Lauren Polly, MEd., CCC-SLP, is a speaker, speech-language pathologist, healthcare leader, and multi-award-winning author of The Other Side of Bipolar. Drawing from more than 20 years working with human communication and her own experience of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at fourteen, Lauren explores how people become fluent in certain versions of themselves—and what happens when those versions become too small. Her work combines personal storytelling, communication expertise, and practical reflection to help audiences notice the roles and responses they have become practiced at using and experiment with greater range in how they communicate, create, connect, work, and live.
I’ve spent most of my life wondering what else is there.
What else is inside a person beyond what we can currently see? Beyond the words they can find, the role they play, the label they’ve been given, or the version of themselves they’ve become really good at being?
I didn’t always know those questions were connected. They came out of two very different parts of my life—one personal and one professional—that I was walking at the same time.
Looking back, I think they were teaching me remarkably similar things.
At 14, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
That diagnosis became part of how I understood myself during some of the most formative years of my life.
I learned to watch myself closely. To question certain feelings, impulses, and parts of my personality. To pay attention to what seemed safe and what might mean something was wrong.
And I absorbed a lot of ideas about what the diagnosis meant for my future.
For a long time, getting better meant getting better at managing myself.
But in my twenties, I started questioning whether that was the whole story.
I began exploring what helped me feel and function better in a much wider way—my physical health, sleep, movement, nutrition, relationships, confidence, life skills, and eventually some of the more personal and spiritual questions I was curious about too.
With medical support, I eventually transitioned off medication. And at thirty, the bipolar diagnosis I had carried since I was fourteen was overturned.
That was a huge shift.
But what stayed with me was everything I had learned to believe about myself while carrying it.
How much of who I thought I was had been shaped by what I’d been told about myself?
That question took me much further than I expected.
At the same time, I was building a career in communication.
For more than 20 years, I’ve worked as a speech-language pathologist and healthcare leader.
In speech therapy, you quickly learn that there can be much more inside a person than what is currently coming out.
A person can know. Remember. Want. Prefer. Feel. Imagine. Have something very specific to say.
And not have the words.
Communication gives us ways to let other people know what matters to us, what hurts, what we find funny, what we disagree with, what we remember, and what we need. It’s one of the ways we let another person know us.
My work kept showing me that there can be so much more inside a person than what other people get to see. At some point, I realized my own life had been teaching me the same thing.
Those two worlds stopped feeling so separate.
My Multi-Award-Winning Book was where I first started asking a bigger question.
The Other Side of Bipolar was where I first started putting language around everything that experience had opened up for me.
I had spent some of my most formative years understanding myself through a diagnosis — what it meant about me, what I needed to control, and what I believed my future could look like.
When that diagnosis was eventually overturned, those beliefs didn't magically disappear with it.
And that made me curious.
What happens when something we've been told about ourselves starts shaping what we believe we're capable of?
That question became the heart of my book — and its dedication still captures what drives my work today:
“To those who know more is possible than what they’ve been told they can have and be.”
We all learn what works.
My diagnosis was a more dramatic case, but I believe this pattern is actually pretty common.
We all learn what works.
We notice which parts of ourselves get rewarded, like the ones that make people laugh, earn approval, help us succeed, keep the peace, or help us feel like we belong.
So we start using those parts even more.
We lean into being the capable one, the easygoing one, the expert, the helper, the funny one, or the person who always seems to have it together.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these versions of ourselves. They’re real, and they’ve often helped us build careers, relationships, and lives we truly care about.
The problem is, something can work so well that we stop noticing when it doesn’t anymore.
We keep acting capable when we really need help, stay agreeable when we actually disagree, pretend to be certain when we don’t know, and stay responsible when we just want to let something go.
We become experts at being the version of ourselves that works.
But sometimes, without even noticing, we start leaving out other parts of who we are.
We might have a good life and still feel like something’s missing. We can be around people and still feel alone. We can succeed at work but feel bored with how we’re doing it.
That’s when the version of ourselves that works starts to feel a bit too small.
Lately, I’m more interested in range.
I don’t think the answer to this is finding a singular new and improved version of ourselves.
I think the answer is much simpler: we need more range.
It’s not about blowing up our lives, bringing every part of ourselves into every situation, or trying to be our most “authentic” self all the time.
Just creating a little more breathing room for different parts of us to participate.
Maybe you say the thing you normally edit.
Ask for help when you’d usually handle it yourself.
Admit you don’t know.
Reach for something you used to love.
Let yourself be silly, uncertain, curious, creative, quiet, bold, or just different from how people usually see you.
Small things.
But they can show us how much of our lives we’ve been living from habit.
Recovering Range
This is what I mean by Recovering Range.
It’s not about becoming someone new.
It’s noticing the ways you’ve become predictable, even to yourself, and getting curious about what else you might bring into your life.
Sometimes that starts somewhere very small.
Do something you used to enjoy for five minutes.
Say what you actually think in a conversation where you’d normally stay quiet.
Try a different response instead of the one you always give.
You don’t have to do something completely new. Just try doing it in a different way.
Then notice what happens.
Over time, those small experiments can change the way we communicate, create, relate, make decisions, and experience the lives we’ve already built.
The goal isn’t to become someone new. It’s to make enough space for more of who you already are to show up in your life.
This Is the Work I’m Exploring Now
Through my speaking, writing, and Mental Wealth newsletter, I explore what happens when the versions of ourselves that have worked so well start becoming too small.
How it shapes what we say.
What we don’t say.
How we connect.
What we reach for.
And what can happen when we give ourselves a little more space to respond in new ways.
Not because the life we’ve built is wrong.
But because there might be more of us that wants to be part of it.