Mental Wealth
There’s more to you than The Version That Works.
Lauren Polly is an award-winning author, speaker, and speech-language pathologist exploring what happens when the ways of being that helped us belong, succeed, or stay safe become the only ways we know how to show up.
Her work is about noticing what has become automatic—and making room for more range in how we communicate, create, connect, work, and live.
We all learn what works.
We read our families, schools, workplaces, and relationships, and we notice which ways of being help us belong, succeed, stay safe, and be understood.
Maybe being competent works. Or agreeable. Funny. Independent. The one with the answers. The one who never needs anything.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s something human beings are incredibly good at doing.
But sometimes “this is a way I know how to be” quietly becomes “this is who I am.”
We become fluent in certain versions of ourselves. We say the thing we know will land well. We play the role people expect. At work, we keep reaching for the approach that made us successful. In relationships, we avoid the conversation we already know might create friction. We stop doing things we once loved because they no longer seem to fit the person we’ve become.
I call this The Version That Works.
It may have built your career, helped you through a difficult experience, held relationships together, or made you excellent at what you do.
The problem isn’t that it didn’t work.
Sometimes it works so well, we mistake it for all that we are.
And that can leave us in a strange place: successful but flat, surrounded by people but not always deeply known, grateful for what we have while still wondering why something feels like it’s missing.
Nothing has to be obviously wrong.
The question is simply:
How much of you is alive in the life you’ve built?
I’m not sure we always need another version of ourselves to become better.
We hear a lot about finding ourselves, improving ourselves, reinventing ourselves, and becoming our “best” selves.
I’ve spent plenty of my own life in that world. Lately, I’m more interested in range.
Because when we get really good at being The Version That Works, it doesn’t only shape how we think about ourselves. It shapes the conversations we have, the people we connect with, the ideas we share, the things we create, and sometimes even what we do for fun.
We can become more predictable without realizing it.
Recovering Range isn’t about blowing up a good life or forcing every side of yourself into every room. It can be much smaller than that.
Say something you normally edit. Bring a different side of yourself into a relationship. Try a new approach at work instead of automatically reaching for the one you know you’re good at. Pick up something you used to love simply because you want to.
Small experiments give us information. They show us what still fits, what doesn’t, and what has been waiting for a little more room.
The goal isn’t to become someone new. It’s to create enough breathing room for more of who you already are to participate in your life.
That can look like better conversations. More flexibility when the old answer stops working. More creativity. Deeper connection. More choice. And sometimes, simply feeling more present inside a life that was already good.
Speaking
Conversations that open something.
Lauren brings personal storytelling, more than 20 years of communication expertise, and a sharp eye for the roles people learn to play into keynotes and conversations that are warm, disarming, and practical.
Her talks help audiences recognize where they may be operating from habit—at work, in relationships, in how they communicate, and in how they see themselves—and experiment with a wider range of responses.
Topics include The Version That Works, communication and feeling known, creativity and expression, identity beyond labels, and what changes when the old way of showing up no longer fits.
Substack
Field notes from the places where life gets interesting.
Mental Wealth is where Lauren follows ordinary moments into bigger questions about the roles we play, the things we edit, what success can leave out, why being seen isn’t always the same as being known, and what we stop reaching for as our lives become more established.
Essays, field notes, audio, and ongoing experiments in living with a little more range.
Multi-Award-Winning & Best-Selling Author of The Other Side of Bipolar • National Media Contributor • 20+ Years in Healthcare Leadership & Communication
Book
What if the label was never the whole story?
Lauren was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at fourteen. For years, that diagnosis shaped not only how she understood her mental health, but which parts of herself she trusted.
The Other Side of Bipolar grew from the moment she began questioning whether a diagnosis could be true without being the whole truth about a person.
Part memoir and part rethinking of diagnosis, healing, and identity, the book became the first public chapter of a question Lauren is still exploring today: When does a useful description become a definition we start living inside?
Its original dedication still captures the heart of Lauren’s work today:
“To those who know more is possible than what they were told they can have and be.”
ABOUT LAUREN
A career spent noticing how much can exist beneath what we can see.
Lauren Polly, MEd., CCC-SLP, is a speaker, speech-language pathologist, healthcare leader, and multi-award-winning author of The Other Side of Bipolar.
For more than two decades, she has worked with communication in its most human form: the distance between what is happening inside a person and what they are able to express outside.
Her own life gave her another version of the same question. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder at fourteen, Lauren spent years understanding herself through a label that eventually became too small to hold the whole story.
Today, she writes and speaks about the less obvious ways all of us can become narrowed by roles, praise, success, relationships, expectations, and the versions of ourselves other people have learned to expect.
She isn’t interested in giving people another self to become. She is interested in what happens when we notice the patterns we’ve become very good at—and give ourselves room to respond differently.