36: ADHD and authenticity: the power of using vulnerability online

Transcript for Authenticity Online: The Power of Vulnerability with ADHD
00:00:00
In this episode, I'm going to tell you why you absolutely need to share your imperfections on
social media.
00:00:14
One of the biggest challenges that I have to take a lot of my clients through is helping them get
over this idea that for them to go online and get clients and build their business, that they have
to be perfect because that is just not true. One of the best ways that you can build trust with
your potential and ideal clients is by outing yourself as the beautifully imperfect person that you
are. One of the platforms that I train a lot of my clients on is LinkedIn. And everyone thinks that
to get business on LinkedIn, you have to show up, and you have to be an expert, and you have
to use all the fancy words and you have to show people how smart you are. And how much you
know about what you do, when actually, that is the thing that is going to limit you the most.
00:01:02
Whenever you're showing up in a place where your ideal clients are hanging out, the goal is not
to show them how smart you are. It's to open the door for them to show up in your comments
and appear smart themselves. One of the best ways that you can do this is by going onto social
media and posting about the struggles that you encounter in your day-to-day life. Now, this
could be everything from you. That person who always forgets that you put your coffee on the
roof of your car and drives away, so much so that maybe the cement outside of your house is
stained brown because of all the coffee you've spilled there.
00:01:39
And perhaps even the sidewalk in front of your house has little chips of cement missing because
of all the metal-to-go coffee mugs that have gone flying from the top of your car and hit the
ground. Sharing about that level of imperfection is really relatable. It allows for people to feel like
they know you, like they would know a friend or a neighbour. Now, you can also out yourself for
bigger imperfections how you're screwing up in your business, your divorce struggles that
you've had with addiction in the past. Now, of course, everyone's terrified.
00:02:13
Well, if I share that stuff, it's going to scare people away from me. Good. You want to scare
people away from you. Thankfully, I've never struggled with addiction in my past, but if I had, I
know for damn certain I would not want to have a bunch of people as clients who would find out
potentially later down the line after. Hiring me, that I struggled with addiction at some point in my
life and then be like, whoa, I feel like this isn't a good fit, and back away from me.
00:02:42
Then I want to scare them away up front. A lot of folks who've grown up with ADHD, we have
this level of impostor syndrome that is just unheard of because we feel constantly like we're just
faking being good at stuff. We're faking having our shit together. Because there are so many
ways in which we have had to fake being neurotypical to pass as being okay and being one with
the rest of the class and being productive like the rest of our coworkers. And let me tell you, just
because you're not like everyone else doesn't mean that you're imperfect.
00:03:15
It doesn't mean that you're broken. It doesn't mean that you're faking it. There's that saying, fake
it till you make it. And people get all riled up when they hear it, because when they hear it, they
think of like, that con artist who's pretending competence, and they're going around saying that
they can do stuff, and then they outsource it or they figure it out on the fly and sometimes they
drop the ball. Now, for ADHD, that is not us.
00:03:38
We're not faking our competence, okay? We are faking confidence. The difference here is the P
and S. Wait, that's not how you spell confidence.
00:03:51
P E and F I. Right. How do you spell confidence? I don't even know how to spell this word.
Apparently, I'm over here talking about confidence all day long.
00:04:00
I don't even know confidence.
00:04:05
On my latest episode, I owned that I was literally having an ADHD meltdown in my business,
and I'm still in the process of coming back from that. So I'm actually recording this episode right
after the last episode where I owned that I'm in the middle of an ADHD meltdown. And let me tell
you, I would not feel comfortable owning that to all of you if I didn't know that you were a safe
place for this. And the reason I know that you are a safe place for this is because I have been
sharing my imperfect self for years, and I have never had a negative backlash. Every single time
I have shared personally about how imperfect I am, about how I'm screwing things up about all
this stuff, I not only get people sharing back with me how they struggle with the same thing, or
they have a loved one who did that once.
00:05:01
They wanted me to know that I was supported and cared about and all this stuff, these beautiful,
beautiful responses. But in some cases, I even get clients from it, right? Because the people
who I work with the best see that I'm not perfect, and it gives them permission to work with me
and not expect themselves to be perfect, right? That's the gift that you give your potential clients
when you show up and you show that you don't have it all together. You allow for them to not
have to be this idealized, perfect version of themselves when they work with you.
00:05:41
An interesting metric that my producer shared with me today is that the amount of outreach that
I get from you all DMs on Instagram, DMs on LinkedIn. Emails telling me about an episode that
really hit home for you. Or that you appreciate the podcast or that I normalize something for you.
That kind of outreach is absolutely unheard of in the podcasting world. Now, this blows my mind
because every single time I get a message from one of you and you tell me that you enjoy the
podcast or that it impacted you in some way, if you send me a message, you know, I respond
right back.
00:06:18
You know that I am so delighted that this podcast gets to be that for you. And I genuinely believe
it's because I come on here and I am not concerned with being perfect, and it gives you
permission to also not be perfect back at me. I want to bring this back to social media because
this is going to be so impactful for you in your business as you are putting yourself out there and
building your personal brand and marketing what it is that you do. Right? Usually, people think
that the biggest metric for success is how many likes and comments you get telling you how
brilliant you are and how much money you make on the back end.
00:06:55
Now, the last one is absolutely very important. You want to be getting clients from what you're
posting online. But when you're sharing personally, when you're sharing about how imperfect
you are, the goal is not to be told how perfect you are in the comments. The goal is to get other
people to share back. The goal is to tell the story about how much your grandmother meant to
you and the special bond you had and the funny little activities used to do with her when you
were a kid.
00:07:20
That meant so much. To you that you wish you had cherished more in the moment and to look
down in the comments and see everyone else also sharing about their grandmother. That is a
bond. When you're making friends with someone, you're not just sharing your resume at them
and having them be like, wow, you seem really confident at Excel spreadsheets. That's not a
friendship.
00:07:41
A friendship is, here's this fight I had with my mom once and, oh my God, we didn't talk for three
weeks. And them sharing back the difficulties that they have in their relationship with their
mother, that's where trust is built. When you're able to build that level of trust with people on the
Internet who are interacting with your brand and potentially becoming clients, that's when you
take people from not only being strangers on the Internet or followers to being actual friends and
whether or not they ever become your client. It is so much easier for someone to go from being
a friend of yours to a superfan who promotes you and refers business to you and celebrates you
than it is to take just a simple old follower who thinks you share some useful information from
time to time. And as I describe this, I want you to think about your best friend.
00:08:32
The person who you talk to the most, the person who you go to for advice. Are they perfect? I
want you to list like, the five ways in which they kind of suck. And yet if they have something
cool going on in their life, say they're a musician and they have a show or they've started selling
their art or maybe they started a business. I bet you are going to be the first person to go out
there and shout from the rooftop about how amazing they are and how everyone needs to go
and check them out because you are their friend.
00:09:04
You have so much trust and caring with them. You know more than just their resume. You know
more than what they're an expert at. You knowing the five-plus ways in which they kind of suck
doesn't take away from all the ways you know that they're incredible in what they do. Even if
you're not even the ideal client for them, even if you don't even like the type of music that they
make, you're still going to be a massive fan of theirs.
00:09:32
That's the power of going out onto social media, in your marketing, in your email list, and being
imperfect and just showing who you actually are and what you struggle with. And if you want to
start a podcast about it too, I highly recommend it. Now, the thing to just be really conscious of,
if you have ADHD especially, is that, oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep
listening to find out. But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
00:10:02
Now, the thing to just be really conscious of, if you have ADHD especially, is that you have
rejection sensitivity, dysphoria more likely than not. So sharing something super, super
vulnerable onto social media and potentially getting any backlash is going to feel super scary for
you. And that's okay. You don't actually have to share anything that's super vulnerable. Like I
said, you can share about how you regularly forget that you put your coffee on top of your car
and you drive away with it.
00:10:29
I used to do this with my lunch. I can't tell you how many times I would get to work and I'd be
looking for the Tupperware that I had, like, my leftovers from dinner the night before. And I'd
realize that I had put it on top of my car as I was putting my coffee in the car and putting my bag
in the car and forgotten about it. I lost so many Tupperwares in the parking lot of my apartment
building. I'm like, surprised the maintenance department didn't start ticketing me for littering
because I'd find them in the bushes.
00:11:01
After a while, they started disappearing on me. And I'm convinced that one of my neighbours
figured out that I was, like, dropping my really nice Tupperware somewhere and was like, cool,
free Tupperware. I'm just going to empty it out and throw it in the dishwasher. It's a very
expensive habit. But you can share something silly like that that people wouldn't know unless
they were friends with you.
00:11:19
And that still counts as something that will build trust, right? Because when I share something
silly like that, I imagine actually, I don't even imagine this. I know some of you were in your own
heads thinking that you did some version of that. Also, there's some mistake that you make very
often that maybe your friends kind of tease you for or maybe your family is relentless about.
This morning I was at my mom's house, and I walk into the room and she has all of the jars that
she has used that she has gotten product out of for like, the last five years on the kitchen table.
00:11:55
And she starts asking me, Katie, would you like some jars? And I was like, no, Mom, I'm good. I
don't need any jars. And she's like, Are you sure? Because this is a really good one, and this
other one is really good.
00:12:08
And I just have too many of them. I have to get rid of some of them, but I don't want them to go
to waste. Would you like some? And I literally I started videoing her. And I'm probably not going
to share this because she would murder me for this, but this is the kind of shit that I make fun of
my mom for.
00:12:22
And if she were to go onto social media and share about how her daughter makes fun of her for
saving jars, there would be so many people in the comments talking about the things that their
kids make fun of them for. It's not something that you're going to get massively rejected for, is
my point. You're allowed to share the light stuff as well and have that count. You don't have to
risk getting massively rejected by the whole world for sharing something that is super shameful
and close to you. Okay, so the very first author that I wrote when I started reading self-help
books was Brene Brown, Darren Greatly.
00:12:58
And she talks about building trust with people. She was talking about her daughter and how her
daughter came home from school one day and was heartbroken that one of her friends had told
a secret to the rest of the class. And she recounted how she had explained to her daughter that
building trust was kind of like collecting marbles. So, like, when someone shows you that they're
trustworthy, you put a marble in their jar. And as soon as you have enough marbles in that jar to
see, like, wow, there's a lot of evidence that someone is trustworthy with this, then you can start
sharing vulnerable information with them.
00:13:34
You get to do the same thing with your audience. You get to give them opportunities to show
that they are safe around one little topic and then another little topic and a slightly bigger topic
and then a slightly different topic. And you get to notice how they respond differently when you
share it differently. And you get to decide when your cutoff point is when something is too
personal, too vulnerable. You're not going to go there.
00:14:05
It's all within your control. Now, there may be some of you who have some real dark and twisty
stuff, and that's really the only thing that you think of when you think of sharing vulnerably. Like,
you don't have any goofy stuff that feels like the lighter version of this. And I just want to give
you full permission. You get to share any part of you that you want.
00:14:24
But I want to caution you, share the scars and not the wounds. There's this level of caretaking
that can show up in the comment section of your post when you're sharing something that is
obviously unhealed. Obviously unprocessed. And there's nothing more cringy than sharing
something vulnerably online and then getting a couple dozen DMs from people who are wellmeaning, but they're checking in on you like, oh, honey, are you okay? Do you need some
support right now?
00:14:56
Oh, God. Go away. It might have been Glenn Doyle. I think she was talking about someone who
has written a couple of memoirs and published them and no, it wasn't her. Who was it?
00:15:08
Okay, I'm the queen of referencing things that I don't remember who said it or in what context I
heard it. It was a TikTok. It was an article. It was in a book. Is it an audible book?
00:15:19
But somewhere I heard someone talk about the art of writing a memoir and how sometimes
people write memoirs and they write it to process all the feelings and then when they release it,
people actually can't read these books. They are literally transferring trauma through these
books. So they're sharing the wound and not the scar with you. You don't want to do that. You
don't want to do that for you because it's not going to feel good.
00:15:45
Like bearing your soul in that way to people who, if they react badly to it, it's going to impact you
further. Right? But that is your journal entry. If you have dark and twisty stuff, as they say in
Grey's Anatomy, then I urge you to start journaling about it. I urge you to start processing
through it with a therapist.
00:16:08
I urge you to start really delving into your own process of working through it. Because let me tell
you, as someone who shares her scars a lot online, there's nothing more gratifying than being
able to share something that used to activate you, used to trigger you so much. And sharing it
and not feeling anything about it, not feeling scared, not feeling hurt again, but also seeing
people show up in the comments and be like, oh, my God, thank you. I needed to hear that
there was another side to this. I needed to hear that this is just a temporary experience that I'm
going through right now and that on the other side, it won't be as heavy.
00:16:50
In a way, this podcast is that right? There are a lot of folks right now getting diagnosed with
ADHD for the first time later in life, and so they have lived their whole lives thinking that they are
broken in some way. And I'm so happy that I've created a space where I get to share. But you're
actually not broken. This is just how your brain works differently because it normalizes the
experience for them.
00:17:14
I wouldn't be able to do this podcast if I were still in that mindset of, wow, there must be
something wrong with right? This podcast is a scar and not a wound. Well, last episode was
kind of still a wound, but for the most part, we're sharing scars here.
00:17:33
And if you haven't listened to the last episode, I literally go into the current ADHD meltdown that
I'm experiencing in my business right now. I highly recommend it.
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