11: ADHD? Never compare yourself to others. Even future you!

 Are you beyond sick of the complete mind f*ck that happens when you're constantly comparing yourself to your potential rather than celebrating who you actually are? Then this is the episode for you.

Let me start this episode off by introducing you to someone that you may not have met yet. So there's ideal Katie. Ideal Katie McManus is an incredible woman.

She's gorgeous. She works out every single morning at 05:00 a.m..

She does weightlifting, and then she goes for a run. She then comes back and has a very healthy breakfast.

She reads the New York Times that she has delivered to her house religiously. She is so up to date on current events, she doesn't get any of her news from Facebook or social media.

She has a religious routine for posting on social media. She gets ready every single day by taking a shower, actually doing her hair and makeup. She picks out an honest to goodness outfit every single day and doesn't just wear the same old leggings and sweatshirts for her work day.

She's organized enough to have a schedule of plans with various friends that she is consistent about seeing throughout each month.

And she also makes time to read all the books that she buys at the bookstores on the weekends. She meil plans. She goes to the grocery store knowing exactly what she's going to buy and doesn't buy anything except for what's on the list. She never forgets anything at the grocery store, and she never has to go back. She always plans her time out perfectly throughout the day. So she has just the right amount of time to cook her dinner and to meal prep for her lunches for the following few days.

She even builds it into her schedule to go to the dog park with her dog for an hour every single day and does a solid half hour of training with her mischievous sheepadoodle every single day.

She never goes to bed late because she got stuck death scrolling on social media or because a new show was released on Netflix and she has to watch every single episode the day it comes out.

And her apartment is always clean and tidy, and she actually folds her clothes and puts them away after she washes them.

She is a superwoman.

She also doesn't exist.

Now, who I just introduced you to is the version of Katie that I compare myself to every single day.

And every single person with ADHD has some variation of this for themselves.

We go through our lives being told what our potential is, how smart we are, if we just applied ourselves a little bit more and if we were better organized, how we could really put that into use and really change the world.

We're constantly reminded of our creativity. And then we also have to reckon with our inability to finish most projects that we start.

But what if we were able to finish those projects?

What if we were organized enough to have this idealized life that we've built up in our heads.

A lot of my clients who come to work with me, they're building a business, and they're building this business in the shadow of this idealized version of themselves that they're playing out in their head.

It's really a massive mind f*ck when you're trying to do something that is so brave and so outside your comfort zone already, and yet you're already feeling like you're seven years behind that idealized version of yourself who already did it. And it was super simple for them.

Where does this come from? So, for instance, idealized Katie already has a multimillion dollar a year company. She's already supporting 30,000 people a year in starting their businesses. She's basically better than memory Marie Forleo and has better hair. I'm not hating on you Marie.

I love you. I think you're amazing.

But here's the problem with living your life in the shadow of a person who is so perfect and also doesn't exist is that you never feel good enough in what you're accomplishing.

If you're constantly comparing yourself to this idealized, impossible version of yourself, are you really going to celebrate when you hit that first six figures in your business?

Are you really going to celebrate when you finally reach 1000 followers on Instagram?

And what about your first paid speaking gig?

When you're standing on stage in front of 200 people, you're going to be comparing yourself to the perfect version of yourself who's standing on a stage in front of 30 million people.

I mean, that would be a massive stadium. I don't know if it exists, but also it's in the world where your idealized person exists. So if neither one of them exists and that's a perfect pairing.

So where does this idealized version of yourself come from?

Now, there's a whole basis for where it's created in your childhood, being told that if you just applied yourself a little bit more or if you were a little bit more organized, or if you just did things on time and submitted them by the due date, then you'd get better grades.

So, yes, we're going to get into that. But let's talk about our understanding of how work is done.

That is the disconnect that creates this idealized version of ourselves. In our brains, ADHD people do not do work the way neurotypical people do. Growing up, I never understood how my neurotypical friend Sarah could chip away at a book report over three weeks and have it done four days before the deadline. For her, it was, I'm going to do 45 minutes of work on this every single day until it's complete and I don't have to stress about it.

She was able to turn her brain on for that task for 45 minutes a day so that it didn't become a massive, insurmountable, stressful thing, whereas for me, I had to wait until the day before, binge read that book and stay up all night writing something to pass in the next day. For me, the work couldn't happen until it became an emergency. For me, I couldn't get into doing the work when it wasn't pressing enough. But also we got the same grade, which I know drove her absolutely nuts.

How people with ADHD do work is we do things at about 200%, so we don't just chip away at projects. We sit down and we do that project in one sitting, no matter how massive it is, no matter if it's a two page research paper or a 30 page research paper, all of which, by the way, I have written in one night before the deadline, and I got pretty good grades on them also.

So someone with ADHD can sit down and do a 13 page research paper in one night and still get an A minus from it. They don't see that as their unique way of doing the work. They start thinking, okay, cool. Well, what if I could do this all the time? What if instead of like that friend Sarah who's chipping away at something 45 minutes a day for three weeks, what if I just did this level of work every single day of my life? Think of the things that you could accomplish. Think of the projects you could tackle. If an ADHD person could control that and do that level of work for just the first month of the school year, they would blast through all of their schoolwork for the entire year. There would be no need to do any work for the rest of the year.

The bit that we jump over, however, is that taking action like the actual writing of the paper, is not the only work that we do.

Where the neurotypical Sarah, the work that she was doing was that 45 minutes a day on her book report, the ADHD Katie was spending a good 3 hours a day doing other tasks, but actively thinking about what she wanted to do. ADHD Katie hadn't read the book yet, but she knew the general premise and she knew the themes and she knew the characters because they were well known in literature and was playing out how she wanted to approach the work before she started the work.

Folks with ADHD, we get a lot of slack and we get criticized for being lazy and for procrastinating.

But here's where that's a mistake.

We're not actually procrastinating.

It looks like we're procrastinating, but what we're actually doing is we're doing the work in our heads dozens of times before we actually do the work in real life.

We're playing out how it's going to go. We're trying out different arguments. We're playing around with different ideas and different ways we can approach a problem. I honestly believe this is one of the reasons why people with ADHD make the best lawyers. Because they're so trained accidentally, just IPSO facto, from having ADHD to try out different scenarios in their heads that they are naturally inclined to winning arguments, because they have been trying on different arguments and playing out how things go all their lives without realizing it.

So as someone with ADHD, I know it's tempting to hold yourself to the standard of doing that 200% of work and to do that every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, for the rest of your life, and to eventually catch up to that idealized version of yourself. But you need to recognize that the way you do work is just different than neurotypical people.

One of the biggest challenges for folks with ADHD is we don't see ourselves as consistent.

We see other people having consistent routines and consistent schedules and we think, oh wow, their lives must just run so much better than ours because I can't stick to a consistent schedule to save my life. What would be possible for me if I could consistently do the work that I say I'm going to do?

But for us, the way we do work is just so different. We can't do that every single day. If we did that every single day, I think we would all just die. Because here's the thing. When you sit down to write a paper in one sitting, you don't eat healthy, you don't sleep. You probably forget to pee. You also forget to drink water, which helps with the not peeing, and it takes you three or four days to recover from that.

Also, we have to go through that creative process of quote unquote procrastination.

And I wish we'd come up with a better name for that, because it's not procrastinating the way that we do it.

It's seen as procrastinating because we're not actively working on the task, but we are internally working on the task. It's almost like that movie Inception where you build like this dreamscape and you go and you act out in it and you try on different things and you create a whole world in which this thing is real, but it's not actually happening in the real world. It's all happening in our minds.

So let's get back to the absolute mindf*ck of comparing yourself constantly to the idealized version of yourself. So here's what you're actually doing. You're comparing yourself to neurotypicals if they could work like an ADHD person, and because you can never be that, what ultimately happens is you think that there's something inherently wrong with you. Because no matter how hard you try, no matter how many schedules you draw up, no matter how many cups of coffee you have, you can never force yourself to be that person.

And you see neurotypicals be able to say that they're going to do something, go and do the thing within the timeline that they suggested that they should be able to do it in and then not punish themselves for it being late. And you think, oh my God, if only I could be that person. If only I could say, oh, here I have this great idea of this thing, and then actually go and do it, and not only do it, but complete it. And the fact that you can't do it that way, you then make mean something bad about yourself, that you're broken, that there's something wrong with you, that you're never going to reach your potential because you can't just can't get your together.

What we're really talking about here is self acceptance. And sure, love your body for what it looks like, love your personality for what it is, but love how you do work for it being uniquely you.

We're raised in a society that tells us our worth is based on what we accomplish when our minds are making up, that we could accomplish so much more if only we were different. What that equates to is we would be worth so much more as a human being if we were just slightly different.

And let me tell you, you don't need that. You are fine just the way you are. You're more than fine. You are worth every bit as much as a neurotypical. You are worth every bit as much as the idealized version of yourself in your mind. There's no comparing.

There is this post I saw on LinkedIn last night that I thought was great. There was this girl who went to a party and she saw little mini cheesecakes, and so she grabbed one off the tray and she took a bite. And she turned to someone. She was like, oh my God, this is the worst cheesecake I've ever had in my life. And the person she was talking to was like, oh, well, that's probably because that's a quiche, not a cheesecake. And then she took another bite. She was like, oh, well, for a quiche. This is delicious. And she went on to share that she now has this mantra that if people don't understand her and her value, then she says, oh, well, they just don't understand that I'm a quiche. And I love that.

And so I just want to leave that with you today, is that if people aren't valuing you for who you are, it's just that they don't understand that you're not cheesecake. You are a quiche, and you're a spectacular quiche.

So here's where this complete mindf*ck can get in the way of you actually doing everything that you should be doing in your business to make it successful, is if you're constantly comparing yourself to this idealized version of yourself, who's super successful, who does all the things, who's fearless, who does all the uncomfortable bits in your business, and yet you're still stuck on one little part. Say you've been meaning to launch, like, a digital course forever, and you've been putting it off and putting it off because you're just nervous of putting something out there that people may be able to reject without you even seeing. And why should you even bother if you're not going to do everything that your idealized version of yourself should have already done by now? If you're stuck in that little vortex of shoulda, coulda, woulda if I were perfect, then I want to invite you to a community that will call you on your bullshit and also love the hell out of you. Because they understand. Because we're all ADHD-preneurs in this group. This community is hosted on mighty networks. We have a group call on the first Wednesday of every month. And if you wanted to join us, the link is weeniecast.com/members.

The link is also in the show notes.

And PS, you'll get some exclusive podcast episodes that I don't release here because they're way too valuable.