This is part of MY story. There is a recipe for SUCCESS in all aspects of life. What if the people giving you the recipe, teaching you, or leading you don’t know your recipe?
-I choose to take my trust back with the option to consciously choose who I give it to and when.
-From this moment forward, I chose to learn differently than I have been most of my life, because I pick my leaders and teachers now.
I was sitting in a class, learning a new recipe to improve my marketing and reach more people and I had this realization that I don’t get to pick the people who taught me growing up and those people did not know my recipe for learning.
You will have to watch the video to see who this goes.
For my fellow dyslexic adults, I see you. I really really get it when you tell me there is a pain in you that you can’t explain, and something happened at work and you feel like you’re not good enough, like all your self-confidence is gone. What the heck?
When we push our trauma aside to survive, it still lives in our bodies and affects our decisions as adults until it is rooted out. And you never know where you will be when your body decides its time for it to go.
Please comment and share how you connected with my story.
Transcription:
So, this is just a reminder from me, with an incredible personal story about how I too am on this growth journey. I too am working at the process of healing, the process of growth, the process of totally understanding my neurodiversity and how it plays out in my life, and which parts of it I can adjust, and where I have more choices.
Last week I was sitting—so hard to share—last week I was sitting in a class, a workshop I’m taking, um, about marketing. I’ve been in this course actually for 9 months—I figured that out before this video. And in the class, we are 9 months in and a lot of us are not, um, we’re just not doing the things we need to be doing, and turning in our assignments, and getting our stuff done. And the teacher, in a very polite, kind, loving way—like I’ve never seen it done so well—um, brought forth that conversation.
It started out very simply, just, you know, you’re all paying for this, you want to be here, you keep showing up, so forth. But you’re actually not doing the things. You’re scared and you’re staying stuck and how—you know, what’s kind of going on—and how can we help lead you?
There are two instructors. Um, they couldn’t have asked the question better. And I’m sharing this with you so you understand the setup that helps to lead to the kind of the—I’m calling it a breakthrough—that happened in the moment.
So we started this conversation. And as soon as they started talking about that, I of course got nervous and defensive and was like, “Oh, I’m not doing my stuff,” and—right—all that chatter. And then I quieted that down. And as a group, we started open conversation about it.
“Here’s what’s holding me back, here’s…” you know, these things. And I said, “Well, you know, I stopped.” There was one particular thing I stopped there cause I wasn’t sure exactly how to move forward. I—and then I—I just didn’t move forward. And I need to just go back to that spot and pick that spot back up, which is about—it’s probably six months ago. So I’ve got a lot to pick up. Um, and that makes me a little scared right there—just saying it—it makes me a little scared. I’m like, I have a lot to pick up on. It’s all fine. It’s the reality of it. That’s what I need to tell myself.
As they were talking, a particular concept came out. These are also—the instructors are also, um, business owners, also working in the environments of teaching, coaching, speaking—that space. And so they too have been on a journey. And the reason they’ve put together this course is because they recognize that our industry is not best served all the time by outside entities. It’s a combination of the two, and they work. And that’s what they are. And there is a system and a process to it, and it builds on top of it.
And they started calling it this recipe. So they’re like—the instructor pointed out—we are giving you the recipe. And it’s not something where you—the recipe isn’t something where you pick and choose little parts of it and then are successful. The recipe works that you do this week’s thing, and you have two weeks until the next course, and then you do the thing. Because then we’re gonna build on that thing in the next course.
And when we’ve fallen behind, and when we’ve stopped—’cause we’re scared or overwhelmed or whatever paused us—and we don’t talk about it, we don’t ask for help, and we don’t work through that, we’re preventing ourselves from actually, like, putting this whole thing together and having success.
Simple conversation.
Somewhere in my instructor explaining this and sharing this, something in me shifted in a way I wasn’t prepared for. All of a sudden, as she’s talking, my gut—my lower gut—starts to get really hot. I could feel it. I’m like, “What in the world?” I hadn’t hardly eaten anything all day, so I’m like, that’s not it. And then my shoulders got really hot. So now, my gut—my shoulders are really hot. And then tears—just alligator tears—huge tears—start to just come.
And I couldn’t figure out where—where or why. I’m sitting in this class on Zoom with all these other people, and I just was like—I just was crying. There was no stopping it. I could tell that it had come from deep in me, and it was coming out and it needed out. And so I wasn’t gonna stop. The class was great. It was being recorded. So I went, “No, no. I’ll come back to this. I need to actually be in this moment.” And so I did.
And luckily, I’ve had enough therapy, coaching, great—great, um—interpersonal work to know that when those moments come, they’re very valuable. And so to engage with it, I grabbed a sheet of paper, um, grabbed a pencil, and just was like—I asked myself, like—I literally wrote a question and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And then I sat with that for a moment.
And what came up, I was not expecting at all. And what came up was definitely something from my years in school as a different thinker. And it was the fact—but this is gonna sound like a 7-year-old or younger—”But I did all the things you told me to do. And I followed the whole recipe, and I still failed. And then you sent me back to do it again. And again. And again. And I kept failing. And you didn’t change the recipe. You didn’t help me do it another way. What you did instead, as I would fail, is you said, ‘OK, we’re gonna do it again. This time, I’m gonna give you—we’re gonna give you more work. And we’re gonna make it even harder.'”
And so by the point of third grade, I had no art classes. I had no recess. I’m working my butt off to achieve things in school, and all I’m hearing is—you know—”You’re not succeeding.” And I’m sitting there being like, “But I’m doing everything you tell me to do. And you’ve told me that this will lead to success. If I do these things, I’ll be successful. And yet I’m not being successful. And why can’t you people hear me?”
That’s what really came out. I’m like, “Why can’t you people help me? Why can’t you hear me?” And then, under that came out this: “Then why am I listening to you and your recipe? Because your recipe doesn’t create success for me. Your recipe just creates hell for me.”
And then this—it was just—I couldn’t believe I wrote it down. I can’t stand this statement. Then I wrote down, “But you just need to try hard enough. Or you just need to try more. You just need to try more.”
“You’re not trying hard enough” is how it sounds. I can pull out elementary school report cards that say this on them. I don’t have an art class. I’m not going outside. All my weekends. All my evenings. I remember every time my mom would drive us places—to my extracurricular things—we are running spelling words. Like, we’re doing all the things. And they actually wrote on there, “If you would just try harder.”
And what I needed to hear more than anything was that, “We see you. I see you, Georgina. I see you. You are trying so hard. You are giving it 110%. Keep that up. We haven’t quite figured this out yet, but you’re not alone. And all that hard work—it’s not paying off with great grades yet—but it’s gonna pay off later, and it’s okay. But just keep trying. I see you.” That’s all I needed a few people to say.
But they couldn’t. They just weren’t able to do that. The system didn’t know how to help me. They didn’t have the recipe for how to best teach me. And I get that. I don’t blame the people. But definitely, in that moment, sitting in that class—that is what I call a breakthrough.
When people tell you—and if you’ve had any therapy, I’m hoping somebody explained this to you—but often, particularly when we’re children, and we have pain and don’t get heard, and have to bury stuff, what that means—burying your emotions—literally means you’ve buried them. You have buried them somewhere within your body. You have buried them within your psyche. They’re buried.
You literally figure out how to turn off your feelings so that you bury feelings to survive. That’s what I call a breakthrough—is when those feelings become unburied and recognize it’s safe to come out and actually present themselves in a nice little package and say, “Here. You can handle this now. We’ve got this.”
And sitting in that class, in that moment, for some reason, my body went, “You know what? This would be a really good place.” Because you’re running into this all the time. You don’t trust that anybody actually knows the recipe. Because when you were really little and young, and learning how to learn, you were in systems that made you not trust the recipe.
And so now, as an adult, often I can ask for help. I pay for courses to learn and to do things. And I take 15%, and I don’t—I go, “Oh, I don’t need that part. I just need this. I just need a little of that. I just need a little of this, little of that.” But I don’t actually take the recipe, especially from really good, trusted, valuable people. I don’t follow the recipe and follow the steps and just do the thing to prove that maybe it isn’t successful in my industry or maybe it’s not gonna work out.
But how would I know? Because I’ve messed with that recipe so much that who knows what I’ve really done? I’ve just gunked a few things together. And yes, I have great intuition.
And in that moment, I realized there are people—when I find really great instructors, like the two instructors sitting in front of me and the great classmates that I have that are wanting the same success—my job in that moment is to go back to being the 5- or 6-year-old that really trusted the teachers and really trusted the environment and just do the recipe.
‘Cause I know how to pick myself up from it not succeeding. And I now know, as an adult, I have no problem looking back and going, “Well, these parts succeeded. This part needs tweaking.” I’m really good at that.
I’m sharing this with you because maybe there’s a part of you, from your experiences with the school system—maybe you buried some feelings too. And maybe, in listening to this conversation, and in maybe sharing this moment with me—which I would really like to not have to share with you, because I would really like to tell you that I’ve got all my crap together and these things never happen—but they do.
And honestly, like I said, I’ve done enough healing in my life that I know it was a great moment—that I was able to actually find that, talk to it a little bit, and release that pain and release that fear that I was gonna follow these steps and it wasn’t gonna succeed.
So, why start?
If you happen to say that, I get it. I get it. It doesn’t feel good when I don’t succeed. That ship sailed so long ago. But I also don’t give up, and I’m gonna keep trying. And why not do the recipe when I find people I really, really trust, and I’ve asked them for help, and they go, “Well, here’s how you do it”?
You know what? Just—sometimes—it is safe, and it is okay. And it’s time for me to pack up—not pack up that belief—to release that belief. That belief doesn’t help me anymore. It’s not valid. That was a belief that a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 9-year-old… Like, that is a belief that I had to live through.
And when I can tell you—when I went to middle school, yeah, when I was 7th grade—I said, “No more.” I was breaking down mentally. I was breaking down mentally. Um, my parents could see it. And I remember sitting in a meeting with, um, the people that—I was taking all the, um, special courses from—the spellings and that—and we had a meeting at the beginning of the school year.
I just—I so vividly remember all of us sitting around a table, and I’m crying, and I’m yelling. And I just—my dad was there, and he was rarely at these types of things. And my dad was just really clear with the person. He’s like, “No. She’s done. If you can’t tell, she’s done.”
And I remember specifically telling them, “I would rather fail, like, following the recipe of everybody else than the way that I’m failing now, where I’m trying so hard that I have no life, that I have no happiness.”
I knew the recipe worked for some people. Almost all of my friends were straight-A students. They never even opened the book, and they could sit down with the test and ace it. I can’t tell you how that works. I just admire it.
But I knew it was possible. And I knew that I could take no more. I could just take no more. And thank goodness my parents advocated for me, and they allowed me—and I remember—I had to literally sign off on the fact that I was aware I could possibly fail all of my courses, and that I may even have to repeat that grade more than once. It was on a sheet of paper. I had to sign it. And I said, “I will happily repeat a grade. Just allow me to please be a teenager and have some fun and live a life and figure this out.”
And I didn’t fail, by the way. But I remember at that age, at that point, I had already—at that point—decided I would rather fail out of high school than keep having to live the way that I was living.
Those are tough choices to make when you’re a kid and to advocate for that. That’s how exhausted I was of that system. And that’s how much I understood they didn’t know how to teach me. They were absolutely doing their best. But they didn’t know how to teach me.
And that, since I was going to fail anyways, please let me fail on my own terms.
And while that was the right thing to do at that time, what I now know and can see is that that isn’t always the right approach as an adult in every environment. I need to not push away from things and be like, “Nope, I don’t think you’re gonna be able to help me, so no.” There are times for that boundary. I know how to use that boundary.
But I now, with this new awareness and understanding, get to choose. And this is why I do what I do. And this is why I’m sharing it with you. Because I’m so passionate about the fact that, as different thinkers, we—we have every opportunity to understand how our processes work, how our thinking works. And then we get to choose if we’re going to continue down certain paths, if we’re going to change some of that, how we might be able to change some of that, how we might be able to do it differently—within our skill sets, within our strengths.
So, if you’re struggling with any of that, I get it. I get it. I see you. I understand. From the core of me, I understand what it’s like to be in systems and environments that do not see you, do not hear you, and do not know how to help you.
And as an adult, we don’t have to participate in life like that. We get to keep asking for help and finding the right people and making our way through that. Because I have definitely made my way through that.
For me to have that breakthrough and the next day already be feeling better, and the next day to be processing it into “How can I reach more people?” and to understand I get to choose…
By the way, my marketing class—the project for that day? Yeah. I did my homework. It’s really easy. I just did the recipe.
Oh, my brain wanted to color outside the lines. It was like, “No, I think my thing is special, and I do this, and I can’t quite fit into that bucket.” And you know what? Every time my brain said that, I went, “Oh no, that’s just an old way we were doing it. We’re gonna follow this recipe because we’re baking. And this is chemistry. And—and there’s an art and science to this. And we’re gonna follow this recipe to prove it either is really successful—which, that’d be awesome—or that we need to make some tweaks. But we’re just going to do the things.”
And you know what? It felt really good to just do the things. And now I’m gonna do the next steps with that. And I’m gonna go back and redo the portions that I need to redo.
So thank you for hanging in with me while I shared that really long story and for seeing me. If you’re watching this, I feel seen and heard, and thank you.
My name is JoyGenea. I am an international neurodiversity coach, and I’m a human. And I too am still learning and still figuring parts of this out and still healing. ‘Cause this is a lifelong journey.
And I thank you for tuning in. And if you think this could help somebody—you think there are some teachers that could benefit from seeing this—please share this. Pass it on to others. That’s the only reason I’m making it.
Oh, retelling that story is something I could live without. Um, but if it makes a difference for somebody, I want to share it. It’s a gift.
Thank you. Bye.