17: ADHD past lives - 'childhood trauma' in adults

ADHD past lives (Transcript)

Those formative years as an ADHD entrepreneur

[00:00:00] It's time for us to visit our ADHD past lives. Get ready for the ADHD seance. Ooh.

So today we are going to talk about ADHD past lives, and I'm not talking about how past life you got burned at the stake or how you were a pirate, or how maybe you were in Cleopatra's servant team that carried her around the Nile. What I'm talking about, Is all the different chapters of this life that you have lived.

Now I can say from personal experience as a former serial career jumper that I used to hold so much shame around how little time I would spend in each job we're brought up in the society that has normalized this model, even though it's [00:01:00] outdated, has normalized this model of you get a. You work there for 30 years while you're there, you climb the ladder and you're given a gold watch at the end of your 30 years as you retire.

Now, obviously that is not realistic anymore. No one is sticking with their company for that long, and yet, emotionally we haven't caught up to It's okay to not do that. So today we're gonna do a little thing on, we're gonna call on each one of your past. And we're gonna acknowledge everything that was wrong about those different chapters that pushed you into the next thing.

We're also going to talk about the unique set of skills that you've developed by jumping ship so many times. Because if there's one thing I know about folks with ADHD, we are fast learners. When we're excited about something and it's new to us, we dive all the way. We use our hyperfocus and we absorb [00:02:00] absolutely everything about that company, about that role, about the product, about the service.

We go whole hog, which means that we get really good at it really fast, and those skills never leave us. We carry them from one career to the next, which gives you a unique collection of skills and superpowers. So join me on a journey, friends, while we go back in. To 21 year old Katie McManus

So when I was in college, I was convinced that I wanted to be a French professor. I loved the French language. I'd had some really incredible French teachers, and I know I , I kind of shamed some bad teachers that I had in previous episodes, but let me share with you my two favorite French teachers that had a massive impact on my life.

Ms. Blanchard from Harwich High School was so [00:03:00] inspiring. She was one of those teachers at, in hindsight, looking back, she had a very ADHD friendly C. Because you'd arrive in her classroom and she would make small talk with the whole class. She would offer that transition time that folks with ADHD need whenever we're switching topics from one thing to another.

Whereas other teachers, you'd sit down and they'd start rambling at you about whatever the lecture was that day. She'd tell you a funny story. She'd ask you how your weekend was. Hey, you guys all seem pretty low energy. Are y'all tired? And you'd have this little talk and she'd ease you into it. And what was incredible is that we always learned so much more in her classes because she gave us this transition time, but she also made the French language seem so interesting and so much fun that I got addicted right away.

The next teacher I had was Madam Debower. She was a teacher at the local community college. [00:04:00] I, I spent my senior year of high school at the community college cuz I hated high school so much because besides Mrs. Blanchard's class, like it just wasn't set up for my success. . But anyway, so in that community college in Madam Deb Bower's class, you know, she again just made it so fun and she made it about travel and exploration and adventure, which you just can't accomplish with like, Or biology history, maybe if you're talented, but we didn't really have any of those

So I was fully convinced that I wanted to be a French professor and I wanted to be a French professor and not a French teacher because I knew that I would not be able to handle a class full of children or teenagers. It just wasn't gonna be the right fit for me. It wasn't gonna work. And then my French professor advisor told me how little French professors actually.

And I changed my mind. So then I went on the Google machine and I looked up another thing that I was really passionate about, [00:05:00] wine.

And I looked up the jobs that you could have in wine. And there were two that came up, winemaker, which had a lot of like farming and chemistry and shit that I was not interested in. And this thing called a sommelier. And I had never heard of a sommelier before. But I read the description. I was like, great, that's me.

So boom. Like I went to a training school to become a sommelier and worked in the wine industry for a couple years, but then I got bored. I got bored of the conversation about wine. And to this day, I'm still bored of the conversation about wine. If you ever come across me and you wanna talk about wine, go and talk to someone else.

I have no interest in talking about wine to the point that I actually won't date anyone who's a sommelier, who's interested in wine. Just can't do it. Just can't do. So from being a sommelier, I was kind of this lost soul for about six months. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had like seven jobs in this time cuz I still had to pay the bills.

And I was [00:06:00] doing sales for a video production company. I was modeling, I was acting, I was teaching knitting classes. I still worked at this wine shop and at a little wine bar that were associated with each other. And I think at that point I was also nannying a couple days a. I was doing so much. Oh, and I also worked at a gym.

I worked at a high-end fitness club in San Francisco, so I was doing all these things and I was talking to one of the people at this fitness club who was the regional director of sales, and he heard that I was work doing sales for a video production company. He said, you know what, we're opening up a new club and I'm looking for new sales staff.

I would love, I'd love to interview you. And I was like, oh, I kind of hemmed and hod about it. And then one of the, the sales associates at that club, Jessica, who is now my best friend, came out and I told her about Ray inviting me to interview and she said, [00:07:00] please do it. You'd be phenomenal. I'm going to that club.

So is this other person. It's gonna be an incredible team.

And so I kind of just went for it and I interviewed and got the job and I worked in the fitness industry for about two years. By the way, doesn't matter how fancy your gym is, people always poop in the showers, women and men. Okay, so if you're going into our fancy gym and you're thinking, I don't have to wear like shower sandals or shower crocs.

Yes you do. People are disgusting. And if you're a shower pooper, stop it. These clubs do not pay their maintenance staff enough money to make it worth cleaning up after you. Is that too crude? My mom is gonna hate this episode. She hated me talking about Luna farting. They have to warn. After a couple years of working in the fitness [00:08:00] industry, I honestly just got bored with the conversation.

I just couldn't do it anymore, and so I moved to the solar industry, which is a complete jump. I was basically like the cable guy who came to your house and like assessed the electrical box and your roof. And I'd design a a system for you and tell you how much it would cost . I honestly had so much fun with it until again, I just got bored with the conversation and bored with how much I had to drive.

There were days where I had to drive like five hours a day. I got to the point where I was listening to so many books on tape. And podcasts that I was that person that when you bumped into me, I would just like throw facts at you that I had learned in all these books because I didn't know how to have conversations anymore.

It was really scary. So I worked in the solar industry [00:09:00] for about a year and a half, and again, I got bored and I got frustrated with a lot of the misogyny that was in that role just because of the type of industry it was. And so I.

And I became a manager of a yarn shop and I had so much fun with this and I worked there. I was really just an interim manager while they were finding a more permanent solution because their manager retired right before the holiday season and there was no way they could have done without someone. And I loved that job, honestly, if a yarn shop could afford to pay me a liveable wage

I would love to manage the yarn Shop for the rest of my life. It was the most fun job I've ever had in my life. And gay knitters. If you're a knitter and you listen to this podcast, I wanna meet you. Side note. I found out recently that Monica Lewinsky knits and anytime she's in a new city, she'll look up any of the yarn shops that are in that city [00:10:00] and she'll go to them.

And I am so bummed that in my time running that yarn shop, that she wasn't one of our customer. Like I just would love to meet her. Anyway, , so then the Iron Shop gig ended and I found a new role I was working in sales for at Security company. You may have heard it. Cisco Systems, it's massive. Worked there for a couple years and in that time a couple things happened.

I was in a car accident that gave me a massive concussion that I had to be off work for about eight months. And during that time off, I got trained as a coach because I figured. I'm not gonna do it now. I'm never gonna do it. And I had always secretly wanted to be a coach. Like one, like the common themes in all of the jobs that I've had were I wanted to help people.

I wanted to guide people, I wanted to teach them something. One of the reasons I was really good in sales is because I have this drive to help people and because I have this drive to help people, my clients always saw me as genuine because I was. [00:11:00] And we'd create these incredible relationships. Like I'm still friends with some of the people that I signed up at Equinox, that, which is the high-end fitness club that I worked at.

And then after I went back to work, I realized I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't have a conversation about internet security. I like, I had never found it interesting and I was never going to find it interesting. I literally went, we had this, this trip to North Carolina, to the headquarters there where I met some other team members.

We went to. And I was talking to my coworker who is fascinated with internet security, and I just didn't understand. I had no comprehension of how anyone could find it. Interesting. It just puzzled me. It was like she is an alien from another planet, and that was my sign and that's how I started my business.

let's go through. That was a lot of jumps. I literally went through. Eight different industries and I was really, [00:12:00] really lucky to be in San Francisco because in San Francisco it's normal for people to change jobs every year or two. Okay. It's a startup life and you generally don't stay with startups very long, cuz a lot of them don't last very long.

If I had been in the Midwest, if I had been in New England, this would have been looked down upon and it would've limited how many jobs I could have gotten in the future. So I come from new. . And so while the world wasn't treating me as if there was something wrong with me, I was looking at my resume and thinking, oh my God, like what's wrong with me?

That I'm jumping around so much and for ADHD printer who have had this kind of history, what we do is we tend to take all this evidence that we're job hoppers from the past, and then we look at our business and we're like, well, . Like, what if I do that here? What if I start this business and get bored with it three years?

What if I start this business and, you know, get a year in, make a lot of money, have all these clients relying on me, and then I [00:13:00] decide I don't wanna do it anymore. And when I work with clients who have ADHD who are building their business, this is why I stress that you have to pick a niche in an area that you are interested in that can have some variety.

This is why I love helping new business owners who provide a service because there are so many services that you could offer. There's so many different angles. I'm constantly learning stuff through my clients, and that's how it stays fresh for me. Now, let's also talk about. How sometimes when you have ADHD, you don't necessarily fit into the culture.

You don't necessarily fit into the micromanager that you have, into how they envision how you should be doing your job. And sometimes when you leave a job, it's not by your choice. I'm talking about getting fired. I'm talking about getting laid off. That is a traumatic event. It creates a lot of shame.

I've been fired from two jobs in my life. They were both restaurants and I think it's because I was just an [00:14:00] awful server. Like really? I was just really bad because I have adhd. Like you'd think that would make me really good at like managing a whole section of tables cuz like you can multitask and everything.

I would forget stuff all the time. Like the four people in my sections, granted the two businesses that I got fired from. They both were horribly managed , and the culture was really toxic. You know, it could have been them. It could have been me, who knows. But the shame that comes from having been fired is awful.

And we're doing this seance right now as I'm talking about my past careers. I hope you're looking back at your past careers and you're seeing how you ended and the theme and the meaning that you've created around all this jumping and what it means about. And what it means about your capabilities and your commitment and how others are going to see you as valuable.

And I wanna remind you that as humans, we are meaning [00:15:00] making machines. So we take a bunch of data, like you jump jobs a lot, and we turn it into this meaning that you can't stick with anything, that you are commitment fo, that you're not good in jobs. And maybe that's the truth. Maybe that last bit is the truth.

Maybe that's why you're starting a business. In fact, I'm convinced that's why so many business owners have adhd because we don't fit into the typical job criteria. We don't work like other people. We're creative and if you have a system where you just need people to plug in and do the shit that you need them to do and then leave.

That's not for us. We come in and we see the problems and we wanna fix them, and we wanna like rework the whole system and they don't want that. So whatever shame you're carrying from past lives as you're listening to this, I want you to take a big deep breath with me

and just let it go. [00:16:00] Let it go. That shame has no place in your. And next I wanna talk about the skills and the superpowers that you have accumulated from all these past jobs. Now, it may surprise you, but I'm convinced that the job that was most impactful to me being good at teaching my clients at teaching classes was working in the knitting shop, being a knitting teacher, managing that store.

Because when you're teaching eight different people, how. Take string and sticks and make fabric. You have to come up with a bunch of different ways to explain it cuz some people are gonna understand it by you explaining. Other people are gonna understand it by watching you do it. Other people actually need you to like put your arms around them and hold their hands and guide them to do it.

Other people need metaphors and you have to be able to jump in and out of each one of these ways of teaching within the space of 10 minutes cuz by the end of that [00:17:00] class everyone needs to have made. And that takes time. Also working in the hospitality industry, there's this bar for experience and I mean, they had bars.

Yes, but I mean like there's this expectation of like the quality of experience coming from the hospitality background. Like the superpower that gave me is that when I'm holding a group space, like I know how to make everyone feel welcome and comfortable. If I ever host an event, I know how to host it. I know what matters.

If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you're probably really good at identifying people who are unhappy but aren't saying anything. And that's a really valuable skill to have as a business owner. Now, one of the skills that I learned when I was working in internet security, cuz I had no interest in it, was how do you schedule a sales call with someone else without really giving any information because you actually don't know the information cuz you had no interest in ever learning.

Like you did kind of wanna learn it because you were convinced at the time that you wanted to [00:18:00] continue with this company, but ultimately, whenever anyone explained it to you, you just glazed over because your brain just shut down because it couldn't even pretend to be interested. That's a great skill to have when you're running your own business because it's so easy to be at a cocktail party and have someone say, Hey, like you're a business coach.

I'm starting a business. Can I ask you a few question? Now the typical way people handle that is, yeah, absolutely. Fire away, not me. I schedule a sales call. Oh yeah, absolutely. If you want more information, why don't we do this? We'll schedule a 30 minute call like I have this time and this time available tomorrow, which works best for you.

As I was going through this very jumpy career, I had no idea which direction I was going in, but I always, I always told my friends and family, I know I'm heading somewhere. I feel like I am on the verge of baking a cake, [00:19:00] but I'm not sure what kind of cake it's gonna be, and I have no idea what kinds of ingredients I need, but as I change jobs, as I go through life, I'm just collecting different ingredients and at some point I'm gonna look at the ingredients that I have collected and it's gonna click and I'm gonna know, oh, cool.

I'm making a double chocolate German. Whereas you might be making a cheesecake and someone else might be making an angel food cake. This reminds me of the episode where we were talking about that whole thing, like you're just a quiche. If people, people aren't interested in you, like they don't understand that you're a quiche, you know,

So this is one of those podcast episodes where I'm gonna give you some home. Because I actually want you to go and visit with each of your past lives, and I want you to ask yourself these two questions. Number one, [00:20:00] what shame am I carrying from this chapter of my life? And I want you to write it down.

And two, what's the skill or superpower that I got from this chapter of my. And I want you to write that down too. And I want you to do this for each and every chapter of your life. And it doesn't just have to be jobs. It could be relationships as well, it could be hobbies as well, because especially if you're at this beginning stage of, I know I wanna start a business, I don't know anything about what I wanna do.

I don't even know what the options are. Like do I even have any special skills that I could. This is gonna help you see exactly what your skillset is. It's gonna help you see exactly where you have credibility. Because even if you just worked in that job for one year, you have credibility in that industry.

Unless you are me like in internet security. And if you wanna freak your friends and family out, you can go into a room, shut the door, light some candles, and do it there, and just tell them you're doing a seance because [00:21:00] you are.

I invite you to join my weenie ADHD - preneur community, where you'll get all of the support from myself in a group of fellow ADHD - preneurs.

Go to weeniecast.com/members.

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