You Don't Have A Confidence Problem. You Have A Belonging Problem.

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Something in you keeps saying no. And you don't know why. This episode names it.

Eight to ten weeks after a loss - a redundancy, job loss, relationship, or life shift of any kind - something changes. Moving forward isn't working, even when you're doing everything right. You might have offers. You can't say yes. Something deeper is asking to be heard.

This episode is for high-achieving professional women who can't move forward - whether it was a redundancy, career transition, being pushed out of a role, or a shift that happened years before and still hasn't shifted inside.

In this episode Dr Amen Kaur covers:

• Why losing your job feels like losing yourself 
• The science of identity and belonging 
• The neuroscience of belonging: why the nervous system treats job loss as physical threat 
• Baumeister and Leary's landmark research on belonging as a fundamental human need 
• Why women in senior leadership experience greater loneliness and why that matters here
•  The freeze response (Polyvagal Theory, Stephen Porges), what it is and why you're stuck in it 
• Why borrowed belonging always has a ceiling and what that means for high achievers 
• The difference between fitting in and belonging and why you've been doing the first 
• Where the belonging you've been searching for actually lives 
• Why nothing you've tried - therapy, coaching, mindset work, has been able to reach this

Keywords: redundancy recovery, job loss identity, women career transition, nervous system regulation, belonging and identity, loss of self after redundancy, high achieving women burnout, freeze response career, polyvagal theory women, identity collapse redundancy, female leadership loneliness, career identity crisis, nervous system and belonging, human intelligence framework, BEYOND podcast

Dr Amen Kaur is a Human Intelligence Architect, former FTSE 250 Partner, Doctorate in Science, and founder of BEYOND — a 16-week operating system upgrade for high-achieving women navigating identity transition. She created the Human Intelligence Framework — a five-stage methodology that upgrades the inner operating system from the nervous system up.

Ready to go deeper: amenkaur.com/masterclass

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It’s called “How to Reset Your Biology for Calm, Confident Success — Even If You’ve Faced Setbacks.”

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🧠 Best For: Transformation, Empowerment, self-help, confidence, mindset, healing, identity transformation, psychology-based growth, neurobiology, success without burnout.

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Transcript

The Eight Week Wall After Loss

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's a specific moment that people hit when it's eight to ten weeks after a major loss, like redundancy or job loss. And it could be that you've got like applications out and you might even have some offers come in. But yet there's something in you that says, I can't say yes to moving on just yet. And you don't know why. It just doesn't feel right. You've done everything right like you would have done before, and you're following that process. And yet, every time you imagine walking into maybe that new role, that new company, that new relationship starting over, something inside you, deep inside, goes quiet and it says no. And you try and ignore it. Or you just can't move forward. And somewhere in that stillness, there's a question that's starting to shift without you even knowing, but it's becoming more conscious. It stops being like, what is my next role? What is my next relationship? And it becomes, who am I without this? In fact, who am I? Full stop. And what is it that I truly want? If you're in that moment, I want to tell you this episode is for you and you're in a great place, even though it feels difficult right now. What you're carrying is not what you think it is. And I want to offer you something that nobody has quite named yet. Not your therapist, not your coach, not your strategist, not your even people that truly deeply, deeply love you. But when you hear this, you're gonna know that yeah, this is it. Because a part of you already knows this. You just haven't allowed it to the conscious, or you haven't had the words yet. I'm Dr. Emmancore, and this is beyond. It's built for more. And today we're gonna talk about what is it that you actually lost and where does it actually live? So then you can move forward. Let me explain using it an experience I had where everything just made sense. I saw some bikers driving by. There was loads of them. They just kept moving, and there were so many, and they were making such a lot of noise. And I thought, wow, it was the first time I ever looked at them in this way. Wow, I understand what they have, and it feels good. I can imagine how good they feel right now. Not just because the wind is going through their hair and they're feeling this powerful machine. None of that. It was because they belong. And I felt it in my body. I felt them feeling that belonging and that presence and feeling like, yes, I am here, I exist, because they belonged to that tribe. And then I thought, wow, we've been doing this since we were young. We had our school uniform when we were little, or we were part of a class. It's been happening from a young age. We feel like we belong to a family or a culture or a country, and it feels great. It makes you feel alive. And it clicked for me. How powerful belonging is in terms of identity and the role we play in our lives. Not as a concept, but as a felt experience that you don't want to lose. It's like this experience of being and feeling in your presence and feeling alive in that moment. This is what we lose. Or that person loses when she loses her job or she's made redundant. It's not just the title, it's that experience of feeling alive inside your own body and that feeling of being alive that you hold in that moment. Sometimes we think, oh, it's a motivational problem, it's a confidence problem. And once I get my confidence, I'll feel that aliveness again in my body. And then I'll be able to stand tall and be able to feel good within my body and be that person that exudes that confidence. Then you think, oh, if I get this right role or I get this title, I'll be able to do that again. I remember one of my clients, she was going for all the jobs. She was applying for jobs, but she didn't really want the jobs. She told me, like deep down, I never wanted any of those jobs anyway, even though I was getting declined for them. And actually, I was just going through the motions because after you've been through some loss, because she had been for a redundancy and almost being forced out of the business. And so what they had done was they taken her evidence of a competency as well away because they were trying to force her out. And then she couldn't understand, even though she was applying for the jobs, that she didn't really want them, her heart wasn't in them, and then she felt deflated because they were saying, Ashley, we don't think you're right for this job. But when we really did the deeper work, we realized it wasn't the role that was lost, it was her identity that was lost. And beneath that was the belonging. Something much more fundamental. It's just even the clothes she used to wear to work felt like she had an identity, she belonged in some way. Even though she didn't truly relate to the people, she felt like she belonged. And until she truly understood that nothing she tried really allowed her to move forward, to really feel like she could grow and go beyond where she was. And I'll explain why that is. A sense that she mattered beyond herself, like something she was belonging to something bigger than herself. That feeling of I can stand upright and hold myself steady and strong. She had presence. And that allowed her to feel like I can be seen. I can carry myself and be seen by people. I feel like I belong here. Let's look at the science. The science is showing us that belonging is not a nice to have. It's one of the most fundamental needs of humans. And it's essential. It's essential for the nervous system. Just like food and shelter are essential. When we belong, our nervous system, our body, relaxes and says, yeah, it's okay for you to be you. And then we can have full access to all our resources in terms of our whole brain. Because our nervous system moves out of threat and into openness and being able to be creative. We can think more clearly, we can move more freely and with ease. And most of all, we feel alive. When we lose that, the body registers that as loss and danger, not as a metaphor, but physiologically, real, experientially. Neuroscientist Naomi Heidelberger at UCL found that social inclusions activates the anterior cingulate cortex, which is also called the ACC, the same brain region as processing physical pain. So it feels like you're getting hit when you feel that feeling of I no longer belong to that group. So our body responds to it as a threat. And research by Beekman and colleagues showed that people with a high need to belong show measurably elevated cortisol, a direct stress hormone response following exclusion, because evolutionarily losing your place in a group was like life or death. So what you're feeling isn't a weakness. Let's just get that straight. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it should be doing, what it was built to do, responding to real loss with real urgency. And I can really relate to this. When I had the career, the title of being a partner of a FTSE 250 company, I had the lifestyle, I had the belonging. And there was a huge price to pay for holding on to that. I was living in a toxic environment, and there was this huge amount of anxiety that I was dealing with day in, day out. I didn't know how to let go of that belonging. It felt like it was life or death for me, like I can't live without this. And with that constant level of anxiety, then came: am I even good enough to have this role in title? Am I even competent enough? Or am I performing her, that person that has all that competence? Because I was having to shut down all these emotions, because I didn't want to feel the nervous system, feeling that anxiety, that fear, that constant stress, I had to shut it down. I felt all these emotions that were just building up inside of me. And sometimes they would leak. I'd be on the train and I'd feel like crying, and I'd start crying. And then when I was at home or when I had the space to cry, I would feel numb. I was exhausted, holding it all together. It was like I was just holding it by a thread. I didn't feel like me. And I remember at that time the one word that kept coming up, I want to be authentic. I just really want to be me. And I started to go down that route. And this is why I love helping my clients because they are extraordinary. They want that, they want to be themselves. They've seen, they're so capable, but they've lost that sense of authority within themselves of who am I without that role of being a wife to someone that's established, or a mother, or this title. They've numbed the fears over the years, their insecurities and their emotions, they've numbed. And that was their price to pay for a belonging to a place that they never did. They were way too good for that. And they did that until they were forced out of that situation. It was just too much. Here's what happens when the nervous system is like there's no way of escape. It's not fight, it's not flight. It's something quieter, something you might not even notice. The polyvagal theory describes the third response freeze. It's a conservation state. And so many people live in that state, especially if they feel like they've got the golden handcuffs. Their body goes still, the system shuts inward. And in that state, it's not just the difficult emotions that go quiet, it's all of it. It's that motivation to move forward, that aliveness, that inspiration, that knowing that all of it goes quiet. It's like you're stuck. You can't move forward, but yet you're so capable. This is not burnout, this is freeze. And sometimes if you stay there, you do get to that burnout phase. My clients were never stuck because they're weak. It's a it's freeze mode where the nervous system cannot access the resources needed to be able to move forward. And these are the things that you can get really desperate about trying to recover: clarity, confidence, direction, the feelings of just being like yourself, just feeling like yourself again. This is physiological, not personal. It's not that you're not capable, it's because your system has gone into freeze. Here's what I want to offer you. And I say this with so much care and love and understanding because I needed to hear this too. The belonging that you've built around success, the belonging that came from the title, the role, the lifestyle, the structure, it was always borrowed. So I want to reassure you, you're much more than that. That was conditional, and it was just like one redundancy, one bad boss, one restructure, one person's decision away from it being taken away from you. Not because you weren't good enough, because borrowed belonging has always got a ceiling. It limits, it gives you somewhere to stand, and then it limits you on how high you can go, how far you can go, because the higher you go, the more you outgrow actual those limits, that structure that's holding you in place. And if your belonging depends on a structure, your growth is becomes like a threat to your survival because that's how your nervous system sees it. That's why so many amazing, brilliant women stay in environments that are toxic. Not because they lack confidence or they lack capability or they can't build something up themselves. It's because leaving means they leave the belonging behind. And the nervous system sees that as alienation. But here's the truth that changed everything for me. And I want to offer it to you now. Once you can regulate your nervous system and you feel regulated enough, I want to offer you something that goes beyond the science piece of yes, we need to regulate that nervous system, we need to regulate the emotions for our brain and body to function properly so you have access to your brain so you can feel alive. But let's go a bit further. The more you can become yourself, truly yourself, not performing for anyone else, not the version that has to earn recognition from an external structure, the more you will belong everywhere you go. Not because you're trying, but because you're free. And everyone will want to be around you because you're free. Because you will start to see that every single person is valuable as long as they are uniquely themselves, not the ego, not those narcissistic types, but really truly themselves. And that we're all here to express this life force energy that is running through us in our own way, and that's our own particular way of feeling that aliveness. There's no comparison because we are only our own version of ourselves that has ever existed. And joy. Joy is how our body knows what that feeling is of being alive in our body and experiencing that. When your body lights up, it's different from how other people's body lights up. It's not a preference. If they really enjoy that, I might enjoy it. It's your signal of what it is that you need to express and experience to feel truly alive. You were never outside of that. You were never not belonging. You just couldn't feel it because we had to numb ourselves to feel safe inside the structures. And that's what cut us off from the signal that we're already home. We're here. We're already at home here. When you can stop numbing and let your nervous system come out of freeze, fawn, fight, flight, whatever it is, and you actually then are able to look at the emotions and release and regulate those. You don't just get your confidence back. You get something so much more fundamental than that. You get your own signal back, you get to listen to that signal, your own knowing, your own aliveness. And from that place, you don't need a role to confirm your existence. You don't need a structure to hold you in that sense of presence. You hold yourself and an extraordinary thing happens. And I see this happen again and again with women. They actually then find the thing that really helps them feel alive. And they become that they become like a magnet to all the good things because everyone wants to be around them. They love them because they're truly being themselves. Not because they're performing, but because they're free. And then what happens is they start getting what they want, like the higher-paid job and the job that they thought they never could have, but they go for it because they have this life force energy running through them. The belonging that you've been searching for your whole life is not in any room that you're ever going to walk into. It's in you. It always was. And the work of getting back to it, of letting the nervous system feel safe so that it can come out of the freeze mode or the fight or flight mode, so that you can just start to feel yourself again and start to be able to feel in control of your own emotion. That's exactly what we do. So that you then are the authority in your life and able to be capable and in your authority and power to do what it is that you came here to do. If today something inside you recognized itself, I invite you to the masterclass. That's where you want to start. I'll pin it into the comments or into the show notes. Please also do like, subscribe, share, and comment this video so we can support more people to really step into their own authority and reclaim their power. I'm sending you so much love. Till next time.