My ADHD Story: From Childhood Chaos to Organizing Coach

In this episode of 'Organizing an ADHD Brain,' Megs shares her personal journey of living with ADHD, from childhood challenges to becoming an organizing coach. She discusses her early experiences with temper tantrums and feelings of not fitting in, to discovering her passions in music and math. The host talks about her struggles with self-worth, coping mechanisms, and overcoming obstacles in both her personal and professional life. Additionally, she announces a clothing swap event and her transition to a new membership platform. This deeply personal story highlights the importance of understanding one's brain, embracing passions, and finding community support.

Add 42 seconds to each timestamp to account for intro:

02:44 Childhood Memories and Early Challenges

06:37 Struggles with Self-Image and Coping Mechanisms

07:28 Discovering Talents and Academic Struggles

15:42 Early Adulthood and Career Exploration

30:12 Transition to Professional Organizing

32:16 Understanding ADHD and Personal Growth

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Transcript

Yeti Stereo Microphone & FaceTime HD Camera-1: 0:42

Hey beautiful people. Welcome back to another episode of organizing an A DHD Brain. This week it's gonna be a little bit different. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my own story and my journey to where I am today. You may have heard some of these stories before, so if you have sit back and relax, it's always nice to have a good reminder. And if this is your first time hearing a little bit more about me, welcome and it's so weird'cause I'm a little nervous to share more about me personally. But I also think it's important to have this transparency, especially if you're considering getting a coach. I want you to know a little bit about me to see if we align or if you just simply like me and wanna continue to listen to the podcast. In other news, I am hosting a clothing swap in the Colorado Springs area, and more specifically in Monument Palmer Lake area on April 19th from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM. So bring all of your old clothing things that are in good, gentle, used condition. We're accepting women's clothing, men's clothing, kids' clothing and accessories and shoes. It's$10 to get in. You drop off your old clothing and you can shop other people's gently used clothing. We actually turn Balanced Studio in Palmer Lake into a little boutique. It's so fun and you can take whatever you want with you. I've always had some really great luck. You also have the chance to win a mini styling session with Tara from Style Elevation with Tara, or a virtual decluttering session with myself where we actually work in a space of yours, which is super fun. So if you're interested, please check the show notes below and you can RSVP on Facebook. I am not on Facebook, but the Facebook invite is in the show notes below. Also, super fun announcement. I am going to be transitioning my membership platform from where I'm currently at on Wix to circle. my good pal Russ from the A DHD, Big Brother hosts a community on circle and it has been so cool and I'd really love some additional capabilities for my own community, so I'm gonna be making that transition, so right now signing up for my membership is on hold as I build the platform for our new membership, and I invite you to join me over there. But if you're in the membership right now, don't worry. everything that we have planned this month is still happening and you can still access the current community. This Thursday the 17th, myself and Russ from the A DHD Big Brother are hosting a public decluttering body doubling session on Zoom. We would love for you to join, get to know us, and we're gonna talk through letting go of some stuff in our home and we're doing it all together. So pick a space, join us on Zoom and come enjoy some witty banter, I'm sure, and some insights into letting go of your own stuff. I'd love to see you there. Okay, let's dive in. I wanna give you an idea of some of the things that I've started to acknowledge as part of my own A DHD journey, even though I wasn't diagnosed with A DHD until about three years ago. I wanna tell you a little bit about my journey into where I am now as an organizing coach. But I do think it's really important to start with my childhood. And what I remember from my childhood is that I threw a lot of temper tantrums. I remember some of them, but I also am reminded of them from my family who tells me all the time that's what I used to do. I used to yell all the time. I would scream, I would kick. And I like to joke around now that is how I built my lung capacity. But if I remember back being a child, I remember being very adventurous. I remember loving to laugh. I remember loving life, and I remember that I always loved to build a good fort or collect newts from off the ground or get my hands dirty. I loved playing in mud. I loved being outside with my friends. I just genuinely loved being a kid. I was a Navy brat, so we moved around a ton before we eventually landed at my grandfather's house that my parents inherited. And that is where I spent most of my childhood. I didn't have a lot of kids around in the neighborhood that were my age, so this was an adjustment for me. But I do remember having friends that were second homeowners from New York and they would come up and we would have adventures in streams, building dams and clearing out the streams of old leaves so that we could make the water run a little bit faster. I remember my childhood being full of joy. there's nothing like a good rainstorm in New England. I remember when I was in fourth grade. I was outside playing with one of my good friends and we saw the rainstorm coming. I don't know if you've ever seen that before, but you can see the rain before it actually hits you and it starts to roll in and it just pours down on you. instead of running for cover, we just decided to play. We decided to run around and just get soaking wet, and it was so incredibly amazing. I'll never forget that moment. One of the first times really started to feel different as a kid was moving to my grandfather's house. I had previously been at a school where I played soccer, and I loved soccer. I was good at it too. I just remember having such a great team and teammates and I loved the game. But when I came to the new school and I tried out to be on the soccer team, I remember feeling awful. I remember feeling like I didn't belong and as if everyone had already had all their friends, and I didn't have a place amongst everyone else. And I remember just feeling so incredibly shy. So I quit. I told my parents I didn't wanna do it, and they didn't force me into doing it. And so I retreated and I consistently felt like I didn't belong because I was the new kid. I came halfway through the school year and everyone had already had their friends. as I started to make friends, I didn't feel like I was worthy enough because all of these other kids had been going to school with each other since they were in preschool and kindergarten. Regardless. I still saw my brilliance as a kid. I used to sew my own doll clothes because my mom didn't wanna buy me any of the American girl doll clothes that I wanted. I used to paint rocks My best friend and I, her parents were second homeowners coming up from New York City and they had this gorgeous stream in their front yard and we used to take all of my Barbie dolls and pretend that they lived on the side of a mountain in this stream. And it was so fun. I used to build forts and lean toss. I took care of my neighbor's horses down the road, and I was obsessed with adopting cats. In fact, my dad got my mom a cat one day, and then I decided it was my mission to adopt the rest of the cats. So we had at least three cats growing up in this old farmhouse, where they definitely helped with the mice problem. But as I got older, the insecurities that I initially felt from joining a new school started to progress. And ultimately, I found coping mechanisms in food. my parents worked a lot. My dad had retired from the Navy and he was a school administrator, and my mom was a nurse. And so oftentimes I would find myself home alone after school. And I would eat. I remember pouring myself bowls of chips and drinking two or three sodas in one sitting. And as I approached the seventh grade, I was over 200 pounds and my dad kept telling me it was baby fat. And I believed him. I was like, oh, this is normal. It's just weird that all of the rest of my friends are super teeny tiny. But that I now understand is one of the coping mechanisms I developed in order to keep myself safe as I was growing up. As I got older, I continued to thrive in certain areas of my life. I started singing at a really young age, and I was a part of the choir. I was performing. There was nothing I wasn't involved in as far as performances go. I loved being on stage. There was something about it that just made me so incredibly happy. And then in addition to that, I was really good at math. That was something that I could do without even trying. And now I know there's something about music and math. I think it's because it has a very clear answer. It's very clear on whether or not you're hitting the right note. And then of course, whether or not you get the right answer. I liked the clear, concise understanding of math and music, and it lit up my whole world. I decided I wanted to be a rock star at a very young age. What was interesting about that and what it taught me is that those were things that I was seemingly good at without trying. So when I would try to do things and I wasn't good at them right away, I would give up and just say that I wasn't supposed to be good at them, that other people were supposed to be good at them. And this is just not where I excelled. Because I was good at math, I decided I was not good at history or English or writing, because those involved all of these other components that felt foreign to me, that felt too complex, and it felt like that was never something that I was just gonna be good at. And so I avoided it at all costs. But because of that, I accepted mediocrity as my norm. I was just meant to be mediocre and to be in the background and to not be the star of the show because I wasn't good enough for the other stuff. And then of course, because I was such a larger kid, I assumed that meant I was less than everyone else. In fact, I was made to feel that way. my brothers told me that I was fat. the kids were certainly not shy about telling me who I was because of what I looked like, and I believed them. And we didn't talk about this stuff. This stuff was just something we didn't talk about it. I just saw that I needed to be skinny based on the magazines I bought And the posters I put up on my wall. So I didn't think anything else other than I needed to be skinny, but I had no idea where to begin, and that's where diet culture really started to become a huge part of my life. But I never stopped singing throughout this whole process. I was constantly singing. I sang in the Vatican when I was 11 years old with my traveling chorus. We sang in churches in Florence, we sang in Germany. It was just a really cool experience. I even performed with Meryl Streep when I was in fourth grade because it was a part of a larger performance and I had no idea who she was. Don't get me wrong, but it was a part of my journey. And because of this journey, I thought that in order for me to thrive in life, I needed to be thin, and that would be the only thing that would get me from point A to point B. And so it became my hyperfocus dieting, not eating, binging. There was a lot that went into this and my whole perception of who I was as a person. So instead of focusing on school, instead of focusing on my brain and what I was capable of, instead of focusing on singing, although that's something that I still did and I continued to perform, I focused on the way that I looked. My whole life has been consumed with the way that I look, and it's vulnerable telling you that now because as I'm looking at myself here, I'm like, I'm not perfect, but I love myself and I love who I've become, and I'm really proud of all of the work that I've done to get there. But it's fascinating to explore some of what I've gone through in order to get to where I am right now. I remember in high school when I wrote a paper and I loved my English and my history professor, even though I had already decided that I was mediocre and I was never gonna be enough. I loved them so much and I wanted so much to impress them, but it didn't necessarily make me work harder. But I'll never forget one moment when I had written an essay and both my English and my history professor tracked me down in the hallway and I didn't go to a very large school, so it wasn't very hard to track me down. But they tracked me down to tell me what an incredible job I had done on this paper that I had written. And I remember thinking, oh, I just edited it. Oh my gosh, looking back on this now, I like what? I had edited the paper and they thought it was great. Whereas previously I would literally just write it and as soon as I was done, because I had procrastinated, wait until the last minute, I was so done with the paper because I didn't want to do it, that I wouldn't even look at it again. So anything I turned in was just a rough draft. And again, coming back to my parents, my mom is deaf, so communication in general is pretty difficult for her. And then my father had been on a ship most of his life, and so him transitioning back into being a father and learning how to speak to me in a way that made sense just wasn't a part of my life. So I didn't speak to my parents, I spoke to my friends, but these weren't regular things that we talked about as far as our growth or education or or understanding what we're capable of. I think we all had this unsaid communication of, you are just good, or you are just not. And that's just the way it is. There's not much that you change with that. You just show up as you are, and that's the way the world accepts you, and then you just fit in. It's almost like this power dynamic that you fit in where your place is in the world. There was this other project that I did where I measured every nook and cranny in my parents' house, my grandfather's old house, and I had to do a two scale drawing of it for my eighth grade history class. And I remember very specifically my teacher saying, make sure when you turn it in, the grass is not scribbled in. It needs to be colored in because we're gonna be hanging it on the walls. It's part of the project, but most kids will turn it in with scribbled in grass. Don't do that. Guess what? I spent so much time measuring and making sure that everything was to scale, and this is a home that was built in the 18 hundreds. it has a lot of varying elements in the home that need to be accounted for. So because I had spent so much time on those various elements, I didn't have enough time to color in the grass. So guess what? It didn't look good, and I was so annoyed that it didn't look good that I didn't turn it in. I hated the fact that I wasn't going to be delivering on this one element that they said was so important for me to be able to turn it in. So I didn't, it's fascinating how based on this little bit of feedback I decided that it wasn't good enough. So here I am starting to understand like this strive for perfectionism, but I wasn't able to speak about it. This wasn't something that I was able to reason through. I just accepted that I was never going to be good enough. But the things that got me through were eating right. I got that dopamine hit from there. And music, I was constantly listening to music. And what was cool about my music education growing up is not only was I listening to the fifties, sixties, and seventies with my parents in the car, the Beach Boys or Kenny Rogers, because that's what we would listen to on road trips, but I was also listening to music from my brother's era and things that they really liked. Or my sister who grew up in the eighties, I was listening to her music. And then of course I was developing my own love for music myself. And I also remember one of my best friends, her mom used to listen to country music. So not only was I listening to pop, but rap, r and b, classic rock, you name it. I was also listening to country music and I developed a love for Each and every one of the genres And then of course, classical music or Beethoven and all of these different symphonies, because that was a part of what I did in singing. I would learn how to sing music in different languages so that I could learn how to express myself. So that never went anywhere. As I continued to accept that I just would never be enough, and I was mediocre. In addition to that, I have been a rule follower my whole life. And so when I went to school right at 18. I was two blocks away from Fenway Park when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. And it was a magical experience, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. So by the time I was in my sophomore year of college, I was already$60,000 in student loan debt, and I still had no idea what I wanted to pursue. I wanted to pursue music that was definitely on my radar as it has been a common theme in my entire life. But my parents advised me that wasn't a good choice because I would never be able to make enough money to be able to pay these student loans back. So I didn't pursue my passion. In fact, I left school after my sophomore year because I realized that this is definitely not something that I wanna continue to accrue debt with, especially if I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do after college, and I thought you had to have it figured out. I was so envious of the people who had everything figured out for school that again, I just chalked it up to there being something wrong with me, and that my brain was so scattered I couldn't focus on one thing. And then of course, the one thing that I did decide was important enough to me, wasn't the thing that anyone in my family had supported. So I constantly relied on people outside of me to give me the validation I needed to pursue the things that I wanted to. What's funny is, as a podcast host right now, I also remember in high school I used to be the co-host with one of my best friends on the morning show. We had a television studio in our high school, and I was the co-host with my best friend. In addition to that, I had a radio show with one of my other best friends in college where we would play some of our favorite emo and other rock music so that people could see how cool we were. We still reminisce about that time. To this day, I've always wanted to speak my mind, but I've never truly known how to do it in a way where I could accept myself. And I think that's what's really interesting now about this podcast is that it's okay that it's just me that believes in me. Because anyone who this resonates with will show up and if this podcast does not resonate with you, that's okay too. So as far as a DHD goes, I see this in my scattered brain in wanting to do so much. And truthfully, I wanted to do everything. There were so many things that I got excited about that I could do them. I was a key holder at a pharmacy, at the age of 18. So all of the pharmacists that I worked with were encouraging me to go to pharmacy school, especially being in Boston Sure that's absolutely something I could have done. It just didn't feel exciting to me. I wanted life to feel more exciting. And in addition to this, I thought for sure that the only way that I could show my worth was to get married. And so I married one of my very first boyfriends at the age of 23. And he was in the military and he wrote love letters to me and I thought it was perfect. I thought that this is exactly what I needed to do and who I needed to be. It wasn't until I made an incredibly powerful decision and the right decision for me, to divorce that man at the age of 26 because he was not going to help me get to the life that I wanted to live. And he didn't bring out any of the qualities in me that I wanted to portray in this world. So at the age of 26, I was still getting my degree and I had decided to get my degree in political science. I was still trying to find myself in the world, and I just recently went back and read some of my old journals from around that time, and I started to see this spark in myself where I was actually believing in who I could be versus just trying to make everyone around me happy. So instead of making my parents happy and staying married to the same man miserably for the rest of my life, I got a divorce. and I won't tell you the reasons why we got a divorce because that is a whole nother story, It's also not necessarily my full story to share. With that in mind, I started to find myself, but not immediately. This was the beginning of a whole nother journey. But during this whole time, I was still singing. It never left my life. I was in the acapella group in my college. I continued to sing and participate in talent shows at UMass Boston where I eventually got my degree in political science. I also co-founded an acapella group in Boston and they're still semi-professional to this day, so shout out to sound off acapella. I was only there for a year before I decided to move across the country to Colorado and start. A whole new adventure. This is a pretty common theme in my life. I see now that I love to start new adventures. I love to do something new to expand my brain, and I now understand that this is what I do to allow myself to grow, to put myself into uncomfortable, positions so that I can see I am able to grow. I used to work at the Cheesecake Factory. It was a really super fast-paced environment, the way I was able to function under high stress and really fast paced environments made me thrive. I loved being in what we call hell well, And making drinks for the entire restaurant and the entire bar where I was not only creating relationships and having conversations with people, but creating these drinks that had rules behind them that I had to follow in a very strategic manner. I had to come up with new systems and new ways to make sure that everything got done But working at the Cheesecake Factory gave me a lot of insight into what I could do. I had decided that we should do a flash mob. I always wanted to do a flash mob, and I thought it would be so cool, just like to bring joy and elevate people's lives. one of the women that we worked with was a choreographer and we planned it all out where everyone was gonna be, what the music was gonna be, and people would show up for rehearsals and we were figuring it out and what the dance was gonna be. we had posters up all over the place so that you could join and you could know where everything was. this was my baby, I was in charge of all of this. One day, one of the higher ups from the company came visiting and I noticed that all of the posters had been taken down. And when I asked someone about it, They said that our general manager was not very excited about the flash mob, and he was a little embarrassed about it. So he took down all the posters so that the higher ups wouldn't see it. And in that moment, I never said one thing about it again, and I let it fizzle out and die because I was so embarrassed that I didn't have someone believing in me. And so I didn't ask questions. I just took that one person's word for it and went on with my life. And I think back on it because I was like, we were so ready to make it happen. And I wanted so much to make it work. But because one person didn't think that it was realistic, I decided to let it die. I look back on that with a lot of shame now because I feel like I was so capable of making these things happen and showing up in the world. But I look at that as this unfinished project. I had gotten so excited about it, and then one person didn't believe in me and so I let it go. I think even talking about it right now, I'm starting to realize a little bit more about my personality then and how I've evolved to who I am now. But a common theme as I'm continuing to work through this whole process is I kept thinking that in the event I could change my outward appearance, everything in the world would be better. And that was the thing that, constantly consumed me from sunup to sundown that if I looked better, my whole entire existence was defined by the way that I look. After I got my degree in political science, I decided to move across the country. I moved into my brother's basement. I had no money to my name. I think I had$300. In fact, I ended up opening up a checking account at a local bank because they would give you$250 just for signing up. I also did a job for about a month. I sold DirecTV out of the back of Walmart. If you've ever been stopped by one of those people, I'm so sorry. It was me. I did that and it was awful. It was one of the worst things I've ever done. but as I was discovering myself, I did find a job at USAA. So if you're not familiar, this company is, an insurance company that has been around for over a hundred years, and it's an incredible company. I started working for them as an insurance agent, selling insurance in all 50 states, and I loved it. I thrived at it. I learned how to talk to people. I learned how to ask questions so that I could truly understand the differences in how people show up because everyone in the United States is so incredibly different. Talking to someone from New York versus California versus Oregon is gonna be totally different than talking to someone in Mississippi or in Texas or in Alabama. It's fascinating, and I learned how to speak to people in a way that they understood that I was listening. And so that was the start of my journey into the corporate world. And as I worked my way up into leadership, originally when I started coaching, I thought I just needed to tell people what to do and then they would be able to do it. I very quickly understood that I had to ask people questions to understand what made them work, what made them tick, and what helped them understand their pathway forward and how some people didn't wanna move forward. They saw themselves staying exactly where they were, and I had to respect that because it wasn't my choice to make them move forward. Whereas I had these other people that wanted to conquer the world and I was able to guide them to that place. And help them, believe in themselves in a way that helped them understand that they could do that too. I loved my leadership role, and I loved Brene Brown. I read Simon Sinek. I immersed myself in leadership books. I loved the art of conversations and learning how to listen, to understand instead of listening to respond. I dove into the corporate world in a way that helped me thrive. And as I started to dabble in the project management world, one of my mentors asked me, what's one of the most important things that you wanna gain from this experience? And I said, presenting. there was this one director who presented in a way that people actually wanted to listen to her. And I was like, oh, I want to do that. I wanna be able to speak in a way that people want to listen. And I think this has been my goal my whole life. I wanted my family to listen to me. I wanted my friends to listen to me, and I wanted to be able to be heard in a way that people actually wanted to listen to what I had to say. And so I would attribute a lot of my success today to the experiences I had in the corporate world because I was really able to put myself into uncomfortable positions to allow myself to grow things that I hated because it allowed me to be bigger than I was before I tried it. it was during this time towards the end of my career that I had made some huge decisions that I thought would change my life. First I got bariatric surgery, so I had bariatric surgery because I thought that finally I was going to be able to lose weight, and this would help me conquer the world in a whole new way. And I think in some ways, yes, losing weight has been such a key to me, understanding myself in a whole new way. But it didn't change anything for me. I still had to conquer the way that I was speaking to myself, the way that I thought that I had to show up in the world. I had to speak to myself in a way that was kinder in a way that I was able to love myself no matter what size I was at, because it didn't matter how much weight I lost, it mattered the way I spoke to myself. Pretty shortly after that, probably about a year after that, I realized that I wanted to quit drinking. I didn't want drinking to be a part of my life anymore because it became a hobby. It was like, what do you do on the weekends? I drink, right? Instead of doing the deep work that I really wanted to do to expand my horizons and my dreams, I was working so much that I was exhausted and in order to quiet my brain at night, I would drink wine, and that was just something that allowed me to feel like I was sane again. But I knew that I didn't want that to be a part of my life. And honestly, back when I had moved to Colorado about nine years prior, I wanted to quit drinking then, and I just never made it a priority. So as I made it a priority, I thought everything would be perfect, but then I was no longer drinking and I was depressed. I didn't have this one thing that I had gone to, to quiet my mind for so long, and now my mind was on. And so not only was I talking to myself in a negative way, but I was also so depressed and not happy in what I was doing anymore. I loved my team, but then there were so many changes that were happening in the corporate world at that time that I didn't feel seen or heard in the same way that I had before. the leader I had at the time he told me that I got too excited about things or would take credit when I was trying to advocate for a certain team in our department. it was just such a strange transition because I had always had leaders that supported me wholeheartedly and helped me grow to where I was and I stopped growing and I didn't like that it was too stagnant and so I needed something new. But during this time I was also diagnosed with A DHD and I was in complete denial. I remember my therapist telling me that not everyone's brain works the way that mine does and she used the example of me procrastinating and waiting until the last minute to do things because I was getting my master's degree in project management at the time, and I was so overwhelmed with trying to get everything done and also managing a family and also managing this corporate career. It felt overwhelming and I didn't know how to structure my time in a way that made sense. And so she advised me to go get a diagnosis. And when I met with the psychiatrist, our diagnosis took about two hours. It was hilarious, she was like, yep, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you have a DHD. And I walked away and I was in complete denial.'cause a DHD for me meant like these little boys who can't focus and are hyperactive, but that's not me. I followed rules and I was quiet and I held it all in. And my brain never stopped working. but I was never necessarily hyperactive. In fact, I learned how to stay incredibly small I was taught how to be small. I was taught how to play small because that was safe. And so that's what I continued to do. So when I was trying to leave the corporate world, I hired a career coach because I was like, something's gotta give, I've gotta figure out what's going on here. And I wanted to get back into the creative space of my brain that I knew. Like I've always been a good artist. I've always had an eye for design, and I thought maybe I'd be an interior designer because I love making spaces look really beautiful. But during this time, I had also been letting go of a ton of stuff in my home. I had been selling stuff on Facebook marketplace. I had been learning how to let go and bringing things to Goodwill. I have been trying to teach my parents how to let go in their homes so they wouldn't have as much to have to go through on a regular basis. So I decided that I wanted to become a professional organizer. And of course I had watched the Marie Kondo shows and the home edit and all of this stuff looked so pretty and it looked so cool. And I wanted to create Pinterest perfect pantries and tell everyone about the perfect products to buy and figure out exactly how to make your life feel easy again. And I hadn't necessarily created all these spaces for myself, but I knew I was capable of doing it. So that's what I decided to do. But of course, after I had quit my job, I took my family on vacation and then signed to become certified in manifestation. So I did that. I also signed up to take a podcasting course so I would understand how I could do that. And I started a business at the same time. And then of course After living here for only three years, the floors were cracking, so I had to advocate for our floors to get replaced. And then my brother-in-law got diagnosed with cancer and so my sister needed me to show up. So here I am trying to juggle all of these things at once and looking back on it now, I can't even believe that was something that I was capable of doing. It feels so overwhelming to even think of what I was going through at that time. I was trying to start this business, but in no way, shape or form was I capable of focusing on one thing at a time.'cause there were so many competing priorities trying to take me in all of these different directions. It wasn't until I started reading books on a DHD that I started to feel seen and heard for the first time that I really started to understand my brain in a way that made sense for me and made me feel like I wasn't broken. I was just different. And as I started to approach things in this way, understanding my brain, I started to understand why organizing was such a difficult thing for people with a DHD, our executive function and our time blindness and our impulsivity and our nervous system regulation. All of these things played such a huge role. And then of course, consumerism and buying so much and trying to seek external validation for the way that we felt internally. There's so much that goes into why we have so much and all of that, but it helped me understand how to work with people a little bit differently. So while I was originally doing in-person organizing pretty regularly, I started to dabble in coaching because in-person organizing is awesome if you hire someone to work with you in this space, and I encourage you to work with them one-on-one. It's amazing. You start to learn like what you don't need anymore and how you could function in creating systems. It's beautiful, but there's still so much to accomplish from coaching because if you hired someone to professionally organize your whole home, it's a lot of money. That is a whole lot of money, and if you have the money, incredible. But I really wanted to help people understand their brains in a way that they knew that like you're capable of doing this on your own and you don't have to actually stop your life to do it, but you do have to change. You've gotta change your mindset. You've gotta understand what beliefs you have that are keeping you stuck in this same cyclical pattern time after time. After I started the podcast, I wanted it to be solely around organizing. But the first year of podcasting for me was really just learning so much about my own brain and the way that other people have managed their brain understanding people's diagnosis stories, understanding how people show up with their clutter, and how they attack their clutter, and how there's so many similarities with the way that we respond to clutter. And this second year, I have really honed in to understanding how different we all are and how there's not one podcast I could do to make the world of difference in your life. But I am gonna keep showing up because this stuff is so much more complicated than just putting stuff in places. And another thing that really helped me understand the importance of organizing is just the amount of stuff that we've accumulated over the years. And part of it stems from like the greatest generation and going through the Great Depression and not being able to let anything go because it's a scarcity mindset is that, oh, how could I possibly let this go? What if I'm never able to get it again? But now we're in the day and age where you can simply order something on Amazon and it shows up on your doorstep two days later. And so it's so very easy to be prepared for literally anything in your life. Not only are we getting excited about all of these things that we wanna do in our life, but it's so easy for us to start a new project or for us to do something different because while things continue to get more expensive, they're also very cheap. There's cheaply made stuff that we can get, and so we can always be starting a new project or doing something new or let our brains go to the next most exciting thing. I just realized there was so much more to life than creating Pinterest, perfect pantries than buying the perfect product because you'll very rarely see me suggesting products because I don't want it to be another unfinished project sitting in your garage. But what you will hear me talk about is mindset and how, while our brains are so good at taking us down a rabbit hole of doom and gloom. We can also get in front of that, and we can bring ourselves to a place where we can believe that we can do literally anything in this world. I read the book, the 5:00 AM Club, a couple years ago now, and I said to myself, oh, I could wake up at five. This sounds doable. This sounds like something I want to do. So I did it, but it was also a pain in the butt. I hated it. I hated waking up early. My brain constantly tried to talk me out of it. In fact, sometimes it would win. A lot of the times it would win. I was very inconsistent. I didn't do it every day, and I would always find a way to sleep in a little bit more. But after the first year, it got easier. After the second year, it got easier, and now I can't even sleep in anymore. My body is so ready to get up and conquer the day I still try to sleep in, but it's not something that I'm capable of. I also still love to stay up at night. I used to stay up all night. I used to love doing projects in the middle of the night, and someone described it as procrastinating the next day because it's so overwhelming to have seen everything that you've done. How could I possibly go to sleep? Although sleep is what makes our brain function a little bit better. I literally could go on and on about the way that I see myself now versus the way that I saw myself growing up and the way that I even saw myself. Through my family's eyes as the youngest in the family, as the one who never knew how to tell the right jokes or never felt comfortable enough speaking her mind because I was always told that I wasn't mature enough or I didn't have the right things to say. I think what's cool about this journey and finding my voice on the podcast is I'm starting to understand that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about me. It only matters what I think about myself and the things that I know I'm capable of doing. And now I also think that community is so valuable in this because I would never have been able to get to where I am right now without the support of my incredible podcast community that I meet with every single week. I also have this really cool networking group that I'm a part of it's full of previous corporate girlies, but also incredible women that are trying to make something of themselves outside of this nine to five trap that we sometimes fall into. And not to say that they're not great because who doesn't love a consistent paycheck. or my incredible husband or anyone else who has listened to the podcast and just said that my voice is great, or one thing or the other? Your words that you send me whenever you sign up for the dopamine menu are so fun. So thank you for continuously sending those. But it has been a journey to get here, and the community aspect and the support that I've gotten has been incredible. And the reason why I keep showing up is because I believe in myself, because I've been allowed to believe in myself. I've been allowed to believe that I'm not mediocre. And while I don't necessarily think that there's anything super special about me, because I don't think in general anyone is special outwardly, I think we're all equal, right? We're all just trying to make it in this world. But we all have a voice to share, and our voice is meant to be shared with the world. We all need to be saying what we have to say confidently. And if someone tries to knock us down because they don't like what we have to say, what a bummer for them, because I think in general they're afraid to say what they really need to say too. I realized pretty fast as I was building my business that I was meant for so much more than just organizing. And it's not to say that organizing out there, like anyone who's creating those spaces for you, freaking amazing'cause that's a whole nother journey. But I wanted to use my brain and what I've always been working on as far as coaching goes to really help people understand what they're capable of. And then because I know so much about decluttering, organizing and A DHD to be able to support you in finding your real brilliance because you are brilliant under that craziness of a brain that you have, it has allowed me to support people in finding who they truly are. And I'm really proud of that. Like so proud of that because by working with so many people with A DHD and seeing how freaking brilliant they are and how so much fun they are and how very uniquely different they are, it's helped remind me how brilliant I am as well. You hear me say these things on the podcast on a regular basis, but something I like to do when I'm going into a spiral or I feel yucky because it still happens and I wanna give up. In fact, two weeks ago I wanted to quit the podcast altogether. It still happens guys, my A DHD hasn't gone away just because I'm organized. It's still a real thing that I have to manage on a regular basis. I'm just better at managing it now than I used to be. But some of the things I tell myself on a regular basis is if everything is important, then nothing is important. So if I'm trying to do everything and I'm not focused on just a few things, or I don't reaffirm what my priorities are, then I'm going to get lost in a cycle of burnout. And I know that I recognize the patterns. I can see that now. So I use each time that I'm looking at something that feels uncomfortable with new eyes to say, what is the world trying to teach me right now? And if I could go back to that younger self, like seriously in life, I don't have any regrets because if I did it wouldn't allow me to be the person I am right now. I don't have any regrets because I've done the things I've done that have given me the lessons and the life understandings to be where I am right now, and I'm gonna continue to grow from that. But if I were to look at my younger self right now, I would try to help her understand that she's so worthy, she's so worthy of love, and she's easy to love. She's so worthy of feeling safe, and it's okay to tell yourself that you're safe. And she's so worthy of believing in herself no matter what she wants to do, because ultimately we're big dreamers and when we take action on those dreams, we can achieve gigantic things on the other side. What I've learned to accept this year, as I have said before, is that it's okay that it's me and my family that I've built and my friends who support me. It's okay to do the work because doing the work and understanding what you need to let go of allows you to show up more authentically as yourself as you continue to grow in this world I am in right now, my Find Your Voice era. Although I've had this podcast for almost a year and a half now I'm finding my voice and I'm learning what it looks like to not only show up authentically as I speak to you about A DHD. And how we can understand our brains a little bit differently as we tackle the different organizational projects that we have in our house. But it also allows me to show up authentically as who I am and you might like some aspects of me and you might not like some aspects of me, and I just want you to know that's totally okay. I'm not offended by it, and I'm proud to be able to say that out loud. So thank you so much for tuning in. Thanks for supporting the podcast. Next week, we're gonna be back to some regularly scheduled programming with another interview, another solo episode. I'm trying to alternate them each week. So it's an interview and then a solo episode, and we'll continue to have some really cool and exciting things coming up. So don't forget to join the body doubling session we have coming up here on Thursday the 17th. We're all gonna be decluttering together, so get an idea of where you wanna start, because we're all gonna be doing it. And honestly, it's very hard not to do things when you are in a group of people who also have a DHD, who also wanna get things done. Come learn a little bit more about how community can support you. And if you are ready to start your coaching journey, book a call with me in the show notes below. Have an incredible week and I'll see you next week.