ADHD? Skip the frog. Eat the ice cream first!

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. In this episode, I'm going to tell you why you might want to eat the ice cream first and skip the frog. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. The way grocery stores are set up, usually enter in through the portion. That's the produce department, right? So that's the healthiest part of the store. And then you go through the meat department, the cheese department, the center is all the garbage that we really shouldn't be eating. And on the other end of the store, where you naturally go from one side to the other, you don't zigzag across, is where the ice cream is and where the cakes and the cookies and all the unhealthy things. And the psychology behind this is that you use up your willpower to say, no, I don't need those things in the very beginning. Also, the fact that you started off with something that was super healthy, say you got bananas and spinach and broccoli, and you got all the things that you can meal prep and be super healthy this week, by the time you get to the ice cream, it's like, well, I'm already planning on being healthy. What's a little treat if I'm going to be healthy? And then you fill up your cart and you go and pay for it, and you go home, and of course you have all these treats and now you're going to eat them. They did a study that people who actually did it backwards, instead of starting where the doors were and going through the produce department, if they went the other way and started off in the bakery, went through the frozen food aisles and then to the dairy and the meat and then the produce, they made healthier decisions throughout their shopping because, like, if they're starting off in the frozen aisle where all the ice cream is, you. You haven't made any healthy decisions at that point, you know? And because you haven't made any healthy decisions, it's easier to say no to it. And why do I bring this up? We've been so well programmed to tempt ourselves with the carrot, to say, you know what? Like, the reward comes after I do the hard stuff. We are so profoundly Programmed for this, that whole multibillion dollar industries will set up their stores nationwide in the United States to take advantage of that. Once you've done all the productive things, then you're allowed to do the fun thing. Now for neurotypicals, this works because they have a steady drip of dopamine throughout the day. That whole philosophy of eat that frog, do the hardest thing in the earliest part of the day, get it out of the way, and then you can get to the easier stuff. Sure, that's a great bit of advice for neurotypicals, but for people with adhd, we don't have enough dopamine in the morning to do the hardest thing. If we're setting up our schedule so that we have to do the hardest thing in the morning, and then we do like gradually easier things throughout the day until we get to the point where we get to enjoy ourselves, well, guess what happens? We don't do the hardest thing. We procrastinate on it. We probably around. We probably aren't actually productive at all because we're procrastinating on it. And we don't want to get into anything too much because like we're just telling ourselves. Okay, well I just want to check this one article first and then I'll get into that big project. Oh, let me check this one email. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, well I'll respond to this later after I do this thing. Oh, let me check Facebook. Let me just check on Facebook and see like, you know, if I've gotten any comments on that post that I did earlier the week in the week, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, until it's mid afternoon. You've done all, all day, right? It just doesn't work. And yet we are so well taught. That's how we should be running our lives. Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't work. So why are we trying to make it work for us? This is kind of like buying clothes that don't fit you, right? Clothes are meant to work for your body. Your body's not meant to work for the clothes. We all have that pair of jeans in our closet that we don't fit into anymore, but we keep them around just in case. And sometimes, you know, we're having a thin day, we squeeze ourselves into them, we cut off the circulation to the bottom part of our body and we can't eat anything or else we get this like really painful band around the middle of our stomachs. It sounds crazy. And yet we do this to ourselves. All the time. We try to make ourselves fit into things that do not fit us. And we do this with tasks, we do this with clothes. We do this with social groups. We do it everywhere. It's so accepted in our society that no one calls out how crazy it is. And the people who do, like, sometimes people look at them weird, and sometimes people do genuinely say, oh, my God, you're right, or, I want to be that person for you in this moment. Stop trying to eat the frog. If you want to eat the frog, do it later in the day. It's funny, in the last couple years, I noticed this habit that I had. So, you know, I'd work Monday through Friday, and then Saturday would come around, and, like, we don't really have weekends anymore as kids. Weekends were the best. We got to relax. We got to watch one Saturday morning and recess and Pepper Ann. And it was amazing. And if you're outside of the U.S. i'm sorry if you don't understand those references. But anyway, so it was, like, fun. But, you know, as adults, like, the weekends are for doing stuff that you didn't have time to do during the week. All the errands, all the cleaning, all those, like, stupid little, like, tasks that you neglected to do during the week, like changing light bulbs that went out, whatever. And I found that on Saturdays, I would have a really long list of things that I'd want to accomplish. And I get up and I'd walk my dog, and I'd come back and I'd shower and I get ready, and then I would just sit on my couch in complete paralysis, maybe messing around on my phone, but completely unable to get the get up and go to go and do the things. And then the morning would pass, and I'd be halfway through the afternoon, and I still wouldn't have accomplished anything. And that's when the shame would set in. That's when the guilt and the feeling like a failure. Oh, my God, like, I suck at being an adult. Like, adulting is just too hard for me. I can't handle this. And then instead of actually relaxing on Saturday, I'd spend it punishing myself for not getting things done. And then I'd have to do them on Sunday. And then when the new week rolled around, Monday morning, I wasn't refreshed. I wasn't rested from the weekend because I didn't give myself any time to rest. So I tried something different. I made a new rule for myself on Saturday mornings. Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first. 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 I made a new rule for myself on Saturday mornings. I assigned myself a movie to watch. So I would get up, I would make coffee, I would take my dog for a walk, I would come back and instead of jumping in the shower and getting ready for the day, I would turn on a movie. And it had to be a movie that I had seen multiple times before that I didn't necessarily know all the words to, but I knew what the next scene was going to be because I didn't want to get sucked into something that I needed to find out how it ended because I didn't know how it ended already. The point of it was not to watch a movie. To, like, see this movie. The point was to watch a movie that sucked me in enough that I would get immersed in the story, but that if I got bored halfway through and was finally ready to go and get stuff done, I'd be able to walk away from it. Some Saturday mornings I would watch youh've Got Mail with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Oh my God. One of my favorite movies. I go online. Welcome. And my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words. You've got mail. Squirrel. Squirrel. I've seen it so many times that sometimes I get towards the end and I'd start, like, getting up and doing stuff around my living room. It would still be on, but I'd be tidying. Or I had an open concept apartment at the time. So, like, I might go to the kitchen and start unloading the dishwasher and putting the dirty dishes from the last two nights because I'm terrible at doing dishes into the dishwasher and dealing with all that stuff. I might go and put a load of laundry in. Some mornings I would have to watch a couple movies. Some mornings, like, I would watch one movie and I had no get up and go after it ended. So I'd pick another movie. But without fail, there was always that point in the morning where my brain flipped from, okay, cool, I've rested enough. I've done this really easy task that I really enjoyed. That filled me up. Now I'm ready to go and actually get stuff done. What I was ignoring before I did this is that my body and my mind both needed rest and when. And I was putting it under the stress of here's this massive to do list of things that you need to go and do today and then expecting it to just jump to and get to work. I wasn't giving it that rest. I wasn't giving it that moment to recharge. And the result was I just spent the whole day stressing out about it and not doing anything and feeling like a failure, which put me further into a dopamine deficit, by the way. Now, I do this pretty religiously on Saturday mornings. This has started and it has never stopped. Saturday mornings. I don't assign myself any work to do. I don't tell myself I'm gonna go to the gym. I don't have a to do list of errands to run on Saturday mornings. And what's incredible is after I implemented this, I get all my errands done on Saturdays. They're all done unless I have company in town. They throw off my schedule. I get everything done on Saturdays. But I start off with the thing that I enjoy most. I start off with the rest. I start off with the thing that's normally a reward if you have adhd, which you probably do because you're listening to this podcast. You know what I'm talking about when I say that I habitually will create these ideal routines for myself. You know, these elaborate schedules of my ideal morning and how I'm gonna join the 5am Club and I'm gonna do all these healthy habits in the morning and then start my day. I'm gonna feel amazing, right? I drop these schedules and I put them in my bullet journal and in my Google calendar and I'm so gung ho, I'm gonna do it this week. And then I don't. I just don't like the things that I assign myself in the mornings traditionally are the hard things, you know, like getting up and going to the, the gym. I love going to the gym, but not in the mornings, telling myself I'm going to clean in the morning, telling myself I'm going to read, like professional books on marketing and business. I love those books, but not in the morning. And what ultimately Happens is the longer scale of what I used to do to myself on Saturdays. I'd get a couple days into the week, look at this schedule that I'd drawn up for myself, realize I hadn't followed it at all. All these habits that I intended to track and say, okay, check them off as I go to feel really good and get that dopamine flowing. They wouldn't be checked because I wasn't doing them. And because I had assigned these things to myself in the morning and didn't do them in the morning. If I did them later, I wouldn't get any dopamine out of them because I was already behind. It honestly took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that what I do for myself on Saturdays I could also do for myself every day of the week. I'm sure you know what that feels like. It's like one of those, like, light bulb but duh moments, right? You're like, oh, yeah, that's right. I am smart. But why have I been such an idiot up until this moment? So I started doing this thing a few weeks ago, and it has completely changed my week. It has completely changed each and every day that I'm working. It just starts me off with this incredible energy, and I get so much more done, and I feel better about what I get done throughout the day than I ever did before. And it's basically that I'm hitting the ice cream aisle first. So one of my favorite things to do that I never seem to have time for is reading fantasy, fantasy romance novels, which, by the way, they have kicked off in the last 10 years. Okay? I have been out of the game because I've been busy working and I haven't been paying attention. And let me tell you, there are some really good fantasy novels that are available especially for us grownups. Did you know that things get spicy in fantasy novels for grownups? They never got this spicy. When I was a kid, let me tell you, I always told myself, okay, you can start reading something for pleasure after you get all this stuff done. You can read fantasy novels. But at the end of the day, after you get all your work done, I would dangle that carrot for myself. And because how I was setting up my day was for neurotypical and not someone with an ADHD brain. I wouldn't get everything done. And I never got around to reading. I never got around to the thing that I enjoy the most. So every month, I do a new moon circle with a group of friends. And it's just a great Way to set our intentions for the month. And we look into the meaning of the new moon and all the astrological signs and, you know, what's at play there. And whether you believe in it or not, I think it is one of the best things that I do every single month because each astrological sign has a different meaning to it. The planets have different meanings to them, and it helps you look at your life through a different lens. Lens, right. So this past month, what really kicked me into this was that whatever the. I forget what moon it was, I forget the astrological signs and planets that were at play, but it was all about how do you enjoy your life, how do you derive pleasure from life and how important it is to build those things into your daily routine. And so as we're setting our intentions for the month, I decided that I would start off my day with 30 to 60 minutes of reading for pleasure before I did anything else. And let me tell you, I haven't been consistent. Not every single day. But the days that I've started off reading a novel, reading something that I really enjoy, that sucks me into story and lets me visit these made up friends and be in this fantasy world and experience fairies and werewolves and vampires, whatever it is. The days that I do that, first thing, I get so much more done. And not only do I get more done, I feel better while I'm doing it. I feel more inspired, I'm happier. I'm also more interesting to talk to because I'm not just working constantly. I've exposed myself to some literature and these outside experiences, I think they're interesting things to talk about. That's really up to the person I'm talking to. And if they're interested in fantasy fiction. So ultimately, what I want to offer to you is stop trying to be quote unquote, productive in the morning and instead assign yourself something fun in the morning, something that you enjoy. Put that on your to do list because you'll do it more consistently. Because let me tell you, reading for pleasure is at the top of my list every single morning. It's something that I really enjoy. So because I enjoy it, gives me some dopamine. And then the fact that I did it and I'm able to cross it off my list, that gives me another dose of dopamine, which means that the next thing that I try to do, I'm going to have a lot more energy for. I'm going to have that drip of dopamine going that'll help carry me into eating that frog later in the day foreign. We're very solidly a culture that believes in deprivation and the fact that depriving ourselves of the thing that we actually want will help us get to another thing that we actually want. Like, case in point, dieting. Right? Dieting is all about saying no to the things that you really want and saying yes to stuff that is, quote unquote, really good for you. And saying quote unquote because, like, everything is fuel for your body. There's nothing that's really necessarily bad. You know, you can just eat it in moderation. But what ends up happening when you deprive yourself of something is it's all you can think about. It's all you can think about. So you can't focus on enjoying the healthy things that are right in front of you. And then because you're depriving yourself of it and you're thinking about it all the time, you develop this massive craving. And I don't know about you, but, like, if I'm craving something, say I'm craving apple pie, which I do, like once a year. It's not one of my favorite desserts, but it's just one of those things that, like, there's nothing else that hits like apple pie, right? So you get this craving for it, but then once you get the apple pie, you don't just have one slice, you have like three. And then later in the day you go back for more. So instead of like just giving yourself the thing that you enjoy and letting yourself experience it and then moving on, not making your whole day about getting this thing that you've deprived yourself of, but it's just a little blip, like, oh, cool. Like, I got a little taste of this. Awesome. I'm not going to feel bad about it, but now that I've had that, like, I get to go and make healthier choices going forward. A lot of sales roles are set up with deprivation in mind. So if you work in sales, you'll know this. And if you haven't worked in sales, and this is news to you, a lot of sales jobs, their base pay doesn't cover how much it costs to live. It's usually like minimum wage. And then your commissions are what you depend on to be able to pay the bills. And a lot of organizations, they set it up so that if you don't hit your goal for the month, your commissions actually won't cover your base pay. So you're incentivized, quote unquote. Like, this is the belief that if you can't afford to Live. If you don't hit your goal or your quota, it's going to incentivize you to hit your quota and surpass your quota. There have been so many studies that show that when salespeople have a base pay or guaranteed amount of pay that will cover their cost of living and they don't have to worry about that, they actually outperform far more than the salespeople who are stressed out all the time about being able to pay their rent. This is that deprivation mindset. This is dangling a reward on the other side of all these hard, arduous tasks with this big threat looming over you. Now that I've I understand myself better, I understand why when I was in sales, I was constantly burning myself out. Because the ADHD brain does not function that way. The ADHD brain has far more access to its creativity, to connecting the dots on different resources that we have available to us and to innovative problem solving when we feel safe, secure, and like we're having fun. And I never felt that way when I was in sales. So here's your permission slip. Start your days with something that you enjoy. It could be reading. It could be word working. It could be doing yoga. It could be playing with your dog. It could be coloring. Who cares? It doesn't. You don't even have to color with the adult coloring books. You can use kids coloring books too, by the way. There was a period of time where everyone thought that I would love these adult coloring books because I love coloring. I really do. It's like something that I find so, so relaxing. So they kept giving me these stupid adult coloring books. And let me tell you, when you enjoy coloring and you enjoy coloring with kids coloring books, the grownup coloring books are really stressful. There's so many tiny little boxes and then all these patterns, and then you have to stick to the pattern. You have to stick to the color scheme. And no, I don't want that. I want kids coloring books. If you want to give me coloring books If I want kids once I want ones that I can screw it up and not feel bad about it. Am I alone? Am I the only one who feels like the adult coloring books are really stressful? If you also feel this way, please get in contact with me and just reassure me that I'm not alone here, really appreciate it. And if you're a friend who once gifted me one of those coloring books, I want you to know that I appreciate the thought and I re gifted them to someone who really did appreciate them. 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 weeniecast.com 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. Is that bad? Should I not have admitted that I re gifted a gift? Squirrel Squirrel Squirrel Squirrel. 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 $1.99 a month, Winniecast 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 weenicast.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 weeniecast.com hyperFocus or.