How to build discipline when you're an ADHD entrepreneur

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, we're going to talk about how to build discipline with ADHD. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. A question I get all the time, and it's actually one of the top searches on Google, is how do you become disciplined when you have adhd? Before we get into how we develop discipline as someone with adhd, we have to let go of the version of discipline that we have in our minds, that we see in movies, that we see on social media, that we hear talked about in books. We have to let go of this idea that we're going to become rocky, that we're gonna have the perfect diet, that we're gonna be running through Philadelphia up and down the art museum steps, and that we're gonna do this every single day without fail. So many of us have had this vision of who we're gonna become when we finally find the right routine, when we finally, quote, unquote, fix ourselves. And the only thing having that vision does is set us up to feel like a massive failure. Because for someone with adhd, discipline looks completely different. For folks with adhd, discipline is often goal centered. It's done best in sprints, it evolves over time, and it's reliant on momentum and not motivation. Now, there are a bunch of ways where we set ourselves up for failure when we're trying to become disciplined about something. And let's just use working out as an example because it applies very similarly to your business. I want you to imagine you have all this motivation, you've decided you want to get in shape, and so you come up with this whole plan and you decide that you're going to start working out, but you wait for the motivation to hit. You're like, you know, oh, yeah, like I said, I was going to go work out today, but I'm just not feeling motivated for it. So I'm gonna do it tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm gonna start getting in shape, right? And then tomorrow rolls around, you're like, well, I didn't do it yesterday and I still don't feel like it today. I'm still kind of tired. I didn't really sleep well, and I have a lot to do, so here's what I'll do. Tomorrow's Wednesday. That's not a good day to start things on. So I'll wait until next Monday. Because we like starting stuff at the beginning of the week. Right? It just makes sense that way. Then the next week rolls around, and Monday comes, and you had scheduled that workout, and you do go to the gym and you do a couple things, but you're tired, and this is hard because you're out of shape, and you made this really complicated workout that you're supposed to follow. And then Tuesday comes and you're sore, and you're like, yeah. And before you know it, you're three months past this goal, and you're not in shape. I mean, you have a shape, but it's not the shape you want your body to be in. We're all in some kind of shape. It might not be the shape we desired. And you end up feeling like a complete failure because you see everyone else being disciplined about their workouts and going to the gym every single day and doing the workout they assign themselves, even on days where they felt really sore and tired. And you wonder what is wrong with you that you can't manage to do this. Like, there must be something wrong with you, because other people can do it just fine. Why can't you? And the thing is, is that that's the way neurotypical people do it. Neurotypical people who have consistent dopamine in their systems, they can hold that discipline. They can make the plan and stick to the plan and follow through on the plan every single day or, you know, however many days they committed to doing it in a week, they can rely on that first little batch of motivation to really get them going. For someone with adhd, we have to build momentum, and building momentum sucks. Like, let's not beat around the bush here. It is so annoying. It's not sexy. It's not impressive. Like, literally for someone to build discipline in going to the gym religiously and build that routine around it. If you have adhd, the first couple weeks will look like this. Day one, you drive to the gym, you sit in your car, and you play on your phone. Then you drive home. Day two, you drive to the gym, you go inside, and you get a smoothie at the smoothie bar, and then you drive home. Day three, you drive to the gym, you go inside, you get on the treadmill, and you walk for 10 minutes. Then you get off the treadmill, and you get back in your car and you drive home. Day four. You drive to the gym, you go inside, you get on the treadmill, and lightly jog for five minutes and then walk for 15 minutes, and then you go home. For someone with ADHD, we have to really do a slow build to build momentum. The goal here is to go to the gym every day. That is the win. If you went to the gym, you won the game. When we set ourselves up for failure, it looks like creating all these things that we then have to go and do at the gym. I used to work in fitness, okay? So I know how to make a really complicated fitness plan for myself. And let me tell you, when I come up with four different routines that I have to do for the four different parts of my body that I want to work, and I've decided I want to do three sets with this many reps for each one, and I don't complete everything, I feel like garbage. Even though I got a really good workout out of it because I didn't stick to the plan. That's not helpful when you're trying to build momentum. Because once we start associating failure with something or a place like the gym, what do we do? We get into the avoid cycle, right? Because we don't want to feel like a failure. We feel like a failure in a lot of areas of our lives because we don't do things the way that society says that we should be able to do them. And that doesn't really help us meet our goals. Part of what helps you build more discipline in the areas that matter to you is setting low expectations for what winning looks like. Like, what is the. The barrier to entry for you to be able to check that thing off of your list of I did this today. That is what builds discipline. That is what builds momentum. That is what creates a routine. A month into that workout routine where you're driving to the gym and giving yourself credit for just being there a month in, you're going to be doing weights. You're going to be, like, doing crunches in the stretching area. You know, you're going to have made friends who recognize you and say hi to you, who will miss you if you don't show up at that certain time because they've gotten used to seeing you around that time, you're going to start seeing progress. The five minutes that you were able to run or jog on the treadmill, what Was it that fourth day? That's going to be up to 20 minutes. You're going to be able to jog for 20 minutes. And that's going to feel really good because it's going to give you hope that if you could progress from five minutes to 20 minutes, what's going to happen in another month, and what's going to happen in another month after that? And probably after a month, you're already starting to see some changes in shape to your body. There's more tone, more definition. Maybe you lost a couple pounds. If you're trying to build a discipline as a person with adhd, you need to think about what is going to be that low barrier to the entry that will allow for you to build that early momentum. It gets to be small and insignificant and not impressive. Now, another thing that really helps folks with ADHD is when you're trying to build discipline around something is you have to tie it to a goal. If you're trying to wake up at 5 o' clock every morning and meditate and drink green juice just for the sake of being able to say that you wake up at 5 o' clock in the morning and meditate and drink green juice, it's never going to happen. That's not enough of a goal. If it's a contest so that you can someday meet. Oh my God, this would be so funny because for a while the Rock, Dwayne Johnson, he did. What was it like, the Rock Alarm, like, he actually developed an app because every single morning on Instagram stories, he would do a little story about getting up and going to the gym and people started relying on it and it became people's motivation for getting up. Like, imagine if he made a whole contest for people to do the same thing and tag him on social media. Oh my God, I should be his social media account manager. Oh, this could, like, be a game changer for him. This could make him so much more famous, obviously. But imagine like he could have a whole army of people who get up at 5am and meditate and do green juice and then go work out. Because there's a goal of you could win this contest of getting to work out with him one day and maybe he buys you green juice for a year. Right? There has to be a goal tied to it, is what I'm saying. And Dwayne, if you're listening, hi. I hope you're having a great day. Hope you had a good workout this morning. I do this for myself and my business all the time. So if you follow me on TikTok, you'll notice that I've been posting every single day for 94 days as of the day that I'm recording this. My goal is to hit a hundred days. Now I'm already thinking ahead. I'm already thinking, okay, I want to make this a 200 day goal because in a hundred days, I've grown my account from around 560 followers to just over 1100. So my main goal was to be able to break a thousand and be able to have a link in bio and be able to go live on TikTok. Now my goal is to have, like, a good following that consistently comes to my lives. And I would really love for there to be an average of a hundred people watching my lives every single time. Now, that's not a massive goal. There are people out there who have thousands of people watching their lives all the time. I. I'm being realistic with myself because I want to be able to set myself up to win. I want to set a realistic goal that in another hundred days, or 106 days, if I'm being precise, I'll be able to reach just like I did with this first hundred days. Which brings me into my next point, which brings me to my next point, is that we thrive in short sprint Prince. We're never gonna do the same thing over and over again every single day for the rest of our lives. Okay, let's just let go of that belief right now. You're not rocky. It's not gonna happen. But if you assign yourself to do one thing every single day for a hundred days, you're gonna build momentum. And here's the thing about momentum, is it is this magical force, you know, that that game that, that people play at the end of a party. And it's not a game that anyone consciously starts. It's where, like, one of those sad balloons has kind of slightly deflated and lost its. Its lift, right? And it's not necessarily just sitting on the floor. Like it still has some helium, that's doing some work, but it's not bouncing on the ceiling. Like it's on the ground kind of floating off and on. One person will just tap it, and it goes into the air and it has like a really slow arc. And then someone else will tap it and then it'll float off in another direction. Another person will, like, kick it with their foot. And all of a sudden, like, this whole group of people are kind of drunk, are playing this game of don't let the balloon fall on the floor. And as it continues, like, no one has ever, like, made up rules for this consciously. No one's ever said, we're not allowed to let it touch the floor. But the balloon cannot touch the floor. The floor is lava. And as it continues as like it hasn't fallen on the floor, more and more and more the anxiety in the room goes up. Because what if you're the person who lets the balloon touch the floor? You know, you're kicked out of the group, you're no longer friends with anyone there. You know, you're banished. It's the same thing with everything that we commit to doing every single day. If you want to get consistent on social media, give yourself the goal of posting every day for a hundred days. It works. If you want to get in better shape, give yourself the goal of eating seven servings of vegetables and fruit every single day for a hundred days. It works. You know, if you have a workout goal, do the same thing. A hundred days. But we have to set the barrier to success. But here's the deal. We have to give ourselves like the small wins. You can do the bare minimum and still get credit for doing that thing that day. So I've been showing up on TikTok every single day for a hundred days and there are some days where it's like 10pm I'm really tired, I want to go to sleep. Like I don't look good. I'm not, I'm not putting my face on social media. And so I give myself permission in those moments to go and find like a random video that I took of the beach and use that as the background video and then write a caption that's like over the video so you kind of have to read it and put some background music on it. It takes five minutes. But you know what, I still succeeded in posting to TikTok that day. It's still a win. Even though I didn't come up with like a whole scripted three minute thing of, you know, empathetic marketing that really shows people how I can help them. As a business coach, give yourself the easy wins. You're making this thing that you're trying to be disciplined around goal centered. You're giving yourself shorts, sprints so that you build up that momentum because you don't want to drop the balloon. Now the other element here is you get to give yourself permission to let it evolve over time. If you have an ADHD brain, like you're going to get bored. It doesn't matter how much momentum you've built up around something. If you are no longer getting any pizzazz from it, if there's no more juice than that goose, then you're gonna get bored and you're not gonna let yourself do it. You're literally. Your executive dysfunction will kick in because you won't wanna do it anymore. Cause you're over it and you'll stop doing it. You have to give yourself permission to change what you're doing from time to time. And it doesn't mean that you're being bad with discipline. It just means you're setting yourself up for success. So maybe let's go back to the workout example because it's such a great example. You know, say you're really into like a weightlifting kick and for 100 days you're going in and like, you know, there's, you're doing like an ab rotation. So on. On A days you're going and doing upper body, on B days you're doing lower body. Screw doing ab work. No one likes doing that. So you're just doing a B for 100 days. You're weightlifting now. You're gonna get bored of that. You're gonna get tired. It's just not gonna be letting you up anymore. So for the next hundred days you're going to go and do some form of cardio. So you might do like an A day where you're running on the treadmill, a B day where you're riding on the bike, and then a C day that you're going to drop pretty fast on the rowing machine because that's hard. And then of course you're going to get bored with that and you're going to move on. And full permission for you to evolve this and change it, but still keep it goal centered. You know, as I was growing my following on LinkedIn, there were sprints where I was posting every single day. And then there were sprints where I was commenting for an hour and a half every single day on other people's stuff. I was probably still posting, but not every single day. Just because you don't stick to the original routine that you set for yourself doesn't mean you failed. It just means that you made it interesting for yourself so that you could stick with it. The thing that is going to take you out from building any kind of momentum, any routine that's going to help you reach your goals. Oh, 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 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 the thing that is going to take you out from building any kind of momentum, any routine that's going to help you reach your goals, is when you start comparing yourself and what your journey looks like to other people. Comparing is the death of happiness. It's the death of progress. It will make you feel like you've failed even when you're doing so well, even when you're absolutely killing it. Let the people like Dwayne Johnson wake up at 5am and do whatever they do in their 5am club. I'm not a part of it. Let them share on Instagram stories, okay? Because just because they're doing it their way doesn't mean that your way is any less significant, any less valid. You get to do your version that works for you. What's the thing that Taylor Swift is doing? She's rerecording everything as Taylor's version. This gets to be enter your name here version and find fun ways that will keep you motivated. My big barrier to entry when I think about going and working out at the gym is that like, I used to work with personal trainers who did all the thinking for me. And because I used to work out with personal trainers, I don't like doing wimpy workouts because I feel like I'm better than that. And so I was trying to figure out, and I'm on Cape Cod right now and I'm very picky about personal trainers. And I'm not going to be here forever, so I don't really want to spend time and effort investigating who's the best personal trainer to work with. So I was trying to find workout plans that I could buy online and there's this very sexy man who chops wood. His name is Thorin.

They've been making these crazy looking axes since the 70s and the idea is that these teeth will help widen the cheeks on the axe with these springs as it makes contact. But don't go buy one. I'm gonna review it, give it a rating 1 through 10 and see if it's worth it. Now, you might be asking yourself, thor, why are you putting on glasses? You almost never put on People pe. Even if they are made of steel, the extra moving pieces make me very nervous. I don't know if you heard that was kind of jarring.

Squirrel. Squirrel. I love his videos. Like, he, he just takes the thirst trap and runs with it and he tests out different axes and he gives you reviews on the axes. So you actually get to like, find a reason to explain to people why you're watching this man chopping wood. Right. Because you're interested in the efficacy of these different axe types, obviously. You're also really interested in how different types of wood split because obviously when the zombie apocalypse hits, you're going to need to know which kinds of trees to go and chop down that are going to be easier to burn for firewood and to like, you know, chop into logs. Anyway, he's apparently like a really legit personal trainer and he's put together this whole app. And I'll be honest, the app has videos of him showing how to do all the exercises. And I'm sorry, I'm. I'm a red blooded woman. Sure. Like, that's great motivation. Yeah, Like, I'll sign up for your app, sir. You tell me how to do a crunch, please. The point being, before my producer turns bright red and his face explodes out of embarrassment for me that I'm sharing this is that you get to make things interesting for yourself in ways that work for you. You get to motivate yourself in whatever way works for you. For me, it's looking at this very nice looking man and having him explain what I need to do for my workout. That's fine. You get to make it fun for yourself. You get to find different ways to motivate yourself. If maybe you have a goal of doing something every day for 50 days and at the end you give yourself a mani pedi, you know, maybe you're gonna take you and your spouse out wine tasting, maybe you're gonna give yourself like a day off from the kids. Whatever's going to motivate you and reward you at the end of this cycle, set that in motion. Like, create that right now. Because we don't have to be disciplined just for the sake of being disciplined. We get to be disciplined and make it fun for ourselves. We get to make it interesting, we get to make it funny, we get to be really involved in it. And actually when we make it more fun, when we tie more rewards to it, we're far more likely to succeed. 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. And if you want to be like me and follow Thorin because you're really interested in different axes and wood types, then we're including his TikTok account link in the show notes. Go check them out. I mean, go and check out the axe cutting obviously. 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 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 weeniecast 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 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.