I call them word farts. My brain swaps a word, drops three, or writes something that means nothing. It is not a measure of my IQ, and I will stand my ground on that.
For a long while I read those as evidence that I didn’t deserve to reach my dreams or to have dreams. I played small, really small. Unconventional high performers will do this often. It’s damn incredible to see what happens when people unlock that lie and step into their strengths.
Here is one of the reframes that gave me my capacity back. A word fart is a hiccup. It arrives, it passes, it says nothing about your intelligence. My strength was never spelling. It is reading people and solving the thing no one else can. Yours is somewhere specific too, and it is not in the typo.
Stop letting a two-second glitch grade a lifetime of range.
What is the one skill you are genuinely elite at, that a spelling error has never touched?
Transcription:
That neurology doesn’t leave us, and at times it shows up in a variety of different ways. And why I’m talking about it is, one, so you don’t feel so alone, and also to remind you that it doesn’t limit your success. I like to call these word farts.
Just like hiccups, there’s nothing you can do about hiccups. They happen, they go away. I have word farts. I create things like that and go, “Wow.” This is not a judgment of my IQ, and I am very clear on that, and I will stand my ground on that very deeply. But it is definitely a hint of my neurology.
That’s all. My strength is not spelling and grammar. My strength is coaching. My strength is actual human communication and behavior. That’s my strength, not spelling. And I’m okay with that. I can own that. I can talk about that. There was a time in my life I couldn’t, and I will tell you, that created more messes than anything.
Legal documents that had to be rewritten and refiled at a large expense to multiple people. When I wasn’t being clear about the magnitude of how this could affect other people and myself, that was when this was actually a problem. That is when I had a lot of shame and a lot of guilt about it.
Now, it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. And luckily, majority of the people around me know that, and so we get to laugh about it. We get to say, “That’s one heck of a funny sign.” I just have to laugh at that, because that is what it is.
If you noticed in the story, one of the things I did right away was I laughed. I do that intentionally because when things like this happen, it does bring an instant flash of shame and guilt. And that breath, and then that laugh helped me re-anchor and helped me push that out. And then it’s just a matter of owning it. “Yeah, this is my neurology. I’m glad I could share it with you.”