Mastering the Art of Decision-Making with Brian R King, MSW

Get set to embark on a fascinating journey into the complex world of decision-making with our special guest, Brian King. Master the art of effectively navigating life's myriad of choices and understand how your decisions can shape you as an individual. We'll dive into the Break Process, a unique tool to manage overwhelming emotions, and the impact of our upbringing and belief systems on our ability to decide.

Our conversation opens with an introspective look into the challenges of decision-making and the importance of acknowledging our needs. Brian and I reveal how we've learned to prioritize our needs and break free from ingrained patterns to make decisions that truly reflect our authentic selves. We share personal anecdotes about the fear of making mistakes and how we've learned to view them as valuable lessons and growth opportunities. We further delve into a fascinating discussion about the influence of our environment and societal roles on our decision-making, with an insightful reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Our dialogue then shifts to the significance of setting boundaries and making informed decisions. We highlight the power of self-awareness and personal growth in this process and discuss how understanding our values and needs can lead to effective decision-making. We also share our experiences on conditioning ourselves to view mistakes as stepping stones to personal development. As we wrap up, Brian shares his transformative work with neurodivergent individuals and the incredible impact it has on them and their organizations. This enriching episode offers invaluable insights into the art of decision-making, providing you with the tools to make decisions that align with your true selves. Tune in to this enlightening conversation and empower yourself with knowledge and skills that could well prove to be life-changing.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hello and welcome back to the Overcome Yourself podcast. As you know, my name is Nicole and I'm so excited to be here, to be back here with one of my first podcast guests ever, and that is actually how we met and we've been working together ever since. The amazing, the incredible, the I don't even know what words to use to describe your awesomeness Brian King bryankenhelpcom, one of my favorite people on this earth. Give it up for him. Welcome, Brian, I'm so excited to have you here.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Wow, after that introduction, it just makes me look back to the time when you said we first connected, and how far we've gone since then. It's, it's amazing.

Speaker 1: 0:49

I love it. Okay, so you were saying you have a topic. We were talking about the name of my podcast, overcome Yourself, named after my book Coming soon. I've been talking to my editor right now with the final edits and you said you had an amazing topic. Throw it at me.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Well, I love spending time on Facebook having conversations with people, and I can't remember what sparked it, but I started asking questions about are. Is it difficult for people to make decisions? And if so, what's in the way? And, man, did I open up Pandora's box with that?

Speaker 2: 1:24

People are sharing in spades, and there's so many reasons why people won't ask for help, why they won't raise their voice, and it all boils down to well, not all of it, but one of the main factors is that they were raised by people who kept calling them that what they were doing was wrong.

Speaker 2: 1:41

How they were deciding was wrong didn't really teach them how to decide, how to prioritize, how to sort and sift. It was just that reactive way of parenting. No, that's wrong, you can't do that, you can't say things that way, and so, at least in my experience, what it means to do it right, get the right answer, guess correctly gets conflated with what will make everybody happy, and those two have nothing to do with each other, because the right, the right decision, is so contextual is it right for me, is it right for the company, is it right for the school? And if rightness is only measured by, is everyone going to be happy with me. You're stuck, you can't win. So one of the things I've been pointing folks back to is you need to start by giving yourself permission to have needs, to be okay, acknowledging the fact that, yeah, I do have needs. They do matter. I need to get to know them, because it's key to me feeling more grounded.

Speaker 1: 2:58

Ladies, did you hear that? Did everyone hear that it's okay to have needs? And you know what? It's imperative that we take care of our needs. And I just want to throw this in there, because if we don't take care of ourselves, we can't take care of everybody else.

Speaker 2: 3:14

And that's more than just a pleasantry or an affirmation. It is the truth. How many sick people do you know that are walking around doing I don't know if they're doing their best, but being as resourceful and resilient as they could be In order to really engage and utilize all of your resources? One thing you really need a lot of is rest.

Speaker 1: 3:47

And that's the key to breaking those cycles. We just talked about how our parents were in those cycles and I remember what I thought of when you said that was one of my dad's famous saying is when you ask well, why do I have to do it that way? Well, because I said so and there was no explanation. There's no, nothing right.

Speaker 2: 4:05

That's about obedience. It's not about teaching anybody problem solving.

Speaker 1: 4:10

And so this is a big deal. This is a big deal. So how do we learn how to do that, Brian? How do we learn to make decisions?

Speaker 2: 4:19

One of the first things and we're already getting there I want to try and articulate some kind of a path, even though my path tends to be full of tangents and distraction. But the first thing is to acknowledge that there's a problem with the way things are and the status quo is no bueno, it's not working for me. Yeah, and identifying let's see, put me on the spot here. Well, one thing that, because I tend to flush these things out in dialogue with folks, so I would ask questions to try and guide them to what keeps you here. And we don't necessarily need the entire backstory and relive all the trauma and all the bad things that were said to you. But what do you still believe, what do you still hold true that keeps you operating like this?

Speaker 1: 5:19

I just thought of something and I think it's pretty powerful so like we've been working together, so we know each other's stuff right and it's making me realize that this is another way. Can this be? Let me ask the question, instead of making it a statement can this be something else that we can use the break process for?

Speaker 2: 5:39

Absolutely, but now we need to tell everybody what the break process is.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Well, tell us. Tell us, Because I, just when you were saying, acknowledge that there's a problem, I'm like, okay, that's bearing witness to the problem, right, and so that's the first step of the break process, and usually this is for emotions, but I love you know the framework for decisions as well, right, and then what are? Remind me what are.

Speaker 2: 6:05

Let me give everybody a kind of an overview of what it is.

Speaker 2: 6:09

The break process is my signature process for walking through potentially overwhelming emotions without getting overwhelmed, so that you can make use of them, find the wisdom in them you know, let go of whatever causes you to react to it and then emerge peacefully on the other side. And, nicole, one of the many things we did together is create the break process course, which is a do it yourself, where people can learn to walk themselves through the process and the bearing witness is being with your experience, without immediately jumping into storytelling. An emotion comes up and you just kind of watch it and feel it, acknowledge the sensation instead of going oh my God, I don't like this. This is terrible. It means there's danger and then you whip yourself up into a frenzy because of the story, of the story. This emotional feeling could fade away in seconds.

Speaker 1: 7:09

I just want to do a little plug here. If you do want to check out the break process course, highly recommend it. He said I was part of creating it, but I'm also a student of it. Helps me every day. You can go to Nicole text very calm, slash, brave process and it will be redirected right to Brian's website so you can check out the break process course as well. All right, so we're bearing witness. You explain it in motion. Can you tie that back into our decisions? How do we bear witness while we're making a decision?

Speaker 2: 7:38

Well, one thing that could become readily apparent and I'm so glad that you drew the parallel with the break process when you start thinking about making a decision, when you are presented with a decision, what shows up, bear witness to me.

Speaker 1: 7:55

I'm feeling what shows up.

Speaker 2: 7:57

Someone says, hey, do you want to do this? You want to do that, and all of a sudden you feel anxious. Bear witness to that. Okay, Anxiety is the response to a decision and once you've acknowledged it, then you can start asking yourself what story does the anxiety want to tell me? And that's when you start getting a sense of what are the beliefs Part of the story might be.

Speaker 2: 8:21

Well, I better get this right, because if I get it wrong, people are going to be disappointed. They're going to be all these trigger words, these very specific experiences that you are looking to avoid. I'm looking to avoid disappointing others, so I'm safer to not make decisions. In fact, I'm cool if everybody else makes them, because then I know they'll be happy. But then I get to sit on the sidelines forever just being grateful that they allow me to be in their presence. You know it's a need for connection and I'm willing to sacrifice having my own needs met to be connected. And it's important for people to realize it's not an either or choice. You get to be connected and belong at the same time. People can't meet your needs if they never get a chance to know what they are. So it's important to learn what they are. Get in touch with them and learn to articulate them. People who truly care about you will be eager to make sure you're okay.

Speaker 1: 9:36

I love that. I love what you said about connection and belonging.

Speaker 2: 9:42

All right.

Speaker 1: 9:42

What's R? Remind me of what R is.

Speaker 2: 9:45

The R is the get to the roots, the root of it. And that's when you ask yourself what's underneath this. Is there a belief? Well, in the case of anxiety coming up, one of the core beliefs is that it's dangerous to make decisions. You perceive that there is inherent threat in that situation. Well, when did you decide that? Give me an experience or a moment, as best as you can recollect. Where you decide it is a threat?

Speaker 2: 10:23

And if that's the root, then we move on to A, which is accept the facts are not, or that feelings are not facts. So, in this case, when you have a feeling that there's threat, now we can look at it and realize it's not a fact, it's a story. And then we learn to depersonalize it, disconnect from it, anything we need to do to realize it's a story in our head, it's not an experience in reality. And then from there you move into the V, which is allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and look within, to where there's some hurt and the experiences that made me have to be this people pleaser. Well, chances are. Yeah. How do I learn self compassion such that I can acknowledge the hurt, grieve it, seal it without it being overwhelming to me? And then, once you have found the lesson, the wisdom, the next step forward, you emerge the E, enter the present moment more peacefully, slow, steady, very gentle on yourself because, let's face it, we can watch a newscast and get traumatized.

Speaker 2: 11:48

So, we don't need the process of healing to be one more potential source of pain.

Speaker 1: 11:59

It's so important Making decisions. It really changed. It changed everything for me, like sitting down and deciding how to decide no, but it's true, because you know what. It's really annoying to ask what's for dinner every night, like you know. That's like murder inducing anger, annoying.

Speaker 2: 12:29

Oh, that marriage has ended over that question right, you know what I'm saying. But I like to be sort of deciding to decide, because you need to come up with some rules for yourself, some sense of a process. Did you figure out a process?

Speaker 1: 12:47

I don't know, this was all very internal that it happened and it was just. You know, I didn't want to feel like a kite in the wind anymore, like I wanted to be able to make a decision and then go with it and not worry. And it took making decisions that were wrong and then realizing okay.

Speaker 2: 13:08

So when you know like these are.

Speaker 1: 13:10

This is how we weigh the options and learning to weigh those options, Because that's what it's like. It's doing it Like you're not going to learn how to make decisions in a book, you know, because everything is a decision from the moment you wake up. Am I going to get up right now, or am I just going to chill for five more minutes?

Speaker 2: 13:25

you know, and then I ended up doing a lot of writing about just on Facebook, just keep flushing this issue out. It was one of the big preoccupations with the community was the fear of making the wrong decision. So one of the questions I asked was what is the value of a wrong decision? You know it's something that you have to avoid, clearly in your belief system. Is there any value in it? And I went into detail in terms of how you learn anything if you don't experiment and figure out what doesn't work. You know it's a win to be curious, to want to discover what makes this happen. Why is this? And with the curious mind, that insecurity kind of vanishes. But at some point they learned that your decisions are some kind of a measuring stick. How right are you? How wrong are you? You know what's your balance sheet in terms of right decisions versus wrong decisions. There's this comparison that people do, where if I make more wrong decisions in my mind than right, then I'm a wrong decision maker. It's a very fixed way of seeing it.

Speaker 1: 14:39

Very inflexible.

Speaker 2: 14:41

They don't see themselves as a student that's going through a process of trial and learning, who can reflect upon their process, what they did, what didn't work, and then adjust accordingly to improve, moving forward. I'm trying to remember the three words I used. It's like reflect, refine, reengage, something like that. And instead the people in question here who were talking about making the wrong decision, that possibility was paralyzing. They didn't see any value in. Hey, let's see what happens, let's discover. To them it was an opportunity to feel more shame.

Speaker 2: 15:28

Imagine being raised to believe that. But then, thank goodness, as adults you can get to the point where you say to yourself or ask is that true? Why do I believe that? What if I believe something differently? And if so, what could I believe instead? Because options don't just exist in the donut section. Options exist in what lens do you want to have on the world? I Align myself more spiritually with Buddhist thinking. If I were to speak to somebody who is in the Jewish tradition or Muslim, they have very different thinking on how the universe operates and what their role is in it. No same with Christianity. But if we both show up, valuing human beings, being generous, being kind, the community minded, I don't care why you are the way you are. If we share similar values and we want to show up in the world in the same way, we can hang.

Speaker 1: 16:39

Yeah, I mean, we all want to eat good food, we all want to be in community. You know, we want basic things, you know, and I think that's beautiful, brian. I think that's beautiful I'm making is how do we most efficiently get our needs met and this is reminding me of something that I talked about in my book is about how Remember who was talking about it.

Speaker 2: 17:06

Read the book, so that you can get the direct quote. That's why we write things down.

Speaker 1: 17:10

How we. We think that character is a steady, stoic thing like our character is what it is, and we don't realize that our character is a Loosely correlated set of behaviors based on our environment and if that environment changes, your character would change. If you get dropped into a very dangerous situation, you're not gonna be nice, sweet Brian anymore. You're gonna turn into someone who is going to set boundaries and get out as quick as possible.

Speaker 1: 17:43

Oh yeah, survival instincts are gonna be right, and I mean We've learned about how character can change how quickly, like I'm sure you've heard of this study when they had to stop the study like they couldn't even. Prisoners would have to be prison guards and they became abusive and yes, and like they, they, they melted, they melted into those roles and like they were physically abusing people, they were and it's, it's.

Speaker 2: 18:12

Okay, and I tell you what.

Speaker 1: 18:13

What right, it's very lord of the flies.

Speaker 2: 18:17

One big takeaway from that study is that a person uses a persona or role to give themselves permission.

Speaker 1: 18:25

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 18:26

I was talking to my youngest about this the other day. He very, very shy, but he did one of the school plays last year and he was out there Projecting and doing his lines and he looked very confident. Well, it was the role. The role gave him permission to show up that way, because it wasn't him was the role. So wearing these statuses Can give us permission, unfortunately, to act out our insecurities.

Speaker 1: 18:54

Yeah, yeah you only other people, and so on and it goes back to character is not the studies doing thing, it's every single one of those decisions that they made while I'm wearing this uniform, so I can beat someone, or I'm wearing this uniform and that person's a prisoner. They weren't really a prisoner, they. They didn't do anything wrong, but they were treating them as if they did like in their mind. That that story Concreted, and so let's bring this back to positive, because we can do the same thing and we can use these decisions To make great things happen for us. Right? What if we do take on the role of a leader in our community? What if we decide to take on the role of the business owner who's giving opportunities to other people Instead of being the sad and shy business owner? Right, like, we step into those roles with the decisions, and Then I'm gonna point something else out and then I'm gonna give the floor back to you.

Speaker 1: 19:51

Another thing that makes me think about decisions is how we can eliminate some, because really successful people, they set habits and and then you don't have to think about those things anymore. So, like you know, if you wear a certain shirt on a certain day, now I don't have to think about it, or if you have like your meal planned out, I don't have to worry about oh my god, what am I gonna be eating? And so creating success habits like that? Like I saw an article I know I'm going on a tangent, whatever.

Speaker 2: 20:21

Yeah, of course here.

Speaker 1: 20:23

Who is it? Bezos, the. He has this. The his girlfriend that's living with him now, who, by the way, apparently is a badass. She's like a helicopter pilot. She saw that there wasn't enough pilot, so she made her own company, and she's like encouraging other women to get their pilot's license. She's like it's really easy. She's teaching him how to be a pilot super cool.

Speaker 1: 20:43

That is one empowered woman right, and she's a journalist, so she uses her helicopter to go get stories and stuff. So pretty cool, and she was talking about how living with him is like is like a masterclass every day and one of the things that he does like every Sunday morning he gets up Extra early, he goes and he grabs his Betty Crocker cookbook, opens it up, puts it on the counter. He's been doing this for years, so like he probably already knows the recipe. But it's about the routine. He has to go get his book, he has to put it on the counter, he has to make sure that all the ingredients are measured out, and so there's no wondering what are we gonna have for Breakfast on Sunday? Like he already knows that he's gonna get up and make pancakes, all right. So out of all the things that I just said, I want you to take the floor and just keep talking to me about Decisions like what which one of those things is I love.

Speaker 2: 21:35

I love what you picked up on that the point of habits because if you have to problem-solve Every situation as though it were brand new to you, it's gonna be overwhelming and exhausting. Every single time we learn decision-making based on our experiences with previous results that we've gotten Okay and the way I look at the opportunity provided by wrong decisions that that's how people like to look at it is. It's an opportunity to be resourceful. You know what resources do I have? What do I know? What am I able to do? Who do I know? You know? What ways of getting answers do I have available to me?

Speaker 2: 22:17

Then you set down and begin the process of figuring out what do I know now, what can I apply, moving forward. And if you need to write this process down, so be it. Mm-hmm, because some brains are scattered such that you remember steps, you read, you reverse steps, you forget steps. But, having it written down as a point of reference, follow the directions as they say, right follow the recipe so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you are Presented with a similar situation.

Speaker 2: 22:52

And also, I can't say enough about values, what you value above all else. If you have a value of maintaining your inner peace, the person you know who tends to suck you dry with every conversation, you don't have to sit there and hem and ha about do I talk to him on the phone? I'm not sure you know weighing all of this guilt and people-pleasing stuff like you used to. You just say no, I don't have space for that right now. Set a boundary because you know what your values are. You're self-aware enough to know what your needs and wants are. Draw on that line as something that starts to come much more quickly Now.

Speaker 2: 23:33

I don't want people to get the impression that it's your needs or their needs. That's the black and white thinking that tends to happen with a lot of neurodivergence and stuff. It's that your needs and my needs. And, as you kind of talked about earlier the putting your own oxygen mask on first, filling your own bucket, taking care of yourself first it's the same thing here. It's your needs and my needs. If we both have our needs met, we can show up as our best selves for each other, what we want, to support each other in making that happen, as opposed to indulging in this co-dependent it's all about me and it's your job to make it all about me. That doesn't work. That doesn't work now.

Speaker 1: 24:22

No, no, and that's really creating win-win situations for everyone. You know, it's making sure that everyone's needs are met and everything gets done.

Speaker 2: 24:33

And that's an important value of mine win-win relationships.

Speaker 1: 24:36

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I'm just processing everything that we've talked about because we've gone from the brave process course to bringing in those topics from my book and it's just.

Speaker 2: 24:51

It's all connected.

Speaker 1: 24:52

It's all connected right. So do you have any tips, any practical tips for quick decision-making, Anything else you want to add to this amazing conversation?

Speaker 2: 25:05

How many decisions honestly need to be made quickly?

Speaker 1: 25:17

The ones when you're driving on the highway. A lot of those are reactions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, but I mean quickly. I guess there's not that many, right? I don't know, Tell me.

Speaker 2: 25:33

Well, considering the context and I see people in the business world who are always advocating this you know real leaders make faster decisions. You don't want me to win that. You know I not only have difficulty often seeing the plan I can follow the plan they also have difficulty seeing into the future because my sense of time is so messed up. I have a better understanding of what's happening right here than what might be happening in a couple days from now. So if there is something that's time-sensitive and requires an appreciation for how much time it's going to take, you don't want me making that decision. So if you want me to make it quickly, on top of it, well, it's going to be extra bad.

Speaker 2: 26:24

So in some respects you got to ask yourself am I the one to be making this decision? Am I being given enough time to make a found, well-informed decision? So that's another question is what do you need to make a decision? Do you need quiet? Do you need time to journal it, to think it through? Do you need to talk it out? I'm one that needs to talk it out every time.

Speaker 1: 26:54

So if some of us are just in front of you saying, okay, I need you to make a decision.

Speaker 2: 26:57

I need you to make it right now and they won't allow you your process. You need to be able to say under these circumstances, I cannot make a decision.

Speaker 1: 27:09

And that in self is a decision being able to say that you know and understanding yourself enough to be like, hey, this is not going to happen like this.

Speaker 2: 27:19

And deciding to self-advocate and hold firm the boundary.

Speaker 1: 27:23

Yes, and that comes from. That comes very naturally, like a lot of times when I heard people saying that, it was like I thought it was going to be where I was going to be fighting myself. But what happens is that as you're working on the self-development and you're raising your own value like in your own perception, your own worth it's kind of something that happens naturally you start seeing reactions differently. So I just wanted to point that out. There's a naturalness to the process that happens as you're doing all this self-development, because you're doing the hard work of the brain process, of just bearing witness to what you're feeling. Where does it come from? Checking the roots, looking at the roots, really acknowledging what's going on and checking the stories. That's where the hard work happens. And then the decision that that boundary gets set very naturally, because you're like I already did this work and I can't do this with you.

Speaker 2: 28:29

And so I just want to remind everyone that it's a process.

Speaker 2: 28:33

Like you were talking about with Bezos, and every Sunday he opens the recipe book. Building up the habit means you begin to condition your body to expect different experiences than what you're used to. So when you get used to thinking differently about what it means to make a mistake, and before long you start leading into it with I can't wait to see what happens, and it's more about wondering, curiosity than the shame and dread in the past. Now you get into the habit of seeing and feeling differently about wrong experiences, to the point where you don't have to decide all right now. I'm going to see this as an opportunity to be resourceful, because I have it in my notes that way. That's not what we're aiming towards. We're aiming to the point where you just see it as an opportunity because you've conditioned yourself through trial and learning. Do it like that.

Speaker 1: 29:34

So for me, what I like to do? Because if I catch myself like, oh, you fucked up, or oh, this is bad, or oh, this is wrong, so what I what? My phrase that I go to is like well, now it's an adventure, so we don't know where we're going to end up, right, and so now it's an adventure, yeah, and like learning to have grace on yourself, like talking to yourself like you were a four year old you made a mistake, it's okay, it's not the end of the world, we just got to get some paper towels and we'll clean it up. It's good, you know, we can't sit there and yell at ourselves and be like, oh my God, you're so stupid, I can't believe you dropped this one.

Speaker 2: 30:09

Like you would say that's all four year old, you absolutely can talk to yourself like that, but what kind of results do you get?

Speaker 1: 30:14

Right Like that. Just sucks, like you're stuck in this. It sucks, it sucks. You're stuck in this circle of suck. And then you're like why am I so depressed? And it's like, well, let's look at your thought patterns, right Like, let's see where it's all coming from. And I know from experience. I know this from very hard earned experience.

Speaker 2: 30:36

Yeah, all of that inner work. It can be the hardest, most vulnerable, most most frightening stuff you ever experienced, but that's not the work that causes those feelings. It's all the stuff you're bearing witness to that you were previously shutting down. But once you allow it to come up, you acknowledge it, you love yourself, you learn from it. Then it lessens and now you show up wiser, calmer, more open, happier. So many other good things that are on the other side of suck.

Speaker 1: 31:13

That's where you are able to stop self sabotage, because that's what's keeping you in those patterns, not you. I'm not talking about you, brian, I'm just saying us, us in general. When we're in those patterns, that's what happens. I love it. I think this has been a wonderful conversation. Decisions are really something that I remember, just deciding. One of my favorite quotes is decide. There's homicide and suicide, and those are the death of self or other, and then we have decide, and so decide means the death of all other options. Now, that one's a little bit more extreme, but it did help me to. To decide Like nothing else. Like when I decide that this happens, everything else like doesn't count anymore. So like when I decided that I was going to drink water every day. That's not an optional, that's not like, oh, am I going to do that today? Like no, like that is what happens, so all other options are dead. The only option available is drinking water, you know. And so wordplay wordplay helps me a lot, and making rules and making it fun like that.

Speaker 2: 32:26

Give yourself leverage in the way you word it and the way I heard decision is. It's decisive, it's like incision decision, it's like cutting.

Speaker 2: 32:38

So, I see like a samurai with the sword going. Just because that's my frame of reference and, if you can use that, when I think of a samurai I think of someone who is victorious, and so if a samurai slices and cuts something off, I feel like all right, going into. I don't like the warrior metaphor because there's too much resistance in that, but just the fact that I'm taking charge, I'm making a clean decision and I'm committing to an action. Yes, and this and nothing else.

Speaker 1: 33:14

I think that that that is part of the message of making fast decisions, but it kind of gets lost because that's very masculine, it's very patriarchy, just like this fucking decide and go right. As women, we think of all the other things, and so I was like, well, then you got to give me a minute, you know.

Speaker 2: 33:34

Well to see. Here's the thing. As women, you are conditioned to consider the feelings of everyone in your life.

Speaker 1: 33:43

Right.

Speaker 2: 33:44

Before you do anything, and that's that's what trains people to become martyrs. Is very step back from that.

Speaker 1: 33:55

Red personality. You know, like go, go, go, what is it? Type a. But I think the idea is, when you make a decision, like the important thing about it is it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be in two seconds, but deciding and then sticking to it, learning because that's the boundary in itself, because you know, like we have boundaries Mostly we think of boundaries with other people, right, like you can do this to me but one of the most important things I learned was setting boundaries for myself, and I think that goes back to that. Yeah, so that's what I just wanted to wonder.

Speaker 2: 34:31

There are so many different ways and directions we could go with this, but hopefully this gives people a good enough beginning.

Speaker 1: 34:39

Yes, now talk to me. Talk to me about your offer. Like you've got an amazing offer going on right now.

Speaker 2: 34:46

Well, we've talked about the work process. But the really thing I'm excited about and what's ironic is, I may actually be getting a one to one client for this reason is people can work with me exclusively through Oxford.

Speaker 2: 35:01

Meaning that we can just message. You can send messages whenever you want, doesn't mean at 3am I'm going to be waiting up to answer. But that kind of flexibility means you don't have to sit down and think everything out before you talk. You can do things in little bitty seeds A question here, an observation there, and we can walk things through at your own pace in small enough bites where it doesn't end up being confusing, not to mention at the end of it you have the strategy written out for you right there.

Speaker 1: 35:37

Who's the program for? Because we kind of jumped right in. Oh yeah, we were talking about women and then people are probably like he's not a woman. So tell me a little bit about your market and who this Voxxer Day program is for.

Speaker 2: 35:51

Because I myself am very neurodivergent, have diagnoses of autism, adhd, dyslexia and more. I work primarily with women who are neurodivergent themselves and or have kids that are neurodivergent, and I have an online community that I call Empower, because it's all about helping members get out of their own way so that they can take the actions to meet their own needs, better their lives and so on. And I also work with a lot of males At this point. They're young men who have a hard time launching. You know, they've gone through college or they're adults now and just don't know how to adult.

Speaker 2: 36:33

And with a combination of Voxxer and talking, I'm helping them find a safe way to engage their lives without feeling like they need to jump off a cliff in order to step into adulting. And having those little opportunities to check in when maybe they're less settled, less anxious, their mind is clear, might be at midnight. That might be the best time for them to get their thoughts out, as opposed to scheduling a time when they're feeling rushed. Their coffee hasn't kicked in yet. For some folks, appointments just don't fly, so Voxxer is really been a tremendous asset in that respect.

Speaker 1: 37:17

And there is nothing more powerful than having a coach in your pocket Nothing. I am a case study for you. You know, like I've been working, like you guys know, we just talked about how he was one of my first guests and really the work that we've done together is just, it's just. You mentioned you said the other day on our culture call, that the work that you've done with me is pivotal and the work that you've done for me has been absolutely pivotal for my life and for my business, and so I really appreciate you, Brian, and you know anyone that decides to work with you is just going to be in the best hands ever. The link to Brian's programs is going to be in the call notes, in the show notes down below, so make sure you check that out. Any last thoughts the free community, the Empower community, is free right.

Speaker 2: 38:09

The Empower community is the paid community.

Speaker 1: 38:11

The paid community. Where can we hang out with you online for free?

Speaker 2: 38:14

Well, if you're a Facebook fan, which is where I spend most of my day, I have a free group there called Happily Neurodivergent, and that's a women's group. I'm always open to helping out guys, but they tend to be very, very reluctant to seek help. The door is always open.

Speaker 1: 38:32

Awesome. And so we have the free community and we also have the paid resources, which are a steal. Brian, I think you should charge a lot, lot more for what he does, because the work is so transformational. So you know, book as soon as you can before I talk him into raising his rate, all right.

Speaker 2: 38:52

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 38:52

Brian, so so much for being here. This has just been absolutely amazing. I love, I love what we're both doing. I love what you're doing. Brian is also available for speaking engagements. He is a keynote speaker, and so if you are part of a large organization who is looking because you also work with corporations who have neurodivergent employees and want to make sure that they're helping them the best way possible, right, so if you're a corporate credit, he does have corporate plans available, and so all of that information is going to be down in the show notes. I love you guys so much. Thank you for being here with us, and I will catch you guys on the next episode of the Overcome Yourself podcast. Bye.