In this episode of More Yourself, we’re diving into one of the most powerful (and sometimes uncomfortable) tools in the ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Toolkit, developing self-trust.

We’ll explore how so many of us late-diagnosed ADHD women have been conditioned to doubt ourselves, to mask, and to override our inner knowing. But what happens when we start listening to our bodies, following our curiosity, and letting go of the need to get it all “right”?

This conversation is about experimenting without pressure, embracing the lessons in things not going to plan, and gently tuning in to your own guidance. It's about creating a life that works for you, not what the world expects.

So here’s your invitation: What would it feel like to trust yourself... even just a little more?

My new book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, is now available, grab your copy here!

What I discuss:

• Thriving with ADHD by embracing your ADHD, not performing or masking.
• Leaning into self-trust (despite fear) to build clarity, confidence, and resilience.
• The role of playful trial-and-error to learn without the pressure to be perfect.
• Using failures to learn, grow and discover new information.
• Using somatic tools and breathwork to regulate and reconnect.
• What setting unapologetic boundaries looks like.
• Taking small steps and recognising how your body responds.

Timestamps:

• 01:19 – Embracing Authenticity
• 03:37 – Book Excerpt (Chapter 7, pg. 131 – Self-Trust)
• 06:50 – Flexing the Self-Trust Muscle
• 08:04 – Leaning into Discomfort and Unmasking
• 09:26 – Cultivating a Growth Mindset
• 09:56 – Exploring Post-Traumatic Growth
• 13:34 – Trusting Yourself and Inner Guidance

Join the More Yourself Community - the doors are now open!

More Yourself is a compassionate space for late-diagnosed ADHD women to connect, reflect, and come home to who they really are. Sign up here!

Inside the More Yourself Membership, you’ll be able to:

• Connect with like-minded women who understand you
• Learn from guest experts and practical tools
• Receive compassionate prompts & gentle reminders
• Enjoy voice-note encouragement from Kate
• Join flexible meet-ups and mentoring sessions
• Access on-demand workshops and quarterly guest expert sessions

To join for £26 a month, click here. To join for £286 for a year (a whole month free!), click here.

We’ll also be walking through The ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Toolkit together, exploring nervous system regulation, burnout recovery, RSD, joy, hormones, and self-trust, so the book comes alive in a supportive community setting.

Links and Resources:

• Find my popular ADHD workshops and resources on my website [here].
• Follow the podcast on Instagram: @adhd_womenswellbeing_pod

Kate Moryoussef is a women's ADHD lifestyle and wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed ADHD women find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity and clarity. 

Foreign welcome back to another episode of More Yourself Here on the ADHD Women's well Being podcast.

This is just my Monday episode which is a bit more of the personal coaching, my personal insights, reflections, kind of the stuff that I don't get to share as much on the Thursday episodes and kind of morphs into what I'm doing in the More Yourself community as well, which, if interested, it's all on my website, ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk you can find out what is going on in this amazing new space for newly diagnosed or newly aware women who are only just discovering their adhd, their neurodivergence.

I'm really excited.

It just feels like a bit of a breath of fresh air for me where I'm able to step in and use all the knowledge and the insights that I have learned, learned and absorbed from doing this podcast for so long, working this space, coaching, speaking to incredible people over, you know, the past five years, and being able to blend it in this sort of neuroaffirming way of guiding more women to trust themselves, to be their authentic selves and to be More yourself.

Literally be who we're meant to be, step into who this version of us, perhaps we've never quite felt comfortable with, or we've been masking or hiding or overcompensating and allowing this version of ourself that has been buried very deeply, perhaps through not feeling safe, not being able to show up as who we are due to our family and our societal conditioning, or just perhaps we've never had the opportunity to have space or quiet or time to process what it is that we actually want and maybe not trusted ourselves.

And last episode we were using my book, the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, to wet the juices a bit, so to speak, of diving more into this kind of conversation about tuning more into what we need, building a life that feels more authentic to us.

And I was talking about somatically using our body to tune in, even if our brains and our minds are still feeling very chaotic and noisy, that it's just being able to tune back into our breath, have some time out, being able to detach from all the input that comes from being constantly online emails, social media, text messages, WhatsApp groups, constantly being told where we have to be.

You know, showing up and just feeling like our life is out of control, like just feeling that we have no space or room to maneuver or to have more flexibility and freedom.

And I want to just tune into a part of the book it's actually page 131.

And again the chapter is the build a life that works for you.

It's chapter seven.

This bit is called Leaning into Self Trust.

And I'm just going to read a little bit and then I'm going to use this opportunity just to kind of pose you some questions and get curious and maybe challenge you on some of the constructs that you have created in your own mind and the limiting beliefs and all the things that hold us back and suppress us and question ourselves and sort of live and work in this perpetual state of self doubt.

So I write.

We all have dreams and aspirations, but when we are living with adhd, most of the time we're too afraid to voice them aloud.

A lifetime of being ridiculed, not listened to or fearing how we communicate means we look to others for approval and validation.

Even just saying this, just being able to say this out loud feels, you know, almost like freeing just for someone to say to validate this, go ah.

Okay.

Maybe my body has not really understood, maybe there's something that has never felt safe, but actually I've never known what this is.

So I continue to say.

Neurodivergent brains are renowned for honing in on the out of the box perspectives.

We're the trailblazers, the outliers, the trend spotters.

And when this is celebrated and encouraged, we can further embrace this expansive thinking.

However, if this has not been nurtured, or we've been told to, or taught to shrink and suppress this part of ourselves due to a need to feel safe or accepted.

Leaning into self trust as opposed to the default mode of self doubt, perhaps that what many of us have experienced or feels like the norm to us is a terrifying suggestion when we haven't trusted our abilities for most of our adult lives or have been unsure how we've achieved what we have because of our methods looking so different or messy or perhaps highly unique, we instantly doubt that we have what it takes to get to where we want to be.

I mean I want 100% felt this when writing this book.

I was a first time author, never been published, never done anything like this before, and I had a way of working that felt right to me, but was also probably wildly different to maybe what my agent or the editors or the publishers had think is what generates a book in the right order.

Thankfully they knew I was neurodivergent.

I had to say from the very beginning, I'm gonna probably do this in a way that is not the best way for you guys, but intuitively feels right to me.

And that felt so freeing to be able to do that.

And they gave me that platform and I was so, so grateful.

But it was my self advocacy and my asking for this way of working that allowed me to do this without constantly judging or criticizing myself, which is, I kind of did anyway, if I'm honest.

But you know, it could have been a lot worse imposter syndrome that we have discussed in the other chapters and I will talk about this in other episodes.

It can take lots of self awareness, inner work and therapy to leave it behind and finally believe in ourselves and what we have to offer.

When we can trust that we have what it takes, we begin to see life brimming with potential and possibilities.

And as my confidence has grown over the past five years, from the inception of my business with this female ADHD focus, I've had to consistently and terrifyingly lean into self trust.

I knew that if I needed this information, there would be many other women like you in a very similar situation.

So this flexing of the self trust muscle is a mindset gamble that mostly pays off because even if a particular idea didn't work out, what we've learned from going through all these different stages of the experience will always be worthwhile, even if it didn't turn out the way we wanted.

This is about recognizing there's no such thing as failure.

It's always about learning.

It's about trying new things and being okay with the outcome.

However that looks, not putting all this pressure in this expectation of outcomes, of it being perfect, of it being right, of allowing us to play a little bit and get curious and something might work, something might not.

What can we learn from that?

What lesson can we glean from that?

Where can we use this in as part of this, this life school that we're all living?

We're all in this same learning process.

We don't stop learning until we die.

However, we need to be able to recognize that there really isn't anything, you know, failure may look on the outside like something very, very tangible and embarrassing and shameful, but we will always, always learn from failure.

Failing upwards, however you want to call it, instead of productivity speak.

And it is important that we lean into this discomfort.

It is important that we lean into these things that feel very, very scary.

Because without leaning into this and unmasking, unpeeling and leaning into perhaps what feels authentic but also terrifying that we're able to make more aligned and self led decisions and no longer be paralyzed by our self doubt.

And it is a muscle that we have to flex each time we do.

Terrifying as it is, we give ourselves that little bit more resilience and self knowledge and awareness that we have that inner strength to do the scary things that perhaps may not feel like what's expected from us, that perhaps doesn't feel aligned with the brand that we've been portraying to other people, but actually feels deeply right to us.

And sometimes we feel that very intuitively in our bodies.

We just know, and again, it's a muscle we keep having to flex that we feel something in our body that's saying to us, no, that doesn't feel right or no, put that boundary up or don't do that thing or push back or question or advocate.

And sometimes it's a bit more of a low hum of there's a unsureness, but you're not quite sure.

You might have to kind of keep questioning and keep making space for that.

And this is how we cultivate this growth mindset, which is very, very helpful for us with adhd.

This growth mindset, you know, we can call it in the positive psychology world, it's post traumatic growth.

So many, many of us will have gone through some trauma, maybe lots of little T traumas or unfortunately some big T traumas, and that we're holding onto and our nervous system is still processing and we may still feel these triggers in day to day life.

But there's also a thing called post traumatic growth where we are able to use what we've gone through throughout our life and use it for a force, for a force for creating change and impact and support and expansion and growth.

However that looks in your world, your community, your parenting, your relationships, whatever that looks like.

So a few questions that I pose, and this is to ask yourself when you are feeling uncertain, try these questions.

Maybe if you are listening right now, grab a pen, grab your phone and jot them down.

If you haven't got the book, it's all in the book as well, so don't worry.

So the questions are, what if it did work out?

What if that thing that you've been considering or posing or worrying about or ruminating on or going round and round in circles on, what if it did work out?

Can you write that down?

What would it look like?

How would it feel in this kind of version of your reality?

Visualize what it would look like.

Close your eyes.

How would that feel in your body?

And what's the worst that would happen if it did fail or didn't go according to your plan?

You know, I always talk about Removing that outcome, Remove the pressure, remove the expectations and just try, try it.

And I'm going to go as small as possible.

You know, here, like small, sustainable.

This is not about blowing up your life.

This is not about making huge, huge decisions.

But perhaps it is.

But start small.

What if you made that decision that you've been thinking about for ages that has felt really scary.

And what signs in your body can you recognize when it's either a hell yeah or oh no.

Like can you feel it in your body?

Maybe you can just hone in on that.

Maybe there's a way that you can just practice this as like a little game.

Note these down with these brief examples such as spotting, you know, an outfit in a, in a window where you perhaps wouldn't normally choose it, but you kind of think, you know what, I love that, I love that color and I'm going to wear it.

It's different to what I'd normally wear.

But you know what, sod it, I'm going to get it.

Or saying yes to an adventure or changing, you know, a holiday destination or going out for dinner somewhere different or meeting up with a friend that you perhaps wouldn't normally meet up with one on one, or trying different types of food that perhaps you've been a bit curious about but your partner has never liked.

And notice that feeling in your body.

What are you feeling when you do something fun or something that is against your typical values or interests or conditioning?

What happens if you did something differently and something else, you know, write out or say out loud affirmations such as, I choose to trust and believe that I have the answers within me.

It's so empowering to know that we can trust ourselves, that we can be self led, that there is self leadership, self responsibility that we can step into, that we don't need to rely always on asking other people seeking external validation.

And I'm not saying here, don't be alone like a lone soldier.

You don't need to be hyper independent.

This is not about closing in and not asking for support or help or asking for advocacy in the workplace.

This is not about kind of like really pushing people away.

But this is about trusting yourself finally.

And this, this choice to be more intentional about listening for that inner guidance and that wisdom and another one that I love that really softens my nervous system is even though things may not go according to plan, I'm always learning and growing.

So just simply listening to our bodies, learning and understanding this new language of what it somatically feels so we can take away the noise, the noise from our busy, busy brains that makes us so confused and leads to this overwhelm and this mental depletion and exhaustion which is often contributing to our burnout.

Write it down, speak it out loud, help yourself, help yourself, make a bit more sense and then create this new foundation for working with this inner guidance system rather than against it.

So I'm going to leave that there.

Again, all of this is in my book.

I've sort of just used this as a bit of inspiration and the book is available on all platforms.

Go and have a look at it if you haven't got it.

And we will be doing more things like this within the community as well.

So I hope that this has resonated.

And yeah, thank you for being here on this episode and if you prefer the interview based episodes that always on a Thursday where we're delving into all things neurodivergence, adhd, growth, expansion, self development, development, self awareness, it's all there.

So take care and I will see you for the next episode.