Written by Coach JoyGenea with assistance from Claude, image by ChatGPT
You did not pick up your bad relationship with rest, play, and basic needs out of nowhere. You were trained into it. Twelve years of it. And it is still running.
I almost threw it away. A binder from Decoding Dyslexia Minnesota, sitting in a pile of things I was cleaning out. I flipped through it before tossing it, landed on a page of potential IEP accommodations, and stopped cold.
“Student will not be held in from lunch to complete an incomplete task.”
“Recess, special events, or rewards cannot be withheld for academic or punitive reasons.” “Student will not be held in from recess to complete work.”
These are things that have to be written down. Spelled out. Put into a legal document for a child. Because without that document, food and movement and play are apparently open to negotiation.
I stood there holding that binder and felt it land somewhere deep. Not as old news. As a live signal from a system that shaped how you think about yourself right now, today, as an adult. And if you grew up with a different brain in a school that was not built for it, I want to say this clearly before anything else: none of what happened in those rooms was information about your worth. It was information about the fit. You were not the problem. You were never the problem. You were in a system not built for your success.
What actually happened in there.
If you had a different brain in school, the message you received, over and over, in the most formative years of your life, was this:
what you produce determines what you deserve.
Finish the work, then you can eat. Get it right, then you can play. Meet the standard, then you get to rest.
Nobody said it out loud. They did not have to. The structure said it for them, every single day, for twelve years.
The brain does not work well when you take those things away. Rest is not a reward. Play is not a privilege you unlock after productivity. They are how a brain, especially a different brain, regulates, recovers, and actually does its best thinking. When you spent twelve years in an environment that treated them as negotiable, you did not just have a hard childhood. You built a belief system. And that belief system came with you long after you were done with school.
I see it in clients constantly. The person who skips lunch because they have not earned a break yet. The one who cannot sit still and enjoy something without a background hum of guilt. The graveyard of abandoned hobbies, not because they lost interest, but because play never quite felt allowed. Real work is never done. So rest keeps getting deferred. And then they wonder why they are running on empty.
It is not a discipline problem. It is not laziness. It is a belief that got wired in before you had any say in the matter, by a system that was not built for how your brain works.
The band kid who helped a teacher understand.
After a speaking engagement recently, a teacher came up and told me he did not quite understand how school could leave a mark that serious. He was smart, school worked for his brain, it was a good experience. He genuinely could not picture what the other version felt like from the inside.
So I asked him about a time he tried something and could not get traction. He had played in band for two years. Always last chair. Practiced constantly, never moved up. Eventually he stopped, because why would he keep going back to something that was not working?
I told him: for a kid with ADHD or dyslexia, that is what school felt like. Every single day. Except they did not get to stop. They had to keep showing up, always last chair, for twelve years straight.
He went quiet. Then: that would have been awful.
Yes. It was. And you carried it with you when you left.
This is not about blame. Most of the people who ran those classrooms were not trying to cause harm. They were working inside a system that was not built for your brain. That does not make the impact smaller. It means the work of unwinding it is yours to do now, not theirs. And the first step in that work is simply naming what actually happened. Not dramatizing it. Not excusing it. Just seeing it clearly for what it was, so it stops running quietly in the background of every decision you make about what you deserve.
A few places to start.
Notice where you are still asking yourself to earn basic things. Not as a self-criticism exercise, as a curiosity one.
- Where does rest feel like something you have to justify?
- Where does enjoyment feel like something you have to schedule around productivity?
- Where does asking for help feel like admitting you did not try hard enough first?
- Where does doing something just for the fun of it feel like time you have to account for later (watch for the places you feel guilty while having fun, clue)?
- Where do you notice your body signaling it needs something, and you override it because the timing is not convenient?
Those are the places the old belief is still active.
Try eating lunch without an agenda attached to it. Not as a hack. As a small act of telling your nervous system something different from what it learned a long time ago.
And if something pings you, a document, a conversation, a video, a moment that brings some of those old feelings forward, let it. That is not regression. That is your brain flagging something that still needs to be seen. You do not have to spiral into it. You just have to acknowledge it rather than push it back down.
You do not have to do this alone, either. Part of what makes these beliefs so sticky is that they were installed in relationship, inside systems and classrooms and dynamics with other people. Unwinding them tends to go faster in relationship too. Whether that is a coach, a trusted person in your life, or a community of people who actually get it, connection is part of how this moves.
What changes when you start.
When people begin to see that pattern clearly, something shifts. Not all at once. But the guilt around rest starts to lose its grip. The graveyard of abandoned hobbies starts to look less like evidence of failure and more like a map of what actually matters to them. They start to notice when they are punishing themselves for needs that were never negotiable in the first place.
The version of you that eats lunch without guilt, rests without earning it first, and exists as a whole person in a life that actually fits is not a fantasy. It is just the destination nobody drew a clear path to yet.
Here is the million dollar coaching question.
What are you still NOT allowing yourself because some part of you is waiting to finish the assignment first?
Ready to stop running on someone else’s rules? Book a free discovery call at https://joygenea.com/schedule-free/. It is a conversation, not a pitch. You will know by the end of it whether this is where you need to be.
Video Transcription:
Today I really want to reach out and acknowledge my dyslexic, ADHD, autistic, neurodiverse people that, that listen, that follow. If you are one of those amazing people, I wanna definitely speak to you today in particular because today I am definitely feeling like one of your tribe, and a big part of that.
And I, I thank you for being my people and being around and participating in this. And why I’m feeling that way in particular is because, as you might know or maybe you’ve experienced, from years of masking and hiding and working to fit in and assimilate in a variety of environments, particularly the h- for careers and so forth.
Anyways, I used to stuff down a lot of how, who I was actually, how, who I was, how my neurology worked just me. And years now… i’ve stopped masking for years now. I get to just be authentically me all the time and so I forget sometimes that I’m even in environments that I should probably mask and make people more comfortable, and, and I don’t care much anymore.
I am reminded though, from time to time, of how far we have come and also how far we have yet to go as a society in embracing our different thinkers and as supporting and engaging them. So what brought this to the forefront and what really hit me hard was a combination of two things. One was a conversation I had recently after doing a speaking engagement where a gentleman came up and asked me very calmly, uh, he was a teacher and he said, “You know, I, I know I’ve seen these students.”
He goes, “I just– as you’re speaking and talking about how school was very traumatic for you and left an imprint on you in a very negative way,” he’s like, “I don’t, I just don’t quite get that, like that has not been my experience.” Obviously, he thrived in school very well, very gift- I could tell he was gifted and smart, and school worked with his brain, so he flourished.
It was a great place for him. And so we talked for a while, and I’ll come back to him because I came across a document, it’s fabulous. It is from Decoding Dyslexia, great website. Each state has their own particular website. This one came from the Decoding Dyslexia Minnesota. It is about supporting- parents to be the best advocates and to understand the schooling system and to understand how to keep track of that.
Anyways, I had a copy of their binder that they give parents, and I was cleaning stuff, I was gonna throw this out, and I saw it. I paged through it, and I came across potential accommodations. These… This is three pages front to back, and I thought, “Well, that looks interesting,” right? Let me read a couple of these to you
Recess, special events, or rewards cannot be withheld for academic or puni- punitive or discipline reasons, including missed work or goals, unless it is withheld for the entire class. That alone left me speechless. Student will not be held in from lunch, gym, or specials to create an incom- to complete an incomplete task unless it is student or parent requested And then there’s this one, “Student will not be held in from recess to complete work.”
That is part of potential accommodations in an IEP, and I thought, “People have to be told this? This doesn’t seem like common sense to not take recess away from a seven-year-old, and to not take away lunch,” right? Student will not be held from lunch. Really? Eating? I’ll give you a hint. The brain doesn’t work well when we take those away.
But I won’t get into the semantics of that. Why that hit me fairly hard and brought back a lot of emotions from my childhood and from my schooling. And some– and it reminded me, I don’t talk about it a ton, but it reminded me of the shadow that f- that does, not follow us, but is a little part of us, and the experiences that we have had.
And there are times when some of that, things come along, like this document, that ping us and, and remind us, “Oh yeah, that wasn’t the best feeling. That wasn’t the best time. That was challenging.” And it reminds me where I’m at now to reflect on that, to appreciate that I’m not in those environments anymore, and to also understand that there are ton…
if this is still in a document that’s years later from when I was first diagnosed, that tells me there’s… How many adults have come out of this same system and experienced all of those things, and now they’re trying to navigate the adult world and wondering why it’s not making sense and why they’re not fitting in and why it’s so dang hard.
Well, I’ll give you a hint. It’s not just your neurodiversity. It’s not just that you are dyslexic and you are wired differently, or you have ADHD, or you’ve got a buffet like I do. It’s not just that. It’s also that we lived and grew up in environments that told us play was negotiable. Recess and food. I was taught food was actually negotiable.
It could happen after I was productive, not before. It could be taken away if I wasn’t good enough, if I didn’t finish my assignments, if I didn’t do everything just right. When you step back and look at it, that travels into adulthood. And I see clients that don’t eat properly. I see clients that skip having fun and work really hard, and they’re like, “Where did I get this belief?”
I’ll give you a hint. It came from spaces that you spent 12 years in, 12 foundational years in, that by their actions told you that certain things were more important than other things, like food. So You’re not alone if every once in a while a video or a document or a person taps your shoulder and, and kind of, you know, reminds you of some of the spaces you’ve been and some of the feelings that you might have had in the past.
And I also remind you that all of that can be shifted, all of that can be moved forward, and an incredible, vibrant life can lay out before you. It does need to be addressed, though. You do need to understand that you have built up some of these beliefs. And s- so for the teacher, I’ll swing back around to that story, for the teacher that was asking me about not understanding, you know, why there could be some trauma, I was I was searching for a metaphor for him to help find a spot in his life where maybe he tried something and it wasn’t extremely successful.
And luckily, he had tried to be in band, and he did that for two years, and then he stopped because he’s like, “I just couldn’t get it. I was always the last chair. I never moved up. I practiced and practiced, and I never really got ahead.” So he goes, “I wasn’t gonna keep doing that.” And I went, “That is a perfect example.”
I said, “You got to quit.” I said, “For someone with ADHD, for someone with dyslexia,” I said, “just because school’s uncomfortable, just because it’s not working, d- we don’t get to quit.” I’m like, “That’s not an option. We gotta keep going back every day.” So I’m like, “Imagine you had to keep going back to band until you graduated, even though you were not doing well, even though you were always last chair, even though it was really hard.”
And it… i… And then I, I let him think, and he was like, “Wow, that would’ve been awful.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I said, “So that’s why, as adults, part of moving forward is embracing that differently wired brain, and another part of it is healing some of the baggage that came from that environment and came from those spaces.”
I have done a lot of work on that, and I love helping people work through that because it’s pretty incredible what’s on the other side. But you do have to take a little bit of time to acknowledge you’re wired a little differently, and how do you need to work with the world with that different wiring?
I’m Coach JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach and international neurodiversity coach, and if you can’t tell, a bit of a different thinker, and I am championing you. If you love this video, please pass it on. If it resonated with you, again, please like it. Please subscribe if you wanna see more videos like this.
And I would love your comments and feedback. That really helps me to come up with topics to just make this engaging. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to sharing some other insights next week.