Hi, I’m Simone. Nice to meet you!
I’m a certified Deep Ocean Coach, Free to be ME! neurodiversity advocate and creative “Jill-of-all-Trades”, who loves helping people to joyfully embrace their unique neuroprocessing style, preferred motivational triggers and natural energy flow in a fun, imaginative and non-judgemental way.
Although my Free to be ME! coaching framework can be applied to anyone, I especially enjoy helping other women like me, whose creative, analogical and deeply-intertwined thought processes present unique challenges when dealing with a world that is still heavily biased towards highly-structured, obsessively-logical and efficiently-linear neuroprocessing styles.
If your mind works like mine does, you may identify with labels, such as “Scanner” (Barbara Sher), “Rainforest Mind” (Paula Prober), “multipotentiate”, “multipassionate”, “polymath”, “Renaissance mind”, “lifelong learner”, and probably also “attention deficit”, “hypersensitive” or “gifted”.
Like me, you may have also spent a small fortune on fancy planners, supposedly-foolproof organizational systems, storage containers and dozens and dozens of books on conquering chaos.
Or perhaps you’ve wasted hours scouring the internet for every imaginable clever hack or magic-bullet solution that you hoped might transform an easily-distracted, “squirrel mind” into a well-focused and more efficient paragon of organizational virtue.
Over time, I came to realize that the type of people who had their life “together” enough to write about optimal organization and effective time management strategies actually didn’t have the problems I did and probably had never had them.
They certainly didn’t seem to have a brain that was wired the way mine was, nor did they appear to be driven (or distracted!) by the same things that excited me.
Now, if misplacing my keys, wallet, phone and glasses on a regular basis, were the worst of my problems, that would simply be a little frustrating and unnecessarily time-consuming.
A far greater and often-unrecognised problem is the emotional distress caused by constant exposure to unflattering and mentally-toxic labels, such as “scatterbrain”, “messy”, “unfocused”, “indecisive”, “impractical”, “disorganized”, “chronically late”, “unreliable”, “sloppy”, “lazy”, etc.
The emotional distress this causes becomes even more painful if you firmly believe that you need to completely eradicate these apparent “weaknesses” to be truly worthy of acceptance and love, but at the same time, feel powerless to do so because you have “failed” so many times before.
A rose by any other name simply does not smell as sweet. And the labels that those in our surrounding environment use to describe us have a powerful influence on whether we are willing to allow our true colours to shine through or instead will waste a huge amount of energy constantly trying to keep them properly concealed.
The potentially distorting effects of language and the labels we use for ourselves became particularly clear to me as the result of various events in my own life story.
Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, I currently live in North-Rhine Westphalia in Germany, but am still very much an Aussie girl at heart, and always will be.
Moving to Germany from Down Under at the end of 2000 to be with my then-boyfriend, now-husband really turned my world upside down (and not in a good way!).
It was not just a physical shift between two opposite poles in geographical terms.
It also turned out to be a polar shift in cultural mindset that left me feeling confused and out of synch with the people around me for many years – kind of like an alien who had landed on another planet, where everything was now back to front and “up” was now “down” and vice versa.
The mental map of the world that I had been raised with no longer matched the social norms and preferred cultural values of the environment that I now found myself in.
In Melbourne, I had had the good fortune to develop freely in an educational environment that had allowed my natural love of learning to blossom to its full potential. As a result, I had been rewarded with various scholarships and frequent praise from my professors.
I had also had the chance to spend an exchange year, studying with many of the all-time greats in my chosen field of Cognitive Linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley.
A promising academic career lay ahead of me and I was totally in my element until Cupid’s arrow hit its mark.
After I moved to Germany – none of my previous awards mattered. By German standards, my degree was incomplete, so my academic success up to that point was entirely irrelevant.
Far more problematic, however, was that those aspect that had previously been praised as my greatest talents and strengths were now constantly being criticized as my greatest weaknesses.
As I struggled to get my bearings in this new environment, I became painfully aware of just how strongly our beliefs about our own self-worth and talents are influenced by the language patterns, value judgements and cultural traditions of our surroundings.
Eventually, I was able to recalibrate my inner compass and to find a more reliable way to navigate based on universal principles of energy flow instead of on the shifting sands of cultural norms.
This worked well until my son came along. Having fallen pregnant naturally, after an eight-year long struggle with infertility, I was initially over the moon.
That was until it came time to send him to the local state-run kindergarten in the small suburban town that we had moved to shortly before.
My upbringing in an open-minded and highly-multicultural environment in suburban Melbourne, had left me entirely unprepared for the wave of linguistic and cultural chauvinism that suddenly swept over me like a tsunami.
I watched helplessly as my son’s unmet needs for a smaller group, and his initial communication difficulties, due to the fact that, as an only child of an English-speaking mother, he had had less contact with German-speaking children, were quickly turned into a diagnosis of “suspected autism”.
Duly stamped and labelled as “seelisch behindert” (spiritually disabled!), he was quickly shunted off to a special needs kindergarten, where surrounded by other kids with communication difficulties (most of them also the children of foreign parents!), the gap between him and his supposedly “neurotypical” counterparts progressively widened.
Although it was a very difficult period in my life that took me dangerously close to the brink of burnout and depression, it also taught me a lot of important lessons as well.
The realisations that I had come to years before with regard to my own difficulties adjusting to a new culture took on a whole new dimension, as I saw the same processes of toxic mislabelling being applied to my son.
This has made it possible to take a far more discerning and critical view of cultural conditioning processes in general.
The energy dynamics system that I had developed years before to preserve my own sanity became an invaluable help in understanding the differences between me and my son with regard to we how perceive and process the world around us.
Neither of us is “right” or “wrong”; our inner compass is simply calibrated differently. This is also true for me and my husband, as well as for me and many of the people who live in this neighbourhood.
Most importantly, these differences simply makes us “neurodiverse”. They do not make my neuroprocessing preferences or those of my son “abnormal”. Nor do they make the current preferred standards of cultural conditioning here in Germany – “neurotypical”.
Being part of a minority in Germany has also forced me to identify my core values and to learn how to defend them against the overbearing influence of so-called “experts” who incorrectly assume that “frequency” and “normality” are always the same thing.
The belief held by many “majority rules!” advocates that their preferences are somehow more worthy of respect than those of a minority grouping shows a basic lack of understanding of why a normal distribution curve has the wave shape it does in the first place.
We are “different by design” and occupy different positions between contrasting alternatives for a reason in what I like to refer to as Mother Nature’s “Polarity Playground”.
This is why a driving force in everything I do is my desire to defend diversity against the homogenization and standardization of humanity that is happening all around us.
In keeping with this, my Free to be ME! Framework and the Polarity Paradigm that underlies it are not about “fixing” things that aren’t actually broken.
The techniques I suggest definitely do not involve teaching you to shapeshift or to wear a mask in order to be accepted in a world that was designed to favour certain neuroprocessing styles at the expense of others.
Out-of-the-box thinkers require out-of-the-box coaching approaches, and just because something works for a lot of people does not necessarily mean it should work for you, too.
By understanding the universal laws of energy dynamics that underlie the framework, you can easily learn to navigate from where you are now to where you want to go without having to change who you are at your core.
YOU still are (and will always be!) the expert on YOU.
My primary goal as a coach is to empower you to take back the reigns as the chief authority in your life, so that you can then transfer that expertise and self-knowledge into everything you do.
Most of all, I want to help people to truly understand why diversity matters, and how their uniqueness and the individual mix of energies that they contribute to their environment are actually a gift to the world, rather than a range of deficits to be ashamed of.
When we finally learn to “paint with all the colours of the wind”, we can harness the creative power of opposing polarities instead of letting highly-polarized conflicts tear apart the fabric of society and destroy our planet in the process.