Latest / Radiant Voices / Exhausted by Pretending to Be Someone You're Not?

Transcript

Exhausted by Pretending to Be Someone You're Not? · Radiant Voices

• speaker-0: Why do we do it? It's a survival mechanism. We are tribal animals. If we don't fit in and we are expelled by the group, then our chances of survival are much, much, much, much, much lower. We're hardwired to fit in and that's why we mask. The problem is that we are not all the same. We are all diverse and it's important that we are all diverse because otherwise, society wouldn't function the way that it does. speaker-1: Hi everybody, welcome. I'm so happy to be sitting with Anja Halsman. She is a peak performance and inner alignment coach. She trained extensively with Anthony Robbins. She's done Esquillion coaching hours and she works with leaders to overcome peak performance that is exhausting and find a way to work and perform at the highest level from a more effortless, call it a flow state. And I'll ask her right now to just to introduce her work a little bit more coherently than I did. speaker-0: So it's very much about owning your strengths, understanding your weaknesses, making sure that you're taking care of your nervous system, which I know is a lot of the work that you do, taking care of your body. All of these things have an impact and your physical environment and your community. All of those things play into how well you show up in the world and take any of those areas away. And it's like you're a three-wheeled car that, you know, it's kind of struggle. So it's about bringing all aspects of life into alignment, but also making sure that you know who you are actually and what you need and that you can ask for it or arrange for it. speaker-1: So I would love to start in a particular place that's really interesting for me and that is your Polish, English, immigrant, maybe first or second generational experience and how that is imprinted on who you are and how you facilitate people and how you interact with your world actually. speaker-0: That is such a question out of the blue. I was not expecting you to ask that at all, especially after your intro. So yeah, so my, first generation British. I think that's a technical term. So my parents were immigrants from Poland and they came from Poland during the seventies when Poland was still in communism. So it was an authoritarian state. They were very much restricted by what they could and couldn't do. And just like many young people at the time, they found a way to leave and start up afresh. So how has it impacted who I am today? So Polish culture is obviously a very big part of who I am today. My parents are very much a big part of who I am today. And I find it actually quite difficult to extricate the Polishness from the neurodiversity, which is strange because they are not synonymous by any means whatsoever, but I'll give you some context. So my dad was Effectively, the way he earned money was as a builder. And yet he was also an artist. He was incredibly creative. He was incredibly charismatic. But he struggled to follow through. he would, you know, people would be amazed and wowed by him. He had sponsors all the time, people who wanted to support him in his art. But he really struggled to follow through and complete anything. So eventually he burnt all of his bridges and ended up in a pretty depressed state, which led to a number of really bad decisions in his life and eventually to an accidental death. And he was 50. I was 17 at the time. So that feels like it's bigger than the Polishness. I was brought up also in a Polish community. On Saturdays, I'd go to Polish school. And I felt like a misfit. I'm going to say this. I felt like a misfit at Polish school as much as I did in my English school that I went to from Monday to Friday. So I didn't really feel like I fitted in anywhere. At the time, I thought it was because both of my parents were atheists and the school, Poland being quite a Catholic country, the school was also affiliated with the church. So we had religious studies there and people would go to the Polish church on the Sundays, you know, and the whole community was really based around the church. And I also ironically went to Catholic schools, English schools. So, but my parents being atheists, I would come back home talking about Jesus and how kind he is and all these things that he did. And my mum would then challenge that and that caused a lot of confusion in me. So I felt like I had a really confusing childhood anyway, but I didn't feel like I fitted in anywhere. My mum, by the way, is incredibly resourceful, also incredibly creative. That's a theme that goes through both sides of my family. But she did soft furnishings and you could call that interior, soft furnishings, interior design slash interior design. But effectively both of them were manual workers. And there were words that I didn't know in English because we spoke Polish at home. so I would go to my friends' houses and they would say something to me. like, I remember not knowing the word ladle for spooning soup until I was probably in my mid teens. you know, I held this thing. I'm like, I don't know what this is called in English. What is this? And I'd never had things like beans on toes, which is a typical English thing, or baked potatoes and cheese would be something that I would have at school, but not something that was familiar with for me at home. And also, I think one of the interesting parts of the Polish culture, which did not exist in England, was that Polish people had nothing. during communism. everything was in paper bags. I used to visit all the time when I was young. So I experienced what it was like. There goods were in paper bags and brown paper bags. There were no brands. People would queue up for the simplest things. The currency had exploded and everything costs like thousands and millions, you know, and I have trouble with numbers. So a bit of dyscalculia there, right? So for me, I was like, I don't even know what this means. and everybody would share everything. It was in principle, like you shared what you had because nobody had much. But, and that's how I was raised at home, you always share. And yet I would go to school and we as a family didn't get things like crisps. I don't know if you call them the same in South Africa. Yeah. And, and, but my friends would have crisps and my assumption was, okay, you've got something that I don't have, then you'll share it because that's what people do. It's what community does. But I remember being told off, like, if you want crisps, you should get your own. And I, that's sort of, that was really painful for me because I, again, I didn't understand why, why they would be like that, why they would be so, what's the right word there? Like. holding on to their own things with so much. speaker-1: Aggression. speaker-0: figure. And, exactly. And so I found that really confusing. But I think the whole thing, my my childhood experience was influenced by so many different things, including the struggles of my parents, we always had financial struggles, including the the the difference in culture having being raised by family who came from communism, Eastern European culture, which is different anyway to Western European culture. And then you throw on top of all of that, the fact that all of us were neurodivergent and nobody knew about it. Nobody had the language for it. Nobody understood. There was a fear at that time. Maybe, maybe it was just my mom who had this fear, but certainly having a psychological problem was really stigmatized, especially by my mom's generation. And, and so that was like the worst possible thing that could happen to you to have a psychological problem. And, and so I grew up with that fear that I might be broken and I can't tell anyone about it because if I do. then I'll be stigmatized. speaker-1: That's really, really powerful. You know, w I I I love it because I did send us on a bit of a side quest, so I I at least slightly apologize for that. But I wanna join the side quest if you don't mind and say you know, I I speaker-0: Please go for it. speaker-1: I I at the age of ten, I was brought born and born and raised for the first ten years of my life in Toronto and Canada, and then arrived in South Africa as a little ten year old and came from like real free, kind of hippie ash community on Toronto Islands. to an Anglican school. My parents were basic basically atheists too. I was in you know surrounded by corporal punishment and kind of racism and it was just it was in a very extreme environment where, you know, the teachers hit the kids, you know, we got hit with with rulers and and shoes and actual whips on our butts if if they needed to discipline us. It was completely foreign and that sense of identity or belonging really struggled with that move. And I've ended up working with a lot of immigrant, multi-generational, single-generational immigrant folk who have moved across to the UK, Ireland, or the US, for example. And it seems to have this incredible impact on us and our sense of being safe around others, being safe to be our full selves. In other words, do I belong Am I part of the the tribe? Am I safe to be my full crazy unique self? Or do I do I conform? And I learned very particular conforming types of behaviors. I learned to really scan and say to to work out what was acceptable, fit in, and so on. Yeah, and and I know that masking is one of the things that you like to talk about and one of the things that you work with. Let's talk about identity fitting in and masking. Like why do people mask? How do we develop these masks? speaker-0: I love this question and masking or unmasking is one of my favorite topics and what I work on a lot. Why do we do it? It's a survival mechanism. Essentially, we are tribal animals. If we don't fit in and we are expelled by the group, then our chances of survival are much, much, much, much, much lower. Right. So we need to fit in, we're hardwired to fit in. And that's why we mask. So it is a very normal thing to do. The problem is that we are not all the same. We are all diverse. And it's important that we are all diverse because otherwise society wouldn't function the way that it does. You know, some people are sporty. Some people are more academic. Some people are stronger in language. Some people are stronger in mathematics, you know, and so on and so on. Some people are better manually. We need all sorts of people in the world. We can't all be the same. And yet, depending on where we find ourselves, who is in our environment, we try to conform to those people who are there. And if we're not like them, then we try and squash parts of ourselves that are not accepted and we mimic what the others do that we get praised for and applauded for and acknowledged for and try to make that our personality. The problem is that might not be true. That might not be who you are. I'm going to go off on a little tangent here because the association that my brain just made, and I'm always making associations, is that there's this phrase, you can't choose your family, right? But you can choose your friends. But when you're little, when you're still a child, you also, you're dependent on the immediate community that you're in. If you are in a sort of hippie community where, you know, people are really free and easy going, then you have permission to do that too. If you're in a really aggressive competitive community where people are expected to achieve high things and, and, and, you know, do more, do more, do more, then that's what you're going to try to do. Even whether that is your natural, way of being in the world or not. And that's what can lead to burnout. When it comes to neurodivergence, which I've mentioned, I work with high achievers who are unboxable, gloriously unboxable, I call them. And what I've noticed is a pattern that anyone who really identifies with that term tends to be neurodivergent. It's not like you can diagnose somebody just because they do things differently and are unboxable, but that's definitely the pattern that I'm seeing. And those people who are masking not only in the local environment that they're in, but they're also potentially masking real needs and neurodivergent traits. Now you mentioned ADHD right at the beginning of our conversation. Someone who has ADHD is undiagnosed, doesn't understand ADHD perhaps, right? Because it is important to understand what it is in order to be able to identify with it, right? Might have time blindness as an example, where they really struggle to know how much time is passing and how much time they need for something. General challenges with time and they tend to be really late for things. Or they might have super high anxiety around the time blindness and therefore are super early for everything. And if you don't know that that's just a trait of ADHD, what that does is it causes stress in your nervous system, which I know is. your favorite subject as well. And, and it's, it's a never ending fear of, you know, what am I going to say? How am I going to excuse myself this time that I'm late, right? For me, I'm, I'm almost always late to the gym in the morning by a minute or two. It's not like seriously late, but it's a minute or two because when I leave the house, I, I, I'm only factoring in the actual journey, the bicycle journey from my house to the gym. I don't factor in the fact that I need to put my shoes on. I might need to find my keys. I might need to find my water bottle. I might end up in a conversation with one of my two kids about something like that they have to know the answer to right now. And so, so it's always a bit of a scramble to get there on time. And I used to feel bad and anxious about that, but now I just know that that is me and I try my best to be on time. And even though I know I can tell you all the things that I do wrong, that I should do differently to get to be there on time, for some reason, I can never remember that in the moment. So the masking is the anxiety of like, no, I've done something wrong. The unmasking is, this is just the way that my brain is wired. I can, for important things like our podcast meeting today, I'm on time. I'm really good with working with my calendar. With things that are outside of my calendar, I give myself grace. I do my best. I've got some strategies in place. Most of the time I'm on time. Some of the time I'm late. I accept that about myself. And I also don't feel like I have to apologize for being late to other people unless I've put them out. Like I cannot, you know, I'm not like a mean person. I don't think the world revolves around me, but I also don't need to feel bad about who I am. Does that make sense? speaker-1: Very, very much makes sense. I'd actually love to get a bit of a clarification about masking. I don't understand or I don't know masking from a neurodivergency point of view so much. I really understand it from a I call it a fawning or pleasing strategy point of view where we might wear a mask where we learn in order to be safe, and I think you used th this kind of terminology earlier. We learn and so for many people who whose family environments had levels of unsafety or inauthenticity, it was the the strategy the required strategy was to wear a mask. Now that either meant shut down your emotions and just be pleasing, quiet, a yes kid, say whatever's appropriate, or we just do not express emotions in our home and so you learn to shut down and mask and really develop a can a set of conditioning that just comes into operation unconsciously, maybe in all communication situations where l let's just say it is a fawning strategy where we are instantly more up in our heads prob probably overthinking, probably scanning the room to work out what everybody else is feeling and what we need to do in other in order to placate and please and calm down and settle and be acceptable. So it's a whole set of conditioning that just switches on. And somewhere below us, or rather below that conditioning in our settled body, our lower body, for example, is a more grounded I'm here. The whole of me is here, as opposed to what do I need to do to be okay? Okay, so if I just present that as a as a form of fawning pleasing masking, is the neurodir neurodivergent masking that you're speaking of different? Or parallel. speaker-0: It's actually, I would say that it's the same, but it's more extreme. Okay. It is also based on hypervigilance and feeling lack of, lack of safety. I go back to an ADHD example. My daughter has been diagnosed, which is with what's called moderately severe ADHD, right? So she, she has, she has hyperactivity and she also has this sort of daydreaming side of, of ADHD. Now, She masks really heavily at school because she loves people. She's an out, full out extrovert. She's like, she lives for her friends and for being with other people. There's nothing worse for her than being isolated. And she has been told, I know she's been told even by her peers, she's only nine. She's been told by her peers, she's a bit much, right? So she tries to tone it down. She's like holding it in all of this energy in the whole day. And that's cool. She actually really loves her teachers and she has good relationships with her teachers, but it's because she's holding it in the whole day, right? So all of this is being held in the whole day. She gets home to a safe place where she's accepted. And what happens? She explodes. Right? Because all day long, it's like this pressure cooker. She's been, it's been building and building and building and building and she needs to let it out. Now, the challenge is that when kids don't have a place to release all of that pressure and that masking that they've been doing, they And they continue masking at home, for example, because it's not understood or it's punished or whatever it is, right. Then they, they continue to hold it in. And then what happens over time is that you can get quite a severe burnout, depression, or when they become teenagers and they get access to drugs and alcohol, they go down that route. It doesn't have to be that way, by the way, it's not like you have ADHD and you become a drug, a drug addict, right. It's, know, alcohol is socially acceptable. So, so a lot of people end up using alcohol as a, as a way of trying to calm themselves down, which is not a healthy way of doing it. Or cigarettes is another one, right? Just the irony of cigarettes smoking, you must know this is that the inhale, the fact that you're breathing slowly. It's part of what calms the nervous system, right? So, you know, if they just did that without the cigarette, it would be actually super speaker-1: Mm. speaker-0: helpful. So that's with ADHD when it comes to autism. Autistic people have much higher sensitivity, so they have lower filters for their environment. So the reason why Like you would say a stereotypically an autistic person doesn't give as much eye contact. And by the way, I suspect that I am autistic as well. I just don't have a formal diagnosis. But the reason why the eye contact is difficult is because it's too much information. They find it much easier to hear the information and process the information when they don't have to look at the face as well. That's just one example from autism, but that also builds up when there's so much noise, smell, the lighting, the number of people in the environment, the heat, the humidity, all of these things can be really overstimulating. If you are autistic or have some autistic traits, then those things are also going to be building up for you. Right? So masking is showing up regardless and I'm going to white knuckle through this. Unmasking is saying, actually, I need to remove myself from this environment. I need to go into a quiet room where I can be by myself and there is deadly silence. And maybe it's all white or all black or, you know, whatever it is that that person needs, right. Or I need to go and take a nap. That's what unmasking looks like. I, you know, I can feel it's getting too much. need to offset this and remove myself from this situation. And that can be really challenging and high achieving individuals. This can happen still. And they are white knuckling through it. And then they have severe burnout after severe burnout after severe burnout. And they don't understand why. Because, you know, they're doing all the things they're supposed to be doing and it's still not working. speaker-1: It's so interesting this whole discussion era because I I I noted just obviously researching you and and some of the notes that you shared, that you shared a bit about HSP, highly sensitive person tendencies. And this thing, you know, I I often work with HSPs, highly sensitive people and people who'd consider themselves to be highly empathic, which sometimes are strategies learnt that children learn to again scan their environment to be safe. To read the room, because they have to read the room from early on to know what to do. And what th that strategy of being kind of always on in a room, scanning and out of body, kind of out of self, because you're so in the room, absorbed in what everybody else needs, that you're not in yourself feeling your own needs, attached to your body, grounded and resourcing yourself by being at home. We're then when we're in that position, that hypervigilant position, we're taking on too much information. In other words, we're all senses are open and we're we're kind of gulping down visual data, sound, etc. So I'm curious whether we would even know what the line is between what would be considered autism or a highly sensitive kind of strategy, nervous system and and and processing strategy of taking on too much information which could potentially be ameliorated or rectified, not rectified, let's just say, supported by a movement back into the body with nervous system regulation and and then a development of appropriate boundaries, which is that the world I'm gonna create more of a sense that the world is over there, I'm over here, and none of their vibes or energy or opinions comes in here without my permission and the learnt experience of creating some separation where before that person was kind of over the bound over the boundary, over the parapets looking around for danger. Okay, that was a long any any thoughts about that? I'm just throwing that out as a curiosity. speaker-0: I've got so much to say, but I'm not sure that I understood what the question specifically was. speaker-1: So the question specifically was, do you see that there's a very clear distinction between what you're describing as autism or what could be a highly sensitive person or empath? Is autism a cognitive and nervous system inheritance, or is it something that happens developmentally versus empath stuff which Can happen through conditioning, your family environment, for example. Is there a difference? Can we tell the difference between an an an an empath and an speaker-0: I'm going to let you in. I'm going to let you into a not very well hidden secret. speaker-1: Please share. speaker-0: But I don't think it's talked about outside of the autistic community. And that is that there is a strong belief within the autistic community that people who are highly sensitive are just undiagnosed autistic people. speaker-1: That's very interesting. speaker-0: Yeah. And I myself have always identified as HSP. And then when I do, I did the research, I realized, and also, by the way, my son is like my mini me, right? So the way that his brain works is exactly the same as mine. I completely get his process and, and how he's looking at things and, you know, he's, my husband says, if I want to know how to deal with with our son, I just think about how I would deal with you, right? The way that our minds work is very, very similar. He's recently been diagnosed with autism. My whole life, I have been extremely sensitive. And that's why I think I probably am autistic, even though I haven't gotten official diagnosis, which I kind of... Mentally, because I have this perfectionist tendencies, I feel like I need to tick that box before owning the identity. But certainly, also I'm perimenopausal and in perimenopause, like everything gets way more intense when you're neurodiverse. So it's really been coming out now. Is there a difference between autism and HSP? I suspect over the next decade or so, we'll discover that it is one and the same. It's just different parts of the spectrum. Now, another thing that you brought up, which I think is really interesting as well, is trauma. I don't know if you must be familiar with Gabor Mate and his work. He talks about ADHD being a trauma response, but at the same time, there has to be that high sensitivity in the first place, even if it is a trauma response. And then there is also the challenge of the fact that neurodivergence is so highly inheritable that if you have neurodivergent kids, there has to be somebody. Chances are extremely high that somebody in your family, you or your spouse are neurodivergent too. And that that goes back generations, right? So then what you have is generations of people who've been wired differently trying to fit into the world. And for some people that has meant they've gone to the extreme. If we think about like gay people who were persecuted for their gayness and became extremely severe and strict parents, know, not allowing any kind of, you know, feminine behavior in their sons, right? The same thing. inevitably happened in the has been happening in the neurodivergent community. And so there is trauma, generational trauma from misunderstanding the neurodivergence that goes, who knows how far back, right? I think there are certain societies where certain types of neurodivergences are more welcome. and seen as a positive thing. But in the Western culture, it's difficult to be neurodivergent. And in current day, right, where we go through the same schooling system where we're more expected to behave in certain ways, we're expected to develop at certain speed, you know, we're expected to be able to socially be a certain way. That does make it really, really difficult. And those kinds of experiences also cause micro traumas, as you know, right? So where does trauma begin and end and neurodivergence begin and end? Well, neurodivergence is genetic. Unless you have had a brain, a literal physical brain trauma, it's a genetic thing. Could it be triggered by trauma? it, has to be something there already for it to be triggered. there are, so, I have a podcast as well called neurodivergent unplugged and I've interviewed a lot of high performing neurodivergent people, many of them undiagnosed, but when you hear about their experiences, how they've been accepted at home really, shapes how they grow up and who they become in the world. so there is always a lot to unpick. speaker-1: it's so interesting. You know, this thing about nature, nurture that we're discussing, I think is also fascinating. I I'm I'm then curious, do you think then that the science and and our understanding is really unfolding at the moment? That we don't re we can't really identify how much is nature versus nurture and the conditions of our childhood and that there's some kind of interplay between the two? speaker-0: Neurodivergence is considered a neurodevelopmental condition. So it is genetics. However, how highly masking that person is as they grow up depends on the environment that they grew up in. speaker-1: So let's let's play for a moment. You're working with a leader who begins to identify hang hang on, there's something quite quirky in the way that I work and I think I've been was fighting against myself my whole life and I want to come into some sense of alignment or flow or just a a kind of a more of an inner yes to how I am. How do you begin to help someone work discover who they really are and how they really work and then come into alignment? speaker-0: Yeah. So the, the secret fear that I think most undiagnosed high performing neurodivergent people have is that they might be broken. Yeah, it's, it's, it's for some people might be very, very deeply buried, but they are trying to hide that fact. You know, they're trying to keep up, but, but often. They are misunderstood in the workplace. You can't generalize, right? Because everybody is different, right? But some are super fast thinking. And before their boss, for example, CEO, or whoever it is, even finishes the question that they're posing, this person may have already processed the entire thing. in pictures in the mind, created a working model, run it, found the errors, you know, and, you know, and has a solution. But because that's not acceptable to be that fast and other people have their own process, then they have to sort of, they feel like they have to sit there and wait patiently for the other people to you know, reach the same conclusion as them, which might be two hours later, or in three weeks time after six other meetings, right? They've learned that when they come up with the answer straight away, it's not accepted, right? So they bite their tongues and they hold it in just like my nine year old daughter, right? For other people, it might be that They're very direct in their language. So that's a typical autistic thing. They might be very direct in their language. And they're just literally stating a fact and it's misperceived and they are misunderstood and people get upset and angry with them. And they're told that they're mean, for example. And yet they're like, I just, I just need these answers so I can continue my piece of work and get it done, you know, and hit these deadlines that you've set me. so it's, it's, it's a lot of confusion as, you know, why it feels so hard for them and maybe wondering if everybody else finds it so hard. And is there something fundamentally wrong with me that I am finding myself working harder, or at least it feels harder, whether it's like having to restrain yourself. Or entertain yourself in other ways to keep your mind active when everything is, you know, people are going through this really boring, simple stuff that you've already figured out a month ago. Right. And, and so the question you asked was like, how do you begin to unpick that? And the starting point is always like, what is the experience? What, what are the things that are confusing to you? Let's, let's understand. What that is, what are your preferred ways of working? When do you work at your best? What do you love about your work? What do you hate? Let's have a look at all of these different patterns and challenges. And also, you know, when do you feel like your body is open and, and loose and relaxed? And when, when are you, do you have constant tension? Are you getting stomach problems or headaches or chronic inflammation in your body? Let's find out what is actually happening. And then you can start building from that place because especially with high achievers and yes, these people are always very intelligent. They have a lot of strengths. And you want to always build on strengths. And the things that are difficult are the things that we want to absolutely minimise or delegate to somebody else, right? There was a fantastic study and I need to look up who did this, but there's a fantastic study which they did on speed readers who you might be familiar with this, on speed reading. And no, that wasn't what it was about. It was a tester. That was the context. They took a bunch of people and tested how fast they read and they then taught them how to speed read. And you could see a measurable improvement in all of the people's reading speed, obviously, because they would talk to speed read. But there were people in that group who initially already read quite fast. Once they learned how to speed read, their improvement jumped up not by the same level as everybody else, it jumped up multiple fold. Now, I don't remember the exact numbers because I have a terrible memory for details, but what that goes to show is that when you have a strength and you leverage that strength, that's when you will become exceptional. That's when you get the quote unquote superpowers. But you have to be focused on your strengths, not on your weaknesses, not on compensating or masking for the things that you find difficult. I'll give you another really great example. There was a time when I worked for the Times educational supplement in London in my late twenties. And I was told of this guy who was a journalist for the Times that he may have been even for the Times newspaper. And he didn't use any punctuation at all in his writing. He just literally just wrote the words and then he handed it off to somebody else to put in all of the capital letters, all of the full stops, commas, the rest of it, because he started off trying to do it and his reports would come back marked covered in red. This is in the day before computers, right? They come back. with all of these corrections and this and that, that he would then have to change. And at a certain point he realized the writing is good, can't do the grammar or the punctuation. So I'm going to just completely stop and focus what I'm good at and hand the rest over to somebody else because somebody is going to correct it anyway. Right. So that person then was able to excel in what they were doing and not be held back by this minor detail of challenges with punctuation. speaker-1: I really love that. It's really the sense I if I may just paraphrase it, I I and I imagine that in your work when people initially come to you that they're exhausting themselves trying to compensate and mask for stuff and and and essentially they're wasting enormous amounts of energy in the wrong in the wrong place. Instead of leveraging their genius and their strengths, they're spending all their time trying to pretend to not be who they are. And so once once you meet people where they are and I imagine there's a bit of a sigh of relief and a kind of a homecoming in recognizing o and and learning to accept themselves as they are. D is there a process involved in in helping to helping them to find that acceptance? Or do they does it just naturally happen in the in the discovery process? speaker-0: Most often, yeah, most often, once you understand your own wiring, there is a moment of grief, obviously, all of that suffering that I went through, you know, I could have had it so much easier, like all of the things that I lost, a lot of people do go through a grieving process. And that's important, right? Because they've probably struggled for a really long time. For some people, may have cost them marriages, may have cost them relationships with really important people, jobs, et cetera, right? But then there comes that moment of, now I can let go of that, right? Which is what I experienced myself. It's like, I don't have to, I don't have to work so hard anymore. And it still is a process because you've, if you've lived most of your life, I'm 46, right? I've spent, I spent probably 44 years of my life, heavily masking and trying to be who I thought I was meant to be in the world. Right. There are still moments where I go, that's really interesting that I reacted that way. I clearly wanted to please that person or I wanted to be perceived in that certain way. And so I have to come back to myself and process that and reflect on it so that next time I can do it in a better way. And sometimes it takes a few, you know, a bit of trial and error before you get there. I do believe that it takes time. It's not an overnight process. Even if you have a diagnosis, like just having a diagnosis doesn't change who you are, but understanding what it means, how it's impacted your life and how, and what can be different going forward, that's liberating. speaker-1: It sounds like really, really, really powerful work and very satisfying for you. I'm so curious, you know, we've spoken about autism, HSP, neurodivergence, and some of the stress that that all of these ways of being can cause us. I know you do nervous system work. To what degree do you support people to then release the anxiety and the stress or how do you help people release stress and anxiety around masking? How do they and does nervous system work support someone to sit more deeply in their way of being? speaker-0: Yeah, I love this question. Yes, I, it's really important to do that nervous system work. So I am a fan of tapping or EFT, which I think is really impactful. Me too. Yeah. And, and it certainly has done wonders for me and There's a, there's a little tangent story about how I've used it to help my kids sleep and not have nightmares as well, but also sitting and processing, sitting with the emotions and processing the emotions through the body. Obviously, these are, you, you can't move forward without that. If you, if, if you skip that step, basically you're going to be tripping over your own shoelaces forever. speaker-1: I just want to do like pause this moment just because it's I think it's such an important moment in this podcast because I'm a huge believer in processing life. And I also work with clinical EFT and what you're describing here. I just wanted for the audience to say really clearly what we're saying is we accumulate past stuff that becomes lodged in our systems and we have these Perceptions of our patterns and our history, and these perceptions are accompanied by lots of emotion. And those active thoughts and emotions we have about ourselves are essentially can playing a big part in determining what happens next. And this thing of getting in there with our little spade or EFT or any other deconditioning or processing tool, EFT, which is emotional freedom technique or tapping. Getting in there, digging out the muck and processing our past and and current triggers, I think is one of the most important ways we can unburden and move forward into whatever kind of reality we wanna create. Do you wanna r rephrase that? Do you agree, disagree? speaker-0: No, I love what you're saying. I love what you're saying. And I think I just want to add for anyone listening to this, this is not the same as you going and reliving your traumas, you know, through talk therapy. This is about allowing your body to actually release what's been blocking inside of your body that you're not aware of. with, you know, this is not something that you can think your way out of, you have to do it through somatic work. And, and I, you said it really beautifully, and I fully agree with everything you just said. speaker-1: Right. Yeah, I wanted to perhaps give an example. Let's just say this could be an either a a very ne neurodivergent person or a highly anxious speaker and they've spoken up in a meeting and they've flubbed it in whatever way that is. Either they were just way too much or they were way too little and but let's just say they were way too much, or in the case of a highly anxious person, they shut down and they became robotic while delivering the bullet points and they clung to the bullet points but sounded like a zombie or a dead per dead robot. And either way they left that meeting full of remorse, disappointment, frustration. They are now have a memory that they're sitting with and they're gonna spend the next few days mulling over that feeling like a failure or not enough or too much. And that's gonna deepen a belief system that they already have about themselves for which they have perspectives and appearances across their lives. And we have the opportunity, instead of just going, there's more proof that I'm broken, as you said, or I'm not enough, or I'm unfixable, instead of doing that, we can process experience like that, experiences like that, release the like you said, the pressure inside, the frustration, sadness, disappointment, and replace it, potentially if you if you're using the positive sides of of EFT, with positive choices, a positive perspective. I choose to learn and grow, I choose to forgive myself. But we actively work with what's happening in our lives so we don't get bogged down. And rather than just adding into this cup of I'm not enough, we're tossing it out and saying, I'm gonna I I can do this, I'm gonna do do better next time, but I forgive myself and I I choose to release this pattern, I choose to release my judgment of it. Yeah. Over to you. Just thoughts thoughts about that. speaker-0: No, it's really beautiful. Now, the only thing I would add to that is that there is also the opportunity to prepare differently for future public speaking, if that's what the specific situation is, so that you can come in with ease and confidence, knowing that you can do it well enough. And I'm sure that that's work that you do as well. speaker-1: Love it. Yeah, I always say to people, you know, three weeks before that speaking event or before that big presentation, what feelings do you have? Perhaps there's mounting anxiety. And imagine spending three weeks before a presentation with your anxiety doing this massive uptick and not processing that anxiety in advan in advance. We should be minimizing that curve all the way through in the weeks before rather than arriving there and wondering why we're anxious and triggered. So Processing in advances obviously it's a big gift. And so we have this ability to do work before and after that can completely change our experience of being of human visible around others and really empowering ourselves to share our magic with greater ease and really let go of some of the patterns that I think haunt many of us. speaker-0: Yeah, and they are unconscious patterns. That's why, again, I just really want to, maybe your listeners are already familiar with the somatic principles, but it's not about talking about it. It's really about allowing your body to physically let go of what's blocked. So you're not carrying it around with you all the time. speaker-1: Hundred percent. Like the the quickest way to know if it's in your body is to walk into that room, whatever that room is full of people, and watch what's happening in your body. Your heart's racing, you are sweating, your voice is shaking. There's a full either fight or flight happening or full on freeze mode shutdown happening. It's a full body, full nervous system event. And to think that you can just Mindset your way out of it, in other words, just do stuff in your brain with and leave the body out, leaves out one of the most important mechanisms for finding freedom and ultimately finding safety in your body. When if you can make your body feel safe in the rooms that you occupy, it goes such a long way to feeling at home inside yourself, no matter the environment, no how no matter how pressurized the room, if you can just sit down. Deeply in yourself, things become, let's just say, a bunch easier. And yeah, we are kind of we're kinda out of time. Is there anything you'd like to share as we're kind of summing up here? It's been such a rich converse. speaker-0: it's been a fantastic conversation. think the, the, what I would like to say is that if any of what I have said has resonated with anybody listening to this episode, don't let it scare you. It is a wonderful thing to be neurodiverse and increasingly. So, there's a freedom that you get from just understanding. your own wiring and you begin to notice that you gravitate towards other people who are wired similarly to you, that you speak each other's language, that you don't have to mask anymore. also that unmasking is not a switch that you have. It is also a process. takes time. I'm still unmasking, as I said. much further down than I was a couple of years ago. And it's good to get support and not have to do it alone because it can feel really lonely. Also, if you're not sure who it's safe to talk to about it, a lot of people feel even imposter syndrome around considering a neurodivergence, right? Best thing is to read up on it, educate yourself, see what you do identify with. You probably will not identify a hundred percent with all of the symptoms and that's totally okay because it is all a spectrum. But you don't need to suffer and you don't need to carry on hiding because if you are gloriously unboxable, there are many more of us out there. speaker-1: Ugh, I love that so much. Please have a look in the show notes that Anya's links will share to her website and podcast. And this has just been so rich for me. I I I don't know enough at this point about neurodivergence and I think I'm due to learn some more. And it's been just so educational and stimulating and just such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being here today. speaker-0: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Jeremy.