BADASS MINDSET PODCAST

Let go of your ‘sad story,’ and start creating your BADASS story!

• Lacy Wafer • Season 2 • Episode 58

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As a child, I was diagnosed with ADHD and perscribed medication for it, but I often wonder if my restless energy and distraction were just part of growing up in a world buzzing with stimuli. In this episode of BADASS MINDSET PODCAST, I invite you to rethink & reframe the labels and perceptions that society often imposes on us. 

Shifting the lens to personal narratives, I'm also getting raw and real with you about  how altering my story around trauma has been so transformative in my healing & growth journey. By reframing adversity as a catalyst for my growth, I’ve found a path to greater happiness and inner-peace. From mental health challenges to physical ones, I want to emphasize the power of focusing on what can be GAINED, rather than lost. 

I am so grateful for our BADASS community and commitment to self-improvement. I want to invite you to join the conversation by sharing your thoughts & refelctions with me on Instagram @boldlylacy, so we can inspire each other and create a wave of positive transformation together!! 🌊🌊🌊💫

Share a personal story or submit a question you'd like answered in a future episode!

❤️‍🔥SUBSCRIBE to the podcast for weekly tips and insights to fuel your journey!⚡️

❤️‍🔥Add us on IG & TikTok @badassmindsetpodcast & @boldlylacy to connect deeper + ignite your journey and keep your growth game on point!!🤘🚀 Let’s goooo!

Speaker 1:

Hey babe, welcome, or welcome back to the Badass Mindset Podcast. I'm your host, Laci, and I'm going to help you train your brain and your body to manifest groundbreaking levels of health, happiness and success in your life. I'm so fired up. You're here because it is time for us as a society to rewrite the outdated belief that wanting and achieving more is greedy, selfish or just wishful thinking. We're about to go on a deep dive into mindset mastery, where you'll learn all about how to rewire your brain, turn your setbacks into your success story and awaken the ultimate badass that lives within you. So if you're ready to create some serious magic and epic results in your life, take a quick minute to set an intention for what you want to get out of listening to this episode, and then let's fucking go. Hey badass, I am so grateful that you're here and happy to dive into today's conversation with you, because I was having a conversation the other day with someone about ADHD and how this diagnosis just gets thrown around. Okay, hear me out. I don't want to get off on the wrong foot before we even start, but hear me out, okay.

Speaker 1:

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. I was put on medication for ADHD. It was a pretty strong case. Okay, I had to go literally go sit in another room anytime we did reading assignments, because I couldn't focus. I couldn't get through one paragraph without forgetting what I'd read completely. I couldn't read a single page without my mind going elsewhere. And the biggest thing that I used to get in trouble for in school as a child maybe you can relate with this is interrupting and talking and being too loud.

Speaker 1:

All of these things, these signs that doctors will say are big signs of ADHD. Now am I saying that the issue did not exist? No, but what is ADHD? Attention deficit, hyperactive disorder? Was I hyper as a child? Absolutely. Did I struggle paying attention? Absolutely, but when you really think about it, what kid doesn't I mean?

Speaker 1:

Genuinely, our brains are still forming until we're 25 years old and as children, especially from the age of 4 to 12, that's like the prime age when we're learning we're having so much new information thrown at us. We're learning social cues, we're learning how society runs, we're learning how to be, who we're supposed to be in this world and how we're supposed to do things. There's so much information coming at us and we're learning all these things and all we want to do is play and have fun. That's literally what we're wired to do Play, learn, have fun and if we're not doing that, our brains are in overdrive. We can't focus on one single thing because we have all these unsolicited thoughts and we want to do these things. So we were talking about this and we're like, honestly, this is not a stat I pulled from anywhere, this is just a number that I'm gauging in my own mind but we're like there's probably 90, 95% of diagnoses for ADHD that aren't true problems, but we're leaning on these diagnoses I don't know how you say that plural we're leaning on these to bail us out from our shortcomings. And again, I want to be very clear I am not a believer in one size fits all. I'm not saying that there aren't very severe and very real and valid cases where it's like no, this is a real struggle in my everyday life. But genuinely, I think most of us struggle with this and the tendencies of ADHD because we're not actually doing anything that matters, that we're actually interested in, that we can put our focus into. So, of course, our mind is elsewhere.

Speaker 1:

But the reason I wanted to talk about this is because it got me thinking about a situation that happened, oh, about five, six years ago now. If you don't know my story up to this point, I'm going to give you a quick trigger warning. I'll share the quick version of my story. In 2017, I was raped by someone I considered a friend, and I went down a really dark and depressing path for the three years following. Fast forward to this.

Speaker 1:

One night, I was out with my now husband, then boyfriend, one of my friends and one of her friends. We were drinking a little and my friend that was there with us got very drunk to the point where she definitely should not have been driving Me and Isaiah talk about this to this day. This is one of the biggest regrets that I have in life. I try not to have regrets because I believe that everything I've gone through, everything I've overcome, learned from I learned from it all and I've grown from it, but this is one of the most regretful moments of my life because I felt like in this moment, I turned my back on who I am as a person and what's in my heart, and so what happened was she was getting ready to leave and she was pretty drunk, like to the point where you definitely kind of have to take care of her. You got to babysit. If you've ever been out with someone, you know what I mean. When they get drunk past the point of being able to care and look out for themselves. Sometimes it's just not the most fun thing, right.

Speaker 1:

I was really annoyed in that moment. I did not feel like babysitting somebody. I had kind of made it past my drinking phase at that point and I just wasn't in the headspace to deal with somebody who couldn't take care of themselves. And so I gave her her car keys and I was going to let her drive. And Isaiah, he looks at me like I'm fucking crazy and he's like what are you doing? Why would you do that? No, she's not driving. I don't care if it's out of the way, I don't care if it's inconvenient, Like what kind of friend are you? And I'm like Dave kind of hit me like where it hurt a little bit. I'm like, well, I don't want to think of myself as a bad friend, but I don't want to deal with drunk people. I don't have any patience, I don't have any capacity for this, and it took me a few years to understand why, why I didn't have the patience or the capacity, why I was going to let her go and risk her life. But in reflection and as a result of healing, I realized I was going to let her go and risk her life. But in reflection and as a result of healing, I realized I was still harboring pain and resentment from my rape and the way it went down.

Speaker 1:

The night of my rape I was at a friend's house the mutual friend whom I met this person through and I was not drinking, but he was and he got drunk enough to the point where I was not comfortable with him driving home. He had to work in the morning. So I was like you know what? Give me the keys, I'm taking you to my place. You've been there before. It's not a big deal. You can sleep at my place. I will bring you back to your car in the morning before you need to go to work. And I brought him home with me and that was the night he raped me.

Speaker 1:

After I did spiral and go through a phase of drinking and escaping and doing everything I can to numb out and not feel the pain from that and there were many, many times when people supported me and took care of me and my drunk ass, when I couldn't support myself and care for myself. So I understand the importance of having friends that you can count on, that will not judge you for what you're going through, that will just show up, be there, get it done, take care of you and then help you process and heal at a later time, whenever you're ready. I understand how important that is and that I could have been in a very different situation if I did not have that support. But in the moment of now, my friend being in that position and I'm the one who's supposed to be providing that support and that help I had no capacity to show up for her and to support her on a mental, emotional or physical level, because I didn't know it at the time. But I was still harboring that resentment and confusion and pain of what happened to me the last time I chose to help a drunk person.

Speaker 1:

That realization was such a profound moment in my healing journey. It honestly changed the trajectory of my journey because that was the moment that I realized my inability and unwillingness to let go of my sad story was stopping me from showing up for the people that needed me and I cared about and needed to support. Luckily, Isaiah had the emotional intelligence and the grace to see me through that decision and that experience. That was not a proud moment, and he stayed there for me. He stayed my friend. He still supported me through my healing journey. But to this day that's one of my moments that I'm the least proud of and I feel shame about sometimes. Now I have forgiven myself because that's not who I am and that's not the type of person I am. I have upgraded my boundaries, my surroundings, my environment and my expectations for myself and the people that I surround myself with. I don't mean that to say that I think any less of her or anyone that I was spending time around. During that time. We were all going through our own things and my point is that moment and that realization was really a catalyst for me in recognizing that I hadn't actually healed yet. And until I did, until I stopped letting that experience dictate how I live my life, I'm going to continue living in this nightmare, spiraling out of control and wrecking myself into the ground in every way. So since I've started my healing journey truly started it which began with therapy and hiring my first mindset coach I learned about the feedback loop.

Speaker 1:

I explained the feedback loop in one of my early, early episodes so you can find it if you scroll all the way to the bottom. It's probably time for me to redo that episode. I bet I can explain it a lot better now that I've been podcasting for a while and sharing stories and learnings. But what the feedback loop is is it's how we process information and make sense of it. So our brains receive information through all five senses taste, touch, smell, visual. What's the fifth one? Oh my God, but you get it all five of the senses. That's how we receive or process the information. And then our brain goes through this three-step process called deletion, delegation and distortion and, depending on which camp it falls into and depending on our level of emotional intelligence and our ability to have the self-awareness to understand what's going on, it then dictates our actions, our energy, how we feel, what we do and what we attract. So the feedback loop is really the holy grail of how we feel, what we do and what we attract. So the feedback loop is really the holy grail of how we create our reality.

Speaker 1:

And what I learned is that you have to feel to heal. If we don't fully feel and process our emotions, we store them in the body as tension and they come up in other ways If the right button gets pushed. That's what's known as a trigger. We react in a certain way or sometimes we just feel a certain way and we don't even understand why. What happened is so deeply rooted and subconscious that the smallest little thing could happen that triggers that feeling that you never processed and causes this overwhelming sensation within the body. And that's your body trying to feel it, but because you're not fully aware in that moment, consciously it's just floating around and going back into its little closet until it gets triggered to come out again. We have to fully feel to heal, because those experiences that we have and how we define them, that makes up our identity. Our identity is our brain and our body's blueprint for how we experience life, blueprint for how we experience life. And so if you're in a place currently where you've suffered from tragedy or loss or maybe an illness, any level of struggle, this doesn't have to be something that's like, oh my God, like crazy and intense. It can be any level of struggle. Until we change our narrative about that struggle and make it something more empowering, we're going to keep living in this negative cycle, recreating the problem and the triggers and it's going to dictate our entire life and existence.

Speaker 1:

So the best question I was ever asked in my healing journey which is also one of the most profound moments in my journey, that it changed the trajectory of my healing is a question from Tom Bilyeu, founder and CEO of Impact Theory and original co -founder of Quest, the supplement brand. He said how is the worst thing that ever happened to you the best thing that ever happened to you? It took me a long time to be able to answer this and not be triggered by it, Because you might hear this now and this might trigger you. This might be like what the fuck, Lacey? How is being raped the best thing that ever happened to me? How is losing my child or my sibling or my best friend or whatever? How is that the best thing that ever happened to me? How is being bullied? How is having these chronic illnesses? How is me fucking struggling every single day just to survive and make ends meet the best thing that ever happened to me? How selfish of you to ask me that. How out of touch with reality are you? That's fair. I wondered all the same questions, but when I finally got to a place where I was able to take the emotional charge out of it and really sit with the question and not let it mean something about me. Just actually think about it from an unbiased perspective. Well, how could the worst thing that ever happened to me actually be the best thing If we think about it? For me, being raped made me more empathetic with others and allowed me to help people on a deeper level and understand them and their struggles on a deeper level. Now I want you to hear me loud and clear.

Speaker 1:

I do not believe that everything happens for a reason. I do not believe that people get raped and people experience tragic loss and this and that and the other so that they can learn a lesson and grow and help others through the same things. In a perfect world, nobody would have to suffer from this shit. That's how I feel. But that narrative didn't serve me. It didn't make me feel any better, any happier. It certainly didn't make my life any better. So I stopped looking at it from that lens and I said, okay, how is this horrible, terrible thing that happened to me? How is it the best thing that ever happened to me? It transformed my life, Not immediately, not in the first three years, but once I started on that healing journey, I'm going to be so honest with you.

Speaker 1:

I don't know if I would be where I am today if that didn't happen to me. I'm not saying I'm grateful to be so honest with you. I don't know if I would be where I am today if that didn't happen to me. I'm not saying I'm grateful for the experience itself, but I'm grateful to be on this journey. I am so grateful to be where I am today and I could not imagine another path. I genuinely couldn't. I say that with so much genuinity. However, you say that I'm truly grateful for my experiences and who I am today and I believe that it's because I reframed my narrative and my identity about that experience that I've been able to achieve and manifest the level of life that I get to experience today the inner peace, the absolute gratitude, the joy that cannot be matched. I am the happiest person that I know.

Speaker 1:

I am living about 85% of my literal dream life. I'm getting closer and closer to it every year and I'm just so excited for the future and I couldn't always say that there was a time when I had no hope for the future and it looked really dark and I was questioning if it was even worth it if I was even worth it but I'm so glad that I made the decision to heal and to go on this journey and just to give it a chance. You don't even have to be confident and sure in the outcome, you just have to be willing to give it a chance. You just have to be open-minded enough to see there's another way of living that you might actually enjoy better. So I just want to take this moment and say I see you, I hear you, I fucking feel you.

Speaker 1:

Our society is not set up for us to succeed. I get it. It feels like there's a lot more struggle in the world today, and we can sit around and we can dwell on this and go down the rabbit hole all day long, and the only thing that's going to do is make us more depressed, more defeated, less likely to take action and make genuine change. We can sit here and sob and complain about our situation, or we can try to do something about it as a collective, because that's truly what it's going to take. It's going to take a lot of us getting on the same page, deciding that this isn't the way we are going to live. This isn't the future that we're going to leave and create for the next generations to come, and we can do something about it.

Speaker 1:

And that starts with you. That starts with the story and the identity that you're clinging to, Wherever you are today, wherever you are in your life. However, your story has gone so far. That doesn't have to be the way your story ends. You can choose a different path. You can choose to change your narrative. Instead of focusing on the tragedy or the loss and the pain, how can we turn our focus to the massive gain? What have we gained from this? What is something good that has come out of this? I'm not saying it's a worthy trade. I'm not asking you to invalidate whatever your experience is. Truly, I am not asking you to invalidate it. You are so valid in your experience and your struggles. But how can we at least make this story and this experience serve you If maybe your struggle is less intense and you're like I haven't suffered from extreme loss and pain, but I struggle with more day-to-day things that just kind of run in the background and they make it hard for me to just get by on a day-to-day?

Speaker 1:

Maybe you have the ADHD diagnosis? How can you change the focus Instead of I can't focus on anything, I can't pay attention. My brain moves a hundred miles an hour. When's the last time you did a lifestyle audit? Are you actually doing anything in your life that you care about? That means something to you, Because one of our superpowers as people with ADHD, allegedly is also the ability to hyper-focus on things that we care about. So maybe you just need to find more things that you actually care about, things that you're excited about, lit up by. Maybe that's the small shift you need to make to make this work for you instead of against you.

Speaker 1:

Maybe your struggle is your health. Maybe you're overweight, you're burned out, you're stressed out. How can we shift the focus of all the things you're not able to do to all the things that you are able to do or that you will be able to do when you get to the bottom of this? Maybe it's time to go on an inner journey and figure out why are we overweight, burned out or stressed out? Why are my hormones imbalanced? Why is something going on with my health right now that is keeping me from having the energy or the positive experience that I want to have in my day-to-day life?

Speaker 1:

What's at the bottom of this. And then, once you figure that out, oh well, now I have the knowledge and the tools to transform my life. That's what I can focus on, and while I'm transforming my life, the people that I care about are going to see me doing it. They might become curious, ask me what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and it might empower them to change their life too. It might empower people that I've never met, who are just watching my journey silently, Because I know there's people in this community who are watching my journey silently. You've never reached out to me, You've never said anything, but you're silently watching. You're a silent lurker, not just to me, but to other people, and if you're a silent lurker, there are silent lurkers watching your journey. So how can you change the focus from what you're struggling with currently to something that's helping you grow instead? This is such a powerful paradigm shift that I really want you to grasp with me, Because it changed my life. That's why I'm sharing it. It changed the trajectory of my life, and I couldn't imagine my life and where I'd be today if it went any other way.

Speaker 1:

If you want to change your life, you have to stop clinging to your sad story, Because we all have one Not saying that some aren't worse than others, but we all have one. And it's not a contest to see who has it the worst. It's not a contest to see whose pain is the biggest. The bottom line is we all have something and if we keep clinging to it, if we keep letting that be an excuse for how our life is turning out, it's only going to get worse. And it doesn't have to be that way. I get it, You're exhausted. I get it no-transcript. None of us get to make it out without feeling anything. It's all a part of the human experience and we're all going through it.

Speaker 1:

So lean onto your sisters and your brothers and your mentors for support. Get a support system if you don't have one. There are plenty of people who have been through some tragic shit that are willing and have the capacity to support you. Look for them. You probably won't have to look as hard as you think. Get the support you need and do something different. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Speaker 1:

If holding on to this identity and this narrative hasn't helped you change your life yet, I'm offering you a different path. Holding onto this identity and this narrative hasn't helped you change your life yet. I'm offering you a different path. Find someone that you trust at least enough to be open and honest with to see if they can help you and take that step, Because I promise that it's worth it. I promise your life will change if you give yourself that opportunity. Your story does not have to end this way, and if you've resonated with any part of my story up to this point, I hope you'll at least let that be a testament to what's possible and what's available to you too.

Speaker 1:

I'm by no means perfect. I'm by no means at the end of my healing journey. I personally believe it's a lifelong journey and I'll never get off this ride. There will always be an area that has room for growth, and that's okay. I'm happy to be on this journey and if you're ready to come on this journey with me, I'm so, so, so fucking happy to invite you on this journey with me. I want you to know I mean so please reach out if you're feeling called in this direction in any capacity, because this is what I believe my mission and my purpose in life is to help guide people to healing and happiness, so I love you If you made it all the way to the end of this episode.

Speaker 1:

I'm really grateful that you're here. I hope that you got something out of it At the very least. I hope that you have some things to think about later when you're sitting alone and just reflecting. Thank you for being here. I'm so grateful for this time that we have together every week, and I look forward to being with you again in the next episode. Have a beautiful week. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here and, queen, give yourself a high five for showing up and committing to be the best version of yourself for you and your people. You are such a badass for that. If you got anything good from this episode, would you send the love back by dming me on instagram at boldly lacy, letting me know exactly which part resonated with you? These types of messages empower me to keep showing up, and they also help me understand the types of conversations you really care about. All right, bestie, we'll talk again soon, but for now, it's time for you to step up and start being the badass that we both know you are.