I don't know. I'm frozen. And I don't do anything. And then of course, that's just taking up more time. Or I go to fun, which is classic people pleasing, where I'm like, Okay, what should I do? What do you want me to do? What do you think we should have for breakfast? And my husband's like, why are you asking me like just make something in here we get into this seems spiral every time of fight flight freeze fawn in every argument. So no, while I'm doing everything that I quote unquote, should be doing going to therapy, marriage counseling, working on myself, reading books, doing everything that I can. And yet, I still don't know how to get out of this vicious cycle that keeps like dragging me down. And I feel like I'm drowning. And it doesn't feel like I can choose in that moment when my husband would ask me why you're doing that. It didn't feel like I had a choice to do anything different. So fast forward. I'm finishing up my coaching certification right now. And it's all about neuroplasticity, and how to change your brain. And I started down this rabbit hole when I was really sick and trying to figure out like, I was so desperate. I'm like, I will literally try anything under the sun to try to get better. And neuroplasticity is one of the things that I deep dive research. And you know that when we get hyper focused on something, especially when we're desperate, how we will deep dive into things and realizing like Oh, my goodness, like, there is an option to like change the way my brain functions. It felt like oh, just too good to be true. So when I signed up to do this coaching certification, it started out to be like, oh, yeah, I would like to help my clients change their habits. But like, selfishly, I was like, I don't care if I ever use this thing ever again, in my work. If I can figure out how to change my reactions and get myself out of this hole, it will be worth every single penny I spent on it. Because it's a commitment. It's a lot of money. And it's a lot of time, and I'm taking courses in the evenings, which you know, as a mom is the hardest part of the day in, in one of my very first practice sessions, I brought this pancake problem to my partner to practice. And I was like, I need to change my reaction when my husband asks me why I'm doing stuff like, I don't want to feel automatically annoyed. And I don't want to automatically feel like he's criticizing me. Like I want to take him for his word that like he genuinely wants to understand. And I want to be able to just answer his question like I don't need fancy fluffy unicorn and reward feelings. Like I just want to feel neutral about this. I just want to be like fine with him asking me a question. And we worked through this neuroplasticity system. My teachers called the meta pattern in the next day. We're getting ready in the morning. And he asked me a question. I don't remember what it was, but he asked me why I was doing something in the morning, which is probably like, why are you taking so long, right? And I was just like, Oh, I'm just I just answered the question. That was it. And I was like, holy working shirt balls. If I literally just answered that question, I didn't get upset. I didn't go down the shame spiral of how I was taking too long, like blew my mind. And that was the moment where I was like, This is it. This is what we need for ADHD to be rewriting our reactions, when we're feeling things that we don't want to feel. And I want to be real clear here that this isn't about changing your reaction when it's like rightfully so like, this week in the news has been hard. And I don't watch the news because it's too much for me. So I generally run on the premise of like, if something important happens, my husband will let me know. And if not, I will probably see it on Instagram. And that is the sum total of my news intake because my heart cannot handle it. So like, rightfully so this week is really hard. In that kind of righteous anger that gets people moving and changing the world. That's not the kind of feeling we want to change. That's the kind of feeling that makes things happen. I'm talking about the feelings you feel that you don't want to feel those patterns that have been ingrained throughout your life or by trauma or by someone who was not kind to you are whatever it is, that created a reaction that you don't want anymore. And you want to change the way you feel about that. I'm talking about those kinds of feelings. In that pancake moment. I knew I can put this to work in so many ways for ADHD, I'm working on it with my kids bedtime. That's the one of the hardest parts of the day for me, I'm tired, my medicine has worn off, I have run out of energy, I just want to go to bed. And that is when I usually lose my cool that is when I start yelling at everybody Medusa mom shows up and is taking everybody's head off. And that is paired with a lot of times like they're not listening to me anymore, because they are also tired, and they are also out of energy and moving slowly and not catching all that I say and doing like half of what I said in the last two weeks, I have only lost my cool twice in the last two weeks compared to where I was a year ago. This is like a miracle of miracles here. I don't expect myself to be perfect. I'm still human. And I can pinpoint both of those things and clearly say why I know why was too stressed and needed to take some space. But what I know is that I didn't stay there. I think that's one of the hardest parts when you have ADHD is that when you get stuck somewhere, you're stuck and you can't do anything else. And then the whole day falls apart when things don't go as planned. And then it all is a hot mess after that. Now that I have the skills to change my reaction. I don't stay there. On the one day I lost my cool right before lunch, rightfully so my kids weren't listening one trips and falls eats it. And I'm start yelling, I was with a friend. And she she heard like my mom voice come out. And she was like, Oh, my goodness, something's wrong. And it was like, oh, no, what's wrong is that I'm having a meltdown right here. It was able to pull together and be like, okay, Patricia, focus, scoop up this kid, make sure he's okay, bring him to lunch, we got to eat no more running and flip flops. And I was able to pull it together. And we had a great rest of the day. The one day I lost it at bedtime. It wasn't epic meltdown level, it was just like, oh, well, but sure you were yelling a lot. And you need to rein it in. And I was able to pull it together and calm down enough to then go and apologize to my kids and be like, I am sorry that I yelled at you. I should not have acted like that and being able to have forgiveness for myself so that I can then apologize to make kids and own up to like, hey, that wasn't cool to me. I'm so sorry. In turn bedtime around, I have the recipe like okay, I'm doing bedtime by myself. My husband wasn't home that night. It was a stressful day, I let them stay up extra late because it was a Saturday. Of course it did not go on my fever. I'm like I can go through all that and rationalize why this didn't go well, I can see the pattern. I know what I need to do differently next time, but I'm not gonna beat myself up about it. And I was able to pull it together to still connect with them before they went to bed. Those were my heartbreaks when I'm working with my clients. And they are so sad that they didn't show up in the way that they wanted to. And they're beating themselves up, just like I beat myself up for it and knowing that like, I don't have to stay in that place anymore. They don't have to stay in that place anymore where it's really hard and just in the shame spiral. Instead, being able to recognize like, Okay, this is not going well. What am I going to do? Bring my stress rebounds down. How do I want to handle this differently? Let's put it into place and being able to show up as the mom that I want to be that right there is worth every single penny that I spent on this certification if I were to never use it ever again, it was a worthy expense because it was an investment in how I treat myself and how I treat my family and knowing that I can then turn around and share this with other people like it is beautiful. And I'm like over here just wanting to like shout from the rooftops like you don't have to stay mad at yourself, you don't have to see a shame for how you treated your family yesterday. You don't have to keep that negative Narrator playing in your brain that tells you all the stuff that you do wrong. You don't have to stay in that guilt of being a horrible mom, like you don't have to do any of that there is another option. And I've seen it not just with me. I mean, I've seen it in myself in so many ways. Like it's not just my relationships, but things like now like changing the way I view like, being in large crowds of people was always very anxiety driven for me. And now I can walk into a place and feel not necessarily like super comfortable, but I'm not panicked. I can walk in with my head held high. And be me Be confident me be calm Patricia and shine my light and talk to people that I normally would never want to talk to. Because I have rewritten the way that my brain does things. I've seen it in my clients where I have a really shy client who always feels like on the outskirts and not welcome and she spoke up in successful mama meetups last month for the first time ever. She's like one of my OG clients. She has been with me for a year. And she just spoke up. She's never done that before. I about like peed my pants when she did that. Like it shows me like how she is coming into her own and being competent that she is valuable. In her opinion matters and what she has to contribute mean something. I've seen it in one of my clients who has a neurodivergent four year old, and she's trying so hard to be patient and stay calm in the bedtime struggles that used to be Medusa mom Central. And now she can show up and be present and focus on what's the true goal here. My goal is to connect and to be present and we will get in bed calmly. Eventually, I've been doing some free coaching and successful mama meetups as I'm practicing all the stuff that I'm learning in my certification. And like I've seen, I mean so many but like off the top of my head, there's one mom who's a new supervisor, and every time one of her employees would come to her she'd panic of like imposter syndrome, I can't do this. And now she is calm enough to give herself space to listen, and then have the like capacity to try to help them and figure out the answer instead of the panic. I have seen another one of the moms and successful mama meetups was struggling with leaving for work at five o'clock. It's because she wanted to be present and pick up her son and trying to leave work was full of anxiety of like, I still have more stuff to do. I didn't get enough done in being able to give her that gift of calm and peace to walk out the door. And like do what she knows is most important in that moment, which is being with her son, she now has access to that feeling of knowing like I can't do this. Another mom was feeling touched out by her two year old Haven't we all been there and how she can approach her child with calm and connection in those times where it feels like too much. When I see this working in mom after mom after Mom, I can't help but sit here and tell you like things can be different when we look at the neuroplasticity of our brain. And it feels like oh, when this you know trigger point happens, I can't control my reaction. You're right in that moment, your brain is on autopilot and just does its thing. But when we can go in and activate that trigger, like if you think almost like, you know, when my husband would say why are you doing this? Are they cute or you push the button, and then that circuit lights up red, and I'm angry. But when we can go into our brains and like metaphorically light up that circuit when the button gets pushed, we can go in and separate that feeling and then in our brain find that place in our brain where we have the thing we want. So for example, I want to be able to just answer the question. There's plenty of times in my life where I've just answered a question, I know what that feels like. And to me that calm feels like the color blue. So if you imagine like I'm waiting up that section of my brain in blue, they know what it feels like to be calm. And when we're doing this neuroplasticity work. We're over here pumping up that blue light, so it hits like strobe like Vegas level light. And once it is so strong, we can then connect it over to that button that when you used to push it hit read. Now when that button gets pushed, because everything's lit up in blue in your brain, we can now connect that button to the blue and solidify it and the more time we spend on it, the more we can link and make that connection stronger so that when that button is hit, it's not going to read anymore now it's going to blue because blue is We're we've set up that point of strength, and we rewrite that path. If you want to see this in action, you can go into my Facebook group and watch the pin the video at the top of me coaching moms, or you can volunteer for one of the ones I'm doing in the next couple days. And yes, we have grace for ourselves, because we're human. Like I said, it doesn't mean I've never yelled at my kids since then, sometimes you're gonna be mad, sometimes things are frustrating. But in that moment, I want to know that the most important thing is the connection there and to be able to reroute myself to lean into that connection point and being present, instead of being angry Medusa mom. And the more that I practice that being present and connecting with them, the more it solidifies in our brain, there's a saying neurons that fire together, wire together, and the more that we light that up, we can build that new path, even if that old button of red has been in place, since you were a little kid. Our brains are amazing, amazing things that we I mean, really, we don't even understand the half of what they do. But what we do understand is that they can be changed. And all this has been coming together for me as I go through my certification and seeing the links of how I can apply this to ADHD. Because most of the coaches that are in the certification program are not ADHD coaches, it's a really wide variety, and everyone's able to like layer it into what they're working on. There are coaches in there that have been certified previously, or been coaching for decades. And there's also people who are just starting out and like to watch how this meta pattern of the neuroplasticity in your brain functions in every area across all of these different personalities, that time and time again, it works like my mind has been blown in how effective this is. And I just realized over the past couple of weeks that like my coaching has always been amazing. Because I understand ADHD brains, I understand strategies that work. But now I combine that with overcoming all the hurdles that are keeping you from doing what you know, you already need to do. Like, this is the crazy part about ADHD. It's like you know what to do, and then you don't do it. But why? Like what's holding you back from that when we dig into all those little hurdles, but it usually makes sense why things aren't working, like if you're trying to put your morning routine in place, but yet your teen is always running late. That's really hard to keep your cool. It's hard to stay on track. It's hard to still have a good day after you've been yelling at everybody for 45 minutes to get out the door. So I know I've got the strategy to come up with the right morning routine that works for you. But the missing piece was how are you gonna overcome those obstacles? How do you still keep your cool and stay connected with your kid and be present still have a good day, in spite of the fact that it's not going how you thought it was gonna go? Because when you have kids like nothing ever goes