As ADHD entrepreneurs we need to STOP calling ourselves lazy!

Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please, please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel in this episode, we're going to talk about why calling yourself lazy is never okay. Squirrel. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel if there's one thing that everyone with ADHD has in common is that we have a gross misunderstanding of the word lazy. This word gets thrown at us so much throughout our childhood, our adolescence, our adulthood. We hear it from other people and we say it to ourselves and it is f ed up. And we need to stop doing that because what we often perceive as laziness in ourselves often is a whole slew of other things. And I'm going to go through what they are in this episode. Now, first and foremost, if you are not taking action on something that is different from being lazy, oftentimes laziness is the label that we slap onto other things like executive dysfunction, needing rest, or gear shifting. And I'm going to help you see the difference. Now, we've all had that experience where we're sitting on our couch, we're doom scrolling and we're watching all these reels or all these tiktoks, or Maybe we're on LinkedIn and we're like commenting and, and we're doing busy work. We're doing passive stuff that, like, we can tell ourselves is inspiration for what we're going to do next. We might be engaging with our community, which ups the algorithm. So if we do post something, they'll see it. But it's. But in the back of our mind, we know that thing that we need to be doing that we should be doing right now. And in our mind we're actually, like working really hard at it. I did this for a solid hour yesterday. I had to create a script for a video and I kept telling myself that I would just read one more buzzfeed article. One more buzzfeed article about actors who took A hiatus from acting or who quit the industry completely. One more article about how you know peaches aren't good for you or whatever. I don't know. BuzzFeed has the most ridiculous stuff. It's not useful information. I don't know why I need to fill my brain with it, except that it is a great delay tactic when I'm in executive dysfunction. Now, here's the difference between being in executive dysfunction and being lazy. Now, when you're in executive dysfunction, you want to do the task. You are trying very hard to mentally make yourself do the task in your brain. You're literally playing out the different steps that you have to take with doing the task, but you still can't do the task. Now, you might do things that other people might perceive as lazy, and you may even perceive yourself as lazy for doing them. You know, in that moment, I totally could have looked at myself and been like, you're being such a lazy turd. Why are you sitting here reading buzzfeed articles when they don't move your business forward? You know exactly what you need to do. You're just being a lazy jerk and you're not doing it. But I don't do that to myself anymore because I know the difference between executive dysfunction and laziness. When you are genuinely lazy, it's that you know what you have to do, but you don't care. You know what you have to do, and you are actively putting it off on purpose. Now, this isn't saying that you're never lazy. I'm sure you are. I know I'm lazy in a lot of ways. I'm lazy when it comes to laundry. I have mountains of clean laundry because I hate folding laundry. I will be actively lazy about avoiding folding that laundry. I will spend the next three weeks digging through these piles of clothes for the clothes that I need instead of folding it. I have no desire to fold is just going to look that way and I'm okay with it. That we can slap the lazy label on, but the stuff that we apply the lazy label to are usually the things that we genuinely do want to do, especially in our businesses. Now, executive dysfunction can happen for a whole slew of reasons. It could be that you don't know how to do the thing. A really common thing for people with ADHD is we learn really quickly. And so we're used to being really good at stuff really quickly. And when we're really good at something and we enjoy it, we have no problem getting up and jumping right into it and getting into Action and doing the thing. But when we don't know how to do it and we don't know if we're going to be good at it and we don't know if we're going to enjoy it, that's a lot of hurdles for us to overcome. So if you're slapping the lazy label on yourself over not doing a thing that you've never done before, or maybe it's your first time doing, is it really you being lazy or is it you not being confident at being good at it? Is there too big of a hurdle of you needing to learn how to do it? That is a completely different thing from being lazy. I'll use this podcast as an example. I tried to start a podcast years ago. I talked with someone who gave me a very long to do list, including using software on my computer that I didn't know how to use. He gave me, like, weird, complicated instructions that I didn't fully understand, but I was too embarrassed that I didn't understand to actually ask more questions about understanding. And I never did it. There's no podcast that I started, like, never even recorded an episode, right? Nothing. And the only reason I have an episode now is because I have this amazing producer in my corner, Neil, who's blushing right now, who literally does all the things that I don't know how to do and have no interest in learning how to do for me. He's my hero. He's my. He's my fairy godmother. He swooped in and saved the day. Sometimes being lazy is actually just a sign that you're trying to do that you shouldn't be doing. That's not a good use of your time or talents. Sometimes being lazy is just a massive sign from the universe that, hey, you need to hire someone else to do this for you. It's going to be way more productive if you hire someone else to do this for you. Or you just need to hire someone who can train you how to do this. Well, if you sense it's something that you're going to be passionate about, learning how to do something is the first step to being confident in it. Now, if you don't know how to ride a bicycle, and I told you to just go and ride a bike, would you confidently be able to hop on a bike and go for a bike ride? Probably not. You'd probably look at me sideways and think, like, what are you thinking? No, I'm gonna fall, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna get hit by a car. I'm gonna Break my leg, I'm gonna skin both knees. I'm gonna, you know, smash my head in and it's gonna be a really bad afternoon if I go ride a bicycle right now. Katie, for me to tell you to go ride a bicycle, you're going to have to learn how to ride the bicycle first to be able to do it confidently. You know, the same for dancing. You know, I'm not a good dancer. Okay, I, I know a little bit about how to dance. I took a ballroom dancing class in college. It was a bad story. I don't want to go into it. But anyway, if you were to tell me to get up and dance in front of a bunch of people, I would be highly uncomfortable doing that. I wouldn't feel confident in doing that. Now, me sitting back and being like, nuh, I don't want to do it. You could absolutely perceive that as lazy because it's inaction, but it's genuinely that I don't feel I have confidence in dancing. Now there are a whole bunch of skills in your business that you probably have no idea how to do. And you can either learn how to do them yourself or you can hire someone to do it. But stop calling yourself lazy for not doing them. It's not laziness, it's just neptitude, which is also not great, but it's fixable. Now, another reason why we may get kicked into executive dysfunction and be perceived as lazy is we might actually just genuinely need some rest. Now, I'm recording this podcast after working a 14 hour day yesterday. Now, I love what I do and everything I did yesterday I was super excited about it lit me up in all the different ways that I love doing and it's fine. You know, I'm not going to do that every single day. But some days when I work a 14 hour day in my business, I'm doing stuff that I absolutely hate and it takes a ton more energy for me to get through the whole day and get everything done. Now the next day I could absolutely expect myself to just get up and at em, do another 14 hour day and just suck it up and do it. But that's not realistic. Like on those days after you've had a big like dopamine expense day, it's unreasonable of you to expect yourself to have the same energy levels. And what we typically do is we assign ourselves everything that we didn't get done the day before to that follow up day. And when we sit in our bed, still in our towel from our shower with the TV on desk Scrolling on our, on our phone, eyeing our computer that's over in the corner of the room that has all the work that we should be doing right now, but we just can't get out of bed. And she's like, I'm cozy and it's kind of cold, so maybe I'll just like put the covers over while I'm in my towel and I have my wet hair and this is weird. No one should know that I do this. And no, you need rest. If you're literally laying in a towel on your bed at 10 o' clock in the morning after a day of working 14 hours and you can't get yourself out of bed to go and do work, that's a big sign that you need rest. That is not laziness. One of my formative memories about being lazy comes from when I was a kid. And let me just give a whole disclaimer here. The process of diagnosing people with ADHD has never been helpful to the person with ADHD because the whole diagnostic criteria has to do with how other people experience us. It has nothing to do with or it hasn't had anything to do with our experiences of ourselves. Right. Growing up, what my parents saw was someone who didn't want to do their homework, who was difficult, who didn't do what they said. And I know you're probably nodding be like, yeah, that was the same for me. And that's what my doctors were telling them. That's just normal for a person with adhd, is they're kind of lazy, they don't wanna do this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that's what I grew up to believe about myself. And I remember Saturday mornings after a full week of school, which I'm gonna get into, how the normal school day doesn't really serve people with adhd. In a minute, I would be absolutely spent energetically. I'd have no energy. And I don't know if you're a millennial. You probably remember ABC's one Saturday morning, you know, with pepper and pepper and way too cool for seventh grade and recess and Doug. And I remember, like, it was just the absolute thing that I needed to decompress after a really long week. And I remember my mom coming into my room being like, hey, Katie, when are you going to get up? Are you going to waste the whole day in bed? You know, because her perception of it, as she was told by my doctors was her job, was to get me up and moving, was to get me to stop with what was happening with my ADHD and start acting like a neurotypical. Now we've learned so much about ADHD since then, right? So my mom, like that's what she was told by my doctors. She didn't do anything wrong, she was just given some bad advice. But a lot of us have this experience and especially if you didn't get diagnosed until later in life, your parents probably did similar things because you weren't acting like a neurotypical, you weren't acting the way that they wanted you to act. And your parents main job is to make sure that you become a functioning member of society, right? So their job is to make sure that you kind of conform in some ways. But ultimately like my, you know, 8, 9, 10 year old body, my brain just needed some rest, it needed some dopamine, it needed time without an assignment. And just, I mean if you have adhd, you know this like picking out an outfit for the day can feel like an assignment. Eating breakfast can feel like an assignment. Going walking the dog can feel like an assignment. When you have no dopamine in your system, it's the same thing throughout your day sometimes, especially after doing a ton of work that maybe you didn't enjoy doing or just was very taxing on you. You're gonna need a break. You're going to need to rest Sometimes Buzzfeed articles are exactly what you need. Sometimes just sitting down outside without your phone and taking a breather is exactly what you need. There was a period in high school where I hacked my ADHD in a really weird way. So I would get home from school and I'd immediately be resistant to doing any kind of homework. I hated homework. And like partially it was because a lot of it was boring and partially it was because I just didn't have any energy to do it. You know, I just spent a whole eight hour day being forced to mask for a bunch of different teachers and friends. I'd have to change environments, which was just a lot for my brain to do. I'd have to shift, like switch subjects. I had no transition time except for when I went to French class And my teacher, Ms. Blanchard gave us a moment to kind of arrive in the room and have some small talk and kind of get settled. Love her. She, I don't think she even realized how ADHD friendly she was and actually I should probably tell her so. Ms. Blanchard, if you're listening, you are very ADHD friendly and if I see you around town or if I talk to you, I'm going to tell you in person anyway, after an eight hour day, like I was spent. It was too much for me to even think about doing homework. I really just had to recover. And so for a while I got myself up at 3 o' clock in the morning every single school day and I did homework in the morning before school. Now the way I did this was kind of weird because I'm the queen of snoozing. If I set an alarm on my phone or on an old school alarm clock, like in my sleep, I will turn it off. My brain will actually incorporate the sound into my dream. So it was like a fire alarm in my dream and I got rid of it and it's like woohoo. Like save the day. No, I just slept through my alarm. And so how I hacked this was I discovered that the TV that I had in my bedroom had a timer on it. So it not only would turn itself off at a certain point, you could also schedule it to turn itself on at a certain point. And I don't know why I picked this channel. It might've just been an accident or it might've just been the channel that like I was watching the night before. Typically it probably had the show that I liked the night before. But for a solid three or four months, I would wake up every single morning at 3:00 in the morning with Walker Texas Ranger on the TV. That's right, Chuck Norris was always in my bedroom at 3 o' clock in the morning. He was the first person I saw. And it was always an extra uncomfortable morning when I look over and the episode would be starting with him having his shirt off. No, no. And as I'm describing this, you're probably remembering back to a time where you figured out a way, consciously or unconsciously, of how to make sure that you did the miserable thing when you had the optimal amount of energy. And I'll bet you like me, it only lasted for three or four months because unfortunately nothing really lasts in ADHD land. Everything's transient. Now. Another reason why your executive dysfunction can be kicked into gear and look a lot like laziness is because you're shifting gears. Now. I just talked about how in school, going from class to class to class to class completely burned me out. What genuinely would have helped me so much more is instead of having a five minute break where you basically have to run from one end of the building to the next end of the building to get to class on time, and miraculously, if you could go that fast, go pee at the same time would be to have a nice 20 minute break, a nice 20 minutes where you get to talk to people. Maybe go sit down and just kind of be alone in your own head. Maybe go to the next class and sit there and kind of get settled. That would have been a much more ADHD friendly way for a school day to be arranged. Now I understand why schools don't do this, because having a bunch of teenagers that are just unstructured for 20 minutes in between each class can be dangerous. Fully understand that. But it did not work for me. I need rest in between tasks. I need reset time. I need to be able to mentally pack away everything I just worked on and shift gears into the next thing. This is one of the reasons why I schedule my week so that I do client calls on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and sometimes Fridays. Because there's stuff that I have to do that's work in my business and I can't get into it if I'm shifting between that and client calls. Now, some genuine things that you can do when you're wanting to shift gears into things is, ooh, what am I gonna say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. Join the Weenacast 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. Now some genuine things that you can do when you're wanting to shift gears into things is honestly play some games on your phone, go for a walk, go and sit in the sunshine, make yourself a snack. This can be really helpful for you to do throughout your day, but also throughout your week. Realized that I had this tendency to make all these big plans for what I would be doing on Saturdays. I'd have like a whole itinerary and a whole to do list and errands that I need to run. And Saturday morning would come and I'd wake up and I'd drink coffee and I'd sit on my couch stressing out about everything that I needed to do but not getting up and doing them. And before I'd know it it would be mid afternoon. I'd feel terrible for how behind I was. I'd feel completely exhausted. Cause all I was doing was stressing out about doing it. And at that point, I would have to go and do a couple of them. Like, you know, go and buy food, because I'd be hungry, but I wouldn't get anything else done. And so I would literally go into Sunday feeling behind on my weekend, which is ridiculous, I decided to give myself this new routine. Just like back when I was a kid watching one Saturday morning, I would assign myself a movie. A movie that I had seen a million times before. Something that wasn't a big intellectual flex for me to take in. Something like you've Got Mail or Forrest Gump or really anything with Tom Cruise or Disney. Love Tom Cruise. Oh, my gosh. Anyway, why am I saying that? No, let me take it back, let me take it back. Let me take it back. I hate Tom Cruise. I love Tom Hanks. Why is my brain not working? You've got mail. Or Forrest Gump. Really, anything with Tom Hanks or a Disney movie. Something that I've seen a million times before, by the way. Tom Hanks, if you listen to my podcast, please send us a message. I absolutely love your work. I think you're an amazing human being. And all the reports say that you're super, super nice. You and your wife do really nice things when you go and travel. Anyway, I started doing this on Saturday mornings. And my deal with myself was I would sit there on my couch doing nothing. I'd have no expectations of anything productive until I watched this one movie. And if I needed to watch the movie again, I would restart the movie again until I got to that point where I was bored. This is why you want to pick something that you have seen a bunch of different times. Once you get to the point where you're bored, that's when you get up and go. That's when you need some more stimulation and you have the motivation to get up and start working on your to do list. But I wasn't allowed to start my to do list until I got bored. And let me tell you, I got so much more done on Saturdays. Most Saturdays. Some Saturdays, I would legitimately sit on my couch watching movies all day long. And that was okay, because I made a deal with myself that if I needed to do that, I needed to do that. It had to be rest. But we all know that sitting somewhere, being stressed out about the things that we have to do that we're not doing doesn't Count as rest. It actually exhausts us further. Which brings me to the ultimate point here is you need to stop calling yourself lazy and instead you need to start with the narrative that you are strategically using. Rest. Okay, I'm going to tell you the story. So I went to Bridgewater State College for my first year of, you know, freshman year of college, right? And spring semester, I discovered that there were like these one credit athletic classes that were half a semester. And the first half I signed up for ballroom dancing, and the second half I signed up for archery and cycling. Okay? So ballroom dancing, obviously as cold as winter. And it was inside. So I show up to this class and it's this older couple. They were adorable. They did competitive ballroom dancing throughout their whole adulthood. This is kind of like their retirement gig was teaching a bunch of college students who, you know, wanted to off for an hour a week how to ballroom dance. And it really quickly became apparent that there were the majority of the girls in the class were there because they had crushes on the guys who were there. And the guys were there because they wanted to pick up a girl who wasn't one of the ones who was already interested in them. So this class was like a curated, like, love triangle waiting to happen, right? And so at one point, like halfway through the semester, well, of course, like, we were all terrible at dancing. Like, we'd learn it kind of, you know, but like, we wouldn't practice it because like, the girls who were interested in the guys and wanted to practice with them, they'd ask them to practice and the guys would be like, oh, no, I'm busy. And then they would be too chicken to ask the girls that they wanted to practice with, like, to go and dance with them, right? So it was just like, it was very. And of course we're all teenagers and like, really uncomfortable with each other and like, we have a lot of hormones. And I was there to learn how to dance, by the way. I took it very seriously. So, like halfway through the semester, we were assigned a group and we had to come up with a dance routine as a group, right? We had to choreographic and I think it. We had to be like four or five partners. So it was a lot of people to coordinate. And I didn't realize it, but there was this one guy in the group who had a crush on me and there was this girl who had a crush on him and he wanted to partner with me. And I was like, okay, that's fine. But he wasn't a very good dancer. So I swapped away from him to this other guy who had a crush on another girl. So he wasn't interested in dancing with me. But I was kind of militant because I wanted to get an A in this class and I wanted to learn how to dance really well. So I completely, like, blew past all the emotions of this. I like, I feel bad for the people in my group because I was probably not the nicest person because I was like, we're going to have the best dance routine ever. And then the guy that I made partner with me because he was a better dancer, he had the piece of paper that had all of our choreography and then he lost it. And then he didn't show up to class and it was just a nightmare. But the worst part was that. And I like. I think we all like passed with like, Cs. It wasn't the end of the world. It was also just ballroom dancing. No one expected us to be good. The half semester ended. Moved into the next half of the semester where I'm in an archery class with the girl who liked the guy who liked me. And then at that point, the guy came and asked me out at archery in front of her. And I had found out that she liked him at this point. And I spent the rest of the semester positive that this girl was gonna shoot me in the back with her bow and arrow. So I said no. And it was just. I don't know, it was just like a very awkward situation. I like, I didn't get shot. That was nice. 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 199amonth, Weeniecast for Winners delivers in depth and actionable advice that's specifically designed for entrepreneurs, including those with adhd, whether diagnosed or suspected. I'll talk you through how to increase your sales conversions, keep your mindfulness on point, and even offer practical tips that can help you be more productive and successful in your business, all while catering to your unique needs of being an entrepreneur who might be struggling with adhd. With winicast for Winners, you'll get practical tips and strategies that you can use to drive your business forward without the frustrations and setbacks that often come with adhd. So if you're ready to start seeing real Results, subscribe to Winniecast for winners today at winniecast.com forward/winners for just $1.99 a month, you'll gain access to the valuable insights and strategies that can take your business to the next level. Weeniecast for Winners is a show that's worth every penny for entrepreneurs who want to succeed. Subscribe now and start enjoying the benefits for yourself. Join the weeniecast hyper focused community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weenicast.com hyperfocus all one word, that's weeniecast.com hyperfocus.