Moving Beyond Self-Doubt and Imposter Syndrome to Find Happiness with Emma Seppälä
On Health
Aviva Romm
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever felt torn between dreaming big and staying realistic? Between trusting your instincts and wondering if fear is holding you back? In today’s conversation, we’re diving deep into what it truly means to reclaim your personal sovereignty—the ability to stand fully in your own power, free from self-doubt, external expectations, and the weight of comparison.
My guest today, Dr. Emma Seppälä, is a psychologist, researcher, and bestselling author dedicated to helping people cultivate happiness, resilience, and self-leadership. As a Yale lecturer and the Science Director at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, she’s spent years studying what actually helps us thrive—not just succeed.
Together, we explore:
- The social science behind self-doubt and imposter syndrome—and how to break free from it.
- The inner critic: where it comes from, why it keeps us small, and how to find inner quiet.
- The role of meditation and breathwork in rewiring our nervous systems for resilience.
- How comparison culture and social media impact our self-worth—and how to navigate them with sovereignty.
- Why we need to redefine success and self-worth in a world that constantly tells us who we should be.
- Daily practices to help you stay rooted in self-trust, confidence, and joy.
This conversation is full of powerful takeaways, practical tools, and a deeply personal look into how we all wrestle with self-doubt—even those of us who have spent decades doing this work. If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re enough, struggled with self-judgment, or wanted to free yourself from limiting beliefs, this episode is for you.
If this episode resonates with you, share it with a friend who might need a reminder of their own power. And if you love it, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it helps other women find this show!
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Looking for supplements for yourself and your family, including some of those I talk about in episodes? You can find those - and your 15% discount on every order here: avivaromm.com/supplements
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the stuff your mother never told you to the stuff your doctor never learn, |
| 0:09.0 | on health is what happens when a midwife plus a Yale trained MD shares about all things |
| 0:14.3 | women's health. |
| 0:15.4 | From periods to menopause, sex to reproductive health politics, motherhood to mental health, |
| 0:23.1 | join me for taboo-busting conversations that demystify and destigmatize our bodies, all while bridging the gap between conventional |
| 0:28.4 | medicine and wellness. Along the way, we'll be exploring the science and wisdom of how our bodies |
| 0:33.5 | work, what makes us well, what gets in the way, and how we can live our best lives on our terms. |
| 0:40.2 | When it comes to women's health and well-being, there's nothing we won't talk about. |
| 0:44.0 | The new medicine for women is here. I'm Dr. Avivaram. Welcome to the podcast. |
| 0:59.0 | I used to love when 80s movies did the bloopers. You know, at the end of a good 80s movie, they'd show all the outtakes that were just hilarious. |
| 1:03.9 | They were the flubs and the things that people said accidentally, and often the actors would find themselves in stitches laughing and then |
| 1:11.7 | we would laugh along with them. It's why I used to always love to stay until after the movie |
| 1:16.7 | credits were rolling. I still tend to do that because you never know what magic is going to happen. |
| 1:21.8 | Well, as I was getting ready to introduce my guest today, I had the same thing. I just had total blooper. I couldn't get the |
| 1:30.7 | words out. The introduction wasn't flowing. And some really lovely magic happened with my guest. |
| 1:38.1 | So I'm going to leave it at that and let the magic unfold so you can enjoy. But also it's |
| 1:44.0 | just a reminder that sometimes the beauty |
| 1:46.9 | happens in the imperfections, in the letting go of control, and in not trying so hard, |
| 1:53.2 | which is a good reminder for what we're talking about in today's interview. Enjoy. Do you ever |
| 1:58.5 | find yourself torn between dreaming big and staying realistic, between |
| 2:02.2 | trusting your instincts and wondering if it's just fear holding you back? How do we know if the |
| 2:06.6 | dreams that we're chasing are truly ours, or if we've just absorbed them from a world that |
... |
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