Dr. Shadé Zahrai

But I didn't know how to say no.

And so at the age of 9 or 10 or 12, I still felt like I had to perform to make people happy.

This was entirely in my head.

If I had communicated to them or set a boundary or said, look, I don't feel like it, they would have been fine.

My family loved me.

I didn't know.

And I internalized from a young age.

that I am only as good as the performance I'm giving, which means making other people happy.

And I have carried that with me through my entire career.

In fact, one of the drivers of me doing a PhD, which was one of the hardest things I've ever done, was because of this feeling of not being enough and needing to still prove myself.

which is the wrong reason to do anything.

And I will tell you this much, it's done and I still don't feel, I still haven't developed that acceptance.

So it's an ongoing process for me and I'm very aware of it and I'm working on the habits to develop it.

But when I entered the workforce, so I did law because I did really great in high school.

And I had a lot of pressure to use those grades.

So it was like law, medicine, engineering.

I wasn't going to do meta engineering.

So I did law.

I did it with psychology because I was passionate about people.

But law was so difficult for me that I had to focus so much on it.