ADHD entrepreneurs have these 5 annoying traits. Let's celebrate them together!

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. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, we're going to talk about the top five annoying things that I and probably you do as ADHD entrepreneurs. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the weeniecast. There are two types of ADHD people that I tend to come across nowadays that I have this podcast and I work with a lot of ADHD folks and the first one is very similar to me. They got diagnosed with ADHD when they were a kid, were never actually brought on board with what that meant for them. Right. Because back in the day when you got diagnosed with adhd, it was very much, here's how your ADHD is making everyone else frustrated. And I, along with all these other people who grew up knowing they had this label, but not actually understanding how it impacted them on a day to day, have now gotten to the point where they're comfortable with the label, but they're now watching TikToks and reels and listening to podcasts like this and they're understanding, oh my God, I didn't realize that was an ADHD thing. That other thing that people do is also an ADHD thing. Holy crap. I thought it was just me, like this whole time. I feel like there is gatekeeping of this information and it's probably because the people that researched ADHD early on didn't have adhd. And really the only reason I got diagnosed with ADHD is because I wasn't really following along with what was going on in class. Right? So I was the problem. That's how kind of how they approached it early on is this child is being a problem. We need to make them not be a problem anymore, maybe give them some Ritalin or smatter all or whatever else there is out there and hopefully that'll do the trick. I don't remember at any point. I will, you know, absolutely do an episode on my experience as a child getting diagnosed early on, because I think that would be super valuable for those of you who got diagnosed early on to know that you weren't alone. But there was no point throughout all that where I was told about rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria, or executive dysfunction. I just thought I was, I was bad at paying attention to stuff. I didn't realize that there was actually something going on in my brain that made it hard for me to start things. It honestly wasn't until the lockdown of COVID 19, where I got on TikTok and started watching these videos by people who have ADHD. They're younger than me, so they obviously had different support systems when they got their diagnosis, and they were describing all these things that I've done all my life. Squirrel. Squirrel.

What fake ADHD looks like? Yeah, I have, like, really bad ADHD because I can never focus in class what real ADHD looks like. Okay, I'm just going to brush my hair. I kind of wish I was a brunette. Oh, are those my keys? I literally lost them.

Beep, beep, beep, beep.

I have an identical twin sister, and we were both diagnosed with ADHD, but our diagnoses were almost 10 years apart. I presented as very outwardly hyperactive, and she presented as more inattentive. So I was loud, disruptive, and had trouble sitting still, whereas she appeared uninterested during lessons, doodled a lot, and always seemed to be distracted by her thoughts.

All right, let's sit down and do some work. Work, work, work, work, work, work. All right, enough. Come on, sit down. Dude. Focus, Focus. Ford Focus. What a piece of car.

Squirrel. It's like you're a zebra in a herd of horses. You might realize that you're a zebra, but you think that you have to fit in with these horses. And really, like, zebras are horses. They're not great. They can't do the things that horses do. But understanding that there are other zebras that are also shitty horses and that they're shitty at being horses in the same way you're shitty at being a horse, there's a relief to that. And I hadn't ever experienced that relief until I started watching TikToks by other ADHD creators. And really, that's the only reason this podcast exists. So thank you to all those creators on TikTok who inspired this. So in honor of that, I want to share with you the top five annoying things that my ADHD does that drive me and everyone around me up the wall and how I am learning to cope with them, because, let's be honest here, they still drive me nuts. They're still problems. I haven't figured out the solution to this, and as I'm sharing these things, if you have an experience of this, I would love it if you shared how this shows up in your life to my Instagram if you go to Instagram, it's at Katie the coach. And if there's a thing that you have going on that I'm not listing, I'd love to hear that too. Because the goal here is to start showcasing, like, the person with ADHD their experience of having adhd, rather than the diagnostic criteria that represents how other people are frustrated with us. For someone to be able to diagnose us, they kind of have to be able to see, like, how us being ADHD is negatively impacting the people in our lives. It's usually the thing that we see, but for us, that doesn't quell this feeling of, I must be the only one. I'm just up, there's something wrong with me. No one else has this problem. So the goal is to create, like, a very comprehensive list of all the annoying that we have to struggle with with ourselves, so that we know that we're not alone, so we know that we're actually adequate zebras, not inadequate horses. So the first thing on my list is I'm a 60 percenter. I get really excited for new projects. And because I get hyper focused on new things that have variety and energy and are interesting to me, I can bang out a big chunk of any project to a point. There. There comes a point where it stops being exciting. Like, this new project loses its shine, gets a little dusty. The way you got yourself into it. With that, motivation fizzles out. Like, as I'm recording this podcast, I'm sitting in my office. It has four walls, as rooms do. Some rooms have more, some rooms have less. I don't know why. I wanted to clarify that some to explain that three of these walls are painted a different color than the fourth and not on purpose. Because when I made this room my office, I decided I wanted to repaint it. And I got three walls in, and I was like, you know, that's good enough. Like, I don't really feel like painting that fourth wall. It seems like I can do it later, right? Like, this is good enough. That wall never got painted. Of course not. It's still the old color. To its credit, it does look like an accent wall. Okay, so it works. Unless you look under my desk and you see the can of paint that's still there with the drop cloth and the thing. Let's not talk about that. Also, there's, like, too much stuff in front of that, so you probably wouldn't even be able to see it if you did come into my room. This happens everywhere. This happens in all aspects of my Life as a crafter. For those of you who do knitting and sewing and quilting, you'll know what I'm talking about. When I moved out of my apartment in Philadelphia, I literally counted how many knitting projects I had started and not completed that were still in project bags. And I'm pretty sure the number is around 23. Now, to give you an idea of the kind of knitting I do, usually a ball of yarn that I buy is around $30, and these projects usually have about three of those, if not more so $90 worth of yarn. The needles are usually $20 each, and then of course, the project bag. So literally 23 projects that all cost me all in, say, $130 that I've never finished. They're all about 60% done. And honestly, I know I'm just going to continue to move them with me as I go through life until I die. They're never going to get finished. Like whoever I leave my estate to when I'm old because I don't think I'm going to have kids. I feel really bad for them because they're going to have to throw out my unfinished work that I started 60 years before. So to whoever you are, if this podcast is still around when I die, I pre apologize to you and also I pre apologize for all the projects that I know I will start between now and then and never finish that you will also have to deal with. What's extra fun about this is it doesn't just exist in painting rooms, in renovating your house. It also happens in your business, which makes it so much Fun for your VAs, your OBMs, your podcast producer, to work with you. As Neil and I were talking about the topic of this episode, he reminded me of a couple things that I told him I would get to him months ago and then completely forgot about. I'm not gonna lie, hearing about them gave me a little bit of anxiety, but also I should probably get them done, right? This is something that drives me crazy about myself. It's something that if I could wave a magic wand, I would change. And it's also something that I honestly have not figured out how to fix. Right? I have set goals for myself that I'm going to finish. All these things. I have asked for accountability on them, and usually that accountability just gives me anxiety. The one thing that I find does help is having someone sit down and doing it with me. Like body doubling, having a friend come over. I mean, it would be really boring for a friend to come over and just sit there while I finish a knitting project that, like, really honestly needs another 14 to 25 hours of knitting. That would be a very patient friend. Or it would be a friend who, like, really has to catch up on, like, a major series or something on Netflix. I have good friends, but I also don't have any friends who have that much free time. So it's probably not effective for a lot of stuff that I'm only 60% on. So if you have any tips on this, I would be open to hearing them. If you also do this, I'd love to hear exactly how this shows up for you in your life. This also shows up in how I live my life in my space. So, like, for instance, if I decide that I'm going to take Luna for a walk, I have to put on socks and I have to put on shoes. I'll go into my bedroom, I'll open the drawer, pull out the socks, then put them on, and then go for a walk. I won't close the drawer. By the time I've acquired the socks, the drawer has ceased to exist to me. It has served its purpose. Like, there's no next step in my mind to the point where I will walk into my bedroom and every single drawer in all of my dressers will be open. And it's inconvenient because if you need something in a lower drawer, you can't get to it. So that's when you kind of have to close things. But that 60% done shows up in a lot of places. It has made me kind of an annoying roommate in the past, and I do apologize. My former roommates. Anyway, moving on. The second thing that drives me absolutely bonkers about myself and also annoys people around me is I'm really good at planning the plan, right? Planning the plan does not equal doing the plan. This happens especially for us in the new year, in a new month, right? We decide that we're going to take on a new habit that sounded like Hobbit. A new habit, like working out or being on social media. We're really good at planning out what we want to do, and we can kind of get addicted to the planning of it and not actually ever do any of it. So planning on the plan for me, this especially shows up in creating workout plans for myself. And in my business, two areas that are pretty important, my health and my income. Now, I will say there's something about this that I do like, because creating a plan, to me, I find very soothing, very reassuring that when you see the plan laid out on paper and like there's space for it in your life and you could do it if you wanted to do it. It's there for you. It fits. There's time for it. It's not like you're being unreasonable in saying that you know you're going to devote X amount of time every single day when you don't actually have that time available. So there is some value here, right? Because sometimes when you have anxiety, like you just have to do one little thing that will bring your anxiety down enough that you can move on and do other stuff. Sometimes this is that for me. But for the most part, I'm really great at making plans that I never act on. I imagine who I would be if I made the plan and did the plan. Think about how fit I'd be. Think about how accomplished I'd be. Think about how many books I would have written by now. There are several books that I've started and I've never finished, but I have plans for them. I have the chapters planned out. I have the storyline or the point of the book. Fiction and nonfiction. I could be a New York Times bestseller author by now. I'm now going through what my life would look like and I'm living in a moment of regret because there's no way I'm ever going to follow the plan. There's no way I'm going to plan the plan and then actually do the plan on all the plans that I've ever made. I get excited for new plans all the time. And actually maybe that's a hobby. Maybe that's something I do for fun. If you listen to the last episode where we talked about having fun for fun's sake, maybe planning is actually something that I do for fun, which is kind of sad. I need more hobbies. I need to get out more. This episode is basically an apology tour to everyone who has to deal with me on a day to day basis or has had to in the past. So I apologize to those of you who've had to deal with my planning self and my not doing self. I want to say I'll try to be better in the future, but I'm always trying to be better and it never actually works. Number three, Another thing that I do as a business owner with ADHD is I actually steal dopamine from myself all the time. This dopamine theft usually happens by me setting an arbitrary deadline for me to do something that I planned on and then not doing it and missing that deadline that I set for myself that no one else was counting on and then feeling bad about it and feeling like, oh, my God, I'm so behind. This is three weeks late, when really, like, it doesn't affect any other part of your business. No one's waiting for it. It's literally just something that you said that you would do for you and then gave yourself a deadline for. When you pass a deadline, there's no more dopamine in that action. If you go and do it, you don't get any credit for it. There's no, like, wave of relief that you got this done, you failed already. Right. It is the ultimate way to steal dopamine from yourself. This is one of the reasons why in the Monday sprints that I do with my clients in my communities, one of the first things I have them do in that call is I have them forgive themselves. Like, silver light just kind of washing over them. That, like, washes away the lateness and the behind on the deadline and, like, kind of cleans up all the energy around the tasks that they're going to assign themselves that week. Because if any of those tasks are hangovers from the week before, the week before, the month before, the year before, they're not going to have any credit attached to them. They're just going to have failure. And whenever we feel like we've already failed at something, that's prime time for our executive dysfunction to pop up, and we will avoid it and we'll continue to feel about it, and it doesn't matter actually how many other things we do and accomplish in that week. If we still have that one thing that we're behind on, it actually robs dopamine from the other things as well. We got this from school, we got this from work. There were deadlines. We had to have our homework in. If we didn't do it, we didn't get credit. If we didn't learn the stuff by the time the exam, we failed the exam. When you run your own business, you're the boss. You make the rules. If business is going fine without this thing, then you're fine. No one cares. I had a complete meltdown to my social media manager a couple years ago because I had set this expectation for myself. Even though I tell all my clients different, I had become prominent on LinkedIn and had a really steady posting schedule for it. Like, it was just baked into my routine. And then I was like, okay, cool. And then now I'm going to do TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram all at the same time. Counter to every bit of advice I give Every one of my clients. It's too much. And so I assigned myself the work. I planned the plan, and then I didn't do the plan. I had this freak out because I was robbing dopamine for myself and I wasn't getting other stuff done. Jess called me out on it. She was like, okay, cool. Were you ever getting clients from these other platforms? And at the time, I wasn't. She's like, okay, cool. So. So you not doing it is actually not hurting you in any way, shape, or form. Right. It's not like you're. You're missing out on business because the business isn't there yet, because you haven't done it yet. You've gotten all your business from LinkedIn and from referrals and from other sources. You're fine. When we rob ourselves of dopamine, we rob ourselves of that steam that keeps the momentum going. And it's cruel and it's unnecessary, and it actually hurts us more than it helps us. So deadlines, use them to the extent that they're useful for you, but when they start becoming destructive, stop. That's what I've learned. Related, but different. The all or nothing. So for someone who's not athletic at all, like, doesn't know the rules to sports, if you've been around here a while, you know, I can screw up the most simple sports metaphor, but that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy physical fitness. So, like, I love going to the gym. I love picking up heavy things and putting them back down. I love cardio and kickboxing and all that stuff. And I think when I create a fitness plan for myself, I tend to get excited for all the things that I can do in a week in my mind. And I forget that my body still has to actually do the things. So I have to catch myself on this all the time. And this happens at least once a month. I'll make a workout plan for myself. Three days in the gym. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Here's the workout plan I'm going to follow. Oh, I have four more days in the week. Great. What if I ran two of them and did yoga or Pilates the other two? Oh, but now I want to look at the schedule for that yoga studio. They have a yoga class at night, but that's on a Tuesday or Thursday. Okay, cool. I can do two workouts that day. Oh, yeah. Well, if. Now, if I want to do. If I want to run two times a week now, it kind of has to overlap with this thing. Okay. So I'll work out three times that day, two times this day. That's not going to happen. I'm not an athlete. I'm a normal person who sits most of the day, okay? I'm also way less in shape than I used to be when I worked at Equinox, right? Which if is a place I used to work at. It was a high end fitness club. What I still do to myself to this day is I make this elaborate plan with this unreasonable amount of workouts in it, and day one, I hold myself to the expectation of doing it and I don't do it. And then it's like, well, I've already failed at this, so I might as well not do it for the rest of the week. And then next week I'll start. We do this all or nothing thing to ourselves, right? And we attach failure to it when we don't adhere to it perfectly, okay? It happens in fitness. It happens in diets. If you're trying to lose weight or you're trying to eat differently. If like you're trying to cut sugar out and then you go eat ice cream and then you, you ate ice cream once. So you've screwed up the whole plan and all, nothing. So now you're just gonna eat ice cream and completely fall off the wagon. Happens in our businesses, like posting social media. You know, if you're in a 100 day stream and you miss one of the days, what happens the next day and the next day and the next day? Do you have the same momentum? There's a point at which giving ourselves like short sprint goals to do something every single day is really helpful. But it stops being helpful when we apply the all or nothing rule to it. If you failed one day, then none of the rest counts. It does actually count. That's something that drives me absolutely crazy about myself. And yet I still do it. You know, I still do it. I still make these elaborate plans and I never stick to them. It's exhausting. I mean, it's not as exhausting as working out two or three times a day. Now I'm just thinking about how fit I could be, you know, how in shape. Oh, my God. The last thing that really annoys me that qualifies for this list is, ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. One of the biggest challenges I hear from new business owners is how hard it is to figure out what to post on social media and to stick to consistent schedule with it. Because it's hard. And so in the month of May, I'm actually launching a challenge to help you build that muscle of posting every single day. Each participant will get their own customizable content plan for the month of May, an extensive list of content prompts so you have an endless bank of ideas of things you can post that work with your content plan. Every Monday through Friday we will have a 45 minute Zoom call at 9am Eastern where you will create your content and one lucky person per day will be able to volunteer for for the coaching hot seat where I will help you fine tune your messaging so that your content can help you attract high paying clients. If you can prove that you posted every single day for the 31 days, you will win a 30 minute one on one coaching call with me. Normally I charge $497 for this, but for the whole challenge for your content plan, for the content prompts for this 23 daily calls that you're going to get throughout the month. It's only $197. This is my birthday gift to you this year and I'm so excited to hold your feet to the fire and make you post every day about your business and get more clients. If you're down for a challenge and you want to join us, then go to weaningcast.com challenge. I can't wait to see you there. The last thing that really annoys me that qualifies for this list is this assumption that I suck. I pretty much assume that I suck at everything. It takes a lot of positive feedback for me to start believing that I don't suck at something. This is classic imposter syndrome. Now this comes from various places in our ADHD matrix, right? Comes from rejection sensitivity dysphoria where maybe we do something but we don't get like the overt feedback that was positive. And so we assume that it wasn't good enough, that we weren't good enough. It can also come from having shiny object syndrome and jumping from hobby to hobby to hobby to hobby. You know, we don't necessarily become deep experts about everything. We become generalists. And whenever we come across someone who knows more about a thing than we know, we just assume that we're trash, right? We're trash. They're the best. We suck. We're the worst. And that's that. Early on in my business, I did this a lot more because when I would go online, when I go on social media, I'd get all these advertisements from fellow business coaches and they looked more successful than me. And they looked more well put together. They had way more success stories with their clients. Now, I completely discounted that. This person usually had been in business 10 years longer than I had because they'd been in business 10 years longer than I had. They had a bigger budget, they had more programs because they'd had the time to develop them, and they just had more experience. And also, like, you can appear successful online and not actually have success. So who knows if these people actually were as successful as they were. But these advertisements were in my awareness. Cause they were showing up for me and they would make me feel so small. Until I realized that the Google machine pays attention to everything that we talk about. So as someone who's constantly talking about business coaching, because I'm a business coach, the Google machine can't discern between, oh, this person does that, or this person is interested in that. So the Google machine just shows you lots and lots of business coaches, right? Or if you're a yoga teacher, lots of other yoga teachers, or if you're a landscaper, lots and lots of other landscapers to the point that it's really easy to think the market's completely saturated and everyone else is way better at this than you are and you should just give up. Now, I've gotten better at this because I have that understanding. And yet still I get major imposter syndrome. When people who I admire and respect and I see as successful in a lot of different ways. When they reach out to me and ask me to partner with them, my imposter syndrome flares up. Like, no, you're not qualified for this. Forgetting the fact that like, they know I'm qualified, there's a reason they want to partner with me. Now, this annoying thing, this assuming I suckness is one of the most painful things. Because this assumption that I suck or that I'm not good enough is in a lot of areas actually keeps me from going for things that I really deeply want. I have adhd. And if you follow sacred money archetypes, I'm a maverick, which means I'm very risk comfortable. Okay, I'm okay with risk. I actually really enjoy it. And also sometimes if the risk is that I'm going to be rejected or told that I'm not good enough, I will just self reject. I will hold myself back. I won't actually go for it. That's not something that helps you grow your business. It's not something that helps you grow an empire, which I'm working on right now. So this as I'm Talking through this, I feel like I'm just giving myself a therapy session. Honestly. There's an activity that I assign to my clients and I rarely do for myself. You know the movie Mean Girls and how like the premise of the movie is based around this group of girls who are mean and they write mean shit about everyone else in this world. Burn book. The burn book gets out and it tears people down and like violence ensues. They have to have a whole school assembly to assess or to acknowledge all the mean things that God said. And the reason it got that far is because the mean things that were said were believed by the person that they were said about. If you say something mean about me that I don't think is true already, I'm not gonna get upset about it, I don't care. But if you say something mean about me that I'm already holding against my, if I already assume I suck in that way, that's painful. Now what I tell my clients to do that I'm gonna start doing after this recording is instead of collecting a burn book on yourself, because we all do it. We're all constantly scanning the world for all the ways in which we suck, instead of collecting a burn book about yourself, start creating a brag book. We have a weird relationship with that word brag, right? Because when we see someone brag, it's usually done in a way that is meant to make other people feel bad. That's not bragging. That's being an. In its most energetically pure form, bragging is a manifestation tool. Bragging is basically saying to the universe, oh my God, this amazing thing happened. I'm so happy about it. I would love if more things like this happened. Please and thank you. Now the trick here, and I know this for my clients and if you have a business, you know what I'm talking about. Because we all know for our clients, things that we don't do for ourselves, right? Anyway, a brag book isn't going to feel real until you do it a lot. Because if you've been raised your entire life to look for all the ways in which you suck, and you're really good at looking for that evidence, looking for evidence that's opposite to that is going to feel really fake for a long time. So it takes repetition, it takes constantly acknowledging the things that you're good at, the good things that come to you, the things that you're grateful for. It's a practice, it's not a one time thing. And I'm explaining this to you, but I'M also kind of explaining this to myself so that when Neil and I stop recording this podcast, I can sit down and plan a plan about how I'm going to incorporate this into my day. And you can see where this is going to go. I'm going to plan the plan, I'm not going to do the plan, and then I'm going to continue to assume that I suck. It is a vicious cycle, people. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to get out of it. But you know what? One of the best things about the weenie cast community is that we can be in this vicious cycle together, and it doesn't feel as vicious. And for that, I thank you for being here. I thank you for being in my world and for all the beautiful feedback that you give me about this podcast and how it helps you every day, and for all the ways in which this episode might not have actually been helpful at all. Because I haven't actually figured this stuff out for myself. I apologize and I thank you for listening. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes money, then go ahead and book a generate income strategy call with me by going to weenicast.com forward/strategy call. On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams, and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together. Okay, back to this thing with the weird apostrophe. Okay, in this. Shut up, Neil. Stop talking. Okay, Okay. I have to get my together. Are you hiding? Are you hiding? So I don't see you laughing. My RSD is pulsing right now. Oh, my God. Rsd. Okay, in this episode, we're gonna talk you through why you need to have more fun. For fun's sake. For sake. Yes. Yes. Brilliant. Awesome. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Join the weeniecast Hyper Focus 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.