For most of my life, the words people reached for to describe me were things like "scatter-brained," "too much," and "sensitive." On a bad day, from someone who didn't know any better, maybe even "lazy." I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until my 30s, and I wasn't diagnosed as autistic until my 40s. By then I was already a husband, a father, and years into a career, having a whole new language handed to me for a life I had already lived.
The hardest part wasn't the diagnosis. It was realizing how much of my life I'd spent believing I was just broken. A lazier, worse version of everyone else. That belief is the whole reason this show has the name it does.
What the Show Is About
Empowered, Not Broken is about the messaging around ADHD, autism, and neurodivergence: the language we use, the assumptions we carry, and the advocacy that comes from getting that messaging right. My own story is a lens into that, not the whole show. That means advocating on a few fronts at once:
- For ourselves as late-diagnosed adults, working through what the new information means for who we are.
- For our kids, who are growing up with a very different set of answers than we had.
- For neurodivergent people everywhere, in a world that wasn't built with any of us in mind.
Neurodivergence isn't a deficiency. It's a different way of thinking, processing, and experiencing the world. It comes with real struggles, and it comes with real strengths. Both are true at the same time. This show names the struggles honestly and builds the scaffolding, real tools and real understanding, to work with your brain instead of constantly fighting it. Not fixed. Not cured. Empowered.
Every Brain Is a Neurodividual
You'll hear me use a word on this show that I coined in the very first episode: neurodividual. It describes the unique, individual shape of one specific neurodivergent brain. ADHD doesn't look the same in me as it does in you, and autism never shows up the same way twice. Every one of us has our own mix of strengths, struggles, sensitivities, and wiring, even when the diagnosis on paper is identical. You are not a stereotype. You're a neurodividual.
What to Expect
- A coaching lens, not a clinical one. I'm a coach, not a clinician. Everything here comes from lived experience, coaching work, and research I've actually read. If you need clinical care, this show will point you toward it, not replace it.
- Research you can trust. When I make a claim about ADHD or autism, it's backed by real research. If the science is still uncertain or debated, I'll say so.
- The hard parts, too. Grief, identity, masking, and relationships rebuilt with new information all belong here alongside the empowering parts.
Empowered, Not Broken is a solo show hosted by Braden Young, founder of Empower ADHD Solutions and co-host of The DadDHD Podcast. New episodes come out on the weeks DadDHD isn't recording, so there's always something new to listen to.
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