37 Weenie! Cuz 75 Hard Challenge rules and ADHD don't mix!

Hey new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Hey new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please, please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. I am so excited for this episode today. Squirrel. This is our very first episode that's inspired by one of our listeners, Squirrel. Squirrel. This is the 37 weenie baby. Squirrel. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus and this is business strategy for weenie ADHDpreneurs. Squirrel. And if you have a topic that has to do with ADHD and running a business and you'd like me to do an episode on it, please send those in. We have a link in the show notes where you can submit your question. This question was by Nicole Case, who is one of our listeners. She listened to the first episode about Shiny Object Syndrome and she wanted to know how ADHDpreneurs can build more consistency in their business and life. And in talking about this topic, we have to acknowledge what consistency looks like for people with ADHD and what it looks like for neurotypicals. So I want to talk about a few different topics that that really work for neurotypicals. And when we think of consistency for neurotypicals, we think of people like Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book Grit, you know, and we think of people who are so committed to something that they do it every single damn day of their life. We think of runners who train for marathons. We think of academics who have their PhD and have several published books. We think of authors. We think of people like Stephen K. And I think Douglas Adams, and they're pretty famous for sitting down and writing every single day for a certain amount of time. Now, in some ways, yeah, sure, this works for Neurodiverse folks. Mostly it doesn't, because sitting down and doing something, the same thing over and over and over again, day after day after day, year after year after year really doesn't work for us. Things that work for us are really shorter sprints, meaning 30 day goals, 100 day goals, three month goals of doing something every day. Now I'm talking about this, and I'm literally on day 98 of not drinking alcohol out of a hundred day goal. Okay? So I can do stuff like that, that I can set a 100 day goal for myself and I can succeed at it. Here's some good news and some bad news about consistency. You can absolutely build consistency in your life and business, but you can't do it consistently. Meaning that setting really, really, really long goals of doing something every day for the rest of your life, or even the next five years of your life, or even the next one year of your life is going to be incredibly challenging to a person with adhd. Why is that? It's because we get bored. We have this insatiable desire for variety. We cannot live in a world where we don't have more variety in our day. So I want you to imagine as a person with adhd, I guarantee you've gotten hyper fixated on a certain kind of meal. Okay? For me, my, my current hyper fixation is grilled chicken with rice that has mushrooms cooked in and I put some zucchini curry sauce over the top. Okay? That is my hyper fixation meal. It's something that I can, you know, it's fairly healthy. I can eat it pretty much every meal. I can eat it for probably a month and a half until I get absolutely so bored of it that I cannot even imagine putting in my mouth again. So in knowing that, in knowing that we can be consistent for short periods of time and not long periods of time like we set that expectation for, it actually opens the door for us to make this really super f Cking fun. I know that feeling. I know that feeling of wanting to become that person who goes running every day. I know that feeling of becoming that person who wants to have that perfect morning routine that sets you up for success every single day. To become that person who can read one book a week for an entire year. Okay? But that's just not who we are. We'll read one book a week for probably the first couple months of the year and then we'll get bored and we'll wanna watch TED talks or we'll wanna watch documentaries or we'll wanna go and just take a class and learn something different. Just because we can't build consistency into our world and into our lives like neurotypical people does not mean that we're failing at it though. It just means that we mix it up a little bit more. It just means that we have more variety. It just means we have more flavors available to us. And so one of the areas I want to talk about this as it comes to your ADHD and your business is building variety in how you market yourself, building variety in where you show up on social media. Now let's talk about a client of mine who is a prolific writer, just an amazing writer, right? So they can show up on social media, they can show up on LinkedIn specifically, write a ton of posts, get clients from there, and after a couple months of doing this, it gets a little stale. You know, it's like, okay, cool, I'm writing every day. I'm getting likes, I'm getting comments. That feels good. Those are dopamine hits. I'm also getting some bookings. But what else is there that I can do, you know, what else can I do to connect with people? This client, one of the things that we transition them from just posting on LinkedIn is to going to virtual networking groups and introducing themselves and asking questions and how to talk about themselves in breakout rooms so that they could also get clients from there and fill that that need for variety that their ADHD drove them to. Another thing we did is, you know, they were a prolific writer, so what are some really easy ways that they could start creating some video content with the things that they've already written? It's so easy to get bored with your day to day when you are an ADHDpreneur. And setting an expectation that you're going to do something for five years straight is just not realistic and it's not kind to you. One of the least kind things that we do to ourselves as ADHDpreneurs is we set expectations for ourselves that would be perfectly fine if we were neurotypical, but because we're not neurotypical, because our brains just work differently, because they have a different set of needs for variety. The kindest thing we can do is give our brains that variety and give ourselves a chance to actually succeed at the goals that we give ourselves. So I recently watched this movie and it's called Britney Runs a Marathon. It's not a new movie. I thought it was new, but it was just new to me. It came out in 2019. It's on Amazon Prime. Squirrel, what brings you in today? I have a hard time focusing. You get enough sleep every night? Drinks on me for this side of the room. How much is enough? Six to eight hours? Oh, way more than that. I had a friend, she was prescribed Adderall and now she's very alert. You know, some people abuse Adderall. What? Let's get you healthy squirrel. Anyway, and it's about this young woman who is really struggling in her life and she kind of stumbles into running because her doctor tells her she needs to get in better shape. And she very quickly decides she wants a big goal. So she decides she wants to train for the New York City Marathon, and she gets two friends on board. And it's a long story. It's very quirky, it's funny, it's heartwarming. And she does this. She actually goes and she runs the New York City Marathon. It's a great example how we can sprint, pun intended, to a certain goal. But it has to be something that has a deadline and it has to be something that we can see marked progress as we go through it, because it's really hard for our ADHD brains to keep doing something without seeing that progress. Just like Brittany signed up for the New York City Marathon, trained for it, or maybe it was the other way around. You have to train for it, you have to qualify for it. Anyway, I'm not an expert on marathons, never going to run one myself, but anyway, so just like she did that, just like she set up this timed project, we get to do the same thing in our businesses and we get to set ourselves up for success by making sure that we're checking in on those metrics for success. So, for instance, in your business, say you've never been on Instagram before. Say it's a brand new platform for you and you really want to show up and start building your followerships. You want to start getting clients from there. You want to set up smaller goals for yourself. So your goal may be to get 10 clients from there, but that's not something that you can control. You may also want to get 10,000 followers up from there, and that's also not something that you can control. What you can control is how you show up. Join the weeniecast hyper focused community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast.com hyperFocus. So a really simple challenge that you can give yourself if you wanted to show up on Instagram is to post a reel every day for three months. And this could be simple. It's something that you could pre batch. You could do 20 reels in one day and have that covered for the next 20 days. Squirrel. So as a business owner and being super busy, I don't have a lot of time to look up how to do my hair. So my amazing hairdresser taught me how. So first you dry it, then you curl it, and just kidding, I was not going to use a hot iron on my hair while also filming. This is not Little Women. We're not burning off anyway. Then you do a little flip and here's the end result. Thank you so much, Bobbi, for helping me look like a grown ass woman. Squirrel. You could actually set aside an hour every day to do this, to set up a reel. And if you use the full hour, great. And if you don't, then you have that rest of that, that hour back. You know, you get to create it any way that you want, but you have to set yourself up for success. I want to point out that your brain is automatically going to go to, is this working? Is this working? Am I getting the results that I want? Am I getting enough likes? Am I getting enough comments? Has anyone booked on my page yet? And I want to remind you that you can't control that. That's a metric that you can't control this podcast. You know, I hope you're telling your friends about it. I hope you're messaging people and be like, oh, my God, you have adhd. You have to listen to this podcast. I have no control over that. Okay? All I can do is show up and talk at a microphone with my producer Neil here, who's cracking up in the background whenever I slip up and say something stupid. Those are my very favorite parts. But it doesn't change that I'm showing up for this podcast. This is something that I'm creating a sprint for. This is something that I'm determined to have, you know, an episode every week for at least a year. Neil's really happy I said that. He's laughing right now. You don't know this, but every episode he's there in the background, just silent. So I want to talk about how you can build this consistency into your life and really hone in on an area that's going to be most beneficial to you as a human and to our business. So I want to share how I became super consistent on LinkedIn. And granted, I want to own that this was during the Pandemic. I have no children, I have no spouse. Like, I was a lone ranger, and I was able to focus 100% on my business. Okay? So I'm just owning my privilege here as a single woman with no responsibilities. Okay? So when I started on LinkedIn, my first step was literally to get help because I didn't know what I was doing. I was posting occasionally. I didn't really know what I should be saying. I didn't really understand how the platform worked. And so I really. I invested in a session with Leah Turner, who was just starting out as a LinkedIn coach at the time. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. I mean, the best thing that I learned from working with Leah is that I could go onto LinkedIn and not be perfect. I mean, I made $50,000 USD in the first seven months after working with her. Squirrel. Squirrel. This was one of the most transformational sessions that I've ever had. She really gave full permission for me to show up just as I am and to not just talk about all the cool things that I do with my clients. She really gave me permission to just show up and be myself. And regardless, if you want to go work with Leah Turner, I highly recommend it. You don't have to. Whatever first step you take in building this consistency, especially when it comes to something new, is to learn what the you're doing, okay? Because if you don't know what you're doing, it's going to be really, really easy for that voice of doubt to come in a few days in or maybe a couple weeks in and say, this isn't really working. Do you know what you're doing here? Because I don't think you do. I think. I think you don't know your ass from your elbow here and you should probably just give up, okay? And we don't want that voice to win. That voice sucks, okay? That voice is the weird guy who eats hard boiled eggs and then talks really close to you afterwards. Ew. Okay? So to counteract that voice, that weird voice who eats hard boiled eggs and then talks too close, we just need to know what the hell we're doing, okay? And it's really simple. Just pick a teacher to teach you how to do a thing, okay? You don't have to become an expert on it, and you also don't need too many cooks in the kitchen. So pick a social media guru to follow and do everything that they say for a certain period of time. If it works, great, you found it. If it doesn't work exactly the way you want, then at Least you've learned. That's not the methodology for you, okay? There's nothing wrong with experimentation. There's nothing wrong with trial and error. I know we were all raised in a school system that told us that if we didn't pass the test on the first go, then we failed and there's. There's no moving on to the next grade. Guess what? That's not how life works in school. I think I heard. I heard this quote somewhere. And it's like, in school, we learn and then we pass a test, right? In life, we pass the test and then we learn a lesson or we learn. Okay, no, hold on. What was that? I forgot the quote. Something like that, but you know what I mean. So we're just going to, like, pack away all the traumatic lessons we learned from school and we're going to start anew, and we're going to start in a way that we embrace experimentation. We embrace the guaranteed failure that's going to happen. All right? This is not about results. This is about you taking action every day. Consistency actually has nothing to do with results. Consistency has to do with you showing up and you doing the work, whatever that work is that you've committed to doing. If you want to use this next bit for a personal challenge, be my guest. If you have a health goal you want to reach, if you have a crafting goal you want to reach, if anything else springs to mind, you don't want to apply this to your business, then be my guest. I'm not a die hard for this, okay? I want you to show yourself that you can build your own unique brand of consistency in your life. And I want you to win doing it. So one of the things that my team and I are so excited that we've put together for you. Have you ever heard of 75 hard? It's that insane challenge. I think you have to drink a gallon of water every day. You have to do two 45 minute workouts per day, which I. I'm sorry, that seems insane. I like that one of them has to be outside. I think that's really good for us. We really do need, you know, sunlight for our circadian rhythms. Hopefully you're getting enough sunlight in your day. Especially as we head into winter and the sun is limited. You have to not drink alcohol for 75 days. You have to stick to a very specific diet or something of your choosing. I don't know. That just seems like a lot. And because people with adhd, we have these big expectations that people throw at us to be super random and weird. Let's just give it to them. Okay. So we've created our own challenge and it's a sprint and short and it's going to show you that you can stay consistent in whatever goal it is that you're trying to reach. And this is the 37 weenie baby. And I challenge you to join us for the 37 weenie. This is 37 days of not being a weenie and going after whatever goal it is that you want to apply to. The very first step is you have to be visible every day. So I challenge you to post on LinkedIn every day of the 37 days. If you need any help, I've put together a free training. It's a 20 minute video guide of how you can write a post on LinkedIn and you can download that and everything else I'm about to list@weenicast.com 37. Number two, in the challenge, you are going to read 10 pages in a book that is on a topic that is related to the work you do. So if you're a psychic, I want you picking up a book that has 10 with astrology. If you don't know anything about astrology and I want you learning about astrology. If you're a private chef and you really want to learn another cuisine, then pick up a cookbook that has to do with that other cuisine. I don't care. The book doesn't matter. You just have to pick something that is relevant to the work you do. And by the way, reading on this topic is going to make it so much easier for you to post stuff onto LinkedIn. Number three, we're actually going to copy this directly from 75hard because why not? It never hurts to be well hydrated. You're going to drink a gallon of water a day. And by the way, I did the math mainly for myself because I drink so much Spin drift. If you wanted to drink this full gallon in all Spin drift, that would only be about 10 and a half cans. 10.66 cans per day. Okay. They come in packs of eight, which is not the most convenient. So if you just bulk buy them, you can go to spin. We're putting a link to them in the show notes. Number four. In the challenge, you need to journal every day. And to make this super easy for you, we've actually put together a whole list of journaling prompts for you to express your gratitude, to acknowledge yourself for what you're doing well, and to also sort through those tough days where you feel like you can't do anything. Right. And last but not least, step five, what you're going to do every day is you are going to take a 30 minute walk without your phone. That is right, my people, you are going to leave your phone at home or at least not touch it in your pocket. You need to get out, you need to decompress, you need to disconnect from work. And so in 37, we need, you are going to go for a 30 minute walk per day, rain or shine. Or if you're really far north, also snow. I don't care about the weather. You are going for a walk outside. And if you are in a colder climate, remember to moisturize because no one likes dry skin and the cold really dries you out. And everything that we've listed here in this challenge, you're going to be able to download the training, all of the materials@weeniecast.com 37. Spot on. Perfect. Thank you. Great. Lovely, Lovely. Oh, lovely. That's an okay. So this is something that I've learned. People with ADHD have echolalia, which is when we hear something that's said differently or we see something written or we say something in a funny way and like we repeat it over and over and over again. It's actually, we can't help it. So it's just like when I'm hanging around British people, I, I tend to say things in like kind of a British accent and people tend to think I'm fun of them and I'm not. I actually don't even realize I'm doing it until they're like, that was British of you. And actually I've started gaining, I started getting like, anxiety sometimes when I'm around people with accents because I know my brain is just going to automatically want to repeat what they're saying and I don't even realize I'm doing it. Doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. Are you an entrepreneur? Are you struggling to stay focused and organized while juggling a million tasks? Are you looking for ways to improve your productivity but finding it hard to stay motivated? Then you need to get access to my Weeniecast for Winners show. That's exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I know you might be thinking, I've tried everything to stay on task and nothing works. But I'm enjoying the advice I'm getting here on the Weeniecast, and let me tell you, I'm delighted to be able to help you and thousands of listeners just like you, my friend. But the Weeniecast for Winners podcast is next level, and I'd hate for you to miss out on it. For just 199amonth, Weeniecast for winners delivers in depth and actionable advice that's specifically designed for entrepreneurs, including those with adhd, whether diagnosed or suspected. I'll talk you through how to increase your sales conversions, keep your mindfulness on point, and even offer practical tips that can help you be more productive and successful in your business, all while catering to your unique needs of being an entrepreneur who might be struggling with adhd. With winicast for Winners, you'll get practical tips and strategies that you can use to drive your business forward without the frustrations and setbacks that often come with adhd. So if you're ready to start seeing real Results, subscribe to Winniecast for winners today at winniecast.com forward/winners for just $1.99 a month, you'll gain access to the valuable insights and strategies that can take your business to the next level. Weeniecast for Winners is a show that's worth every penny for entrepreneurs who want to succeed. Subscribe now and start enjoying the benefits for yourself. Join the weeniecast hyper focused community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word? That's weenicast.com hyperfocus.