How ADHD entrepreneurs can ensure they keep 'juicing their goose' in their routines!

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. In this episode, I'll be talking about what happens when your ADHD routine stops juicing your goose. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. You know that feeling when you've been cruising along in one routine for a few weeks, a few months, maybe even like half a year, and everything's going perfectly? You feel like you're getting everything done. It just flows until that one day that it doesn't. It might be that you moved, it might be that maybe your partner had a schedule change and then you are now responsible for something different on Tuesdays. It could be a change in the season. It could be that like the daylight hours affect when you go out and get exercise, for instance. But whatever it is, at that point your routine gets broken. And when your routine gets broken and you have adhd, it's not like you can jump right back into it for whatever reason. When we lose the juice in a routine, it's kind of like getting lost in the woods without any way to navigate yourself out. And you know the feeling, it's super overwhelming because everything that you had handled before, you no longer have handled. It's frustrating because you had all this stuff handled before, why can't you handle it now? All of your to do list items, you just can't seem to prioritize them. You're staring at this list and everything seems important and for the life of you, you can't seem to figure out what you should be focusing on first. The random life stuff that you normally would have dialed in just kind of floats off. This happens most often for my clients when they go from working full time in a corporate job, which creates a ton of structure for them, to working for themselves, to being fully self employed where they are responsible for creating structure. You know, this is the ugly truth of having. Well, one of the ugly truths of having ADHD is we actually thrive in structure, but we massively suck at creating it for ourselves. I'll never forget when I worked in the solar industry, I lived in this really pretty area and three times a week religiously I would wake up at 5am to go running at a really beautiful running trail. I'd meet a friend every single morning. I would meditate, I would have a healthy breakfast, I would prep a really healthy lunch because I'd be on the road for most of the day. I would pre make a smoothie to have mid morning. Like I had my life dialed in because I had this schedule. I would religiously have dinners planned with friends throughout the week. When I started my business, all those routines, all those healthy things that I used to do for myself, the social life, they all kind of went out the window for a bit. Now, a lot of that had to do with the pandemic when my business was like really, really in full swing. We were locked down, you couldn't go out of the house. Which is another major change that a lot of us went through in the last few years. Big world changes and small life changes all impact our routines. They all impact the structure we're either able or unable to create in our own lives. It can be as small as seasonal changes. Maybe you really like running and that's really what helps you quiet your mind. And that's almost your meditative practice. But what if you like running early in the morning and then now it's too dark for you to run and you have to change it up? You have to figure out what other time in the day you can do it so that you're not accidentally getting eaten by coyotes, which hasn't happened recently. And it's always a concern of mine. The most frustrating instance of this is when you go on vacation and you come back and you seem to have forgotten how you do your work. This happens to every single one of my clients. It happens to me. It's so frustrating because you've just gone on this like amazing, relaxing recharging break and you come back and all of a sudden like it's like you have to start from scratch all over again. And as someone who moves a lot, who hasn't figured out where exactly I want to live in the world, I can tell you every single time I move, it's like I reinvent my life. There's a reason why. And here's something that I do for my business. And I offer this, if it works for your business as well, if you also move and change time zones occasionally. I made sure when I started my business to set up regular hours where I'd have client calls, where I'd have team meetings. That was time zone friendly, right? So like when I'm in Eastern Standard Time in the United States, my morning calls start at 10am Now, I did this specifically because if I ever go to California, there's no way I'm getting up before seven to do a call. And there's a three hour difference. I have a lot of friends and family in California, so like there's reason for me to spend a good chunk of time. There's also if I'm ever in Europe and I'm wanting to travel and work, I don't want to be working too late. So my latest call usually ends around 4pm for when you're in Europe, that's around 9 or 10 in the evening. I consciously set up my hours so that if I'm traveling around or if I move, I don't have to change them. But what do you do when there's no more juice in your routine or something has shifted so that the routine that you were completely satisfied by just no longer works for you? Most of us just try to get through the to do list. We just like look at what needs to be done and we try to like create a new routine out of like the bare necessities, which doesn't always work. You know, it might work for a little bit, but then we have to kind of reconfigure the routine from there. Where I have found you can create a longer lasting routine because we know that they all routines have an expiration date for ADHD years. Like there's no routine that is going to stick for the rest of your life. And I know we think every single time we get into the rhythm of a routine we think, oh my God, like this is it, this is how I'm going to live my life for the rest of my life and this is perfect and blah, blah, blah. There's just a moment where it just doesn't work for you anymore. You know, where you're bored. If you have adhd, you have a need, not just a desire, a need for variety. Doing the same routine day in and day out works for a little bit, but it won't work forever. So regardless if you don't have anything changing in your life ever, you're still going to have to redesign your routine from time to time. You can do it accidentally, you can do it as a reaction. Absolutely. Or you can do it my way, which is a very conscious designing of how you want to live your life for the next few weeks or few months. So whenever I have to remap my routine, the first question I always start with is what am I craving more of? Recently I just remapped my routine to include a lot more reading, a lot more Reading for pleasure. I realized that I was lacking a bit of whimsy in my life. Whimsy that like TV shows just can't scratch that itch, you know what I mean? There's a difference between watching a TV show and reading a book. Like a TV show, sure, you can get sucked into the story, but when you're reading a book, you feel like you're immersed in it. You feel like you're in it with them. You're not just regarding, you're just not just watching it like you're in the room whenever something happens. It's really cool. But I realized, you know, when I was remapping my routine because my old routine stopped working for me, that I needed to carve out specific time every single day so that I could actually do that, so that I could be in these other worlds and experience these fictional friends, you know? Now this will change. I'll get sick of this at some point and I might need more creativity. I might need to like, start knitting again. Or maybe I want more movement. Maybe I'll need to like, do a new kind of exercise like yoga or hip hop dance, who knows? Actually, I tried hip hop dance and I have no rhythm, so probably not doing that. Like, I'm all for embarrassing myself, but everyone has a limit, right? Oh my God. The best was when I decided that I was gonna try breakdancing. Like, I signed up for a breakdancing intro course. And let me tell you, you have to have a lot of upper body strength to even be able to do that stuff. That is not something I have. Although it is a lot of fun, it is really cool to like go and do some break dancing moves. If you have upper body strength, I recommend you try it. But if you don't, maybe work on the upper body strength first. Okay, so number one, you are assessing what is it that you're craving more of and you are prioritizing that in this new routine. So, for instance, reading more. I'm doing that every single morning after I wake up. Second, what do you want to continue that is, for whatever reason. Harder. Now. Now, this for me tends to be my workout routine, right? I do not like hot weather. I don't like sweating. I don't like being at all sticky. And I also live in New England where the summers are just hot and the humidity is like 100% all the time. So this summer is not when I'm my most fit. I will own that. There's not a gym that is really well air conditioned here. So I have to find different ways to exercise in the few rooms in my house that have air conditioning. Right. That's a limitation I have for others who like to exercise outside. The seasons can also change your routine. I mentioned it before. With daylight hours changing, maybe you don't like running in the dark with coyotes snapping at your heels. That's okay. But it means that you're going to have to reconfigure your routine to fit in, working out. Maybe you really enjoy the hot weather and you don't like the cold, like a crazy person. And during the winter, you don't like going outside to exercise. You're going to have to find a new routine. This can also apply to different things in your business. When I'm working with a new business owner, one of the rules that I have for my clients who are early on in their businesses is that they have to commit to one social media platform and one only. If they want to post to the other stuff to the other places, they absolutely can. But that's secondary to whatever it is that they're posting on that first platform. So say you've made a commitment to post on LinkedIn every single day for a year now. There's going to come a moment and this happens across the board where you're just going to lose all inspiration for that platform. It's gonna get stale, essentially. But that's where you're getting your business. That's where you're spending most of your time marketing what you do. You've built credibility, you have followers, you have built a lot of trust with the people who follow you. And if you were to jump to another platform, like those of us with ADHD are so often tempted to, you're gonna be starting from scratch. Sure, you can build it up, but it's gonna take time to build that same, same level of trust, to get that same cadence, to really understand what's effective on that platform. So what happens when, for whatever reason, sticking to that one platform is just harder now? The answer for this is going to be massively different depending on what it is that you're struggling with. Whatever this thing is that in your past routine, it was really important and it's still important for this next routine. You're going to have to figure out what your limitations are. What is it that's making it harder? How can you augment how you do this thing? Next, you want to assess what needs to keep happening. Maybe you still need to keep doing meal prep on Sunday nights. Great. Your kids still need to be picked up from School. That's not going to change. It's not like with the new routine, you're going to adopt them out. Your dog is still going to have to be fed in the mornings and still taken for walks. Unless you want to hire a dog walker. You're still going to have to plan on having dinner. You're still going to have to see clients. Like, there's stuff that you're going to just have to, like, make time for in this routine. But full permission to change it up. Full permission to change when you are available to your clients. This is your business. If you were running a store, you could absolutely change the hours at the store. Stores open. It's no different. When you're running a business and you're running it online or you have times that you talk to clients, you get to alter that to work for you. Because we're not just building businesses for the sake of making them make lots of money. No. Yes. We hope that they make lots of money. Right. But we're building businesses that will support us living our ideal life. I don't know about you, but my ideal life changes. And so my business gets to change with me. My routine gets to change with me. So you're gonna assess everything that needs to keep happening. And if you need to redesign where it goes and how it fits into your weekly routine, full permission to do that. Next, you're gonna assess the. That no longer needs to happen. Maybe there's something that you do that, like, is just. It's just habit, but it doesn't have any impact on your business. It doesn't make you feel better as a human, you know, it's something that you just have always done, but you're not getting anything out of it. An example of this is I got into this routine of watching TV in the evenings and I would watch shows that I had seen before, right? So, like, I could have them on and I could kind of mess around my phone and I could play with my dog and all stuff. And it just became part of my routine. I would turn the TV on as I was getting into bed because, you know, like, I could hang out in bed. This is too much information. I go to bed really early because Luna makes me. My dog runs my life between like 7:45 and 8:00pm she starts snarling at me in like a friendly way. And it's because she wants to go to bed and she won't go to bed unless I also go to bed. So from the hours of like 8pm to 10pm, I'm just sitting in bed because she made me. And the routine was that I would just go to my bedroom, I would change into pajamas, I would wash my face, brush my teeth, and just turn the TV on to something that I've seen a million times. And then I would, like, mess around my phone or play with her, usually not because she goes straight to sleep, because that's her bedtime. And I realized that, like, I didn't really actually want to watch tv, but I was doing it just because it was the routine. And, like, regardless if I wanted to watch tv, I would still get sucked into the episode that I was watching, which would make me stay up later, which means that I wasn't getting as good sleep. And when I reconfigured my routine to include more reading, I realized that I was doing this thing that I don't even really enjoy. We all have some version of this, I guarantee you. And let me tell you, we have a finite amount of time on this earth. Do we really want to be spending it doing stuff that we really don't care about? Probably not. The grim reaper is coming for all of us. And when we meet them, do we really want to regret doing stuff, stuff that we didn't enjoy? And finally, so you've worked out, like, what you're craving more of. You've added that in. You've hopefully found a solution to continuing doing what you need to do. That's, for some reason, harder. Now, you have included all the things that need to keep happening in this routine, and hopefully you've dropped a few things, and you're going to be full of hope that this is perfect, that this will work great. This is my life now. You have it written down on paper, but you just have to follow it. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That's not how it works. You're going to trial and error this, right? Because the first routine that you design for yourself, you and I both know, probably isn't going to work. You're probably being a little too ambitious about what you can fit in or about when you want to do stuff. For the longest time, I tried to create routines where I would work out in the mornings. And let me tell you, I hate working out in the mornings. I'm not awake yet. When I work out, I want to have some resentment build up in me. I want to have something that I'm kind of annoyed at that doesn't happen until later in the day because when I'm on the treadmill, I want to be running out of rage. When I'm Lifting weights. I want to do it with some oomph. That doesn't happen in the mornings. That happens around 4pm for me, that's usually when I have enough frustration built up that I can really take it out on a good treadmill. The main part about this is when you're designing a new routine for yourself and it's not going well because this will happen for all of us. Anyone who has ADHD has this experience of trying to, like, create structure in their life and having that structure not work for them or not following through on what you say you're gonna do. The most important thing is, ooh, what am I gonna 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 sprinkler 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 Anyone who has ADHD has this experience of trying to, like, create structure in their life and having that structure not work for them or not following through on what you say you're gonna do. The most important thing is that you have compassion for yourself. Our brains are meaning making machines. Like, we can take any kind of data out there in the world and make it mean something about us. From like, oh, that person that I am a light acquaintance of. They didn't wave to me. They must hate me. Well, maybe they just didn't see you. Maybe they were looking past you and you thought they were looking at you, but they actually didn't see you. They were looking at the clock behind you, you know, when you were waving at them. The fact that we're meaning making machines is one of the most beautiful things about humans, right? It's the source of all of our art, our poetry. We find really beautiful ways to explain things that we have no way of understanding or knowing for sure. And it's also one of the parts that us up the most, right? Because we can take a piece of paper that has a routine written on it and halfway through, look at it and see that we didn't do half the things on the list and make that like silly piece of data mean that we're a failure, that, oh my God, I'm a failure. I can't stick with the list of stuff that I wrote down on a piece of paper. I'm not worth anything. I know as I say that it sounds ridiculous and yet I know you're listening to this and thinking, oh my God, I do that to myself all the time. Because I do that to myself all the time. The funny thing about running a podcast with ADHD is like, I really have to examine my life. And it's amazing the things that I actually genuinely think I'm the only one who does them until I gut check it with my clients and my ADHD colleagues. And it makes me feel so much better that I'm not the only one. If you do this to yourself, if you hold yourself accountable and hold yourself to task to like, to this whole to do list that you don't stick with and you punish yourself for it, please tell us, please go to the weeniecast.com and scroll to the bottom and leave us a voicemail and tell us exactly how you do this to yourself. My clients, anyone who's in any of my paid communities, the hyper focused ADHD membership, the build your own business group programs, and my one on one clients for them. I run a lot of support calls throughout the month. One of the calls that I run is a Monday sprint. I do this three Mondays a month and it's just a half hour call. It's really quick and easy. We do 10 minutes where we're just doing a brain dump of everything that we think we have to do and then we're prioritizing a few things that we're gonna get done each day. I mean, it's short and it's simple, but it has such an incredible impact for my clients. But the thing that I always start it with is forgiveness. We have a moment at the very beginning where I ask the question and someone always answers because it's the same question every time. What do we start Mondays with? We start Mondays with forgiveness for all the we didn't get done last week because we all know that feeling of doing a brain dump of everything that you have to do and then feeling immediately bad when you're putting stuff on the list that was on last week's list and the week before's list that you still haven't gotten done. The problem with that when you have ADHD is that when you have something on Your list that you're already behind on, that you are already a failure at, when you do get around to doing it, you get no dopamine from it because it doesn't matter that you got it done now because it was due three weeks ago. Now, you can choose to keep doing it that way or you can do it my way, which is the right way. And whenever you do a to do list, start with forgiveness. Everything on that list is a brand new item. It takes the pressure off. It also gives you, like, way more dopamine when you actually get it done. And I want to remind you, if you do have a few of these things lingering in the back of your mind, and I know you do, I know you're thinking about them right now. So however long you've been meaning to do them, however behind you are, did your life end by not doing them? Did anything catastrophic happened by you not completing that task? Did anyone die? Did your house burn down? Did you lose all of your money? Did your dog all of a sudden stop loving you? No, none of that stuff happened. Well, I hope none of that stuff happened. The things that we put on our lists, we feel like they are life or death. We feel like they're so important most of the time, they actually have very little importance. They might have impact once we get them done, but they're not going to harm us if we haven't done 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 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. 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, 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 weenicast.com winners for just 1.99amonth, you'll gain access to the valuable insights and strategies that can take your business to the next level. Winicast 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 com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast. Com hyperfocus.