Embrace Your Weird

The Neurodivergent Leader Podcast

“Embrace your weird,” encourages Christina Stathopoulos, founder and head coach of Hear Her Roar, a leadership coaching company that focuses on empowering millennial women. In this episode, co-hosts Heather Wagner and Donna McLaughlin talk with special guest Christina about the importance of being openly yourself and leaning into your unique life experiences to empower both yourself and others.

Christina discusses each of her identities, including her relationship with being neurodivergent as an autistic woman and as a person with obsessive compulsive disorder. She shares with listeners how she has learned to embrace these identities rather than hiding them away. While Christina used to shy away from the parts of herself that were viewed as “weird” or “wrong,” she now proudly accepts and cherishes those pieces of herself, as they allow her to better connect with others and to be a better coach.

Tune into this week’s episode of The Neurodivergent Leader Podcast to learn more about how embracing your neurodivergence can empower you to find more success in both your personal life and your work life and inspire others to do the same. If you are someone who has ever been called “weird” or made to feel othered, don’t miss out on this conversation!

Quotes

• “When I first decided to become an entrepreneur, I was very much still in that world of ‘put out what is categorized as good and keep in what it categorized as wrong or bad about myself.’ And immediately where that halted me in the process of growing a business was I couldn’t figure out how to connect to clients and I couldn’t figure out how to pull in the people that I really craved to be working with. I think the reason for that was because I wasn’t willing to see traumas that I had been through or the things that made me different from other people as something to look at and process. I just saw them as that’s just in the way and I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and forge ahead and push ahead.” (09:52-10:46)

• “Coaches need to start with having a very clear understanding of their own identity and having ownership of it.” (24:08-24:14)

• “Now I enter rooms and I go, ‘Hey I’m queer. I’m neurodivergent. I’m an immigrant’s daughter.’ These are ways that I’ve lived that inform how I view the world.” (25:25-25:35)

• “As a suggestion, just because you may have done the work to heal your relationship with some of your identities doesn’t mean that your clients have.” (29:17-29:28)

• “Embrace your weird, whatever that means…There are ways that you’ve lived your life that will be so crucial to other people getting to transform and connect differently because of you.” (34:57-35:32)

Connect with Christina Stathopoulos:

www.hearherroar.net

https://www.instagram.com/hearxtinaroar/

Learn more about the Neurodivergent Leader Podcast:

www.neurodivergentleader.com

https://www.instagram.com/neurodivergentleader/

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm