EP104 | What building in public at 49 has taught me about trust

What if the thing you keep hiding until it feels ready is precisely what would let people trust you?

If you've spent years being handed certainty, whether its the confident diagnosis, the protocol that promised, the wellness expert with five clean steps and watched each one quietly fail, you may have learned to trust yourself a little less each time.

Anindita traces the old defensive reflex that surfaced when Palak told her the truth: the urge to explain, to defend, to protect the build instead of hearing the person in front of her. 

She chose not to act on it and what followed was a realisation and dealing with how she'd first built the Companion the way a good girl builds things, and why a thing that has an answer for everything cannot hold space for anything.

What she found: the trust she was most afraid to lose arrived not despite the mess, but because of it.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL UNDERSTAND:

• Why building for competence — the answer for every scenario — quietly makes a tool less able to hold space for what someone actually needs.
• How being handed false certainty by doctors and protocols made many women trust themselves less every time it didn't work.
• Why showing the mess of building in public built more trust than any polished version would have.
• What it looks like to build technology that says less rather than more — and why she would rather occasionally disappoint than quietly flatter.

The mess was never the obstacle to trust. It was always the way in.

Transcript

Last week, a member of my team, Palak, told me that the thing I had built didn't work the way I said it did. She had been using the companion, the somatic compassionate AI, and she typed different things in it, and it gave her back almost the same answer 2 or 3 times. So she did what any real person does. She closed it and decided to come back to it later. And then, because she wanted me and our team to be aware of this, she told me, welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women living with autoimmune and chronic conditions who are done being overwhelmed by everything they are supposed to do to get better. This show is built on one belief your body is not the enemy. It is wise, responsive and on your side even when it doesn't feel that way. I am a functional medicine certified health coach, founder of Body Wise Healing and creator of The Effortless Healing Companion. I've spent a decade working alongside women with chronic illness, and what I know is this healing doesn't require more protocols. It requires coming home to yourself. Each week. This podcast is a place to do exactly that. Wherever you are in your journey. However hard this week has been. If you're ready to embrace healing with compassion and awareness, not hustle and self-blame, this show is for you. And there was a fleeting moment where the old me wanted to explain to her why it had responded this way, to basically defend myself and what I had built by telling her that it behave this way instead of hearing the person and her feedback in front of me. But I didn't do it because I realized that she's right. We are too far inside this to see it, and we needed her precisely because she is new to the companion in a way that Charlene and I are not. I was thinking about this moment last week, and because I turned 50 in a few weeks time in August, I've been also thinking about what this strange year of building in public has actually taught me, specifically the last nine months or so. Um, and the same word keeps surfacing. Trust. Here is what I used to believe about trust. I believe that people would trust me if I look like I had it all figured out, if what I created looked polished and perfect right from the start. If I never showed them the parts that were real and unglamorous, the mistakes that I made, the edits that I did, the constant iterating, the constant improvements that I have been doing since the last nine months. After all, as a good girl, I learned early to be liked rather than was seen, and to always have the right answer and to never let anyone catch me not knowing. So when I first build the companion I built in the way a good girl builds things, I tried to have a backup plan in place for every scenario I could envision. I created a hundred prompts. I created different, you know, responses, and I was so busy making it completed that I almost made it ineffective as a companion. That actually reflects that how you are really doing. Because the thing that has an answer for everything. Cannot hold space for anything. You know anything you know that happens in life, which is uncertain, which is uncomfortable. And I had to tweak and build up like parts of it again, uh, smaller, quieter and more willing to say nothing. That is what I had to do most of all. Building in public meant that I had to do that where people could see what was working and what was not. In fact, I've written about building the companion round the first time, the 100 Proms, the backup plan I had created for every scenario. And I had thought, you know, I actually thought, uh, before I got this feedback recently that I had rebuilt my way out of it, but told me that I hadn't entirely. Mostly, I was terrified that people would trust me less. And it turns out that I had it exactly backwards. They trusted me more. Because here is what I think is actually true. And it took me almost 50 years to feel it in my body. People, I'm not looking for someone with no flaws because they don't exist. They are exhausted by people who seem to be perfect. The women who find their way to me have spent years being told exactly what they needed. The doctor was sure about the cure. The protocol that promised sustainable health. The wellness guru who told them the five steps to fix their gut health. This level of certainty kept failing them because it, you know, made them trust themselves less every time. It did not work for them. So when someone finally says, I don't have an answer to that and means it without being ashamed of it, it comes as a relief because finally, they need someone who isn't trying to perform an authority they don't have. And I think this is why I built the companion the way I did. It doesn't pretend when it doesn't have something true to reflect back. It says less, not more, and will never give you a confident, polished, wrong answer just to keep you comfortable. There's a version of AI being built everywhere right now that is designed to please you, to agree, to flatter, to keep you on the app. In other words, sycophantic. I built the opposite. Sometimes mine will frustrate you the way Palak was frustrated, because it won't fix you, and it certainly won't perform for you. The answer has to come from you. I'd rather build something honest that occasionally disappoints you than something charming that quietly makes you feel smaller. That's a strange thing to want to be true of, a piece of technology. But it's the same thing I want to be true of. Loom 49 has been the year of building with the door open, every wrong turn I made visible every iteration that I shared online. One founding member, instead of the 25 had actually imagined in March. The protocol I had to dismantle and tweak and build again. And the bug a new dream team mate had got that I'd been so close to. Too close to see. Actually, none of it is the perfect version, yet all of it is the true one. And that's the difference. And I am what? Something happened that I did not expect. The trust didn't come despite the mess. It actually came because of it. People don't trust the version of you that has all of it together. They trust the version of you that tells them the truth, including the truth about what you don't yet know. I'm about to turn 50, and I've spent a lot of my life believing I had to earn belonging by having all the right answers, all of the time. And really, the great late, slightly funny lesson of this year is that the cracks were never the problem. As Leonard Cohen said, the cracks are where the light gets in. So if you're building anything, whether it's a business or body's feeling a different relationship with yourself, and you think you have to wait until it's polished to let anyone see it, I want to gently tell you that you have it backwards the same way that I did. The polish is not wall builds trust. Honesty is let them see the track cracks. The light that gets through is precisely where the trust gets in. I turn 50. This over is not a number to hit, just a reason to open the door quietly and invite a few women. Women who are ready to come home to themselves. A coming home circle opens for the next cohort again this August, with the companion at its heart. If your name is on the waitlist, you will hear it first. The link is shared below.  

JOIN THE WAITLIST