What is ADHD entrepreneurship? It's unlocking your business potential by embracing patience and faith!
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Hey lovely weenie! Welcome to another episode of The Weeniecast - the podcast for ADHD entrepreneurs seeking business strategies.
I'm your host Katie McManus.
This episode I'm asking "What Is ADHD entrepreneurship?" and suggesting it's actually about having patience and faith.
I'll be discussing with you the importance of patience and faith when starting a business, particularly for individuals with ADHD.
I'll be emphasizing the need for realistic expectations and consistency, debunking the allure of instant success promoted by certain business gurus.
Watch the episode promo
The game of faking high cost luxury
In a world dominated by instant gratification, it is easy to become discouraged when immediate results are not achieved in business. The host reflects on the influence of social media and the portrayal of lavish lifestyles by some influencers, revealing the extent to which these individuals can fabricate success.
I will be sharing all the tactics used by fake business gurus, and uncovering the truth behind their seemingly luxurious lifestyles.
Nothing is what it seems!
From obtaining private jets for those instagram perfect photos to utilizing designer rental services, these individuals craft an illusion of opulence to impress their audience and elicit trust in their business acumen.
But don't worry - I'm here to lift the curtain on their parlour tricks for you!
Don't be distracted by your doubt!
The episode will highlight how fake business gurus often try to instill doubt in their audience, making them question their own abilities and strategies.
By casting doubt and creating a sense of inadequacy, these influencers manipulate aspiring entrepreneurs into seeking their guidance and products.
Let's put an end to their ability to manipulate you so brutally. Share this episode with any other business owners that you think would benefit from a little truth around the contrapreneurs that prey on unsuspecting ADHD entrepreneurs.
The key moments in this episode are:
[00:01:49] Consistency is key; unrealistic expectations are harmful.
[00:09:27] Sure, engagement is good but where are the clients?
[00:13:35] Lost in woods and why it's a valuable business lesson for you.
[00:18:05] Optimize strategies for our ADHD brains in business.
The next steps for you after you’ve listened to this episode are:
Book a call with me: If you want further help or action steps, you can book a call with me to discuss your specific needs and how I can assist you in achieving your goals.
Message me: If you're looking for insights and guidance tailored to your specific needs. Mention the Weeniecast when you do so I have context!
Check out my website: Visit my website to explore more resources, blog posts, and valuable content related to your area of interest. Stay updated with the latest industry trends and tips.
Follow me on Instagram or TikTok: Join my social media community to get regular updates, tips, and insights. Engage with my content and connect with like-minded individuals in the comments section.
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With the Hyperfocus Community, you're stepping into a space designed to amplify your growth, ensuring you're equipped with the insights, strategies, and mindset shifts to catapult your business to new heights.
As well as group coaching, networking and business referral exchanges there will also be some access to my premium services.
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Surround yourself with like-minded individuals who are ready to hold you to your commitments, ensuring you remain on the path to success, even when challenges arise.
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Whether it's nailing your business strategy or mastering the art of work-life balance, the Hyperfocus Community equips you with the tools you need to thrive.
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Transcript for: "What Is ADHD - Patience and fear"
Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to tell you how your ADHD business needs
you to have patience and faith so that you can make $50,000 in two months. Squirrel.
Squirrel. Hi. I'm Katie McManus. Business strategist and money mindset.
Coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. This week I got a text from a former
client she completed with me in the spring, and while we were working together, she
quit her corporate job, went full time in her coaching business, and one of the things that
we constantly talked about is the patience and faith that are required when you're
starting a business. Now, the text reads, hi, Katie. I signed four clients in the last three
weeks. I just wanted to thank you. I know it takes time, lol, as you have told me many
times, but I just feel really abundant and thankful for the work we did together.
I am planning to raise my prices soon now that I have a steady bit of income coming in.
Thank you. Thank you. Now, I'm sharing this, obviously, because I want to brag about
my client, because I'm so proud of her, right? Doing that is not easy. It takes a lot of
hard work, patience and faith to keep going, and it paints the picture of the realistic
expectations you need to have of your new business when you first start out. It feels so
tempting when you first start and you first start posting the social media and you share a
couple of posts and a few pictures and you don't get any clients, and it's so easy to get
down. On yourself, right? Because you're constantly looking at social media and seeing
all these six and seven figure business gurus who are talking about their course. That'll
help you make $100,000 in 90 days or get to seven figures in under a year.
And it's super easy to think that you are falling behind, that there's something wrong
with you, that you're not at that level yet. And I want to remind you that results like that
are unrealistic. What it takes is consistency. We live in a world where if we want
something like we go to Amazon or we go to the shop and we can instantly have it, or if
not instantly, we get it the next day. There's this instant gratification cycle that we are
programmed by our current world to expect in every different aspect of our life, right? If
you want a date, then you can go onto your phone, download a number of apps, swipe
left and right, and meet someone for dinner that night. Unfortunately, starting a business
is not one of those things, but because we're so programmed to expect it in most areas
of our lives, when it doesn't happen in one area, we start wondering if there's something
wrong with us. Now, this client in particular, who just signed four clients over the last
three weeks, she has been posting to LinkedIn consistently since January, she has
been fine tuning her message. She's been getting better and better at writing copy.
She's been learning what her voice is and connecting with her ideal clients. She's been
hosting webinars and getting people to experience her in low pressure ways. She's
really going above and beyond in all these different areas of her business and it's
paying off. But I want to point to it didn't pay off immediately. I mean, unless you're
incredibly lucky, there are no immediate results when you start a business. But why do
we expect to have immediate results? One of the things that plays into this is the fact
that there are so many influencers or business gurus out there who are selling a bullshit
program and they're getting onto social media and they're talking about their seven
figure business or eight figure business and bragging about all their successful clients,
but never actually naming those clients. Just want to point that out. And we believe
them because by all their pictures, it appears that they're living the life of luxury.
They're constantly on private jets, traveling to exotic places. They have all these
pictures of them at luxury resorts sitting poolside. You can see that they're ordering the
most expensive things on the menu. They are touting the most expensive accessories,
designer brands. They're constantly out shopping. And because as humans, we tend to
believe what we see, right? We believe that they are as successful as they say they are
because they have all these pictures. Well, let me tell you, I did some research this
week and I found out just how easy it is to fake being rich. Actually, you can pretend to
be a gazillionaire for about $7,200 and that's on the high end.
And this is what a lot of those business gurus do. They don't actually fly around on
private jets. They rent a jet for 2 hours to sit on the tarmac so they can do a photo shoot
inside. And they don't just do a photo shoot in one outfit. They'll bring a ton of outfits and
they'll change their clothes as many times as they can within those 2 hours that you
think throughout the year as they're posting these pictures that it's a brand new day and
they're going to a brand new place and this is their private jet and oh, my gosh, this is
their lifestyle. It's not I'd be shocked if they were flying first class if they were going
anywhere, but it is so easy. You can rent one of these private jets for anywhere from
$1500 to $5,000 for a two hour session. By the way, I'm pretty sure to book a private jet
anywhere.
The minimum is 20 grand. And that's for a short flight. That kind of travel is extremely
expensive. And there's a reason why they want you thinking that that's how they travel.
Because if you can throw away 20 grand on a simple flight, you must be doing well in
your business, right? You must know how to help other people make six figures in 90
days or seven figures in a year. The other aspect is all these designer clothes and
accessories that they constantly have. You and I both know how easy it is to do this rent
the runway. There are so many different luxury rental companies out there, and you can
buy a subscription, so you can get new stuff every single month, or you can rent one off.
In the last year, I heard about this group of women in China who were all lower middle
class, and they wanted to all get rich boyfriends. And so they would get together, and
they would rent all of these designer things from pantyhose to well, they would buy the
pantyhose. You don't want to rent pantyhose, but they would buy, like, share pantyhose
between four women. They would rent a designer bag and take pictures with it. They
would go to the top tea houses in Hong Kong, and they would order the high tea
service, and they would each take turns taking pictures as if they were sitting down to
tea. They weren't actually eating it because there were about 30 of them there trying to
take this picture. And guess what happened? It worked. They were able to get these
rich boyfriends.
It's almost like they got this idea from somewhere. I wonder if they got it from these fake
business gurus. It's really easy to fake having money. It's really easy to get pictures at a
luxury resort and make it look like that's where you spend most of your time. Do you
know how many pictures you can take in 24 hours of staying at a luxury resort? A lot.
You can take a ton of pictures by the pool. You can change outfits numerous times with
the sun in different positions in the sky, and it makes it look like it's a brand new place,
especially if you're spacing these pictures out over a whole calendar year. A lot of these
influencers will get on to their social media profiles, and they will shame people and
make them feel bad for taking longer to build the six figures.
What they're trying to do is so doubt in you and make you think that there's something
wrong with you, wrong with your plan, wrong with your strategy, that you're behind all
these other people who are doing so much better than you and maybe aren't even as
qualified as you. But I want you to remember, it's most likely smoke and mirrors. There's
no way for you to verify their income. There's no way, unless they are actually sharing
honest to goodness testimonials of people who are verified out there in the world who
you can go and check, and they match up to who they're presenting. There's no way for
you to verify their claims. So as we're thinking about having patience in our business
and patience for ourselves. Know that there are people out there who are counting on
you being impatient. Right.
Because it makes them money. Might not make you money, probably won't make you
money, but it will make them money. There's this added element of the ADHD
entrepreneur. When we want something, when we're driven to go and do it, typically
we're really good at doing stuff really quickly. There's not much of a learning curve for a
lot of things for us. And so when we start our businesses, we expect that, okay, cool, I'm
going to learn how to do LinkedIn. Awesome. Okay, now I'm posting to LinkedIn every
single day, creating good content.
I'm getting decent amount of engagement, but where are the clients, right? Where are
the clients? Like, I'm doing all the right things. Where are the clients? Because we're
used to being good at things right away. We're used to getting what we want right away.
But I want you to remember when you're doing social media marketing, it's not like a
gumball machine where you sit there, you put one quarter in and get two gumballs out.
Each post you do is not going to produce clients. What it actually looks like is like a slot
machine where you're sitting there and feeding quarters for hours over and over and
you might get one or two and you might get a dozen, who knows, depending on what it
is that you're selling. But it takes time and it's unpredictable and it really does take
patience and faith. One of the things that will help you have more patience and more
faith is, oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out.
But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. And it really does take patience and faith.
One of the things that will help you have more patience and more faith is knowing that
you have a strategy that's proven to work. If you're sitting there knowing that you're
randomly throwing spaghetti at the wall and you have no fucking idea if this is actually
going to work, I guarantee you you're going to give up. Like, imagine you were lost in
the woods and it's like you're running out of food and who knows how you got there.
Maybe you sleepwalked or you wandered off from hiking or I don't know. I don't spend a
lot of time in the woods. However, I did once get lost.
Oh, my God, this is okay. So last summer, my friends all decided to do a ragnar race.
And if you don't know what a ragnar race, it is the worst thing in the world. No offense to
people who love ragnar, but basically it's a relay race where you get a team of eight
people and it can be road or trail. This was a trail race, and each person is responsible
for doing all three loops of the race once. And there's a green loop that's supposedly
supposed to be easy. It's not. There's a yellow loop and then there's a red loop, and
these colors indicate the length.
So my first loop doing this Ragnar race was the red loop, which was already over 7
miles through the hills of West Virginia. And I actually went off trail. I didn't realize that I
got lost. Instead of doing 7 miles, I did im miles. This is my biggest fear. And thank God
I was doing this in the middle of the day because this relay race goes all night. And if it
just so happens, your turn happens at 03:00 in the morning in the middle of deep night,
you're out in the woods in the dark, and it is terrifying. When I did my night run, I was
doing the yellow loop and I actually passed a woman and she had help.
I wasn't like ditching someone who was injured in the woods. She had help, but she had
broken her ankle and the trail was so rough that they couldn't get a stretcher in. So
there was this team of people rescuing her and they had to basically just prop her up
and make her walk the last 3 miles on a broken ankle. I don't recommend Ragnar
unless you really like suffering. If you really like suffering, I highly recommend it. Now,
my experience with Ragnar was so bad that I was worried that future me would forget
how bad it was. So I recorded this video to myself reminding future me to never do this
again. Squirrel.
Squirrel. Okay, I'm never doing this again. Never. And I'm filming this now to explain the
future me who has FOMO about being left out of this stuff. You do not want this. This is
painful and dangerous and no squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. But here's the thing.
Imagine so when I was lost in the woods, I didn't realize I was lost until I re encountered
the trail again that had all the red flags on it.
And I realized I'd been off trail for 2 miles. If you were in the woods and you realized that
you were lost and you didn't know how to navigate, if you didn't know where you were
even going and what direction back to camp might be or back to a main road would be if
you start walking and for a while you don't encounter anything, how much longer are
you going to keep going that direction versus if you know how to navigate, if you know
that the camp that you were at was due west? You're going to be able to look to the sky,
hopefully determine by the station of the sun in the sky where due west is, and start
following your sense of direction. That way, if you're familiar with the area, if you know
there's a road to your right, you're going to start walking to your right. But the patience
when you don't have direction, when you're not sure you're doing the right thing. It just
can't be there. I want you to know that when you're building a business, when you have
a fitness goal in mind, it takes time. You're not going to go to the gym for three days in a
row and deadlift 20 pounds on the first day, 50 pounds on the second day, and then 250
pounds on the third day. That's not how that works.
You're going to have to build up to 250 pounds. It's going to take a lot of time, and
you're going to plateau as you get there. There are going to be times where you just
can't lift more than 150 pounds, and that's normal. The same is true for your business.
The trick here is to not let Shiny Object Syndrome get the better of you, right? Because
as you are plugging away and posting and sharing about your business and doing all
this work, it's really tempting to go to other social media platforms and see how other
people are being super successful and maybe even see some of these fake gurus
talking about how easy it should be if you just follow their three steps and think, oh, well,
maybe I should give up on my strategy that I know will work and go and do this. And if
you want to hear my strategies on how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome, you want to go
and listen to the very first episode of this podcast where we talk about it. When I started
posting to LinkedIn about my business so that I could get clients, I ended up making
$50,000 in two months. Now, what I'm not telling you is it took me five months to get
there.
Took me five months of posting consistently, every single day, engaging on the platform,
being active to get to the point where I could make $50,000 in two months. It took
patience, it took dedication, and it took a whole fuck ton of faith to believe that what I
was doing would work. This is how it happens. Any big thing that happens, it happens
all at once. And after a really long time, I have a client who in this past year started
doing some consulting work, and it seemed to fall in her lap making five figures a month
from only doing a few hours of work a week. And when we talked about it, when this
opportunity first arose, it felt like it just came out of the blue until she realized that she
had been nurturing this relationship for years. And that's what happens in your
business. To get there, to get to those moments where you're signing four clients in
three weeks, to get to the point where you're making $50,000 in two months, to get to
the point where you're signing consulting clients for five figures a month for only a few
hours of work a week, you need to be consistent.
You need to have patience, and you need to have faith that your strategy will work. If
you're sitting there listening to this podcast and thinking, well, I don't know if my strategy
works. I made it up. Know that you're not alone. First and foremost, if you've never
started a business before, you're not expected to know how to start a business. It's not
like breathing. It's wild how we have this expectation of ourselves to know how to do
something that we've never done before. Imagine if in high school, they just expected
you to read for three weeks, learn how to speak the French language, and then pass
the test and be fluent in French.
That's not how that works. You have to go to class. You have to learn from a French
speaker. You have to practice. You have to get it wrong. You have to be corrected. You
have to have practice conversations. You have to learn new words, right? And still there
are going to be moments when you get to being fluent that you're not going to be
perfect.
If we don't expect that of ourselves when it comes to French or advanced chemistry or
whatever, why do we expect it of ourselves when it comes to building a business? And
you can read all the business books in the world, all the books on creating a business
plan, and yet, if those strategies aren't optimized for folks with ADHD brains, they're
unlikely to work for you. Because what do we know about the world that's designed for
neurotypicals is that we really struggle to fit into it. For you to have a strategy that works
for you, you need a strategy that is designed for how you work. Because the goal is not
to someday have a successful business that makes you a ton of money and be happy.
Then the goal is to enjoy the work you do every single day you do it. With some
exceptions. Like, let's not be unrealistic here. You're going to have bad days, right? Like,
if your friends convince you to do a ragnar race and you get lost in the woods, that's
going to be a bad day.
But still, the goal is to enjoy the journey. And I know that sounds super fucking corny,
but that is the goal. The goal is not to build a business that's going to be miserable for
you to run until you can sell it. The goal is for you to build a business that you really
enjoy being in every single day that provides you wealth and options and opportunities,
and at some point, if you choose to exit, potentially sell it to someone else who will also
enjoy running it. But to make that possible, you need a strategy that will work for you.
And if you're not sure what that is, then I invite you to book a Generate income strategy
call with me. In this call, we will identify exactly what your big goals are.
We'll talk about how you can reverse engineer them into real action steps. Today we'll
talk through all the things that are getting in the way of you building this on your own.
And if you want any information on any of my programs, I'm more than happy to save
some time at the end to talk about them. And if you want to go and book that session,
then please go to weeniecast.com strategy. I didn't even plan it. It just kind of came out
of my face hole. Okay, that's what I'm calling mouse from now on. And my brain is now
my brain hole.
It's a Google machine.
© 2022 - 2023 Katie McManus – Business Strategy For Weenie ADHD-preneurs