#183 She Left Everything to Find Her Voice

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #183 Rachel Radway

“She Left Everything to Find Her Voice”

 

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing. I get to interview Rachel Radway today, and what a story, what a story about leaving everything behind for the purpose of finding herself and her voice. I’ll introduce Rachel in a moment. I just want to say, “Hi, Rachel.”

(00:23) Rachel Radway: Hi, Doreen. Thank you so much for having me. I am really looking forward to our conversation.

(00:28) Doreen Downing: Yes. For our listeners, they know that it really is a conversation. It’s not like I give you the microphone and you start teaching. Really, people are more curious about what happened to you early on in life. How did you find your voice somewhere along your life, and what does that mean?

So let me first introduce you, and we’ll go from there.

(00:55) Rachel Radway: Sounds good.

(00:56) Doreen Downing: Yes. After more than two decades of success in corporate leadership, burnout forced Rachel Radway to make a radical choice. She left her job, sold her home, and moved to Peru to recover and rediscover her voice. Ooh, that’s big, huh?

Rachel is a certified leadership and executive coach, mentor, speaker, award-winning author with over 25 years of experience across startups, national nonprofits, Fortune 100 companies, and global enterprises. Her journey led to the discovery of neurodivergence and a deep understanding of what happens when perceptive, differently wired leaders are asked to mask to fit in.

Today, Rachel supports high-achieving, highly perceptive, and neurodivergent leaders to lead with confidence, clarity, and authenticity without burning out. She’s also the author of Perceptive: Insights for Leaders Who Feel More, Process Deeply, and Think Differently, a book that reframes neurotypes as powerful strengths and true leadership assets.

That is so rich. Thank you for letting me introduce you because I get thrilled and feel so honored to be with somebody who’s had a life experience, both, let’s say, in the corporate world. Hello, I’ve never done that. Wow, years. I’ve heard a lot about how people do burnout and make life changes, which sounds like you did.

But before we get to that moment in your life, I’d like to dial way, way, way back. Not past life, not that far back. It’s a different kind of show, unless you happen to go there.

But early life. Where did you grow up? Did you have siblings? What were your parents like in terms of voice and feeling confident saying, “Hello world, here I am”? Any kind of stories that you can share with us about early life experience?

(03:29) Rachel Radway: I’m happy to, and it’s interesting just listening to you asking that question brought back something that I hadn’t thought about for a while.

So I’ve been reflecting on this, and I had a really, I would say, unconventional childhood. My parents, I have one younger brother. My parents, for a variety of reasons, moved around a lot. I had lived in, I think, four different states before I was eight years old. Then my parents got divorced when I was, not even, I think when I was five.

There were already a number of experiences. Today, things like that are not so uncommon. Back in the seventies when I was growing up, they definitely were uncommon. I was never a particularly shy child. I was very creative. I was a maker. As soon as I could hold things in my hands, I was creating. I used to write plays and make my brother act in them with me, and write stories even before I could physically write.

So I used my voice a lot in the early days, and I think one of the things that really affected me was when we moved to New York City just before my eighth birthday. It was towards the end of the school year. You know what kids are like. I was born in California. We had lived in Massachusetts, we lived in Ohio, and even though we were not in Ohio for all that long, I am someone who picks up accents and languages, and that’s a part of my story.

So I arrived in New York City with a Midwestern accent, and the kids were merciless. I got teased for it. I got teased for all kinds of things.

(05:28) Rachel Radway: I was definitely a different kind of kid. I liked wearing skirts and dresses. I was definitely not a tomboy, and I got teased for that. I used to bring arts and crafts projects with me in my lunchbox to the cafeteria to work on, just because I felt like it was a good use of that time. I got mercilessly teased for that.

I think those are some of the experiences that started to lead to my losing my voice and just really not speaking up as much because it was so clear that I was so different from the kids around me.

(06:10) Doreen Downing: Yes, yes. Thank you for pointing to some of those moments. It’s really clear when I listen to people tell parts of their story that I can see how what was going on there that was a challenge is now your strength. It’s so amazing that you’re talking about scripting something for your brother to play in. That’s leadership. You direct, you say, “You do this, you step here, here’s what to say, here’s the script.”

And also a willingness to be somebody who knows she’s different but isn’t hiding. It sounds like you still showed up, right?

(07:03) Rachel Radway: It was, you know, it was, I think I was very torn. I did still show up, and I didn’t really see any way not to show up. It wasn’t really in me to hide, I think. At the same time, I knew that I didn’t fit in and very much wanted to.

So I kind of, they say, “fly your freak flag.” I don’t think I thought about it necessarily in those ways. Arts and design and craft and things like that were very, very important to me, so I just kept on doing them. Like I said, I liked wearing skirts and dresses, so I just kept on doing that.

At the same time, I really, really wanted to be accepted by the other kids.

(07:52) Doreen Downing: Oh yes.

(07:53) Rachel Radway:

(07:54) Doreen Downing: I get what you’re saying about the conflict, the inner conflict of paying attention to what you like and how you want to be and who you, I mean, it’s not like we know who we are at that age anyway, but it does feel like you were aware, and you were also intimidated in some way to actually be more expressed.

What about your, I do not know, I heard the divorce, and so you probably stayed mostly with your mom?

(08:28) Rachel Radway: I stayed with my mother. My father and I did not have a good relationship. They should never have been married in the first place. It was just one of those stories. So I was with my mother.

My mother, it’s interesting because I was just listening to another podcast where a similar story came up. It was a very intellectual family. Both of my parents were lawyers. Actually, I’m the only member of my family who does not have a law degree at this point.

My mother’s mother had been the principal of a school for developmentally disabled kids in a time when women did not even have college degrees. That was just the atmosphere that I grew up in.

There was not a lot of focus on the internal, on emotions. I think we were all authentic because it’s the only way that we know how to be, but it was also a very specific kind of growing up, if that makes sense.

(09:35) Doreen Downing: Was there pressure to—?

(09:39) Rachel Radway: There was not necessarily overt pressure. There was definitely felt internal pressure, and I could not even tell you now how much of that came from me and my genes and my DNA and from the family.

Of course, you cannot grow up in a family where everybody’s got advanced degrees and not feel a pressure to succeed.

(10:06) Doreen Downing: That’s what I was thinking, exactly.

(10:08) Rachel Radway: Yes.

(10:08) Doreen Downing: Just the context of what was around you, what the modeling. Just one more question.

(10:16) Rachel Radway: Sure.

(10:17) Doreen Downing: I get the mismatch between your father and your mother, but you said it was not a very good relationship. Just anything more about how that affected you in finding your voice, having a voice?

(10:32) Rachel Radway: I do not know how much it did. And then of course, from a psychological perspective, of course it did at some level.

I very much was determined to be my own person and do my own thing. Now, at some point during my teenage years, my father said, “Oh, I feel like it’s my fault that you do not have this certain kind of relationship with men.” I always resisted giving him that credit and just wanted to take all the responsibility for myself and how I grew up.

My father did put a lot of pressure on me academically and in other ways. Again, not necessarily overtly, but with some of the things he did. He did also encourage me to accept my differences and play off them, and use some of the things that I think he saw as my gifts. So he encouraged that, but really our relationship ended very, very, very early on.

(11:59) Doreen Downing: Let’s speak more now about the growing awareness. I heard that your father went, “Hey, I see you,” and that mirroring is important, and that’s what I was asking about.

Did you feel pressure? Did you feel mirrored? But somehow you did honor that. That’s something I’m getting so strongly today from getting to know you better, is that you know who you are. Even though that might be internal conflict, you still do not lose it. You might not express it, but you know it.

So how did that grow, that pressure to, I guess it sounds like you entered the corporate arena?

(12:50) Rachel Radway: I did. So it’s interesting because thinking back on this, and again reflecting on your questions, I was really fortunate in a lot of ways. I went to, I mean, many, many, many ways.

I went to a high school for intellectually gifted kids, and that high school experience was so different from what I might have gotten had I just gone to a regular New York City public school. One of the wonderful things about it was, like any school, there were groups and there were cliques and there were lots of different personalities.

Because there were certain criteria that we all had to meet to be there, we knew we had some things in common. Like any place that has a bunch of certifiable geniuses, not me, but some of my peers were.

There were a lot of different personalities, and anything went. It was a much more accepting place than a lot of typical high school experiences might be. So that was great during the first part of my teenage years.

Then I ended up going to college, and that was a completely different experience, and one that I actually could not wait to get out of. I went to a great school. I did have a couple of good friends there, but it was a very different kind of environment than where I had been before, and it was much cliquier.

I really did not feel like I fit in anywhere. I think that was where I first really went quiet and did not speak up.

Things changed a little bit once I got out of school and joined the corporate world. It’s funny in terms of your voice. My voice, one of my childhood dreams was to find a company that would sponsor me to live in every country in the world so that I could learn every language and help the world communicate more effectively.

Communication has always been one of my gifts and one of my interests. At this point, I’ve studied nine languages in addition to English. Although I’m not fluent in any of them, it’s always been a passion of mine.

So it’s interesting to think about how I really did go silent for a while. Part of what I wanted to do when I left college was actually become a translator and interpreter, and again going back to helping other people communicate.

But translators and interpreters do not use their own voice. They use other people’s voices. They help amplify other people’s voices.

(15:47) Rachel Radway: So, yes. So I entered the corporate world, very quickly realized I did not belong, but I did not have any other model. I did not know what else there was. It was just one of those things. You did not take time off. You went to college, and then you got a job, and that’s what you did.

(16:06) Doreen Downing: Life.

(16:08) Rachel Radway: And so I did that for many, many years. I now know that I was wearing a mask. I was not aware of it at the time, but I did that for years and years and years until the time that I was telling you about a little bit earlier, where I really just became so severely burnt out that I ended up having to quit my job, sell my home, and move to rural Peru to start my recovery journey, which ended up taking several years.

(16:44) Doreen Downing: Well, how did you, what is, picture, give us a picture of burnout so that the listeners can go, “Oh yes, I think I’m getting close to that.”

(16:56) Rachel Radway: Yes. So one of the things that’s true about burnout is it can look very different in different people. What I have learned more recently is that there is a phenomenon called neurodivergent burnout, which can be even more severe and can be chronic for people who are wired a little differently, and there are lots of factors that play into it.

For me, at the time, it was not only just exhaustion and fatigue. I had a lot of chronic pain that I was dealing with. I had some brain fog. Two of the things that struck me later that I do not think I was quite as aware of at the time are that I lost my sense of empathy. I really was just very cynical about everything, and I lost my sense of humor.

I used to laugh all the time at the office and outside, and I was not laughing. Nothing was funny. It was just a burden to be carried, to be borne.

(18:00) Doreen Downing: Oh, oh, are you saying you were depressed?

(18:06) Rachel Radway: I think I was depressed as well, but burnout can look very much like depression and can manifest in similar ways.

(18:14) Doreen Downing: Yes. Well, I’m going to take a brief break. We’re just on the edge of learning what happened next, and we’ll be right back to continue Rachel’s story.

Hi, we’re back. This is Dr. Doreen Downing. Today I’m with Rachel Radway, and we’re learning about her journey to find her voice, and this whole idea of being a little bit different and having the knowledge, the self-knowledge, that you feel different than other people, but that you’ve got to fit in. And how do you do that?

Then going into the corporate world and putting on a mask in order to fit in. So this is all about fitting in, but not fitting in. It seems like what we’re talking about today.

And so we’re back now. Rachel was talking about burnout because I asked her, if you want to go back and review some of what we’ve done already today, what is burnout actually?

One of the things I just learned from Rachel is, it looks different for different people. I did not really think of it that way before, but I’m so glad you said it in that way, that people go, “Okay, my burnout can be different than other people’s burnout.”

So you were burned out, then what?

(19:33) Rachel Radway: So I just want to add one thing to what you just noted, and that is burnout can even look different for the same person experiencing it at different times.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the past few years is that was not the first time I had burned myself out. I had done it before. I had been burned out in college. But at the time, there was no social media and people were not talking about it, and I really did not recognize it. I had no way to recognize it when it happened again because my context was so different. And again, it still was not something that people were talking about even when I went through it again in 2014.

So what happened next was I first started thinking, well, maybe it’s just the environment, because the work environment that I was in had become very toxic, and that was generally recognizable to a fair number of people. I thought, I just need a different job.

Those of you who can hear what’s coming know already, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I quickly realized after interviewing and actually getting to one of the top two candidates for a very desirable position on paper, I realized I cannot do this. I’m not even in a headspace where I could take another job and be successful, forget anything else.

I really had no concept of boundaries at the time and put 150% of myself into everything I did. I was in a role and working for a company that did not align with my values or my goals. On top of that, you put the masking, and it’s basically like my brain was running two different operating systems all the time.

So of course I burned myself out. I mean, how could you not? This is something I see in so many clients, so many women especially, who put themselves into everything and put themselves last.

So what I realized is I cannot move forward. I have to move aside. I have to give myself some time and space to start healing. Fortunately, things lined up. I put my condo on the market and it sold immediately, and I took that as a sign.

My boss at the time was actually half Peruvian, and when I told him where I was going, he was really excited for me and invited me to come back if I changed my mind or if things did not work out. So the parting went a lot better than it could have had I let myself keep going a little bit longer.

I ended up moving to Peru with absolutely no idea of how I was going to support myself, what I was going to do, or what it was going to be like there. I had never been there before. I ended up staying for four months, and then I moved to Ecuador where I bought a little adobe house in the mountains with banana trees and organic gardens and a beautiful view of a big sacred mountain.

I stayed there for a while doing lots of different things. Then after a while I ended up moving to Portugal and selling my little house and buying a little apartment in Portugal by the ocean and having more adventures there.

It all took years. This whole time I was really recovering. I was not doing. I was trying to just be, because that’s not something I’ve ever been particularly good at. The journey took years.

(23:19) Doreen Downing: I hear it. Wow. The journey is what we’re talking about. You’re saying the healing journey, but the healing feels like finding or discovering or experiencing yourself in these new locations or situations, circumstances, and then going that that’s how you grow, it feels like.

You put yourself in an environment, and if it’s a positive one, like the ones you’ve described so far, it sounds like, yes, I think that’s the huge difference. What I’m getting at is a negative environment can stunt you, and a positive environment is like, “Ooh, look at our growth.”

(24:06) Rachel Radway: I would say I, so yes, absolutely to all of that. There definitely were some negatives along the way. I mean, nothing is perfect, and there were a lot of challenges, especially in Peru and Ecuador, but also in Portugal. None of it was easy.

I was doing this on my own in countries where I did not speak the native language. I started speaking it, but I was definitely not fluent. People did not always understand what a single, middle-aged woman was doing there, having picked up and left her home and her people and everything.

It was tough, and there were a lot of challenges along the way. At the same time, there were some amazing experiences that I never would have had otherwise, and some amazing people and time and space.

One of the things that had been most important to me when I set out on the journey was getting out of the bubble that I was in, honestly, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the corporate world, in the tech world. There is a very big bubble that you just forget that you’re in and lose sight of, and I really desperately needed other perspectives and other sets of values that were very different from what I was experiencing there.

Because I had lived abroad before, long before I started my corporate journey, I knew that that was out there and something that I enjoyed. So that was incredibly important.

So it was recovering, it was the experiences, it was a lot of reflecting on, look, you can live in different ways than I was living. The box, that box or that bubble—

(25:59) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(25:59) Rachel Radway: There are other ways to do it, and it was a lot of thinking about who I really am and what I really want and how can I live my life in a way that’s aligned with those things and not just the pre-programmed route that I really had not thought that much about.

(26:20) Doreen Downing: Okay, Rachel, those answers have come to you. I know because of what you offer. What have you come to know about who you are, what you do, what you offer, and let’s move into that aspect of what today is about now, sharing about, well, what do you, how are you sharing all these lessons?

How are you helping other women, maybe also men, wake up to the more that’s possible, especially if they have what you keep referring to, and what I read earlier is differences?

(27:02) Rachel Radway: Exactly. So about three years ago now, I was laid off from another job, and I decided to do something I’d wanted to do for a while, which was to get my coaching training and certification.

That was another one of the best decisions that I could possibly have made for myself. It really is so much of who I am and who I had been before but had not even realized it. It’s one of those things where you find out about something and suddenly it’s everywhere, but before you know about it, it does not exist.

I love coaching. I believe that I was meant to coach. I had actually been coaching in a lot of different contexts leading up to that, but did not really know that that’s what I was doing.

Around the same time, I learned first that I had ADHD, which was completely new to me, and I was in my fifties. This is something that is happening with so many, especially midlife women right now, partially because of the hormones, the drop in estrogen that happens at a certain point in our lives that turns out to exacerbate symptoms that we might have been masking our whole lives because we were smart and did well in school and did not cause problems and would not have raised any eyebrows. Normally there would have been no reason to send us for an assessment.

When I started coaching, I knew that I wanted to coach women leaders. Now I do coach all genders, but at the start, it was just women, and it was women in corporate. I did not say anything more specific than that.

What I found was that the people who were drawn to me were uniformly women who showed traits of high sensitivity and or neurodivergence, whether or not they recognized that or were even familiar with the terms, and most of them were not. But patterns kept arising, and I noticed more and more of them.

Then a series of events happened that led me to focus my niche a little bit more closely. I was approached about writing a book, and in the process of writing the book, I learned a whole lot more about myself.

For one thing, I learned that I also have some autistic traits, which both inform and conflict with the ADHD and explain so much about so many patterns in my life and things that had happened in work and in life in general, personal things and work things and relationship things.

I learned that high sensitivity, I had always known that I was highly sensitive, is actually a form of neurodivergence. Our brains are wired differently and structured differently. I learned about the incredible amount of overlap between all of the different forms of neurodivergence.

Frankly, I personally do not even necessarily believe that such a thing as neurotypical actually exists. We’re all wired differently, and every brain is different, right?

(30:28) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(30:28) Rachel Radway: So I do not know where the typical is, how that’s being defined.

(30:32) Doreen Downing: Yes, good point.

(30:34) Rachel Radway: So this is what I do now. I help clients who are leaders in their own way. They do not necessarily have to have a leadership title, although many of them do, but who think differently or feel differently or process differently.

(30:54) Rachel Radway: Really learn to embrace their gifts and their superpowers because we all have them, even if we’ve been programmed just to focus on the challenges, and to redesign and even realign aspects of life and work so that they can thrive, and also to prevent burnout.

I see it so much. It is so common in our culture, and it can actually be prevented. I’m really, really passionate about helping individuals with these areas and also helping organizations foster more inclusive and more neuro-inclusive cultures.

(31:41) Doreen Downing: Great. There’s a lot of education there, but I like the realign and the redesign, which feels very personal to me and to the listeners of what they can get from you by finding you and listening to you.

I’m sure you’ve got other ways. Reading the book would be one opportunity, and we’ll have that in the show notes.

So we’re coming to the end, and what I like to do is to pause for a moment here and have you come to some kind of way in which you want to leave the listeners with your message. It’s spontaneous. It’s based on how we’ve been talking today, I guess, and it’s in the moment. Just like last words, I guess you might say for today.

(32:38) Rachel Radway: I think my last words would have to be to listen to your intuition. We all have it. For many reasons, a lot of us learn to bury it or just to ignore it or not even to recognize it in the first place.

Your inner wisdom knows. Your body knows. When they are sending you signals that something is wrong, the best thing that you can possibly do for yourself and for those around you is to listen to those signals.

A lot of people, especially those whom I work with, say things like, “But I can’t. I have to take care of my kids, or my spouse, or my partner, or my team, or everyone else.” You cannot be there for them if you’re not there for yourself first. It’s just not possible.

So listen to your gut, your intuition, your inner knowing, your inner wisdom. That’s really the definition of true self-care. It’s listening to those things and then doing what is being called for.

(33:49) Doreen Downing: Yes. Oh, I love it. Listening deeply to yourself. I’ll add one thing, the heart.

(33:56) Rachel Radway: Yes.

(33:57) Doreen Downing: Yes, of course.

(33:58) Rachel Radway: The heart, of course.

(33:58) Doreen Downing: Thank you for adding that. I love your list. Thank you so much, Rachel, for taking us on this journey of exploration, exploring you.

We’ll guide people to learn more about you and what you offer by what we’ve put in the show notes so that people can definitely take advantage.

One thing. I know I said “last words,” but wow. I just want to admire the bravery, the courage to break out and move into a new environment. That’s part of the message I want to leave with people today, whether it’s in a corporation or in a relationship or in a country, a city.

The containment of self and recognizing that. What Rachel just said about listening to yourself and not knowing what to do next is part of the journey, I think, but to trust.

I just feel like I could go on and on with you. So thank you again so much.

(35:20) Rachel Radway: Thank you, Doreen. May I add one thing that you just raised for me?

(35:24) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(35:24) Rachel Radway: Very quick. One of my favorite things is courage is fear walking. We do not have to be fearless, and we do not even have to know where the end of the journey is. We just have to take that first step, and that meshes with what you were just saying.

We just have to take that first step and believe that it’s going to lead us in the right direction.

(35:47) Doreen Downing: Great. Last words. Thank you so much.

(35:51) Rachel Radway: Thank you for having me.