Mind, Body, Heart: The ADHD Connection w/ Olivia Rose

Olivia Rose, success and productivity coach for women with ADHD, shares her journey of discovering how connecting mind, body, and heart wisdom can transform lives and help break free from "Wonder Woman Syndrome."

• Creativity is a superpower for those with ADHD, allowing innovative problem-solving and thinking outside conventional boundaries
• Understanding ADHD beyond stereotypes – symptoms manifest differently across genders and individuals
• The body holds wisdom our minds often ignore – learning to listen can prevent burnout and illness
• "Wonder Woman Syndrome" in modern motherhood creates impossible standards of perfection
• Small acts of self-care, like brief mindfulness practices, can dramatically improve relationships and daily experiences
• Starting mindfulness practice doesn't require perfection – even one minute daily can begin training your brain
• ADHD brains often reject routine – varying practices while maintaining consistency is key
• Breaking free from negative thought loops starts with becoming aware of the messages playing in your head
• Physical sensations provide important information about decisions – notice when you feel "calm activation"

https://mindforcepodcast.buzzsprout.com

Chapters

• 0:50 Episode Introduction
• 1:35 Meet Olivia Rose: Success Coach for ADHD
• 8:05 ADHD Superpowers and Misconceptions
• 16:15 Wisdom of Body, Heart, and Mind
• 25:42 Wonder Woman Syndrome and Performative Culture
• 33:42 Mindfulness Practices for Chaotic Lives
• 40:20 Living Fully with ADHD: Creative Solutions
• 44:12 Breaking Free from Perfectionism
• 46:42 Key Takeaways and Episode Closing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:23

Thank you for watching. Hi everyone, I'm Nate Shearer and this is Mindforce a podcast for love, life and learning, because your mind matters. Today we have Olivia Rose and today we'll be talking about the power of connecting with the wisdom in your body, heart and mind in unison, living more fully with ADHD and breaking free from the performance of perfection in the modern working motherhood, or what she likes to call the Wonder Woman Syndrome. So we'll start with the background the who, what, why and where. Olivia, who are you, what do you do, why are you here and where in the world are you?

Speaker 2: 1:06

It's really good to be here. Thanks, nate, absolutely, yeah. So I am a woman, cisgendered female, living in Denver, metro, colorado, and I am a success and productivity coach and I work largely not exclusively, but largely with women who identify with ADHD. Some are diagnosed, some are undiagnosed and some just feel like the chaos of modern life scrambles their brains a little bit. So, however folks identify is fine with me, because success, productivity strategies and that mind-body-heart connection really can help everybody live a little more fully.

Speaker 1: 1:45

That's perfect.

Speaker 2: 1:46

I'm trying to see if I answered all your questions here, just I guess I'll add a tad more. There is the most women that come to my practice are Gen Xers or millennials, but I also serve men, business owners and non-business owners alike.

Speaker 1: 2:02

That's perfect. Okay, we'll move into some warm-up questions. First question is what's one thing about ADHD that you feel like is a superpower Creativity.

Speaker 2: 2:14

Yeah, we're a really creative bunch. But you know, I didn't know. I didn't know this about myself. I was like I just, you know, you live in your own brain, your own body, your own experience, so you don't know how you're different than others. And I was a senior leader in a government agency and I was a mentor and a coach in a mentoring program for younger professionals and all of my protégés would say my gosh, you're just so creative. Like how do you think of things so creatively? And I was like I do. You know, it's just how my brain works.

Speaker 2: 2:50

And I started to realize and really think about it and notice that you know, the proverbial boulder in the road is like not as much a problem for me but like an opportunity to get creative and do problem solving. And so when that boulder shows up in the road, like everyone else, at first I'm like I'm trying to get somewhere at a certain time or I have a certain thing to do. It's not cool, universe. But I'm quickly like do we get a new pathway and go around it? Do we scale over it? Do we get a forklift and move it? Do we build a pulley system? And then you work in a team, you figure these things out or you work in yourself.

Speaker 1: 3:23

However, that goes in different conditions and things like that and you know, either being pass or fail, and something I think is really odd and kind of confusing to me, because it feels like more recently, everyone kind of uses the different terms and uses them so loosely, where it seems like you know, if someone makes a video where they have their hangers up in their closet and they line them up, they say, oh, I'm so OCD. Or you know, if they forget something, oh I'm so, I'm so ADD. So can you briefly talk about, like you know, how different people can have different symptoms and things like that, and not just because you forget something. I feel like it's being used a little too loosely and maybe it's good that it's not, you know, being seen as negative as much, and maybe that's good, but maybe it's gone too far, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 4:27

Yeah, I think that's a really great question, and the one thing I do want to note here is, while I have a master's degree in educational psychology, I will be really clear here that I am not a therapist and I am not a mental health counselor and I am not here to diagnose you or anyone else, and there are professionals that can do that. So that is an important disclaimer and in my practice, in my work, I really try to focus on this idea of regardless of how your brain works, because there are great things about every brain, there are challenges about every brain and there's evolution in every brain, regardless of what it is. How do we use the opportunities of life to grow into the next invitation of ourselves? So to your question yeah, there is a little bit of that, maybe a lot of that in the current nomenclature. I hear it too, and I actually cringe quite a bit at the OCD one myself. I'm a bit OCD, or excuse my OCD I just need everything to be in order.

Speaker 2: 5:24

All human brains want to see order in the visual field. When we see disorder, when we see disorganization, even if we don't know it, our cortisol levels go up. We get a little bit anxious, all of us. Some people have maybe more thresholds for chaos than others. That is certainly true. But all human brains, all human brains and bodies will have an elevation in cortisol when the environment is not visually organized, regardless of what your tolerance is. So it's. I try to see it and not get as frustrated, although I sometimes do. I'm human, but I try to see it as that person is recognizing in themselves that they're having a trigger moment where they need certain things in the visual field or auditory field, where they hear they need things to be a certain way in order to bring that down and feel a sense of peace and calm. And so, as someone who has worked through some anxiety and depression, which are really common symptoms of ADHD and we can talk about that in a little bit about symptom awareness but working with my own generalized anxiety and intermittent depression, I will notice that I don't get as triggered or I don't notice that I get as triggered as the visual field, but the auditory, what I hear, makes a real difference and there are times where small noises that I normally wouldn't notice make me crazy and feel like chaos and feel really distracting and that idea of misophonia, certain noises disrupting brain and creating like almost an itching feeling in your body is again symptom aware, another common trait of ADHD. But my partner will actually say to me, are you feeling a little stressed or a little tired? Because I am all of a sudden annoyed by you know, the commercial on YouTube that's a little louder than the TV show, or the clicking of a pen, current nomenclature and sort of.

Speaker 2: 7:22

Using these frequently, I found for myself, when I could move past people going, oh, I'm a little ADD myself or I'm a little ADHD. I started using that as an invitation to say to folks like almost like a bonding moment, like OK, you're, you're, there's something we might have in common here a little bit, even if not to the same extent, and there's something going on for you. What might that be? What needs to be put at ease in your mind, your body, your heart, in order for you to not feel that your attention is being pulled? And there is environmentally induced ADHD. The acronym is VAST and it is essentially. You are operating as if you have ADHD, even if your brain is not mapped that way because of the influence of your life, the environment, technology, the way we live, etc.

Speaker 1: 8:11

That's awesome. Yeah, in a second we'll go over the symptoms things. I got a specific question for that, but I'm going to put a pin on that so we can keep rolling. So the next question to roll into our next theme if your body, heart and mind could give you a piece of advice, what would they give?

Speaker 2: 8:26

Yeah. So my mind, we'll start there, because I'm very mind dominant. All people tend to have a particular dominant center. We sometimes refer to these in the coaching world as centers of wisdom or centers of knowledge. It's pretty common in Western culture to be mind dominant, but there are lots of people who are heart dominant and body dominant. So our athletes it's kind of a no brainer there they tend to be body dominant, right? Our caretakers, our caregivers tend to be heart dominant.

Speaker 2: 9:07

Listen to your body. It knows some things, especially if I am perseverating, if I am stuck on something and I just can't, you know, just like I'm going in circles. I have worked so hard on training my brain to say your body might have some answers here. Stop ruminating and start connecting with your body. So my heart advice that it gives me is be open. Keep your heart open, because every fracture, while painful, is an opportunity to heal and get stronger.

Speaker 2: 9:30

And my past way of being is ooh, pain hurts. We all say that pain hurts. Emotional pain hurts. I wasn't really good at soothing emotional pain or discomfort, so it was closing, closing, closing harder exterior. But I've learned over the years that if I open up more, yeah, I'm going to have pain, I'm also going to have greater joy. And you know, every bone that breaks gets stronger when it mends itself. The same thing happens with the heart. So my heart just reminds me pain is temporary. You get to get strong. And then the third one, and my body goes yeah, yeah, listen to me, I know stuff. You hadn't listened to me for a really long time, but I know stuff. Start listening.

Speaker 1: 10:06

That's perfect. Yeah, there's that pottery thing in Japan which I wish I remember what it was called, where it breaks and they put the gold into it. Yeah, that's super cool. Brings even more beauty and whatnot to a broken pot.

Speaker 2: 10:20

You know, nate, I just have to note here I think it's really fascinating that you brought up Katsugi, because in the form of coaching I do we work a lot in metaphors. And one of my clients this is so funny, I swear audience, we did not plan this One of my clients, one of my first clients, with ADHD, who actually helped me realize that that was something I was working with inside myself. One of the metaphors I gave her to grow into as aspirational was a Kitsugi piece of how can we start to take these fractured pieces of your life and make them more beautiful by inlaying them in proverbial gold and, I have to say, over six months transformation. The work she did was incredible and her transformation was phenomenal. And my favorite thing, I just I think of it often when I'm having a hard time. I think of this often.

Speaker 2: 11:05

On our last coaching session we were talking about how she was moving through her life and how she would maintain this great progress. She said I'm no longer a kitsugi piece, as beautiful as I was through this process and growing into this. And now all the pieces are by themselves and they're reflective and shiny, like, like almost like a broken mirror, but not sharp. And these pieces I can now give to others when they need them. I can receive them from others. They can move through the world and continue to make the world a better place. And oh the goosebumps. It just was amazing. So thanks for bringing that up as an opening to talk about that.

Speaker 1: 11:40

Yeah, that's, yeah, that's perfect. I think a lot of times, like, we see the negative and you know we hone in on it. But I know I've been through, you know, the death of my father and my, you know my grandparents and divorce, and you know joint custody and co-parenting and all these things, and I try to share that with the sections I lead and it's, you know, not to be negative but hopefully to bridge that gap and I think that's why we go through these difficult situations right, so that we can give those pieces away. And so I know, like my brother is still struggling through some of the things that you know kind of stunted because my dad passed away when he was transitioning, graduating high school and going to college was to go out and do fun stuff and make that transition. And you know you have such a pivotal, you know, life moment there. It kind of has, you know, held him back and you know kind of stunted some things there and he's working through and processing and everyone processes differently.

Speaker 1: 12:31

I want, you know him and my mom you know we always talk about hopefully at some point he'll be able to use you know, the difficulties and pain that he's been through to help others and, you know, bring other people along, and I think giving that away is super important, you don't? You know, if you just go through it and it's painful and it's just painful, then that doesn't do any good. Be painful and then use it to help others, so that's really good stuff. I'm glad she's, you know, got that reflective, sharpless or non-sharp mirrored glass that she's hanging out giving out to others. That's great. And then the final theme we have is what's a moment in motherhood where you took on the role of Wonder Woman but later realized you didn't have to?

Speaker 2: 13:08

Probably most of the moments up till a few years ago. One of the things about this performative culture that we're in and for a moment to link it to what you were talking about one of the big challenges right now is that we can refine our images so much Social media, plastic surgery, how we perform who we are. There are a lot of ways where you know we're not living in communities where you're bumping into people on their best of days and worst of days, kind of naturally Much more refined way of performing life in some ways, especially when I think about social media. And I have to say we need more folks like you in the world the good, bad, the ugly and everything in between, because that's truly living, not just looking like everything's sunshine and bubblegum all the time. And so with that and I'm sure that men identify with this too I haven't lived that experience so I can't speak for it. So I'll speak from my voice of a mid-40s white middle classclass, a culturalized female in America, and so many of the women I talk to feel the same of like we don't even know that we're in this Wonder Woman culture, this we have to do it all all of the time, and I didn't know I was making choices, I was just living the life that I thought I was supposed to live. You know, I went to college and I worked for a few years and I found my calling. I went to grad school and I got my graduate degree. And I did that while doing a 20 hour a week internship and while working 20 hours a week as a nanny, you know, went into working my butt off, eventually took this job in a government entity as a leader, and that came with a lot of responsibility and a lot of time that I had to dedicate to it. And a year later my child came along. Or a year and a half later child came along and you just, you just keep adding, but you don't necessarily subtract anything.

Speaker 2: 14:56

And the first wake up call that I thought I heard, but didn't really hear it completely, was actually my cancer diagnosis in my mid 30s and I'm very fortunate. I had very curable lymphoma and not many cancers are considered curable, but this one is, and I'm almost eight years cancer free. So I'm in that category of safe and cured. And I remember a colleague said to me disease is just dis-ease and the longer you are not at ease, the longer you are not aligned with yourself, the longer you're living in a way that doesn't fully work for you, the more likely you are to develop disease. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you, sure, and I'll do some things different after the cancer treatment. And I did for a little bit, but not for very long. And then before I knew it, I was. Then I was doing this job. I also before my cancer diagnosis.

Speaker 2: 15:51

Just before that, I had separated from my husband and started through the divorce process and so I had my first apartment with my child, who we did did share. So I had my child 50 percent of the time in a new apartment in a new place, navigating that with a four yearyear-old and what that's like Working full-time in this job. And I had just gotten promoted to the senior position in my division and I was working almost full-time for the community college. So I just started doing it all over again and just before I knew it I was back into doing it all over again.

Speaker 2: 16:20

And it wasn't until coming out of near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, really struggling with my own mental health stuff and struggling to how long can I stay in bed before I have to show up online for a meeting where hopefully I can be off camera or, you know, just really struggling to move through my days. That really was when I was so lucky that my current partner said to me I love you too much to watch you fall apart in this way. We've been through too much. It's time for something different. And that's where the light bulb really came on and I decided it was time for me to do something really different, which included a whole long story but got me to coaching and really saved my life getting coaching, going into coaching, training and becoming a coach and changing the way I live my life in almost every aspect.

Speaker 1: 17:08

Yeah, it's so wild to me today Just today actually, I was talking with a co-worker and active duty military, and so some of the things we do are just really bizarre to me.

Speaker 1: 17:17

And so the thing that we were talking about today not perfectly aligned, but just really makes me think of it, and related was some people will stay at work for 8, 10, 12 hours and it just sometimes feels like they don't do that much. But then if you leave at 8, right on the dot, you know you're seen as almost lazy and why are you leaving on time, and so it's rewarded or almost congratulated that you stayed for 10 or whatever the number may be. But it feels like sometimes, or maybe more of the time, it feels like the 10 and 12 hour people are the ones walking around with the coffee cup kind of hanging out poor time management. And so it's really weird the way as a culture, we have rewarded certain things. You think we would reward the time management you got in, you looked at your, your checklist, you got the things you needed to and you got out in six instead of eight.

Speaker 1: 18:04

That's awesome right but it's like, no, it's like, oh, you need to stay for 12 and stay, just to stay, and it's like, and like some of the things you touched on, like affecting relationships and other things, you should be getting home and you know putting the kids to bed and you know getting them washed and you know fed and all things.

Speaker 1: 18:21

Some of the things are just really bizarre where some people are so focused on the clock or this, like almost like a brand of accomplishment that you stayed longer. Cool. Like I don't quite understand, like do the time that you need to and get out. Like, if you have motivations, like some people, their motivation is to get out to grab their kid at daycare and get home and feel recharged and come in the next day, and so if you have a motivation, you come in, you use your time wisely, you move through your task so you can get to the thing that you love. That seems like the perfect motivation. Get out there on the dot, you know in this like negative context, like no no, get out on the dot, that's fine, and get that kid and get home.

Speaker 2: 19:07

Yeah, it's truly a law of diminishing returns. Right, more time is not necessarily more stuff done or more productivity, and that's one of the things I love about the own work I've done on myself and in understanding ADHD and working with others is actually the more, the more intentional breaks you take in a certain way, the more productive you can be when you're on task. But it's when we're forcing ourselves to stay on task for too long our productivity totally tanks. We're not doing nearly as much as we think we are, but our brains are fooled by time on task and it feels like we're getting more done because we're spending more time on task. You could say I worked on it for two hours, therefore it was useful. Well gosh, what if you could do it an hour and 15? Wouldn't that be more useful? But it's just not the natural way our brains work.

Speaker 1: 19:48

And I think a lot of times we need to think back to how we were built. Like we're caveman or whatever. We weren't supposed to sit and do something for like eight hours straight. Like that's insane. You're supposed to go hunt and gather and do something for short periods of time and then move on to the next thing. So it is a little bizarre Like, oh, sit behind your computer for eight hours, that's probably not going to work.

Speaker 2: 20:08

Probably not.

Speaker 1: 20:08

Boy, that's crazy. So I want to make sure it's conversational. So I got a moment here for you to ask me a question before we move into the three main themes.

Speaker 2: 20:16

Yeah, I am dying to know for you, Nate how do? Yeah, I am dying to know for you, Nate how do you know the wisdom of your body? So, when you need to make a decision, how do you hear your body communicate with you about what's right, what's wrong, what you should do, what you shouldn't do? What is that like for you?

Speaker 1: 20:32

I'm probably in the heart category. I'm driven by a lot of emotion and things like that. I try to do a better job and you know, as you grow, obviously you try to round things out and things like that. So I think I do a better job now of, you know, building in more logic and things like that. But I definitely am an impulse buyer and shopper and things like that. So I've really tried to take that into consideration and being in leadership roles where I'm frustrated, I'm mad, I'm whatever, when the initial thing happens, and so I've really taken to heart some advice that I got If it's not an emergency or an emergency room, then you probably need to sleep on it.

Speaker 1: 21:08

So if it's not, you know life safety, you're going to hurt somebody. Then you know, go home, you know process it, talk with the wife or whatever that processing thing is, sleep on it and then go through that. But I think that's how I kind of process things, where in jest try to take in things in different forms or fashion, but I think ultimately it kind of comes through with my heart, because that's kind of the way I feel, which is funny, because I'm like upbeat and happy, go lucky, and so sometimes a lot of people think that things don't bother me and things like that. But that's just the way I've always been, and then when my dad passed away at 50 and you know you saw how much life that he still should have had and things like that it really just doubled down and reinforced that like there's not going to be too much that's going to derail my day.

Speaker 1: 21:52

I'm just going to keep going, and so that's one thing I think I've struggled with a little bit, because from the outside, oh, you look like lazy, fair, like you're not concerned or you don't care, like I care. Um, I just process that way and you know there's. I just don't want it to take from the rest of my day or the rest of my joy. So yeah, I think, probably processing in a slower fashion, trying not to rely strictly on emotions, but it does kind of resort that way but taking in the logic and try to get all the sides of the story and get all the information that you can, which I feel like most of the time you got to make decisions with 40% of the information but get as much as you can, sleep on it and then process for the next day.

Speaker 2: 22:28

When you process that, do you feel any particular sensation in your body when you know you've landed on the right answer? Sometimes people will say I feel energized, or I feel calm, or I feel it in my heart, or I feel it in my heart or I feel it in my gut. Or do you notice any of that for yourself?

Speaker 1: 22:44

Yeah, yeah, I think it's probably in that peace realm, where that calm and peace and you know that it's right and it clicks, because I'm in my third job in the Air Force and the first two I was fine. I went to work and you know I didn't love them but they were OK. And I remember when I found my third job, like I have to tell these stories of people and every time I just feel like this walking cliche. But I remember I shadowed that day and I was like this is the thing I have to do, like. And so it was crazy, because usually you get two chances to apply for this specific position, but the time that I had in service I can only apply once. So I had one and only shot, and so I'm like I need this, this is what I have to do.

Speaker 1: 23:25

Like, I shadowed, I saw how cool it is and how it aligns with how I feel bored and stagnant. I have to try new things. So my particular job is hospital administration, so I work the backside of the hospital. So I have one job but like five different jobs within one. So it could be insurance, readiness, training, logistics, so ordering, buying, you know you have insurance claims, like basically anything that is not patient care, that touches a patient, because I pass out of blood and needles, so I don't work the front side of the house but anything in the back can be me. And so that thought of like continuously learning, always trying something new I can't really get bored because there's too much to learn and I only get put in one section every couple of years and so when I went over and shadowed and saw this like continuous learning for basically forever, it's like I have to do this and so, yeah, I was blessed enough that it worked out.

Speaker 1: 24:18

It is kind of funny when they did the announcement, the guy that did mine, colonel Dieter, thought it'd be funny to say you didn't get it, we'll try next year. And I couldn't talk because I didn't have another year, but I couldn't muster like a thought to bring it together and luckily, you know, the other commander came by to congratulate me but he was running late so they had to tap dance for 10 minutes in this. You didn't get it and it was the longest 10 or 15 minutes of my life. But yeah, I think that's that same feeling I felt like when I went over there. It's just this piece where, like this is the thing I have to do and you're like a hundred percent sure, cause I think a lot of things you take in information and you're kind of unsure or you're not sure, because the second and third order effects are impacting other people, but there's certain things where it just clicks and you absolutely know.

Speaker 2: 25:04

It almost sounds like as you're describing it. It was like a calm and an activation at the same time.

Speaker 1: 25:10

Yeah, yeah, I could say activation, absolutely how you like, perked up.

Speaker 2: 25:13

Even just talking about your voice, got this energetic tone, your posture, and it was like you were at peace, you were calm but you were activated, you lit up around. This is a calling, this is an opportunity. Might not be the rest of my life, but this is my opportunity, right here and now. And it's so interesting to see how you sensed into that very feeling, into your whole being, just by going back to that memory and talking about this work that you get to do now.

Speaker 1: 25:38

Yeah, seven years. In the first ones I got up, I went through the motions and like it's again cliche, but like I love getting up out of bed and going and, you know, taking care of people because I love helping people. I can't do the blood or needles because I'll be on the floor, but now I get that chance to be that second. You know line directly behind that, putting the supplies in providers' hands and things like that. So it's amazing. It's a perfect thing for me. I love it. There's fires every day and there's literally never a dull moment in the hospital. There is always something going on.

Speaker 2: 26:10

That's true, and I hope for a moment to you know, break that third ball and invite the listeners, if they didn't catch that tonal change, or the viewers, if you didn't catch that change in Nate's tone, if you didn't notice his body change, the way, his whole being changed, even that voice tone, if you didn't notice it, go ahead and jump back and listen before, and then listen when he started talking about how connected this job was for him and how it was the right thing at the right time and the right opportunity. And that one chance only, as you sense into that, it's an opportunity to stop and say where are those things in my life and what does that tell me about who I am now, who I'm becoming, where I belong, where I'm going, and just notice what, that calm activation, what is that for you? Or maybe it's a different sensation you have, but I think that's just a nice opportunity to note that that transformation happened right in the middle of this episode.

Speaker 1: 27:03

It happened right here I'm going to have to go back and watch it myself. So we'll move into the main theme. The first one the power of connecting with the wisdom and the body, heart and mind. I love stories, so I'm going to ask for a couple different stories. So can you share a story about a time when listening to your body, heart or mind helped guide you to a better decision?

Speaker 2: 27:24

I have one from just last week. It's a small one, but I think it's the smallest things that tell us the most about life. I mean, we can think about these big, epic things like the job change that's huge and there's a lot in there or major life changes, marriages, divorce, death, birth, all of those things. Our brains notice those because they're substantial. What we often don't notice are the small little everyday things that are the real keys to living with more peaceability, living with more feeling of success, stability, productivity.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Just last week my parents were here visiting. They live about 3,000 miles away so we only see each other once or twice a year and I love my family. They are amazing humans but we don't live near each other so we don't have a natural rhythm all the time. And they're at my house so they're off their game, right. They're not always feeling very comfortable. It's not their bed, it's not. You know they don't have their favorite tea or soda or pillow or you know all those creature comforts. And it's easy when you're out of your context to get maybe more irritable, tired, bored, frustrated and annoyed. You know just feelings that you may not always feel so much. And likewise, when you invite people into your home. It changes the rhythm of your home and I used to be of the sort of mindset that my parents don't see them all that often. They live 3000 miles away and so when they're here, we have to spend as much time together as possible and always be together. And more is more is, more is more, and that's how I had always operated. And I would start to elevate my anxiety a little. I would start to like, but I wouldn't always notice it, and then it'd be like just hang on, just get through, even though we want to enjoy the time. You know, it accumulates and it escalates and inevitably a snarky remark, a flip comment, some sarcasm or even a flat out like leave me alone, you know. And then you go into a cycle. I feel bad, I don't see these people I love very often I need to make up for it, and the cycle just repeats over and over.

Speaker 2: 29:18

This time when they visited, I have really incorporated a lot of what we call somatic practice into my life. It's basically just things you do to intentionally be connected with your body. It's not any like you know. It's not as complicated as it sounds when you say somatic.

Speaker 2: 29:33

It might be something as simple as 10 minutes of yoga or five minutes of a mindfulness activity, and so I had a couple of things on the calendar that I had signed up to do over Zoom that were somatic related, and one of them was the first full day that my parents were here, and I did that first thing in the morning, and by the end of the day I realized I never had, I never had that irritability, never once.

Speaker 2: 29:55

And it didn't even occur to me that by maintaining one hour for myself in the morning, doing something for me, physically in my body and my somatic practice evened me out. That one hour for me meant I don't know how long we were awake after that. The next 12, 13 hours were much richer by taking that one hour for what I needed than well, I shouldn't do this thing because my parents are here and then forcing my way through. So that's my very real life, very recent story about listening to the wisdom of my body and doing what I need first so I can be more quality with the people I'm with and doing what I'm doing.

Speaker 1: 30:31

Yeah, that's a perfect example of we talk about you know, taking care of yourself first. We use the example of the oxygen mask on the airplane or pouring from a cup. You can't pour from an empty cup. So I think that's a good real life example and I think we learn the most and remember the most from real life examples. You can read books, you can do whatever, but when it happens in front of you, it always just solidifies more and you remember that. So that's awesome. The next question is how can someone begin to tap into the wisdom of their whole self while still feeling, while life feels chaotic or overwhelming, which I feel like life is pretty overwhelming.

Speaker 2: 31:09

Well, no one's going to like the answer. It's the effort, temptation, fullness, and we all say it's inevitable. All of my clients go yeah, yeah, I know I should, but and the reality is that this is how I put it quite frequently, if you feel like your mind is too full to be mindful, it's because you're not being mindful. It's a practice, right? So you know you want to develop muscle tone. You don't develop muscle tone by doing one going to the gym one day and then you're not swole after one day. Right, you have to practice. You have to build those muscles over time to build those up.

Speaker 2: 31:50

Your brain is an organ that acts like a muscle. It has to be trained and an untrained brain will wander. Whether you have ADHD or not, it will feel like it. It will wander. You know the squirrel, the shiny object. Your brain will go there. Untrained Mindfulness is the easiest way to train your brain and it's not hard. Except it feels like it's hard because we have a little bit of a myth around mindfulness. We tend to think oh well, real meditation is when you can just turn your brain off and sit there and not have any thoughts, in quietness for two hours.

Speaker 2: 32:22

Anybody that follows Dan Harris's work will note that he has a two and a half hour a day meditation practice. That's great. Maybe someday I'll get there Many days for me. Five minutes, I just shoot for five minutes, and you know what? My brain is not still and quiet for five minutes, and actually Harris talks a lot about that in his work as well.

Speaker 2: 32:43

So many things will flow through your brain. The whole point is to swipe left. So when something comes in your brain, just swipe it left. Something else comes in your brain, swipe it left or right, I don't care. Swipe it back, swipe it up, I don't care where you swipe it, just swipe it. And as you practice, thoughts come in, thoughts go out, thoughts come in, thoughts go out. And then sometimes thoughts come in. They hang out here for a while I forgot. Now I gotta swipe it out. The more you do that, the more your brain will start to slow down and be stiller. It might never be completely, still it might. Different strokes, different folks Practicing that actually calms your brain down for a full 24 hours.

Speaker 2: 33:21

It gives you more clarity, it gives you more peaceability and your brain will slow down all of the things it's interpreting. So you make something like 35,000 decisions in a day, whether you know it or not, and your brain is going well. I got all these decisions snapping my fingers here, got to move them fast, got to make decisions fast. But actually if you slow your brain down, the automated decisions that need to be automated. Great, do those fast.

Speaker 2: 33:46

I often say you make a decision to put your underwear on before your pants every day and it's good to automate that, because if you have to think every day which direction do my underwear go, then you're either a supermodel or a wrestler. Most of us are not. We know the underwear is going on than the pants. So yes, automate that. But when you can slow your brain down, it gives you better decision making quality for the things you have to think about I'm hungry, do I eat the potato chips or the mixed nuts? And you can make those decisions at a better quality when your brain slows down and doesn't just go for the quick response.

Speaker 1: 34:20

So people are out there, they're listening, they say, oh, that sounds great, I'd love to start that. And then they begin to overthink, because I feel like this is what I would do. How do I sit? What do I sit on? What do I do? How do I so someone on their very first day? How do you just start?

Speaker 2: 34:37

Yeah, I don't care where you start. Yeah, I don't care where you start. I don't care how you start, just start, because you'll find it for yourself. That being said, we like instructions, so I'm just going to tell you have a seat somewhere reasonably comfortable. For some people that's on a pillow, cross-legged on the floor, for other people it's sitting in a chair.

Speaker 2: 34:55

You can lay down and do mindfulness. I actually don't recommend it because it's more likely to lead to sleep and kind of. The point most of the time is to actually work on training the brain, not just go to sleep although doing it at bedtime is helpful. But just have a seat, stack your spine as best you can, don't worry about perfection. Close your eyes or lower your eyes, set a timer, maybe even for one minute, maybe for five minutes, I don't know. Start small and just just do it One minute. Look, I did it. I didn't die. Maybe I could do it again tomorrow. And for some people, here's another great tip Do it in your car for two minutes before you go into work. Just sit in the seat of your car, turn everything off it's a cold day, keep your heat on, but you know the radio off and just sit and try to do it, and if you really can't get your brain around it, there are many other things, such as guided meditation, that can also be a really nice entry in.

Speaker 1: 35:44

Like Nike said, just do it, Just get out there, start swiping, come to peace. We'll move into the second theme of the day living more fully with ADHD. How has ADHD shaped the way you experience the world and what have you learned from it?

Speaker 2: 35:59

Well, it's the only way I see the world. So there's that, because we get one brain. But I think that the biggest thing is that coming to understand how my own brain works and working with others on understanding how their own brain works. For all of us it's just an exploratory process and an evolutionary process of tapping into what does and doesn't work for you. And, like I said before, my body is the biggest source of wisdom.

Speaker 2: 36:24

So in the past I wasn't tuned into my body well at all. Even when I played club sports I would train my body but I didn't really connect with it, I didn't really listen. And actually when you play sports you often try to learn to tune out parts of your body because you don't want to feel the pain right. But I started to learn that I could. I didn't know I was irritated until I was really irritated and then I might be really grumpy or whatever comes with that. And as I started to tap into my body, I started to know little signs and symptoms or signs and signals. I was a little bit, a little bit irritated, not a lot irritated, and once I could sense into that, I could start to make choices to release it or to dig in and follow it and find out. Am I carrying something with me? Are things accumulating for me, or is there something I just have to let go of? Or does it require me to pay attention to it so I can do something different? So the point of life right is not to eradicate all pain we can't but it's to use the discomforts of life to figure out what that's telling us in ourselves, in the same way that we do it really.

Speaker 2: 37:32

Naturally, when we enjoy something, we enjoy something, we do more of it. We enjoy caffeine. Most of us don't drink try coffee until we're a teenager and actually we don't even really like the taste of it. But from what we know we're all coffee drinkers because we like what caffeine does. So it's easy to do more of what we like. We tend to ignore the signals of things we don't like. But if we can stop and check in with those. But to use it in the sense of mining it for information on how I can live more in rhythm and aligned with what works for me.

Speaker 2: 38:17

So, like a lot of folks with ADHD, routine is not my friend. I don't like it. I loathe it. At first it's a little comfortable and then contempt. I don't like it. So this may resonate with other people who think they have ADHD or know they have ADHD. So I change. We were talking about mindfulness. I change my mindfulness practices because sitting in the same spot, still every day in the same way, I will just come to reject it and hate it. But if I change it up and I do a walking meditation or a guided meditation or whatever else, then I can stay with things more. So it's staying consistent. I'm meditating but I'm giving myself the opportunity for some variety within that to keep myself engaged.

Speaker 1: 39:01

Yeah, that makes sense. My wife actually just got diagnosed and something I thought was interesting. So this is what I wanted to ask earlier it's weird to me that when they try to diagnose which, like you said, not clinical, so no diagnosis, but it's interesting to me they sent home these questionnaires and different things to answer and all of them seem to have a negative connotation, like it's like you get distracted, you do this, but it's it's odd to me and so I'd like to ask, like can you highlight some of the things? Is there's like hyper focus and that can be used to, you know, get things done? And so it's odd to me. Where it's like on the clinical aspect, when they're talking to her, asking her questions, it's like all the negative, like shouldn't there be like another sheet that says I also do these things, like I hyper focus, so bad I could get, like you know, read a whole book in one sitting or something. But can you touch on some of the positive aspects instead of just making it seem like they're all negative?

Speaker 2: 39:53

Yeah. So I'll second that hyper focus and it can go either way. I've known people that have been like well, I spent six hours doing something that like didn't really bring a lot of productivity. They can also be very productive. Like I went into a hyper focus phase and like did a big overhaul and tidy in my office and now I am more calm and less agitated because my office look beyond my computer and the visual field has like books stacked crooked and notebook paper here and there. You know just that kind of thing, and I really got to lean in and hyper-focus in that and now I feel calmer in my workspace. So that's one of them.

Speaker 2: 40:40

Like I said before, we tend to be extremely creative. We are the creative solution people. We're not the people going. Well, when you have problem A, you use solution B when the problem goes. People that say you got problem A, we got 800 solutions, let's go get creative.

Speaker 2: 40:56

There's some folks out there that think that we were actually the brain design folks that were the foragers and the finders in previous ways of living, because we scan the environment a little differently and we can look for things a little bit differently and see things a little differently. So there is a lot of great stuff there. We also there's a piece around ADHD. Folks tend to be hypersensitive to feedback and can take positive feedback and interpret it not as positive but as a negative. You know, a teacher or an instructor might hand a paper back and say this is the best paper you've ever written and we're like that means my other papers were bad. And even just knowing that, what that means is that we're the folks programmed to notice the danger in the world and keep ourselves and others safe. That's a positive. We have to work on the mind messages that happen Right. But another positive is and this is a difference typically and again, no people are exactly the Gen Xers were in the diagnoses of ADHD because it was normed on white middle class boys when it was and it was, you know, not really understood until I believe, the late 70s. And then you know there was this prototypical we can all think of that, that boy in the class that we know that like couldn't wait for recess and was like, played every sport and was bouncing around the room. It was, it was normed on that type, so it's easy to identify.

Speaker 2: 42:31

It was more known as ADD at the time for women because of this like feedback thing, we actually can produce what people are looking for a little bit faster and a little more acutely. So that means let's take a school example you get feedback from a teacher that your paper wasn't as great. Maybe it was a B, not an A. Well, our sensitivity to a B is not as good of anA can turn on that focus and that drive to get better at the material and start producing better results. And then we get those A's and those commendations. We may not always hear it as such, but it happens. So for many women that includes, but those are a few of the ways that I know for myself, I know in my research and reading and I know in working with other women. These are some commonalities of some of the really helpful traits of living with this way that the brain can work.

Speaker 1: 43:40

That's perfect. We'll touch on the last theme breaking free. Okay. So what's one myth about having it all together? As a working mother, you'd love the challenge.

Speaker 2: 43:51

You're not perfect, sorry, and you won't be, that's.

Speaker 2: 43:55

OK signals, whether you have ADHD or not. If you are a working mom in our culture right now, in this Westernized culture, you think you have to be better tomorrow than you are today, and or better the next minute than you are this minute. And yes, it is true, you should always be striving for bettering yourself. But it's not the performance, it's not the being perfect, it's working on what's going on, the messages that are repeating inside of you that you might not even be hearing, that you need to listen to and work on reframing, dispelling, eradicating, reshaping all of that, because those messages that are playing in your head probably came from your childhood, probably weren't ones you chose but were given to you, and now they repeat on a loop and you may not even notice it sometimes.

Speaker 2: 44:51

That same client that I talked about with the katsugi piece one day she was like I have the silliest story to tell you and I don't know why, but I just have to tell you, and it was about watering her plant and spilling water on the floor and telling herself that she was careless that's just water on the hardwood floor, you just clean it up with a towel and you move on Right. But it turned on this recognition that she was telling herself she was careless. You know feeling fractured and broken to yeah, I can be carefree, which means sometimes they spill water on the floor and I can clean it up and it doesn't have to be a big deal. Right, let's put a little less pressure on ourselves, and part of that is working on those stories, those messages on loop that are in our head that we may not even know are there.

Speaker 1: 45:46

It's the smallest things, it seems like. I feel like there's a couple different episodes. I mentioned stories of people with guests that I know from you, know previous lives and whatnot, and I remember stories that you know seem insignificant, but I don't, like you said, I don't get to choose what's planted in there.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Okay, so let's try to. You do get to choose to get rid of it, though.

Speaker 1: 46:04

Get rid of it. Yeah, there of it. Yeah, there's the swiping right? Yeah, so we'll try to piece it all together.

Speaker 2: 46:16

So we went through three really good themes today, if listeners could take away one insider action from this conversation.

Speaker 1: 46:18

What would it be?

Speaker 2: 46:19

I think they can probably guess Meditate, work on a mindfulness practice or practices that can work for you. Slow down that brain because it'll be easier to hear what we just talked about, those negative messages that might be playing on a loop that you can choose to start letting go of and reshape and reform.

Speaker 1: 46:37

That's perfect. Well, thank you, Olivia, for coming out. Please provide feedback. The feedback makes this podcast even better. Drop your thoughts on questions or questions on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube or Buzzsprout and thank you for being part of the Mindforce journey. I love you all. See ya, Thank you you.