ADHD New Year Resolutions

Hello there. This is getting back into podcasting and our YouTube channel. We have taken some time off and I have a new sidekick here with me who you have not seen before. This is Coach Vida. Vida is amazing and I am so excited to have her be a regular part of the podcast and part of the original ADHD Coach, ADHD Out Loud, ADHD Upgrade. She's Part of all of the things. Actually, you're even part of my marketing agency and everything. So you're like in every area of my life right now. It's awesome.

You'll never get rid of me.

So today we're talking about ADHD, New Year's resolutions. I have had 6 conversations today about—

New Year's resolutions are— it's a fool's gambit. It really is for everyone, neurotypicals and neurodivergents alike, because People forget the secret sauce to making them work. If we could make things work on our own, as on our little solo island, we would. But all programs near and far that are super, super effective have one thing in common: community and accountability. Like, even if it's just you and your bestie going to the gym, walking on the treadmill, and then leaving and drinking wine, you're still accountable to each other to show up.

You have to have community, and it's— community brings accountability.

Yeah.

Like, it just by the nature of having community. But when you're ADHD, having a community that is one, also ADHD, so that anything you say is at most a giggle, there's no judgment, there's no criticism, there's no shame ever. It's huge because I can say to our team, I remember saying this a few months ago, I was on a new medication and the voices in my head stopped. Like my head was quiet and I was losing my mind. And I said on a mastermind call, I'm running a mastermind call, excuse me, I'm having a hard time thinking today cuz nothing's None of the voices in my head are working. And it took us 10 minutes to get back on track because everybody was laughing so hard because everybody got it. They're like, oh my gosh, I hate when that happens. You know, it was just— I couldn't think because my head was quiet. You say that to a neurotypical person and they're committing you.

That's a grippy sock vacation right there. Yeah, I mean, it kind of breaks my heart. Like, I'm an adamant people watcher. It's part of my autism. I like to watch people and then figure out why they do the things they do. So every year At this time, I just kind of watch the parking lot of the local gym, and it's like I could probably do a bar graph on attendance. It's like it's packed the first week, and then from there it gets progressively less. Right around the second week of February, it's back to normal levels. But I think that's true of engagement in all kinds of programs. But things like Weight Watchers, things like even addiction counseling, things like book clubs, you know, all of these things are Successful because you're showing up for other people. Other people expect you to show up. And that is like, that is one of the next level secrets for neurodivergent behavior modification. We will show up for other people before we will show up for ourselves.

And when we show up for other people, and that's why we've built the community we've built.

Yeah.

And, and we restarted this. So anybody that's been listening to my podcast or my YouTube channel for a long time knows that, hey, wait, you already had an ADHD accountability program. Yeah. Well, things aren't the same anymore, and I had to take a look and step back and really evaluate how we had things. And there were 2 things that were like— I asked every member of the community who was still there, and then I went and asked people who had left, because we'd had 5, 10 people who had left over the last year, and asked them why they left. And most of the time it was because they weren't ready for it, it was too much for them, whatever. But we had a couple people that were like, people are too friendly. And they asked too many questions. And when I asked for help, 5 people offered to help. And I was like, oh, that's okay. Well then you're not my ideal client because I love that. But you know what that meant to me? It meant that then I heard from all of our members and every single one of them said, I'm never alone at 2:00 AM. If I need somebody, I can just say, hey, I need somebody and somebody will step up and help. 5:00 AM, if I'm starting my day and I'm looking to start a new morning routine, somebody's there to do it with me. There's always accountability, there's always support. And whether it's an emotional thing or I can't figure out how to get Canva to work thing, whatever the thing is, somebody's always there to help and help in a way that works for your brain. Because it's not like your neurotypical therapist or coach or whatever saying, just get a planner.

But I hear that all the time. Like, okay, so my background is in education and special education and then behavior modification. So it's like breaking down things. People really get stuck in this rut. Like, I— it has to look a certain way, that's the only way success counts. And it's like, but what is the end result that you're going for? Because so I live in Oklahoma, and Dallas is the big town that everybody goes to. My husband— I'm gonna have to trademark this saying because he steals it all the time— and I tell people there are lots of ways to get to Dallas. So the end goal is to post more on socials or Show up more presently for your children, whatever. Success does not have to look like everyone else's success, but I think neurodivergent brains get hung up in the minutia of trying to make it look like everybody else.

Well, and we've also been criticized. I mean, I don't know how many clients, well, and I know this for myself, but how many clients I've talked to about the fact that, well, you have to do it this way or you're not doing it right. Your success has to be follow this pattern and this thing, or it's not success. And I actually was told previous to this last year I had been a 7-figure business owner and I was actually told I was not successful by a mastermind, female mastermind group. And I couldn't understand. And finally I got the main person on a call. I'm like, I don't understand. Why am I not considered successful? Well, you have to find 7-figure success by doing this. And it was the Instagram influencer way of doing things. And that was apparently the only way you could be a successful business owner. And I was like, and I didn't even have Instagram at that point. Like at all. I hate Instagram. I have it now and I still hate posting on it. I just don't care about social media. And I built a whole empire of businesses because it was multiple businesses by never doing social media for myself. And apparently you can't do that.

But, but that's the thing. It's like, okay, I know that people have a lot of things to say about the movie Legally Blonde because, you know, it's a parody, right? But Elle Woods gets into Harvard and she goes, what, like it's hard? Because She just checked the boxes and did the thing, and guess what? She got in. Now, in the movie, there's magical things that happen and she gets in. But if you're dealing with neurodivergent brains, a lot of times I think we get bogged down in that minutia because the task list is not hard for us, especially if we're getting a lot of dopamine because it's a new thing. So like New Year's resolutions for ADHDers, oh, we get a lot of dopamine right at the beginning. But about 2 weeks in, if you're not showing up for somebody or there's not some kind of gamification or there's not some kind of accountability group, the dopamine starts to wane. And then by the first week of February, everybody's like, and I'm done.

Yep. And it's even neurotypicals who are done by February. It's not just neurodivergent people that give up because everybody does. And I had this conversation 45 minutes ago, an hour ago. Somebody asked me, well, how did you get control and cure your ADHD? I was like, whoa. Totally not cured. Today's a good day, but I totally am not. And it was only a good day for a little bit because Vida on a team call was like, you need to shut your camera off because your autism is showing a bit there. I was annoyed about something and it was actually nothing about the call. It's cuz I was doing something else. But you don't have to be anybody's version or do anything that everybody's version of things. How are you going to be successful in your way? So I tell clients there's no one way to do anything. There is no one way to do any task.

The end goal. It's the end goal. So if for you, taking your dishes outside and putting them in a kiddie pool and filling it up with water and bubbles, I would use dish soap. But if you're going to do that because you want to get the dishes done and then spray it with a garden hose, who cares? Are your dishes clean? Yes. Did everyone have fun? Double points for that. And then you carry them back in.

Who cares?

I mean, who cares?

Laundry does not have to be done in any certain way. Did you know you don't have to sort colors and stuff out from each other? You could throw them all in one huge freaking load in the washer and walk away. It works.

Yeah. Cold water though. Cold water. But I find this a lot for people that are a little bit more financially blessed than others. If you can outsource a task, outsource it. But people are like, no, I have a washer and dryer and I have to wash laundry. And I'm like, so are you successful at that? And they're like, no. And I'm like, can you afford a drop-off service? And like, yeah. And I'm like, then drop it off. It frees up so much more cognitive load. And that is part of the accountability piece a community can provide because when you are low and need extra spoons, like if you need extra things to carry you through, somebody else has them.

Mm-hmm. So I used to write all of my own content and I was like, I had to do it because I wasn't successful at doing things if I didn't do it and I didn't schedule it and I didn't create the graphic for it and I didn't do all of the things. I now go, oh, somebody write me a post on this. And I don't even write the whole entire post. I hand it to somebody else on my team and make them do it. I don't even do it anymore. You know how freeing that was for me to not have that level of control over every single thing that some coach or somebody told me at some point in time I had to do? I think probably— I mean, I probably saw it somewhere or something, but now I have so much more time for coaching and creating amazing things and being a visionary for what I want to do. And hand it off to somebody else who's better at it and likes doing it. And I think that's a big thing, is better at it. And my husband loves loading the dishwasher because then it's all loaded very methodically and it looks like Tetris. So how are you doing things? What is the best way for you? So Vida and I, we had some clients talking about 75 Hard.

The Hard 75.

And I took a look at it because I kind of knew what it was, but not my thing. So I hadn't really dove in. I read like a blog on it and then went to Vida. Oh, we have to be able to create this because this is toxic as hell. Oh my God, this is so bad. How can we create something else? Now, this is where ADHD brains are amazing. I said that to Vida, like maybe 2 hours later, and that's with having dinner in between that. Mm-hmm. Vida comes back to me with all of these ideas and I've got an idea and we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that. And by 9:00 AM the next morning, we had a website, a graphic, a logo. We had everything done.

And that's the deal. It's like sometimes it hits just right. And no, we didn't follow like everyone else's, oh, well, you have to go do market research and oh, you have to do this and oh, you have to do that. Like, I don't have to do that because I know the people that I'm writing this for because I am one. So we took the Hard 75 and we wrote it and changed it specifically so that people that are neurodivergent could participate in a program like the Hard 75, but this one is built specifically for neurodivergent brains. So it incorporates Incorporates all kinds of behavior modification tricks that work specifically for us. Like we need a behavior range. So you one of the things is put away three to five things a day because normally we fall somewhere in the middle. But you have a minimum and you have a maximum. If you don't check off one of the things on the list or if you have a bad day, you don't stop and go all the way back to the beginning like the hard seventy-five because that's That's devastating to the neurodivergent brain. We just keep going because life doesn't work like that.

Life definitely doesn't work like that. And I think a lot of what we're saying here is you have to find your way to do it and you have to find a way that's healthy for you to do it. Not something that's going to damage you. I think that's one of the big things that I had to learn growing through this process. And I obviously, I've been doing this ADHD coaching for 20 25 plus years. I'm gonna keep saying just add the plus on.

I like it.

I, I, yeah, I'm not, not going above 25. And the biggest thing I had to learn for myself was, one, there's no perfect way to do it. Two, I need to habit switch. How I do it has to switch. How I do a task has to switch almost every day. I tell my clients I have 12 planners because I need 12 different ways to plan out a day. Yet today I was too lazy to do it today, but oh, can't see it because I have a background. I have a flower planner and the flowers were bothering me today. I don't like flowers today for some reason. I just don't. And I don't wanna use that. Some days I love a lot of stickers. Other days I don't like any stickers. Some days I like to write down everything I'm doing all day. Other days I'm gonna write it digitally. Who cares? There is no— you don't have to— a planner is not going to solve your problems, first of all. And second of all, use the thing that tickles your brain today. If you putting a cute pom-pom headband on makes you happy today, do it. If working in your bed with your sweatpants on works for you and you can get motivation doing that today, great. If working at Panera Bread is going to work better for you today, go do it. If working while laying upside down on your couch and like leaning, do it. Who cares?

And I think more employers, not all employers, but more employers are getting on this track of it's still the end result, like Micromanagers are the ones that get in and nitpick you along the way. Real life-changing leaders are more concerned with the end result than how you get there, because this is what neurodivergent people need. We need someone to trust us and our super creative brain to problem solve. Now, that being said, you need some definite coping skills along the way so that you don't procrastinate and then Do the thing that we all did mostly through college where we would just wait till the night before and then bust out a 25-page paper, you know, and because we can do that. Just because you can do that doesn't mean you need to do that and you need all that stress in your life. But I do think too, we have a tendency to fall in this all-or-nothing pattern. That is not success because success is not a best-fit line. It's a roller coaster. So True success is found 10 to 90%. It's found in the middle.

True success is doing it your way. One of my team members wrote a post the other day that 25% of small business owners have ADHD. Well, the other side of that is 69% of multimillionaires have ADHD. So small business owners, oh yay, 25% of them have ADHD. That's horrible. Oh man, they feel so— oh no, multibillionaires, 69% of them have ADHD. So when you look at things and you look at what most multimillionaires do, if you're into highly successful people and reading what their morning routines are and stuff, and they've got this in the interview, they've got this really regimented morning routine and you see it all written out and you're like, oh my God, no way. Especially as an ADHDer, there's no fricking way I am ever doing that. Well, I happen to have worked with one of those people that has articles written about him. And he laughs because there are some days that his idea of planning and doing his morning routine and all of that is yelling to his assistant on the phone and having them do it all.

Yeah. I always tell people, I'm, I pick on Warren Buffett a lot, but not because I don't think he's great. It's just Warren Buffett does not mow his own lawn. He doesn't fold his own laundry. He doesn't do all of these things that we struggle with as far as executive dysfunction. He is outsourcing that just like Danielle's millionaire, billionaire bestie is doing. They're farming it out. And because that is how that they, they have found success. They know their strengths right away. And personally, like, yes, I think ADHD coaches, neurodivergent coaches help us because they give us that accountability and they're not your bestie. So they're going to hold you accountable in a way that's not enabling. But I also think if there was another expense That you could squeeze into your budget and it wasn't outsourcing some kind of executive function task, I think it's an assistant.

Oh yeah, it's absolutely an assistant. And I am somebody who has one and I am not rich by any means. And I talked about being a 7-figure business owner. Let me, I'm going to tell you, I'm a negative numbers business owner right now. I'm very honest about that. I'm not paying, I'm not even supporting my business right now. But the one thing I'm not getting rid of, even though I'm in the negative numbers, Is my assistant because nothing will get done without her. Vida knows this. Nothing gets done without her. Without Gina, I am a disaster. I have to have a Gina in my life, and got rid of my housekeeper. I got rid of getting my laundry done. I got rid of my lawn guy. Of course, it is December, so that was not that hard to do right now. But still, I've gotten rid of all of those other things because my assistant is the thing that makes me functional. So what thing makes you functional? For some of my clients, I'll say you're the thing that makes me functional. You give me the account. Accountability, and you give me the action-taking time to get things done. I have another client who bartered with her teenager. She will allow her teenager, because they have like screen time things and all of that, they bought their teenager her own laptop and she has her own Netflix account so she doesn't have to share with anyone else in the house for her to help her mom do and be her executive function skills to get things done in the house.

I like that.

And all she does, all of the teenager does is create chore charts. And then make sure everybody's doing their chores in their house. That's all she's doing. She's not actually doing any of the chores. She is just the executive functioning skills that nobody else has in the house. She's the only neurotypical in the house.

I mean, I play to your strengths. Like my husband, he's always like wanting to plan these super intricate vacations and that appeals to him, but then he gets mad at me cuz I don't. And it's not that I don't enjoy going on them, it's just planning them and getting bogged down in that stuff is not my cup of tea. I'm like, throw some stuff together. stuff in a bag. I've got some money. Let's go. Like, that's how I live most of my life. So the planning aspect has to be very simple and it has to be very streamlined. And he just really likes to get into the nitty-gritty and it drives me crazy.

So I'm a weird mix. I want to know everything about where I'm going. Like, I need to know everything. I want to look at the map. I want to know— I have no sense of space, so I get lost very, very easily. And I have a lot of anxiety when it comes to And I don't like getting trapped small places either. So I have a lot of anxiety about that. So I will research everything. I drove my— we went to Disney recently, and I watched every Disney tip YouTube video and TikTok and everything. So I knew everything about going on that trip. Now, I still want to, when it's time to go, pack, let's go, let's have fun, let's go wherever the mood takes us that day.

Yeah.

And I'll go do that. But I have to know everything about my destination because it causes me a lot of anxiety.

That makes sense. I just don't care where we stay.

Yeah. See, I need to know where we're staying, what my room's going like. I need to know all of the, and my husband's like, if we hear one more thing about this, we're not going. 'Cause I don't wanna know anything else. Shut up. Please stop talking about it. And, and if we're gonna go see a movie, I'm like reading all the trivia before we go see the movie. And I'm like, I gotta know all of the things. Like, I just have to know all of the things. And my husband's like, shut up. I don't wanna know nothing. Let's go.

Yeah, I do. I do stuff like that. But it's the blurt. It's the neurodivergent blurt that gets me in trouble. Like, did you know this is based off Hamlet? And then like, so then everyone knows that the main character dies and then that's like, damn it, Fida.

Yeah, I do that too. Pattern recognition. We're good at that. Yeah. So knowing that pattern recognition is amazing for us, but failure recognition is not. We know we're gonna— we know we're gonna fail at something. We've already planned that we're going to fail about at our New Year's resolutions before we even get there. We know that they're gonna, but we refuse. And I say we, we as a neurodivergent crowd, takes a long time for us to get to the point where we're willing to ask for help because we should be able to do this. We're smarter than everybody else. We know we're smarter than everybody else, and we are. I mean, to be fair.

But I'm with you. Like, I am smarter than a lot of people at a lot of stuff, but I need someone to hold me accountable. It's that meme that's The Office. It's like, I need someone to lead me. But when I'm in the mood to be led, I need someone to show me, but nicely. It's like, there's all of these things that check off my boxes. Like, I do need accountability, but I need someone that understands me enough to know that if they yell at me and get kind of hateful with me, you're just gonna make me wanna fight you.

Somebody who understands my brain works. Somebody knows I'm like, Gina knows I'm super visual and that she can't hand me a list of things ever because I will never do— if somebody writes a list for me. I'm just not gonna do it. But if you hand me a really pretty color-coded something, I'm totally gonna do that because I love that and I love that how that looks. But it's, and I think that's why I love ADHD Upgrade so much is we've got like 20 different ways that we do every single thing depending on whose brain is working however today.

But that's the thing about being a kind of a conglomerate of like neurodivergent amazingness. It's like, how can I do this? Someone posted in a group and then you have 4 different ways and then you can choose your own adventure. And it's like, oh, none of those work for me. And honestly, it gives the rest of us dopamine. It's like, ooh, I can problem solve today because we can solve other people's problems way quicker than we can solve our own. And this is true of neurodivergent people in lots of aspects of life, but it's because we are too close to our own situation to see outside of the box.

So having support is like the biggest key for those of us with ADHD. Having support that gets us, not the support that's gonna yell at us. Our spouse who is always frustrated by our ADHD and us, especially if they're neurotypical or another type of neurodivergence. We have 4 neurodivergent adults in my house and we're all on a different, we drive each other crazy. We cannot be accountable to each other. We will kill each other. That's just not gonna happen. Well, even on our team, Vida and I are great together, but there are other people on our team that I drive crazy. I know I drive them crazy because my brand of ADHD does not match theirs, and that's fine. So don't go and don't use your bestie. If your bestie and you are great at counterfeeding each other into distraction, probably not a good person to be accountability partner. Yeah.

And we are as a group extremely self-aware. Like, so don't lie to yourself and be like, yes, Susan and I are gonna do this. And, and it's like, so have you and Susan have any success at doing stuff in the past? And if the answer is a resounding no, this is not the year. I am not trying to break a heart, but I'm just telling you right now, Now that is a broken system and let's fix it, but it's probably going to be with someone else.

Mm-hmm.

You and Susan can just meet and have fun, and then there's no shame in it when you and her get distracted cuz you and her aren't doing the thing.

You're not there. You're not there to keep each other accountable to make sure your houses are clean and you launch that new landing page or whatever it is. You're there to entertain each other. Great.

If Danielle and I lived closer to each other, we would probably be at each other's houses like 24/7, and they would probably have to throw buckets of cold water on us to make us stop working only because we're, it's like 2, it's just, we sync up and then it's like, let's do all the things.

14 hours in the vehicle together and our partner in crime was sound asleep in the backseat. We were bad. We talked about so many things and so many ideas and we were, we worked the whole entire time and we were in heaven.

It was great because we found someone in each other that, yes, got how our brain worked, could hold us accountable, but also we could bounce ideas off of each other and we could do the thing. And then guess what? When we got home, we actually held each other accountable and are doing the thing. And we really want to give that gift to everybody else. But I can tell you what, people to hold me accountable are not found inside my house. They're not found inside my family. They're not found inside the colleagues that I have from my previous job. I love all those people. They're amazing people, but they are not people that motivate and drive me to do more.

And same in my house. My husband is I can have some amazing conversations about what I'm up to, and he always has some amazing insight. He's also an entrepreneur, so we have some great talks, but him and I can't hold each other accountable or actually give ourselves advice that is like solid. We have to follow through. That's just not, not gonna happen. We end up fighting. It's just not good. So if you need support, if you need help, we're here for you. Reach out. We have programs from free all the way up to, I mean, way, way up. But our main program is $19.99 a month because we want you to have the accountability and the support and the community because the community. Our community is so amazing and so entertaining and so supportive and amazing.

Absolutely.

Have a good day, everybody. We will be back with you with ADHD Out Loud next time.