The Vibe With Ky Podcast

The Vibe With Ky
  • 4.6 (37)
  • Mental Health
  • Updated Biweekly

Join Kyrus Keenan Westcott for honest, funny, and deeply relatable conversations about ADHD, mental health, and the chaos of being human, on The Vibe With Ky Podcast, sponsored by Sucreabeille. We ditch the toxic positivity to bring you real talk with therapists, content creators, coaches, and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Whether you are navigating burnout, anxiety, or a late diagnosis, this is your safe space to unmask and breathe. Subscribe now for new episodes that educate, entertain, and empower. Much love. Good vibes.

  1. 2d ago

    Rebellious Curiosity: You Are Your Own Rescue (ft. Dr. Yemi Penn)

    Rebellious curiosity means asking the question no one wants to ask, and answering it without blame. Dr. Yemi Penn says the one you've been waiting to save you is already you. That is the heart of this conversation. Dr. Yemi Penn is an engineer by first profession who became a researcher, keynote speaker, and filmmaker, and she hosts the Decolonising Trauma podcast. She holds a PhD, and to be clear, she is not a clinician. What she offers is lived experience and years of research, not medical advice. We get into what rebellious curiosity actually looks like day to day, how she went from an engineer who lived on fixed answers to a self-described Cultural Alchemist who "lives in the tolerance," and what it means to decolonise trauma, to step back from the one story we were all handed and ask what else might be true. Yemi walks through how to tell the difference between your real self and the inherited story running the show, and why the reality that feels most permanent might be one that is quietly keeping you company. I also share something personal: the years my existential OCD kept me locked in a version of reality that felt one step from collapse, and how her framing genuinely reframed it for me. By the end, she leaves us with something Tarana Burke and Brene Brown said best, that you are your best thing, shadow parts and all. This one is warm and honest, and it lands somewhere hopeful without pretending the hard parts are not hard. More from Dr. Yemi Penn:Her podcast, Decolonising Trauma (a verified Apple or Spotify show URL unblocks this link)Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.yemipenn/Website: https://www.yemipenn.com If you need support:Mental Health Resources Hub: https://thevibewithky.com/mental-health-resources-hub/ Ky is a mental health advocate speaking from lived experience. He is not a clinician, and this is not medical advice. Much love. Good vibes. - Ky

    Rebellious Curiosity: You Are Your Own Rescue (ft. Dr. Yemi Penn)

  2. 6d ago

    When Cancer Returns: Rebuilding After a Setback (ft. Tim McDonald)

    Nobody prepares you for the second time. The first climb out of something hard gets support and attention. The second one is quieter, because you already used up the big reaction and you already told everybody you were okay. Tim McDonald is living inside that right now. A few weeks before this conversation, he learned his cancer is back after almost six years. He is a patient advocate, a speaker, and the author of From Patient to Advocate, and he is a stage four colorectal cancer survivor and a liver transplant recipient speaking entirely from lived experience. He is not a clinician, and nothing in this episode is medical advice. He explains, in his own words, what a blood test told him and why there is nothing to treat yet. He talks honestly about the first week, the one he calls mentally hellacious, when he was not eating much and doing the bare minimum and playing the what-if game he says he hates. Then he walks through the question that got him moving again: what has actually changed? His answer was that one piece of information changed, and everything else about his life was exactly the same. From there the conversation turns to self-advocacy, and this is where it stops being about cancer. Tim did not wait for a referral. He researched, made his own calls, and drove eight hours round trip for a one hour appointment to reach the right expert. His first oncologist told him to get a second, third, tenth opinion and keep going until he believed what he was hearing. That applies just as directly in a psychiatrist's office, at an assessment, or with a GP who is not listening. If something you thought you had put down has come back on you, whatever your version of that is, this one is for you. Tim's book, From Patient to Advocate:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GL3BQMH6 Tim's website:https://www.timmcdonaldadvocate.com/ Mental Health Resources Hub:https://thevibewithky.com/mental-health-resources-hub/ Ky is a mental health advocate speaking from lived experience. He is not a clinician, and his content is not medical advice. Much love. Good vibes. - Ky

    When Cancer Returns: Rebuilding After a Setback (ft. Tim McDonald)

  3. Aug 23

    You Don't Have to Earn Rest (ft. Brea Segger)

    You don't have to earn rest. The calm you keep chasing is not something you arrive at after enough effort. It is already in you, and something else is in the way. Most of us were taught the opposite. Push harder, optimize more, stay disciplined enough, and eventually you get to relax. Brea Segger has spent over twenty years working with leaders, entrepreneurs, and high achievers, and she says that framing is the trap itself. Brea is an embodiment guide, not a therapist or a licensed clinician. Her background is unusual: she started in international business development and mergers and acquisitions before spending more than a decade running a holistic medicine institute in Canada. She knows the high achiever world from the inside, which is part of why this conversation goes where it does. In this episode she takes apart the language her own field runs on, including the phrase she has nearly removed from her own website because it turned into another rule book. She makes the case that suppressing your emotions was protective rather than a failure, and that the little kid who learned to push things down was doing exactly what kept them safe. She puts the high achiever and the person in active addiction on the same continuum, and explains why that framing removes shame rather than adding it. And she describes self-trust as something you already have and forgot, not something you build from nothing. I told her about a long stretch where I could not tell the difference between rest and guilt, where sitting still felt like I was failing at something. Her answer reframed the whole thing for me. Then I asked where a person should actually start. Her answer took about four seconds: lie down for five minutes and do nothing. Not meditate. Not fix anything. Just be there. So I asked the follow-up I knew some of you were thinking, which is how you get back up once you are down there. CONNECT WITH BREA SEGGER Her website and newsletter:https://www.breasegger.com/ Her podcast, Beneath The Story:https://www.breasegger.com/beneath-the-story-podcast She also has a retreat coming up called The Embodied Woman Mastery Retreat, six days in Costa Rica this November, for women, capped at eight people. Full details are on her website. Kyrus Keenan Westcott is a content creator and mental health advocate, not a licensed mental health professional. This podcast is for education and entertainment and is not a substitute for professional diagnosis or treatment. Guests speak from their own experience and expertise; their views are their own. Much love. Good vibes. - Ky

    You Don't Have to Earn Rest (ft. Brea Segger)

  4. Aug 18

    The Parts of Yourself You Threw Out Too Fast (ft. Michael Kopper)

    There is a version of you that you already decided was worthless. Michael Kopper spent years proving his was, and then went back for the pieces worth keeping. Michael is the Executive Adviser and Coach at Basis Technologies, where he works with executive teams on the conversations they have been avoiding. He is not a therapist or a clinician, and nothing in this conversation is clinical advice. What he is, is someone who rebuilt a life after it came apart in public, and who now spends his days helping leaders be honest with the people who work for them. Michael was a finance leader at Enron. The decisions he made there sent him to federal prison. He does not soften that, and neither did we. But the part that stayed with Ky is what came after. Michael did not just rebuild. He spent years working very hard at pretending the old version of himself had no value at all, and it took four or five years before he went back and looked again. When he did, he found two things worth keeping. In this conversation, Michael and Ky get into why companies keep promoting their best people into management and then never show them how to do the human part of the job. Why owning a bad decision is what makes the consequences survivable instead of fatal. Why there is no work version of you and a home version of you, and what it costs a team when leaders pretend otherwise. And what you can actually say at work when telling a senior person you are scared is not safe. If you have ever decided an old version of yourself was worthless and then spent years proving it, this one is for you. The framework Michael works from is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp. Want more? The ADHD Vibers Subscriber Hub is where Ky goes deeper. The Real Ones tier, five dollars a month, includes the ADHD Deep Dive Library and Reverse the Mic, where podcast guests flip the script and interview Ky. Reverse the Mic is for subscribers only and is not part of this public episode. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thevibewithky Facebook Subscriptions: https://www.facebook.com/thevibewithky/subscribe/ Everything else: https://thevibewithky.com Much love. Good vibes. - Ky

    The Parts of Yourself You Threw Out Too Fast (ft. Michael Kopper)

  5. Aug 14

    Burnout and the Power of Play, with Gary Ware

    There is a version of rest that never arrives. You will relax once the list is done, except the list is never done. Gary Ware has a name for that, and it is not laziness. He calls it living on a proving ground. It is what happens when play drains out of a life. The people around you stop being people you enjoy and start being competition, and work turns into something you have to earn by proving you are worthy of it. Plenty of us have lived that way so long we stopped noticing it was a way of living at all. Gary Ware is the founder of Breakthrough Play. He is a facilitator, a keynote speaker, a coach, and the author of Playful Rebellion: Maximize Workplace Success Through The Power of Play. He is not a clinician. What he works with is applied improv, practical tools, and his own experience. He was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at twenty six, after six straight hours of testing, and he has said that day was the worst day of his life. That is not how anybody tells you a diagnosis is supposed to feel. We get into the night he nearly fell asleep at the wheel driving home from an agency job, and what made him pull over. We get into the company that quietly took the word fun out of its stated values and replaced it with excellence, and how nobody ever said out loud what was being given up. People just stopped going to lunch. And we get into what actually helps. Taking a play history. The one question that opens it up. A five minute move you can make this week that costs nothing and asks nobody's permission. Gary also flipped the microphone around and asked me his own questions. That part is not in the public episode. It lives in the Subscriber Hub. CONNECT WITH GARYWebsite: https://www.breakthroughplay.com WANT MORE?Join the ADHD Vibers Subscriber Hub on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thevibewithkyOr on Facebook Subscriptions: https://www.facebook.com/thevibewithky/subscribe/The Real Ones tier is five dollars a month. It includes the ADHD Deep Dive Library and Reverse the Mic, where guests interview me. Both are subscriber-exclusive and neither is on the public feed. Ky is a mental health advocate speaking from lived experience. He is not a clinician, and this content is not medical advice. Much love. Good vibes. - Ky

    Burnout and the Power of Play, with Gary Ware

  6. Aug 10

    The Neurodivergent Friendship Gap, with the Synchrony Team

    For a lot of us, the support just stops. You finish high school and the programs end, the services end, and nobody hands you a replacement. Your social life quietly becomes your own problem to solve. Jamie Pastrano said something in this conversation I have not stopped thinking about. There is no milestone for loneliness. You get one for a first job, a first apartment, riding the train alone. There is not one for having somebody to call on a Tuesday night. And if nobody measures it, nobody plans for it. Jamie is a licensed social worker and a peer certified provider, and a mom. She watched her autistic son age into that gap and could not find him a solution. Brittany Moser is a former teacher with a master's degree in autism studies. Rebecca Matchett, who everybody calls Becky, spent two decades in fashion, co-founded Alison Olivia, and holds a patent in women's sizing. Together they built Synchrony, a social app made specifically for neurodivergent adults who want to make real friends. Not adapted from something else. Built from the ground up for us. The part that surprised me is the way you get in. You upload an ID, and somebody who knows you vouches for you. I assumed that would push people away. They told me the opposite. Wide open platforms are exactly what failed this community, and those extra steps are what finally let people stop performing once they are inside. We also talk about masking and what it does to your body, what happens when the diagnosis came late or never came at all, and how to bring something like this up with someone you love without it landing badly. And we go straight at the AI question, because there is an optional coach in the app named Jesse. Synchrony, the app and the download links: https://joinsynchrony.com Go deeper in the ADHD Vibers Subscriber Hub.Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thevibewithkyFacebook Subscriptions: https://www.facebook.com/thevibewithky/subscribe/The Real Ones, five dollars a month, gets you the ADHD Deep Dive Library and Reverse the Mic, where my guests flip the script and interview me. That one is subscriber-exclusive and never hits the main feed. Jamie, Brittany and Becky recorded one for this episode. Ky is a mental health advocate speaking from lived experience. He is not a clinician, and this content is not medical advice. Much love. Good vibes. - Ky.

    The Neurodivergent Friendship Gap, with the Synchrony Team

  7. Jul 27

    Space, Expectations, and Real Intimacy, with Simone Milasas

    A man came in from three hours of surfing and asked his partner if she was angry at him. She said no. Why would I be angry? You love surfing. He only asked because the woman he dated before her used to yell at him every single time he went. That story stopped Ky cold, and it is the heart of this conversation. A lot of us were trained to read somebody needing space as the beginning of the end. Your partner goes quiet. They want a night alone. And your brain has already written the breakup speech. Simone Milasas is an author and a relationship facilitator from Australia. She co-wrote Relationship. Are You Sure You Want One?, wrote Joy of Business and Getting Out of Debt Joyfully, and hosts The Choice, Change & Action Podcast. She has spent years in rooms full of people asking her how to fix their relationships, and her answer is almost never the one they showed up for. Her position is that relationships do not fail from bad communication. They fail from needs, expectations, and projections nobody ever said out loud. Ky and Simone get into the five elements of intimacy, trust, honor, allowance, vulnerability and gratitude, and why you have to give all five to yourself before you can hand them to anyone else. They talk about the myth of "the one" and how it keeps people stuck. A concept she teaches called creationship. Why she keeps a second bathroom on purpose. And the money conversation she used to book a restaurant table for four to have. The line that keeps sitting with Ky: when she needs an hour alone, it is not against him, it is for her. Heads up, there is some language in this one. MORE FROM SIMONE MILASAS Her podcast, The Choice, Change & Action Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-choice-change-action-podcast/id1512950259 Her website: https://www.simonemilasas.com/about WANT MORE? Everything lives at TheVibeWithKy.com. The blog, the newsletter, the store, and every other episode. https://thevibewithky.com/ For the deeper stuff, join the ADHD Vibers Subscriber Hub on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thevibewithky Or on Facebook Subscriptions: https://www.facebook.com/thevibewithky/subscribe/ The Real Ones tier is five dollars a month. You get the ADHD Deep Dive Library and Reverse the Mic, a subscriber-only segment where guests flip it around and interview Ky. Neither one shows up in the public feed. Ky is not a doctor or a licensed mental health professional. Nothing here replaces working with one. Much love. Good vibes. - Ky

    Space, Expectations, and Real Intimacy, with Simone Milasas

  8. Jul 24

    Procrastination and ADHD, with Sean McCormick

    In this episode of The Vibe With Ky Podcast, executive function coach Sean McCormick explains why ADHD procrastination is a signal that a task needs a different person, not more willpower. This one is for you if you have been called lazy your whole life and always suspected that word never quite fit what was actually happening. Sean McCormick, M.Ed., is a credentialed education specialist who taught public school special education before he understood his own ADHD. He founded Executive Function Specialists for students, built the Executive Function Coaching Academy to train educators, and co-founded an adult coaching practice called UpSkill Specialists. He joined me for this conversation after we spent three days together at NeuroDiversion 2026. The shift in this episode is small and it changes a lot. Executive function is not a measure of effort, it is a set of brain-based skills involving working memory, self-regulation, and task initiation. Once that lands, the question stops being why can I not make myself do this and starts being what does this task actually need. Here is what comes out of the conversation: - Procrastination often points to a task that needs a different person, which Sean calls who not how. - Constraints create real freedom, and Sean explains the fixed non-negotiables he keeps in every week. - One full unscheduled day, phone off, does more for an ADHD brain than another productivity system. - Sean shares what five years of sobriety did for his focus, decision making, and follow-through. CONNECT WITH SEAN MCCORMICK UpSkill Specialists, his adult executive function coaching practice: https://www.upskillspecialists.com/ For educators thinking about coaching, the Executive Function Coaching Academy: https://www.executivefunctioncoachingacademy.com/ CONNECT WITH KY Website: https://thevibewithky.com/ Patreon, for the ADHD Deep Dive Library, exclusive neurodivergent content, and the Reverse The Mic segment that is not available anywhere else online: https://www.patreon.com/thevibewithky Facebook subscription, for the ADHD Deep Dive Library, exclusive neurodivergent content, and the Reverse The Mic segment that is not available anywhere else online: https://www.facebook.com/thevibewithky/subscribe/ Instagram: https://instagram.com/thevibewithky TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@thevibewithky The ADHD Vibe Store: https://thevibewithky.podia.com/ This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice. If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified professional.

    Procrastination and ADHD, with Sean McCormick
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4.6
out of 5
37 Ratings

About

Join Kyrus Keenan Westcott for honest, funny, and deeply relatable conversations about ADHD, mental health, and the chaos of being human, on The Vibe With Ky Podcast, sponsored by Sucreabeille. We ditch the toxic positivity to bring you real talk with therapists, content creators, coaches, and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Whether you are navigating burnout, anxiety, or a late diagnosis, this is your safe space to unmask and breathe. Subscribe now for new episodes that educate, entertain, and empower. Much love. Good vibes.

Information

  • Creator
    The Vibe With Ky
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    329
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Vibe With Ky
  • Show Website
    The Vibe With Ky Podcast

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