Kristen Carder 0:05
Kristin, welcome to the I have ADHD podcast, where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults. With ADHD, I’m your host, Kristin Carter and I have ADHD. Let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting, relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder, I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B. Hey, what’s up? This is Kristin Carter, and you are listening to the I have ADHD podcast. I am medicated, I am caffeinated, I am regulated, AF and I am ready to roll. I am delighted today to have my forever coach and mentor, Africa, Brooke here with me today. She is going to just knock your socks off. So buckle up and get ready. But let me tell you a little bit about who she is before we get rolling Africa. Brooke is a Zimbabwean born consultant, developmental coach, speaker and author of the book The third perspective, brave expression and the age of intolerance. She’s known for her work in overcoming self sabotage and self censorship, which is exactly what she helped me with when we worked together one on one over the period of a year and a half. Maybe there was quite some time, and it was transformative for me. So Africa, you have imprinted on my life forever. Thank you for being here. I’m so so happy to welcome you.

Africa Brooke 1:42
Oh, wow. What a delicious

intro. Your voice is like honey all over my being. Thank you so much. And I’m really happy that we get to have this conversation again. I think it’s been How long since our last one? A couple of years. Two

Kristen Carder 1:57
years, at least. Wow,

Africa Brooke 2:00
two years. Oh, wow, you’re someone that I’m always so, so looking forward to having conversations with whether it’s going to be a private one or a public one. So I’m just very grateful that I get to do this with you. Thank you, my darling.

Kristen Carder 2:14
I’m just so pleased to have just had a small window into your book writing process. I remember the day when we were sitting face to face via zoom, of course, as you were in London, and I am in Pennsylvania, but we were sitting face to face, and I remember you saying these words, I’m writing a book, and then you go, you like, covered your you covered your lips with your finger, and you said, like, it’s a big secret, and I just was so delighted to know the secret. And then here we are a couple this is probably three years later, yes, that you have externalized all of the thoughts that you’ve been working through and helping clients with, put it into book format, put it out there into the world and and it’s a huge success. So tell me about your book. What is the third perspective? Yes, so

Africa Brooke 3:11
to me, something that I always invite people to do anyway is to just kind of filter those words through your body and your mind the third perspective, and to have a think about what it intuitively says to you. And when I’ve asked people what it intuitively says, most people have had it pretty much nailed. So the third perspective to me, I see it as an invitation out of the binary. It’s an invitation out of the either or out of the left or right, with us or against us, pro or anti, and especially with everything that is happening in the US, and to be honest, all over the world in different parts, at this moment in time, there’s probably something, one thing you can think of, regardless of when you’re listening to this in real time, or in two years time, there’s going to be something that is happening in society where you are forced or pressured to pick a side or to prove your goodness, you know, and to me, the idea of the third perspective is realizing that even though our minds are very binary machines, we want to make sense of things immediately. We want to know where to place people, so we’ll look at their worldview, their opinions, their ideas, their thoughts, who their friends are, who do they vote for? So we know where to place them, but we don’t realize that the gray, which I think of as the third perspective, is that space where we allow ourselves to be human, where we allow ourselves to have the nuance, to realize that sometimes it’s actually not as simple as we would like it to be. So I wanted to write this book because I think there’s a collective fear that is starting to build where people feel that they have to pick a side, and if they don’t, they’re going to be cast out of the tribe. They’re going to be cast out of the community. They will lose their friends. They will. Lose their clients, they will lose it’s this idea that if I truly speak up, for example, or if I say I don’t agree with something, or if I say that I’ve changed my mind, I’m going to be punished for it. So we see our authenticity as leading to loss in some way. So I wanted to write a book where I’m not just sort of, it’s not a rant by any means. It’s not a memoir. It’s not all about me. I wanted to take my intellectual property as a developmental coach, as a researcher, as a consultant, as someone that’s really tapped into everything that is happening collectively, and to give people solutions. So the subtitle of the book is brave expression in the age of intolerance, because I want us to realize that brave expression is an option, you know. So that’s kind of like the little bullet point list of what the third perspective is, an invitation out of the binary.

Kristen Carder 5:54
And now a word from our sponsor, hey, Kristen, here. I’m the host of this podcast, an ADHD expert and a certified life coach who’s helped hundreds of adults with ADHD understand their unique brains and make real changes in their lives. If you’re not sure what a life coach is, let me tell you. A life coach is someone who helps you achieve your goals, like a personal trainer for your life. A life coach is a guide who holds your hand along the way as you take baby step after baby step to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish. A good life coach is a trained expert who knows how to look at situations, all situations, with non judgmental neutrality, and offer you solutions that you’ve probably never even considered before if you’re being treated for your ADHD, and maybe even you’ve done some work in therapy and you want to add to your scaffolding of support, if you’ve got to join my group coaching program, focused. Focused is where functional adults with ADHD surround each other with encouragement and support, and I lead the way with innovative and creative solutions to help you fully accept yourself, understand your ADHD and create the life that you’ve always wanted to create. Even with ADHD, go to I have adhd.com/focused to join, and I hope to see you in our community today, such a moment in time where you’re exactly right. We are desperate to be on the correct side, whatever side that is, we’re desperate to make sure that people know that we are in agreement with whatever you know is the quote, unquote right thing to think right now. And I’m curious if you could give us some background, some perspective on that, because in your book, you go into great detail about the evolutionary process of our brains and how we are like it was actually very physically dangerous for people to disagree with the tribe and and how that’s still impacting us now.

Africa Brooke 8:20
And you know what? It that piece alone, which is pretty much at the beginning of the book, where I talk about the biology of conformity. I think when we hear the word conforming, right? Immediately, a lot of us will say that I would never conform. It sounds like this thing that other people do and we don’t do it, you know? But I think it’s very important, and that’s that’s a pattern in so many of the things that I pointed out in the book, that it’s much easier to notice other people’s intolerance. It’s much easier to notice where other people are using the wrong language or not getting it right. But to see it in yourself is a very unnatural thing. So that’s why I talk about the biology of things that the human animal, it’s it’s very unnatural for us to turn inward, to sort of look at ourselves and to look at our own behavior. We’re external beings. We need to look around us so we can assess what the threat is, so we can determine whether this person is a safe person or not. So we use different categories, right? Be it identity markers or someone’s politics or someone’s choice of friends or many different things, but conforming is something that at a point in time, yes, but even right now, depending on what country you live in, it’s very dangerous to speak out. It’s very dangerous to even ask questions or to say you don’t agree with something, or to say that you’ve changed your mind, or to say you’re not okay with the people in power, or whatever might be, it’s there’s actually a very real cost to it. But for most of us, that is, especially those of us listening to this in the Western world, chances are that is not the same story for you. How. Ever, we still have that same biological wiring whereby we feel that if we deviate from the crowd, if we deviate from the tribe, essentially, because I think that kind of language, to me, brings it really back to the root of all of this, that this is tribalism. You know, we don’t want to be cast out of the group, but I don’t think that’s a good place to stop and to allow for ourselves to continue conforming, because it’s just something that is biological. It’s just the way that it is. I think we have to do and this is why I wrote the book. I think we have to do our very best to go against those natural instincts where we continue to betray ourselves and cross our own boundaries, because we’re so fearful of what will happen. And I wonder where you where you would say, Kristen, you have seen this for yourself, because I think examples can kind of bring this conversation more to life.

Kristen Carder 10:54
Look at you asking me to talk about me. It’s interesting to have the conversation around the conformity that we are pressured to adhere to in society. When many of us grew up in families where conformity was anything other than conformity wasn’t an option. Yes, and I would say that I grew up in such a family, and so I feel or identify myself as someone who has been groomed since toddlerhood to conform, and have always felt my spirit pushing against that. And it’s a really interesting conversation to have around authenticity, conformity, crossing your own boundaries and being authentic to yourself no matter what, because so many of us, ADHD ers and so many of us who grew up in toxic and dysfunctional families had to self abandon in order to keep the connection with our caregivers, with our families that we so desperately wanted. And now what I see happening is that is mirrored in society. Yes, so the connection that we had to keep in our families, which of course, kept us safe, and now we’ve taken that same feeling and we have projected it onto society, as if we need to conform in society in order to stay safe. And you made such a great point that for most of us listening to this podcast, for you and I specifically, we are perfectly physically safe to disagree with people. There are people in the world whose lives would be at risk were they to tell the truth about what they believed. You do not fit into that category. But for some reason, my body sure feels like it is dangerous, yes, to say what I truly think when it goes against the grain, my body feels like it’s dangerous to disagree with someone in power. My body feels like it’s dangerous if I don’t adhere to kind of like the trendy beliefs of the time. And I think that what your book so systematically does is walk a person through the process of untangling that, that need, that rush, that like craving for I have to say the right thing in order to be safe. And you really help the reader break it down and untangle that and say, like, are we really in danger,

Africa Brooke 13:41
right? Is

Kristen Carder 13:43
there really an issue here? Yeah. So that was a very long way around to say that, yeah. I think for me, personally, I’ve had to untangle that in every area of my life. It hasn’t just been like, do I agree with covid mandates or not? Like, it’s so much deeper than that. It’s like, yes, do I adhere to the family system or not? Absolutely that that is big. Yeah,

Africa Brooke 14:10
and I love that you you really opened up that thought in the way that you did. Because I to me with conversations like this, Kristen, I do think that’s the whole point. I think the whole point is to riff out loud and see where you end up in thought, because we don’t get to have these conversations often enough. So I think they can be sort of bumpy because you suddenly realize, Oh, I’ve never, I’ve never said this out loud or tried to make sense of this thing that is just so somatically known, but it’s not intellectually known, you know, and something you were saying that really stood out to me was the fact that I’m paraphrasing here, but the fact that all of this is so deeply personal, it’s so easy, and I kind of go into this in the book, that it’s so easy to assume that this is a political conversation, but it’s not. The reality is that our lives, our very. Intimate lives have been so politicized. But this is not a political conversation. This is about what is happening in your home. Are you finding yourself censoring your thoughts and your speech in your home? Is there something that is not really working in your relationship, but you feel terrified of even acknowledging it to your partner to say, Hey, I’m dissatisfied in this area. Can we figure something out together? Has a friend done something? But you’ve been sitting on this thing for such a long time now, the resentment is building up. Now you have this internal intolerance, which will eventually have to come out anyway. Is it also conformity? In the sense of you won’t even allow yourself to wear certain clothes, or to have a certain hairstyle or to listen to certain music. I think we have to start spotting this in our day to day, because it’s so easy to think, Oh, this is not a conversation for me. I’m fine, but however you are in your most intimate moments is how you’re going to be when it comes to the wider things. So we think of the covid, we think of racial conversations, what’s happening in the Middle East, the voting, the election, how you will respond to all of that is a symptom of something that is much more intimate, that is happening in your day to day Life.

Kristen Carder 16:16
Yes, that’s exactly it. That is the outworking right, the way we respond politically, the way we respond to people in our lives online that we disagree with, the way we respond to a triggering post, the way we respond to a celebrity that we thought was on our political side, but now has taken a stance and they’re on the other side, the way that we respond to that is a symptom, just like you said, of what happens in our personal life. So how do you respond to your favorite aunt when she says, Hey, I disagree with you politically. How do you respond to your partner, to your best friend when they are making choices that you disagree with or that that are impacting you. Are you able to be authentic and not self abandon? Talk to me about self abandonment, because that is something. It’s a thread that I’ve been weaving into the conversations on this podcast because of all of my work in therapy and becoming someone who just is just a gosh darn woman who will not self abandon anymore. I’m just not going to do it. Not it is one of my top values to stay connected to myself at all times. And that is the deepest work of my life. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. But talk to me about what does self abandonment mean to you? Like, why do we do it? Just riff on that for a minute. For me. Oh, absolutely.

Africa Brooke 17:47
And you’re naming something that is so current in my life right now, and just the season of life that I’m in where I am thinking so much about needs, which is something that seems so simple and sort of obvious, but to me, it’s part of this conversation around self abandonment. It’s been a big realization going back into therapy and realizing that I never got to and I’m sure a lot of people listening will sort of understand and resonate with this in different ways, but I just wasn’t raised in a family, but also in a culture where needs were a priority, you know, outside of survival, outside of survival, emotional needs, and even people just asking, oh, what do you want to eat today, or what do you want to wear, or what would you prefer? Just simple. Again, I like to bring things back to the everyday, to the simple, because that informs everything else, I promise you. Because what Foundation are you working from? Are you working from a foundation similar to me, where I was born and raised in a culture and in a home where needs were never a conversation, it was all about survival. So I grew up became a young girl, young woman, and a woman going into her her 30s, realizing that I’d never consciously thought about what it is that I actually want, it was easy for me to think about big things, to kind of make big decisions, to go into the analytical, the intellectual, but very simple things I would I would find it very difficult to articulate discomfort, very difficult to articulate sadness, or to articulate when a boundary has been crossed or something doesn’t feel right, even in sex, not being able to say, this is painful. Can we do something different? Feeling that I just had to bear it and just sort of be there, not not feeling able to point out anything that seemed too, quote, unquote, too small, because it seemed as if, like maybe I’m just starting creating conflict for conflict sake, but also because I was very conflict avoidant, because in the home that I grew up in, any conflict meant punishment. So you don’t. Get to sort of articulate what it is you want, what is not okay. You just sort of go with whatever the head of the house, my father decides so self abandoning as I was actually writing the book. But even before that, I realized that, similar to what I said, that very little around this has to do with what’s happening societally. It’s about what has already been happening within you. Because if I’m already well trained at self abandoning, once I get told that vaccines or whatever are a mandate, and you absolutely have to do it, or this is the way that it is, or you have to use this language. And if you don’t use that, if you’re so well trained at self abandoning, you won’t even ask questions around it. You will just feel afraid, because you feel like, okay, so I have to do this thing, and the fear will consume you so much because it’s happened before. It’s so historical, it will consume you to the point of just going with whatever the approved decision is because to ask questions is dangerous. To say, hold on. But why do I have to do that? Because in doing that, you’re expressing needs. You have a need, even in that moment for clarity, right? But if you don’t even know that that is something that’s important to you, you will override that. Even if your body is telling you, no, no, you will absolutely override it. So for me, self abandonment is something that I started thinking about more so while I was writing because I realized that it wasn’t about cancel culture, actually, or any of this, it was about something much more historical, and a pattern that’s already been at play for decades.

Kristen Carder 21:42
When you say historical, you mean historical in your own life, yes,

Africa Brooke 21:45
yes, absolutely, a pattern that I’ve always known, you know, so the details will look different. Whatever’s happening externally will look different, but the inclination to self abandon will always be there, because choosing myself felt so foreign, you know, or it felt like a betrayal of some sort, which is why writing the open letter that I did and speaking in the way that I did was was very, very important in finally addressing that self abandonment, because I had to be okay with this feeling that was saying, but You’re betraying the black community by speaking in this way, you’re betraying left leaning people by speaking in this way, you’re betraying feminists and women by speaking in this way. Because it had never been about choosing myself. It was always about fawning right to other people. What do other people want? So yeah, it was that historical pattern that I had to address, and I would invite anyone that is listening to this, and we do this in the first part of the book of awareness, where I pose the question, what are you afraid of? Because we need to stop being very honest about what we’re afraid of. If I speak up, I’m afraid this will happen. I’m afraid I will lose my job, my clients, my whatever it is, my family, the perception that people have of me, we need to start being very, very honest about that. But also, who do you feel like you’re betraying by being your most authentic self? Because that was the question that I needed to ask, right? So the self abandonment piece is, to me, one that can’t be sort of pulled out, and then we look at everything else. It’s it’s a fixed part of this conversation, because ultimately, self censorship is a form of self abandonment. Self Sabotage is a form of self abandonment, because you’re communicating that your needs don’t matter.

Kristen Carder 23:38
Oh, my word yes to all of it. You mentioned your open letter, and I think it’s important that we at least touch on it for a second, because if people have not listened to the first episode that I did with you a couple years ago, or just don’t know about your work, this is how I found you. A theologian that I follow because I’m a nerd, posted your open letter and was like, this woman is incredible, or this woman is fearless. And I was like, oh, let’s let me go read this. And I remember, I want to say we were in covid lockdown. I was seeing a gray couch. Okay, so the timeline is correct. I was sitting on my gray, Mid Century Modern couch. I just got to flex every second. I just remember the moment. I remember the moment that I clicked on this person’s story. I clicked over and I read every single word of your open letter, and I remember thinking, I have to work with this woman. I need. I want to be this brave. So tell us just a snippet about that open letter and how it catapulted you into the work that you’re doing now.

Africa Brooke 24:46
Yes, and thank you so much. Thank you just for sharing that, because it’s men. It was in the height of the pandemic, so I pressed publish on that open letter on January the second 20. 21 okay, and it was a very intense time, collectively for all of us, but we had we weren’t even prepared for everything that was to come. But it was at the height of the racial uprising. Had happened the summer beforehand, and around December 2020. Is when the conversations around the vaccine that had just been created were coming out so that with the conversations around who’s going to get it, who’s not, and what does that mean if you decide to get it, and what does that mean if you so again, that same mob mentality and tribal energy was transferred from one topic so neatly into another, and that’s still happening to this day. So the letter that I wrote was called why I’m leaving the cult of wokeness, and you can type it in and you can find it. This

Kristen Carder 25:51
letter had read it to this point. Do you? Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 1 25:54
Now it’s about 53 million people, and that’s, by the way, I always make it clear that is just the data that I have for my end and that’s that’s mind blowing. Anytime something happens culturally, it explodes again. So that’s currently happening in real time. So this letter for me was making a declaration that I’m not going to be participating in these psychological games anymore, because I had realized, and the realization was very shocking, actually, that even though I was a very outspoken, confident person, I had already been in the public eye for about five years at that point in time, and my story had been picked up by the UK media pretty quickly from 2016 my recovery story, and I got pretty much thrown into the world of psychology from 2016 onwards, and I decided to get trained in psychology as well and to understand shadow work. So shadow work, for those that don’t know, is an incredible sort of thread of psychology that was created by a man called Carl Jung. So he was a Swiss psychologist, and It studies the human shadow in the sense that the things that we would rather hide from the world, the things that we repress about ourselves, but these things end up overtaking us, whether we like it or not. So the mission for most people, if not everyone, is to integrate their shadow. Is to accept the duality, you know, is to accept that you’re not all good and you’re not all bad. You’re both and because when you don’t do that, you will always be living in fragmentation, and when that fragmentation gets to a point of not being able to hold that’s when a lot of harm happens, not even just to yourself, but to everyone and everything around you. So I became obsessed with shadow work, but especially the language of self sabotage. That’s the thing that I honed in on in 2017 because that time alone, which I describe in the book as it’s essentially when you were the one poking holes in your own ship, and you don’t even realize it,

Kristen Carder 28:05
and then probably blaming others that your shipping, blaming

Africa Brooke 28:08
others even though there’s no one on the boat, apart from good

Speaker 1 28:15
Isn’t it hilarious? That’s essentially what self sabotage is. What happens when you are the one getting in your own way when you’re the one pulling the plug on yourself when what you say you want and your behavior are in direct conflict. So that became my area of study, my area of just really wanting to understand, why do human beings do this thing that we call self sabotage, and what role does the shadow play? And that just became my work over time, and started working as a coach, and then started working more so as a consultant with individuals and teams and a fusion of the two. So I’d been, by the time 2020, came around, I’d already been sort of in the world of wanting to understand self sabotage. I’d already been encouraging people to express themselves bravely in different ways, in the context of, you know, their interpersonal lives, but also business. So if I’m to be very honest, I think what, what then came to a head in 2020, which I’ll go into, was a shock to my own system and a blow to my ego, because I thought I was above it. I thought I was above not even just self censoring or compliance, but I thought I was above getting sucked into that binary, thinking of believing that I am somewhat self righteous, that I am somewhat on the right side of history, even though I wasn’t leading with the identity of an activist, I was kind of almost treating myself as if I was because something that had happened for me, sharing everything around my recovery and sobriety and the findings that I would come across around how, for example, how the alcohol industry uses certain marketing techniques. Market alcohol to women. So there were certain things that I was finding and sharing and my work got immediately labeled as activism. And that part of it is very important, because by the time 2020, came around, the racial injustice George Floyd is murdered, their conversations around race that are happening, et cetera, there was an expectation on me to speak in a certain way, and I wanted to speak, but I also felt that pressure, again, the group, the pressure of the group, and even though there were certain things around it, I didn’t agree with, whether it be the approach other people were taking, or even the idea that we should wait for a little bit more information to come in before we make kind of these sweeping conclusions that was not allowed, that was absolutely not allowed. And then where it sort of really hit a peak for me was when there was this idea that, this idea that if you are born white. If you’re someone that has been racialized as white, you are essentially, if you will, born with original sin, and you have to spend the rest of your life atoning for the whiteness. And the way to do that is by signing up to some extortionate anti racism, course, and then you’ll become a good white person, I just did it. There was something very disturbing about everything that started to happen around this time where I had to look at my friends or the people that I relationship with, even ex partners who were white, through the this racialized lens to figure out whether they wanted to be in relationship with me because of my race. Was I a fetish in some kind of way, all of the conflicts we had in our relationships? Was there some sort of racial, malicious intent to it so? And I mean you, I wonder what your experience of this was on the other side of it, and I’m sure we spoke about it before, but it is worth kind of just touching on again, because I realize now just how sinister a lot of things that were happening at that time was, and I think a lot of people, sadly enough, especially white people, don’t feel that they are allowed to say how sort of Scary and terrifying it was because you’ll be told that that is white fragility. You know that you’re centering yourself. There’ll be all of these other things put upon you. So I find that it is very important for people to be honest about how just how confusing that time was, and how things took a dark turn very quickly. So my open letter was a combination of speaking about that aspect of how I had participated in this thing that I actually didn’t agree with, but I felt terrified, I thought because of my race and because of my supposed political leaning. And by supposed I mean that even though I never claimed to be on the left, people just looked at my identity markers and assumed that they know my politics and what I stand for. But the other side of that is that I too thought that I needed to perform all of those things, and I had done that for a short time, until I realized just how much of an integrity breach it was, and that open letter was me declaring that I’m not going to participate in whatever this is anymore. And if that is the grounds for cancelation, then please take me into the town square and stone me and I will take it.

Kristen Carder 33:34
This is why you are one of my favorite humans on the planet, because when you just so boldly say, cancel me.

Africa Brooke 33:43
Yeah,

Kristen Carder 33:43
go for it, or you can’t cancel me. I’m uncancelable. Sorry. Like, go ahead and try. It’s not, it’s not a thing cancelation it just My heart is beating so fast because that brazen, bold, fiery energy, I think, is what we need if we are going to have honest conversations, if we are going to be people who don’t self abandon is is this understanding that you don’t have to consent to be canceled? You just don’t it doesn’t mean that there won’t be pushback. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be Fallout, but you do not have to consent to cancelation and then a pretend apology, and then this, like this, whatever work you have to do to, like, make repairs. It’s just like, there. You don’t have to consent to that. And that is something that I am very much trying to weave into my soul. I want to just weave it like a we’re weaving a little basket. I want to weave it right into my soul, because I do believe that the most influential i. And the most impactful way that I can live is as if I’ve already been canceled, or if cancelation is not really a thing, or if understanding that the cancelation, or whatever that means, is a symptom of a greater problem. And I can have compassion on people who who just want to silence whatever it is that might be my truth in your book. Chapter Four, the titles, my love, the title you owe the internet nothing. And Christian Carter wrote three exclamation points after that title. I don’t think that we truly believe that. I think that what we and again, this is symptomatic of just like a deeper issue. But I think that we, and by we, I mean anybody who wants to have some influence in the world. I think we think that we certainly do owe the internet quite a bit, and we certainly owe the internet, especially as a woman, to be like, I need to show up being pretty, right? I need to have a bra on. I know that you don’t consent to that, but like for me,

Africa Brooke 36:14
I really don’t consent to that. I understand.

Kristen Carder 36:20
I need to show up, and I owe at least, to be professional like and truly, we owe the internet nothing, and I am sure, and I’m curious, what your experience was during that time of writing that open letter and then people reading it and being so confused about, like, how could, first of all, how could you call wokeness a cult, and how could you not adhere to these guidelines? Because, after all, you are black, and I wonder what people thought you owed them. Ah,

Africa Brooke 36:55
that’s good, you know? I’ve, I’ve never been asked that question. You are such good questions. You know what? I and this seems to be a thing that also exists offline, but I really do realize now that people thought I owed them, not only the version of me that made them comfortable, that that’s the big thing people, the details might look very different for all of us. And you don’t even need to be a so called public figure to be experiencing this online. By the way, you could have 20 followers and just write something that you think is fairly insignificant, or share a video, whatever. And because of the thing that I write about in chapter four, called context collapse, where there are no boundaries. Online, things can land anywhere. So this conversation is important for all of us. But what I realized is that people experience the disappointment, right because you have disrupted the version of them that they have created in their own minds. That’s ultimately what it is. Because when you think about it, most of these people, maybe a handful of friends, or whatever it might be, they don’t actually know you. That’s something that I keep very close in mind, that these people do not know me a lot of the time. If you are someone that has a so called platform, it’s a parasocial relationship, where they feel like they know you because of the snippets of your life that you have shared, but they don’t actually know you at all. So that feeling of disappointment and just being so confused and not understanding why you would say something like this, it’s because the version of you that they have created and decided that you are is not aligning with who you actually are. So for me, I realized that it was just that people thought that I owed them a specific version, but then also a little an additional nuance to that, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Kristen, is that people expect you to remain the same person online at whatever point they found you at, Oh, that isn’t that point, they found you at whatever you

Kristen Carder 39:06
How dare you evolve? Change your mind.

Africa Brooke 39:09
I didn’t expect this from you. Sorry, Susie, you’ve been following me for two days.

Kristen Carder 39:18
Oh, so good, right?

That’s so good

Africa Brooke 39:22
all of these things, I remind myself, and it falls into the you not owing the internet nothing. Because also, if we unpick that even just a little bit further, what do we even mean by the Internet? Instagram alone has 500 million daily users. So who are you trying to please when you when you start to think about things in that way, I find that for me, it removes a lot of the charge and a lot of the mystery, and to realize that most people are seeing your post while they’re picking their nose on the toilet, that really you don’t have to try and impress them. I promise you, oh

Kristen Carder 39:58
my gosh. Is. Isn’t that the truth? I want to take this conversation and broaden it back to what we experience in our families, because Isn’t it the same when you evolve inside a family system and your mother or your grandmother says, I did not expect this from you. I did not expect you to say something like that. I did not expect this limit from you. I did not expect this new boundary. How dare you? How dare you evolve? And I am just very much stuck on the idea that what we’re seeing in society is a symptom of the dysfunction that we grew up in. I agree it’s just on a larger scale.

Africa Brooke 40:47
I really agree with that. And actually, internal family systems is something that I’ve just started exploring and getting into. And I’m blown away that I hadn’t come across this before, but it’s exactly what you’re speaking about in that it’s so easy to look at the external things again to look at the symptom. The symptom is cancel culture. The symptom is the intolerance that we see online, social media, blah, blah, blah. But even if you take all of those things away, the problem still remains. It will find a way to express itself. So the reason why, even in the book, I keep on trying my best to bring it back to the self, is because I truly believe that, for example, only when we learn to hold our own contradiction, so that shadow that I was speaking about, can we learn to do it to the outside world. I think we force ourselves to sort of do it the other way around, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t actually work, because if you don’t believe that you can also be problematic, that you can also be bigoted, that you can also be manipulative, that you can also lie, that you can also do things for personal gain, whatever it might be, and make peace with that, and not for allow those plants to be expressed. Because, guess what, they exist, whether you like it or not, is just integrating them and befriending them and allowing for yourself to actually live through values that allow for you to be connected with yourself and the world around you. But if you are incapable of doing that for yourself and trying to have this sort of morally perfect avatar which gets to really play online, where you use the right language, you share the right infographics, you do the right thing, and you will always be experiencing that fragmentation, and you will never be able to make peace with other people’s totality as well. And I think that’s that’s what we’re seeing, which is why I prefer to refer to all of this counter culture specifically as collective sabotage, because I truly believe that it’s individuals, all of us, and I include myself in this. It’s individuals that are in their own state of self sabotage, and then we come together, then we become a collective that is acting against our own best interests. But if I make more of an effort to hold multiple truths about myself than if someone tells me they love Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, I won’t feel like it’s a threat to my sense of self righteous.

Kristen Carder 43:14
Yes, I wonder if people just had a heart attack. First of all,

Africa Brooke 43:22
I just had some knees fall to the floor.

Kristen Carder 43:27
I wonder if anyone is thinking, I did not expect that from you, which

Speaker 1 43:32
is good to spot that. I think, yes, if we’re going to for this to be a space that is so open, and I know the people here are very open minded. And you can be open minded and still have your boundaries and convictions, of course, but I always invite people, because it’s actually the the journey of brave expression to just notice, just notice what’s uncomfortable certain words or certain people that people might talk about, to just notice, thematically what happens to you. Notice if maybe you were on board with me and you liked Africa, but now a part of you has rejected me because I said that, and just be curious without judging me or judging you. And I think that’s all part of this, to not give such a firm meaning to whatever you feel, but just to be like, Oh, I felt this little thing when she said, Joe Rogan. Oh, isn’t that? Isn’t that interesting, right?

Kristen Carder 44:20
I think too, an amazing practice is noticing how your body responds to Instagram posts or whatever your particular platform is, especially if you’re in the US right now. And it’s just like the political climate is bonkers, and I have really tried to zero in on my own body’s response to particular news outlets, to headlines, and just noticing like, Oh, that’s interesting. What’s coming up for you here? I wonder why that is, what is your body telling you here? What are what do you feel like? Is? Dangerous about this. What do you feel like maybe you have to lose here, or your quote, unquote side, or your people have to lose where, where might be the hidden truth in this that you that you could maybe pull out, or it’s like, I don’t agree with everything, but I do see the point here, you know, and, and I think the conversation around the gray area the third perspective, it’s so important, especially as a neurodivergent person, because we want everything to be black and white. Our brains naturally work in the black and white. We are binary thinkers by nature. And as I say, that there are nuances to that, of course, because some of us are extremely creative and we’re outside the box thinkers, et cetera, et cetera, but kind of like our out of the box hard wiring is very programmed to be black and white, and so it’s very easy for us, if we continue the political conversation, to think of one side as all good and one side as all bad. And something that I’ve been working on in the last couple years is, is it possible that neither side is all good or all bad, and what’s the good in the side that I don’t identify with? Where can I find the good? Where can I find the gold? Where can I find the parts that I agree with, and where am I, like, drawing a line and saying, like, that’s not for me. This is not I’m not in agreement with that. And that’s healthy, that’s good. But it doesn’t have to feel like it puts me at risk, right? If I point out something good in the opposing side, it doesn’t mean that I’m, like leaning in that direction. It’s just that I’m a full human who can see the third perspective Absolutely.

Africa Brooke 46:48
And you know what? I i really like the zooming out approach, and again, where I have patience and empathy and understanding for us as human beings trying to do this is that that level of self inquiry is very unnatural, which is why it’s uncomfortable, you know. Which is why even in people reading the book, a part of you might resist actually doing the exercise. You might be like, Okay, welcome back. I’ll come back. Let’s just continue. And I get it. But even if you do one of them in the entire book, it will reveal something because of how much it requires of you to actually turn inward. So I yeah, I think what you’re saying is so important in just stopping to even ask one of those questions, why does this feel like such a threat to me right now, even just that question alone, when you see something online and a part of you wants to respond immediately or to unfollow, or my favorite cult classic, when people announce that they’re gonna unfollow, which is always lovely

Kristen Carder 47:54
about that, is it boosts your it boosts your engagement. So they’re they’re commenting, is boosting your engagement, and it’s making it more likely that they’re going to see your stuff,

Speaker 1 48:06
even if sabotage. That’s what that is. That’s what you’re saying.

Kristen Carder 48:12
Oh, that’s too good.

Oh, my goodness, it’s

too good. Your book I wrote here. It’s a master class on crafting your image and your reputation. It’s a master class. I just I am so in favor of every listener finding the book the audio I have a hard copy and an audio book, and you read the audio version and your voice? Sexiest voice I’ve ever heard? Thank you. Seriously, so

Africa Brooke 48:48
can I get that on a tote bag and a mug and a and a cat? Thank

Kristen Carder 48:53
you. Like under the audible thing, it’s like sexiest voice I’ve ever heard. Christine Carter,

Africa Brooke 48:58
okay, I’m writing that down. We’re adding it to the endorsements list. That’s

Kristen Carder 49:03
endorsements. There we go. So funny, one thing that I have really been working through with my clients is as they learn to stay true to themselves and not to abandon themselves, there’s this tendency to maybe take it too far and maybe be a little bit too open, a little too vulnerable, not being able to read the room. And you go into detail, I think it is at the beginning of the book, but you go into detail about this. And can you tell me the difference between self censoring and just being mindful of the context or mindful of the moment. How does someone know, should I should I say what, what I’m thinking right now? Or is this a time to hold my tongue? Because I think, especially as someone with ADHD or someone who’s neurodivergent, it’s almost like you tell us the rule. We want to follow the rule. So if the rule is, say what you’re thinking at all times, then I’m going to follow that rule, and probably to a fault, but you have a really interesting way of assessing whether or not it’s context appropriate. So can you explain that for us, so that my people are understanding of the difference between the two. Oh,

Africa Brooke 50:21
I love that and that. Let me pick up from what you just said, the language you used, context appropriate to me. Brave expression, courageous expression, whatever you want to call it, whether it’s assertive expression, confident expression, it always has to be from a grounded place. This is really important, but it absolutely has to be discernment led my my mission and my main message is not about saying it all. I even write this in the book, saying everything and saying nothing are not your only options. That’s really important to remember. Saying everything and saying nothing are not your only options. And if you are someone that has a very binary brain by default, that’s going to be a very important mantra for you to remember that it’s not about saying everything or saying nothing. It’s understanding that self censorship is when you’re withholding your ideas and your speech and what you want to say out of fear. So it’s fear driven. So that is, that is an important distinction to make, right there. It’s fear driven, whereas using a social filter, again, very different from self censoring, is that grounded discernment. We’re talking about, where you actually read the room and you look at your audience and the people around, maybe this is not the right crowd for this kind of joke or this kind of whatever. No, just say to my other friends or to my partner, you’re using that discernment. And here’s the thing, with the social filter, we’re using it anyway, even if you do have a very binary brain, you do have instances, unconscious instances, where you kind of scan and you sort of look around, but you’ve been doing it for all of your life, so you might not even realize that you’re doing it. But I would like for you, even in your next Conversations, or when you’re with people, the next time, try and spot where you naturally sort of kind of decide this is not the right time to say, this not the right time to have that conversation. But maybe I’ll have it a little bit later. So you’re really doing that sort of dance of conversation. So I want you to know that self censorship is fear driven, and it’s when you won’t allow for yourself to speak. But the nuance there is you might also agree with things because you’re afraid. So fear is the driving force behind it. That’s an important thing to maybe just hone in on just a tiny bit. I think we think self censorship is when you’re not saying anything full stop, but it’s also when you’re saying things you know are not true because you’re censoring what is real that is important. Okay? And then so the way that I sort of invite people to start getting better at training their discernment muscle, whether we like it or not, it’s going to be a game of practice. There is no strategy that can get you out of this. To me, all of this is trust building. The only way to build trust is to make decisions. Okay, you need to make decisions. It’s about knowing when to take certain risks in conversation, and you won’t get it right all the time and again. Let’s not go to extremes. I’m not talking about saying something that is going to get you losing your job and your kids and your home. No, that’s not what we’re trying to do here. It’s literally those little micro moments. I always think of things like, you’re having dinner at a beautiful restaurant, and a pasta dish comes over, and you try it and it’s extremely salty. And you know, it’s always when you have the pasta hanging out of your mouth that the waiter says, How does it go? And your instinct in that moment, I promise you, especially for women, the instinct to that moment, to stay Oh, it’s great. Everything is fine, because you don’t want to seem like you’re complaining. But this is where you get to practice those daily moments where something, maybe they forgot something or something little the binary mind will take you to the extreme of I will seem rude if I say this is too salty, because the vision in your mind is the version of you that says, I don’t like this. This is too salty. But there’s, there’s a way in which you can say things. Maybe you can say, You know what, it’s just a little bit salty. Would we be able to swap it? And I talked a lot about this in the book in terms of tone and delivery and body language, because it’s all part of it as well. But again, in that moment, you could choose to self sense and say, No, it’s fine, and then just have a miserable dinner for the rest of it, or order something else, but what you’re doing is communicating to your body that your needs are not important. So again, it’s that self abandonment piece. Objectively, it just seems like a pasta dish. It’s no big deal. I’ll get something else. Why? When someone has just asked you, how is it you have an opportunity to tell the truth? So. Those little micro interactions and things build up over time, you know? And then when it comes to something much bigger, you’ve already built that baseline of trust and discernment. So again, that’s how I like to bring it back to the everyday, because it’s it’s all well and good to be inspired after this and feel motivated to be like, Okay, the next time something is happening, I will speak up. But what are you going to be doing as soon as you finish listening to this in your next interaction with someone in the supermarket, with someone at work, if people ask you after a meeting at work, Oh, do you have anything to add? And you actually do, but you feel shy and you feel like, no, no, I It’s fine. It’s already been said when actually you could add something. So again, it’s those moment of using your discernment and being honest about whether it’s self censoring or if you’re holding back from a grounded place because it’s not the right environment.

Kristen Carder 55:58
You describe it in the book as choosing the right outfit for the occasion. Yeah, we’re not gonna wear a prom dress to a funeral, right? Y’all like, let’s not do that. It doesn’t mean that even though you really want to wear the prom dress, you’re not self abandoning. It’s just like, it’s just not appropriate. There we go. Put the prom dress on when you get home, go out for a drink after, you know, and it truly is like looking at the situation and choosing the outfit that that you wear different clothes at work than you do at home. You wear different clothes, you know, maybe around your grandma than you would around your boyfriend like that’s it’s normal. This is not a problem. It’s very discerning and appropriate. Yeah,

Africa Brooke 56:47
I love that so much, and I can even think of myself in that specific example. And I think it gets to be fun to you when we start to think of the everyday stuff, because I promise you, the cultural stuff is not going anywhere, but it’s the everyday stuff that you gives you more of an opportunity to test these things. So for example, for me as someone that didn’t know how to even articulate their needs, or didn’t think my needs were important, I grew up in a home where I felt pretty repressed, because I was also very different from my siblings. I was more so the black sheep, the kind of wild one. So I myself as a teenager, and in my early 20s, I went to that extreme of being like, I’m gonna wear whatever the I want to wear. I’m gonna do whatever I want to do, etc, kind of just going to that extreme where you become contrarian just for the sake of it. But actually that’s not, that’s not true confidence. It’s a performance of confidence, because even when I would wear certain things or do certain things, the reality was that I was very uncomfortable inside, because I felt as if I was just doing it to rebel, to kind of show that I know what my needs are. Now I get to decide what I put on my body. I get to so in the context of, let’s say things that are happening in society, or whatever, you can find yourself as when you’re in that journey of brave expression and unfailing going, or maybe feeling you need to go to the extreme of saying everything right, which is where you see people that are self proclaimed anti woke, where they become the very thing they claim to oppose. They go to the far side of it, when actually that’s

that can be intolerant as well. Extremely,

it can end up being a performance of it. And in terms of outfit, I’m someone that loves I love shared clothing. I always have. I love shared clothing. I love a little bit of cheeky, tiny little nip. But I understand the environments that I’m in if I’m somewhere where I’m working, if I’m somewhere around religious people, if maybe it’s the daytime and it’s just not, it doesn’t feel appropriate, then I wear something different. I’m not feeling censored or as if repressing myself or not expressing myself. No, it’s called behavioral flexibility. It’s environmental flexibility. It’s a social filter that is from a place of discernment and knowing what is appropriate or not. But to get to that place, you need to allow for yourself to kind of be in practice, to kind of feel into different things, so that you don’t end up just kind of going into the full on. I’m just going to be whoever I am in every single moment without actually having that behavioral flexibility, which is, I think what we’re essentially talking about,

Kristen Carder 59:24
yeah, and what that screams to me is disconnection, not connection. I think what humans want most in life is connection, connection to self, connection to others, connection to God. My opinion, yes, I agree. I agree. When we’re screaming, I’m just gonna do what I want. I want to say what I want. That’s so disconnecting. And it doesn’t even feel connecting to self. It doesn’t it doesn’t feel to me when like you said in those moments when you’re just like, I’m gonna wear whatever I want. I’m gonna express myself however I want, no matter what. A context that doesn’t feel grounded and connected. It feels very cut off. It feels very dissociated. It feels very like causing great disconnect. And I think just like to support the work that you’re doing, I think that the opposite of sabotage, maybe is like some form of connection. The opposite of self censorship is this connection, like I know myself. I’m connected to myself. I’m willing to speak from a place of authenticity within the context now that I find myself, yeah, connection, I think, is what we’re all just starving for. I

Africa Brooke 1:00:38
love that. I love that so so much, because it also gives us all an opportunity to look at, where are we crossing our own boundaries for connection, and how can we again? It just produces those beautiful self inquiry questions. But also, what else could I lean into more so that I can actually connect because you’re you’re so right. If self sabotage is a form of fragmentation, you’re split in so many different ways. The whole idea is integration. It’s connection. So you can actually feel and be part of the world, instead of always feeling like an island, which is where I think you then become contrarian for the sake of it, speaking just for the sake of it, rebelling, just for the sake of it. And to me, that’s not courageous expression. Courageous expression, I think can be, and often, is actually more grounded and more silent and more soft and more easeful. It’s not forceful in any way. You know? Yeah,

Kristen Carder 1:01:36
I have about 150 more questions for you, but we are out of time, and I just want to say thank you. I highly, highly encourage everyone listening to go by the third perspective. Of course, we will link it in the show notes. It truly is a master class in becoming yourself, in my opinion. And I just want to thank you for your work and for your contribution. It’s massive, and it’s greatly appreciated. Oh,

Africa Brooke 1:02:03
wow, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you. I appreciate you. You’re someone that I’m always, always looking at in terms of inspiration, and what I what I really love about you, and the way that you approach your work and work with your clients is that there’s just such a fierce commitment to integrity. You have such a devotion to the conversation and to your mission, and the way that it’s expanded and grown over time is just it really is a sight to behold. So the fact that I can say that I’ve had a chance to work with you, but to be a friend and to be someone that I look at you as a mentor, I really do. So I’m just, I’m just so grateful for this. Thank you so much.

Kristen Carder 1:02:47
Thank you. A few years ago, I went looking for help. I wanted to find someone to teach me how to feel better about myself and to help me improve my organization, productivity, time management, emotional regulation. You know, all the things that we adults with ADHD struggle with, I couldn’t find anything. So I researched and I studied and I hired coaches and I figured it out, and then I created focused for you. Focused is my monthly coaching membership where I teach educated professional adults how to accept their ADHD brain and hijack their ability to get stuff done. Hundreds of people from all over the world are already benefiting from this program, and I’m confident that you will too go to Ihaveadhd.com/focused for all details.