By Coach JoyGenea with very little assistance from AI other than grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Image by ChatGPT
One of the gifts of being a traveler who loves to study human behavior is that I get to meet a wide variety of people who I share common values with. And my favorite part is I get to hear stories.
There is no algorithm, they are not spoon-feeding by artificial intelligence. I love it, it’s human interaction and it is one of the most grounding things for me. It gets me out of my head and into the present moment.
This week’s top story reminded me of the value that just one person can make when they are the right person at the right time with the right message. It has the power to transform someone’s life.
This week’s story is brought to you by some proud parents (total strangers) inviting us to a basketball game. One that their son was coaching. They went on to explain how successful his teams are and how he gets these teams when they are always at the bottom of their division and he leads them to championships at the college level. Then his parents started sharing stories of the people whose lives he’s changed forever through his investment of time and energy in the players. The father became emotional sharing a few of the stories. The parents beamed with admiration and pride for their son’s accomplishments.
It reminded me that it just takes ONE person to see us, to see the very best of what is possible in us and to guide us to grow into that.
That is how uncomplicated change can be.
Learning Forced Fit vs Natural Fit
When it comes to children who are unconventional or neurodiverse, parents’ and teachers’ beliefs and understandings matter more than anything else. Their view of the world shapes our view and identity. For many people with ADHD, dyslexia, and autism, if they were taught the Forced Fit, box thinking, they are struggling as adults and that is where the right ONE person can shift them right into the Natural Fit identity and thinking framework.
On the left side of this diagram shows what it is like to grow up believing everything needs to fit in a box. What happens if you are not a box thinker, but you are kind, loving, and a rule follower, so you do your very best to fit in those boxes and to work with the box thinking? At some point you become exhausted trying to live a life inside the box. That is where coaching comes in. It only takes ONE person to change all of this. To release the presumptions and shift this thinking.
The right side of the diagram shows what it is like to grow up building your beliefs and understanding of the world through your strengths and weaknesses. Your parents and teachers are; teaching you healthy boundaries, encouraging your strengths, exploring, building, and providing emotional safety and support. This person understands the flexibility of life and seeks to find where they add value for themselves and others.
The Value Add
If you missed out on being taught healthy boundaries, encouragement of your strengths and exploration, and emotional safety and support in your childhood, and you want to be a high performer, balanced in strengths, purpose, passion, financial success, and love, you are going to need that “one person” to speak in a way that resonates so clearly to you that you let go of the non-serving “should” box thinking and replaces it with emotionally safe, encouraging thinking around your strengths, removing the restrictions placed on you by someone else’s limited/fearful thinking.
Why I Coach Unconventional and Neurodiverse Leaders
This is a group of people who live outside the box and have taken actions their whole lives outside of other people’s understanding. They are high performing and brilliant and they have achieved success all while playing by someone else’s rules and playbook. They are not even playing to their own strengths and personal skills. What happens when they live like this for too long, out of alignment? They feel exhausted, angry, confused, stressed, alone, misunderstood, and even burned out. Then you bring in that ONE person at the right time and the action that happens, well it feels like magic to watch or be a part of, when a person is emotionally supported. Once that happens you can start to explore all of the boxes (beliefs) that other people told you you needed to be and do to be good enough in the world. Once you start to shift, remove, and change those misguided and wrong fitting beliefs and get the right ones in place, the happiness, joy, relief, rushes in and fills people’s lives at home and at their companies. It is amazing. They become so productive, engaged, and fulfilled.
It just takes ONE person to invest in someone at the right time.
What Brought My ONE Person Into My Life
I sometimes get annoyed that my one person didn’t come along while I was in school and it took until my mid-thirties, and then I celebrate that that person even came along in my life at all. For some people, it never happens.
The best metaphor I can use to describe my life when that ONE person stepped up for me goes like this:
If my life was a bus, all of the wheels had come off, I was in the ditch, and the bus was on fire alongside a busy road.
I had just started my business and left my fulltime job a year before a major economic recession, my new business was in the wrong location for my target market and I was struggling. My marriage was ending, I learned I was not able to have children, personal and business bankruptcy was on the horizon, a brother in and out of prison, and parents alive but totally absent.
I had played the game of life following all the rules I was taught, and this was how it had turned out.
I felt totally alone, burned out, exhausted, confused, scared, angry, frustrated, focused, alert and a little excited. Internally, I was sure I was a total failure in everything I set out to do.
There was no reserve team to come in and save me. I was going to have to build the team and figure this out myself. And one of the things I knew, was that I could not rebuild and pretend that I wasn’t dyslexic, and I couldn’t pretend that package of thinking wasn’t affecting all areas of my life. I understood the reading and learning part of being dyslexic. I needed to understand and embrace all the other parts of my processing and thinking style and then grow my life using the strengths of those skills and not avoid or bury them.
I needed to burn the playbook, one page at a time and rebuild it in my strengths and weaknesses, in love and in vulnerability. ALL OF IT. I couldn’t bury or leave any of me out of my next chapter playbook and I haven’t.
Who was your one person?
If you didn’t have that one person yet, can relate to some of my experiences, and would like to learn more, schedule a free coaching call. Maybe you will meet your ONE person.
Video transcription:
So, this week’s article, you’re gonna love it, actually. I’m talking about the one, the one, the one person- so often when I meet very successful, and by successful I mean confident, happy, engaged, um balanced individuals, that are different thinkers. One of the keys to that is, we can look back at their childhood, and there was one person that made a huge investment in them, of time, of energy, to see them to see their potential, and then to help them actually like lean into that and become that person that they they were seeing. Not enough people recognize how one person can make that big of a difference, and so that’s what I’m talking about, and why that’s so important, or how that plays out is, in particular in children, if there is that one person that teaches them their natural fit, like they might be a different thinker, they might they’re- they might connect things in three dimensions instead of in, you know linear manners. If somebody teaches them how to use that strength, how to make that an advantage, it’s the difference in their entire life, it is that simple, and I talk about it in the article about natural fit. We all have a natural fit in the ecosystem of the world. We all have purpose. I know this for a fact. I’ve seen it over and over again, and if for some reason the people around us, the teachers, our parents, they encouraged a forced fit, meaning here’s the box, we need you to be in the box. You need to be this to be successful. You need this to to be happy, and most of the time for a lot of us, that’s not happy, and in particular in leadership we can- I definitely see this where people have achieved great things, and they’re miserable, and I immediately know that somewhere along the line, that one person didn’t come along to help them connect their natural fit in with life and success. And so, it’s just figuring it out, it’s being that one person.
So, one of the things I really enjoy about relocating, and being in a variety of places is meeting new people. I enjoy the randomness of that. This week, this whole article is inspired by a- some beautiful people I met. They were actually the hosts at the place that we’re currently located, and they happened to be cleaning the bathroom, and I had you know struck up a conversation. I was, I was washing my hands, and it was such an interesting conversation, and they started talk- they meaning we took the conversation outside the bathroom and and um engaged. They were a couple, and I got to hear their story, and a big part of their story was their son. Part of why they were at this campground, and why they’re doing what they’re doing is because their son lives nearby, and he is the coach of a baseball team, and that- it was just such a fascinating conversation with them about his success, his growth, everything that he’s doing. They they they gushed with pride about him, and they also gushed even more, were far more emotional, about the students’ lives he has changed, and it really really reminded me it can be as simple as just one person investing in another human being’s future, another human beings potential.
It is it’s so incredible for me personally, and I talk about this in the article in far more detail, but for me somebody came along and was that for me, and and I’m not gonna go into that person in particular in this article, but I talk about where I was when that person came along. It wasn’t, and people champion me as best they could as a child, but the systems and the education they didn’t know, so they could only go so far with that, but luckily I had someone champion for me when my life was by far at a complete reset mode. It felt like everything I had tried to do I’d fail at. When- I’ll paint the picture for you- when when your marriage is ending and you know you played a role in that, in the fact that you you know like you just know, I’m sorry, marriages end, and you both contribute to those relationships ending, and I I own some of that. I was also finding out at that same time and part of why my marriage ended, I’m not able to have children, and so I was processing and working through what that meant for me and how that was gonna play out. I was also in my second year of business, um and I was trying to run a business in the wrong location. My target population and goal clients were not in the location I was trying to start this business and run it, and then um an economic disaster happened, and the stock market crashed, and it became a whole another thing, and so I can truly say at that moment it really did feel like everything I was attempting to do I had not been successful at, and it was a challenge every day, and luckily one, luckily one person invested in me at that time and said, “well I see a lot of great potential in you. You can do this.” And that made all the world of difference, and I know in my coaching that is what at times I am for some people, is just that one person to say, “I see a lot in you. Let’s unpack this. Let’s understand this better. Let’s make a bunch of actions that are going in the direction you’re already headed, but you just- I I see you. I get it. Let’s get things into that natural fit. Let’s stop working from that forced fit. What worked for other people may not work for you at all. Let’s let that go and let’s redo this.” And it’s incredible. It’s incredible what happens for people when they do that, when they’re able to let go of those boxes, and start to actually work within their natural fit, and get all those shapes and pieces to come together. It- I’m not giving enough magnitude to how incredible it is, but it really, really is incredible, so I am so grateful for those beautiful people that I had an opportunity to run into, and I just wound up leaving that conversation thinking about that one person.
I’m like so often we don’t recognize that we maybe have that opportunity in somebody’s life, or we don’t recognize that maybe that person stepped into our life and we need to take- we need to trust that and seek to get that help, cause that might be the one person that absolutely changes everything for us, is a key to so many other things. So, my question to you is as you talk about this, who who’s your one person? And maybe you’ve had one or two of those types of people that just made an impact in your life that was profound, and if they’re still alive, I highly recommend you reach out and tell them that, cause you can’t tell them enough how much their investment in you mattered, you are so grateful for that. And I would love to hear your comments, your feedbacks, I’d love your stories about this, because we all have had moments where we needed a champion, and if we’re lucky the universe has brought us someone to help us through that, and so I would love to hear about your one person.
I’m JoyGenea, Unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and champion for those people working on making incredible things happen in this world. Bye now.