I love the men in my life.
I say this because it surprises people — or at least, it used to. Women in this space aren't always expected to lead with that. But I adore them. For the way they love me, respect me, lift me up, and — on specific, important occasions — practically get my head out of my ass.
There's a particular quality some of the men closest to me have. They see me accurately when I cannot see myself. Not the version I'm performing, not the version that's holding it together or coming apart — the actual version. The one underneath whatever story my brain has decided is true about the situation I'm in.
It took me until recently to understand why this keeps happening. And it turns out there's real science behind it.
Negativity Bias and Why Your Brain Distorts Emotional Clarity
Negativity bias is one of the most replicated findings in psychology and neuroscience. The human brain registers negative experiences — loss, threat, failure, criticism — at roughly three times the intensity of equivalent positive input. This isn't a character flaw. It's a survival mechanism. Remembering where the predator was once mattered more than remembering where the berries were.
But it creates a specific problem for anyone who is building something, leaving something, or standing in the middle of a transition: the view from inside a hard moment is, by design, distorted. Your brain is not giving you an accurate read of the situation. It is giving you a threat-weighted read.
Which means when you're grieving, or second-guessing, or deep in the rubble of something that didn't go the way you planned — you are neurologically not equipped to accurately assess what you have actually built. What's real. What it means.
Sometimes someone else has to tell you. And they have to be right — not just kind.
Accurate Reflection During Life Transitions and Emotional Upheaval
I was a pro-EU lobbyist and activist in my twenties, in a leadership position, when a political organization came after me. Aggressively. I was rattled — the kind of rattled where you start wondering what you've done wrong just because someone is angry enough to make noise. I was so thrown that I pulled back from putting my name forward for the presidency of the organization. I opted out. It felt like failure.
I remember my father's response when I told him.
He said: "Wow. Look at you being taken so seriously that they target you."
And then, in that particular way of his: "You're doing great things, and big whoop about the presidency. You can say in the future — I was a lion back then. Forget about it, you have bigger fish to fry."
I'd been so busy measuring the attack that I'd completely missed what it signaled. He didn't talk me out of my feelings. He recalibrated my perception. Being targeted wasn't evidence of failure. It was evidence of impact significant enough to threaten someone.
My brain had filed it under threat. He handed me the accurate reading.
When I quit my PhD, stepped back from my career, and went to study yoga and meditation full-time, almost everyone in my life thought I was having some kind of crisis. The polite version was concern. The less polite version was that look — you know the one.
There's a weight to the mainstream perspective on leaving a good trajectory. All that capacity, all those privileges, all that hard work. The implied ending is always: what a waste.
A very close friend — someone who had watched my life from university onwards, up close, both professionally and personally — said this to me:
"Dijan, you are not a lost person looking to escape into these things because you couldn't make it in real life. You have already made it. And now you're looking for something more interesting. Don't worry about it."
What made this land wasn't that it felt good. It was that it was true. He wasn't manufacturing comfort. He was being accurate. And that accuracy gave me permission to actually surrender into what was next — as someone who had genuinely earned the right to choose something different.
That shift was everything. I don't know if I'd have moved into this next chapter with the same wholeness without it.
I was in Bali, in the middle of deciding to sell my meditation center and exit a business partnership that wasn't working. I was grieving. Confused. Feeling, if I'm honest, like someone who had made something beautiful and somehow still ended up losing.
A friend came through for one night — he was visiting, I was leaving for a trip, we had only a few hours together.
He looked at me and said: "Dijan, you made it. You are living the dream. Can you please enjoy this? People are killing themselves to be in a position that you are living in. A villa in Bali, a retreat center fully realised, sharing your gifts at an international level, living a life where you get to choose. You have made it. So relax."
I want to be clear: none of those things came without real effort, real pain, real commitment. I'm not giving you a pretty pink picture. But I was so deep inside the grief of what was ending that I had lost complete sight of what I had actually created.
He pushed the clouds away. And underneath them — underneath my brain's threat-weighted, loss-focused version of reality — there was something genuinely beautiful.
The Healthy Masculine Perspective and the Power of Accurate Reflection
All three of them were calibrated. They had the distance I didn't have, and the closeness to know what accuracy looked like. They said things I hadn't even known to want to hear — and they were right.
This is what I've come to understand about a healthy masculine perspective, at least the version I've been lucky enough to receive: it stands slightly outside the storm. Sees the shape of things from there. And offers that view back, clean and direct.
The feminine holds complexity beautifully. We feel everything, track everything, know more than we're given credit for. But inside high-stakes, high-emotion moments, negativity bias does its work on all of us. The losses loom. The failures take up more space than they deserve. The beauty of what we've built gets obscured by the weight of what's hard right now.
And sometimes what we need is someone standing outside that gravity field, saying: here's what's actually there.
Someone who can see.
A Question Worth Asking
Who in your life does this for you — not the person who makes you feel better, but the person who makes you see more clearly?
And when they offer it — do you let it in?
If this kind of work interests you — learning to receive accurate reflection, to see yourself without the distortion — that's exactly what we do inside Deep Dive sessions.
