Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast. I’m your host, Ken Jensen. I’m someone who overcame bipolar disorder in an organic fashion back in 2004. That process taught me a couple of things about bipolar.

I was living life so incorrectly, in relation to what the better part of me wanted and needed me to do, that it took bipolar disorder to shock me into seeing I should go another way.

The fact that it was bipolar that was the change agent, meant I’m more creative than most. I have a certain, slightly higher amount of intelligence than the average bear.

And I have a way of seeing life and expressing myself that most around me do not, in such a way that I can have great impact on those who need me most.

You might be the same. I want to help you understand this about yourself. And I want to help unlock your greatness and then unleash it on the world in the best and coolest way possible!

Hello, bipolar prone folk! Welcome to Episode 41. I No Longer Trust My own Judgment. This is part of the, almost finished, Life Of An Outsider series.

You’ll find a link to the series in the footer of the website bipolarexcellence.com.

Look for this Episode 41 over at that website and you’ll see the show notes, the transcription, any links to products I may have mentioned and whatever else I forgot or doesn’t fit inside a podcast delivery module as well as it does a web page.

Okay. No longer trust my own judgment. Oh, this sucks. This one. Oh my God.

This is imposter syndrome for one, who am I to do this thing? Who am I to say, I’m an expert in this? Who am I to want to reach for the stars? Right?

That’s part of it. But there’s also a more tangible… I’m doing these things and nothing’s working.

Now. I, I live, if I’m going to at all, I live more in that first thing. But I lived for longer in the second one.

I became part of so many projects and I built so many online presence things for myself and others. And I had the beginnings of so many things that fell flat.

I started three other companies that went nowhere.

I worked on a, oh, I became a company once, just to sell fireworks, in one of those millions of tents you see all over New York state during fireworks season that sell the crappy little ground-based things.

That was one of the hardest jobs I ever did in my life. And I did it in a heat wave. And I wanted to die.

I didn’t want anyone to come in the tent because I literally was sitting with my head hanging from my shoulders trying to breathe, it was so hot.

And after all the money was done and I did the math, I ended up after killing myself for, I forget how many weeks, I think it was a month long process. I ended up making like $10 an hour when all was said and done. Completely not worth it.

Totally utterly not worth it, but fascinating discovery experience. And I discovered really cool people would come into the tent and want to talk.

And I learned about people in my area, with stories, the likes of which that were just phenomenal. And I enjoyed that part of it as I always do, no matter what I’m doing.

But I needed that money. And then I needed it to be what the ad purported it to be. They played with their numbers a little. There was a bit of a sheisty-ness to that whole fucking organization.

Lesson learned, but again, it’s like, when? When am I going to pick a route that gives me what I need, particularly economically, without murdering myself?

And I went through. I went through so many versions of that, never getting out of it. And I got involved in so many projects that were absolutely fascinating, where I got paid absolutely nothing. Or I got paid minimal. Or there was a barter. And I was very glad to be part of those things.

Because what I learned in them and the people I met and the fun I had, led in large part to Bipolar Excellence eventually coming to be.

But even Bipolar Excellence is like the, I don’t know, at this point, fourth or fifth website, I’ve built to share my information, each time getting closer to what it is I was actually about. But not actually nailing it.

Right now, Bipolar Excellence nails it. I can say that for a fact.

I already know how it can grow larger and beyond what it perfectly suits right now. But for right now, it is what it is exactly. And I can work with it as is and love it.

But everything prior was a certain amount of missing the mark. Again, I got closer in each iteration, but it’s wearing. In my case, it took years.

Some of you even, you know, with my help are going to get this done a lot faster than I did. You can, you know, I help you avoid what I wholeheartedly slogged through unnecessarily. But even that’s not correct because it’s like, you’ll learn something.

I think, particularly with bipolar people, bipolar prone people, we crave complexity.

And we have a lot of energy at different times. And our minds want to explore. We’re like a form of adventurer and we’ve got to scratch that itch. It’s not every bipolar person.

But I think a lot of us suffer from that. Because it is a suffering. And yet there’s always something in it that we love. And there’s all these cool stories that come out of it.

And there’s a wisdom we get, because we get exposed a larger wisdom than what the general public can never claim to have.

Because we get exposed to more, faster, in a more varied context. And we can track it all and we can do something with it. That’s where I come in for you. Doing something with it.

But years of this?

You just don’t believe yourself anymore. Because nothing ever bears the fruit you thought it was going to bear. Let me attempt to put your heart at ease.

This may be what your path looks like. And you have no choice, but to keep walking that path, collecting the wisdom and the nuggets that come from the experience and the journey and the searching, to eventually to uncover what it is you’re supposed to be. You’re not going to have a choice in that respect.

For the rest of you? You too do not have a choice, because you’re meant for more. Most people are meant for more, but some of us can’t tolerate not discovering what that is.

There’s people out there, majority of the population is content and comfortable, while also, to a certain degree, unhappy and they rationalize that away. And that’s even fine.

It just is what it is. There’s no need to put any judgment on it. It just is what it is. But if you’re like me, and I hope you are, it is unacceptable.

So you can’t quit. You can’t give up. You have to find out what your purpose is. And to do so you’re going to have to make a lot of wrong headed decisions.

You’re going to have to experiment, experiment, experiment. You’re going to have to say yes to way more than you should, as you get a clearer picture of what you should start to eventually say no to.

You need to expose yourself to enough, so that you have a set of data to pull from, to find yourself within it.

Then slowly but surely, there’ll be times when, even though you love a thing, the sound of it, you’ll say no.

You’ll have data, through hard earned experience, that will prove to you… I did that once before and it did, it was, you know, it was this and that, and those things were positives, but it ended in destruction over here. No, I’m not going to do that.

It’s going to be hard to create those no situations. But they will come. And the more you say no to something- here’s another groovy thing about the universe- people are going to want you more.

What do you mean? No.

It’s not going to happen immediately. Probably. It’s not going to happen any kind of soon. But it will start happening because you’re growing in your power and that is supremely attractive to people.

They want you on board. Matter of fact, if you’re like me, you already have that to a large degree and they are insanely attracted to it.

That’s why these fucking odd ball situations that lead to nothing but doom for you keep happening! It’s like you’re laughing all the way into the mouth of the volcano before you leap.

It’s exciting as hell to climb that hill! Oh, now we’re going to, we’re going to fall into this thing. Oh, this is terrible. And you’ll do that over and over and over, but why?

Because you’re capable, it appeals to you and you already have a certain type of power or draw that people pick up on easily, effortlessly, and they want you in.

Your job is to discern what that power is and to use it more wisely, more sparingly. That leads to becoming better aware of your worth, your true value.

I’m talking a lot of personal work here. A lot of personal development work. Possibly therapy? I don’t know. I never used therapy. But you’re going to have to dig in your heart and in your head.

You’re going to have to, for some of you, you’re going to have to relax your feelings about certain areas of personal development that sound too far out to you and just say yes to some of that. Because if you were going to do better by yourself, it would have happened by now.

This all by itself means you’ve got to pick a slightly different route. You’re going to have to say yes, not all the time to the things you love, but some things that the intelligent part of you say… there’s something there. I should at least look.

Instead of saying yes all the time to projects, set some time off to the side by saying no to these projects and saying yes to these learning experiences from sources you might not be entirely comfortable associating with. But again, remain smart, remain open.

Look at how many people you respect. That’s one of the ways it happened the most for me. People I respected showed me something that helped them that, at that time, there was no way I would have done it on my own.

Fuck that. That’s not real. It’s or that worked for you, but not me. And here’s why. I have a handful of large moments in my life where everything changed, because someone I trusted told me to look into something that I could not at that time support.

But I had such trust in them, I just decided to go for it and everything got better. Real simple and pertinent to our group. When I began my fight to beat bipolar, I just wanted to live. There was no nothing, no grand anything. My, the first thing that fell in my lap was a, a magazine article, in the magazine Discover. The science magazine.

On the cover of the magazine was… can’t remember the title, but basically Can Nutrients Heal Mental Illness? It did not say that, but it was something like that. The first thing that popped in my head was, oh, can they? Cause I know for me, meds did not. Meds made me very much worse. So maybe nutrients are the way to go.

The second thing that popped in my head was, I knew a lot about nutrients from weightlifting. How to heal the body. How to excel in the gym. I knew that weightlifters needed a different kind of nutrition and athletes than, than non-athletes. That made sense to me.

Third thing I thought was Discover Magazine has a reputation that they would not dare risk on snake oil.

There’s no way they’d run this if they hadn’t vetted it somehow. There’s got to be something true here. And that became how I found the company TrueHope, which is truehope.com. This Canadian nonprofit. They’ve been around, I don’t know how many decades now.

But that was the very first step in beating bipolar. And it turned out to be the largest step.

That was, that was the process of me going down a road I never would’ve gone down otherwise. Like I said, there’s been a lot, a lot of other ones. But I’ll just leave it at that so the episode isn’t too long.

So do your best, and it’s going to be fun for you not trusting your own judgment because you’re making, you’re saying yes to too much.

It’s a murderous growth process that simply just has to keep happening.

At some point you’re gonna, it’s gonna shift into… this is going to sound bad… true, and actual imposter syndrome when you feel very sure of what you got your hands on, but now you start wondering if you’re the right person for the task.

At least you’ve got it down to that.

You know what the task is! You know what your strengths are! Now, it’s just you on you. Before it was you on all these different other personalities and projects that came your way. And opportunities.

It was you against this whole sea of choices. That’s doubting yourself. That’s, that’s doubting your judgment.

When you get to where all you doubt is, Am I the right person for the job? You are so fucking close to succeeding, it’s nuts.

That’s the problem you want. That that’s the negative you want to achieve. And it will come.

I’m not entirely sure when I made that shift. But when I became aware of it it excited me, You’ll get there too.

I want to help you. Head over to bipolarexcellence.com and start by getting my free newsletter. Sign up for that. I’ll give you a guide. It mentions TrueHope and a bunch of other things.

It’s a real fun little guide. You’ve got other things in it that can help change your life pretty frigging quick if you click on a few links. And then you’ll be, you’ll be with me. And now we can start talking and see what comes of that.

And I’m so excited to see what comes of that. See you on the next episode, guys.