You Are Your Own Expert

Sometimes the smallest moments reveal the biggest shifts.  A forest walk, a phone in my hand, and the voice that said I was doing it wrong.

I frequently walk in the forest with my dog, about three or four times a week, it’s one of my favourite places to be. Recently, I realised I’ve started using this time to complete small admin tasks on my phone, nothing too complicated like the dreaded tax return, just the kind of tasks I find tricky to start because of the way my brain works. I have an ADHD diagnosis, and those small tasks are the things that can easily get stuck in procrastination and rumination.

What I noticed was the voice that came up alongside it. Years of listening to wellbeing podcasts and reading about mindfulness had left me with a clear idea of how a forest walk should be: no phone, no distraction, calm and present. So as I walked, phone in hand, ticking off small tasks, I started to berate myself. I shouldn’t be doing this. This time should be used better, I’m doing it wrong. If someone came towards me on the path, I even felt the urge to hide my phone and often did.

I’m not sure why movement seems to help my ADHD brain tackle small tasks.  I’m curious about the research around this, but I’ll save that for another post. For me, I’ve discovered that physically moving while doing these simple, otherwise boring tasks makes them easier to complete. It seems to quiet my mind, reduce procrastination, and get things done.

This small moment also made me think about how it links to my work as a person -centred counsellor. Person-centred counselling is about trusting that we each have an innate ability to know what is right for us. With the right conditions, support, reflection, and gentle questioning, we can develop greater self-awareness and make choices that are more aligned with who we are.

It’s a shift from taking information from the outside and assuming it applies to us, towards checking in and asking: Does this actually benefit me? In person-centred language, this is described as moving from an external locus of evaluation, shaping ourselves around external rules and expectations, to an internal locus of evaluation, where our sense of self is guided by our own awareness and experience. 

So, for me, that currently looks like walking through the forest, dog in tow, doing some simple admin tasks on my phone and letting that be okay. This is despite those years of internalising the rhetoric from external sources.  I’ve made the shift from outsourcing my wellbeing to ‘experts’ to believing that I am in fact my own expert with an awareness of what works better for me, even if it does contradict common parlance.  I don’t have to follow every piece of wellbeing advice I hear. I can listen, reflect, and make a choice about what fits my life and the way I interact with the world.