39: As ADHD entrepreneurs we need to STOP calling ourselves lazy!

Transcript for "Calling yourself lazy is never OK"
Transcription
00:00:00
Squirrel. In this episode, we're gonna talk about why calling yourself lazy is never okay.
Squirrel. Squirrel. Hi.
00:00:06
I'm Katie McManus. Business strategist and money mindset. Coach. And welcome to
the Weeniecast. Squirrel.
00:00:13
If there's one thing that everyone with ADHD has in common is that we have a gross
misunderstanding of the word lazy. This word gets thrown in us so much throughout our
childhood, our adolescence, our adulthood. We hear it from other people and we say it
to ourselves and it is fucked up. And we need to stop doing that because what we often
perceive as laziness in ourselves often is a whole slew of other things. And I'm going to
go through what they are in this episode.
00:00:51
Now, first and foremost, if you are not taking action on something that is different from
being lazy, oftentimes, laziness is the label that we slap on to other things like executive
dysfunction, needing rest or gear shifting. And I'm going to help you see the difference.
Now, we've all had that experience where we're sitting on our couch, we're doom
scrolling and we're watching all these reels or all these TikToks or maybe we're on
LinkedIn and we're like commenting and we're doing busy work. We're doing passive
stuff that we can tell ourselves as inspiration for what we're going to do next. We might
be engaging with our community, which ups the algorithm.
00:01:36
So if we do post something, they'll see it. But in the back of our mind, we know that
thing that we need to be doing, that we should be doing right now. And in our mind,
we're actually like working really hard at it. I did this for a solid hour yesterday. I had to
create a script for a video and I kept telling myself that I would just read one more
Buzzfeed article.
00:01:58
One more Buzzfeed article about actors who took a hiatus from acting or who quit the
industry completely. One more article about how peaches aren't good for you or
whatever. I don't know. Buzzfeed has the most ridiculous stuff. It's not useful
information.
00:02:12
I don't know why I need to fill my brain with it, except that it is a great delay tactic when
I'm in executive dysfunction. Now, here's the difference between being in executive
dysfunction and being lazy. Now, when you're in executive dysfunction, you want to do
the task. You are trying very hard to mentally make yourself do the task in your brain.
You're literally playing out the different steps that you have to take with doing the task,
but you still can't do the task.
00:02:48
Now, you might do things that other people might perceive as lazy, and you may even
perceive yourself as lazy for doing them. In that moment, I totally could have looked at
myself and been like, you're being such a lazy turd. Why are you sitting here reading
BuzzFeed articles when they don't move your business forward? You know exactly what
you need to do you're just being a lazy jerk and you're not doing it. But I don't do that to
myself anymore because I know the difference between executive dysfunction and
laziness.
00:03:18
When you are genuinely lazy, it's that you know what you have to do, but you don't care.
You know what you have to do and you are actively putting it off on purpose. Now, this
isn't saying that you're never lazy. I'm sure you are. I know I'm lazy in a lot of ways.
00:03:35
I'm lazy when it comes to laundry. I have mountains of clean laundry because I hate
folding laundry. I will be actively lazy about avoiding folding that laundry. I will spend the
next three weeks digging through these piles of clothes for the clothes that I need
instead of folding it. I have no desire to fold it.
00:03:54
It is just going to look that way and I'm okay with it. That we can slap the lazy label on.
But the stuff that we apply the lazy label to are usually the things that we genuinely do
want to do, especially in our businesses.
00:04:11
Now, executive dysfunction can happen for a whole slew of reasons. It could be that you
don't know how to do the thing. A really common thing for people with ADHD is we learn
really quickly and so we're used to being really good at stuff really quickly. And when
we're really good at something and we enjoy it, we have no problem getting up and
jumping right into it and getting into action and doing the thing. But when we don't know
how to do it and we don't know if we're going to be good at it and we don't know if we're
going to enjoy it, that's a lot of hurdles for us to overcome.
00:04:46
So if you're slapping the lazy label on yourself over not doing a thing that you've never
done before, or maybe it's your first time doing it, is it really you being lazy or is it you
not being confident at being good at it? Is there too big of a hurdle of you needing to
learn how to do it? That is a completely different thing from being lazy. I'll use this
podcast as an example. I tried to start a podcast years ago.
00:05:14
I talked to someone who gave me a very long to-do list, including using software on my
computer that I didn't know how to use. He gave me weird, complicated instructions that
I didn't fully understand, but I was too embarrassed that I didn't understand to actually
ask more questions about understanding. And I never did it. There's no podcast that I
started, like, never even recorded an episode, right? Nothing.
00:05:37
And the only reason I have an episode now is because I have this amazing producer in
my corner, Neal, who's blushing right now, who literally does all the things that I don't
know how to do and have no interest in learning how to do. For me, he's my hero. He's
my fairy godmother. He swooped in and saved the day.
00:06:00
Sometimes being lazy is actually just a sign that you're trying to do shit that you
shouldn't be doing. That's not a good use of your time or talents. Sometimes being lazy
is just a massive sign from the universe that, hey, you need to hire someone else to do
this for you. It's going to be way more productive if you hire someone else to do this for
you. Or you just need to hire someone who can train you how to do this.
00:06:27
Well, if you sense it's something that you're going to be passionate about, learning how
to do something is the first step to being confident in it. Now, if you don't know how to
ride a bicycle and I told you to just go and ride a bike, would you confidently be able to
hop on a bike and go for a bike ride? Probably not. You'd probably look at me sideways
and think like, what are you thinking? No, I'm going to fall, I'm going to die, get hit by a
car, I'm going to break my leg, I'm going to skin both knees, I'm going to smash my
head.
00:06:56
It's going to be a really bad afternoon if I go ride a bicycle right now. Katie, for me to tell
you to go ride a bicycle, you're going to have to learn how to ride the bicycle first to be
able to do it confidently. The same for dancing. I'm not a good dancer, okay? I know a
little bit about how to dance.
00:07:17
I took a ballroom dancing class in college. It was a bad story. I don't want to go into it.
But anyway, if you were to tell me to get up and dance in front of a bunch of people, I
would be highly uncomfortable doing that. I wouldn't feel confident in doing that.
00:07:32
Now, me sitting back and being like, Nah, I don't want to do it. You could absolutely
perceive that as lazy because it's in action. But it's genuinely that I don't feel I have
confidence in dancing. Now, there are a whole bunch of skills in your business that you
probably have no idea how to do. And you can either learn how to do them yourself or
you can hire someone to do it, but stop calling yourself lazy for not doing them.
00:07:57
It's not laziness, it's just ineptitude, which is also not great, but it's fixable.
00:08:07
Now, another reason why we may get kicked into executive dysfunction and be
perceived as lazy is we might actually just genuinely need some rest. Now, I'm
recording this podcast after working a 14 hour day yesterday. Now, I love what I do, and
everything I did yesterday, I was super excited about. It lit me up in all the different ways
that I love doing. And it's fine.
00:08:31
I'm not going to do that every single day. But some days when I work a 14 hours day in
my business, I'm doing stuff that I absolutely hate and it takes a ton more energy for me
to get through the whole day and get everything done. Now, the next day, I could
absolutely expect myself to just get up and at ‘em do another 14 hours day and just
suck it up and do it. But that's not realistic. On those days after you've had a big
dopamine expense day, it's unreasonable of you to expect yourself to have the same
energy levels.
00:09:10
And what we typically do is we assign ourselves everything that we didn't get done the
day before to that follow-up day. And when we sit in our bed, still in our towel from our
shower, with the TV on, desk scrolling on our phone, eyeing our computer, that's over in
the corner of the room that has all the work that we should be doing right now, but we
just can't get out of bed. And she's like, I'm cozy and it's kind of cold, so maybe I'll just
put the covers over while I'm in my towel and I have my wet hair and no, this is weird.
No one should know that I do this. And no, you need rest.
00:09:43
If you're literally laying in a towel on your bed at 10:00 in the morning after a day of
working 14 hours and you can't get yourself out of bed to go and do work, that's a big
sign that you need rest. That is not laziness. One of my formative memories about being
lazy comes from when I was a kid. And let me just give a whole disclaimer here. The
process of diagnosing people with ADHD has never been helpful to the person with
ADHD, because the whole diagnostic criteria has to do with how other people
experience us.
00:10:19
It has nothing to do with or it hasn't had anything to do with our experiences of
ourselves, right? Growing up, what my parents saw was someone who didn't want to do
their homework, who is difficult, who didn't do what they said, and I know you're
probably nodding be like, yeah, that was the same for me. And that's what my doctors
were telling them. That's just normal for a person with ADHD. They're kind of lazy, they
don't want to do this, blah, blah, blah.
00:10:50
And so that's what I grew up to believe about myself. And I remember Saturday
mornings after a full week of school, which I'm going to get into, how the normal school
day doesn't really serve people with ADHD in a minute. I would be absolutely spent
energetically. I'd have no energy. And I don't know, if you're a millennial, you probably
remember ABC's one Saturday morning with pepper and pepper and way too cool for
7th grade and recess and Doug.
00:11:20
And I remember it was just the absolute thing that I needed to decompress after a really
long week. And I remember my mom coming into my room being like, “Hey, Katie, when
are you going to get up? Are you going to waste the whole day in bed?” Because her
perception of it, as she was told by my doctors, was her job was to get me up and
moving, was to get me to stop with what was happening with my ADHD and start acting
like a neurotypical. Now, we've learned so much about ADHD since then, right?
00:11:52
So my mom that's what she was told by my doctors. She didn't do anything wrong. She
was just given some bad advice. But a lot of us have this experience, and especially if
you didn't get diagnosed until later in life, your parents probably did similar things
because you weren't acting like a neurotypical. You weren't acting the way that they
wanted you to act.
00:12:14
And your parents’ main job is to make sure that you become a functioning member of
society, right? So their job is to make sure that you kind of conform in some ways. But
ultimately, my 8, 9, 10 year old body, my brain, just needed some rest. It needed some
dopamine. It needed time without an assignment.
00:12:35
And just I mean, if you have ADHD, you know, this like picking out an outfit for the day
can feel like an assignment. Eating breakfast can feel like an assignment. Going and
walking the dog can feel like an assignment. When you have no dopamine in your
system, it's the same thing throughout your day sometimes, especially after doing a ton
of work that maybe you didn't enjoy doing or just was very taxing on you. You're going to
need a break.
00:13:03
You're going to need to rest. Sometimes BuzzFeed articles are exactly what you need.
Sometimes just sitting down outside without your phone and taking a breather is exactly
what you need. There was a period in high school where I hacked my ADHD in a really
weird way. So, I would get home from school, and I would immediately be resistant to
doing any kind of homework.
00:13:29
I hated homework, and partially it was because a lot of it was boring, and partially was
because I just didn't have any energy to do it. I just spent a whole eight-hour day being
forced to mask for a bunch of different teachers and friends. I'd have to change
environments, which was just a lot for my brain to do. I'd have to switch subjects. I had
no transition time, except for when I went to French class and my teacher, Ms.
00:13:57
Blanchard, gave us a moment to kind of arrive in the room and have some small talk
and kind of get settled. Love her. I don't think she even realized how ADHD-friendly she
was. And actually, I should probably tell her, Ms. Blanchard, if you're listening, you are
very ADHD-friendly.
00:14:13
And if I see you around town or if I talk to you, I'm going to tell you in person. Anyway,
after an eight-hour day, I was spent. It was too much for me to even think about doing
homework. I really just had to recover. And so for a while, I got myself up at 03:00 in the
morning every single school day, and I did homework in the morning before school.
00:14:33
Now, the way I did this was kind of weird because I'm the queen of snoozing. If I set an
alarm on my phone or an old-school alarm clock, like in my sleep, I will turn it off. My
brain will actually incorporate the sound into my dream. So it was like a fire alarm in my
dream and I got rid of it and it's like, woohoo. Saved the day.
00:14:52
No, I just slept through my alarm. And so how I hacked this was I discovered that the TV
that I had in my bedroom had a timer on it. So it not only would turn itself off at a certain
point, you could also schedule it to turn itself on at a certain point. And I don't know why
I picked this channel. It might have just been an accident, or it might have just been the
channel that I was watching the night before.
00:15:16
Typically, it probably had the show that I liked the night before, but for a solid three or
four months, I would wake up every single morning at 03:00 in the morning with Walker,
Texas Ranger, on the TV. That's right. Chuck Norris was always in my bedroom at 03:00
in the morning. He was the first person I saw. And it was always an extra uncomfortable
morning when I'd look over.
00:15:37
And the episode would be starting with him having his shirt off. No. And as I'm
describing this, you're probably remembering back to a time where you figured out a
way, consciously or unconsciously, of how to make sure that you did the miserable thing
when you had the optimal amount of energy. And I'll bet you, like me, it only lasted for
three or four months because unfortunately, nothing really lasts in ADHD land.
Everything's transient.
00:16:06
Now, another reason why your executive dysfunction can be kicked into gear and look a
lot like laziness is because you're shifting gears. Now, I just talked about how in school,
going from class to class to class to class completely burned me out. What genuinely
would have helped me so much more is instead of having a five-minute break where
you basically have to run from one end of the building to the next end of the building to
get to class, on time. And miraculously, if you could go that fast, go pee at the same
time would be to have a nice 20 minutes break, a nice 20 minutes where you get to talk
to people, maybe go sit down and just kind of be alone in your own head. Maybe go to
the next class and sit there and kind of get settled.
00:16:54
That would have been a much more ADHD-friendly way for a school day to be
arranged. Now, I understand why schools don't do this, because having a bunch of
teenagers that are just unstructured for 20 minutes in between each class can be
dangerous. Fully understand that. But it did not work for me. I need rest in between
tasks.
00:17:18
I need reset time. I need to be able to mentally pack away everything I just worked on
and shift gears into the next thing. This is one of the reasons why I schedule my week
so that I do client calls on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and sometimes Fridays. Because
there's stuff that I have to do that's work in my business and I can't get into it if I'm
shifting between that and client calls. Now, some genuine things that you can do when
you're wanting to shift gears into things is what am I going to say next?
00:17:51
Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
00:18:01
Now, some genuine things that you can do when you're wanting to shift gears into
things is honestly, play some games on your phone. Go for a walk. Go and sit in the
sunshine. Make yourself a snack. This can be really helpful for you to do throughout
your day, but also throughout your week.
00:18:19
Realized that I had this tendency to make all these big plans for what I would be doing
on Saturdays. I'd have like a whole itinerary and a whole to-do list and errands that I'd
need to run. And Saturday morning would come and I'd wake up and I'd drink coffee
and I'd sit on my couch stressing out about everything that I need to do, but not getting
up and doing them. And before I'd know it, it would be mid-afternoon. I'd feel terrible for
how behind I was.
00:18:45
I'd feel completely exhausted because all I was doing was stressing out about doing it.
And at that point, I would have to go and do a couple of them, like go and buy food,
because I'd be hungry, but I wouldn't get anything else done. And so I would literally go
into Sunday feeling behind on my weekend, which is fucking ridiculous. I decided to give
myself this new routine, just like back when I was a kid watching one Saturday morning,
I would assign myself a movie. A movie that I had seen a million times before.
00:19:14
Something that wasn't a big intellectual flex for me to take in. Something like You've Got
Mail or Forrest Gump or anything really. Anything with Tom Cruise or Disney. Love Tom
Cruise. Oh, my gosh.
00:19:30
Anyway, why am I saying that? No, let me take it back. Let me take it back. Let me take
it back. I hate Tom Cruise.
00:19:35
I love Tom Hanks. Why is my brain not working? You've Got Mail or Forrest Gump.
Really? Anything with Tom Hanks or a Disney movie.
00:19:42
Something that I've seen a million times before. By the way, Tom Hanks, if you listen to
my podcast, please send us a message. I absolutely love your work. I think you're an
amazing human being. And all the reports say that you're super, super nice.
00:19:54
You and your wife do really nice things when you go and travel. Anyway, I started doing
this on Saturday mornings, and my deal with myself was I would sit there on my couch
doing nothing. I'd have no expectations of anything productive until I watched this one
movie. And if I needed to watch the movie again, I would restart the movie again until I
got to that point where I was bored. This is why you want to pick something that you
have seen a bunch of different times.
00:20:25
Once you get to the point where you're bored, that's when you get up and go. That's
when you need some more stimulation and you have the motivation to get up and start
working on your to-do list. But I wasn't allowed to start my to-do list until I got bored. And
let me tell you, I got so much more done on Saturdays. Most Saturdays.
00:20:50
Some Saturdays, I would legitimately sit on my couch watching movies all day long. And
that was okay because I made a deal with myself that if I needed to do that, I needed to
do that. It had to be rest. But we all know that sitting somewhere being stressed out
about the things that we have to do that we're not doing doesn't count as rest. It actually
exhausts us further.
00:21:12
Which brings me to the ultimate point here, is you need to stop calling yourself lazy. And
instead, you need to start with the narrative that you are strategically using rest.
00:21:29
Okay, I'm going to tell you the story. So I went to Bridgewater State College for my first
year of freshman year of college, right? And spring semester, I discovered that there
were, like these, one-credit athletic classes that were half a semester. And the first half I
signed up for ballroom dancing, and the second half I signed up for archery and cycling.
Okay, so ballroom dancing obviously as cold as winter, and it was inside.
00:21:51
So I show up to this class and this older couple. They were adorable. They did
competitive ballroom dancing throughout their whole adulthood. This is kind of like their
retirement gig was teaching a bunch of college students, who wanted to fuck off for an
hour a week, how to ballroom dance. And it really quickly became apparent that the
majority of the girls in the class were there because they had crushes on the guys who
were there.
00:22:17
And the guys were there because they wanted to pick up a girl who wasn't one of the
ones who was already interested in them. So this class was like a curated love triangle
waiting to happen, right? And so at one point halfway through the semester, well, of
course, we were all terrible at dancing. We'd learn it kind of, but we wouldn't practice it
because the girls who are interested in the guys and wanted to practice with them,
they'd ask them to practice, and the guys would be like, oh, no, I'm busy. And then they
would be too chicken to ask the girls that they wanted to practice with to go and dance
with them, right?
00:22:59
So it was just like it was very and of course, we're all teenagers and really
uncomfortable with each other, and we have a lot of hormones, and I was there to learn
how to dance, by the way, I took it very seriously. Halfway through the semester, we
were assigned a group, and we had to come up with a dance routine as a group, right?
We had to choreograph it, and I think we had to be, like, four or five partners. So it was
a lot of people to coordinate. And I didn't realize it, but there was this one guy in the
group who had a crush on me, and there was this girl who had a crush on him, and he
wanted to partner with me.
00:23:34
And I was like, okay, that's fine. But he wasn't a very good dancer. So I swapped away
from him to this other guy who had a crush on another girl. So he wasn't interested in
dancing with me. But I was kind of militant because I wanted to get an A in this class,
and I wanted to learn how to dance really well.
00:23:49
So I completely blew past all the emotions of this. I feel bad for the people in my group
because I was probably not the nicest person, because I was like, we're going to have
the best dance routine ever. And then the guy that I made partner with me because he
was a better dancer, he had the piece of paper that had all of our choreography, and
then he lost it. And then he didn't show up to class, and it was just a nightmare. But the
worst part was that, and I think we all passed with C.
00:24:18
It wasn't the end of the world. It was also just ballroom dancing. No one expected us to
be good. The half-semester ended, moved into the next half of the semester, where I'm
in an archery class with the girl who liked the guy who liked me. And then at that point,
the guy came and asked me out at archery in front of her, and I had found out that she
liked him at this point.
00:24:37
And I spent the rest of the semester positive that this girl was going to shoot me in the
back with her bow and arrow. So I said no. And it was just I don't know, it was just like a
very awkward situation.
00:24:53
I didn't get shot. That was nice. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
© 2022 - 2023 Katie McManus – Business Strategy For Weenie ADHD-preneurs