I learned reading KPI spreadsheets as a partner in a FTSE 250 business, where I could tell you which person on a team was struggling before anyone said a word to me. And I give you five lessons you can use today.
The five lessons
You didn't lose your confidence, you lost your container
Emotions compound, and the danger is the delay, not the emotion
Your emotions are data, and naming them changes your nervous system
Every emotion needs a different solution, which is why the wrong course leaves you exactly where you started
SAS: space and self-regulate, before you decide anything

Lesson four is the one almost nobody talks about, and it's the reason people spend thousands and come back feeling identical.
Not sure which one is yours?
I've built a short quiz that tells you which pattern is running things for you right now, with an audio to listen to based on your result. It takes a couple of minutes.
Quiz - Click here
Research mentioned in this episode
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., and Way, B. M. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421 to 428.
Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., and McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking Emotion Differentiation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10 to 16. Note that this literature is largely correlational rather than causal.

About Dr. Amen Kaur
Dr. Amen Kaur is a trauma-informed who spent over 20 years in leadership, becoming a partner in a FTSE 250 business, before moving into helping women after major life transitions achieve their career and business goals through identity change & creating systems that help implement change.