 Welcome to Pukipondas, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. I'm Dr Pukinightsmith and I'm your host. Today I'm in conversation with Anthony McCann. His main work is as a specialist ADHD coach and trainer for ADHD awareness. He also works internationally as a public speaker. He was diagnosed with adult ADHD at the age of 44 and believes passionately that a deeper understanding of how the ADHD brain body works can lead us to helpfully transform our personal and our professional lives. In today's episode we explored can striving to be authentic about a lived experience of ADHD risk harm. But we did a lot of exploration of what ADHD is and isn't first. Anthony was fascinating to talk to and I could have gone in any one of a hundred directions with his ideas. I hope you enjoy our chat. Can we start by, could you introduce yourself? So I sometimes introduce people but I always think that the introductions are more interesting when they come from you because I want to know what you care about you. What I care about me, well introductions were always a difficult thing for me because what I care about me is I get myself into trouble because I don't like the labels, I don't like the hats you know that we're expected to wear one hat because it doesn't confuse people. So the one hat that I wear to not confuse people is ADHD coach. So that's what I do on a day to day basis. So I work with clients, mainly adults or parents of children who like myself have had difficulties because of the kind of brain that we have and I also research that as well. So I worked as an academic for about 20 years in lots of different disciplines and now I apply that understanding and that knowledge and that kind of method and investigatory habit into thinking about ADHD and trying to make sense of ADHD from the inside out because one of the things that frustrates me greatly in a lot of these different mental health conversations is how much we are made sense of by other people who don't actually have an experiential understanding of what we are going through. So that's very, very important. There's a lot in there. Okay, so can you talk to me a little bit about ADHD and why that's kind of a big important part of what you're doing both professionally and personally? Well, as you know yourself, when you have a particular kind of brain it is your life, it's your experience, it's every part of you. One of the things that has fascinated me about thinking about this conversation about ADHD because it's complex as to who accepts what and who says what and where, how and when. One of the fascinating things for me is looking back through my history of theoretical work looking back through my history of interests and seeing how particular aspects of this kind of brain, particular aspects of this kind of approach to experience have infused absolutely every single aspect of my life and also how all of the things that I've been interested in throughout the years now add up to a kind of cumulative pool of insight about how this brain works and how this body works and how this personality works. And one of the things that I've been keen to do in my work thinking about ADHD from the inside out is to get away from the broken brain model because I find that very powerful and quite insidious in some ways not in any conspiracy theory way but in a deeply unhelpful way. I think of myself in some ways as a recovery coach. So what I do is I help people design a more helpful approach to their own lives for themselves. And if you have a model that says your brain is essentially an inherently broken but it needs fixing that it somehow has something wrong with it, you know, disordered or dysfunctional or deficient in some way with these executive function deficits and with these kind of dopamine, low dopamine problems and all this sort of thing. If you have that idea that somehow we need to be fixed a bit to make us more like all the other neurotypical people. I find that, well, first of all, that undermines anything you might do in terms of recovery and it leads to what is effectively a steady state understanding of whatever these difficulties are that we're having. And first and foremost, people with these kinds of brains tend not to like steady state anything. We like movement, we like fluidity, we like, you know, process, we like dynamics. So that was one of the things I very much resisted. As soon as I got my diagnosis was I became very aware of what the orthodoxies were of the stories that people were telling. I have a deep respect for neuropsychology. I have a deep respect for psychiatry. I'm pro-medication in the sense that I take medication and it helps me, but I don't accept the narratives that people are using to explain why the medication works, because I'm trying to work at finding other ones, because the ones that were there didn't seem to satisfy my experience of it or more clients' experiences of it. So what fascinates me about that conversation is that there seems to me to be a very distinctive kind of brain, which makes up about five, maybe as much as ten, but certainly five to seven percent of the population. And we experience, in terms of the work I've been doing, we experience consciousness and experience itself in a very different way. And we have certain core features that allow us to make sense of the world in a very distinctive way, but in a way which leads to quite a bit of dissonance with the world around us, which was not designed with us in mind, and I'm sure you would appreciate these issues yourself. So that issue of having the world not being designed for us far enough, we don't need it to be designed for us, we're not that arrogant. At least some of us might not be, but I might be. I was going to say I wouldn't mind. No, it would be great. But that question of the interface is where I see the disordering, it's where I see the disability and the disabling processes taking place. I was deeply disabled by what I experienced. I was no experienced, profound disordering. I was almost catatonic walking around the house to the extent that my wife believed that I had possibly got early onset Alzheimer's. I had pretty much entered an associative state where I was wandering around just unable to connect with the world around me. So the disability can be real, the association can be real, the quality of disorder can be very real. But where we locate that has huge implications for how we think about treatment, recovery, whatever it is. Do we locate it within the brain in terms of some essential features? Do we locate it in the interface between us and the world? Do we only locate it in the world? And we have no part in it. So where we locate, that's very important. And for me, I locate it in the interface. And that's that's how I think about the ADHD style brain as I tend to tend to think about it. So just to backpedal slightly, I'm always aware that people listening in will have more or less understanding of things. Can you just explain like what would be the kind of the textbook definition if you like of ADHD, what normally people think of when we think ADHD? And how does that compare with how you would maybe explain it or explore it with your clients? Absolutely. So people tend to talk about ADHD in terms of what they used to talk about it very clearly before diagnostic changes took place over the last year. Talk about in terms of hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. Now hyperactivity has the stereotype of the crazy boy in the classroom who can't sit still and causes trouble. The impulsivity has the, you know, always makes me think of the marshmallow test and the for me rather questionable consequences of the marshmallow test where people were saying that people are deeply impulsive and they rush at things and they can be reckless and they can, you know, make decisions before thinking about, you know, the consequences of it or just have no understanding of consequences whatsoever. And then the third thing would be inattention, which would be that people just are just always somewhere else and floating off and not interested in, you know, what's in front of them. Now, for me, those three kind of diagnostic criteria that people tend to go for and you can be either hyperactive type according to the diagnostic criteria, you can be impulsive or it can be inattentive type, hyperactive type or combined. And for me, one of the difficult things is that that's people looking at us from the outside. Okay, that's that's an, you know, it links into a lot of the behaviorists observable symptoms issues going back historically but you know what was observable about these people. How are they deviant from the rest of us and how can we find ways to classify them in a way that maybe makes them a little bit less deviant or or, you know, put some in a box somewhere that makes them more kind of understandable and handle with to make up a very bad word. So that was very interesting to me because it's something in the back of my head and this is very classic with this brain something in my back at back of my head was going doesn't feel right doesn't feel right little alarm bells going off. Yeah, because that wasn't how I experienced things. The stories that people then use to explain that within the kind of neuropsychology zone tend to be things like there's a number of them but what common ones are one going around that we have low dopamine production. Therefore, we crave high dopamine production and we dash off trying to get these dopamine hits all over the place and that we have to be buzzing all the time to be happy and all these sorts of things. Okay, I'll say it now. That's a myth. Maybe explain that later. And another story is that we've got executive function deficits that that somehow the front frontal lobe part of our brain I've said this in videos myself at the beginning of my coaching career on YouTube if you want to watch them. I wouldn't recommend it about how, you know, our executive functions broken in our brain and, you know, therefore we can't do administration and bureaucracy as well as other people. But we can take stimulants which helps us fix that a little bit and we can reconnect with that. There's a lot of discussion about what executive function actually means. There's been articles written which identify kind of up to 40 different understandings of executive. Oh, wow. Okay. And also, it's very, very influenced by models from the business world where the whole question of executive function, you know, also ties into that book the executive brain which was republished and reedited in second edition came out recently, which very much influences this conversation as well as to what are the qualities and executive brain that are connected to this prefrontal lobe and connected to the ways in which we are in the world. And then that in turn connects to conversations which are deeply embedded about productivity, which are very common in disability studies conversations, you know, about who's who's productive who's not productive. And to jump forward a bit, one of the things that fascinates me about that is that I don't know if you've read the authoring autism book, can a neuro queer work about autism. No, but it sounds like I need to. It's an excellent book but it's one of the it identifies one of the ways people tend to talk about autism as kind of a failure of communication and it's kind of a communication deficit. If autism is in the stories that people tell about it is framed as a communications deficit. For me, very frequently ADHD brains are framed as having a, and people are framed as having a productivity deficit that that we aren't we aren't working well enough and product producing well enough in the modern world to be to be good enough at that the admin and the bureaucracy and the, you know, production line and stuff and that's how it tends to be presented. Okay, is that we don't fit very well and therefore we're not productive enough and we don't think don't do things smoothly enough and frictionlessly enough to fit with the modern world of production and industrial industrial life. So, so that's sort of one of the stories that tends to be thrown around with an executive function. And then there were there are a number of other ones that have to do with, you know, how fast or how slow the sign ups is fire and all that sort of stuff and various other various other ones. Then there's the other one, which is very very dominant, which is the goal question about emotional dysregulation. It's effectively, though people won't say it out loud, it's effectively a narrative about emotional retardation that we are developmentally delayed in terms of our emotional regulation. And again, people don't say it as they really mean it they don't they call it, you know, developmental delay they don't call it emotional retardation, but it's the same model that they're using palatable or I mean what I imagine so I imagine that certainly get a little bit more bite back and blowback. If that were the case. If they could call it that and again that was something that didn't feel right to me. And that I felt that if what people were seeing was impulsivity and hyperactivity and emotional dysregulation and all these sorts of things. But surely there was something else going on under that which I could make sense of through my experience and working with clients and trying to make sense of their experience. And I went diving into a rather unfashionable area personality theory. And I went diving back 150 years into personality theory and back through the unfashionable and for in many ways unpalatable async and his work back through there. Not the IQ stuff and racism stuff. Back into the personality. Yes, it's clarify back into the personality theory work back through was it's I can't even remember names of all these people but back a good good 150 sometimes 200 years to try and make sense of the ways in which people were identifying different kinds of approaches and different personalities and while I was happy to discount the Myers-Briggs stuff because that was very, very much not supported by scientific research that followed it. The underlying original work of young in terms of extrovert and introvert was interesting. The work that async was doing which developed that into four types was interesting and seemed to align with some of what I was looking at. And I also align some of that with sports psychology and align some of it with also with some work in clinical psychophysiology otherwise known as hypnosis and biofeedback. And I kind of mixed it all together with the work I'd previously do doing in academia and I ended up with a model of this distinctive brain with certain core features. And for me that's been the core of the work that I've been doing since and just to mention three of them. So I've identified that these brains seem to have a deep deep autonomy drive, not in a Freudian sense just as a steep craving for autonomy built into them. Almost 100% of the time. And that this is effectively where all of our energies are going all of the time. What does that mean an autonomy drive? What does that look like? It means that 100% of the time our brains are trying to make sense of the world experientially on our own terms. Okay. And that we are effectively experiential learning machine. But anytime we have to make sense of the world on other people's terms in other from other times and other places sometimes that raises our stress levels because that becomes difficult for us. And the, it's on the one hand it has that, you know, we dash for the improbable effectively. It's an inbuilt tendency to head for the improbable to have for the cracks where the light gets into. I kind of think of it in terms of the princess and the P we have this deep instinct for understanding where something doesn't feel right. I also call it homeostatic intelligence, but but it's this sense of when a system is out of balance or when something slightly out of balance or out of whack. It's a deep, deep sense of that. And that's what we head for. So we head for where the greatest amount of experiential learning is likely to happen, which makes it very difficult for us. When the world around us has been designed already with all the policies protocols procedures everything in place all the traditions in place everything they all laid out. And that's where the experiential learning available in places where you're expected to have low autonomy expected to have low experiential participation. And you're just expected to follow the rules or follow the follow what people tell you to do or follow the instructions or all that stuff. The core of a lot of the difficulties we have to maybe talk about later but but for the moment just that sense of this autonomy drive drives everything. And it is really the core thing. The second thing which is related to that. And this comes to the impulsivity and hyperactivity and and also inversely to the intention. We have this deep, deep relationship with proximity, as I call it so present time and present space. So our native space is effectively the 10 feet around us and the bodies we live in. Of course everybody's is, but because of our deep, deep 100% autonomous learning energies that is effectively our safe space. And as soon as we go beyond that 10 feet in terms of our attention, then it becomes less safe and it becomes more stressful. Okay. That sounds hard. That is hard because the entire education system is based on drawing our attention to things beyond that 10 feet. We are taught to learn what other people have thought we are taught to learn what other people have done in other places we are taught to to regurgitate and imitate what other people have done in other times and other places. So we are effectively disengaged from our experiential learning systematically through conditioning through an educational process unless we're very luckily and have good teachers occasionally and have follow things like, you know, art practice or like a Montessori or Steiner approach maybe. Some Montessori teachers, some Steiner approaches. Again, things in general, I have a difficulty in championing because particular things in particular places can be very, very obvious and there are certain things about Steiner that in the present time might not be that palatable either. There's going to be no one left soon, is there? But that's actually really important for the ADHD brain because so-called, because what happens is the vast majority of the people that I come into contact with and certainly in my own experience as well, what happens is that the constant adaptation to the beyond your 10 feet, the constant adaptation to the rest of the world, leaves you just disconnected from your sense of yourself and your sense of how you make a difference. And for some people can lead to deep depression and for some people can lead to deep anxiety depending on where they are in terms of their physiological kind of makeup. It's something which is the heart of the disabling process, is that disconnection from that 10 feet around you. And that for me is really important. So you've got your autonomy and you've got your proximity. And then there's another thing which people with these brains we tend to have. And again, this has only been really identified in giftedness research and in very marginal and not terribly rigorous research on indigo children from the 1990s is the helpfulness instinct. Okay. And this, this deep, deep helpfulness instinct that we have and it's connected to the proximity and it's connected to the autonomy. But it's about, you know, we just, we want to be helpful. So 100% of the time almost or maybe 99% perhaps, but most of the time we are intending to be helpful. That flies in the face of everything that comes to mind with a stereotypical ADHD, you know, yeah, tell me more. We tend to be helpful. And the thing is that the more unsafe the environment we're in, the more that helpfulness instinct simply becomes about self survival. Okay. Or it can also become about self denial and total commitment to an external authority. So you can, you can channel it in different ways. But the thing is that the healthier the environment, the more that hyper responsiveness to the immediate time and immediate space from the proximity kind of stuff. The more that hyper responsiveness is deeply helpful because you can notice what can be helped what can be improved your seeing the cracks where the light gets in your, your, your respected enough for people to be aware of what you're able to do and so if you're in the same, that's wonderful. You're the person who sees the things that maybe somebody else didn't say, you know, and you're like, Have you thought about this, and you become a little bit of the helpful naysayer in some ways. You know, but, you know, in some teams people don't respect that. And the more intense the environment becomes, the greater the likelihood is that that will not necessarily be respected, but the helpfulness instinct will keep taking away. And it's something that I've had one client just started crying when I mentioned it, you know, because that they've spent their entire life with this helpful intention and no one had ever noticed it. Oh, because it was kind of clouded out by the way in which their behavior came across so. Yeah, and just just they did, they'd fought to be part of a world that they couldn't feel part of. So what do you do then I mean what what, how do you help. So back to a strength based approach so you've got the figure this there's kind of five core core traits as well so another one would be very briefly would be this this deep concern for safety so emotional safety is one of our abiding concerns that that in any environment which isn't obviously safe emotional safety will trump any of any will be at the main guide in any decision making. Because we are aware of it and unless we are being strategic. And that's that's that's the important part so I teach people how to be strategic in where they feel less safe, which goes back to kind of what we talked about on Twitter. And then the final one would be the question of authenticity so the way I frame it for clients is that with this brain. We can smell in authenticity within ourselves or within others, the way a dog smells fear. Wow. Okay, right so more about that. So if we ourselves are not acting true to ourselves and what we feel are our core strengths. We will feel it we will feel unhappy with ourselves and we will feel unhappy with the situation and if we continue it, we could even get into self loathing pretty easily as well. One of the strengths of inauthenticity is we have very very low tolerance for inauthenticity, unless, again, in self or in others or in everyone, either but unless it's something we train ourselves to do. Okay, it's one of the things that causes difficulties one of the things that causes people to walk out of jobs without, you know, a moment's notice. It's one of the things that says I'm not doing this anymore this doesn't feel right. Yeah. And it's just this deep deep feeling of this this isn't right this doesn't this doesn't feel right. And those are the people that make change happen now. Well, this is the thing. This is absolutely thing the earlier part of my work was going to my academic work was very much about dynamics of violence and accelerative violence. And about helpfulness. So I've been developing what effectively is a discipline of helpfulness studies. So one of the things I'm fascinated by and pretty much anybody with this brain tends to be fascinated by is, you know, what counts is appropriate. What counts is helpful. When is what's appropriate unhelpful. When is what's helpful inappropriate. Wow. So that whole series of tensions, then is kind of at the heart of how these brains operate because we love knowing how stuff works. So if people are largely cognitively centered where they largely in their heads and interiorized stuff, then those people tend to be about how ideas work and how they link to each other and how they all connect and how the systems work. If they're more kind of body centered, then they tend to be more about operations in the world and how all that stuff works and how it can work more helpfully and all that sort of stuff. So yes, these are the these are the alchemists the way finders the healers the, you know, and I like to joke but I'm not joking that, you know, I think these were the one person in the corner of the village, who was either the healer or the the lawgiver or the warrior or whatever in the village of 25 that had a more contemplative approach to what they were doing and was thinking more in terms of being helpfully thoughtful and thoughtfully helpful. There's a lot that I think I want to interview you about eight more times on each of those topics. I am interested to know about your experience so obviously your experience of ADHD has driven you to understand more about it and that now you've explained your thoughts on it. I see so much of your work reflected in those traits that all kind of sits and makes a lot of sense but when like when did you learn that you, how do you even say were ADHD have ADHD how do you have not good at words. I don't, I was phrase that the more the words matter the less the words matter which is the idea. But when we start quibbling over words then it's more to do with the quality of the atmosphere is the issue not the words themselves. Yeah, I'm a poet I play with words I'm happy to play with words now. So, I talk about us in terms of having an ADHD style brain. So, you know, or an ADHD style personality because but I also talk about it in terms of creative rebels as well. So, you know, I'm playing around with the idea of creative rebellion at the moment so this idea of creative rebels because effectively people are creative rebels who haven't had the difficulties. To that profound degree don't require a diagnosis that might they might help with a little bit of guidance now and then but they don't need a diagnosis and they certainly don't mean the medication. You know, but if you are at the point where your life is falling apart. It's a bit like the idea of, you know, people who say that addiction isn't addiction unless it's something that deeply deeply affects your quality of life in a negative way. It's the same with ADHD that you have the brain you have. Maybe start calling it ADHD when the way in which you interact with the world causes you difficulty to the extent that it hugely and negatively affects your quality of life and the quality of life of those around you. And that's what happened with me. So for 20 years or so maybe longer 30 years I was joking. Well, maybe 30 years ago they didn't talk about it. I was joking about having ADHD. I just have ADHD, you know, blah, blah, blah. Until such a point as I would walk from one room to the next and couldn't remember what I was there for until such time as, you know, I hadn't seen the floor for 30 years. I couldn't do the dishes and I couldn't put things in the laundry and I couldn't, which is difficult when you have a wife who's disabled who can fall over boxes in the hall. And kids whose rooms aren't going to tidy themselves. And so on and so forth. So one of the things that was really important for me was, and I've written about this in a poem called first. Which is online in various places. I think it's on my Twitter media feed. But, but that was effectively about that moment of acceptance that my wife turns to me and says I think you need help. And then I absolutely without hesitation said, yes, let's get help. Wow, you're ready to hear that. Absolutely ready. What happened was I was a restructuring the University of Ulster in the days. I think it was one of the first people of that trickle that it was eventually that eventually took the University of Ulster to to court over it, but I was in the trickle at the beginning. I took voluntary redundancy while in quietly and secretly offered something else which I won't say because it'll probably cause a kerfuffle and insert kerfuffle here that would have happened if I had said it out loud. Anyway, I got out of the university career and had been using my wife very much as a PA in many ways. And when my wife got pregnant for the first two children, which lasts about three years really in terms of the effects for her. She was just too ill. She was largely bedridden almost for kind of nearly a full two years. As a result, she wasn't able to help me. And because that was suddenly taken away I hadn't realized how much support and structure and scaffolding my wife had given me Emma had given me for everything that I was doing. Yeah. And my career just didn't happen. I had a million different projects that didn't come off. At one point I walked in the door and said, by the way, we're moving to Tasmania. It wasn't funny at the time, but it wasn't her. It was entirely in earnest on my part. And so that that was very much we were lurching from one project to another. I was trying to reinvent myself a million different ways and, you know, constantly finding projects that would take over the world and, you know, I started. I got into a kind of depressive cycle and I started taking Sitalopram. And I've done that for a year and then I just got worse and worse and worse. And now I know, well, I'll explain that a second. So I went to the, got the ADHD diagnosis and that was a gateway then to getting stimulants which overnight changed my life. Really? Right. I went from not having any connection to the world to being able to do the dishes and do the laundry, everything within the first 24 hours and not a problem. I sat down at the table for dinner for the first time in five years. Because you took stimulants. Because I took stimulants. Why? Tell me more about that. So this is kind of deeper work that I'm working on at the moment, but what I'm interested in is why stimulants work for some people and not for other people. Now, I'm fascinated that a lot of the work that people talk about in terms of stimulants often goes back to a study around 2006, which was done with rats who hadn't been diagnosed with or without ADHD. They were just rats. Sounds like a high quality study so far. I mean, go on. But so the lot of focus for stimulants has been on dopamine and serotonin and the effect that that has on people. I'm not really interested in that because what I'm interested in is clinical somatic. I'm interested in the degree to which people do or do not have a connection with their somatic sensory range. What's very interesting to me is that people with kind of a low somatic profile who tend to have a more dissociative kind of dissociative depression rather than anxious depression approach to life that they tend to respond very well to stimulants. Whereas people with a deeper and a higher kind of somatic connection. So people who kind of just trying to put it in layman's terms because I'm very fascinated by what you're saying but you're very clever and use a lot of big words. So people who feel more are more likely to be made kind of anxious by. So it's much feel more because people who are kind of stuck in their heads a lot. So effectively people were stuck in their heads a lot. People who have stuck in their heads a lot tend to have a better response to stimulants. Okay. Now, my guess is, and this goes into stuff that maybe as a whole other conversation but my guess is it's because the stimulants are sort of a surrogate sensory stimulation. They replace a real somatic stimulation with a pretend stimulation where the brain is basically saying look, I'm not getting enough connection a meaningful connection with the world I'll take anything I can get. Yeah. And this is the closest clean clear thing for the brain to anything I can get. So there's a kind of a slight of brain that takes place where the brain just goes look, I'm not getting enough in the world I'll take anything. And a lot of the stimuli kind of buzz stimulation that people go for is again the brain doing that it's I look give me anything I'll take anything at this stage because I'm not getting that connection so I'll take anything. So stimulants work for people who are very much down that road. Yeah, very disconnected from the world. And what fascinates me is that stimulants can backfire for people who either never had that profile. Or down the road can backfire for people who have had both the deep body connection to themselves, and then also develop the kind of the dissociative depression thing and flip back and forth between them I call the washing machine. They flip back and forth between depression and high confidence and depression, high confidence, depression, high confidence, depression, high confidence. So that present almost like bipolar kind of. You can yes that's exactly how presents. And kind of so you get that kind of hypomania and the depression. So what I discovered was that when I was taking satelopram and then taking concerta. Yeah, I increased the satelopram because things weren't quite right. Yeah. And it made me hypomanic for three days. Okay. Which then told me that the reason I got the diagnosis in the first place is because I've been taking satelopram. And it made me increasingly increasingly distractible and disconnected. Wow. That's quite wow. There's a lot there. Okay. So, gosh. So one thing then you've been studying ADHD for already quite a long time. And you have quite a deep understanding of it for quite a long time before it occurred to you or your wife. No, not at all. Not at all. My study was in the social sciences. I see. I had a deep, I had a deep interest in psychiatry and I had a deep interest in psychology and I knew kind of, I had a background in understanding kind of psychology back to the William James and four and all that sort of stuff. But in terms of mental illness, my main experience had been through depression as I understood it. Looking back, I'd made attempts as people tend to with this brain, I'd made attempts to diagnose myself with, with ME and CFS and Cormac fatigue syndrome and various other things because that deep exhaustion is very characteristic of this brain. I've worked as a translator and interpreter and I know that when you, when you work in another language all the time, it exhausts you. And that's why in Europe, when people do interpreting, they do 20 minutes on 20 minutes off 20 minutes on 20 minutes off because your brain cannot cope with that intensity. And that's one of the things that exhausts us. Wait, you, sorry, you've worked as an interpreter as well. Just, you just threw that in a little bit. My first degree was languages. I worked as a kind of, I've done interpreting along kind of informally along the way, but I have worked as a translator because languages was my first degree. So I started off in languages and then I went to history, literature, folklore, stuff. And then I went to anthropology of music and critical legal studies and various other things. And all of those things, effectively what I did, looking back was I took a journey from height up in my head, disconnection with the body, sight, sound, and journey back through the body in all the disciplines I took. So my disciplines are actually can be staged back down through if you want to talk about Chakras, if you're that way inclined, you can. But the disciplines are staged, kind of staged return to my body in retrospect. Okay, so you now are feeling that you're kind of connected. No, still a journey. How many, how many more careers are we going to have? Sometimes I think I think one of my difficulties is that the, for me, one of the reasons for me that. So I've been, I've been building polyvagal theory into a lot of this. So one of the things that fascinates me is the way in which. I've built polyvagal theory into work I was doing on how different levels of intensity leads to different qualities of response and different qualities of expectation. You have to explain polyvagal. I'll explain what I mean by that. So as you raise the intensity of within a person, for example, the type of thinking that tends to happen will change in quality. And so turn it around as you deescalate the intensity as you lower the intensity within the disposition within a person within a kind of psychological profile within yourself. Helpful thinking simply starts to happen. Yeah, you know this yourself from the work you do with people. I just don't use posh words. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So basically when your brain is doing that, you can't think that's. Yeah, so I can go once saw the Russell brand was talking about in the Oxford Union about how, you know, people, people where I'm a camera, people doing that there to other people, you know, well, if the other person does that there to them, there's just lots of that going on. You know, I'm flapping just for anyone listening on the podcast here. Yes, kind of talking hands. So what's important is that the people who people who have a kind of a low somatic low body connection response to the world. Yeah, they tend to default to the what the polyvagal people would call the dorsal zone. So they tend to default in stress responses to the fight to the freeze and overreact response. Okay, so they tend to go to, you know, the place where the blood drains the essential organ organs. And you basically do whatever it takes to survive and it's very much a place of existential threat. So so that's the stress response default. And that was one of the key things for me at an early stage of realizing that for these people with these particular kinds of brains. That was a particular default response only for some of them. Yeah. Yeah. So the second personality type are realized was where people with this type of brain have a default to the sympathetic system, which is the fight flight and control response to stress. So that's very much not driven. So the top one tends to be driven. It would seem by kind of oxytocin and intensity that the second one tends to be driven by adrenaline and cortisol. And is very much about fight flight or control. It tends to be very much the the I'm I'm big place. Whereas the dorsal zone tends to be the I'm very small place. Right. But then the big insight for me was realizing there weren't just two types, because I assumed I was the dorsal type I assumed I was the kind of the low connection to the the world place because I what got me to this work. Particular quality work was that I had always found it very difficult to understand what was going on in my body. So this question of interception. So what was going on my body was always kind of a bit of a mystery to me. So to the extent that needing to go to the toilet needing to eat needing to drink feeling tired. All of those were felt as sort of a sensory model. Pick up on your internal cues kind of chance. So you know I'd be surprised by the fact that I was nearly doubled over needing to go to the loo. You know some cases and that always been the case for you or when I was very young it was certainly the case and I eventually traced it back and this is one of the things that got me was I traced it back to biomedical trauma when I was about to three days of intense peritonitis and burst appendix when I was two and I was on a boat, a Greek ship in the ocean at the time and they'd diagnosed me with flu and my parents were having to deal with this. But my appendix burst and I was had it for about three days, worst possible scenario should have died a million times and that seemed to leave me with this deep quality of default to existential threat. And this deep pathological shyness that I had throughout my life. But one thing I could never understand and never included in that conversation was something that I realized when working with a different with another client was that I also always had the desire to be on stage and to be seen and always had this deep sense of purpose that I that I had really important things to do so I had the big, big sense of self thing going on to yeah, and suddenly realized I was both. So there weren't just two types they relaxed the there was also a combination type to get all ADHD about it. But the combination type wasn't the combination of the symptoms it was the combination of people who do the washing machine between the dorsal stress response and sympathetic stress response and you get a kind of flip flop flip flop and the higher the stress the quicker the flip flop. So that must be hard to manage though right because how you would manage one is quite different a bit like you found with the drugs know you kind of entirely entirely and it's very confusing to because it leaves you with a sense of almost dual personality. You know, because you become the center to contradiction because you want to sidle over or swaggery to the girl over there in the corner. If that's where you're inclined, you know, at the disco when you're you're 16. But then I spend my time half an hour counting down the 10 seconds ultimatums until I go over and never go over. You know, so it's complete hell. Yeah, you know you have this deep inner confidence that you know you know you can do stuff but then you can never do stuff. And you get stuck in that. So working with that is a very, very, very different kettle of fish. And what's fascinating about it is that the dorsal response is driven by story. And the sympathetic response is driven by by external sensory body response. So the stories are what flood in and bring people back to the dorsal. The intuition kicks in and brings people back to the sympathetic. But then the stories flood in and bring them back to the dorsal. So yes, at high, high, high stress levels that can look like bipolar. So how do you how do you help? I mean, this is what you do now. So very quickly, I have a kind of a questionnaire that I give people from the research I've been doing to kind of work out where on that. How do they sit themselves in terms of what their general stress responses tend to be, what their inclinations tend to be. If somebody is kind of born low somatic as you can be, if you're born low somatic, very rare, but people can be born with a very, very deep. Technically they call it alexisomia and a deep disconnection to their bodies. Then it's a very slow and patient process of slowly and gently building that relationship up relationship up with the world of kind of very simple somatic exercises very simple connections with the body very simple sensory stuff. There's there's lots of different areas you can look to things like somatosensory psychotherapy. Some kinetic work, some, you know, but also very simple things like, you know, learning how to boil an egg in some cases. You know, because you often have this such a deep connect disconnection to the world that you literally cannot do anything for yourself. And if that then come gets compounded by having traumatic experiences on top of that. So in some cases people, you know, do have to kind of go off and do trauma work with other people as well. But for the stuff that is kind of basically non trauma related some of the trauma response exercises that people do can also be very helpful. So a lot of the stuff that people because it's about reconnecting with with reality with the world with what's there. So it's about re re association re association with the people who are kind of more sympathetic and like myself who have had and still have sometimes anger issues and things like that. And, you know, it's a very different thing because what happens is, because people with this kind of high body connection they're like this raging river of energy. Where people who are kind of born with kind of a cognitive head inclination might spend some time in their heads people who have the raging river energy who then go into their heads, then spend about 85% of the time compulsively overthinking. And it's a huge river of that going on up there. So that can be difficult. So again, that's about reconnecting them with their core sense of confidence that there's never gone away. And what's helpful with with these clients is they tend to recover very quickly because once they realize that their core sense of self is coming from the confident place. Yeah, they learn to notice when the stories come rushing in. Okay, they learn to trust their connection with the world they learn to, you know, trust that exercise and movement and being out in the world and doing stuff out in the world will flow and reconnect with everything. And they just learn to be aware of their triggers for getting back up there in their head again. Yeah, and stuff like that. So there's a number of different things you can do with people but I find actor training is very helpful. Certain kinds of actor training, because that's, that's about people. It's been designed for people who are drawn to the stage first of all so they're draw these people who are have that big sense of self, but frequently have these head issues as well so it's been designed for people to bring them back into their bodies to bring them back into certain types of actor training, bring them back into that sense of being comfortable with their movement being comfortable with their selves, and being aware of that 10 feet around them in terms of qualities of atmosphere qualities of relationship. So actor training can be very deeply powerful for certain people with this brand. Really, really fantastic. That makes sense now you've explained it but when you first said it I thought it would almost be the opposite because you're sort of what you're saying it's almost like you're looking to be more authentically connected to self and then you're saying so you do So the reason we initially were going to talk was this whole idea about kind of, yeah, being authentic about your lived experience and whether that's a good thing or whether it can ever be traumatic and having understood your kind of, yeah, take on ADHD and thinking about just tell me more because you've done thinking on this already. So one of the biggest difficulties with this brain is that people, as I said before, adapt 100% of the time to the world that isn't designed for them. Now what happens then is they kind of might not have developed any clear sense of self at all. They might not have any clear sense of kind of almost dismissed any question of self esteem because there's nothing there. So if you're constantly throwing yourself at the wall, hopefully you don't stick, you know, constantly bringing the circus to town hoping people like the circus, you know, and not shout something like it this way comes. That's kind of what you've spent your energy doing. And you keep thinking it'll work next time it'll work next time and you know, insert Einstein quote about, you know, probably misattributed about keep doing the same thing that hasn't worked last time and hope it'll work the next time and something to do with insanity and all that sort of thing. That's what people tend to do. So what what tends to happen is they don't then develop that authentic sense of self, yeah, while also having this deep radar for authenticity and inauthenticity. So it becomes deeply, deeply distressing that sense of disconnect. So what I do is I encourage people to dial down the amount to which they throw themselves at the world. Okay, okay. So they basically get them to dial down the emotional intensity when they throw themselves at the world so you don't plant trees with flourish where they're going to get cut down. Okay. In fact, you might just go and have a chat about chainsaws with the people who are cutting down trees and not try and cut that not trying plant trees there at all. So the idea is that you spend it's kind of the 8020 principle reversed is the 2080 principle. The idea is, instead of investing 100% of your energy, throwing yourself at the world, at most invest 20% of your energy, throwing yourself at the world, and at least 80% of your energy, working on your strengths, working on what nourishes you, working on what you flourish with and building that world of safety and autonomy and proximity and helpfulness and authenticity within yourself and within your space within your relationships. And that's the key but the authenticity is that when you are deliberately performing inauthenticity in a world which was not designed for you and which does not operate on your basis. And this is hugely relevant to conversations about passing in racial terms as well and passing in autism and passing in lots of other areas that you do learn to adapt. Now, there's a very thin line between adaptation and assimilation. Because one key thing remember about this brain is that it is resistant to paths that are previously well trodden. Right. So what I call it, I call it the performance of the probable. So effectively, what you do is you learn to perform the probable of what people expect. By doing that, if it's a fairly healthy and safe environment to begin with, by doing that you can then build trust that you're not going to do something off the wall and shock people. And that when you've performed the probable and shown that you're credible in a PhD, for example, it would be the literature review is the performance of the probable. When you've done that, the more you do that the more room you build for your autonomy. Okay, okay, the more room you build for yourself because the greater the trust and safety that other people feel around you. The greater the lower the intensity will be, and the more room there will be for everybody to be experiencing in a more helpful way. But the deliberate performance of inauthenticity doesn't take anywhere near as much energy as throwing yourself authentically into an inauthentic space where you cannot be yourself without causing friction and ripples and trouble and everything else. Now, sometimes people will want to make friction and cause trouble and everything else if there are questions of legality, safeguarding oppression, violence, structural violence, you name it. Okay, so what we're talking about is the performance of inauthenticity in environments which are effectively those of professional practice. Okay, so you, you kind of pick your battles. And the idea is that you, you perform the probable you only make a fuss. If you're willing to live with the consequences or walk. And you only make a fuss in constant in situations of legality. Yeah. And safeguarding health and safety, or basic human dignity. And is that is that how you live. It wasn't how I lived and I suffered badly for it. So I suffered at least kind of four years of bullying at different jobs and universities. And they nearly broke me. They nearly broke me. So, one of the things that this is is about knowing how people with these brains can be both prone to being bullied and scapegoated. Because they're the ones that tend to say but hold on a second but hold on a second. And if they have some of the, if they had a history of trauma, then that that also people with a history of trauma can can be seen a mile away by people who have a radar for these things. And like bullying. So, the other thing is that sometimes people with this brain can also be the police, which is an interesting kind of flip as well. But bullying is something that that often happens in and around people with these brains, whether they're the ones who suffer from it or want to inflict it. So, one of the things I think I learned from that. And one of the thing I went on to do was to look at systems change. And I became a specialist in cultural climate in organizational systems. And looking at how to either transition to or or move to cultural climate within an organization that allows for greater helpfulness and safety for everyone involved. Where isn't just a rhetoric of inclusion and safety, where it is actually a quality of relationship is fostered and facilitated in and through the ways in which they do things. But the difficulty in that and the difficulty and the reason I train people on this is because the work that the Orthodox best practice and standard practice of every professional practice I have looked at institutionally is ultimately leading to a space which leads to less helpful relationship. That's a big statement. Yeah. It has to do with three things in particular but one is the level of intensity that people are encouraged through issues of urgency and productivity and you know go go go and grow grow grow and all this sort of stuff. So the levels of intensity are exponentially already ever being pushed. Secondly, there's a level of kind of low relational density if you want to think about in one way, or elimination of uncertainty thinking in another way that is at the heart of the orthodoxies of most professional practice. And that's in terms of efficiency in terms of administration in terms of bureaucracy. And another thing that becomes very very important in these environments is very highly directive forms of power so should must need to have to want to, you know, so you're talking about essential essential job requirements and job description sort of stuff. It's all about should must need to have to it's all about very strong push very strong pull. They're not gentle environments. And those tend to be environments that tend to be associated with the freeze and overreact response in the people I work with. And that's, that's why it becomes very very difficult to go in there just as yourself without a sense of armor, without a sense of some sort of sense of performing a role which is very clear and where the expectations are very clear. Because also, there's so much to critique in those types of environments that our there's something not quite right here just goes. So, you kind of, you either need to change the environment or the person needs to kind of adapt and be inauthentic, I guess, in your words or to your point. Yeah, so if you perform the probable at the levels where you need to be an authentic and just to just be a calm embrace the cog in a sense. Then you might if you still if you want to be in that industry, then you can actually perform the probable to the extent that you get promoted and then you perform it a little bit less, they get promoted perform a little bit less. If you're the level of executive leadership or a level of any level of leadership, then you can be a little bit more innovative and responsive in the work that you do and be rewarded for it. But if you try and be that responsive at a low level, you'll be crushed, you'll be crushed. You know, and I just get you into trouble and people don't want to know what your opinion is that just don't at the low levels. So unless it's in your job description, perform the probable is basically the idea. It is and it isn't in the sense that first of all, it's self care. It is about self care and survival on the one hand. If it isn't your job description and if you like for me it isn't my job description to help people change their environments then I go in and I perform the improbable. But if it is your job description to just do what you do, you know, then find other areas of your life don't give it you all your energies just you know if you want to be the person that changes the system. You're not going to do it by being in a role where changing the system is not what you do. Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah, so yeah. You know, so you know you don't you don't go into the point of highest intensity is the point where you are least able to make a difference. Yeah. In any system. So that that's the that's the counter intuitive thing that people think they seem to think that you're rushed to the point of highest intensity because that's where, you know, my desire to resist and change the system will be most effective. It's where it's going to be least effective because it's where what you most value in yourself is going to be least valued. And you need to build up that trust that before that. Yeah, kind of credibility. So you're, am I right in understanding that you're you're kind of saying then that essentially in order to sort of live a fulfilling life if you have a ADHD type brain and that you are going to kind of practice some degree of inauthenticity in some circumstances, but that you would choose the means of your kind of life where you would be wholly authentic. Yes, and put the entire, you know, 8% at least of your efforts into being authentic and being grounded and being as much yourself as you can be. And the more toxic the environment you're working in less emotional energy you give it. Okay, if you're in a hugely toxic emotional working environment, then you give it 5% of your emotional energies. I get asked about this a lot, not about ADHD, but just generally about how open and honest we should be about our own struggles. And I think just more widely that, you know, if you're me, it doesn't really matter how open and honest I am because I don't account, you know, it's just up to me what I do and no one's paying my wages and you know, it doesn't really matter if I rock the boat, it's just my problem. If I were trying to hold down a role within a company, then as you say, it can cause issues. So people do sometimes say, you know, or should I be more open, more honest and actually similar to what you're saying, it's about, I often say it's about picking those battles. And that actually sometimes you're not going to be received in the way you want to and that can be deeply difficult as well when you try to be yourself and it's not well received. If then we might accept that, yes, okay, so we might practice within our work if perhaps we're not in a position to change the environment there, we practice in authenticity there. Which bits of our life, like where can we be authentic? Where is it safe to be authentic? What's your experience there? Well, for me it's in the house, it's in the home. It's in the work that I do as a helpful professional so I can be as authentic as I can within the coaching space and as a coach presence in the room. And I have certain friends that from the get go it's always been just non-judgmental space. And so there are certain, I've also been very, very deliberate in gravitating towards those types of spaces in my life as well. I've been very deliberately aware and in finding a lifelong partner as well. But you know, I was trying to gradually gravitate towards a quality of relationship with myself that would be more in tune with somebody that I would like to be with. And I think that we kind of learn it by default through knowing what isn't safe, through knowing what isn't authentic, and it becomes a reversal thing but in terms of revealing ourselves then in the spaces where we are performing a certain degree of inauthenticity. And it's about reading the room. You know, that, and I do temp work sometimes to keep myself fresh. And I was in a temp job where I revealed that I had ADHD, and, you know, I had a discussion about reasonable adjustments and then they were all ignored. It was absolutely awful, but the way I had to deal with it was dial myself down to almost zero and just get on and do exactly what I was required to do to embrace the cog, and then at a certain point I just left. What would be, what would those reasonable adjustments be just for anyone who might be, you know, might have a colleague who is. So what one simple thing was that, you know, I asked, I specifically asked not to let me near any spreadsheets. Because spreadsheets in my brain just go. And then, despite the fact that I had this conversation about, please don't let me near any spreadsheets and possibly the only thing I really asked for. And stay away, keep me away from the finances. It was like, okay, today you're going to do the finance spreadsheet and I'm like, what, but at that point it got to the point where I knew the other things going on that I realized I didn't want to work there so I wasn't going to make a fuss. And that was the, if you're prepared to walk, don't make a fuss. So I just walked out eventually, but the, but there were certain things going on where, you know, with ADHD brains, so-called, you don't tend to have a very much for working memory. So, you know, I would tend to write things down if I needed to remember them. And I'd be told by the micro managing line manager that I didn't need to do it that way. I had to do it the way they were telling me, you know, or being told that what I was doing on the screen which was working out the software program by myself or just something I'm pretty good at was not the right way to do it because I had to do it exactly the way that they did it. And I've come across that before as well where people, a couple of times where people are telling you how to do something on a computer their way. Instead of just saying, you know, sorry, my brain works differently. And I've actually said this explicitly something in my brain actually works differently. It's much easier for me if I just work it out on my own. Yeah. And you specifically struggle to, yeah, you need that. Ignore it. Just ignore it and play along and get angry with me. You know, so that sort of thing is difficult. It's a difficult decision. Do you or do you not reveal that you have ADHD? I think if you're in a, definitely if you have a long term relationship and safe and good quality of relationship with the people you work with, and you think this will add to a greater support for you in the workplace. Fantastic, go ahead. But read the room. You know, if this is not somewhere where you feel non-judgmentally that people are supporting you, if you feel there is constant judgment, if you feel there is constant micromanagement, it's unlikely that it's going to be a safe space for revealing anything about yourself that isn't about the cog. So read the room. And sometimes people have to stay in work just to earn money. Yeah. And I'm very well aware of that. I've been there myself. We have to do a job that you hate just to earn money. If you do have to do that, that's where it becomes really important to just stay in your box, stay in your lane, do the job, come home, and then have a life that you love. You know, sometimes you do have to do the shitty stuff. And it's just, it's just what you have to do. So, you know, with families, we have to put food on the table. So that's very much at the heart of it. And it's about picking your battles that, you know, the more you develop your sense of strength for yourself, the more you can then bring that to other places where you will be more effective, where you will be more helpful. And the more you can explore that, that, that helpfulness instinct to actually, you know, join groups or join organizations or just start projects where that helpfulness can really take take flight. Yeah. We've got a lot. So I'm really aware of the time and the time has flown and I want to talk to you for about eight more hours. I wonder if we can finish by thinking, I like to always keep things practical as well, like lots of people who kind of engage with me, it's because they want advice and I wondered if you might end with talking to us about, you know, how can we be a good friend to an adult with ADHD or a good parent to a child with ADHD, or kind to ourselves if we think we may have an ADHD style brain. Yeah, one of the key things is to remember that they primarily only really work in the present tense in the present space. Okay. You know, so if you're there going that you said this and you said that and you said the other, because they feel the social pressure of needing to thinking you need a memory response. They're going to perhaps even invent a memory response and it won't be what they actually remember necessarily. And it may not actually even be true but because you're expecting a memory they'll give you one. So, you know, when we're younger we sometimes become really good at lying because we keep people keep expecting us to know what happened in the past. We give it to them. So that's the thing is just that they will work that we work best when we're in when we're here now. You know, if you've got us in the room you've got us in the room. It's a kind of mindful interaction essentially being. Yeah, if you haven't got us in the room you haven't really got us. And if we don't respond to your emails or if we don't respond to things you've asked us to do, it's because we're not in the room, effectively. And so these things, anything that isn't about us in the room can be difficult and isn't first nature. It's second nature. And so that's very important. So then representing us back to ourselves can be very problematic. You always do this. You never do that. It's because if people start bringing evidence to us about what we've done in the past, we largely don't remember can't remember and we generally responded to the moment in a way that we thought was best. Yeah, we make mistakes. You know, and if we do make mistakes it's often hard for us to learn to say sorry, but if we say sorry, it needs to be in the moment. And sometimes we don't understand why we need to say sorry because we thought we were trying to do something helpful. So again, not assuming that our tensions are bad. Okay. Okay. It's very, very important. And just generally, we can be very, very loving and very, very responsive. But know that if our stress levels are very high, chances are we're going to be more responsive to what's in our heads. And we're going to be acting more inappropriately in terms of what's around us. And this is a huge issue, but I'll just mention it is that also I find that parenting tends to be very difficult for people with these brains. The child for the parent. Okay. Because you have a safe non-judgmental space where you're allowing yourself to hyper respond to this kid that you love. But sometimes the parental role requires you to be in a box and be in a lane. And those two things, you know, go against each other so you can spend your time trying to be the parent of establishing clear expectations. But then when the intensity rises because you've established clear expectations and they resist them. Especially if their brains like you, then that can just lead to this blah. So sometimes being a parent can be very difficult with this brain because there's a, there's a, the expectations suddenly become unpredictable when there's another person like you in the room. How do you, how do you manage that? Largely by delegating to the other person who's an adult. But, or taking time outs or largely what works tends to be avoiding words. Avoiding words, say more about that. So moving instead of shouting at kids, move forward and give them a hug. If they're a huggy kid or I've won, I've won kid is a huggy kid. And I've won kid who's a, you know, not so much huggy kid, but a brief hug kid. So, you know, just ignore the words if you can manage it. But again, the more stressed you are, the harder it is to do. But avoid words and move forward. And sometimes one of the kids, I seem to be able to fuse them by just putting my hands out for a daddy hug instead of shouting at them. But I'll probably shout at them at some point as well. We all have those moments, don't we? One of my daughters this morning was having a tough morning. I couldn't even tell you why, but you know, we just all have those days, don't we? I was not managing especially well and whatever reason anyway got quite snappy. And my daughter followed me outside and I was like, what do you want? And she's like, I just thought you might want a hug, mummy. But I wasn't in that moment where I could accept it. And so I went, well, not right now. And then I came away from that and I felt horrible. And a few minutes later, I got this little knock on my door and it was her. And I was like, I'm so, so sorry. And she came in and she went and made you a cup of coffee because if a hug doesn't work at coffee, I'm like, wow, I have just been a horrible person. And here's this amazing little, yeah, parenting's hard. Just remember that the of all those things I mentioned earlier, the bridge for people who are whether it's the parent or child or relationship or child, the bridge to making things better for somebody with ADHD is the safety bridge. Safety bridge. Okay. Okay, so if you can in any way make it a safer space, they will respond helpfully to that. That's where I'm not quite sure about the term of unconditional positive regard, because I think everything's conditional in the sense of it as conditions. But if I weren't being so pedantic, unconditional, positive regard is very important. That sense of just, you know, people with this brain tend to do their best they can under the circumstances as do most people. And so when we get scared and stressed and feel unsafe, we can really withdraw into ourselves, like hugely, like we can, we can build up huge castle walls in a second, particularly if we have histories of existential threat. So, but it could happen like that. And we can come out of it very quickly as well. Yeah. You know, but it's hyper response, it's always hyper response. So again, that's something to remember that, that even if we go into a flash response to something, give us, give us space, we'll come out of it again. Okay. So we will respond to the quality of the relationship that we find around us. Yeah. And that is what we will respond to, even if we've misrepresented it to ourselves, that is what we'll respond to. So if in doubt, try to create that kind of emotional safety and then the rest may follow. Wow. That's a lovely note to end on. Thank you. It's been a fascinating and, wow, a lot of different stuff. I'm going to need to go and lie in a darkened room and just kind of absorb all that you said, but I've, I've hugely enjoyed talking to you and would like to talk to you for days. And your brain is a very interesting place. Isn't it? Like you, you think a million miles an hour, it's brilliant. I love it. Yeah, but it's been fascinating to me that, but I now know why that is. But also it's great that I live with someone who can very clearly and half jokingly say to me, I understand all your theoretical work. I just don't really care. I just don't care. I just don't care. I just don't care. I just don't care. I just don't care. I just don't care. I just don't care. And that is exactly the person that I need to be with. Very clear from the beginning, she was no fan girl. So, you know, but that's the exact, that people like us thrive. Like, like, like people say, kind of kind of brain thrive on the ordinary. You know, thrive on that lack of, you know, push. And that we can kind of build our own interests. You know, we can kind of build our own interests, but having someone around who kind of gravitates, brings me towards a more gentle place is what I kind of always looked for. I was lucky to find so, so that, that, that sense of having. That understanding to just let us get on with it. Is very good. How did you meet. On the now defunct guardian soul mates. That's a whole other, that's a whole other podcast. Yeah. She was in London. I was in Northern Ireland and. Yeah, I just. I sent her and said senior year before that, but I hadn't connected with her. Contacted her and then I sent her an email and then. We were engaged. Within four months within, well, within five Skype. She was on my doorstep. So. And we got into the top 10 of guardian soul mate stories a few years ago. We got married within nine months. Now two kids and. We're hitting was it. I can never remember the year we got married, but we're going on nine, 10 years now. So. Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. Oh, it's lovely. Well, congratulations on being in the top 10 guardian soul mates. I'm intrigued. Does it exist out there? Can you send me a link? Can we. I don't know if it's still out there, but we, we, we were very close. I think we were beaten to the top spot by somebody who worked in an office block and got people to vote. Yes. But. It's just not on. It was very unfair. Yeah. We liked that we have a whirlwind romance and we keep it, but our kids are so much part of our lives now that we keep looking at wedding photographs and wondering where they were. Yeah. And I bet they, my kids have no conception of the fact that there was a world before them. We, yeah. Yeah. Every night. I mean, they're, my girls are 10 now and they still don't really seem to get the, you know, the world did exist more than 10 years ago. They made me feel very old all the time. And I think in the scheme of things, I'm not that old, but yeah, they have a great way of making me feel old. Wow. Wow. I hope we'll speak again. Yes, indeed. Enjoy this. Thank you very much for the opportunity and invitation. Yeah. No. And thank you. And I'll put links to, you sent me a whole bunch of interesting links to things that you do, including your kind of creative stuff as well, which is a whole nother avenue. We didn't go so much into, but I will, I'll put those, those links all in the description on YouTube or in the show notes on the podcast. So if you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. And I'll put your Twitter and stuff so people can chat to you, because I'm sure that there'll be plenty of people who've got many questions for you. I still have hundreds, but I'm, you know, One thing to say as well is that I very much speak courses to courses, forces for courses that, you know, I can also speak ordinary speak as well as the theoretical stuff. So, you know, I generally only speak the theoretical stuff to people who kind of tend to be, you know, I'm clever. I'm kind of like, Oh, you, you have color coded books. Come on. Color coded books. I'm getting out a new psycho, neuropsychology chat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but yeah, it's, but also one of the things that's always been very important to me is even if I do the theoretical stuff, I try and rephrase it in ordinary ways as soon as I do it. Cause there are a million ways we can tell stories. About what we do and how we think, but that's a, and my writing tries to go to a more personable place, which is less theoretical. Yeah. That's a challenge. I love that. Yeah. You bring such kind of, yeah. So much kind of theory and depth of thought and intelligence to it, but really everything you've said comes back to taking it from a very person centered point of view, which is, I, in my humble opinion, exactly the way that these things should always be done. So, um, yeah, I look forward to kind of, yeah, continuing to follow your, um, your, your thoughts, your theories, your ideas and kind of keeping in touch. And, uh, yeah. Next time you have a big thoughts you want to share, let's chat again. Thank you very much. Take care. Thank you. Thank you.