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Introduction to the Play Big Queen Podcast...
Welcome to the Play Big Queen podcast.
This is for the woman ready to lead with power, move with confidence, and own your Play Big self.
For my newly minted or late blooming, neurospicy visionary babes who are waking up to your power and unmasking your brilliance.
For the sovereign leader building success on your own terms.
I am your host, Kate Bailey.
I am the Play Big Queen.
My name is my title and a command for all women, Play Big Queen.
I invite you to claim this title for yourself and coronate your Play Big Self too, so it can serve you.
This is a space for bold embodiment, radical reclamation, unapologetic leadership, and a business that works with your wiring, not against it.
Your voice is meant to be bold and heard and your brilliance is here to be claimed.
You are already powerful.
I am in service of everyone fucking tired of the people pleasing grind.
We go deep, we get real, and we play big.
It's a new era for women on the Play Big path.
Long may we reign.
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All right, all right, all right. Welcome back to our second to last episode of the Play Big Queen podcast. I'm so glad that you are here. We are recording this episode and it will be released on Monday, December 29th, 2025. But I have a feeling this is going to be one of those episodes that you're to want to hang on to. It's one of those things where maybe if you've already learned about purpose, you need a refresher to help you.
reorientate to purpose, or if you struggle with finding your purpose in the world, this is just going to be a great resource for you. I've actually taught classes on purpose. I've had modules in my coaching programs, and this is something that we come back to over and over again, especially if you have ADHD, and especially if you're like many people during this time, and you are finding yourself
pivoting in a world that just doesn't make a lot of sense for you anymore. This episode is going to be really helpful for you to get clarity and to just get grounded in what purpose really is and how to approach it. And I want to caveat this episode by going right into talking about purpose as it relates to people with ADHD. If you have ADHD,
whether you are diagnosed, undiagnosed, seeking diagnosis or self-diagnosed. I want you to know that purpose can be especially challenging. And it is not because we lack vision. It is not because we are not talented or because we're not deep enough. It is often because people with ADHD have so many ideas. Some people just have certain talents and gifts turned on.
And some people can just write, some people can just play music or sing. For a lot of ADHDers, we can just ideate. And that comes from our ability to make seemingly unrelated connections across multiple different topics, subjects, industries all the time. You see possibilities everywhere. You could feel stimulated or called to put your attention on many things at once.
Your imagination is a beautiful gift, but sometimes we struggle with containment.
But when we're talking about purpose and being someone with ADHD who's thinking about your purpose, it is very common for us to have the idea faucet turned on. You can get like waves of inspiration that often feel like really intense. It can feel urgent. It can feel electric. And if we're in a scarcity mindset a lot of the time, it can feel like we have to do this now.
right? Like that this is our idea, it's come to us, we have to do the thing now. And it's so brilliant that it should be done. But like, I want to invite you into this abundance mindset around ideas. Like, you're always going to have a ton of ideas, they're always going to be brilliant. And it's kind of like a buffet that you get to choose from. That's just always there for you, right? This is not a fluke, this is something you can do.
And learning how to apply that in either a career or a business or purpose can take some time and can take some contemplation and some internal reflection. Because if we don't take that time, often what will happen is, is it becomes too much, That's one of the major challenges with ADHD is that the faucet is turned all the way on, all the stimulus is coming in, but we don't actually have a system that allows us to filter
the attention or to prioritize, right? ADHD often, even if you're labeled with the diagnostic criteria of being inattentive, a lot of the time ADHD is a problem of focus, not attention. It's like we have attention on too many things at once and we can't filter and funnel our attention into a specific place. And that can be really challenging when thinking about like,
what direction you go in life or what is your purpose. And what happens then is a lot of overwhelm, Suddenly it becomes too much. You start to freeze, maybe even doubt yourself and you start asking like, which direction is the right direction? Like, what if I pick the wrong thing and what if I waste time, So instead of choosing, what can tend to happen is we can stay stuck in our head in this like analysis paralysis and we start to freeze.
and then we don't go anywhere, And so when we start talking about purpose in this episode, something I want you to keep in mind is that contemplation is important and we have to reflect and look at it, but we can't stay in that contemplation mode. Then it kind of like morphs into rumination, right? ADHD brains are really not designed to find purpose through prolonged contemplation. We will just go down rabbit hole after.
rabbit hole. Like we find our purpose through action, through movement. A lot of the time clarity doesn't come before we take action. And the reason for that is, is when you start interacting with your environment, there are going to be some things that stimulate you and some things that you feel like you can do forever. And more often than not, there are going to be a lot of things where after you play with it,
or you're in action around it for a little while, you're gonna feel like you can just move right on to the next thing. And so yes, we need contemplation, we need to evaluate our skills, but at some point we have to get into experimentation and start to see where are the trade-offs that we can live with because in every job, every area of life, even if it's creating your dream job, there's always gonna be some sort of trade-off that you're gonna have to live with.
When I used to coach an EMS, I used to tell my students this, you know, nobody is exempt from eating a shit sandwich in their life. It's just a matter of which flavor of shit sandwich you would like to eat for the rest of your life. Right. So like, say, for example, you get into an industry and you're really not a fan of like industry best practices, but maybe you're really lit up around the cause that being in that industry.
allows you to serve, So like for me, there are certain shit sandwiches I will eat because I'm really stimulated and hyped up around certain causes, Some of those causes are women's empowerment, neurodiversity, inclusion and accessibility, women's erotic reclamations, So like in any one of those given areas, leadership, entrepreneurship, business,
I can make a few trade-offs knowing that I'm always going to be stimulated and lit up by certain qualities that either a job, a business, or a purpose is going to give me.
You won't really know that until you get into action around it, Like you can contemplate it, you can guess and you can be like, yeah, I think I'm going to love this. And then you get there and you're like, actually, this is not for me, That happens a lot. If you have ADHD, that's why we have lots of diverse work histories. But I think the worst thing that you can do is wait to feel certain before you begin, before you begin exploring your purpose.
because for lot of neurodivergent people, whether you have ADHD or not, certainty is a byproduct, it is not a prerequisite. When you are overwhelmed by ideas, again, it doesn't mean you're unfocused, it means you're highly creative with kind of like a low tolerance for friction. And so the goal is not to choose the perfect idea. The goal is to choose one thing that you can move on now.
And that brings me to what I want to talk about really in this episode, So I think it's important to have a healthy mindset around purpose when you go into it. Purpose is not about picking the right forever path. And I think that's where a lot of people, whether you're neurodivergent or not, get tripped up out the gate. For a lot of people, purpose can be this overwhelming idea, right? You get one life.
we never get to do this again. So like you have to figure out this one big purpose and somewhere along the way we get this idea that purpose is about having this one big thing, this one calling in life that you were always destined to do, that there's just one thing that you're destined to do or like one lightning bolt moment that suddenly explains your entire existence and makes everything magically make sense all of a sudden.
And because a lot of us get that message, if you haven't had that moment yet, then you start to wonder what's wrong with you. But again, that's not how purpose actually works. Yes, there are going to be people who seem to just like come out of the womb knowing exactly what they are here to do. That kid that has the perfect pitch, The artist, everyone can see their talent in them immediately. Or the dancer who just like moves like they were born.
with rhythm, completely perfect and intact, But like, even then, those gifts still have to be acknowledged, they have to be resourced and nurtured, they have to be protected and developed. And honestly, those cases are really the exception. Many of us, most of us have to, because of like a capitalistic and patriarchal society, many of us have to kind of like,
bury our gifts in the beginning in order to focus on survival. We are raised inside these systems that reward compliance and predictability and safety. You know, go to school, take the test, talk to the guidance counselor, pick something realistic is like the message that we get growing up. And we're really not taught how to listen to ourselves or our intuition or to like notice where our skill set or our potential is.
we're taught how to become useful to an economy. So we learn how to fit in instead of learning about the value that we provide and how we stand out. We learn how to be employable and how to be essentially a cog instead of a creator. And then we wonder why something feels off, Like you start to feel it when you feel burned out. ⁓
For a lot of people who work the nine to five, that's when the Sunday night dread starts to kick in before your work week. When you're like doing everything right and your soul or your spirit still feels heavy anyway. That feeling is really about misalignment. And most of us were taught and conditioned to make decisions that feel safe.
And safe doesn't necessarily mean bad, but it does mean that we calibrated to what society wanted, what our family approved of, what made other people comfortable and what other people's idea of success was, Whether that's family with two kids and a picket fence or getting married by a certain age, there's lots of ideas of what it means to be
in your purpose and safe and successful that might not line up with what actually makes us feel safe, successful and in our purpose if we took some time to think about it. I think it's really quite tragic that nowhere along the lines of growing up are we really taught to ask what brings me pleasure? What lights me up? What do I lose track of time?
with when I'm doing it, right? And I'm not talking about like having fun, getting drunk or something like that, Like what are you so in your joy around that it actually makes you lose track of time? And then also asking yourself the question like, what have I always done throughout my life, even when no one was watching, for me,
I have always been a writer. I have always been someone who was talking and speaking and breaking down complex ideas to people. I was always a designer. I was always a creator. There were just things that I always did. I was always teaching. I was always coaching. I was always starting up businesses. But what happens is we learn to abandon those things early in life, especially if we don't have someone who could see that that needs to be nurtured. ⁓
And honestly, that's a shadow that I grappled with for a lot of years. Like my parents had some information that I was gifted. ⁓ They didn't have all the information around my challenges in school. And there were things that I totally wish I could nurture earlier or had the resources or had someone to see me in that. But then again, my life wouldn't be what it is if I didn't have the journey that I've had, right? But.
A lot of the time we get the message, whether it's through family or society, that things like art doesn't pay or that writing is unrealistic or that singing is just a long shot. And so we start to get this message that only a few people can make it and that I'm not that person. So we get disconnected from our gifts and we tend to choose fear instead, The fear of not being enough, making enough or starting imperfectly or...
the fear of letting people see that, I want this thing, this dream, my purpose is to like write a book or be a singer or whatever. And we get afraid to have people see us in that. And somewhere along the line, women especially struggle with this. We decide that if we can't be exceptional immediately that we shouldn't try at all.
But the truth of the matter is, like, you don't need to be able to sing perfectly to be a singer. There are lots of people out there with contracts who are not good singers flat out, right? ⁓ And you don't need to be able to dance perfectly if you want to be a dancer. Like every single person has gifts, skills, or something that is uniquely theirs, even if they can't see it yet. And yes, those things like always require development. It is rare.
for talent to show up and be already fully formed, let alone be like packageable on a commercial level if you're looking to like have your talent make you a ton of money, And this is something I also learned from working in talent. Like you can literally just get paid for being more you, especially in the world of social media and influencing, The messy you, the imperfect you. ⁓
the very special combination of like where you're at in your life and how you do things. Nobody else can do it like you. And it's really important to realize that like purpose is not something that's mystical and it's not something that's complicated. I think a lot of people think it's got this like whole otherworldly like magical type of thing to it. But purpose literally just means
the reason that something exists. That's it. So when you ask, what is my purpose? The answer is simpler than you think. And something I used to teach a lot of my clients and even my students when I'm giving them life lessons is that you can answer any question in life by simply asking the question. So if you ask yourself, what is my purpose in life?
The answer is, my purpose in life is to have purpose. Or what is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is to have meaning. I mean, I know it sounds silly to make it that simple, but it really is. What am I gonna have for dinner tonight? Have dinner tonight. Don't just like eat a snack out of the cabinet, you know? Like, the answer to what purpose is is so much simpler than we make it out to be. Because also, you get to decide.
You get to decide what matters. You get to decide what has meaning for you, what you're living for. You get to decide why you keep going. And for a lot of us, the problem isn't that we don't have purpose. It's that we don't trust ourselves to choose what our purpose is. A lot of the time we get like decision anxiety because the world is abundant. There's so many choices. There's so many paths and our time feels limited.
But if you look honestly at your life, you'll find that there are clues everywhere. There are patterns from childhood. There are things that you have always been drawn to. There's stuff that you keep circling back to even when you try to quit it. And a lot of the time it's a matter of just like trusting yourself and permission. And then also not complicating it because you're masking or playing small or
thinking you have to be something else because of perfectionism or because it would look good, right? Like, your purpose doesn't have to be to cure cancer, just because you think you have to have like a purpose that gives back to the world or some morally high purpose. Like, your purpose could literally be to make money and buy the clothes you want to buy.
Purpose isn't this one moment of a massive revelation that happens. It is a lifestyle. To live in purpose means that you live in these small intentional moments that build up over and over and over again. And when we don't live that way, what happens is, is we become reactive.
We're not being intentional about what we want and we deny ourselves what we really want and who we really are and we fight it. Like for all sorts of reasons we want to think of ourselves as a good human being. We want to do the right thing. We want to be moral. But when we do that and we don't admit to ourselves the things that we want and the things that turn us on and light us up and like
really stimulate us and activate us, we wind up living a life where we're just like running away from pain instead of intentionally moving towards meaning and having purpose in life. And I did that for a really long time, Some of that was survival. You have to learn how to get into this space where you're out of survival mode and you just like carve out a little bit of space.
to allow yourself to be, do, and have the things that the authentic version of you wants. And if you do that enough, then that authentic version of you takes more and more space in your reality. And so you're no longer just in survival mode, but you're actually like thriving authentically in who you are and what you're here to do. But for a while, I was just making choices based on survival and
conditioning, Like I took a corporate job because I wanted to look responsible. I wanted to have healthcare. I wanted to have a big fat salary and all the benefits and it was great for a while, but like I didn't choose a corporate job because it was right for me. I chose it because they got lost in the idea of what it means to be a responsible adult and that idea was not something that I ever
contemplated if it was right for me. I never practiced discernment. I just adopted it and like got into the system and that's what I had to do according to someone who didn't think for themselves, right? I stayed in relationships because I didn't want to be alone. I kept going back to school because I didn't want to be seen as stupid. You know, like if you look at any of those things that I've done,
and you do it for authentic reasons with intention, then you start moving more into alignment and in your purpose, If you take a corporate job because you see it as a way to leverage resources to get what you want, that's alignment on a path that like recognizes reality, Like you have to make money, you have to take care of yourself in the process. If you stay in a relationship with someone because you understand the value exchange there,
you know, that could serve its purpose as well. And like right now I'm going back to school because I know I want to be intentional about the things that I learned there and have access to education that I wouldn't find at other places. Making those choices from an aligned standpoint is totally different than making them from your conditioning or just because you have somewhere in your mind that this is the quote unquote
right way to do things, Like at one point, ⁓ when I actually like became conscious of all the things I was choosing unconsciously, like my life just kind of completely imploded. I was working a glossy corporate job. I was living with my partner who I deeply loved who at the time they were struggling with addiction and mental illness. My mom was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. My parents' marriage.
ended in divorce after decades and Hurricane Sandy destroyed my family home and I had the horrifying privilege of having everything fall apart at once. My relationship, my job, my family structure and stability, ⁓ nature itself I couldn't even trust. ⁓
I was exhausted and I was reactive and I was scared and for the first time I realized I had a choice. I could keep reacting or I could get intentional. And so like at that time I asked myself a very different question. I asked myself not what is my forever purpose, but what do I need to do right now to survive and rebuild?
And at the time, the answer was like discipline. I needed structure. I needed to be able to rely on myself and no one else in emergencies. I needed to know how to navigate doctors and things like that in case I had to take care of my parents because that was happening. And so at the time I thought, I was like, well, what's the fastest way I can learn about emergencies and.
get into healthcare and work with patients? And at the time the answer was, you know, become an EMT. And not because it was my ultimate calling, but it was because I was being called into it then, for those who work in the fire department, EMS, it is a calling. And for me, it was also kind of a generational calling because my father's grandfather, my great grandfather, George Shauer
was a firefighter at the New York City Fire Department. He was a first generation American born citizen that was a child of a migrant and he went into the New York City Fire Department. And when I went into the fire department they gave me like his plaque and his letter that he got when he got in but
I remember when I first started choosing intentionally and exploring my purpose and answered that calling, was literally like my DNA shifted at the cellular level and I was interacting with my intuition. And I guess you could say the spirit world and ancestors so differently. I felt so much more presence and support.
in my life than I had never felt before. And when I started on the journey and I started like studying for EMS school and things like that, I remember like really struggling because I was still grappling with some undiagnosed reading comprehension stuff. And I had spent so much extra time with tutors and teachers trying to like understand everything. ⁓
One night I remember I was particularly exhausted and I was studying anatomy in my tiny Brooklyn apartment and I go into the shower and I'm taking the hottest shower ever and I felt really frustrated. I felt like I had been through so many jobs and I had tried so many things and I wasn't understanding what I was learning in EMS school and I just like...
started drawing on the foggy shower glass door, I wrote like, every cell in my body has a function and a purpose. Why don't I know mine? And it was really interesting because it was like the perfect moment of like learning anatomy, learning how the body functions, learning that there's every cell in your body that has a purpose. And
looking back on it, that was really the beginning of my relationship with having a conscious purpose. And that's when I really started asking questions in a much different way in life and I would be like, well,
why am I struggling so much with my experience in life? And it's because I was fighting that the whole reason for life is to just have experience and to grow from it and learn from it. Especially for me, someone who is a natural teacher, educator, coach, speaker.
Life to me is one big classroom and my job is to meet each experience in a way where I let it grow me or change me or evolve me in some way. And I think through asking questions differently and like really asking myself like what is purpose and what is the nature of purpose itself, I started to really lean into that quote.
that I think so many people here in the coaching world, right? The truth is like, you're not lost. You don't find yourself. You create yourself. And a lot of us don't even realize that our purpose is already here. I mean, it pissed me off so much when other people said like, already have everything you need within you, but it's true, right? Like you have inside you, your gifts, your desires, your patterns.
And all of those things point to what feels good for you to be doing in life. When we're really feeling good about the work that we do in the world, it's because we have a certain amount of skill in doing it. We have a certain amount of talent, and the result of it gives us a certain amount of satisfaction. That's really what it comes down to, right? Like, purpose is about intention. It's about meaning.
and it's about how you serve and your purpose changes depending on what season you're in, Like we have many purposes over a lifetime. It's very similar in the way that boundaries work as well, Boundaries are based on your values and your values change depending on what season you're in. And so if you're in a season where say you just had a baby or you're growing your family, like your values are gonna be security, safety and family and like maybe
teaching your children about the world. But maybe you get your support systems in place and when they're five or six, maybe you decide it's a season where you go all in on the things that you want to do for work or career. Or maybe you want to have some exciting adventure through the erotic, right? Like there are seasons for different purposes. You cannot physically be doing everything at once. And I think that's the biggest struggle when you have ADHD.
is learning how to filter and wanting to do everything at once and being stimulated, But there are seasons for growth, there are seasons for creation, and there are seasons for care. Pressure to find the one thing that is their purpose is what keeps people stuck. When you live intentionally, clarity comes after action. So if you're like,
I intend to make healthy choices. I intend to get financially stable. I intend to explore what brings me pleasure or mature with my partner in our relationship and how we do love in the world. When you decide on what you're going to focus on and where you're going to go and you pursue that in action, that's when
clarity starts coming around what your purpose is. There's a really good example of this that I like to share. It's this idea of like driving your car down the road at night and your headlights are on, You can only see about 10 feet in front of you at a time with your lights on on a really dark road or however many feet you can see in front of you. But what you can see is enough to navigate where you want to go.
So say that you're driving and you want to go to Vegas and you've never been to Vegas, but you know you want to go there. And so you get on the road and you start driving and you follow signs that say like West. And so you start going West and you see more signs that says, okay, this is how you go towards Nevada. And then you see some signs that say, okay, this is where you go to Vegas. And along the way detours happen, delays happen.
Like maybe you pop a tire, you could lose confidence in your ability to drive. ⁓ Certain paths will probably reject you. And in that process, if you hold on to the idea that you know that you are going to Vegas, nothing is going to stop you from getting where you want to go. Right along the way. Like something might not happen exactly as you expect. It might not go off.
in the way that you want. The delivery of your desires doesn't always come as we expect. In fact, so often it's the exact opposite. But if you can allow yourself to grow on the way there, that whole process of adapting and taking detours and getting delayed and re-deciding anyways that this is what you want,
This all is part of what prepares you to actually have and hold the thing that you say you want or to really be in your purpose in life. It's important to not judge yourself for your timing, your process, or for even not quote unquote knowing your purpose for a while. As soon as you get out of wasting that energy on judging yourself, that's when you can start focusing on
having meaning, focus on being in service to whatever it is you want to serve. And this is when you can also focus on using what you already have instead of comparing yourself to what you don't. You do not need permission to claim who you are. If you want to be a writer, be a writer. If you want to be a coach, be a coach. If you want to be an artist, be an artist.
Claim it and allow yourself to be in the learner mindset. Allow yourself to be on day one of that journey. If you're like, I always knew I wanted to be a singer, but I felt like I couldn't do it, my voice wasn't good enough, fuck that shit. Just claim it now and be like, I'm a singer. What do I need to do to resource myself? Do I need to get singing lessons? How do I work towards that? Am I in survival mode? Can I get out of survival mode? How do I leverage what I have? Who do I tell? Who can I bring into this, right?
When you take a moment to allow yourself to want what you want without putting a story on it, without making excuses for why you can't or shouldn't want it, and you like think seriously about what you want and what your purpose is, when you take yourself and your desires seriously, from that point, it becomes so much easier.
to take the small steps over time that lead to you doing big, beautiful things in the world. Purpose is about what you have to give and how it feels good to give it, purpose is about love, it's about service, it's about easing suffering and only the way that you can. it's really interesting because I'm interested in like sharing my point of view through fashion and beauty and like becoming
more skilled at learning how to do that and providing beauty and joy is a service, And it is love and it is for many people going to ease suffering in a lot of ways when you share the gift that you want to give people in the way that only you can do it.
and for however long you can do it, it's enough, right? There are some people who are meant to have 40 year careers in singing or fashion or teaching. And there are some people who are only meant to do it for like five years. If you stop judging yourself for how long you are in any given purpose or profession, and you really just start getting intentional about what you want, why you want it and develop your skills around it,
When you stop forcing it and you allow yourself to strike that balance between doing what you need to survive and allowing you to do what makes you feel alive. When you take action on inspiration, things become very clear and very simple. So be gentle with yourself, stay open, keep choosing to have meaning and purpose for today.
day. You don't need to have it for a full lifetime. Just choose your purpose today and take it one day at a time. And remember to like take a moment to breathe and remind yourself like you are not behind. You are not lost. You don't need to be found. You are on the road driving to the next place that you know that you want to go. And that's enough.
and you got this and you will get to where you want to go as long as you decide that you want to keep going there and if you decide you want a different destination then you get to choose that too because newsflash babe it's your life your reality you get to do whatever the fuck you want as long as it truly makes you feel good and happy and healthy and successful
on your terms.
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Outro 1
That's it for today, Queen.
Take what lit you up, leave what didn't.
You know what serves.
If you want to stay in this Play Big Queen orbit, get the rituals, resources, and real talk that fuels your Play Big self, go to xxxkatebailey.com, scroll to the bottom, and join this community.
This is where bold women gather. Neurodivergent visionaries, disability warriors, sacred disruptors.
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Leave comments, give me all the stars, share it.
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that feels right for you.
Or tag me on socials and tell me a moment that truly served you from this episode.
Until next time, remember to honor your own timing, value your own unique way.
And most of all, when you come face to face with your boldest desires, trust your brilliance and Play Big Queen.
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