Discovery

A man and his dog walk into a bar, and the bartender says, sorry, mate. You can't bring your dog in here. And the man says, but this is my guide dog. And the bartender says, that's a chihuahua. And the man replies, what?

They gave me a chihuahua? Ah, yes. You're on the bumpy road to freedom, the podcast about navigating this journey called life, finding freedom while living with ADHD. This is Simon speaking, and I'm in the bus. And today's episode is about discovering who you are.

If you knew then what you now know, would your life be any different? And what would you tell a younger version of yourself if you could? Well, they say life begins at 40. I believe life begins when you finally discover yourself. However, that is my point of view.

And as I said before, I'm not a psychologist, a therapist, a doctor, or a scientist. I was out of school before the bell even rang. My educations and qualifications is this lifelong journey living with the condition from being totally unaware, clueless and confused to a point of understanding awareness. And I'd like to share that from a life point of view for this podcast, the ADHD Bumpy Road to Freedom. And this podcast is sponsored by Bumpy Road Coffee.

And I'm drinking one right now, the Bumpy Road Blend, which is roasted smooth on a bed of hot air by yours truly. And if you're only gonna have one coffee a day, well, spoil yourself. Make it a good one. Bumpyroadcoffee.com.au. You can subscribe to Bumpy Road Coffee and I'll send you fresh coffee every month if you like.

And that's what keeps this podcast going. So it's a win win situation for coffee lovers and also the Bumpy Road community. And of course, if this podcast does resonate with you, join the community and our journey here. It's free just like you are and maybe help others find their freedom by sharing ADHD experiences, the good, the bad and ugly to make this journey called life a little bit smoother. So what is discovery?

Well, it's really a process, right? It's about finding out who we really are. It's exploring our journey from where we started to where we are now. Seeing what built us, the way we think, the way we act, the way we react and figuring out what made us, the process that we went through that got us here today. And look, it's not about creating some mask to hide behind because I think we've done enough of that.

It's about ripping that damn mask off and asking yourself, well, why am I even wearing this in the first place? Because we really want to get back to the nuts and bolts of who we are and not what we're hiding. So you really want to get real with yourself and strip yourself right back. Pull everything out of the closet, spew it up if you have to and see yourself clearly. You don't want to be that person walking around oblivious to who they are.

No one wants to be that person acting like they got it all together when we really, really don't. I don't know if anyone really does, but some people act like they have got it together, but we never, never do. And that's fine. But here's the truth. Right?

Because if you're not being true to yourself, you're never really going to believe in yourself, are you? You can't really trick your brain. No matter what they say, we've all this stuff about, hey, trick your brain to do this. Your brain knows. You're not that stupid.

So look, it's a journey and it's part of what this process and this podcast is about, especially in the beginning. And for me, that's how the bumpy road scenario started with those types of questions. Finding out who I was, the highs and the lows and the constant why moments. Because at the end, it's all about you and it is you. This is you and your journey, nobody else's.

And to get to know yourself, it's a question you've got to ask yourself and depends on which context you want to look at it. This is the way I sort of looked at it myself. Right? I don't know if you've ever read the book To Kill a Mockingbird, but we had to read it in school. Now, I actually read it about three times I think, but there's a part in there where the main character, his name's Atticus and he's the lawyer and he's defending this guy and a lot of the town is against him for defending the guy, but Atticus is really talking about knowing who this guy really is and scout the younger girls trying to work out Atticus, why are you defending this guy when everyone's saying you shouldn't be?

And he turns around and he says, well, to really, really understand a person, you won't know until you climb into their skin and walk around in it. And there's another saying, to know somebody is to walk a mile in their shoes. So here's a challenge. Why not do that to yourself? Look at yourself differently.

Go and look into your own skin or walk in your own shoes. Take that journey. Look back at yourself and look at it from a different perspective. Look at it in the third person from outside your skin, from outside yourself. Go back to that classroom, that relationship, that job, and see through the whole process whether it went right, when it went wrong, whatever that scenario is, and have a look at it in the third person and be honest with yourself because this is about reflecting and seeing what makes you tick.

And you've got to ask yourself that. What am I good at? What did I lose myself at? What's the process I need to go through to get this little journey of life that little bit smoother? Until we strip ourselves back, we aren't really going to know, and this is about creating this path of least resistance because we're on an ADHD journey here and we have masked a lot of things about ourselves.

So let's get right back to that and find out who we really are. You probably ask yourself for ADHD, why is this important? Well, until you know yourself, you can't be yourself, not authentically anyway. We live in a world where we are constantly trying to be who we think we're supposed to be, and we're comparing ourselves to others, chasing the standards that were set by schools or societies and even the people around us. And we've struggled with that, right?

You've tried to conform to what 95% of the population seem to do quite easily and what they're taught. And you'll say the one of the 5% who just can't seem to comprehend the whole way it's being done. And trust me, you're not alone on this because this is why I'm saying it. This is what how I feel. And this is the way I look at it back now when I look back at it all.

A system that wasn't really built for you. Now imagine, for example, if a system was designed by someone with ADHD, that'd be a whole different world. There's actually a book there called Lateral Thinking for Management. It talks about people who think differently with these divergent brains and creative areas and how they can excel, following the system. And let's say that's you and that's an absolute bonus.

Right? The reality is you're wired differently. And once you understand that, it's actually a strength, but you've got to stop judging yourself for the outcomes that were shaped by the symptoms. And these were things that were created for that ninety five percent of the population and you struggled and it caused things to happen in your life that got you to the point where you are today. I've been there.

We've all been there. It's something we can relate to. We blame ourself for always being late, struggling to stay motivated, being messy, constantly getting in trouble and not understanding why. And it wasn't until later I realized that these were symptoms. These were symptoms caused by something far deeper that I didn't know about that you've had to deal with in life.

So this is the reflection. Now, it's the same thing with say anxiety. I remember I moved to a new job, a new town, new house, and something that should have been really, really exciting. I kept getting this really weird, weird feeling in my stomach and I felt like I was really sick. I went to the doctors, I had to get my blood pressure done and I couldn't explain this feeling in my stomach.

I couldn't work it out. It took about a month for that to go away. And I was worried. However, it was years later I actually realized that that's called anxiety. I didn't know what anxiety was.

Now it's quite a common term, but yeah, I was feeling really sick. It was just anxiety. Had I known, well then maybe I could have fixed it. So the takeaway is, and this is the power of discovery, to stop blaming yourself. Stop judging yourself for the outcomes shaped by causes that you didn't even know existed.

But damn it. Sorry. I just spilled my coffee. Has anyone ever done that? I bet you've done that plenty of times.

Hey, just on a side note there. Hey, I do roast my own coffee. So if you are a coffee lover, www.bubbyroadcoffee.com.au. Check that out. I roast using a beautiful air roasting system.

Fantastic coffee. Anyway, back to the podcast. Okay. So how do we discover ourselves? There's plenty of apps out there that I had a look at that's about discovering who you are.

However, I felt most of them were about the now, whereas I feel we need to look back at our past to discover who we are and it's not really complicated at all. It's just looking back at our journey that we have been living and going back to the beginning. Here's the thing. Not discovering yourself is not complicated. Life's the journey we're living it.

So what we need to do is go back to the beginning. You can't paint over the past, but you can strip it back. I used to give life like a book, chapters, stories, turning points, and like any great movie, there's always a beginning, there's a middle and then there's an end. That's how it works. Funny enough, that's how the jump bumpy road idea actually came up about was because I was looking at this journey of life and I was looking at it like it was a book and there was different chapters along the way.

There was and there was downs and there was roundabouts, all these different things. That's how that analogy started. I looked at it as chapters in my life. So look at your life like it's a book. Chapter one is the beginning where you can go back to your very first memory where you feel like something did affect you.

Now for me, was grade one. I had a really that was when I sort of realized that I was on a different spectrum. Right? Now I looked around day one, look at yourself. I compared myself to everybody else in the class.

I didn't understand why I couldn't keep up with them. There's a bit of a process here. Go back to those chapters. Childhood, how were you treated? Did you struggle?

The teen years, what scared you and what made you proud? Your early adulthood, what did you chase? Where did you feel lost? And compare how your journey went through those different stages in your life and how you changed in your way of thinking. And that's the next point is what actually shaped you.

If you reflect on your wins, your failures, the crossroads, where you went left and right when you maybe could have gone right and what would have happened? Be honest here because this is what shaped you. What was your environment, your outside influences? Was there ADHD kicking in there when you didn't even realize that ADHD was kicking in there? For me, I look back at life and I say, I was always chasing money because I felt like that was where we were positioned in life and what to do.

We had to get a job and get money rather than actually chasing what I really cared about. So I was more about money and just survival. You don't have to overthink of it. You can journal it, write it down, or just think while you're driving. What I did was I made a list.

I did it like a SWOT analysis I do sometime in businesses. I wrote down the good things and I wrote down the bad things, the pros and the cons and that sort of stuff. And then I sort of wrote down this list of anything I could think that made me, you know, what food I ate. And that's really actually important because a lot of people with ADHD are looking for that dopamine hit, which comes in sugar. I ate an enormous amount of junk food as a kid.

A little secret I'll share with you, when I was going through a bit of a discovery, when I was about eight years old, I was addicted to these donuts and it started off with getting one before school to then I had to have two and I had to get there every morning to get these donuts to the point where I actually had to steal money out of my mom's purse to buy these things. And it wasn't just any donut, it was these donuts. I never really understood why. Was getting four of these donuts a day. Sounds silly.

I'm just a little eight year old kid stealing money out of my mom's purse to buy donuts and I was addicted to them. Later in life, I then was addicted to cigarettes amongst a lot of other things. It never really made sense to me why I did that. Looking back at it, it was the sugar and the dopamine. Why I was getting these donuts?

And nothing could stop me. I'm very fortunate that I've always been very lean. I would have been massive based on the amount of food that I ate, but that's all ADHD reflective. So all those little things, write them down. What you're trying to look at is all these things that influences and then the ADHD traits and what was the pure you.

And then you can start to really get a bit of a blueprint. Since I started doing that and looking at my life, failures, the chaos, they weren't random. They were part of my wiring, part of the blueprint that made me. So don't be hard on yourself. Discovery is not about blame.

It's about perspective. Seeing who you really are, understanding your blueprint, and figuring out how to make this road a little bit smoother going forward. And the other thing about it is if you're going to go into a situation where you want to go through diagnosis with ADHD, these are questions that you will have to answer, especially in your early years of childhood, particularly between the ages of eight and 12. Go back to those years, really think about what you were like back in those days, because that will answer a lot of questions for you in the long run. So here we are discovering ourselves.

It is an important thing. A lot of people don't go back and reflect on their life and I think it's really important. So in the ADHD world of discovering ourselves, we talked about the process, figuring out who you really are. Break it down. Knowing yourself is the first step of actually being yourself.

Looking back at chapters in your life, your journeys, your blueprint, and how ADHD isn't the whole story, but it's part of what has shaped you. It's part of what has influenced you. You have your own personality that you would have had anyway regardless of an ADHD condition, but we've got your personality which is influenced a lot by your family, your upbringing, everything like that. And then we're throwing the ADHD element into that one as well. So it's a bit of a double whammy there.

Lastly, this is not a blame game. It's about perspective. Seeing your road for what it is and figuring out how to make it smoother. It's your blueprint and it's all about you. So I'm going to give you a little bit of an action plan, a little bit of homework.

I know we hate that word homework, don't we? Look back at your life. Look back at your chapters and your journey to where you are today. Pick a particular moment where you struggled, you questioned yourself or you felt lost. For example, I always go back to the first grade in school when I first had to use a pencil and write and how it didn't work out for me.

I questioned that all my life, but it's very specific time for me because I know that that was very ADHD driven and I spent a lot of my life blaming myself for that and it made me who I am in more ways than one. So find a moment where you struggled. Question what that was. Ask yourself about how you handled that situation. What part of my wiring, ADHD, my blueprint, my experience shaped that moment to where I am today?

For example, my writing, when I couldn't write affected my whole year through school. I couldn't do exams. I still struggled to fill out forms. It affected the type of jobs that I wanted to go for because I didn't think that I was able to get anywhere because writing is such an important part of life. There's so many different elements to that, but just pick a point in your life where you believe that it was ADHD behind it and go from there.

You don't need to overthink it like journal for hours. Just reflect it. Write it down. Think about it. Grab a coffee, whatever else.

And the other thing you can do is in your discovery process is just get a pen and paper and put a timer on. And so I'm going give myself ten minutes to write down word about. It can be smells. It can be food. It can be about things you did or things that you said.

Anything you like, just write them all down and discover who you are. Do it in the third person. Don't ask your friends because your friends aren't going to be honest with you. I will do a podcast next about the diagnosis and going through a stage because that is a journey itself. But discovery is really important.

The recap on that is the process of figuring out who you really are. And we break that down by knowing yourself. And that's the first step to actually being yourself. Looking back at chapters in your life, blueprint and how ADHD isn't the whole story. It's part of what shapes you.

Then remind yourself that this isn't about blame. It's about perspective, seeing your road for what it is, figuring out how we're going to make that smoother moving forward. So going back to the beginning, what you would tell the younger version of you, knowing what you know now. Find a chapter in your life that stands out. What were you doing at the time, in a moment that really sticks out to you?

And tell yourself exactly what you should be telling yourself right now, and that is it's gonna be okay. This is Simon speaking, and you're on the bumpy road of freedom. Thank you for joining me today with the discovery episode, navigating this journey called life living with ADHD.