Beyond the Box: Lauren’s Journey from Silence to Self-Discovery

What happens when the world tells you to squeeze into a box you were never meant to fit?

In this soulful conversation, self-discovery and leadership coach Lauren Goldberg shares her powerful journey from a childhood of silence and perfectionism to embracing her voice, her neurodivergence, and her “kush ball” self. Together, we explore the fog of outdated leadership models, the costs of trying to fit in, and how clearing the fog can open up clarity, confidence, and creativity.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in a career identity crisis or pressured to follow someone else’s path, this episode offers fresh perspective, compassion, and a reminder that you don’t have to do it alone.

Takeaways
1. Silence often begins in childhood—not from lack of ideas, but from fear of failure or judgment.
2. Perfectionism and “toxic professionalism” create a fog that hides authentic leadership potential.
3.Trying to fit into boxes has a cost:  immense energy drain and loss of self-trust.
4. Neurodivergence isn’t a limitation but a source of creativity, adaptability, and leadership strength.
5. Old leadership models (“do it like a man,” “climb the ladder”) are outdated and harmful.
6. Generalists and multi-passionate people are well-suited for innovation and leadership.
7. True confidence comes from embracing your unique “shape” rather than conforming to templates.
8. Career transition can be a playground of imagination, not a void to fill.
9. Coaching provides both tools and presence—helping people feel less alone as they clear the fog.

Soul Sucker Quiz

Take the Soul Sucker Quiz to learn which Soul Sucker screams the loudest in your mind so you can release them from being in charge and set your voice free!

https://voice-matters.com/soul-sucker-quiz/

Transcript

From entertainer at home to silence at school

Lauri 0:32

Hello and welcome back to Soulful Speaking. I'm super excited about my guest today. Lauren and I met in a networking group and energetically clicked and then eventually met with each other. Stop her from telling me everything about her so that we could save it for this. Lauren Goldberg is a self-discovery and leadership coach, disability advocate and entrepreneur, helping give people the tools they need to be confident change makers. Welcome, Lauren.

Lauren 1:12

Thank you. Excited to be here with you, I'm excited for this conversation.

Lauri 1:15

Me too Thank you Excited to be here with you. I'm excited for this conversation Me too. So it's called Soulful Speaking and I always love to hear your journey. Where did your speaking journey begin?

Lauren 1:32

I would say my lack of speaking began as a kid, as a nervous, very anxious kid. It's so funny because, you know, in my family I was the entertainer.

The good girl mask and fear of failure

Lauren 1:52

I was the one who was telling the jokes and doing the stand-up and doing the skits and coming up with characters and, you know, dressing up in costumes and and um, making people laugh. And then, as I had a harder and harder time in school, discovering that I had ADHD and dyslexia and just really challenged by sort of fitting into the box that is mainstream schooling in America, I felt really embarrassed about using my voice and raising my hand and sharing my ideas sometimes. So, yeah, I think, growing up as a child who wanted to please and didn't want anyone to think that I was broken, like having to feeling, like I had to overcompensate because I had disabilities and I didn't want anyone to think less of me because of it, I definitely felt like.

Lauren 3:25

I had to be the good girl, I had to follow the rules and I had to do well, but I couldn't ask for help and if there was any chance of me messing up or making a mistake, I couldn't put myself in that type of position to fail. So I think that's really where my like silence started, and as I have become more confident in myself and my who I am as a person, pride in my disabilities, in my identity and and just a greater self-awareness of like the delight that I bring to the world and my unique spirit, I have become much more vocal and being an entrepreneur. That is a journey in self-development that you don't expect to go on.

Lauren 4:36

And so you, you definitely like using your voice, discovering your voice, refining your voice and amplifying that voice um has been part of that self-development journey.

Lauri 4:54

So yeah, yeah, yeah, there's so much in that I hear, freedom to be you in the like in the family. Before the school, the boxes of and the one size fits all of our school system derailed that or asked you to let go of who you actually were in order to fit this one-size-fits-all mold. And I believe I said to somebody recently, if I could have a second calling, it would be to fix that specific thing in our school system that as kids, we're told a whole bunch of things that we should do, and I have yet to meet a child of 18 or younger who actually knows who they are, what their voice is, they want, because we tend to either be a rule follower AKA a good girl or a rule breaker, or confuse ourselves by bouncing back and forth between the two, which I did, actually, until I was like 32 years old.

Lauren 6:14

Then I started to go.

Embracing the “kush ball” self

Lauri 6:16

Huh, I've been like being who I think people want me to be, without even they're not even asking for that anymore. And then there's this rule breaker and who's the real me, who knows what's right, regardless of what the rest of society is doing. And as you talked, it feels like there were the hard years and now you are finding your way back to the wise version of what you had when you were the child, entertaining everybody, embracing your freedom and your creativity yeah, I think that's true.

Lauren 6:59

I mean, yeah, I I learned to survive in um like I learned to adapt to a box box that was put in front of me that said, like if you survive in this box, doors will open for you, which was true to a point. But you know, I'm sitting here like with my fidget toy in my hands and feeling comfortable, like being myself and breaking out of that like perfectionistic box that was placed in front of me that I I tried so hard, put so much effort into fitting myself into um that now I'm embracing my unique kush ball shape.

Lauren 8:02

Oh, my god, I love that and actually kush ball is a really great fidget toy if you're looking for a good fidget toy um yeah and you know, yeah, so going from, from a world that said, like you have to sit, still you can't fidget, you can't from a world that said, like you have to sit still, you can't fidget, you can't, you have to be a certain way, you have to speak a certain way.

Lauren 8:29

Um, and I think there were definitely like glimmers of who I was. Like people did recognize my leadership, my creativity, but I did not. I was not. There was so much fog in my view that I was not able to really see that in myself for a really long time.

The fog of toxic professionalism and breaking free from old models

Lauri 8:45

It sounds like the fog was. You know? You said, if you follow these things, if you put your kushball self into this box, doors open for you, and they did so there was that benefit. And I'm also hearing the fog as a cost and the immense effort and energy wasted or spent. Yeah, what other kind of costs were happening at that time?

Generalists and multi-passionate leaders

Lauren 10:20

yeah, I mean, I think, having gone from the fog of being in school to the fog of mainstream, sort of like the way that we talk about careers and what I call toxic professionalism, this way of doing careers like you do school and you put your head down and it's very individualistic and it's like you know very, you're climbing the ladder and you are following models of leadership that have been in place, you know for a long time and trying to unlearn that. So that's, you know really what my, my business has been built around is recognizing what's causing that fog in a career. Uh, like career and life, decision making sense. Um, how do we excavate that? How do we clear the fog so that we can get the clarity that we need to make decisions that align with ourselves, our needs, our disabilities, our neurodivergent brains, our unique shape and knowing that that we will evolve? But we were just not meant to be stuck in boxes.

Lauri 12:05

Yeah, yeah, I have ranted myself on old, outdated models of leadership. What are some of the things that sometimes they seem so insidious that I'm not sure people even really realize that they're there. So what are some of the old, outdated things, the fog that you help people clear?

Lauren 12:32

Yeah, I mean. A lot of that has to do with perfectionism and some of the BS standards that people hold themselves to, feeling like they are behind, like everybody else has it figured out except them that they are meant to specialize. Not everybody's meant to specialize. We have a whole world of generalists out there who are set up to connect the dots and be innovative and make swift decisions because they have a wide range of skills and perspectives and experiences that they can connect those dots, and so they're set up well for leadership, and so they're set up well for for leadership. Um, so, moving away from, like, this pressure that I just need to pick a path and stick to it and that's it forever, you know, just move up the ladder and that in that one thing, um, the folks that I work with and I'll include myself in that we are multi-passionate, we want to make the world a better place, but we have so many different things that we're interested in. How can we just pick one thing? You know.

Finding the way back to authenticity: Layoffs, COVID, and taking a leap

Lauren 13:56

I think the other piece to like in talking about like old, old models of leadership is do it like a man I've heard this like has has motivation for women. Do things like what would a mediocre white man do? That's like the like, that's the standard, like we should be. You know, setting a new standard we should be creating our own standards.

Lauren 14:26

We should be embracing our own unique styles, our own unique skill sets and spirit and energy that we bring to to the table, so that it's not just like do it the way Bob did it.

Lauri 14:45

Yeah, yeah, I. I completely agree with you. I saw you do this, so I'll testify. Um could not agree more. You know, even if it worked for Bob which one could argue right now it ain't working for Bob anymore. Even if it did work for Bob, I'm not Bob, so there's a whole lot of what. If it's not actually working for Bob anymore, Then why on earth would I try to do it that way if it's not even working for Bob? Yeah, how did you find your way back to your more wise? You've got the freedom in your speaking. What were some of the key moments that were on your journey to find your way back?

Lauren 15:40

were on your journey to find your way back. I definitely think getting laid off from my job and then having like my next job like disappear overnight, like both of those things happening within a couple years, made me question careers in general and self-advocacy and being the one that is in control of your career and your life decisions, and just feeling so out of control in those moments. These decisions about me were made behind closed doors and I realized that throughout my whole life that's, throughout our life people will be making decisions about us behind closed doors, but just feeling such a lack of control in those moments a such a lack of control.

Lauren 16:40

In those moments, I had been telling myself like entrepreneurship will be. You know, that'll be something I do one day. I'll have my own business one day. I'll you know, I'll get there at some point. And then, and around that same time where I was trying to figure out my next steps after job loss times too, covid hit and nobody was hiring.

Lauren 17:14

And it was like well, really the only alternative here is entrepreneurship, and so what started out as being confidence coaching has and really like I mean that's been like the underlying thing that I've been doing with everyone, but through the lens of careers, and something that I didn't even realize that I was doing until a few years ago was, like I'm also doing that through the lens of disability, justice and helping people helping to break the glass on our own internalized ableism.

Lauren 18:04

Speaking of old models of leadership, right, and some people saying like, like people being convinced that the the best employees or the best um workers are the best like people to work with are able-bodied, and the truth is, folks with disabilities have incredible power, incredible perspective, incredible skills and adaptability and all of these things that I that serve them well in a career sense and in a personal sense. And so being able to challenge that, that ableism, and that challenge that, that ableism, and that, whether it's internalized or external, you know, having the toolkit to be able to do that, it helps to have somebody on your, on your side helping you build that toolkit and helping you learn those, those self advocacy, toolsacy tools. So, yes, I can help you, you know, get a new job, but it's like way deeper than that. It's so much. It's so much more than that yeah, yeah it.

From career coach to self-discovery coach

Lauri 19:23

The confidence through line is the confidence to be your own cushy, non-box, fitting self like that. I don't know if it's a moral or a story of like um, no one would tell a fish to try to fly like a bird if you're trying to teach the fish to fly like a bird.

Lauri 19:46

It's not going to be able to do it. It's not good. It's like you're putting it in the box. That isn't it, rather than acknowledging the skills and the gifts that the fish has when they're in water, their native environment, and when they do it their way in the water. Some fish can fly out. Some fish can even there, and that's deep. Yes, it's confidence coaching. There's a through line there and it's a much deeper, holistic sounding approach to confidence coaching or career coaching.

Lauren 20:28

Yeah, and so what I've been calling myself recently since my title has evolved that's kind of the fun of having your own business is you can give yourself whatever title you want, you can be creative with it, and what I've landed on lately is self-discovery coach career self-discovery coach.

Lauren 21:03

What I'm finding is a lot of folks are like I want to take steps to make decisions about my career, to pursue the next thing, to advocate for myself with intention, but I just feel stuck, or I feel like I'm in a fog. Seems to be a theme in this conversation. It seems to be a theme in this conversation where I feel like I want to. I want to be able to work for a cause that I'm passionate about without self sacrificing.

Lauren 21:26

So, there's a lot of self discovery that needs to happen in order for people to know what they're advocating for.

Flipping the script: job search as playground, not void

Lauren 21:37

So, yeah, it's like it's confidence coaching and it's self-compassion coaching and it's self discovery coaching and it's you know, and that's why I have I have a hard time even stomaching like calling myself a career coach, because it's like the folks that folks typically associate career coaching with like resumes and cover letters and salary negotiation, and there's so many good tools out there and folks who can help you with that and then, in my view, I'm helping folks before they get to that.

Lauren 22:13

I'm helping with all of the juicy deep things that are going to inform what you put in your resume and what you're going to write in your cover letter and what you're going to say in your interview yeah Without it being like here's a formula that you need to follow. It's like we're not putting people in boxes here. We're trying to break out of boxes. We're trying to discover what our own unique shape looks like, and it is an honor for me to reflect that back at coaching clients.

Lauri 22:48

Yeah, you made me think of two things. For years, I also had a hard time calling myself a speaking coach, and I would use phrases like I'm an inside out speaking coach, whereas everyone else is more outside in. Here's the box. How can we fit you into it rather than here's me? What do I want to say? How do I want to say it? And I'm hearing that in what you're saying, like who is the person? And then you know finalize the resume, finalize your linkedin profile, rather than here's the template for a good linkedin profile. Work backwards and watch how much of yourself you lose along the way or like here's a job description.

Lauren 23:52

Figure out how you fit yourself into this job description, as opposed to doing the work on the front end to say here's what I'm looking for, here are what my requirements are for a job, here's what like, here's what flexibility looks like for me and what types of businesses align with my values, so that you can have a much more focused job search rather than just doom scrolling through pages of job listings and feeling really bad about yourself and you're like I don't fit into any of these boxes.

Lauren 24:31

Yeah, it's easier to help someone who knows what they're looking for. Yeah, and so, yeah, that's part of the fun is looking at this like this, being like this career transition, like a playground? For exploration and imagination versus a void that you need to fill as quickly as possible.

Lauren 25:03

And that is a very like I recognize like the extreme privilege to be able to say that but suffering is not finite and when you feel stuck and you feel like I don't know what I'm doing and I'm like just feeling really lost, like we can eliminate that suffering.

Creating your unique leadership identity

Lauri 25:28

Yeah, and it also feels like you help people to not be alone in it, yeah. So if it feels like a void and you can help them, through your presence, shift into having more of a sense of play or opportunity even you know, a challenge, that's an opportunity, just kind of shifting from panic and fill the void to something more creative, however far they can get on that spectrum yeah yeah, yeah, and I mean, and the reason I started this business is because I have done that one too many times, or far too many times, not one too many, far too many times navigating what feels like a career identity crisis by myself.

Lauren 26:23

So pretty much all of my coaching clients, you know, they're either in a position where they're like I'm, I'm, I feel like I'm experiencing a career identity crisis because I don't know what my next job is, or I feel like I'm experiencing this identity crisis because I don't know what leadership looks like for me. Mm, hmm.

Lauren 26:45

Yeah, and so being able to say like I've been there multiple times. I've been there multiple times. I have not only curated tools to help a variety of people in various kind of situations, but part of the fun is we're co-creating this experience together.

Lauren 27:18

We are figuring out what story you're telling feels good to say Mm-hmm, yeah, and what unique tools need to be in your toolbox as opposed to just saying like in your toolbox, as opposed to just saying like here's, you know here's a formula. Follow the formula. There's just there's a lot, there's so much of that out there and it does help eliminate a lot of work, but it also puts people in boxes again and we're trying to break free of that. So that's a bit more about my coaching experience and it's so fun.