ADHD Flotsum and Jetsum...

Katie.

Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. I am delighted to be going live with you today with Kesia Robinson. Kezia, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you so much for having me, Katie. Yes.

And do you want to tell everyone what you do?

Absolutely. So I'm a business coach. That's sort of the headline. I specialize in working with co founders and partnerships, especially with startups, growing businesses. And I also work with some more CEOs, more traditional businesses, but I really help people kind of get the people side of their leadership and their management growth together as well as with some of the strategic work. Yeah. So we have a lot of overlap. It's always good to meet another coach. Yeah.

No, it's so much fun to talk shop with someone who gets it on that side.

Exactly. Yeah.

And I'm so excited for our topic today. We're going to be talking about adhd, the, the, the lifestyle of the distracted entrepreneur. And I love, I love how you put this. It's like the flotsam and jetsam of everything that goes around in our brains.

Yes, yes. So much.

Like you've obviously gone through this as someone with adhd. What do you implement in your life to make it easier for yourself?

So I have. One of the things that's been the most important is just being really upfront with other people. You have to be upfront with yourself and also with other people. And, you know, I'll tell people, I'm like, if it's super important for you as a client, that I am always exactly on time. I am not your coach. Like, that's just not. That's. I'm just not the right person. And what I find is actually a lot of people that opens a great conversation about what is timeliness. Right. What's important, not just what's urgent, what has to be done, when does it have to be done? And often for people, that's actually a real opener into like these values that they have. So people will get really anchored on. If you're late, then you don't value my time and it's like, okay, that's not necessarily the case. And one of the things as a leader is you're going to have employees, you're going to have team members, you're going to have a business partner who, who's what they value about. You may not be four or five minutes. Right. That might not be the thing that they. And how do you negotiate that? So I do find, even with clients who are Particularly sticklers about it. We get to open a conversation. When I say, well, you know, I'm not great at being on time, I will make a note to myself, I will make a priority to show up on time because I value it for you. But also, FYI, there are going to be some times when I'm five minutes late. I'm not going to be half an hour late, but I might be five minutes late. There's also times, though, when I'm going to let us run. You need more time. We'll keep running for another half hour, even sometimes in a strategy session, so it comes out in the wash. But I think the first one is just being upfront with yourself and with other people. And that can be hard because it. It feels morally judging, you know, to say, hey, I might be late, or I may not have remembered to bring the thing I said that I would bring, but I'll get it. We'll work on it. Or maybe there's something else that's more relevant that will have. I will have brought with me because my brain attached to that and not to the thing that I promised to you a week and a half ago. All right.

It's funny you say that, because I am, like, the opposite. I've had so much time anxiety my whole life that my clients joke that I always, like if. When I have to call them, it's always, like, on the dot. But I also design with my clients, like, they call me at the time, so I don't have to worry about remembering what time things are. It's just absolutely coming. My calendar handles everything. And there you go. Yeah. It's so interesting to bring that up with clients because it's really like a leadership lesson, because whatever it is that's triggering them throughout their day, I apologize. My dog is having a temper tantrum.

That's all right.

We might actually take a trip to my pantry to give her a treat. Um, but anything that's, like, triggering to them throughout their day could, like, take them off track and, you know, and. And take them away from what their ultimate goals are.

And so much of it is about really being clear about how you create value. I think that's often one of the things is that if your value. If you've decided your value proposition as a business is that we are always on time. And you are a person who has struggles a lot with being on time. Number one, you may not have set yourself up for success, just FYI, But. But also like that. And you do want to be extra. You. You Know, something like you designed about hey, you're gonna call me is a great example. You do want to be really thoughtful. Whether that's. Maybe you always have a warm up. I mean, I know in certain cultures it's really normal to have your assistant, even if your assistant is just like a, a peer. But it's important that you have an assistant and that they greet people and bring them into an office. So you might kind of say design that with someone. Be like, hey, I'm not always great at being on time, but you are. And so I'm going to ask you, you know, you sit next to me, let's time this out. You're going to pick, pick up my client and bring them in, or pick up the, the meeting and bring them in. So there are things you can do. But it starts with stopping beating yourself up for being a person who's not good at being on time. Yeah. It's always sort of mission critical is to be like, okay, I'm not. Let me not like drive myself up the wall. I'm just not that person. And I create value in other ways. So am I. You know, how do I balance that and really be true to myself and then communicate that effectively?

Yeah. It just astounds me in how many creative ways we people with ADHD take like, the things that are part of our personality and just beat ourselves over the head with it, you know?

Well, you don't have to have. What I found is people, it's probably our greatest, like, skill as in humanity is just beating ourselves up about stuff that is like, not our fault or that we can't do anything about.

Right.

Like, I think that sometimes it is your fault, but it isn't something that's going to change. And so I really focus on, on that. Even with clients who are like, I would say neurotypical, who or even their typical, their tendency is towards being really specific about time or being super focused and detail oriented and they have a hard time seeing the big picture. I really am working with like, what have we got? This is natural to you. So how do you build a network around you as well? Like, I have, you know, one of the things with my virtual assistant, I was like, I need you to stay on top of me. Most times people are like, I want you to do what I say here. There's this. And I'm like, no, I need you to nag me if I'm bumping meetings or I'm canceling, I need you to nag me. And I'm okay with that. And we've, we've designed that particular piece, so I've hired somebody to help me. And so she does get on my case and go, you know, we really need to go through, like right now we're segmenting my database. Super fun. And you know what, I could theoretically do it by myself because I'm the person who knows everyone in the database, but I'm not. So we get on and we spend 15 or 20 minutes at a chunk with her sitting there with me, body doubling, you know, as you know, from ADD and adhd, and me going through line by line and saying, like, how well do I know this person? Scale of 1 to 10, and then which of the three categories do they fit into so I can segment them in order to relaunch a communication strategy. Right, yeah. And, and she had to be comfortable with that. You know, there's plenty of people who would say, I can't stand sitting on the phone with you while you do something that you could do by yourself. And, and so I was like, that's upfront. Right. When I hired her, that that was part of the job.

Well, and it's, I mean, I think so amazing that you had the self awareness for yourself. And you probably train this to your clients as well.

Oh, yeah. And it's not you. I mean, it's not like we were born with this. Right. We spent years and years and years trying to be somebody different. Oh, totally. Right. And then one day you're like, this is failing. I don't know if you had a coach or a therapist. Usually there's somebody in your life who's like, stop trying to do this. Like, just be yourself.

I don't know that I ever had a therapist who actually explained to me how like, even therapists who have focused on adhd, they, they tended to talk over me. And I think a lot of people.

Trying to fix you.

Well, they were trying to talk over me and they were trying to explain to me like the high level stuff that was happening rather than getting like, real about how this was happening in my life. I actually didn't start really figuring out how to work around my ADHD or, or I didn't start recognizing how I'd figured out how to work around my ADHD until TikTok came out and ADHD, TikTok started being a thing. And it's like, oh my God, I do that and that's how I manage that, you know, ADHD thing. And I do that and that's how I manage that ADHD thing. And I think A lot of people who are my age and maybe haven't been diagnosed yet are starting to see this and be like, oh my God, is that me?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And even for me, like, I have some clients who are, I always say I don't, I don't like neurodivergent, so I use neurodiverse. Like, and I've had some clients who are like autistic, like on spectrum. I've also had, you know, clients like, and so I would identify as add, not hyperactive. But I would like. But it was a real process to say, like, okay, our brains all work differently.

Yeah.

Even if we're neurotypical, our brains have a spectrum of how they function. And when you start to understand how much the world that you live in and the way you function is not the same as other people, it makes you so much more curious. And I think that's something when, you know, what you described is sometimes you're meeting, I call them a well meaning neurotypical. They're like a person who's trying to help you, but they're not curious about what it's like inside your brain. So they are giving you advice or suggestions that are totally valid. They're not bad people. But they are completely unaware that the way that you're going to process information, the way that you work is different. And so it falls very flat. And it's hard because then you feel like you're saying, oh, I'm just lazy or distracted. It's hard to say no, that's just not how I work.

Yeah.

And, and without it being very judged, self judging or inviting their judgment.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it is, it is triggering to say no, actually. Like, my brain works different to yours. I have this diagnosis and I think that it. Carrying that term diagnosis makes it even, even if you don't typically have any stigma around, makes it a heavy thing. And then you kind of feel defensive of it when someone's right.

Like there's something wrong with you.

Yeah.

Right. And I think that's fundamentally the difference between. Oh, look, see. Tommy. Hi. Nice to see you. Hey, Tommy. As, as someone, I, I just think of it as, as that there's nothing wrong with you. It is sort of the fundamental difference between coaching and therapy. And in terms of the structure of it, I don't actually think often there's as much functional difference. You can end up doing a lot of therapeutic work in coaching and a lot of coaching work in therapy. Right. There's an overlap. But this idea, there's something Wrong with you. And that's the medical system element. We got to be broken. We got to fix it. And when you start to go be like, you know, there's nothing wrong with you. You might not be operating at your highest potential, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with you, it becomes a lot more about working with what you've got.

Yeah.

Which is what I. Why I love. You know, what you're doing here is really focusing on, like, okay, we got this situation. How do we work with it?

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's interesting. So I don't normally take my Ritalin. It usually just builds up. And I was like, you know what? I wanted to really bust through because I'm writing a book right now. I really wanted to bust through, like, a good chunk of it last Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. I took those three days just to write, and it was amazing. I hadn't taken my Ritalin in a while. I took some and I went to write. And it's like I was saying to my mom, like, oh, my God, the voices are gone. Right. Like, all. All the kind of arguments that happen in my head about stuff and that tease things out. Like, there is only one voice. And I had a really hard time writing with that one voice. And it's like, oh, everything that makes me so good at what I do and so like to see, like, that makes me able to play things out and reverse engineer it. It's a gift from my neurodiverse brain.

Yeah.

And it's. It's, you know, the stuff that they give us to make us more neurotypical kind of strips us of the things that are special about us.

Absolutely. I've been having an interesting. An interesting week in that I did some alternative therapy with non traditional medicine class. One drug we can schedule, one drug we can talk a little bit about it offline with a therapist. And in order to do that, I had to stop taking my antidepressants and my ADD medication for a period of time. And there's a clarity, a different type of clarity that came in. And it's an interesting experience because it's not so focused. Like, it's the soft focus.

Yeah.

Component. But if you. If you think about, like, like. So I had a conversation once with a professional baseball player, catcher, and he was talking about how he can see the entire field at once with the same intensity and clarity. Like, every pixel calls out at the same energy.

Yeah.

Which is not how Neurotypical works. In fact, it'd be kind of dangerous for most people. Like, that's actually why I like distracted driving. Like, it's up there. Like, you need to be able to see. See what's coming and focus on the things you need to focus on and not see all the stuff around you.

Right.

But if you imagine, if you are a catcher, you need to be able to see everything. Exactly. Because you do not know where the ball is going to go. You don't know where it's coming from. You don't know who's. Where, who's going to try to steal second. Right. You're in there, and you need to see it all in the same level of focus. And that's like a superpower for a professional athlete.

Yeah.

That's a negative for you when you're driving. Right. So I think of it in that context, like, sometimes go, what's the context? And so, so what you're talking about is that ability to see all of it at once.

Yeah.

Is a strength. It's just not a strength in all circumstances. And vice versa.

Totally. Totally. Well, I mean, it's. The classic idea of ADHD is like, they're super artistic and creative. And also, like, their. Their living spaces are usually pretty messy, you know.

How. How.

First and foremost, I have a question. What's the worst advice you've gotten from someone who's neurotypical?

Oh, God, just put your head down and do it. Yeah. That is literally like, I was in a. In a finance job, and there were a lot of things about the work that had. Were interesting to me, but I. I just was not thriving at all. And I was trying to get some variety, and I had sort of. By the end, it was like, towards the end, and it was quite clear that it was not working out. But I was going there saying, hey, could I maybe work for this other senior guy, you know, and be kind of a gopher? Or can I do X or could I do Y? And it was always like, just put your head down, grind it out, get better at the thing that we've given you, and then we'll give you more to do. And it's like, no, but I'm going to be better everything if I have more variety in the things that I'm doing.

Right.

And that is so hard to understand because it makes no sense if you're coming from a neurotypical mind. You're like, somebody's not doing a great job at the one thing we gave them. Why would we give them five?

Right, right, right. Yeah. No, that's so funny.

Yeah.

I had. I had one guy tell Me that, oh, well, it just seems like you have a hard time focusing on stuff you're not interested in. So just don't do stuff you're not interested in. And I'm just like, oh, that was like the mansplainiest explanation of what's happening in my own brain I've ever heard.

I mean, I don't necessarily. I think there's a version of that which is I do with people. I have a, like an energy investment exercise where we live, look at what is draining energy out of you and we try to. And we understand what it is about it. Fundamentally, if that work is boring, you shouldn't be doing it. You should outsource it. Right. But the process to outsource might involve some work that's not super interesting. Like you need to go ask around for like, who's good at this? You need to post on. Indeed, you need to do. Right. So you can't just avoid everything that is not interesting to you. You need a game plan. But it's also important to recognize if something's not interesting to you consistently that you should be offloading it. It's just this idea that somehow you can be like, I'm just only going to do stuff that seems interesting to me in the moment. I'm like, I'd spend all day on Google. Like, you know, you probably spend all day on Tick tock. Like I would spend all day Googling, literally just clicking on Wikipedia, one link to another, going down a rabbit hole, reading, I'll go read the research. It's also this idea. You can't focus. I'm like, I can focus. I'll spend two hours tracking down original source materials about like Druid mythology for no real reason, but just because it struck me as interesting. So that's not necessarily like, that's a. I need to do that sometimes. I need to not shame myself for doing it. But that isn't the same as I can't spend my whole life doing it. Right.

I mean, I wish I could. I wish I was like independently wealthy and could spend my time on absolutely anything that was interesting to me. That would be such a cool life, but also not realistic.

Haven't you found though, what happens is you tend to run out of things that like, like I know there was sort of a period of time when I got laid off many, many years ago before I started my own business. And I like, I slept for like a couple of weeks and then I like futzed around.

Yeah.

And then there's just some point at which you're like, oh, you will always come back to mission. Yeah, we'll always come back to wanting to create value, to do things.

Yeah.

So it's, it's knowing that too. I think that trusting that just because you do get off focus and you or you focus on things that are not the task at hand, like you will, it's like a magnet. Like you will come back to the things that are really important to you, to the value you want to create. And they will not go away. They will just keep cropping up and nagging you in the universe, I always say, will give you a love tap. So it's also sometimes just trusting that that's going to happen. I had a great experience. I was at a wedding a couple weeks ago and I'm sitting across the table at the rehearsal dinner from someone and we're talking and we're clicking and I'm like, did I meet you in Miami at a Women Adventure Capital event? And da, da, da. And she's like, yes. And I was like, oh my God, I had something happen. I had a family emergency. She had a bunch of things going on, whatever, and we lost like track of each other. And I was like, yeah, but we're meant to talk. The universe center right back to me.

That's so funny.

3,000 miles away. The universe sent it right back to me.

Yeah. That's incredible.

Yeah.

I had a second question that's kind of looping back. You had mentioned there are some really great strategies that you use and teach your clients on how to set boundaries with people who are neurotypical and well meaning, but having really shitty advice. And what, what is it that you like to advise and use yourself?

I mean, I think the biggest one is, especially if you are like us who like to go down a rabbit hole, arm yourself with a little research. Right. And, and coming in and even explaining. People don't know that, that there is even a concept of like, like they've heard of autism, Asperger's, maybe asd. They like to diagnose people with it all the time. Anytime you meet somebody who seems a little socially weird, you're like, oh, let me give them Asperger's. And it's like, okay, well that's, that's actually not the way this works. They also have these like ideas that somehow they're like idiots of Vance. Like there's, there's a lot of popular culture misunderstanding. So some of it is to really just come in and be like, hey, you may not be familiar with this, like there's people who are. I don't like. I said, I don't like neurodivergent, neurodiverse. People who are neurotypical included in neurodiversity. Now we are looking at things like add, adhd, asd, and a lot of all of these kind of. There's a few, and there's speech language disorders. There's a lot of different things. And again, I don't even like disorders. Right. Like conditions, situations. Some of us will come in with that. Another one is just to stand firm and just be like, hey, I am a functional person. I don't know if you've noticed. I'm pretty awesome. I've done a lot of things. I've been successful. So being clear with. When you're. When someone is unsolicited advice is to be clear about, hey, what? Let me stand for myself, but also let me say, was I complaining about myself? That's a big one. It's like, was I inviting unsolicited advice by saying, I'm always late for things? I'm always this or I'm always that?

Yeah.

Why am I talking about myself as if there's a problem versus saying to someone, hey, I'm interested in, let's say, improving my sleep hygiene. And I know you're very good at it. What are some things that you do?

Right.

Totally different than saying, God, I just stay up all night, and then I sleep all day, and then I this and that. Right. So I also think it's on us to be more thoughtful about how we ask for advice. And if somebody's giving you advice you don't want, you can just. I, like, I've done this before. I'm like, the sleep hygiene came up, and someone was, like, trying to tell me I got to turn my every device off for like an hour. It was going on and on, and it was like, like, that sounds great. I'm so glad that works for you. I'm just looking for, like, one baby step.

Yeah.

So I would love if you would tell me some stuff like, what's a baby step?

Yeah.

I can only operate with one baby step at a time. And that was very helpful to him, and it was helpful to our relationship because I wasn't resenting him coming out of that conversation, even though the first 20 minutes was just like, yeah, you know, So a lot of it is standing up for yourself, but also being aware of are you asking people, inviting people to give you advice when you are just talking trash about yourself?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well.

And it's so funny you mentioned getting resentful. Because I imagine here that person is feeling so generous, like they're giving you all of their magnificent tips and tricks of how you can do this and you're rejecting them. They're like, oh, okay, yeah.

And it's easy to get codependent because. And then we often have to check ourselves. Are we in a codependent relationship where somebody's trying to live our life for us? And especially when you're a coach, it can happen with a client. It's more of a reverse, right. Where you're seeing a client who's struggling and you have to really look at, am I trying to live my client's life for them? So with friends and family being conscious of, okay, am I. Do I want to complain just for the sake of it? Am I asking for some sympathy? Okay, if you're asking for sympathy for having. Being late for stuff from a neurotypical person, that's probably not going to happen. Like, right. You need to be asking, you need to talk to, I need to call you and say I was late for this meeting and blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, we can bond over that. Right. But I think that that's really being, really being thoughtful about what you're asking for advice with. And then when people give you in general, this is just true. When you get unsolicited advice and, you know, and we give it to. Sometimes we catch ourselves giving it is to really just be like, hey, I'm. I understand you're trying to help. I'm not looking for advice right now, but I will keep you in mind when I am looking for advice. Yeah.

Yeah. So I had this mentor, you know, he used to travel from LA to San Francisco Bay area, and he drive every single time to teach these weekend classes for coaching.

Okay.

And I, we were all having lunch. It was like I was assisting the class. He and this other person were teaching the class. And I asked him, you know, why do you drive? You know, it's a quicker flight from LA to San Francisco. And he like put his fork in his knife down and he said, okay, I'm going. I'm happy to talk about this, but here's what I want to design with you first. I don't want fix it. I don't want advice. I don't want. Have you tried this? I don't want any of that. If you want to know this information, I will trust you with it, but only if you listen.

Yeah.

And acknowledge and move on. And he had, he had. I Guess developed this, like, out of nowhere, fear of flying, and he's having panic attacks. And he was like, you know what? It just wasn't worth the panic attack every time I came up. So I've decided to trade him. He traded in, I guess, his. His very uncomfortable BMW, which just, you know, surprises me, for a very comfortable Subaru, and just really enjoyed the drive and, like, made a whole little out of it. And I really. I. Every time I make this mistake of sharing something without designing that ahead of time, I think of him. I'm like, oh, like, just. Just be like, this guy. Just be like, this guy. Just tell what you need because they're happy to provide it once they understand what they're listening for.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

We're about, like, five minutes left. I'm just hearing if. What's the first thing that you advise clients when they're just getting this diet, the diagnosis of having adhd, when they're just realizing, oh, my God, this is the thing that has been up with me this whole time.

I mean, the core thing when I. Everywhere I work with anyone who's got anything that they're. They're. They're having a recognition moment of, is to take a break and just, like, give yourself permission to be anything. Right. I think sometimes we want to put a gloss on it. We'll be like, it's so great. It's like, no, it's okay to be disappointed. Right. It's okay to come back and go, oh, I've got something that I. I thought I. Now I'm feeling like I can't work with it, like, now. And now it's not just like, I don't have willpower now. I've got a brain problem. Right. So I always say, like, don't judge the emotion. We get this rebound guilt. Like, whatever you feel, you then get rebound guilt. You're like, I feel guilty for feeling guilty. How long have I been in therapy? I shouldn't feel guilty about anything anymore. And now I feel guilty about. I mean, it's like, we'll go on and on and on, bounce back and forth. I'm Jewish. Like, we can do this for years. So it's really core to kind of have that moment of saying, all right, however you feel as you feel and sit with that. And the second is to. Let's look at yours. Let's go back through your greatest hits. Right. Let's go back through your celebration moments, because you have done an amazing job of being a human being so far.

Yeah.

Regardless. So it's Kind of that moment of just saying, like, it's okay to feel conflicted. However I feel is how I feel. Now we can move towards a positivity building and then we just look at, hey, where in your life maybe are you not set up for success? And those things are. What's interesting is that where you. Let's go through your greatest hits and where you're not set up for success is the same thing I'm going to do with any client.

Right.

So I think that a lot of it is that it doesn't, you know, is just understanding that whatever is coming your way, everybody's got something, everybody's dealing with something. Everybody's got strengths, everybody's got challenges. So a lot of it is just saying, hey, like, the toolkit that works with someone who doesn't, who's neurotypical but maybe has control issues is going to be the same as working with somebody who might be neurodiverse. Right, right. They've got, they've got stuff they got to work with. We got to go through their greatest hits. We got to work at look at how their life is not set up for success. We got to look at maybe what elements they do need to stretch themselves in order to achieve the transformation. And they could be as neurotypical as you would imagine, but still, they're not where they want to be. Otherwise they wouldn't be coming in for coaching.

Yeah, totally. I, I've made a face when you said with control issues, because that is.

Me and that's a mechanism. Sometimes, like, you've talked about developing various mechanisms and like, from, I would say control is such a fascinating thing because we, we, we seek to control when we feel we can't control. Right. And so some people's threshold, like, is that they need to control everything, but most people, it's kind of weird. Like, it'll bounce up and down. The pandemic was a prime example. People became super controlling about very strange things because they couldn't control the world outside of them. So I think a lot of it is knowing, hey, I'm going to get somebody. It also manifests. You could get somebody who's with an ADD or adhd, who's very controlling and very exacting because they've built this scaffolding around their, themselves in order to, like, be able to function. That's exhausting.

Yeah.

You also can get somebody, though, who's a complete, like, hey, everybody can do whatever. Like, they've, you know, they basically delegated their entire business away, which is not what Leading is and, but also have done that because they don't know how, they don't trust themselves and they don't know how to manage things or how to build scaffolding. So I, I feel like you never. That's one of the magic things about coaching is like, you never know what you're gonna get and you have to really get in and work with people to understand and will often just assign, you know, like that person is not motivated or they're not interested. They're are they're a control freak or they're easily. Or they have adhd and it's like, yeah, but there's always layers and there's a bunch of things going on. And somebody who seems totally put together on the outside may be a complete, like cherry rigged, you know, Goldberg machine on the inside because they've like, they've built all of this around themselves in order to seem like they have it together. And that's a really big thing for me. Working on myself and working on clients too is like, hey, let's. How do we, how do we get that simplified? How we, how do we take off all this scaffolding? How do we get to what really is you? And we build from the strength that's there as opposed to trying to patch all up, patch all these. And fix all these problems that we believe perceive in ourselves.

So, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. That's your approach. Mine's slightly different. It's that like, you know, control for me, I was always like, mocked for being a control freak. But I had this one coach who was like, you know what if that's a value of yours, like having control over certain things. And once I saw it from that, I was like, oh yeah, like, here are the things that I like having control over. And when I was able to communicate it better, people are like, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

And like the control freak title, like.

Left and so, so different. Like what? I mean, like, I am an aesthetics. So like, if you pick a ugly color for your website as a client, I will have a very hard time. Even though I am not your website developer, I am not a marketing consultant, I'm not a brand consultant. But if I think you're. It's something, I mean, if I'm like, oh, that shade of green just is not suiting your product. It doesn't look good against your head. Shut, whatever. Like, so there's a few things that I have to manage with myself where I'm like, I really care about this. But even that process of just knowing yourself. I think that's beautiful. Say all of these things can be. Can have value in a relationship, that can have value in yourself. We talk about systems like partnerships or executive teams. There's a role of micromanaging. If somebody's a micromanager, they're trying to do something, they're trying to provide service. Control is trying to provide service to you. Ultimately, usually we start to realize that. And like you said, when you concentrate, you understand what you don't actually want to control. Right. You just want. There's things that you really value that are really important, and those things you're going to really focus on making sure that they are successful, that they hit the bid that you're going for. There's other things you really enjoy, and you don't necessarily want to delegate those away because you really enjoy them. You'll start to change the language. And then all of a sudden, as you just expressed like, people will stop assigning you this control freak title. Because it. It isn't that you're a control freak, it's just that you care a lot about things and there's areas that are really important to you and there's stuff you just really enjoy and you're not. It's your. Your choice what you delegate. It's your choice what you take input from other people, and that's why you get to be the boss.

Yeah. Well, I think also once you do shift it in yourself and people start saying that you. You stand up for yourself a little bit more, you're like, no, I'm actually not. I just really care about this one thing, and I want to make sure it's done well.

And.

And this is why. And this is what it feeds into and all the stuff. And it's that self advocacy that we were talking about earlier.

Yeah. And we don't have to do business with everyone. So I've often had. With clients who are in service businesses, one of the things we will look at is, you know, I would say when you get someone who's a nitpicker, like a nitpicker cares about things that you don't think are important. Mm. They may care about having input on every single data point, which is not as you. As the consultant or the. Whatever service provider, you don't think that's what your clients should be doing. They may care about the aesthetics of it. They may care, but you can understand. Say like that what we've had a miscommunication about the value of my work. What I think is important about the work I do or my business does and what the client thinks is valuable and what they're paying you for. Right. Which is the stuff that they shouldn't be nitpicking on because you were. They paid you to do it. You can actually begin to understand why somebody who's a terrible client for you is a great client for someone else or vice versa. And I think that going in that approach too, and saying, like, what is important to me? What do I value? Where do I think I create value? And now I'm engaging with clients and attracting people and creating clients who are also aligned with that and shifting the people who are not aligned with that and sending them to, you know, someone else's prince or princess Charming and you're sending them off and referring them out. So that comes up a lot. Yeah.

No, and it's a great, it's a great lesson for everyone to remember that not everyone is going to be meant for us, much like dating.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God. If I had married the first guy I dated, I would probably not be very happy right now. Anyway, we're, we're a little over time, but is if people want to find you, how do they find you, Kezia?

The best place, find me here on LinkedIn. I'm one of the few Kzia Robinsons. You can also check out my website, Cassiapartners.com so it's C-S-S I A-partners.com and I know you'll have my contact info linked up and everything like that. So love to hear from people. I'm always interested in hearing about your business and your journey. So please reach out.

Amazing. And thank you so much for joining me tonight. This has been so lovely and so much fun. I hope to have you back soon.

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Katie.

Thank you and everyone. Thank you for tuning in. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Today is day 28 of me going live every day in September, if you can believe it. We'll be going live again tomorrow and the day after and maybe continue into October. Stay tuned. We haven't decided yet. Anyway, thank you for joining Tommy and for everyone else who watched and didn't comment, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I'm Katie McManus again. This is Kasia Robinson. Have a great night and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.