This is not a framework I built and then applied. I lived it first. Every pillar of RAWSOME Foundations™ was forged inside a real life — mine. This 7 part series is the proof. Living proof. In every sense of those words.
Last week I wrote about Relationships. I said the relationship with yourself is the most important one you will ever have. This week is about what becomes possible when you finally believe that.
The system worked for the system. It rarely saw me, let alone work for me.
I want to begin there — not with bitterness, but with precision. Because that sentence is not just my story. It is the story of every child who moved through institutions designed for a version of a person they were not. Every neurodivergent student in a classroom built for neurotypical minds. Every gay teenager in a culture that had no mirror for them. Every family navigating a system that measured compliance and called it success. Every person who was told, in one way or another, that the problem was them.
Adaptability — real adaptability, the kind forged in a life rather than a workshop — begins in that gap. The gap between who the system says you are and who you actually are. Between what the environment offers and what you actually need. Between the path that was laid out and the one you have to build yourself. I have lived in that gap for most of my life. And I have learned that the gap is not the problem. The gap is where the work happens.
I grew up making things. Not as a hobby. As a survival strategy. In the theatres where my mother ran rehearsals I would walk the rows of empty seats lifting and lowering them — a game of Guess Who played alone in a dark auditorium. I collected bolts, wires, and broken pieces of motorbike from the ground of the car park outside the mechanic’s next to my mother’s dance studio, and assembled robots from them. I took bed slats and built a desk in the hallway — stapler, scissors, sticky tape dispenser liberated from my mother’s office — and ran a classroom that had no students. In primary school I sorted leaves under a tree. Played invented games with pebbles. Drew, coloured, beaded, sewed, did macramé, origami, woodwork, pottery, floristry, gardening, design. The making was constant, various, inventive, and entirely self-directed.
What the science now tells us is that the brain is not a fixed structure but a dynamic one — shaped continuously by experience, by environment, by the demands placed upon it. Neuroplasticity is not a self-help concept. It is a biological fact. And what I was doing, alone in those theatres and car parks and hallways, was building neural architecture that no curriculum had designed for me. Every act of making was also an act of cognitive development. Every invented system was a developing executive function. Every robot assembled from broken parts was a child teaching his own brain, in the only language available to him, how to solve problems the world had not yet thought to name.
This was not creativity for its own sake. This was a nervous system doing what nervous systems do when the environment does not provide what they need — it builds an alternative. That is the first principle of adaptability as I understand and practice it. Not bending to what is. Building what could be.
I was called a chameleon. I understand now that much of what looked like adaptability was masking — the exhausting, invisible performance of fitting into environments never designed to include me. The science is clear on this. Masking — the suppression of natural neurological expression in order to conform — carries a measurable cognitive and physiological cost. It activates the threat response. It depletes the executive resources needed for genuine learning and engagement. A masked nervous system is a braced one. And a braced nervous system cannot access its full capacity. I know this not from a research paper but from the inside — from years of performing a version of myself that was legible to others while the real one waited, patient and persistent, in the gap.
Genuine adaptability is something else entirely. It is the capacity to remain yourself — fluid, responsive, growing — while the world around you shifts. To change shape without losing substance. The distinction matters enormously, both in my own life and in the work I now do with families and educators. We are not trying to make people more compliant. We are trying to build the conditions in which genuine adaptation becomes possible. That requires safety first. It requires the relational ground that last week’s pillar began to build.
In my teenage years I had a room separate from the main house at my mother’s property. Five acres. French doors out to a grass area with a pond. A small sink. A small fridge. I spent a great deal of time alone — not loneliness, aloneness, and there is a profound difference between the two. In those years I built an underground cubby. Clay fireplace inside it. A car bonnet from a neighbouring block as the sloped roof. A child constructing shelter from whatever the world had left lying around, finding in the construction something that felt more true than anything the official environment had offered. That is adaptation in its most elemental form — the refusal to accept that the available options are the only options. The nervous system, given even a small degree of safety, will always move toward what it needs. Mine moved toward making. Toward designing. Toward building environments that fit, because the ones provided did not.
At school I was bullied every day. A child different in ways he could not yet name — neurodivergent, gay, sensitive, always asking why — in a world with very little patience for any of it. What the research now tells us about chronic social threat is that it dysregulates the nervous system at a foundational level — reshaping how the brain processes social information, how it reads safety and danger, how it anticipates harm in spaces that should be neutral. I lived that. My nervous system learned to scan constantly, to read rooms before entering them, to calibrate emotional temperature within seconds. What looked from the outside like social sensitivity was, from the inside, a finely tuned survival instrument. Emotional intelligence forged in fire.
And so I left school. Not failure. Adaptation. The only rational decision available to a person whose nervous system had learned that the environment was not safe. I enrolled full time at a vocational ballet school, studied make-up, nutrition, and dance history, completed Year 11 through School of the Air, and the following year began a graphic design apprenticeship at TAFE. Five dollars and thirty cents an hour. I designed. I structured. I read people and environments with a precision no classroom had taught me — because I had been developing that capacity since I was old enough to walk.
Through all of this I was gay in the 1990s. Under threat in ways that went far beyond the school. That decade made sport of people like me. The adaptation required was not just professional or educational — it was existential. How do you remain yourself inside a culture actively hostile to who you are? How do you build a life when the blueprint has been designed for someone else? You find the gap. And you build in it. You develop, out of sheer necessity, the capacity to hold your own identity in one hand and the world’s hostility in the other, and keep moving anyway.
At twenty-one I decided I wanted to be a teacher. The system said I couldn’t — no Year 12, no ATAR, no traditional pathway. I sat the mature age entry examination. The maths section was challenging. I have ADHD, I am dyslexic, I think in patterns and systems rather than linear equations. And so I used a packet of mints as counters. I externalised the working memory the exam assumed I had internally available. What the science calls cognitive offloading — the use of external tools to extend executive function capacity — I called common sense. I scored and ATAR equivalent of 86. Gained entry to the Bachelor of Education, Primary. The system that had told me I couldn’t had just watched me prove, with confectionery, that I could.
At university as part of an assignment — I designed a music programme for students with autism in a special education unit. What I produced was integrative, visual, tactile, embodied. One component, Beat Detective, had students physically marching tactile Velcro shapes to the floor in time with rhythm, the body finding coherence through movement and music and touch before I had the neuroscience language to describe what I was designing. A regulation-first learning environment. Capacity before behaviour. Environment before expectation. My lecturer placed it in the university library as an exemplar for other students to borrow. I thought I had written an assignment. What I had actually done was translate twenty years of lived adaptation into a designed system for another person’s nervous system. The instinct that had kept me alive and moving was becoming something that could keep others alive and moving too.
I entered the classroom and brought everything with me. I visualised everything — concepts, sessions, environments, relationships. I was creative, articulate, and emotionally mature in ways children sensed immediately. Not because I performed those qualities. Because I had earned them. I held both — the bullied child and the child who bullied — because I knew from the inside what the system only ever tried to understand from the outside. Behaviour that the institution labelled as difficult I read as communication. A nervous system signalling an unmet need. A capacity gap, not a character flaw.
While in those classrooms and schools I ran Wakakirri — the national story dance festival — coordinating a state judging panel. The arts lecturer who had placed my work in the university library became one of the judges. The student whose work was held as exemplary had become the professional who brought that lecturer into his world as a peer. Not as a power move. As the natural consequence of a life built on genuine excellence and relational integrity.
Eventually I knew the classroom was not the ceiling. Not because teaching was insufficient — but because the system surrounding it was. I watched children fail not because they lacked capacity but because the environment lacked the architecture to hold them. I watched educators burn — not from lack of care but from lack of the right conditions to sustain it. I knew that environment. I had grown up inside it. And I knew, with the same conviction that had carried me out of a school I was never seen in, that something more was needed.
So I walked. Not away from the work. Toward a version of it that was larger, more honest, more capable of meeting people where they actually were.
The next adaptation was quieter but no less significant. I moved into counselling — working with neurodivergent clients and their families, people who had been navigating the same systems I had grown up inside, often with the same results. Not seen. Not fitted. Not failing — but failing to be understood by environments that had never been designed to understand them.
The work in that room confirmed everything the classroom had begun to show me. Capacity is not fixed. It is always in relationship with environment, with safety, with the quality of the relational ground beneath a person’s feet. What looked like resistance was regulation. What looked like inability was unmet need. What looked like a difficult child was a nervous system doing its job inside conditions that were asking too much of it.
I also consulted with schools — sitting between families and institutions, translating in both directions. Here is what your child needs. Here is what you are not yet seeing. Here is the bridge. I had spent my whole life on both sides of that gap. I knew the language of both. And I knew, after ten years of that work, that the framework I was building in practice — session by session, family by family, school by school — was working. Measurably. Consistently. Across the full range of human complexity that walked through my door.
But I was in one room, in one city, in the south east of South Australia. And I knew — with the same quiet, certain conviction that it needed to reach further than that.
Literally…. one day Daniel Sobel — IFIP Founder — posted a community question online. I responded. Not strategically. Not as a networking move. I responded because I had something true to say, and because I had spent my life preparing to say it. From that one honest response came an invitation to the World Inclusion Congress as a keynote speaker. From that came IFIP Fellowship. From that came BETT Show London and three Global Inclusion Awards, and colleagues and families and educators across the globe doing this work from their own corners of the world.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Every robot assembled from broken motorbike parts, every peppermint used as a counter, every child held with care — all of it was preparation. And when the opportunity arrived, I was ready.
Notice too — it began with a relationship. It always begins with a relationship. The relational safety of last week’s pillar is what made this week’s movement possible. R underpins A. The ground makes the movement possible. And the movement — all that adapting, building, walking, making — eventually asks something of the body that must be answered. Something that next week’s pillar begins to address.
Adaptability is not a personality trait. It is a capacity. Built in the gap, refined under pressure, expressed most fully when the relationship with yourself is strong enough to trust. The most democratic thing a person can do is refuse to accept a life that does not fit them — and build, from whatever is available, one that does.
Have courage in your conviction. Back yourself in the room.
🌻 J.