Do you know your ADHD superpowers?
"And so literally, I had to find different creative ways for me to learn this stupid information so that I wouldn't fail it. I'll never forget buying all these like multicoloured neon index cards..." - Katie McManus, Brave Business Coaching
In this episode we explore the positive aspects of ADHD and how to leverage them to your advantage so they become ADHD superpowers.
In contrast to the previous episodes where we talked about the challenges of ADHD, we are going to highlight some of the unique superpowers that individuals with ADHD possess.
Accessibility: click to read a written-to-be-read transcript of the episode
The top three ADHD superpowers
Katie shares her top few ADHD superpowers that can benefit your business.
She goes in depth on them, and offers suggestions for ways you can leverage them.
They are:
Creativity
Hyper focus
Making connections
Hyper focus and the French Revolution!
This week we're really spoiling you with this podcast.
Not only are you getting a masterclass in leveraging your ADHD for business success, you're also getting some French History.
Katie explains how hyper focus being one of the ADHD superpowers has helped her to learn so much about the French Revolution.
This episode that's all about ADHD superpowers, covers:
- How to use ADHD to your advantage.
- What you can do when Geography's not interesting!
- The beauty of hyperfocus.
- How creativity and hyperfocus can meld together to create another ADHD superpower!
Here's the TikTok video Katie references in the episode:
https://www.tiktok.com/@thejollyraja/video/7192311300809329966?_r=1&_t=8aJKmZlMI4E
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ADHD entrepreneurs finding balance between darkness and light. Celebration or shame?
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37 Weenie! Cuz 75 Hard Challenge rules and ADHD don't mix!
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About Katie McManus
Katie McManus was trained in Executive Business Coaching and Leadership Development at the Co-Active Training Institute in San Rafael, California.
She's a CPCC (Certified Professional Co-Active Coach) and an ACC (Associate Certified Coach) with the International Coaching Federation.
Weenicast21 transcript audio
Thu, Mar 02, 2023 8:30PM • 24:48
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
adhd, people, interested, superpowers, learn, creativity, create, programme, creative, yarn shop, knitting, person, cable, mom, knitter, french revolution, creative ways, focused, book, skills
SPEAKERS
Katie
Katie 00:00
In this episode, I'm going to share with you how you can use ADHD to your advantage!
Katie 00:14
I've done previous episodes where we're talking about the darker side of ADHD.
Katie 00:18
But I don't want to discount that we actually have a fair amount of superpowers, superpowers that people who don't have ADHD do not have access to on the same level.
Katie 00:30
And I want to spend this episode talking about those different superpowers and how we can utilise them better for our businesses.
Katie 00:39
Now, this is not a complete list by any means. I know I'm gonna do future episodes on other superpowers that folks with ADHD have. But this list is my top few.
Katie 00:52
You can't talk about ADHD without talking about being massively creative. Now, one of the reasons that people with ADHD are creative is we have to be, we have to find creative ways to do things that we hate doing because otherwise we won't do it.
Katie 01:11
So for instance, in seventh grade, I was forced to be in a class on geography. Now, I'm sorry, but looking at a map, and memorising names of countries and their capitals is not interesting to me. Not interesting at all. And the messed up thing here is they didn't really pair it with anything interesting, like history where there's a story that explains why these borders were formed, why they named things in a certain way, what the people were doing. No, it was literally just like, here is Egypt and the capitals Cairo, I think, isn't it? I honestly I don't remember, see, it just wasn't that interesting to me.
Katie 01:52
And so literally, I had to find different creative ways for me to learn this stupid information so that I wouldn't fail it. I'll never forget buying all these like multicoloured neon index cards. And I would write out you know the name of the country on one side and the capital on the other side. And then I would have a map in front of me that was blank. Right. And, and so I would have the flashcards that I'd be running through I then be looking at the map. At the same time, I had one of those like small elliptical machines that I don't know you could buy. I think that one of my parents had bought an infomercial at one point, it didn't have the arm things because that would have gotten in the way of this music stand that I was balancing my notebook with all the maps on. So there I am, every evening doing my elliptical thing as a seventh grader, doing my index cards and quizzing myself on these stupid countries and their capitals. And I'm sorry, I'm not I don't mean to define any countries, I don't think any country is stupid. But I think the activity of forcing a child who's not interested in this to learn the names and the capital in this way, without any other context is absolutely asinine. We come up with creative ways to do things that we hate.
Katie 03:06
Now, the other side of creativity comes from our ability to get hyper focused on something that does interest us. And we're gonna talk about hyper focus on its own next, but how this usually shows up, is you get obsessed, absolutely obsessed with like a new craft, or a new art project, usually by all of the things that are required for this hobby.
Katie 03:31
And you do not stop until you have run through all of your interest in it. So I've done this with knitting, I've done this with creating historical costumes. I've done this with quilting, even though I'm a really terrible quilter. I did this with creating jewellery, there was a screen printing incident. I'm sure I'm forgetting other things. But as we get super, super focused on these different creative hobbies, we're building those skills. We're learning the ability to knit, we're learning the ability to sew, we're learning the ability to create jewellery. Now that knowledge doesn't go away just because we stopped doing it. So once we have kind of collected all of these skills, and all of the equipment that's required to do this stuff, we then have the ability to blend it all together. There's also this thing that happens with folks with ADHD, where we get an idea and we cannot let it go until we take action on it. If you have like an ADHD parent or family member, I bet you can remember a time where they got absolutely obsessed trying to figure out the recipe for something. My dad's a carpenter, you know, so I mean, sometimes he would get it in his mind that he wanted to build something very specific and he just would drop everything else until he was able to do that thing.
Katie 04:48
My favourite example of how this shows up in my family is when my mom actually wrote a whole novel. My mom who always discredits her herself for being creative. She like doesn't think she's creative at all. She's one of the most creative people I've ever met in my life. But she just doesn't have time really to give herself the space to dive into that creativity. At one point, when I was growing up, she decided to take a writing class and ship this writing class. And it really pushed her to come up with a story and write it out and work on it and share it with this group and work on it more. And I remember waking up, I think it was in high school at the time, and she would have been up for hours. Working on a couple chapters of her book, it was just something that she plugged away at every single morning. Now, the concerning thing about this book is that it was a murder mystery, but from the perspective of the murderer, and the murderer had my mom's car and the murderer killed someone for something that would have pissed off my mom, my mom was so into this, that she literally signed up to go on a ride along with our local police station. So Cape Cod, they have a fair amount of money and a lot of resources for their police departments. A funny side note about Cape Cod, if you live in Harwich, where my parents are from, if you're older, and you don't have family in the area, and you're worried that one morning, you won't be able to wake up or something will happen, you can actually put yourself on a list with the local police department and they call around every single morning. And if you don't answer the phone, they actually send a police officer to check on you. What I'm about to describe is something that this community is able to do just because they have the resources to do it. They actually had a programme where older folks could actually go to the police department and learn all the police procedures, including firing gun. So my mom for character research or for the research for her book signed up for this programme, so that she could see the inner workings of our local police department so that she can see what it was actually like to fire a gun because she needed to write about it for her book, because her main character killed someone. She also I think asked a few questions to kind of see how her main character could have gotten away with murder. So just if you're listening to this, and you know, Shannon, maybe watch your back, like don't piss her off, she's done her homework, she'll probably get caught because she did write this in a book, but who knows she has ADHD and she's really fucking creative, she can probably come up with other ways to get away with murder. And hi, mom, I know you're listening, and I hope you enjoy this episode!
Katie 07:39
As an ADHD person who's starting a business, here's the really cool thing that happens. We have developed so many different skills throughout our lifetimes that we can relate to whatever it is that we're doing, I'll use myself as an example, I used to be really into knitting. So into knitting in fact that I worked at a yarn shop. And so into knitting that I became such a good knitter that I started teaching knitting. Now, one of the things that I credit for making me really good at what I do today is learning how to teach knitting because here's what happens. You're the teacher, you're teaching a group of eight to 10 people how to use two sticks, and a piece of string to make fabric. Okay, and everyone learns differently. So some people need to be shown, some people need to be explained to other people need metaphors. Other people literally need you to put your hands over their hands and guide them and show them me learning how to explain how to make fabric out of two sticks and a piece of string was integral to me being able to run group programmes today, even me noticing that that's where that came from, is kind of an ADHD creative thing. Oftentimes, folks with ADHD jump jobs because they kind of get bored after a while. And what I always relate this to is like each job that an ADHD person is drawn to has a skill that they are meant to learn. And it's almost like they're living their life going around collecting ingredients for a cake. But as they're collecting the ingredients, they actually don't know what kind of cake they're baking. So they're collecting one ingredient, they're collecting another and another and another another. And you can collect flour all you want. But that doesn't tell you you're baking a cake, you can make a lot of stuff with flour. It's not until you also get chocolate and eggs, and maybe some cinnamon, and a bunch of other things till you realise Oh, this is the kind of cake that I can make. It's the same for how we build our careers. Right? We go around we collect all these skills. And after a decade or so we kind of look at all these skills that we've collected and think cool crap, how do I make these fit together? And this is where the ADHD creativity really benefits us? Because we can look at oh wow, I have all this background in sales and marketing and I'm a trained coach, and I know how to train people on stuff in a bunch of different ways. And I have ADHD, cool, I'm just going to combine all those together and become an ADHD business coach, who trains people on how to start their businesses. Now, of course, I'm talking about myself. But for you, as someone with ADHD, I guarantee you have done this in some way, shape or form. I guarantee that whatever job you have, right now, if you're working for someone else, you are using some rando skill that you gained. You know, at some point in your early life, we don't always give ourselves credit for how creative we are just like my mom, she doesn't give herself credit for how creative she is. But creativity is not always creating a work of art. Creativity is not painting, it's not sculpting, it's not learning how to do an accurate Renaissance gown for a ball. However, they are different flavours of creativity, creativity shows up in a million different ways throughout our day. And one of the best superpowers the ADHD-preneur can use is to tap into it purposely consciously, every single day to make their work more impactful. I have a former client who is a lawyer, and they have ADHD. And let me tell you, the fact that they have ADHD, allows for them to think of things, different scenarios, how things could go terribly, terribly wrong and also incredibly, incredibly right. And allows for them to see how all of that is connected. I actually think the fact that this person has ADHD makes them better at their job. So creativity is one of the best superpowers of having ADHD.
Katie 11:47
Now, the next superpower that I want to talk about is hyper focus. And hyper focus is that magical thing that happens when you're really interested in something. So I'm going to share something and I know you as an ADHD printer aren't going to totally relate in your own way. There was a period of my teenage life where I was the absolute expert on the French Revolution. I knew everyone that was a major player in the French Revolution.
Katie 12:17
I knew most of the people who were involved in executions, I understood the geopolitical nuances of the royal family being taken out of power. I knew everything about Marie Antoinette, down to what her wardrobe was like and what her diet was like. By the way, she never said, Let them eat cake. That was something that the revolutionaries actually popularised to make her look like a terrible person. I knew everything that had to do with Versailles. When I went to Versailles for the very first time, it was the penultimate, coolest thing I had ever done. Because I had read about it so much. By the way, did you know that hallways didn't exist, then they just had room after room after room after room. So if you wanted to go from one under the palace to the other end of the palace, there was a chance you would just have to walk through the the Kings bedroom, which I'm sorry, how weird is that? Could you imagine? If you were at the White House visiting President Joe Biden, and you wanted to go from one end of the White House to the other end of that White House where you'd have to just walk through his bedroom. Like, I'm sorry, they need privacy, they do a lot of work. Maybe the Kings didn't back then, like caught the gross things that people would have to do if they were in the king or queen entourage. Like the king and the queen didn't do anything for themselves. Anything. And I'm not going to expand on that, because I know my mom is is listening, and she doesn't like want to talk about those things, because she thinks it's not classy. But I'm gonna leave it to your imagination.
Katie 13:57
Though this is the gift of hyperfocus. When we're interested in something like if my high school had figured out a way to make everything they taught me related to the French Revolution, I would have been a straight A student. But they didn't they really fucked up there. They tried to teach me other things that I wasn't interested in. And how boring is that for an ADHD person? This is one of the reasons I think we have so many entrepreneurs who have ADHD. Because we get into a job, or maybe interested in like 30% of it, but the rest is just absolutely miserable. And for someone with ADHD, like we can get hyper focused on the part that we are excited about that we are interested in. But the parts that we're not interested in are a real struggle for us to stay focused on. I think we've all experienced that phenomenon or you're reading a textbook or an instruction manual, or just something that has to do with something you're not interested in. You read the whole page and you don't absorb one single word of it. And you read the whole page again. And again, you cannot even comprehend what was just said, because you didn't absorb it. So this is both a superpower and a massive challenge to people with ADHD. But if you're an ADHD-preneur, who has created a business around something that you are incredibly interested in, you're in the right place. Because here's the cool thing about our interests, like they may wane a bit, like I'm no longer an avid knitter. But I'm still interested in knitting, I still go into any yarn shop that I passed by, which is something that I have in common with Monica Lewinsky, apparently, she's an avid knitter too, and she loves going to yarn shops wherever she goes, maybe I'll bump into her at one. So the other thing about having hyper focus, and hyper focus on things that were incredibly interested in is because we are so interested in them, and we can spend so much time going deep on them, we learn incredibly quickly. Every person with ADHD, who's been interested in something a lot hyperfocus level has had the experience of starting it, becoming nearly an expert at it, and having people around them who don't have ADHD who took a long time to learn this thing be like, how did you learn that that quickly? To get really like knitting nerdy on you? For me? This is cabling. So have you ever seen a cable sweater? So the cabling, so it's actually you have to use a different tool than your knitting needles to create those cables, because you have to have the stitches kind of jump over each other. I remember going in like, the pattern that I was using for a sweater said I needed a cable knitting attachment thing. And so I go to the yarn shop where I worked. And I didn't know how to cable obviously. So I asked my friend Linda, who was running the shop that day, you know, were the cabling needles. And she showed me and I was like, Cool. Can you show me how to use them? And she's looking at me like, are you nuts, I'm running the shop right now, I have a job to do. I can't sit down and teach you something that will take like 45 minutes to two hours for you to learn. And she showed me once and I had it. I had it. It was done. Like, I could have been an expert, I could have shown other people and she looked at me like how did you pick that up that fast? Because I'm interested in it because I needed to learn it so that I could get to my goal so I could finish the sweater. Every person with ADHD has some kind of experience along those lines. Were something that is really complex and hard for other people to learn. Because we have that interest. And because we can be so hyper focused on it. We just get it like that.
Katie 17:38
So if we're to talk about how creativity and hyperfocus how they meld together to create another superpower, it's really how we're able to connect completely different things to create a new thing. There is this TikTok that I saw recently, it was all about how it's really hard for millennials to be managed by non millennials. Because by the time of millennial ask their manager for support, they have already tried a bunch of different things. And because they've tried a bunch of different things. And because they've thought through all these different scenarios and processes that are possible to fix the problem by the time they get to their manager and ask for help with a solution. What they're asking about the manager has no idea because it's outside of their scope of expertise.
Katie 19:20
Now I heard this. And yes, this is a millennial thing. But I actually think it's more of an ADHD thing and a neurodiverse thing. Because when we hit a problem with something that we're interested in, we try a bunch of different things. It's to the point where maybe something is wrong with the kitchen faucet, like you're looking on YouTube, and you're trying to figure it out and like it's showing you this tool and you're like well I don't have that tool I wouldn't even know to buy that tool before in this moment. But I do have like three different little tools that I used when I was making jewellery all those years ago that I've never gotten rid of because I'm worried I was worried that I would get really interested in making jewelery again. And I bet I can jigger the all those things together to do the same thing that this one tool is doing. There's this like, oh, cool, well, I have this other area of expertise that I can apply here to achieve the same result. This is also why people with ADHD are brilliant business owners, you know, because they're usually able to take a service, or a product that is already good on its own, and figure out what other things they can add to it or cross it with to amplify the impact. The example... I'll use my own business for this, you know, I do business strategy and coaching. But I also do money mindset coaching, because one of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs run into is some limiting beliefs around money. And you can't break past them with sheer will you actually have to do the emotional work and understand yourself on a deeper level when it comes to money to move past them. This gives me an advantage in the business strategy world, because there aren't a lot of business strategists that also do that. You know, I'm just going to talk about both my parents in this episode.
Katie 21:10
So my dad has always been involved in local politics. He's either been a city councilman, Mayor, a selectman, depending on where we lived, he's helped other people get elected. And one of the reasons though, that he was so effective at being a city council person, a mayor or a select person is he loves history. He loves learning how decisions were made, and what the laws were at the time that restricted things that they had to be like a decision had to be made in a certain way, and who was involved and why they were involved and what their motivations were, to the point that like, someone would want to instal new plumbing or new sewer system in a neighbourhood. And my dad would come to the meeting, knowing the history of every single thing that happened in 1973, when the last sewer system was put in, like, this man finds that interesting, which I mean, to his credit, someone out there has to find this interesting. And if he's going to be the person, great, it doesn't have to be mean, it doesn't have to be you. But he's able to combine his interest in that, along with his interest in fixing the problem now, with his expertise as a carpenter. And as a builder. He's able to synthesise all these things into an elegant solution and propose that. And because he understands everything at this level, at this really deep level, he's usually really effective and getting other people on board, unless they're complete asshats, in which case, they're not listening to anyone.
Katie 22:47
So as you're listening to this episode, and you're thinking about all the ways in which you're creative, and you're thinking about all the interests that you've had throughout your life, that you've gotten hyper focused on and learned everything about it. And as you're looking at the different ways in which your business can have a greater impact in the world, I want you to acknowledge yourself, that those things are possible to the level that they are, because you have ADHD, you are able to be that creative. Because you have ADHD, you're able to learn things at that deep level. Because you have ADHD, you're able to synthesise all these random things that you've learned throughout your life into the thing you're doing now. Because you have ADHD. And because you've been able to synthesise all these things together, you offer something that no one else can offer. Because no one else has your flavour of creativity, no one else has your flavour of interests. And that's really special. That's something that you get to be really proud of. That's something that you can market and monetize, to not only grow your business and grow your income, but grow the impact that you have on other people in their lives. And I would go so far to say that it is so important for you to do that. Because people need the solution that you have to offer. Whatever it is, and if you're holding yourself back because you're worried that's not good enough. Or you know, you just don't have the time to do it now or any other fear about but not being ready. You're actually just being a selfish asshole, right? You're keeping that solution all to yourself and you're not sharing with anyone how rude. There are people out there who need you get out of your own way and just start doing it. Oh my god, I'm so excited. I'm going to share something about my mom