How procrastination gets in the way of wealth! (Featuring free workbook!)

Hey, new listener. Thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to tell you about the support I wish I had to help me bypass some serious procrastination. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the weeniecast. The question I get an annoying amount of times is how do I prevent myself from procrastinating? How do I get everything done on my to do list? And on and on and on. And let me tell you, I don't. One of the challenges of being a coach who works with ADHD business owners is that I am also an ADHD business owner. And the challenges don't change when you know better. Just because I help other people figure out how to overcome their challenges with their ADHD in starting and growing their businesses doesn't mean I have it all figured out myself for me and my business. Far from it. Knowing all the different strategies that can work for other people creates an immense amount of pressure on me to just be perfect at all this stuff. Because I teach on it, after all. Right? I should be perfect. I fail in managing my ADHD every single day in my business. And I know the shame that goes along with it. I know the frustration and sometimes it's not a big deal. You know, sometimes I don't post to LinkedIn and okay, cool, I'll post tomorrow. Sometimes my newsletter. Oh, no, that's a bad example. I'm very bad at having a newsletter, so that's an ongoing problem. Um, I've actually, I'm gonna start outsourcing that to someone so we won't even touch upon the newsletter. Just don't pay attention to that part of this podcast. I know, I know Neil's not going to edit this out, so, you know, I'll accidentally book an appointment at 2 o' clock in the afternoon, and then I'll just be in waiting mode all morning and all through lunch and then right until 2pm until I have that meeting because I'm afraid that I'll miss it. And then the rest of the day I'll still be in executive dysfunction, not able to do anything because I'm disappointed in myself for not getting more done in the morning. So I know the shame that goes into running a business when you have adhd. I know how hard it is to sit there in executive dysfunction knowing all the things that you need to do that you want to do, and not being able to get up and just do it. I understand the sinking feeling of shame when your well meaning, neurotypical loved ones are like, well, just do it. Just, just start. And it'll be so simple when you start. As if it's easy. There are so many challenges that go into managing adhd, and one of the big ones is we thrive in structure. Structured environments are perfect for us. So having a 9 to 5 can actually be really healthy for us. But a lot of us do not thrive in the nine to fiveness. Like the expectations in the nine to five don't fit us. And also often the activities that we're doing every single day in the 9 to 5 don't reflect our gifts. So it tends to burn us out. So what do we do? We go off and we start businesses where we have to create the structure and we suck at that. We're not good at creating structure for ourselves. And because we're working on our own and because we're responsible for creating the structure and it's not going well, we can sometimes spiral a little bit out of control. We can start punishing ourselves and overworking. And I do this all the time. And, and here's a few ways that I have been working on becoming better at this myself. Now, better is by no means perfect, but these are small things that I've been doing for myself that I do coach my clients to do. And members of the Hyperfocus membership, which is the thing that brought this whole topic up, because the Hyperfocus membership has been on a enrollment pause for the last nine months. Do you know why? Because I've been procrastinating writing the fucking landing page. It wasn't until about a month ago where I got a burst of dopamine and my executive dysfunction decided to off for a little bit where I was able to sit down and actually write out this whole landing page in one sitting. And I want to talk about this because a oftentimes people think that like the reward for doing something is enough for us to be motivated to start it, to work on it, right? So the reward for finishing a landing page is what you make money because people are able to go to the landing page, see what you're selling, click the buy button, and then all of a sudden their money becomes your money and you have a client that didn't necessarily work for me for nine whole months. And I'm convinced that making these small tweaks in my day to day are what finally got me to the point where I had the emotional, mental and dopamine bandwidth to actually sit down and do this. So the number one thing that I've been working on in the last handful of months is to quit work when I'm tired, not exhausted. As an adhder, I am so used to sitting down and doing a project all in one sitting. Every single research paper I did in school, I did the night before. I stayed up all night and I wrote the paper. And usually I didn't even go to sleep in the morning because I didn't want to miss the class because once I fell asleep, then I was dead to the world. Any sewing project I ever did in high school, because I was really big on making costumes for my friends and for myself, I would do in one sitting. I would literally just put on all of the Lord of the Rings movies and have them on in the background as I made these elaborate costumes. And a lot of the things that I do in my business, I do in one sitting. I have to. It's just how my brain works. And when you do things in one sitting, the goal is get it done at any cost. Because usually there is a deadline that you cannot miss. If you miss that deadline, then none of the work counts. If you're doing a costume for Halloween and it's the night before Halloween and you don't finish the costume, guess what? You don't have a costume to wear on Halloween. I mean, certain professors in university, if you do not finish the paper by the time it's due, you do not get to submit it late. So when we grow up that way, when we learn that we have to get things done at any cost, what we train ourselves to do is work through exhaustion. And that's all well and good. We when it's about a paper or you know, something silly, because usually you have some time to recuperate afterwards. But in a business, you don't have that. In a business, if you work yourself past exhaustion on a project, that means the next day or two, you're going to be useless. You're going to have a really hard time doing any of the daily tasks in your business because your dopamine is going to be completely, completely flatlined. And it's really hard to train yourself out of this because the signal normally to stop working is you finish the thing or you're so exhausted you cannot put another two words together. Or like that time in high school when I was making a Disney princess costume, I accidentally sewed through one of my fingers on the sewing machine and I had to go to the emergency room. That's another sign that you need to be done. Not one I recommend. Is that too gruesome? Hey, quick question. Did you follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app yet? It takes just a few seconds. I personally love Apple podcasts, but you can find us anywhere, even on YouTube. So as the kids say, smash that button and make sure you never miss an episode. When we quit, when we're tired, when we're just starting to slow down a bit, when our brains are just getting a little bit murky and things start taking a little longer, what we're basically doing is keeping a reserve of dopamine that we can utilize the next day. It feels like you're being lazy when you do this. It feels like you are being totally self indulgent because you've had a whole lifetime of programming of people calling you lazy for not starting the thing already and then by the time you start doing it, well you know you have to finish it. You did this to yourself. You procrastinated. So now you have to get it done and you have to stay up late and you have to punish yourself. One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in the six plus years that I've run my business is that yes, I set the deadlines for things in my business, but also those deadlines get to be flexible. And me missing a self imposed deadline does not mean that I'm a terrible person. It doesn't mean that I'm unprofessional. It doesn't mean that this business isn't going to work. It means that I'm a human and I'm a human with adhd. And sometimes that's just how we work. I did another episode a while back about how I use my own procrastination as a self care method to reduce stress. If you want to go and listen to this episode, it's episode 77 and I break down exactly how I take different tasks like high dopamine required tasks and low dopamine required tasks. And I always have them organized in lists so that when I'm having a high dopamine day I can say okay, awesome, I'm ready to get some shit done and I look at the list of high dopamine stuff that I need to do and I get to pick and choose and I don't have to do any of the mental work of planning what needs to be done. Likewise, on days where I'm just not feeling it, I have no energy, my dopamine's in the gutter. I'm able to look at those low dopamine items and say, okay, cool, here's some really easily accessible things that I can absolutely get done today. And what this does is it gives me the ability to use my own procrastination to get things done that I need to get done anyway. So I've been quitting when I'm tired since the beginning of this year in 2024, and I'm convinced that by doing that I have been storing up dopamine throughout the week so that I don't get to that point of exhaustion where I need a whole day to recover and where I randomly do get those really high dopamine spurts. And that's how I finally finished this damn landing page. The other aspect to this is Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first Squirrel, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. The hyperfocus community is the inner sanctum of the Weeniecast. It's a club that's designed just for you, where you'll learn how to leverage your ADHD to grow your business. In the Hyperfocus community, we are realistic about the challenges that face AD ADHD business owners and we don't believe in one size fits all solutions. We believe in creating strategies that fit you. On day one of signing up, you'll experience that deep sigh of relief that comes from walking into a room full of people like you who you do not need to mask your quirks in front of in order to fit in because they get you in the membership. Every single month, you'll get two group calls. One is an ADHD group coaching call and the other is a networking call with Facebook fellow ADHD business owners. We will also have co working sessions designed for the ADHD mind. Monday Get Organized Sprint calls to keep you out of overwhelm. Access to weekly Brave Biz Lab calls where I will give you practical advice to grow your business. We'll also have the occasional expert training which are absolutely ADHD vetted and of course, community support by folks like you and those who pay for the year up front. Get a surprise bonus visit weenicast.com forward/hyperfocused and stop procrastinating the things that will grow your business. That's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or click the link in the episode description. The Other aspect to this is knowing when to ask for help and who to ask for help from. One of the most challenging bits about this project in particular is that I had actually hired someone to do it for me. I hired someone who had one really strong recommendation from someone that I know and trust. She has a really massive following on social media, and the work this person did for her was just very successful. And so when I approached this man to write my landing page for me and to design it and do all that stuff, you know, he was like, yep, absolutely. He went and did it and he wrote a landing page for a completely different program. It's like he didn't understand any of the notes that I was giving him about what the hyperfocused membership was. And there were just a lot of problems with it. There were a lot of really basic mistakes that anyone who's done any studies in copywriting would know not to make. And when I tried to work with this individual and give him feedback and just say, hey, you know, like, here's my feedback on the. The copy that you wrote here and how it's laid out and this and that and the other thing. He didn't even understand the basic copywriting terms that I was using. This kicked off me feeling like a complete failure. You know, I coach on this stuff and I hired the wrong person. You know, I didn't vet him well enough. And also I felt like I'd kind of gotten scammed, which basically I had been because he was selling a service that he was not qualified to provide. So, of course, this is for the landing page for Hyper Focus. So of course it created all this icky energy around the idea of working on it myself. And I name this not to badmouth anyone. I'm not going to name who this is because I want you to know that you're going to hire the wrong people. There are a lot of unscrupulous individuals out there who are going to gladly take your money to help you do a thing that they have no, no ability to help you do. And that's just how the world works, unfortunately. And when this happens, you have a couple choices. You can absolutely label yourself as a failure and make it all doom and gloom and a foretelling that you're going to fail at this business. Or you can take it as a lesson. Now, obviously, I highly recommend taking it as a lesson, but if you do, you can't take it as a lesson right away. You have to let the emotions kind of process. You don't let those emotions process out of you. It's gonna create this, like negativity suck around this project and you're never gonna be able to get it done. There's also a trust element. If you hired someone to do something and they completely failed at it for you and you're out the money and you know they're no longer helping you and obviously you either have a choice of doing it yourself and you haven't done it before, or hiring someone else when, oh my God, what if I make the wrong decision again? You have to kind of rebuild trust in other people and more importantly, you have to rebuild trust with yourself to make good decisions. And here's the lesson that I think most ADHD business owners need to learn is that throwing money at a problem is not a for sure way to fix the problem. If you're enjoying this episode, would you do me a small favor? Will you please leave me a review? Don't worry, it's super easy to do and it only takes a few minutes. You can leave your comments in Apple Podcasts, castbox, Spotify, and Podchaser. Just go to weeniecast.com reviews and scroll till you find the chosen app. That's weeniecast.com forward slash reviews. So it's absolutely ironic that in relaunching the Hyper Focus membership, I ran into pretty much every ADHD obstacle in the book in getting the landing page up and running on the landing page, which if you want to go check it out, it's weeniecast.com hyperfocused and we also have that listed in the show notes. You'll notice that I actually call myself out on it. One of the big reasons I launched Hyperfocused the membership is because I wanted there to be an acceptance accessible low ticket offer where folks who maybe aren't ready to work with me or can't afford to work with me yet can still get coaching, can still get support. But I also created it because we all need a place for accountability. We all need a place to go and say, oh God, guys, this is what's going on for me. I think I'm really it up and have everyone pipe up and say, no, you're not just it up. I go through that too. It's normal. We also need a place to go and ask for good referrals. I like, literally, I would not have been able to launch this landing page if it weren't for my team. And my team is incredibly ADHD sensitive. They know not to nag me about stuff because they know nagging is actually going to be a surefire way to prevent me from doing it even longer. Because when you get nagged about something creates more more bad energy and beliefs around it. It makes you feel like you've already failed at it and it robs you of all the dopamine that you'll get from finishing it. This membership is designed to help you find people like that who understand how your brain works and how you can be best supported in all the ways that you need to be supported in your business. One of the things that I'm really excited to be rolling out in the early summer is to have guest trainers. One of the things that I'm vetting for when I pick these guest trainers is do they have ADHD friendly methodologies? I'm never going to bring someone into this community who's going to say, well, just do it. Just power through in a very neurotypical, condescending kind of way that doesn't belong here because that's not what's going to be useful to us. It's also a place where we can be reminded time and time again that we do not need to earn rest. How many times have you sat down at the description dinner table with your spouse, your partner, with your family and been asked, oh, how was your day? And you list off a gazillion things that you did in a way that, like, subconsciously you're trying to get their approval. Wow, you did a lot. You deserve to be sitting down and having dinner and you deserve to watch some TV later and you deserve to put on soft pants and just kick back on your couch. You earned this by working hard. The more I coach other ADHD business owners and the more I get in touch with myself and how I work and how I sabotage myself, the more I realize the biggest problem ADHD business owners have. Because we're ambitious, because we're hard workers, because we have this vision of this bigger life that we want to have, and because I carry a whole buttload of shame and beliefs that I'm lazy, that I don't work hard enough, that there's something deficient about me. The more I see this in myself and in my clients, the more I realize the biggest hurdle we need to overcome is learning that we do not need to earn rest. When we prioritize rest and recharging our brains and recuperating our bodies, when we prioritize that first, everything else becomes more successful. If you want to hear more about this, then go and Check out episode 81 where I talk all about my favorite topic, which is sleep. But genuinely, if you want to be successful at running your business, if you want to make buckets of money, if you want to help thousands of people out there in the world, first you need to help yourself. And if you'd like a community around you to support you and to remind you that you're normal. I mean, as normal as we get, and that your struggles are not unique, and to remind you that you deserve to actually enjoy this whole journey. And you want some coaching from me? Then I invite you to check out the Hyperfocus membership. It's designed for people like you and me. And I really wish I had it nine months ago. I'm gonna look that up. Hold on. Do turtles eat mosquitoes? Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel.