19: ADHD? Be kind to yourself! Compassion counseling time! The dopamine will come!

 

ADHD Self Compassion (Transcript)

 

Katie  00:00

In this episode, we're gonna talk about how you as the ADHD entrepreneur need to have more compassion for yourself.

 

Katie  00:16

So today, we're going to talk about something that is so difficult for people with ADHD to do. And what I'm talking about here is having self compassion. It is the absolute hardest thing for people with ADHD to access for themselves.

 

Now, the reason being is that we have been told, either verbally or non verbally throughout our whole lives, that we are a fuckup we're doing it wrong, we're not paying attention well enough, we're paying attention in the wrong thing. This isn't good enough. Oh, like you spent too much time on this move on now.

 

And what happens to us throughout a whole childhood and young adult life of hearing this is that we start talking to ourselves that way. We start talking to ourselves, like our second grade teacher who had a problem with the fact that we weren't paying attention at storytime. We started talking to ourselves, like our first boss, who didn't understand why we got totally obsessed with that one assignment that they gave us and didn't move on to the next task that we had on our plate.

How I internalise this for myself, I was really bad with deadlines that I didn't care about growing up. I think I've shared previously, like the amount of times that I missed the deadline for a paper, either because I just like planned forgot that the paper was due, or the topic of the paper that was assigned to me didn't interest me at all.

 

And I literally couldn't bring myself to just start working on it. Now, how that has translated for me is I punished myself to no end around self imposed arbitrary deadlines. You can talk to any of my team who works with me on these deadlines, I will set them, I will miss them, I will punish myself for it. And then I will avoid even working on it because it's already associated with failure.

 

And if you're curious about how you can help your team help you better in regards to deadlines and getting things done, you're going to want to go and listen to episode four. But here's the complete mindfuck that makes self compassion so impossible for ADHD people. We have never ending compassion for other people who missed deadlines, because we understand what that's like. We have never ending compassion for other people who screw something up on the first try or who don't get it right, or who struggled to put all the pieces of the instructions together.

 

Because we've been there. And yet we hold ourselves to a higher standard. We hold ourselves to the standard of Well, other people are allowed to screw up here, but I'm not I have to be better. And I'm convinced that this comes from us having to overcompensate in so many ways to be able to function within systems that do not work for us. I'm talking about traditional schooling, I'm talking about traditional jobs. So I live across the street from a school. It's a public school in Philadelphia, and I was walking past their playground the other day I was walking my dog, and the kids are all lined up in the playground, it was recess for them. And there was one teacher who is absolutely losing her shit at them.

 

She's screaming at the top of her lungs, telling them that and apparently and I don't know how they set up their recess. But apparently they set up the recess so that there are different zones, like the basketball zone is the only place where basketballs are allowed.

 

The Hula Hoop zone is the only place where hula hoops are allowed. The football zone is the only place where footballs are allowed. And this is just what I have extrapolated from this one screaming session. She had it the children, right. So she's screaming at this group of fourth graders, because they kept crossing zones. She's screaming at them for how they were playing a little aggressively and I understand you want everyone to be safe. But as I walked past the scene, my heart broke for each and every one of them a little bit. Because you had a group of kids who obviously so desperately needed recess because they had so much energy that they had to get out that they weren't able to follow the rules. Exactly. And here they were not only being chastised, but being screamed at by an adult who was completely emotionally unregulated at that moment. And I can also empathise with this teacher

 

She's probably told them over and over and over again what the rules are, and wanted them to play by the rules for their own safety. And here we are. It's February school started in September. Been a long time this, I get her, I understand that she feels like these kids should know the rules now. But my ADHD self, my inner child, watch this, and watch her threatening to take away recess for the rest of the week. And that, Oh, my God, these kids aren't going to make it. These kids are having their spirits squashed. They're being told so early, that if they don't follow specific rules about how they just play, rights are going to be taken away from them, then things that they need for their own mental health breaks are going to be taken away from them. And I know you if you have ADHD, and you're listening to this, you're probably flashing back to every single time, a teacher or an adult did this to you and your child, being called out in front of your entire class for not paying attention. being yelled at for not finishing an assignment on time being made to be a spectacle, because you did it wrong because you misunderstood the instructions. Or couldn't pay attention to the instructions because the person giving the instructions was really boring about it.

 

06:23

Let's be real that happens.

 

Katie  06:24

And so what happens as we grow up, and as we become adults, and as we break away from systems like this, from work environments like this to start our own businesses. When we don't have people berating us like that, we start doing it to ourselves. How this can show up is an extreme level of perfectionism. It can show up also as overworking yourself, because you're expecting yourself to accomplish so much in a single day. And it can lead to an incredible amount of burnout. And you're probably listening to this and thinking, well, Katie, I function really well, when I have a deadline. I want things to be a certain level of quality.

 

I want them to be perfect. I have a lot of things that I have to do. Are you telling me I shouldn't be doing it? And that's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that how you work is going to be better, you're going to be more effective, more impactful and more productive when you're actually being nice to yourself and not being an asshole about it. Because let's talk about those kids in the playground again, let's talk about how they probably went back to class, not feeling happy, not feeling refreshed, not feeling like they'd had a proper break, but in a state of fear in a state of fear that they might get in trouble of what are they going to tell their parents if they got written up by this teacher? Of oh my gosh, like we're not going to have recess for the next few days. What a disappointment. There's going to be a lot of shame circling in their little systems, they're not going to learn for the rest of the day. Have you ever tried to learn something new when you've had a shitty day? It just doesn't work.

 

Your emotions just don't let those new pieces of information in. And in contrast, when you're laughing and you're having fun, and you're enjoying yourself, and you feel safe and supported by your environment, how much more do you learn in those environments? I've talked about her before, and I will mention her again. Miss Blanchard, my French teacher in high school, she had this beautiful way of making the class fun teaching really stupid things like verb conjugations. You know, I'll never forget her teaching our class, the imperfect tense. Because she made it fun. She found a way of making the imperfect tense of the French language fun. That is a skill, my friends. And also I will never forget it. Right? I absorbed so that information so much more deeply. Because she made it fun, then I really learned anything else. Yes, I know you're driven by deadlines. And it doesn't mean you you're not being an absolute yourself doesn't mean you're not going to still have deadlines. It just means you're not going to be in school to yourself. And also, let's look at the root of the problem there. If you're constantly setting deadlines for yourself and missing them, that tells me that you're actually holding yourself to an unrealistic standard of work. You're probably just really bad at guesstimating how long things are going to take. This is ultimately what I have to face in my life. You're basically my therapist right now. So let me just talk through it. Okay, so what I end up doing, I think that I can accomplish way more in a single day than I actually can. Right? I will very often be on a call with my COO Rhi and explain all the things that I have to do. And all the things that are on my calendar for the day and say, Oh yeah, I can get all this done. She'll look at me through the zoom camera and be like, really? Are you sure? I will? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, you can expect this by tomorrow. And then a week later, she's like, so no rush, no rush. This isn't a hard deadline.

 

10:14

But um, that thing that we talked about last week that you said you'd get done by last Tuesday. How's that going?

 

Katie  10:21

And I'll have to reckon with Oh my god. Yeah, like I was over ambitious. I tried to get too much into my day. And it's not done yet. Me punishing myself for not being done. It's just going to make me more avoidant of that task. Whereas me looking at that, just seeing it as data Wow, okay, cool. If I have four client calls, and two sales calls in a day, and I also have to do a tonne of creative work, the creative work is just not going to happen, I'm going to be tapped at the end of the day, it becomes more of a question of how do I better schedule my time, rather than I suck, we're going to have a suck fast, or talk about all the ways in which I suck, and I'm terrible at my job.

 

And then we're going to doom scroll on social media, while in the back of my mind thinking about how I'm going to crash and burn my life. Right? Me just looking at my schedule and thinking, okay, how can I rework this to work better, for me is such a better place to be than the downward spiral, Katie. So here's what I want you to do. Instead of punishing yourself for missing deadlines, I want you to see this as an iterative process for you learning how you work best, and how you schedule your time best. I want to talk about cars for a second. I know nothing about cars. But I do know one thing, the very first car that was created was not perfect. The second car that was created was not perfect. Today, you can't go out and find a perfect car.

 

Each and every car has ways that it could be better. It could be better. And it depends on who it's for also, right, there's never going to be a perfect car, because there will always be ways that you can improve it, you managing your time is the same way, you're never going to do it perfectly. And also, it's never going to stay the same for you. Because as a person with ADHD, we thrive instructors, but we also suck at creating them for ourselves. And sometimes we'll go through a structure of how we manage our time and we'll work for a while and then we just get bored of it. And then we have to innovate, we have to find a new way that works for us. So we'll actually be able to stick to what you need to stop getting hung up on is oh my god, I used to do it perfectly. I used to manage my time in this way. And I have to go back to that. Because if you have ADHD, I'm sorry, honey, you're never going to be able to go back. Okay? It's like the people from the Titanic, they can't get back on the boat, I'm sorry, it sunk, it's gone. You try to get back on the boat, it's not going to work out well. So this is an iterative process, it's going to change over time. And you have to look at it as an iterative process that will change over time. There's no other way that will serve you. Next, I want to talk about perfectionism. So I'm going to use an example from my own coaching business. And I've changed the details of this, you won't actually know who this is. I'm not outing my clients in this way without anonymizing it, okay. I have this client who started working with me about two and a half years ago. And she came to me and one of the first things on her agenda was that she needed to start a website for her business. And this website, she really wanted to be polished and professional. And she wouldn't have, you know, a proper copywriter do all the copy for it. And she wanted someone to build the website for her.

 

So I introduced her to a trusted friend and colleague who I know is really good at building websites. They contracted together, they started working together, this website was more or less ready to go within six months, it was a little bit of a process because you know, she was busy. And she had to get more details to the website developer, were two and a half years later, and she still hasn't hit publish. On that website. That website exists in secret. Because she constantly wants to go and tweak this and tweak that because she wants it to be perfect. And I know this client is probably going to hear this so high. This is your sign to go hit publish. But this is what perfectionism can do to us. It can hold us back from being known out there in the world. It can hold us back from confidently being able to say, hey, I have this badass website, go check it out. If you want to learn more about my services. If you're being a perfectionist about your social media posts, guess what? You're never going to post anything. It's just not going to happen. If you're being a perfectionist about a webinar, you want to host Guess what? You're never going to host the webinar, right because we only get good at stuff after we've done it a gazillion times. Seems you're not gonna get good at posting on social media and getting clients that way until you've done it a bunch of times, until you've written something, put it out there in the world, seen if anyone resonated with it, and then learned and iterated for your next post, I had this mentor a long time ago, I forget who it was, they told me that marketing always works, right. So you can post something. And it will always work for marketing, it will either get you clients get you attention, get you engagement, or it'll fall flat.

 

So the marketing always works in that you learn cool, I need to do more of this. And I need to never do that again. So as you are putting yourself out there, as you are realising that you're getting super crunchy about wanting things to be perfect, I want you to remember that things will only get incrementally better, the more you do them. I recently just went through and audited my last two and a half years of LinkedIn posts. And let me tell you, this is one of the most humbling painful experiences I've ever done in my business. Because I had to go back and reread what Katie, two and a half years ago, thought was interesting. I had to go back and reread how I structured my writing back then I didn't realise how much my writing has improved over two and a half years. Until I went back and read my writing from two and a half years ago, I never would have gotten to the level of quality that I met. Now, I'm not calling myself perfect. I'm not calling myself on par with a copywriter by any means. But I never would have gotten here, if I hadn't started there. I never would have learned what worked for me to get clients on social media unless I had started there and just tried something. So wherever you are being a dickhead to yourself, and holding yourself to the standard of perfectionism, I want you to stop, I want you to look at it as a learning opportunity. Whatever it is that you want to try whatever it is that you're worried to hit publish on, know that it's going to work, it's either going to work and get your clients are, it's gonna work, and you're gonna know not to do that again. And that's perfect. Throughout my 20s, I had a bunch of different careers, I don't see any of them as a mistake, because I had to do it to realise I don't want to do this. And it's no different in your business. And it's no different in your life. And it's a hell of a lot easier when you're nice to yourself about it. Now, finally, I want to get to your to do list and how you're probably overpacking it and you're expecting yourself to do way more than is realistic for you to do. This thing actually comes from those magical days where we start, like really just feel inspired. Right, we start, we wake up early, and we start working at seven and all of a sudden, it's lunchtime, we haven't eaten, then we have lunch. And then we have another idea. And then we start working like at 1215 Right after we finished our sandwich. And all of a sudden it's 9pm. We've worked all day. And we've gotten so much done. And we've come up with creative ideas. We've started a whole programme, we maybe got three clients, like whatever it is that we had on our to do list for that day. Like it was just a magical experience. Now, because we experienced these days, we think, Oh cool. If I can do that one day, I should be able to do that every day. We forget that the day after that day, we're usually completely exhausted. We have a work hangover from those days that we literally have to recover from. We blow our load of dopamine on those days. And the next day, we have to rebuild it. And sometimes the day after that we still have to rebuild it. So when we're looking at our to do list and thinking, Yeah, I can do 75% of this no problem today, we're holding ourselves to that magical day standard when really just a normal day. So here's what I actually do with my one on one clients. And actually everyone who's in any of my programmes has access to this. So every single Monday, I do a get organised sprint. And in this sprint, I basically have everyone arrive and I have them go on mute, I set a timer for 10 minutes. And in those 10 minutes, they have to do a brain dump of every single thing that's floating around in their brains that they have to get done for the week. Or in just in general. They then in the final few minutes of these 10 minutes, they have to pick the three things that they have to do that day. These are the most important critical things that they have to get done that day, that Monday, then they have to pick the three non negotiables for the whole week. After this 10 minutes is out, they come off of mute and then they share what it is that they're wanting to accomplish that day and for the week. And if they want to come to my brave face labs column Friday and have some accountability, then they get to do that as well. But one of the things that I do with this call is we always start with forgiveness. We always start for forgiveness over the things that we said we were gonna do last week, but didn't get you. Because when those things are hanging over us as stuff that we missed, or we didn't get to, or it's already late, we actually don't get any dopamine from doing them.

 

Katie  20:15

But when we forgive ourselves, and we just added to list fresh, and it becomes a new task for us, we actually do give ourselves that dopamine when we get it accomplished. Now, this list that they've made on Mondays, the instructions are if it's helpful to them, to go back to it every single day and pull three new things every single day that they can do. If you have ADHD, and you tend to be over ambitious on what you can accomplish in a day, I highly recommend this method, because three things is way easier to do than 17. And let me tell you, what I often find when I do this for myself, is that once I finished, like at least two of those things, I have enough dopamine to get that third thing done. And then I'm looking at the list and thinking, okay, cool, I have enough dopamine to do more stuff. Now, what else can I accomplish. And I usually get more than three things done. But I only get more than three things done on the days where I only give myself those three things. I know being a person with ADHD is really weird. And at the end of the day, if you find yourself getting into this negative spiral and talking to yourself, like you're the biggest loser and you can't do anything, I want you to literally sit down and write a letter to your best friend using all the words that you're using against yourself. Now chances are, if you actually were to send this letter to your best friend, they would no longer even be your friend, much less your best friend, they would probably ended that relationship, they would burn any gift that you've ever given them. And they would start bad mouthing you all around town because you're a massive dickwad. And of course, like changing how you think about yourself doesn't happen overnight. But once you start realising how much meaner you are to yourself than you are to other people, it really is a wake up call for you to be kinder. And just like you managing your time and you getting better at things rather than holding yourself to that standard of being perfect. This is an iterative process, okay, you learning what kinds of things you can accomplish in a day is going to be a lifelong journey. It's not something you're gonna workout in one week, I coach on this. And every week, I learned something more about myself about what I can accomplish in a day. I also learn how I need to be held accountable to different things to support me being kind to myself, rather than punish myself over things. And of course, as with all the advice that I ever give on this podcast, this is not prescriptive, this is just an idea. Go with it, make it your own, change it, evolve it and evolve it into a way that works really well from you. I would love for you to go to weaning cast.com. And leave me a voice note explaining how you do this. One of the things that those of us with ADHD struggle with it. Sometimes we hear advice from other people. And we think okay, cool. That's the advice. These are the instructions. I have to go and do it exactly that way to be able to do it correctly. And then we go and we try it exactly that way. And it doesn't work for us. And then we're like, Okay, well, this doesn't work. And we just throw it out. When really when we give ourselves the permission to be like, cool. This is how they told me to do it. I like this element of it. Not crazy about that. But I don't think that's going to work for me. I'll try it once. Cool. Yep, I was right, that one element just didn't work for me. I'm going to change it to this thing and see if that works. And if that works great. And if it doesn't, okay, cool. That didn't work either. I'm going to change it to this thing. Now. This is an element of being kinder to ourselves, we're giving ourselves leeway to have some say, in the instructions that we're following. I want to talk about those kids on the playground again. Maybe if that teacher had redesigned with them what the zones should be or what the rules could be, maybe would have worked better for everyone rather than her holding so rigidly to the rules and how they were breaking the rules pool or the rules just not helpful. Or the rules making it harder for them to have a good time and actually blow off some steam so they can be better students when they go back into the building. Maybe the rules actually need to change and not the kids behaviours. It's the same when you are trying to figure out how you work best. So full permission to say the rules. I'm going to make up my own rules. And they're going to work really well for me because there is no right answer in anything that we do. There's only right for you and if you want to hear more about this then go ahead and listen to episode two where I talk all about time management and your team.

 

 

 

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