How to use your ADHD superpower!

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, I'm going to share with you how you can use ADHD to your advantage. Squirrel. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, and this is business strategy for Weenie ADHDpreneurs. Squirrel. I've done previous episodes where we're talking about the darker side of adhd, but I don't want to discount that. We actually have a fair amount of superpowers, superpowers that people who don't have ADHD do not have access to on the same level. And I want to spend this episode talking about those different superpowers and how we can utilize them better for our businesses. Now, this is not a complete list by any means. I know I'm going to do future episodes on other superpowers that folks with ADHD have, but this list is my top few. You can't talk about ADHD without talking about being massively creative. Now, one of the reasons that people with ADHD are creative is we have to be. We have to find creative ways to do things that we hate doing, because otherwise we won't do it. So, for instance, in seventh grade, I was forced to be in a class on geography. Now, I'm sorry, but looking at a map and memorizing names of countries and their capitals is not interesting to me. Not interesting at all. And the messed up thing here is they didn't really pair it with anything interesting, like history, where there's a story that explains why these borders were formed, why they named things in a certain way, what the people were doing. No, it was literally just like, here. Here is Egypt, and the capital is Cairo, I think, isn't it? I honestly, I don't remember. See, it just wasn't that interesting to me. And so, literally, I had to find different creative ways for me to learn this stupid information so that I wouldn't fail it. I'll never forget buying all these, like, multicolored neon index cards. And I would write out, you know, the name of the country on one side and the capital on the other side. And. And then I would have a map in front of me that was blank. Right. And. And so I would have the flashcards that I'd be running through. I'd then be looking at the map at the same time. I had one of those, like, small elliptical machines that, I don't know, you could buy, I think that one of my parents had bought on an infomercial at one point. It didn't have the arm things because that would have gotten in the way of this music stand that I was balancing my notebook with all the maps on. So there I am every evening doing my elliptical thing as a seventh grader, doing my index cards and quizzing myself on these stupid countries and their capitals. And I'm sorry, I'm not. I don't mean to diss on any countries. I don't think any country is stupid. But I think the activity of forcing a child who's not interested in this to learn the names and the capitals in this way without any other context is absolutely asinine. We come up with creative ways to do things that we hate. Now, the other side of creativity comes from our ability to get hyper focused on something that does interest us. And we're going to talk about hyper focus on its own next. But how this usually shows up is you get obsessed, absolutely obsessed with like a new craft or a new art project. Usually buy all of the things that are required for this hobby, and you do not stop until you have run through all of your interest in it. So I've done this with knitting. I've done this with creating historical costumes. I've done this with quilting, even though I'm a really terrible quilter. I did this with creating jewelry. There was a screen printing incident. I'm sure I'm forgetting other things. But as we get super, super focused on these different creative hobbies, we're building those skills. We're learning the ability to knit, we're learning the ability to sew, we're learning the ability to create jewelry. Now that knowledge doesn't go away just because we stop doing it. So once we have kind of collected all of these skills and all the equipment that's required to do this stuff, we then have the ability to blend it all together. There's also this thing that happens with folks with ADHD where we get an idea and we cannot let it go until we take action on it. If you have like an ADHD Parent or a family member. I bet you can remember a time where they got absolutely obsessed trying to figure out the recipe for something. My dad's a carpenter, you know, so, I mean, sometimes he would get in his mind that he wanted to build something very specific, and he just would drop everything else until he was able to do that thing. My favorite example of how this shows up in my family is, is when my mom actually wrote a whole novel. My mom, who always discredits herself for being creative, she, like, doesn't think she's creative at all. She's one of the most creative people I've ever met in my life. But she just doesn't have time, really, to give herself the space to dive into that creativity. At one point, when I was growing up, she decided to take a writing class, and she took this writing class, and it really pushed her to come up with a story and write it out and work on it and share it with this group and work on it more. And I remember waking up, I think I was in high school at the time, and she would have been up for hours working on a couple chapters of her book. It was just something that she plugged away at every single morning. Now, the concerning thing about this book is that it was a murder mystery, but from the perspective of the murderer. And the murderer had my mom's car, and the murderer killed someone for something that would have pissed off my mom. My mom was so into this that she literally signed up to go on a ride along with our local police station. So Cape Cod, they have a fair amount of money and a lot of resources for their police departments. A funny side note about Cape Cod, if you live in Harwich, where my parents are from, if you're older and you don't have family in the area and you're worried that one morning you won't be able to wake up or something will happen. You. You can actually put yourself on a list with the local police department, and they call around every single morning, and if you don't answer the phone, they actually send a police officer to check on you. What I'm about to describe is something that this community is able to do just because they have the resources to do it. They actually had a program where older folks could actually go to the police department and learn all the police procedures, including firing a gun. So my mom, for character research or for the research for her book, signed up for this program so that she could see the inner workings of our local police department, so that she could see what it was actually like to fire a gun because she needed to write about it for her book because her main character kills someone. She also, I think, asked a few questions to kind of see how her main character could have gotten away with murder. So just if you're listening to this and you know, Shannon, maybe watch your back, like, don't piss her off. She's done her homework. She'll probably get caught because she did write this in a book, but who knows? She has ADHD and she's really fucking creative. She can probably come up with other ways to get away with murder. And hi Mom, I know you're listening and I hope you enjoy this episode. Join the Weenacast hyperfocus 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 as an ADHD person who is starting a business, here's the really cool thing that happens. We have developed so many different skills throughout our lifetimes that we can relate to whatever it is that we're doing. I'll use myself as an example. I used to be really into knitting. So into knitting, in fact, that I worked at a yarn shop. And so into knitting that I became such a good knitter that I started teaching knitting. Now, one of the things that I credit for making me really good at what I do today is learning how to teach knitting. Because here's what happens. You're the teacher. You're teaching a group of eight to 10 people how to use two sticks and a piece of string to make fabric, okay? And everyone learns differently. So some people need to be shown, some people need to be explained to. Other people need metaphors. Other people literally need you to put your hands over their hands and guide them and show them. Me learning how to explain how to make fabric out of two sticks and a piece of string was integral to me being able to run group programs today. Even me noticing that that's where that came from is kind of an ADHD creative thing. Oftentimes, folks with ADHD jump jobs because they kind of get bored after a while. And what I always relate this to is, like, each job that an ADHD person is drawn to has a skill that they are meant to learn. And it's almost like they're living their life, going, going around collecting ingredients for a cake, but as they're collecting the ingredients, they actually don't know what kind of cake they're baking. So they're collecting one ingredient, they're collecting another and another and another and another. And you can collect flour all you want, but that doesn't tell you you're baking a cake. You can make a lot of stuff with flour. It's not until you also get chocolate and eggs and maybe some cinnamon and a bunch of other things till you realize, oh, this is the kind of cake that I can make. It's the same for how we build our careers, right? We go around, we collect all these skills, and after a decade or so, we kind of look at all these skills that we've collected and think, well, crap, how do I make these fit together? And this is where the ADHD creativity really benefits us, because we can look at, oh, wow, I have all this background in sales and marketing, and I'm a trained coach, and I know how to train people on stuff in a bunch of different ways. And I have adhd. Cool. I'm just going to combine all those together and become an ADHD business coach who trains people on how to start their businesses. Now, of course, I'm talking about myself, but for you, as someone with adhd, I guarantee you have done this in some way, shape or form. I guarantee that whatever job you have right now, if you're working for someone else, you are using some rando skill that you gained, you know, at some point in your early life. We don't always give ourselves credit for how creative we are. Just like my mom. She doesn't give herself credit for how creative she is. But creativity is not always creating a work of art. Creativity is not painting. It's not sculpting. It's not learning how to do an accurate Renaissance gown for a ball. However, they are different flavors of creativity. Creativity shows up in a million different ways throughout our day. And one of the best superpowers the ADHDpreneur can use is to tap into it purposely, consciously, every single day to make their work more impactful. I have a former client who is a lawyer, and they have adhd. And let me tell you, the fact that they have ADHD allows for them to think of things, different scenarios, how things could go terribly, terribly wrong. And also Incredibly, incredibly right. And allows for them to see how all of that is connected. I actually think the fact that this person has ADHD makes them better at their job. So creativity is one of the best superpowers of having adhd. Now, the next superpower that I want to talk about is hyperfocus. And hyper focus is that magical thing that happens when you're really interested in something. So I'm going to share something, and I know you, as an ADHDpreneur, are going to totally relate in your own way. There was a period of my teenage life where I was the absolute expert on the French Revolution. I knew everyone that was a major player in the French Revolution. I knew most of the people who were involved in executions. I understood the geopolitical nuances of the royal family being taken out of power. I knew everything about Marie Antoinette, down to what her wardrobe was like and what her diet was like. By the way, she never said, let them eat cake. That was something that the revolutionaries actually popularized to make her look like a terrible person. I knew everything that had to do with Versailles. When I went to Versailles for the very first time, it was the penultimate, coolest thing I had ever done because I had read about it so much. By the way, did you know that hallways didn't exist then? They just had room after room after room after room. So if you wanted to go from one end of the palace to the other end of the palace, there was a chance you would just have to walk through the king's bedroom, which. I'm sorry, how weird is that? Could you imagine if you were at the White House visiting President Joe Biden, and you wanted to go from one end of the White House to the other end of the White House, where you'd have to just walk through his bedroom? Like, I'm sorry, they need privacy. They do a lot of work. Maybe the kings didn't back then. Like, God, the gross things that people would have to do if they were in the king or queen's entourage. Like, the king and the queen didn't do anything for themselves. Anything. And I'm not going to expand on that because I know my mom is listening and she doesn't like it when I talk about those things because she thinks it's not classy. But I'm going to leave it to your imagination. So this is the gift of hyperfocus when we're interested in something. Like, if my high school had figured out a way to make everything they taught me related to the French Revolution, I would have been a Straight A student. But they didn't, they really up there, they tried to teach me other things that I wasn't interested in. And how boring is that for an ADHD person? This is one of the reasons I think we have so many entrepreneurs who have adhd because we get into a job or maybe interested in like 30% of it, but the rest is just absolutely miserable. And for someone with adhd, like, we can get hyper focused on the part that we are excited about, about that we are interested in, but the parts that we're not interested in are a real struggle for us to stay focused on. I think we've all experienced that phenomenon where you're reading a textbook or an instruction manual or just something that has to do with something you're not interested in. You read the whole page and you don't absorb one single word of it and you read the whole page again and again. You cannot even comprehend what was just said because you didn't absorb it. So this is both a superpower and a massive challenge to people with ADHD. But if you're an ADHDpreneur who has created a business around something that you are incredibly interested in, you're in the right place. Because here's the cool thing about our interests. Like, they may wane a bit. Like, I'm no longer an avid knitter, but I'm still interested in knitting. I still go into any yarn shop that I pass by, which is something that I have in common with Monica Lewinsky. Apparently she's an avid knitter too, and she loves going to yarn shops wherever she goes. Maybe I'll bump into her at one. So the other thing about having hyper focus and hyper focus on things that we're incredibly interested in is because we are so interested in them and we can spend so much time going deep on them, we learn incredibly quickly. Every person with ADHD who's been interested in something on that hyper focused level has had the experience of starting it, becoming nearly an expert at it, and having people around them who don't have ADHD who took a long time to learn this thing, be like, how did you learn that that quickly to get really like knitting nerdy on you? For me, this is cabling. So have you ever seen a cable sweater? So the cabling. So it's actually, you have to use a different tool than your knitting needles to create those cables because you have to have the stitches kind of jump over each other. I remember going in like the pattern that I was using for a sweater, said I needed a Cable knitting attachment thing. And so I go to the yarn shop where I worked, and I didn't know how to cable, obviously. So I asked my friend Linda, who was running the shop that day, you know, where are the cabling needles? And she showed me and I was like, cool, can you show me how to use them? And she's looking at me like, are you nuts? I'm running the shop right now. I have a job to do. I can't sit down and teach you something that will take like 45 minutes to 2 hours for you to learn. And she showed me once, and I had it. I had it. It was done. Like, I could have been an expert. I could have shown other people. And she looked at me like, how did you pick that up that fast? Because I'm interested in it, because I needed to learn it so that I could get to my goal so that I could finish the sweater. Every person with ADHD has some kind of experience along those lines where something that is really complex and hard for other people to learn because we have that interest and because we can be so hyper focused on it, we just get it like that. So if we're to talk about how creativity and hyper focus, how they meld together to create another superpower, it's really how we're able to connect completely different things to create a new thing. There was this TikTok that I saw recently. It was all about how it's really hard for millennials to be managed by non millennials, because by the time a millennial asks their manager for support, they have already tried a bunch of different things. And because they've tried a bunch of different things, and because they've thought through all these different scenarios and processes that are possible to fix the problem, by the time they get to their manager and ask for help with a solution, what they're asking about, the manager has no idea because it's outside of their scope of expertise. Squirrel.

Here's where that that's a problem, though. What you end up with is a worker who never asks for help 80% of the time. But the 20% of the time that they do ask for help, their question is incredibly nuanced and difficult to solve. Case in point, I'm working on my company's website, right? I am not a web designer. I don't really know HTML or css. I'm a business analyst. But I'm also a millennial. And like, I understand coding somewhat. So when I go to people who can theoretically try to help me with this problem, that I am having the question I'm coming to them with is, not, hey, can you help me with this thing. What I come to them with is, is, hey, I'm having a problem with this thing. Here are the three solutions I tried. Here's how I reason through it. These are the roadblocks that I came up across. Here's how I tried to get over those roadblocks. Here is where that failed squirrel.

Now, I heard this, and yes, this is a millennial thing, but I actually think it's more of an ADHD thing and a neurodiverse thing. Because when we had a problem with something that we're interested in, we try a bunch of different things. It's to the point where maybe something is wrong with the kitchen faucet. Like, you're looking on YouTube and you're trying to figure it out, and like, it's showing you this tool and you're like, well, I don't have that tool. I wouldn't even know to buy that tool before in this moment. But I do have, like, three different little tools that I used when I was making jewelry all those years ago that I've never gotten rid of. Cause I'm worried. I was worried that I would get re interested in making jewelry again. And I bet I can jigger all those things together to do the same thing that this one tool is doing. There's this like, oh, cool. Well, I have this other area of expertise that I can apply here to achieve the same result. This is also why people with ADHD are brilliant business owners, you know, because they're usually able to take a service or a product that is already good on its own and figure out what other things they can add to it or cross it with to amplify the impact. The example. I'll use my own business for this. You know, I do business strategy and coaching, but I also do money mindset coaching, because one of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs run into is some limiting beliefs around money, and you can't break past them with sheer will. You actually have to do the emotional work and understand yourself on a deeper level when it comes to money to move past them. This gives me an advantage in the business strategy world because there aren't a lot of business strategists that also do that. You know, I'm just going to talk about both my parents this episode. So my dad has always been involved in local politics. He's either been a city councilman, a mayor, a selectman, depending on where we lived. He's helped other people get elected. One of the reasons, though, that he was so effective at being a city council person, a mayor, or a select person is he loves history. He loves learning how decisions were made and what the laws were at the time that restricted things, that they had to be like a decision had to be made in a certain way and who was involved and why they were involved and what their motivations were. To the point that, like, someone would want to install new plumbing or new sewer system in a neighborhood. And my dad would come to the meeting knowing the history of every single thing that happened in 1973 when the last sewer system was put in. Like, this man finds that interesting, which, I mean, to his credit, someone out there has to find this interesting. And if he's going to be the person, great, it doesn't have to be me and it doesn't have to be you. But he's able to combine his interest in that along with his interest in fixing the problem. Now, with his expertise as a carpenter and as a builder, he's able to synthesize all these things into an elegant solution and propose that. And because he understands everything at this level, at this really deep level, he's usually really effective in getting other people on board, unless they're complete asshats, in which case they're not listening to anyone. So as you're listening to this episode and you're thinking about all the ways in which you're creative, and you're thinking about all the interests that you've had throughout your life that you've gotten hyper focused on and learned everything about it. And as you're looking at the different ways in which your business can have a greater impact in the world, I want you to acknowledge yourself that those things are possible to the level that they are. Because you have adhd, you are able to be that creative. Because you have adhd, you are able to learn things at that deep level. Because you have adhd, you are able to synthesize all these random things that you've learned throughout your life into the thing you're doing now. Because you have adhd, and because you've been able to synthesize all these things together, you offer something that no one else can offer. Because no one else has your flavor of creativity, no one else has your flavor of interests. And that's really special. That's something that you get to be really proud of. That's something that you can market and monetize to not only grow your business and grow your income, but grow the impact that you you have on other people in their lives. And I would go so far to say that it is so important for you to do that because people need the solution that you have to offer, whatever it is. And if you're holding yourself back because you're worried that's not good enough, or you know you just don't have the time to do it now, or any other fear about not being ready, you're actually just being a selfish ass, right? You're keeping that solution all to yourself and you're not sharing with anyone. How rude. There are people out there who need you. Get out of your own way and just start doing it. Oh my God, I'm so excited. I'm going to share something about my mom Mom, Mom. 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.