Rewriting Success for the Neurodivergent Mind with Melanie Branch

When life handed Melanie Branch lemons, she didn't just make lemonade—she built an empire.

Join me on Practical Growth, where Melanie, a business mindset coach and the co-founder of Neuro Spicy Academy, shares her riveting transformation. From the dark trenches of a negative mindset to the empowering light of energy healing and coaching, her journey is a testament to the profound impact of reprogramming our internal narratives.

Together, we dissect the critical role of mindset in achieving happiness, and how Melanie's approach is carving a unique path to success for those whose brains are wired a bit differently.

In a world that sometimes seems designed for the neurotypical, those of us with neurodivergent brains are crafting our own maps to productivity and self-advocacy.

This episode offers a beacon of hope for entrepreneurs who think differently, discussing the evolution of flexible systems tailored to our fluctuating capabilities. We celebrate the magic in mundane tasks, explore the impact of generational trauma on our behaviors, and advocate for relationships that empower, rather than drain.

Melanie helps me envision a future society that values authenticity in all its forms—a society where spontaneous connections enrich our lives and where being neurodivergent is not just accepted but celebrated.

Join us for an empowering exploration into the hearts and minds of those who are reshaping the definition of success.

Transcript

E.B. Johnson: 0:00

Welcome to the Practical Growth podcast with me, ebi Johnson. Author, nlpmp and cognitive reappraisal coach. This is the podcast created for people like you people looking for more, more health, more peace, more happiness. Each week, I explore a new topic in pop psychology and help you build a better life and better relationships. Join me for special guests, exciting ideas and practical advice that you can use to improve your life from the inside out. Let's get into it. Hello, hello, hello. It is me, ebi, your favorite podcaster, author and NLP coach. Back for another great episode and brace yourselves, because I am actually here today with a guest this week a really, really great guest. Her name is Melanie Brandt. She is a business mindset coach, the co-founder and COO of the Neuro Spicy Academy, and she is here to talk all things mindset, neurodivergence and what it means to really make something for yourself. Hello, melanie.

Mindset Melanie: 1:06

Hello Ebi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to embark on this journey with you.

E.B. Johnson: 1:13

Yes, I'm so excited to have you and really excited to chat, like I said, about all things overcoming overcoming trauma, overcoming the obstacles that come with being neurodivergent and really creating something for yourself in the world, Because that's something that you've done really, really well. You've done the Neuro Spicy Academy. You're this incredible coach. You've got these huge platforms. I know I've learned a ton from you, so I'm excited to have you here.

Mindset Melanie: 1:36

I'm so excited to be here, and I love nothing more than hearing the phrase you're right, or?

E.B. Johnson: 1:41

you were right, so you can just keep that coming.

Mindset Melanie: 1:44

I'll pay you later, yeah.

E.B. Johnson: 1:48

Cool. Well, let's just get right into it. Let's just start right at the beginning. What's your background? How did you end up here, of all things like helping people with mindset and intuition and you do all kinds of energy work, and how did you? How did that happen for you?

Mindset Melanie: 2:04

Well, the short answer is trauma the long answer is also trauma, so we can't really dive in anywhere.

Mindset Melanie: 2:14

Essentially my whole life I knew that on some level, I knew that I have a very big energy and I have a very big effect on people, whether I wanted to or not, and like many people have experienced, in 2020, at the height of the shutdown, when the world stopped and we were able to catch our breath and evaluate and be like what am I doing? My mom also died in April of 2020 after an 18 month battle with stage four head of neck cancer, which really and I may get some flak for this took a lot of weight off my shoulders and was the breaks that I was. I had been pumping, but this was finally like hey, stop, take a look. What role do you have to play right now if this is now over? Like what is really important to you and all that.

Mindset Melanie: 3:05

So I found TikTok. I found energy healing. I found I had found mindset back in 2018, while I was still working at a very busy restaurant that will not be named. Yeah, and I actually started looking into mindset because my general manager, who's only a few years older than me, told me kind of in passing, very nonchalantly, it was actually really hurtful. He said. You know, you're like the second most negative person here, all of us managers have talked.

Mindset Melanie: 3:36

And you're like the second and the one. The girl who was number one was so bad that I was like, oh my God, I'm second to that person.

E.B. Johnson: 3:45

And it's a very busy restaurant.

Mindset Melanie: 3:46

It has a hundred front of staff house members a hundred back of house.

E.B. Johnson: 3:50

It was a big operation, big operation.

Mindset Melanie: 3:53

So it was incredibly hurtful and I was like there has to be a reason that I have anxiety all the time and my anxiety presents as irritability and anger. So I had started looking into mindset from 2018, 2019, 2020,.

Mindset Melanie: 4:08

the world stopped and I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to start a business, I'm gonna have to be a mindset coach for all these other people out here that are on a spiritual journey and can't figure it out. Because I'm also finding out that I'm a psychic and that I can use my energy for healing other people and like all. So I really just said all right rabbit hole and I jumped.

E.B. Johnson: 4:28

And doors box.

Mindset Melanie: 4:29

I really did, and it's never closed since ever.

E.B. Johnson: 4:34

That's incredible. Did you? You mentioned that when your mom passed away in 2020, that that was a huge weight off of you? Was it just from the care of her, or did you have quite a tense relationship with her before the head and neck cancer?

Mindset Melanie: 4:46

I think you're a psychic too. It was a lot of things I have. There's a lot of animosity unspoken animosity between me and my family, which was my dad, my mom and my sister. So we've always been a family of four, pretty close, tight net family, like you know, with your history and narc abuse and that sort of stuff. The triangulation and all of the other really unhealthy family toxic dynamics that could happen is what I was a part of and I didn't even know that I was a part of all of it until these past couple of years, actually like post 2020. So, without knowing it, when I met my husband at 19 and we got married when I was 20 and he took me across the country because he was in the Navy and my parents didn't like him and all this other sort of stuff, cut to 17 years later we are still married very happily, not gonna want to say it's our 17 wedding anniversary Happy anniversary and thank you.

Mindset Melanie: 5:43

And it's not the same for my dad or my mom or my sister. They had all been in multiple marriages. They were all you know. I was their scapegoat and that sort of thing, but I didn't know any of it. I didn't know any of it. I see this with my clients all the time.

E.B. Johnson: 5:58

I had no idea that my family dynamic was not healthy.

Mindset Melanie: 6:02

I had no idea Like. I knew that I didn't feel great and I knew that I felt guilty and shamed for things all of the time, but I just thought that was the normal. I didn't have anything else to compare it against. So when she passed, it was a very tense 18 months she got diagnosed by going to the ER cause she didn't have insurance. After getting her teeth looked at for a sore that she had in her mouth. That was stage four cancer.

Mindset Melanie: 6:28

So like the cycle that had been in my family of women not going to the doctor and women not taking care of themselves and then that manifesting physically as in the form of cancer, you know she was full blown. So for 18 months we weren't allowed to say the word hospice. We it was mom's getting treatment and we all play our part to get her treatment. I had to fight to get her insurance. I had to fight the doctors to get done what we wanted done. My dad took care of the every day and my sister took care of, like, paperwork and crying. If we needed something from somebody and I was the yellow, she was the crier. So we all had our unspoken role to play. Right, right, I'm raising two sons, two dogs, a husband who's in the Navy and in and out all the time. That's the nature of the fucking job and, like I, just I was an expert at being everything for everyone except myself. Are you the youngest?

E.B. Johnson: 7:25

by any chance I am. I am Funny how that happens, how the youngest is always the scapegoat, so so interesting, so interesting. So what then? Like right after your mom's passing, we're obviously in the middle of the pandemic and the world shut down, which was like we all kind of had to face ourselves in the mirror. But also it was really scary, right Cause it was the unknown for everybody. That must have been almost like a like a black hole closing in on itself, like a star collapsing on itself. How did you navigate that all at one time?

Mindset Melanie: 7:54

I love to say it and I hate to say it TikTok really helped. Yeah, tiktok is a great source of information in the form of a guiding light, right? So if you see something on TikTok and it sparks curiosity in your soul and you go, okay, let me start researching, right? So I'm not telling anybody to get all of your information directly from TikTok and assume that it's all going to be fresh and correct and great.

Mindset Melanie: 8:15

What I am saying is because algorithms are so incredible. We can use them to our advantage and say, okay, what is it that I need to know? So TikTok was really really great. Just literally. Research, research and development. I'm reading all of the ADHD what do you call not documents? Dyslexia helped me. All the studies and the research, all the studies. It's always studies that I can't remember. So I read all the studies. I take everything with a grain of salt. I say, okay, well, I didn't find out I was ADHD until I was 22. I didn't find out I was autistic until I was 36. So let's see if they're only studying little white boys and they're seeing this, this and this and them, of course, they're missing it in us.

E.B. Johnson: 8:58

Yeah, 100%. They weren't even looking at us, we weren't even on the read-on.

Mindset Melanie: 9:02

And then, to this day, there's not enough research out there for adults with neurodivergence. Yes, I get it, let's help the children. Help the children, but also like, fuck these kids right, help me, I'm out here, you can help me, then I can help them and. I can stop the cycle. And so we can help generations to come, if you help me, whereas if you have a fucking six-year-old, what are we doing?

E.B. Johnson: 9:27

Yeah, I agree, 100% agree. Somebody has to hand the torch to the kids. That's one of the big missing pieces. I feel like what was the biggest kind of like first big obstacle or hurdle that you kind of hit the wall after all of that, when you were doing this healing and self-discovery and realizing you were autistic and you were psychic and you had all these abilities to help people?

Mindset Melanie: 9:50

It was the removal of friends and family that I thought would be around forever.

E.B. Johnson: 9:56

Wow, yeah, that's huge and that's not talked about enough either, because it's all just like once you're healed, everything's going to be great. Once you're like doing the right thing by yourself, everything's going to be great. But it's really lonely, it's really lonely, it's really lonely.

Mindset Melanie: 10:09

It's so lonely. We were talking about this before we logged on today for this, but I was out trick-or-treating with my youngest and his friends, so on average 14-year-olds right Couple girls, couple boys, 13, 15, 14, that were caught on a bunch 14-year-olds and I took a lot of notes while we were trick-or-treating last night and was like I'm going to be able to write about this to my email list because there are some lessons that I have learned here in these two hours. But it's very apparent and evident that 80% of the population is never going to become self-aware. I heard that on TikTok multiple times and I went I mean that's a frustrating, staggering number, but I believe it.

E.B. Johnson: 10:47

Yeah, yeah, so frustrating. Well, I think when you come from narc abuse and family manipulation and things like that, it becomes almost easier to believe because you've kind of seen the darkness, as it were. So you can kind of choke down the truth a little bit easier.

Mindset Melanie: 11:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know, I mean we get through it because I want to live as fantastic a life as possible.

E.B. Johnson: 11:12

I don't want to be in pain. Do you know the normal amount?

Mindset Melanie: 11:14

of pain is zero.

E.B. Johnson: 11:16

I heard that the other day and it blew my mind. I genuinely thought that, especially as a woman, that I was just always supposed to be in a little bit of pain. And then, knowing that I have endometriosis as well, I was like, oh, you're supposed to just be racked with pain all the time. You should just be having to fully medicate yourself because you're in pain all the time. Not normal, not normal.

Mindset Melanie: 11:35

No.

E.B. Johnson: 11:35

No, completely normal.

Mindset Melanie: 11:37

So the research that I do, the research and development that I do to create systems and strategies to benefit the neurodivergent, chronically ill woman, afab individual that runs on a 28 day cycle instead of the 24 hour cycle that our universe is set up for right now, right Points everything towards the physical manifestation of neurodivergence in the body.

E.B. Johnson: 12:03

Yeah, yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 12:05

So the people, so everything we experience mentally and emotionally will turn into something in the body. This is not revolutionary.

E.B. Johnson: 12:12

There's all sorts of Eastern, Western, it's all over the world, right Evidence? Yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 12:18

Yes. So I think to myself when I go over the fact that I have ADHD, pda, autism, endometriosis, polycystical variant syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, mast cell activation syndrome, pots, ehlers-stanlos, cptsd, and there's a few others that I always forget, yeah, I gas on myself first of all. I go there's no way, you have all that and I go, ma'am, there's no way you don't have all that.

Mindset Melanie: 12:44

Based on all of the research you've done on yourself, you have all this and probably more. And then, secondly, I just think to myself thank God it's not autoimmune, because I never or hold anything in and I just was known as the Yeller my whole life. So it's like I mean some things. We can be very grateful for a lot of things, even when it feels like they're all piling on top of us.

E.B. Johnson: 13:05

Yeah, 100% Within that you were, because you mentioned chronic illness and stuff, and this is a big one that I always talk about with my clients, who mostly come from the same background right Like neurodivergent, tons of trauma on top of you know, just the trauma that comes with being neurodivergent, and then chronic illness, and so what I push a lot so much is self care and what I've really learned from you especially is self accommodation, like making accommodations for yourself on a personal level, on a professional level, all of the above. So can you kind of speak to the power of that, that combination of caring for yourself and accommodating for your needs?

Mindset Melanie: 13:39

Yeah, first and foremost, I want everybody to say to themselves it's not anxiety and depression, those are not the root causes. I'm not going to get a pill or a CBT therapy. That's just going to change me and I'm never going to have these problems again.

Mindset Melanie: 13:57

No, yeah you may be, you may have anxiety and you may have depression, but if you're hanging out here with us right now, you're neurodivergent. You're neuro. Type is the root of the challenge. Okay, that means executive function. There's Google. There's eight executive functions emotional regulation, impulse control. Working memory is my hardest one. That's why I write things down all the time and I forget what I'm saying all the time and I just blank out and come back and there's word yeah. So there's, there's so many things that we are fabulous and amazing and fantastic at, and then so many things that we're not good at. Yeah, right, it's hard to get in the shower.

Mindset Melanie: 14:37

I get it, I get it.

E.B. Johnson: 14:40

There's a lot that goes on in the shower and I'm going to be like rehashing or rehersing the whole list that you got to get through. Yeah, it's a thing, it's a process, it's a journey, it's hard to even brush my teeth.

Mindset Melanie: 14:51

It's like okay. So I got to make sure I do it before I put my face on, because then I'm just going to wipe all my lips. I got to make sure that I do all this while I'm doing this and that a lot of planning, priorities I'm organizing, organization, self control. It's a real bitch, but if you sit me down in front of my computer when I'm in a flow state and I'm super, super creative and I'm working on a new program, I'll be there for hours until I go oh my God, I really have to pee and I haven't eaten in eight hours, what the hell right.

Mindset Melanie: 15:14

So when we understand this is who you are there's, we can change your mindset. We can make you a more positive, productive person, but we're not going to change the fact that you need to lay down in the middle of the day during your luteal phase of your period, or else you're going to murder everybody around you and your inner voice is going to be real mean.

E.B. Johnson: 15:31

Yeah, very mean, very mean.

Mindset Melanie: 15:36

Very mean. She's not nice up there, Because she was not. She was created by people that were not nice to us.

E.B. Johnson: 15:42

Yeah, yeah. I always say she's tied into that limbic system as well, that little primitive part of the brain, that old, ancient, nasty, lizard brain as well, which loves to play tricks on you and convince you that the world is falling apart.

Mindset Melanie: 15:54

Always. You know. Somebody once said and this just resonates with me so deeply your brain will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.

E.B. Johnson: 16:07

Absolutely Every time. That's your baseline. If that's what you've come to see as normal, that's where you're going to gravitate always, even subconsciously. You know you'll. You'll make choices, choose people, places, things, experiences that will put you right back into that chaos, yep.

Mindset Melanie: 16:21

Absolutely, and when you're a people pleaser or an appeaser or a fauner whatever it was that you were forced into to keep yourself alive and safe. I said this the other day at the Norris Picey Academy. We're doing our weekly deep dive and I said, listen, we're going in season where you're about to be tripped and triggered by all these people that are supposed to love you the most and all of this work that you've been doing on yourself, going to feel like you take 20 steps back, because I'll tell you right now. If my dead mom showed up here right now, right next to me, and we were hanging out for the afternoon, I promise you the first thing I would tell her is how shitty all of her favorite actresses from her soap operas look now and how they got terrible work done. And I don't even watch your soap operas, but I know that's my end right and I know, even after all the work that I've done, that to be accepted by this person, I have to go these rounds.

E.B. Johnson: 17:07

Perform, perform, perform. Yeah, 100%. And this is such a bad time of year because I don't think people understand that they're that trauma which, first of all, is literally physically ingrained in your nervous system. It changes your nervous system, not just your brain, but like the composition, the physical composition of the rest of your nervous system. And at this time of year, when you've spent, you know, 20 years, some people say like for me, I'd spent 20 bad Christmases, 20 Christmases with my family, which were always hell. Things would get violent, stuff would get broken. It was terrifying. It was a terrifying time of year.

E.B. Johnson: 17:37

So this time of year, the closer it gets to Christmas, the more I am tense. You see my shoulders go up and I can feel myself getting anxious. And social settings, and all this because I'm looking for the boogeyman. My nervous system is essentially looking for the boogeyman, like waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so that self care and that self accommodation, so important at this time of year, like majorly and you've got to like comfort your physical nervous system. It can't just be about changing your mindset.

Mindset Melanie: 18:02

That's so funny. Last night I was helping my 13 year old get ready and he was just going to be. We were just going to do skull, right. So I got skull makeup, I got a book it was really easy, just black and gray and white, right. And I put all of the white on very lightly onto his face and then I started on the black and I just the light went out of him and I just went what's what? What is going? If you can't tell me, then who are you going to tell what's going on?

Mindset Melanie: 18:28

And he just welled up and welled over and I was like, oh, and I was like, wow, do you want to take this makeup off? We don't have to do this. I wear my own makeup. I don't need you to wear makeup. Whatever you want to do, like I just don't even know.

Mindset Melanie: 18:39

And it was you know the panic and the overwhelm and the emotions. And I looked right at him and I said, well, use this makeup stuff, this makeup remover. Go in the bathroom, take this off. It's not worth it. We'll figure out what you're going to be. So he went as a director because he was wearing the same outfit. Oh yeah, I just put on a flip board and I said if you're an acting anyway, do your director. If anybody asks you're on the edge of adulthood, that's what the fuck you are. And I looked right at my husband and I said this is because he didn't close the circuit of trauma last Halloween when he got super overstimulated, really far away from home, and him and my husband had to turn around and take him home and he never closed the circuit.

Mindset Melanie: 19:15

So his body is going right back into the last time we did this.

E.B. Johnson: 19:19

It was terrible.

Mindset Melanie: 19:20

I scored it as terrible and it was awful and it's all new, and so we closed the circuit this Halloween, thank God, but good. If that was me and my mom was putting my makeup on at 13 years old and I started saying I don't want to or started crying about it, it would have been a fucking fight 100%.

E.B. Johnson: 19:38

I would have got told stop crying. What are you crying about? You're so ungrateful. You're a brat.

Mindset Melanie: 19:42

I'll give you a reason to cry 100%.

E.B. Johnson: 19:44

Yeah, it's just makeup. It's just Halloween makeup. It's just Halloween makeup. Oh, bless him. See, I love, I love that. I love hearing that there are parents breaking the cycle because it's you know, we both spend so long, you know, spend so much time with people who have just been so hurt again by the people that are supposed to love them the most that they're supposed to be able to love and trust the most. So seeing that there are people doing the work and breaking the cycle is just so impressive to me, like that, because it's I know, I know how hard that must be, because it's so overstimulating being a parent in the first place. So kudos to you, thank you for that.

Mindset Melanie: 20:20

Well, with this time of year too, what I want people to remember is, if you go non-contact with anyone to protect your own mental health, protect your peace, protect your energy all of those things it does feel better, right, Because we know that interacting with these people dysregulates our nervous system and makes us go. You know, as the Brits say, mad in our head, and you know just, really, it does things that we don't need to put ourselves through.

E.B. Johnson: 20:48

But what?

Mindset Melanie: 20:48

people don't talk about is that there is an emptiness that is left that is indescribable, because you know that it is a combination of. You're missing a relationship that never existed, because you're missing a relationship where you idealized and and said, well, if they could just do this, if I could just make them do this, then it would be, they'd be a good parent or they'd be a good sibling, or they'd be the if I. So you're. You're mourning something that only existed in your brain. Yeah. You're mourning something that physically and mentally and emotionally hurt you, yeah, and you're mourning the fact that all these other people that you get to see out in the world get a relationship with their parent or get a relationship with their sibling.

Mindset Melanie: 21:29

They look forward to the holidays right and not because they did anything. Like they're just they, they have a good relationship. Like when TikTok puts a fucking video on my FYP. It says, oh I, just, your big sister loves you. I say your big sister can go suck a nut and you can get out of here and I'm not interested in this Exactly.

Mindset Melanie: 21:46

You got this one wrong buddy, you must not have been listening the past couple years, what are you doing Right, so that emptiness? It's like not even a it's? It's a duller ache than sadness, and I have a dead parent and I have an alive parent and the feeling that I have to both of them is so different but it's crushing either way.

E.B. Johnson: 22:06

Yeah, there's no, there's no good way out of it. You got to like pick your poison, as it were. With which, like which misery are you going to work through and kind of suck down and get on with it? You know, because that's it is what it is Ultimately. The end of the day, it is what it is. You can't make anyone do anything. How do you deal with that grief? Because for me I'm a big, I am a big proponent of literal kind of like, not funeral practices, but absolutely having some kind of physical process to your grief, to kind of make a physical representation of end of the journey, as it were. How do you process that grief of those relationships that should have been, could have been, will never be?

Mindset Melanie: 22:47

Well, I am an Aquarius Moon, so I am very good at intellectualizing a feeling and not really feeling it. Because, as an energy healer with a big aura emotional field, energetic field, that sort of thing it's I have a very big responsibility to responsibly feel my feelings. Because if I freak out about how scared I am about something or how worried I am about something, or anything like that, on anybody else, the only look I've ever gotten is full on fear of just like, oh my God, the person that is never scared of anything or never worried of anything is like worried now.

Mindset Melanie: 23:25

So if they're worried, I'm screwed, so I don't really I don't, and this this is not the best advice for everybody that's out there, right? This is very niche advice If it doesn't apply to you, don't take it.

Mindset Melanie: 23:37

If it doesn't resonate. But I have this deal worked out with my spirit guides where, like I have certain songs that'll play that are a message from certain people dead or alive, that sort of thing Because it makes me think of that person's like, okay, play this song if my mom's trying to get through, or play this song if you know my dad's thinking about me or anything like that, right?

Mindset Melanie: 23:59

So I get signs and messages all the time where I'm like, okay, cool, I know I have a sibling that is thinking about me in some way, shape or form and whether that's them checking up on my social media or that's them looking down at my phone number, trying to call and then not actually calling, not pulling a trigger on that, it's not for me to know, but it's. I get a reminder all the time of. Like you know, I'm not alone. Everything is always working out for me behind the scenes. It's beautiful, oh my God.

E.B. Johnson: 24:24

That's really beautiful.

Mindset Melanie: 24:25

Yeah, because there's so much if you think about, if you go to a play or you go to a movie or Downton Abbey is a really good example of this the people that are running the show behind the scenes and making sure that all the dots are, all, the eyes are dotted and the T's are crossed.

E.B. Johnson: 24:41

Yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 24:41

They're not letting you know of everything that's going on. No, because it's not your fucking business.

E.B. Johnson: 24:46

Yeah, 100%.

Mindset Melanie: 24:48

So I just don't allow myself to like experience a potentially bad scenario twice by rehearsing a potential bad outcome to something, because if it does happen, then now I had to go through it twice, yeah, and if it doesn't happen, I had to go through it once. I never even needed to.

E.B. Johnson: 25:09

That's a really important point, I think, because what I've seen a lot on TikTok, especially lately, is kind of what I call trigger content, which is meant to trigger you and put you in these really emotional states. And people like, oh, think about the time that this happened or this happened, and people doing like trigger journaling, and I don't know if people understand that your nervous system can also get addicted to being in those states over and over and over again. If you're constantly, you know, comes down to that rumination, right, you're constantly spiraling yourself down these super, super negative experiences, memories, thoughts, and they're overwhelming you and putting you back in those emotional states. Your body gets used to those cortisol spikes that happen and those low dopamine levels and low serotonin levels and all that kind of stuff. And that's super, super important that yet you get it, you see it, you mark the mistake and you don't put yourself back in that situation, that experience again as much as possible.

Mindset Melanie: 25:59

Yeah, and I just think about it, joe Dispens. It talks about this real good, about like, if we're creating our life or creating our personality, we're creating our future at all times. What good is reminiscing about anything from the past? And because I don't hear the thing too, I hate to be the one to make you confront some things because I'm not confrontational, but you definitely have to confront things. When you're around me, it's hard to be my friend but, like, nobody ever sits around talking about the good times, how many times you've been sitting around a group of women and they go, that one of them starts in with their birth story and how terrible it is and they all go? Oh, my God, I'm so excited to tell you the terrible story about my C-section of mine. Nobody cares. First of all, nobody gives a shit. I don't care about your past. I really don't care about your past. Tell me how you got here. We're like I don't need you to go through any of those fucking stories that I'm not gonna learn anything from.

Mindset Melanie: 26:54

No, no, no pain Olympics. Thank you very much, and it's literally dragging you down so much energetically. Yeah, that's it Like if people could see their vibration and their frequency coming off of them and then see what it does. When you go into one of those fucking old stories, it's not going to help lift anybody and not bring anybody like.

E.B. Johnson: 27:14

You'd see how much of a waste of time it is and energy yeah and I try to stress as well, because I don't think I've got so many clients and I used to do this as well I thought if I just go back into that memory, that space, that negativity, for long enough and I do it enough and I just pick at the details enough, then I can think through every detail and it won't, it won't hurt anymore or it will never, ever, ever happen to me again.

E.B. Johnson: 27:36

But I just got to keep being in that negativity to kind of transmute it. And that was not really the case at all. And it does more damage because literally when you're in that negative state, like the neurons and the synapses in your brain don't fire the way they're supposed to, they don't connect the way they're supposed to, they get frantic and they miss wire and they miss connect. And that's where we get all the anxiety and the hopelessness and the depression and yada, yada, yada, all the physical responses that come along with that. And I just feel like we're kind of sometimes sliding back into that culture of like let's wallow in the negativity versus making change happen, which probably really comes back to that point that you made, that some people just don't want to change, they just want to wallow in it.

Mindset Melanie: 28:15

Yeah, victim Mindset is really gratifying in the moment.

E.B. Johnson: 28:19

Yeah, so how did you make that shift? How did you kind of? I know that you said accommodations.

Mindset Melanie: 28:24

I was overstimulated 24 motherfucking seven. I was over stimulated. I apologize to any single person that I ever interacted with between 2020 and 1986. When I was born, I was an over. I was a chronically overstimulated, overwhelmed woman and my senses? I'm a very sensitive girl. I know there's a bit of a conversation happening on social media between autistic and highly sensitive right, so I'm not getting into that debate because whatever label makes you understand that you are a normal zebra and not a weird horse I'm fucking happy with. I'll use. I'll say it like the name that you want to use, like the fucking pronouns you want to use. I don't care, yeah.

E.B. Johnson: 29:09

You tell me what?

Mindset Melanie: 29:10

it is that you're dealing with and what you're overcoming. I'm happy for it, but I have to wear headphones 24 seven. So these headbands are headphones. They have little ears in them so I can listen to my phone. We live in a 1300 square foot home, so my husband watches his TV with I said, his TV watch as the living room TV. Okay, we're not that house, right, but he watches the TV with his headphones on most of the time because there's sounds of like zombie sounds or shooting sounds and stuff like that to give them mad anxiety. Yeah, so everybody in my house has headphones. Sunglasses are a must when I go out into the world and I don't want to make eye contact with people. I also have a variety of glasses ranging in size and thickness and whatnot, to use as a little shield while I'm out and about smells. I can't wear perfumes or anything like that anymore, but that's also part of my endocrine hormone chip that I got going on.

Mindset Melanie: 30:03

But I just, I really, really really take fucking care of myself.

E.B. Johnson: 30:09

I love that, because that's not. I don't think that that's pushed, it's. The self-care has kind of been watered down to this idea of like you go and get a massage and then you go and hang out with your girlfriends and you have a nice lunch, and it's so much more than that, especially the accommodation part, which doesn't get included enough, I don't think.

Mindset Melanie: 30:25

Yeah. So if you think about designing accommodations that are going to work for you, what works best for me and my clients is starting from the goal and reverse engineering everything. Right. So if my goal is to go to bed without makeup on my face, sometimes that means that I strictly took the makeup off, didn't wash or do anything else, but just make up, wipe, bang, bang, boom, got into the bed and then, on high energy days, it's a multi-step skincare system and medical tape and all these other things to you know, not ever get the Botox, but it's going to happen soon, yeah, anyways, I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I'm going into the night slowly, but it really just like what is it that you want to get done? Yeah, and then, what is the bare minimum way you can get that done, and what is the fucking maximum way you can get it?

Mindset Melanie: 31:14

done and I want everybody right now listening to take your 100% and never do that again, never perform at that level ever again.

E.B. Johnson: 31:21

Don't need to. It's too much.

Mindset Melanie: 31:22

Don't need to. It's impossible to sustain and it will not go well. So I want you to think about 50%, performing at 50% as often as possible and then being okay with anything underneath it.

E.B. Johnson: 31:36

Oh, I love that. That is my kind of lifestyle.

Mindset Melanie: 31:41

That's what I struggle with I struggle with that. You can't perform this level of self-care if you're still trying to take care of everybody else.

E.B. Johnson: 31:47

No, you can't. You absolutely cannot. You don't have the bandwidth for it. You're just not built for that.

Mindset Melanie: 31:52

And it's not your responsibility. You know what? I don't make people feel comfortable around me anymore. Oh, I love that.

E.B. Johnson: 31:57

I love hearing that.

Mindset Melanie: 31:59

You don't have to feel comfortable around me If you said something stupid. I'm just going to stare at you, right. Plus, I miss read things all the time anyway, between like just social awkwardness and not understanding what anybody's actually doing, most of the time to like just dyslexia I read. You can see this in my TikTok stories all the time. I'll do the little fun filters where it's like. I did a Care Bear one the other day that was like oh yeah, I saw that.

Mindset Melanie: 32:23

I read it the first 10 times as that your secrets are safe with me. I'm the secret Care Bear and your secrets are safe for me. What it actually said is I'm going to tell your secrets to all of my friends.

E.B. Johnson: 32:35

I do that all the time. I do that all the time I misread that.

Mindset Melanie: 32:38

I had to go in comment. I was like I read it wrong. I'm so sorry if you guys read it right. I was like bloating about it, but I read it wrong.

E.B. Johnson: 32:45

Yeah, how would that have made you feel like five years ago if you had made that kind of huge mistake on your platform? Yeah, I was deleted it.

Mindset Melanie: 32:54

Yeah, do you know how many times I send emails out to my list and it doesn't even have the fucking link in it. I did Like I'm like hey, right here and I didn't even link the link. Like whoops.

E.B. Johnson: 33:08

I think that's why you've been so helpful for me, because it's you know, obviously, the ADHD revelations that. That happened to me during COVID and I'm now going through the other stuff. But with that ADHD, when we're inspired to act, it almost feels like we have to do all the things as good, as big as possible. Is that grandiose? Like I can't just become a mathematician, I have to work for NASA. You know like it becomes like an extreme goal and you don't have to do that. You can just slow down and do the simplest thing and it's you still feel just as much like achievement, fulfillment, like you did something, pride in yourself, all of that. You can literally just do the smallest thing each day to move toward your goal. It doesn't have to be a huge, grandiose leap over the edge every time.

Mindset Melanie: 33:50

Yeah, and when we think in terms of small, manageable, sustainable steps or the big, gigantic leaps? Andrew Huberman talks a lot about this on his podcast. He's got two episodes on dopamine not just two episodes on. Adhd. He's got two episodes on dopamine and one of them. The best news about dopamine by far to me was that your brain administers the same amount of dopamine when you think about going to get the coffee as when you deliver the coffee to the taste buds, because the brain wants you to go get it.

Mindset Melanie: 34:25

Yeah, yeah, and those that it has to do that, so when we think about raising and this is what I do with most of my clients and this is what all my programs are really based on. We want to raise that baseline dopamine.

E.B. Johnson: 34:37

Mm-hmm.

Mindset Melanie: 34:38

Because if you have ADHD and autism because the likelihood that you have only one is very low and the likelihood that you have both is very high I'm actually even looking into Tourette's now because I'm getting so unmasked and that's it goes. 8-hg autism, tourette's, and I don't know what the next one is but I'm sure I'll be there soon too. But if you, our dopamine receptors don't even work properly.

Mindset Melanie: 35:03

So, even if you take the Madison that's supposed to make the dopamine and the norepinephrine and all those other chemicals go, they don't have anywhere to land a lot of the time.

E.B. Johnson: 35:13

That's yep, 100%. Yeah, my psychiatrist go ahead, no, go ahead.

Mindset Melanie: 35:18

No. Tell me, will the people that teach you to bite the eat the frog first or like, do the bad thing first? I teach you to build and sack that dopamine. Go get the ice cream first, then let's go home and work. Yeah, well, that is it.

E.B. Johnson: 35:30

Give you the juice. Give you the juice. Yeah, give you the juice. I had a psychiatrist who gave me um lemon balm, told me to get lemon balm tablets which I took at night, which, a, helped me with sleep but B what he told me is that the way um lemon balm works is it actually helps your brain absorb more. So basically, helps more of the receptors turn on and absorb more of the like serotonin and dopamine and all these other things that you need to feel good and calm enough to sleep. So that might be something I give. I put a lot of my clients. I don't put them on it, but I recommend that to a lot of my clients because it's helped me immensely. And, again, it helps with the actual receptors being able to absorb more, which is a huge problem for us.

Mindset Melanie: 36:12

Yeah, um, I actually. This is another controversial hot take and again, you have to do your own research on your own self, right?

Mindset Melanie: 36:18

I have an energic optimization guide that teaches you how to get the most powerful and deeply moving data on yourself for 60 days. It takes 60 days of data on yourself, 60 days of tracking. How do I feel in the morning? How do I feel in the afternoon? How do I feel at night? How do I feel after I eat this food? How do I feel after I hung up this person? How do I feel after I work this amount of times? We really need 60 days of data, but once we get that, we can really start seeing where the fucking drains are. Yep, that you didn't even know was hitting you like a ton of bricks and taking all of your effort and energy away from you and all your ability to focus. Yeah, and we can really like narrow in on what is my biggest struggle.

Mindset Melanie: 36:56

One of my biggest struggles is sleep. I cannot fall asleep unless it's the middle of the day and it's my little afternoon nap 3 pm. I cannot fucking fall asleep. I don't know what it is. So I was doing research and there's a whole school of psychiatrists and mental professionals who talk about ADHD. Years don't fall asleep, they pass out.

Mindset Melanie: 37:16

And I said, well, when I'm tracking, what I notice is I'll get real tired and I'm listening to a meditation and I'm real tired and the meditation ends and then I go to like turn white noise on. And I'm up now and I went, so I have to listen to something or watch something and then just like float off into the night. So now I watch a show all night long on my phone in this wire contraption that sticks up in between me and my husband in the bed so that I can lay there and it moves to where I need it to be and I can lay there and I can fall asleep to my friends and then when I wake up to go pee, my friends are there and I don't have to. It can only be a show that, like you know through and through. So my shows are Veep, silicon Valley and Down Naby classics, and he can always tell when I'm watching Veep because I'm laughing.

E.B. Johnson: 38:02

Yeah oh my god, it's fucking. And all.

Mindset Melanie: 38:07

The only shows that I like are artistically coded just all of them, yeah all of them scream queens all like every time now I'm just like okay, I don't have to, I don't have to be scared of anything, I don't have to be worried about not falling back asleep, because now it's no longer about falling asleep, it's just about laying here and being comfortable with my friends that's beautiful, that's so much better, that's I have to do books, because it's the same thing, because I cannot touch my phone if I'm anywhere near an electronic, that's it.

E.B. Johnson: 38:29

I mean, I could put a tv on in the background, but it's books and it's something about it's. Well, it's the eye movement of reading that makes me pass out, and then I can just drop the book, essentially, or the candle, and fall over, because if I do anything else, that's it. My brain is back up, it's ready to go, it's looking for what it's supposed to do next yep.

Mindset Melanie: 38:47

So the good news is, if we were in caveman times, we would really be the bitches running the show let's get a time machine then, because this is too much. It's too much tell me what we would be, the ones that are like oh well, we slept for two days, now we're good for a couple of days. Let's go find the, the animal that we're gonna kill, and bring back and do all the fun shit that we want to go do and go talk to the other tribes and stuff.

E.B. Johnson: 39:11

Absolutely that would be us see, I've got so many theories on that and this won't make it into the podcast, but I've got a ton of theories on that because I'm also oh positive blood and oh blood is like old, anyway, it's a whole, it's a whole thing. But I have theories about our brains and our blood styles and this whole lineage of, like our brains still being connected to this primitive like go, go, go, do, do, do kind of thing your egg was in your mother's egg, in your grandmother's body.

Mindset Melanie: 39:37

I hate that. I hate that fact. So the trauma that your grandmother endured is imprinted and is something that your body can access. I've been doing a little research not a lot, because we can turn on different parts of our genes and stuff doing. I might not be using all the correct terms, but yeah, basically this is what you're given and you determine which part you activate yeah, pretty much, yeah, pretty much.

E.B. Johnson: 40:00

I think that's that they've been. They've doing a little bit, a bit. They've been doing research on the survivors and the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, the irish potato famine, a ton of other genocides that happened in different countries, and yeah, that shits with you basically forever. That is in your genes. If we all had enough money to go sit down and get our genes mapped, they could probably pick out the major traumas that our family lineage survived just on like looking at that, which is just why I saw there's a documentary on I think it's a document, I don't know anyways on why, culturally, black women talk shit about their kids and it's known culturally to be assigned that they're actually really good.

Mindset Melanie: 40:48

And that goes back to the slave trade days where the owner operator would walk by and say, oh, your son's getting pretty big now, he looks very strong. And she'd be like, oh, he's an idiot, he's a dumbass, he's got no brain, he's terrible, you don't want him. And now, hundreds of years later, that's still how they're talking about their kids. When somebody compliments them on a kid, they're like yeah well, you know, he ain't smart and he's not good for nothing and not this is on that because of what happened hundreds of years ago so that looks like in your gene and in your genes and part of the culture yeah, well, they also.

E.B. Johnson: 41:18

There was a study that just came out the other day where a scientist has now said there's no such thing as free will because of, like cultural pressures that you're exposed to and then your genetic information, which predestines so much of what's going to happen to you, because it will, like manifest as mental illness and then you only have a few of ways you're going to respond to those mental illnesses and all that and it's really crazy. And if you think about trauma in a big historical kind of big picture way, countries start to make sense when you look at them, like a lot of the problems going on in america, a lot of the divisions and upset, makes sense. When you think about traumatized people, generation after generation after generation, being traumatized, not changing anything about those cycles and just having more traumatized people with you know, dna that's not activated and all this other stuff and it kind of adds up. You start to see the layers of trauma yeah, because here's the thing and this goes.

Mindset Melanie: 42:08

It's beyond trauma. This goes into the neurodivergent world of. If nobody knows what the true signs of neurodivergence, adhc and autism are, then it's normalized in that first, and the way I normalized everything about my body the way it swells up when I get bit by a mosquito, the way that I can bend and all that is not normal, no oh god, it's to me that hollering, oh great we'll talk after the show excellent we'll talk after the show.

Mindset Melanie: 42:35

I'll tell you all about it um, but when you think about it, um shit, where was I going? You?

E.B. Johnson: 42:42

got me both.

Mindset Melanie: 42:43

We both lost it here talking about the trauma and it goes beyond trauma when trauma when you see like big, oh, when the system is based on people that don't even know that they have adhc and autism identifying adhc and autism in their kids.

E.B. Johnson: 42:56

It's rigged against you honey. Yeah, big time, big time. Not meant to thrive in the system. Not designed for us, not designed for us, not in any way. What is that? That's a good place to kind of. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions? Because I would say the system is filled with misconceptions. That's why so many of us, for so long, have been without any kind of accommodation or care. What are the biggest misconceptions about neurodivergent people across the board?

Mindset Melanie: 43:24

well, if you're AFAB, it is that you're doing things for attention and that you're exaggerating everything. Yeah, I just made a post about this yesterday. Uh, um, growing pains are not normal. Growing is not supposed to hurt, oh wonderful. So if you remember sobbing yourself to sleep at night as a child because your legs hurt you so bad and your parents are staying there with like their android hide, like I don't know what to tell you, I can rub your legs, but I don't know what to tell you, that's probably ellers danlos syndrome. That's a problem with your uh, your hypermobile connective tissue, and you cannot actually be bendy and be hypermobile. Yeah, because if you're like me, your joints, the connective tissue that are supposed to hold everything together, is so loose that your muscles get really tight to compensate for it, so you're actually the opposite of flexible.

E.B. Johnson: 44:13

Yeah, fun, uh um explaining my whole childhood and all my sports injuries that have ever happened to me.

Mindset Melanie: 44:19

But yeah, continue, yeah yeah, yeah, um, and it's having a different neuro type. Having ADHD or autism is not a mental health illness. It's not a problem, it's not. It's literally just. This is how the brain is built and how it operates. So you can figure out how to get on that train and make it work for you, or you can continue down this path of thinking that you're just going to take a pill and then you'll go be normal I love that, I, I, uh, that one kills me, kills me, kills me because so many people and you know this when they come to you, they want a magic fix.

E.B. Johnson: 44:48

They just want you to like wave the wand, give them the recipe, give them the cheat code, and then they can just walk away and be a new person. And you have to remind them, like that new person that you think you're going to wake up me. That person doesn't exist.

Mindset Melanie: 44:59

Like this is like embrace who you are and just like drive that car, like drive that train, as she said, yeah I wish people would also and I get shit for saying this I wish people would take the power out of the medical establishment hand, especially like western medicine a doctor is not a fucking expert in anything other than syndromes and medicines for syndromes, yeah they may not be an expert on that they're not an expert in your lifestyle.

Mindset Melanie: 45:27

They're not an expert in your fucking goals. They don't know what it is you're dealing with, and if you have a uterus and you were raised a fab, then they're not going to fucking respect you no, they're not, we think that we're going to go.

Mindset Melanie: 45:38

We think we're going to go into a doctor's. We think a we're going to do all of our research on adhg and autism. Then we're going to go into a doctor's office, which costs a lot of money and I don't care where you live, you pay for it. Some fucking hell, oh yeah, and you go in there and you try and explain yourself and take the test and do all this stuff. You spend all this time and you incur mountains of trauma that's the big thing, because nobody's listening to you nobody's understanding what you're saying.

Mindset Melanie: 45:59

They don't even know what the fuck they're talking about. And then, if you do even get the diagnosis, it doesn't come with a fucking pamphlet or booklet or a fix or anything. Here's the thing. You can take vibans and you can take aterol and you can do all that, but it's not going to dictate what you fucking concentrate on no, it doesn't teach you the skills that you need to balance that executive dysfunction that you have.

E.B. Johnson: 46:19

That's, that's the thing. Like you still have to learn how to manage what's going on with your brain and your body. Like throwing a tablet at it might soothe some symptoms, but it doesn't fix the problem at all at all.

Mindset Melanie: 46:29

Yeah, yeah well, let's talk a little bit about I really advocate go ahead. So I just I advocate for being an expert in yourself yes, yeah, you have to.

E.B. Johnson: 46:38

You have to. You got to become your own like advocate. You have to. You really do, yeah, or you're gonna. You're gonna get screwed, you're gonna get screwed. So let's talk a little bit about business, because that's you know, you are, you're like one of my examples that I look, I'm like what is she doing? Do I need to do that? Well, that helped me. Um, because it's a mess sometimes. Running a business, running your own little side hustles as a neurodivergent person. So can you kind of share some examples of like how you help your, your, your clients, your followers build these systems, because that's your big thing. It's like you build a system versus having routines, these rigid routines.

Mindset Melanie: 47:16

Yes, yes, well, we all know that feeling of staying up late and creating a brand new rigid routine that's super detailed. You're gonna wake up at 4 am every day and you're gonna work out for two hours and you're only gonna eat clean, and then you're gonna read two books a day and you're gonna do all this and blah, blah, blah. And you may do that for a day or two and kudos to you for doing that, but it's not sustainable. Yeah, right, if it was sustainable, I wouldn't have a job. The whole productivity world wouldn't be here. You know, the health and wellness industry would be a lot different too. So what you really want to think about is having your muggle tasks and your magical tasks, right. So let's use a new product launch. Right, say, you're gonna launch a new group coaching program. Yeah, we know that they're just loosely. There's 40 items on the list of things that you have to do, right, so we're going to break those down into the stuff that I really like.

Mindset Melanie: 48:10

So, for me, that's the social media content. Uh, going live and telling people about it, um, generating a lot of ideas for my social media and my emails, and all that. And then there's the, the muggle, boring shit, right. So that is, um, setting up the email so that when somebody buys the thing, that email confirmation goes to them, and and that sort of stuff, right. So I break all of my long-term projects down into the fun and the boring part so that when I wake up I know I'm going to work on my project. But if I wake up in a mood where I don't want to put on a face and I don't want to be forward-facing, I'm going to do that muggle, boring shit. And if I wake up and I do want to put on a face and I do want to talk to people, I'm going to start doing some stuff on the magical list.

E.B. Johnson: 48:50

Right, okay, I love that, I love that.

Mindset Melanie: 48:54

No, because you've got to have options. I don't know how I'm going to feel. I don't know if I'm going to be in a flare. I don't know if I'm going to walk right into my luteal phase, which, thank God, nobody told you. That that's the longest part of your cycle is allureal. All the other little phases are four to five days, and then that leaves, if you do the math, a good 11 to 12 days of feeling like shit.

Mindset Melanie: 49:12

And if you have PMDD, like me, thinking that my family would be better off if I just leave and nobody appreciates me anyway. It's not suicidal thoughts, necessarily, because I'm not trying to kill myself, but I definitely believe that nobody appreciates me. Yeah, and fuck these motherfuckers for a good couple of days and now I can actually like feel the darkness come over me and I can feel the light come back.

E.B. Johnson: 49:31

Right.

Mindset Melanie: 49:31

Which is great, you know I would. I would much prefer that that doesn't even happen. But like, if I can feel it now and I know what I'm up against, I'm going to go. You can navigate it, you know. And I just text my husband too. I go, I felt the darkness come over, so I love you, leave me alone. And then the day that I get my period, I text him and I go. I love you so much. Thank you for loving me. I'm so sorry for everything that I've done in the past week or so. I got my period today, oh yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 49:54

And he's always like oh, I love you too, babe, Whatever you know, I'm here for you Whatever you need. So you want to break all your stuff down into the fun and the not fun. So that no matter how you're feeling, you have options for putting your energy in. Getting into a flow state as much as possible. I want you to live your life in a flow state.

E.B. Johnson: 50:13

Do you know how to like, what's the best way to trigger that for somebody? Because I love being in a flow state, but only a few things I feel like can kind of trigger me into that place, that state.

Mindset Melanie: 50:22

Reduced, reduced demand in every other part of your life. You cannot feel like you do not have control over the errands you have to run, over the people you have to spend time with and really I understand that means you're not. So I have two in real life friends. I have two friends that I go on hikes with, I walk through my neighborhood with, I go out to lunch or dinner with. I have two real, in life friends and then everybody else is virtual, because it's hard to be my friend and if you're not willing to put in that much time and effort on yourself, I don't want you to even do anything for me.

Mindset Melanie: 50:56

I want you to do so much for yourself that, like yesterday, I was at lunch with one of my girlfriends and she we were talking about mascara and she goes I fucking hate mascara. If I never had to wear it again. I looked at her and it said are you about to start your period? And she was like yeah. And I was like okay, do you want to get a donut? And she's like yeah. I was like okay, let's do that. Right, I require that from the people that I spend time with. You have to know yourself enough.

Mindset Melanie: 51:21

Like say no, I can't go out with you, I'm in a terrible mood, or you? Know, because I don't want to have friendships where people are like, well, I have to do laundry, I can't do it, and then I find out that they were out and about with a different friend and they didn't invite me, like I don't fucking time for this 100%, yeah, yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 51:34

So really just getting as much control in a low demand lifestyle as you can. Low demand lifestyle is a great thing to Google If you're trying to figure out the best way to be productive and motivated right and I want you to change your relationship with productivity. Productivity means what is the best for you to get the best outcome, so productivity is not working eight hours a day, seven days a week as an entrepreneur. The reason you started your fucking businesses so you wouldn't have to do that yeah, productivity is knowing that I'm in a nasty mood today and my fucking body hurts, so I'm going to take an extra head of medical marijuana and I'm going to watch some real housewives and I'm going to scroll.

Mindset Melanie: 52:17

Nobody's going to fucking tell me anything different? Yeah, that's that's excellent.

E.B. Johnson: 52:22

I was one of those ones that, like I, have to have a rigid schedule and the reason I'm not achieving the stuff that I was supposed that I was told at six years old, when they threw me in a gifted program that I wasn't achieving because I'm not getting up early enough, I'm not running enough, I'm not doing this and not doing, doing, doing, doing, doing and it's not doing. It was not the doing that I was missing, it was like doing less, doing less. It's very much that scene and forgetting Sarah Marshall where he's on the surf board and he's like pop up, no, do less, like, do less. It really is.

Mindset Melanie: 52:50

And we hear that from a lot of like the hippie dippy gurus and stuff. But it really is true the universe doesn't want you to do more, the universe just wants you to go. Okay.

E.B. Johnson: 52:59

Yeah Well, even if you don't like the hippie dippy element of it, you can just look at it from a scientific element. Your brain, your body, you can think of it like a battery. It's only got so much juice in it. You know the spoons theory that also applies. It's only got so much. You've got to actually stop and rest. Do nothing so that you are more effective in the long term.

Mindset Melanie: 53:16

You got to oh my God, you're going to love this. So this is something that I'm teaching in my new group coaching program called recharge, because I'm a firm believer that you can recharge your batteries and get out of burnout and stop the cycle of burnout without taking time off.

Mindset Melanie: 53:30

I agree, it takes a longer amount of time, but it's really in the redesign. So what we noticed, especially the Neural Spicy Academy, christina, and I realized, hey, christina, I love you, she's a headmistress the other co-founder, anyway, she has blue hair. So, okay, back on track. We figured out that we have three energy tanks. We have our emotional energy tank, our physical energy tank and our mental one. Yeah, and you are not pulling from all three tanks any day, ever, ever. You are not going to drain your energy, your mental, your emotional and your physical energy tanks on the same fucking day. No way. Those are things you're thinking, right? So the really the life altering days is when you're pulling from all three every other day. You're going to ask yourself okay, do I have the capacity for this? So I have the calories for this, you have the bandwidth for this. Right, I was. I had a really, really, really hard workout, so I know that pulled a lot from my physical tank. So that means I can either do a little bit mental or a little bit emotional. That's it.

E.B. Johnson: 54:36

That's brilliant. I can't do both.

Mindset Melanie: 54:38

I can't pull from them.

E.B. Johnson: 54:39

Yeah, I'm going to start you.

Mindset Melanie: 54:41

And you can monitor that and that's easy to tell too. Like, okay, well, if I have three coaching coaching calls, that's a lot of mental and a lot of emotional. The only thing I'm going to be able to pull out today is a little walkie-poo while I'm scrolling TikTok after that. Yeah, you're going to be brain dead after that and that happens, I definitely does so sometimes I'll like text my husband to be like I am laying down he's like okay, got it, got it.

E.B. Johnson: 55:07

Oh, I love, I love them in that, just get it, because mine's one of those as well. They make life so much easier, so much easier.

Mindset Melanie: 55:13

Well, because they see what happens when we overdo it.

E.B. Johnson: 55:16

Yeah, yeah, and they don't enjoy that.

Mindset Melanie: 55:18

That's not helpful for them.

E.B. Johnson: 55:19

No, it doesn't. They don't get what they want out of that either? Not at all. So do you think that awareness of self is like the key trait that a neurodivergent person needs to kind of be successful, especially if they want to kind of be successful in business, if they want to go and like, do a side hustle for themselves or something that awareness of you know how they're working, how they need to work, how they need to accommodate themselves Would you say that's the number one trait? Yeah, yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 55:44

You really, once you have a full on awareness of yourself and an understanding of yourself, then you're able to not rely on other people so much and be like. Well, you know, like I had friends before we all broke up. In the last two years I had friends. I'm even ashamed to say the story. I had a friend who I shared a tattoo with. It was a trauma bond. Her best friend, who was also a close friend of mine, died very abruptly in a car accident a few years ago and from that moment on she just sort of attached herself to me and I was just like OK, la, la la best friend.

Mindset Melanie: 56:17

Yeah, and she actually called me to come pick her up in the middle of the day while I was still working in a restaurant and building my business. To drive from my side town to her side of town to pick her and her cat up because her cat was ill. To take her and her cat to an emergency vet that was on my side of town Because she was so concerned about the cat she couldn't drive.

E.B. Johnson: 56:44

Right, ok.

Mindset Melanie: 56:46

And I did it.

E.B. Johnson: 56:47

Oh no, oh no.

Mindset Melanie: 56:53

And I will never, ever, ever again have people in my life that would even ask me to do that.

E.B. Johnson: 57:00

Yeah, yeah. It says so much that, oh, my God Got goosebumps.

Mindset Melanie: 57:05

Let alone think that that was OK to ask of me.

E.B. Johnson: 57:08

Yeah, that's. That is one of our weak points, I think is nerd, because we I know that there's this, this myth that you know, especially people with autism or ADHD don't have empathy, and I find it's the opposite and we are too much for that. We're targeted because they know we will feel for them and we will help them, because we want to help people that need to be helped.

Mindset Melanie: 57:28

And one of the things to that people don't realize with neurodivergence is we could never conceive of treating someone like that, yeah, so we can't imagine that anybody else would treat us like that. So what is a malicious behavior we talk ourselves out of believing is malicious because we could never do that? Why would somebody else who loves us yeah, this friend or family member who loves us and it's always the people that say we're family. You can't do this to family. We love family. If you loved me so much, why do you treat me like this?

E.B. Johnson: 57:57

Bingo. If you loved that person, you wouldn't want them to suffer in the first place. You wouldn't go out of your way to behave in a way that makes them suffer. It's like genuinely that simple. And I always tell my clients, from the day you meet somebody, from the day you meet someone new, watch everything that they do, not just the way they interact with you but with other people. And it's not that you want to keep a tally, but you definitely need to pay attention. Do they pour into other people as much as they expect other people to pour into them? And it can be as simple as do they text first sometimes. Do they invite you places first sometimes, like, how do they treat service staff? How do they treat animals? Like all of that. Do they pour into people as much as they expect people to pour into them?

Mindset Melanie: 58:36

And here's the thing too when you're an entrepreneur, especially if you're a woman, you have a family, a friend, you have goals, you're doing all this stuff. You have to have a clear understanding with your friends of like. You can text me last minute and say bitch, something happened in my schedule. Can you go hiking right now? If I can, absolutely I will.

Mindset Melanie: 58:52

And if you do that four times and my answer is always no, do it the fifth time, because at some point I'm going to be able to do that and I'm going to do the same thing for you, because I used to always think that it had to be like planned out a long time in advance and all those other stuff, and it's like no, those things are good and with a friend that you love and you want to spend time with, with our busy schedules, you do have to plan things out in advance, right, pencilman for Saturday, or la la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la la. But you have to also have an understanding with your friends of like. Sometimes I can do an hour where you just come over, we have tea, we fucking chit chat and then you go to work.

E.B. Johnson: 59:21

Yeah, 100%. It doesn't have to be complicated or grandiose or like. It doesn't have to meet those kind of ridiculous expectations that we've been given of what a friendship should be or what relationship should look like. It can literally be simple. Yeah, it really can.

Mindset Melanie: 59:36

And it's so much better when you do that too, and just so much better.

E.B. Johnson: 59:39

Easier, so so much less stressful. I didn't realize how much stress I was getting from friendships, because that was the primary way that my narcissism patterns came back is like my friends or my mother, who was the big narcissist in my life. So that was a whole whole, another, a whole. Another kettle of fish to unpack, fun, fun, fun. So how do you envision because we are in a really changing time and we're coming to the end here, I won't keep you too much longer how do you kind of envision the landscape for neurodivergent people in the next five to 10 years, because it's changing so fast, like, how do you think they will kind of be represented? How do you think accommodations will look like? What do you think the entrepreneurial landscape will look like for neurodiverse people?

Mindset Melanie: 1:00:21

Well, the number is already really pointing to the fact that there's a lot of people leaving corporate. There's a lot of people leaving a nine to five role. A lot of us got a taste of work from home and realized that like wow, I can do a lot more when I don't have to drive somewhere for 45 minutes every single day.

Mindset Melanie: 1:00:36

Driving will zap my energy and a lot of us used to think that we like to drive. But what it was is. We liked that time to unmask and be ourselves. We didn't actually like the driving.

E.B. Johnson: 1:00:43

We just liked the alone time.

Mindset Melanie: 1:00:45

So, you know, moving forward, what I hope happens is that people are really seen for who they are, what they are when it comes to age, sexuality, mentality, abilities, goals, you know, energy, all that sort of stuff. I really just if we could live in a place where everybody was seen for you know what they bring to the table and what their goals are, and we could just, instead of getting into labels to be like, well, I have ADHD, so I can only act like this, perhaps the label is so that you can identify with your community and know what parts of yourself are to be expected and what parts of yourself are, in fact, bad habits, you know, because we don't have enough dopamine with ADHD to actually create habits, so we have to really create a good choice, making pattern right, it's not a habit, it's a pattern with us, that sort of thing. So, you know, moving forward, I really just hope that everybody can realize their own unique power and that us, especially as, like female entrepreneurs, really stop trying to be strong and start being powerful.

E.B. Johnson: 1:01:49

Oh, I love that. I love that because that powerful is a whole different connotation, whole different connotation. Yeah, so one last big one, because you asked me this question and it caught me off guard, but it was also great. It was an excellent question and I still think about it. But if you had to leave everyone with the biggest, most powerful piece of advice that you've ever learned or you've ever heard, or that you've given to clients or you know whoever, what would that one big piece of advice be?

Mindset Melanie: 1:02:19

Everything having to do with your power. Take your power back. Don't forget your power, don't doubt your power, don't assume that you're not capable of anything, and really become an expert in yourself and you'll discover how powerful you really are, all those things that you always you know how, like, we've thought about something and then it happened and we went what? What did that? I was just thinking about that person and then they called me. Why do you think that happened? Right? So, and then to realize this in real life, the one question you can always ask yourself is who benefits from this?

E.B. Johnson: 1:02:52

Right, oh, that's good yeah.

Mindset Melanie: 1:02:55

Who benefits from you thinking that you're a piece of shit? The patriarchy. So we can't think that anymore.

E.B. Johnson: 1:03:00

Yeah, absolutely, that's perfect. That's excellent advice. Excellent advice. Wouldn't expect anything less. Wouldn't expect anything less.

Mindset Melanie: 1:03:08

Thank you.

E.B. Johnson: 1:03:08

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for being here. What is? Where can everybody find you If they want to work with you, if they want to get involved with the NeuroSpicy Academy or get some coaching, some mentorship? How do they do that?

Mindset Melanie: 1:03:20

If you want to check me out at mindsetsmelonycom, that's my beautiful website. Thank you to my life partner and business partner, Christina, for all of that fantastic work. You can check us out at the NeuroSpicyAcademycom and Instagram and YouTube. So, TikTok, it's Melanie Fix's mindsets and on Instagram and YouTube, it's mindset Melanie. Just look for the pink and purple hair.

E.B. Johnson: 1:03:49

Yeah, I'm so jealous for your hair. Thank you again, melanie. That's amazing. Definitely go and check her out. If you think that you have ADHD, or you just know that you're somewhere in the NeuroSpicy, under the NeuroSpicy umbrella, absolutely go and give her, go and watch her stuff, go and check her out, because it is really transformative, really helpful and it's going to change the way you think about yourself, accommodations and even this crazy, ridiculous healing journey that we're on. So, again, thank you so much, melanie, for being here with us today. Thank you for having me.

E.B. Johnson: 1:04:20

Wow, what an incredible interview, right? I learned so much in that, just for myself, right? About mindset, about accommodating myself, about making things easier, not harder. What do you think? If you loved this interview? If you want to hear more, make sure you go and follow me at the ReelEVee Johnson on Instagram and TikTok and make sure you're following the podcast, too, on Apple Podcast. I'm going to have more great episodes, just like this one, coming out this season, so make sure you are here and getting all the updates on Apple Podcasts, spotify, Google and wherever you stream your favorite podcast from To everyone else. Thank you so much for listening, thank you so much for supporting and don't forget to go and follow me on mediumcom, on Substack, on TikTok and Instagram. And for everyone else, keep your heads up and keep your eyes on the stars. We'll be back next week with another great episode and until then, keep moving forward. Bye, bye.