Mick Unplugged

Breaking Barriers with Nada Lena Nasserdeen

October 25, 2025

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  • Lasting self-confidence (macro confidence) is an unwavering belief in one's worth, distinct from confidence built around specific skills (micro-confidence). 
  • Setting healthy boundaries, often difficult for people-pleasers, is a critical ingredient for personal and career success, and 'No is a complete sentence.' 
  • 80% (and potentially 90% soon due to AI) of success is contingent upon social and emotional intelligence, not technical skills alone. 

Segments

Guest’s Core Motivation
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(00:01:08)
  • Key Takeaway: Nada Lena Nasserdeen’s core motivation is elevating the human condition by teaching soft skills that constitute 80% of success.
  • Summary: The guest’s ‘because’ is a deep belief in elevating the human condition. This is achieved by helping people build soft skills like self-confidence and emotional intelligence. These skills are game-changers for both professional and personal life.
Micro vs. Macro Confidence
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(00:02:48)
  • Key Takeaway: True self-confidence (macro confidence) is an unwavering belief in self, unlike micro-confidence which is tied to specific, potentially temporary, skills.
  • Summary: Eighty-three percent of professionals struggle with self-confidence, often basing identity on micro-confidence, which is confidence in specific skills like technology or coding. Macro confidence, or true self-confidence, is an unshakable belief in one’s inherent worth, which sustains individuals when external skills or titles are lost.
Actionable Confidence Tool
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(00:06:38)
  • Key Takeaway: Building self-confidence starts with identifying specific weak areas across nine elements using a free confidence quiz.
  • Summary: The first step to building self-confidence is taking the free confidence quiz at riseupforyu.com to identify which of the nine elements requires support. One of the most common confidence crushers identified is the struggle with setting healthy boundaries and people-pleasing.
Four B’s for Boundary Setting
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(00:09:21)
  • Key Takeaway: Healthy boundaries are established by reverse-engineering limiting beliefs using the four B’s framework: Belief, Backstory, Behavior, and Breaking.
  • Summary: To reverse engineer limiting beliefs causing boundary issues, one must first identify the specific belief and its backstory, tracing where it originated. Next, identify the resulting behavior (e.g., saying yes to everything, being burnt out). The final step is determining how to break that belief to shift the negative behavior.
Career Growth and EI
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(00:13:39)
  • Key Takeaway: Career growth is directly limited by personal development, emphasizing that emotional intelligence drives the 80% of success not covered by technical skills.
  • Summary: A person’s career can only grow to the extent that they do, requiring continuous development to keep pace with changing industries. Emotional intelligence is crucial because it enables adaptation, pivoting, motivation, and relationship building, which account for 80% of success.
Identifying Toxic Culture
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(00:19:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Toxic workplace culture is often revealed by a lack of accountability and misalignment between stated company values and felt team experience.
  • Summary: Toxic culture is not just gossip; it can manifest as a lack of accountability where goals are consistently missed year after year. Leaders should assess if their team knows the company values and conduct anonymous climate checks, as leaders often overestimate their self-awareness (95% think they are self-aware, but only 10% truly are).
Leader Feedback Loop Necessity
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(00:26:19)
  • Key Takeaway: Leaders must proactively seek anonymous 360-degree feedback assessments to uncover critical blind spots affecting team perception and culture.
  • Summary: Leaders must implement feedback loop assessments because perception becomes reality quickly, often leading to negative team narratives based on small interactions. Getting this internal feedback shrinks the focus areas for leadership strategy, allowing leaders to concentrate on what the team actually needs, such as being more present or empathetic.
Book Series and Leadership Levels
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(00:30:51)
  • Key Takeaway: Transformational leadership moves beyond transactional management (ensuring safety and resources) to actively coaching team members toward self-actualization.
  • Summary: The guest’s book series covers four pillars: self-confidence, emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, and influential communication. Transformational leaders aim to move teams to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy by focusing on helping individuals reach their potential, rather than just ensuring basic needs are met.
Investing in Potential
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(00:33:38)
  • Key Takeaway: Investing in personal development through coaches is essential because 92% of individuals fail to achieve their goals alone, indicating a need for external perspective.
  • Summary: The greatest tragedy is wasted human potential, and if an individual could achieve their goals alone, they would have done so already. Investing in development, similar to how top athletes use coaches, opens possibilities necessary to reach one’s full potential.