The Genius Life
544: The #1 Science-Backed Confidence Hack Nobody Teaches | Shade Zahrai, PhD
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of today's episode?
what up everybody it's episode 544 of the genius life let's go the genius life What's popping, everybody? I'm your host, Max Lugavere, and welcome back to The Genius Life, a show where we try to get a little healthier, a little sharper, and a lot harder to mentally knock over. Kind of like one of those inflatable punching bags, you know, like the punching clowns, but with slightly better macros.
Today, I'm joined by Dr. Sadeh Zahrai. She is a leadership strategist, a behavioral science nerd in the best way, and the author of the brand new book, which just dropped this week, which I can't recommend highly enough. Big trust. I love Sade. She's amazing. This conversation is 10 out of 10.
And if you're one of those people who've ever waited to feel confident before you take action, well, we're going to ruin that habit for you. We get into why confidence doesn't usually precede the hard thing. You often have to do the hard thing first and then your brain updates the story.
We talk about the difference between feeling confident versus looking confident, how to deal with that inner critic without trying to delete it, and a ridiculously practical tool that Sade calls the worry list with an actual worry o'clock because apparently your anxiety responds well to scheduling.
We also unpack the people factor because at the end of the day, you got to look out for the other guy, you know, energy vampires and the like. And Sade is going to share her own balcony moment, which is a concept for zooming out when life feels like you're juggling flaming swords and a thousand open browser tabs. I certainly know what that feels like.
If you've been on a growth journey and someone hits you with the classic you've changed, Sade gives you a response that's equal parts elegant and savage. Listen through all the way to the end. You're not going to want to miss a beat. And as always, don't forget to share this episode with friends and loved ones that you think may benefit from it.
And if you take two seconds to leave a rating and review on your podcast app of choice or subscribe wherever you're listening, it genuinely helps a ton. And I super duper appreciate it. And if you want to try my free weekly newsletter, I send a no-spam, high-signal breakdown of the most useful research, episodes, health tips, and occasional deals that I actually negotiate for you. It's free.
It's loved by 120,000 high performers all around the world. And I write it myself every week at maxlugavere.com slash newsletter. Now, with all that out of the way, let's get into it. Here's episode 544. Let's rock. Dr. Sadeh Zahrai, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
I am amazing. I'm so excited to be here.
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Chapter 2: How can we break the habit of waiting for confidence before taking action?
I love it. Yeah, I mean, I love that word, the competence side of things. I mean, that's ultimately how I want to appear. Whether or not I'm having an on or off day, I want the work that I've put in to come through in my verbiage, in my nonverbal cues that I'm giving off. All that stuff. How's that sound?
Beautiful. Beautiful. So there's some interesting nuance to the term confidence, though, because when we ask people, what does confidence feel like? They'll often refer to that feeling of readiness, that feeling of certainty. I know I can do this.
And what's fascinating is that we're often waiting for that feeling before we do something, before we take action, before we say yes, before we put our hand up for that opportunity. We wait for that feeling and then we wonder why we never get there. and we're still waiting and preparing and planning, but never actually taking the step.
And it's because that feeling that we've associated with confidence doesn't actually come before we take action. When we look at decades worth of research, what my own research has found is that that feeling comes after you take the action.
Interesting.
Because you have to do the thing, whatever that thing is, the speaking up, the taking the risk, the approaching the new person at the bar, that taking on the health goal, you know, getting to the gym, you have to do it at least once.
so that your brain gets this proof point, this evidence that, okay, I can do the thing, I did the thing, which then boosts what's called self-efficacy, which is your belief that you can do the thing, and then that leads you to that feeling of confidence. So if that feeling that we've associated with confidence comes after, what needs to come before?
And so again, when we look at the word confidence, if we look at its origins, It comes from the Latin con and fidere. I'm hoping that I said that with the right accent, con and fidere, which literally means with trust.
Whoa.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between feeling confident and appearing confident?
And the overthinking becomes more. And that's why a lot of people say exercise helps them manage their anxiety, helps them manage their stress because of this link.
Wow. Is it rare then to encounter a high performer who doesn't then have an exercise routine?
It is, it's generally rare to encounter a high performer who doesn't have some method of managing their state. And so for a lot of them, they will have an exercise routine and they will have a very regimented structure of, okay, I'm going to wake up at 5 a.m., get my workout done, get to my day, or I'm always going to make time for it at the end of the day.
And if you don't come across someone like that, it will be someone who does a different form, a more passive form of exercise, like a yoga or a meditation, which I guess is not really exercise for the body, but it's a grounding technique. So they'll generally have something that they do that they don't even acknowledge is helping them with the overthinking.
But we know when we look at all the data and the patterns, there's this amazing link.
It's incredible.
It is.
Why do some people seem to inspire feelings of self-doubt and others inspire the inverse, confidence? And do we need to cut those people out of our lives if they regularly, consistently seem to inspire within us feelings of self-doubt?
I remember I had this experience when I worked in corporate.
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Chapter 4: How can we effectively manage our worries?
No, exactly.
It's to be successful by your own.
Exactly. And that might be yours. Being the best possible parent might be yours. You don't need to trust yourself more to say yes to that opportunity, speak to that person, do amazing things in that regard. your amazing things might be I'm going to be the best mother or the best father for my kids, right? So again, all comes down to choice.
One thing that we do need to acknowledge is that this idea of I can't change is disproven by research. So if you want to hold on to that belief, go for it. But you're discounting the fact that neuroscience shows us the incredible power of being able to retrain the brain. Okay, I want to share with you a story. that illustrates just how powerful the brain is. And it's something I experienced.
I've never really, I know all the research, not sorry, not all the research, but I know a lot of the research on the brain's ability to rewire itself and what's going on here. And I did that five year deep dive. I've never had my own experience where I went, wow, that's powerful in terms of my own brain doing something cool. So when I was doing these last five years, it was very, very hard for me.
And so I have a lot of respect for anyone who's gone through that process. my memory started to really suffer. So by year three of doing this research and writing this dissertation, I couldn't remember things. Both my long-term and my short-term memory had become terrible. I'd have conversations with my husband and he'd say, we talked about this two days ago, do you not remember?
I had no recollection of it. I would have a conversation with someone in the morning, by the end of the day, I couldn't remember who I spoke to or what I said. And this is a problem for me because a lot of our business is working with companies and leaders and people and about the research and applying these insights that we're learning. I couldn't even remember them. This was really concerning.
Now, it became even more concerning
because I read a case study of a woman who was about my age who had something similar where she started forgetting things and she kind of brushed it off because life was busy she had her kids she had her business she kept brushing it off until she finally sought help when it was really bad and they discovered some kind of brain-eating bacteria that was affecting the the parts of her brain responsible for memory and then she had gone to get help too late and now her life is fundamentally different because she cannot remember
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Chapter 5: What is narrative identity and how can it change your life?
Whatever you believe.
Whatever you believe.
Whether positive or negative.
Exactly, exactly. And this happens more often when the negative because it keeps you stuck, right? Whereas if you believe that you're worthy, that you can learn, that you can trust yourself and things will work out because of that, you will find ways to keep reaffirming that. And then what happens? Your life fundamentally changes. So that's narrative identity.
And in one of the chapters, we go through this process of determining what is your current identity in terms of the narrative you're sharing. How do we use techniques from what's called narrative therapy to then change that story? Because Dr. Dan McAdams, who has studied this for 40 years, has found that you can change your story by editing the meaning that you have applied to that story.
Are you internalizing it? I'm not enough. This is not fair. It always happens to me. Or are you learning from it? In fact, there's this fascinating body of work that not a lot of people know about. When a lot of people experience trauma, they also experience PTSD, post-traumatic stress, right? And so there's this very clear correlation, extreme trauma, PTSD.
But there is also a very large body of people who don't experience PTSD. They experience post-traumatic growth. They grow from the experience. And the defining factor for them is one quality, and that is curiosity. They choose to be curious about the experience, about how they're feeling about the experience, about what it could be teaching them or how it could be strengthening them.
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Chapter 6: How does curiosity contribute to personal growth?
And I think that is so beautiful because curiosity is something we can bring
to every situation every interaction in fact one of the things i love about curiosity so max let's say you're having an interaction okay let's say i walked in here today and i was a little bit rude when you met me you might conclude gosh she's arrogant gosh she's rude gosh she's up herself and you've made an assessment about me and my personality based on a very small interaction
What you may not have known is that right before I came into that interaction, I just found out that my son was in hospital. I don't have kids, but I'm just, for illustrative purposes, my son is in hospital because he broke his arm or I just got evicted or my house burned down or my husband's been cheating on me, right?
We don't know what happened immediately before the interaction that we have, but we assume that that is all there is. It's called WASIATI. It's called, Dan Kahneman has come up with this term WASIATI, which sounds like a different language, but it's an acronym for what you see is all there is. And it's this bias that the brain has. We want to draw conclusions based on a very short interaction.
And I see this most common with people. Your barista is rude. You make all these assessments about his personality, but that barista is having a really hard day. The previous customer just abused him on the spot or was racist or whatever, right? And so what curiosity allows you to do is ask what else could be going on for this person.
what other things could have gone on in their life that has led them to respond this way.
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Chapter 7: What are the four attributes of trust and how do they affect you?
And I just happened to be in the wrong place at the right, at the wrong time, or I was the target today. And it's fantastic because when I'm driving, if someone, I'm big on like letting people in and thanking them. And I love when people thank me when I let them in. You should always do it without any desire for return. But for me, it means a lot when they thank me.
If someone doesn't thank me- Clearly you don't live in Los Angeles.
Clearly, clearly. I probably never will because of that comment. If they don't thank me or if they cut me off, I have a tendency to jump into, that was so rude, this person. And I stop myself and I say, no, something's going on. Maybe they were distracted. Maybe they have a kid in the back. Anyone with a screaming kid in the back knows that's challenging.
Same applies when it comes to someone speeding on the streets. I used to think how reckless and look for a big part of it, probably it is recklessness, but maybe that person is rushing to the hospital because their wife just gave birth, or maybe there's some kind of emergency. They have to go help their mother. Who's had a fall. We don't know.
And so by having that openness, that curiosity, not only about other people, but also even about ourselves, it changes your perspective on everything. It means you stop taking things personally. You stop internalizing things. It's not all about you. Other things are going on for other people.
And even when the bad things happen, which they will, it allows you to recognize that, okay, this is not finite. This is not going to define my life. Yes, it happened. It will shape who I become, but I have a degree of choice. So can we unpack your journey and your experience with trust across these four attributes?
Because these four attributes, we have acceptance, we have agency, we have autonomy, we have adaptability. they converge, right? So you have a profile where some might be high, some might be low, a bit like a strength finder or a disc. And then depending on what your profile is and what strengths you have, you often rely on those strengths, even if you're lower on something else.
So there are certain archetypes, these profile archetypes, but let's have a look at what yours is. So when you experienced that horrible news about your mother, What was, did you feel like life is unfair? Why me? What was your initial thought?
I didn't, it was, yeah, it was despair. It was, why us? Why us?
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Chapter 8: What practical strategies can enhance your confidence?
It was... Yeah, it was just a general sensation of like, wow, this really sucks. Like, I can't believe it's like a perfect storm. Like, who else is this happening to? Like, I know a lot of people at this point in my life. Like, who, like, why? Yeah, like, how could this have happened to me?
to us, a family that like, you know, is really small, but like, you know, we're pretty, we're a competent family in many ways. We are a family that has access to healthy food and insight. And, you know, I mean, I was raised in a household that valued curiosity, I think. You know, we have, we've, I come from a very, in many ways, privileged family. So I was like, how is this happening to us?
Yeah.
And then, I mean, it's devastating. It's absolutely devastating to have something like that happen. So you went through the initial fully natural response of this doesn't make sense. This is unfair. Why us? What then shifted? Because you then said there was some point where you decided to go into the, okay, how can I learn? How can I teach? What happened at that point?
um it was uh i think it was an entitlement a feeling of entitlement to answers um i didn't feel at any point that my non-academic training that the fact that i wasn't a medical doctor was a barrier to me understanding all that i could about what she had and you know if there were if there was anything else out there that could be done to help her from a you know from a non-pharmacologic
standpoint. I'm a millennial, so I'm a child of the internet. And so I immediately went to the best sources that I could find to try to find answers. And I've always been incredibly curious. I think that's part of what led to my success as a journalist. And I
And really early on, I think, and especially in those moments of deep, dark despair, I intuitively, I would routinely take inventory of my skills and my abilities. I knew that I wasn't... I knew that I wasn't a medical doctor and that I wasn't a PhD in nutrition or anything like that. But I thought to myself, well, I can that doesn't mean that I can't be just as rigorous in my research.
That doesn't mean that, you know, in fact, at the time, this is like pre the ubiquity of social media. This is like pre wellness world, pre like having access the way we do today with experts on social media. You know, all that was really available to to the inquisitive scientific world. amateur mind was like, you know, maybe TED Talks and books.
But I had read enough books at that point that I realized that like even medical doctors, like, aren't all that accurate or seemingly rigorous in terms of their research because there's a lot of misinformation in nutrition books, diet books, wellness books, right?
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