Let's USE distraction to grow a business! Even with ADHD!

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. In this episode, we're going to explore how ADHD entrepreneurs can turn distraction into their greatest asset. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Queenie Cast. Squirrels. The ironic thing about the topic today is that we have had to deal with multiple distractions before we started recording, which makes it so much fun to do a whole episode on how to deal with distractions because, you know, my producer and I are immediately going to start getting self conscious. Distraction is one of those symptoms of ADHD that is most perceived by the outside world. As people with adhd, we don't really perceive when we're being distracted. Our attention is just kind of refocused on this thing and then refocused again on this other thing and then refocused again on another thing. It really comes up as a problem for us when we have a task that we need to do. And usually my clients who are starting businesses, they're breaking away from working a corporate job where there's a lot of structure. Distraction is one of those things that becomes a lot worse as a solopreneur. And it's also complicated because we actually love distractions. We love when we can find a creative way to avoid doing something that we think is boring or that we don't want to do. The only time I take joy in cleaning my space is when it helps me avoid doing something that I really, really don't want to do in my business, like taxes. And if you're my accountant and you're listening, I know I owe you some stuff and some paperwork. I apologize. The other thing about distractions for an ADHD is sometimes the distraction is actually a massive spark of creativity. It's a new idea that we have to jump into and play with for a little bit or else we're going to lose it. So, you know, as we talk through distractions, I'm not saying that there's a way for you to never be distracted again. In fact, I'm not even saying that you avoiding all distractions is good for you. I think being distracted is one of the major gifts of being an ADHD person. A good distraction can be the thing that recharges us Enough that we can throw ourselves fully into whatever task we need to do. A good distraction can be the thing that inspires a brand new idea for our business, a new offer, a way to help our clients that we hadn't thought of before. And quite honestly, being distracted is actually how we are productive. You know, there are all those reels and tiktoks of the ADHD person who, you know, sees a shoe and they're like, oh, that shoe's out of place. Let me take it to the bedroom. They get to the bedroom, they're like, oh, this towels on the floor. I should put this back in the bathroom. Then they get to the bathroom and the toothpaste has been left open and it's kind of squirted on the sink. And they're like, oh, I should clean that up. And then while they're at the sink, they're like, oh my gosh, I forgot to take my antidepressant today. I have to take my medication. They open the thing like, wow, there's a lot of old antibiotics here. I should be disposing of them and so on and so forth. We don't do things in a linear way. We don't do things in a container. We do things randomly in, in a way that makes sense to us. But the point is, is that things generally do get done. The things that need to happen get done just kind of in a weird order. So if you're someone who really struggles with distraction, I'm going to give you some tactics, some real simple, doable tactics that you can use to manage distractions better. And I invite you to stop vilifying distractions. They're not evil, they're not bad, they just are. And when you learn to use them in a way that works for you, life gets a lot easier. I've broken down distractions into four categories. The first one is other people. The second one is dependence. The third is your space, and the fourth is internal. You. I'm going to go through them. I'm going to be talking about the different things that can happen and what's really helpful, especially for those of you who are in the beginning stages of starting your business or who have just taken your business full time, especially when we're talking about your space and managing other people. One of the hardest things when I started my business and I went full time was that I didn't have anything on my calendar. I didn't have an office that I had to go to from, you know, 7:00am to 3:00pm I worked really early Hours. When I lived in San Francisco, where my manager would notice if I wasn't there, I just kind of had quote unquote, free time. And it wasn't actually free time, it was work time. But because it didn't have. It didn't have this structure that I was used to, I would get invitations from friends to go to lunch, and another friend might ask, hey, I'm gonna go work out. You wanna come work out with me? There's a yoga class we could go to. You know, family would ask me for favors knowing that I didn't have anything planned. And I would say yes because I'm an extrovert and I like spending time with my friends and I like doing favors for my family. And what I realized I was actually doing to myself is I was causing myself a great deal of anxiety because as I was out to lunch with my friend and as I was going to yoga with another friend, and as I was helping my family member with something around their house, I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn't doing the work. I wasn't doing the foundational work to get my business up and running full time. And I found myself actually resenting my loved ones because how dare they ask me to do this stuff. They know that, like, I have a job. But I realized that they actually didn't know that I had a job at. As far as they could see, I just quit my job and I was unemployed, you know, and sure, they thought I was, like, starting a coaching business, but who knows what that means as a new business owner, as someone who has to really buckle down and get those beginning clients, Figure out your marketing, figure out how to do your sales funnel, figure out a whole bunch of other stuff. From the outside, it looks like you're not doing anything. It looks like you're just hanging out the playing on your computer all day. And so the people around you are going to see that and think, oh, cool, they're free. Let's invite them to do fun stuff. And it's hard to say no because we all love fun stuff. I'm a big fan of fun stuff personally, and I bet you are too. And it's hard to say no to something when you don't have an appointment scheduled, when you don't have a client call or a sales call or something on your calendar. But something that you're going to have to get really good at is saying, no, I can't do that. I'm working on my business right now. No, my workday starts at 9am and ends at 4pm I'd love to hang out with you. Can we go to a yoga class this evening? You know, when your family asks you for a favor? Absolutely. I'd love to help you. Can I come over this weekend and help you? Today I'm actually working. You have to be the one who trains everyone around you that you are working on your business. They won't be able to see it otherwise because, you know, for them, you working looks like you going out of the house and going to the office. Okay. It doesn't look like you sitting on your couch in your pajama pants with a blouse on with your computer in your lap. Honestly, that just looks like you've kind of lost it connected to this. You know, your phone notifications, you are in charge of how many notifications you get. You're in charge of what text messages can come through from who when you get notified of them, what social media notifications you get throughout the day. As someone who's easily distracted, you have to set the boundaries with your technology. If you don't, then you're just gonna have this constant, like, ping. You know that someone posted a new Instagram ping, someone did a new TikTok, someone texted you, oh, it's your mom. Oh, she wants to ask if you want to help her with something. It's just. It's never ending. There are so many settings on different phone types for you to manage this. I'm not even gonna walk you through it. You can figure this out, and I've already kind of touched upon this, but you do need to schedule time with your loved ones. You know, if they think that you have all this free time all of a sudden and you're not wanting to spend time with them during that time, they're gonna start feeling really rejected. And especially if you have adhd, you probably have a lot of friends with ADHD and you probably have family members with adhd, which means you have a whole group of people that have rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria. So you saying no, that you would rather sit on your computer doing what they perceive as nothing rather than hang out with them is going to be really bruising to their ego and their feelings. So you do need to prioritize scheduling time to spend with them. This will also help you decompress on a regular basis, because as a new business owner, you're going to feel this immense pressure to spend every waking moment working on your business. Until you're making enough money that you have your normal salary back, you cannot Spend every waking moment doing that, you're going to burn yourself out. So schedule off time with your loved ones. You know, if you live with your partner and you both work from home or you both have a reason to be home, maybe your partner is a full time parent. You need to design with them that sometimes during your workday, you're going to be on YouTube watching puppies learn how to do the stairs for the first time. You're going to be on Facebook, scrolling, kind of, you know, stalking friends from high school. You're going to be doing things on your computer that looks like you are slacking off. But you and I both know in those moments, you're not slacking off. What you're doing is you're actually giving yourself a little dopamine boost so that you'll have enough dopamine to get to the next task. And we need to find ways to communicate to our partners that if they come up behind us and make a comment that can come across as a judgment like, oh, I thought you were working today, looks like you're having fun. It can completely take the wind out of your sails. And you get to explain to them that things like that are actually productivity boosters for us. So that is how we are dealing with other adults in the world. Now, technically, adults and dependents are other people, but like, dependents have different requirements because, you know, you can't have the same expectations for a four year old to respect your time and your boundaries as you can your partner. And if you have a 4 year old who knows how to, like, respect boundaries, then good on you. This is not, I'm not speaking to you. So when I talk about dependence, I'm talking about children and pets. Any kind of living being that depends on you that's going to need care throughout the day. Now, the key here is you have to set them up for success first. All right, I don't have children, so I'm going to use my dog as an example here. If I'm expecting to get a good four hours of work done in a morning or in an afternoon, I need to make sure that she's set up for success, which means I have to get her outside and exercised. I have to go and run her, I have to take her on a long walk because if I don't, she's gonna have this neurotic energy that just comes up and she's gonna constantly want to play with me while I'm trying to get work done. And I love my dog. She's the cutest thing in the world and I love playing with her, but I have to pay the bills. I have to be able to afford all the fancy treats that I, I buy her. I have to keep her in a very good lifestyle. I can't do that if she is distracting me from my work. Now I, you know, I told you I'm not a parent. You know. Your kids may need similar care to Luna. They may just need exercise. They may need to like get some energy out so that they can focus on other things while you're getting work done. Depending on their age, you may also need to outsource the child care. I know this can be expensive. Often for my clients who are parents, there's a stage in their business where the amount of money that they're bringing in is only covering their childcare costs. That's a really difficult thing to deal with emotionally. As someone who is ambitious and also cares about your kids but wants to find that balance. It's one of the reasons why it helps to work with a strategist who can help you figure out how you can make the most amount of money in the least amount of time. And this is often what I do with my clients who are stay at home moms or parents who share the responsibility of taking care of the kids. If you have the right strategy, sure, you're going to go through a phase where your money, all the money you're making from your business is going to childcare, but it won't last. You'll start making more money if you stick to the strategy if you keep at the action plan. So setting your dependence up for success is the only way to set yourself up for success. The other element here is you have to set realistic expectations for yourself. If you have an eight month old and they've been consistently napping for an hour and a half every single day, guess what? That's not going to happen forever. You have to set realistic expectations. You're probably not going to want to schedule calls in that time because there's going to be a day when where that 8 month old is like, I don't want to take a nap or they're going to nap for 10 minutes and then wake up and be really upset. In setting realistic expectations for myself, I know I can't sit down and do eight hours of work because I'm going to have to take my dog outside to pee at some point. I'm going to have to feed her, I'm going to have to play with her. I'm her one roommate. I have to keep it interesting for her. When you set realistic expectations for yourself, you prevent yourself from going crazy. And you also have help everyone who has to work with you because you're not constantly having to change the game. The third category of distractions is your space. And this is something that is massively different for everyone. Some people, to keep themselves from being distracted, need absolute silence. They cannot have a single sound in their space. For others, absolute silence is deafening. You need ambient sound. You might need music going on in the background. You might need to go and rent a space in a co working office so you can have background chatter. Hell, you might need to go into like a busy cafe and do work there. You have to figure out what kind of space is most conducive to you getting work done and what kind of work you get done in that space. For me, I don't even drink, but I find it's really helpful when I have to put together a PowerPoint presentation. Or. Hell, if I'm. If I'm plotting out a podcast episode to go to my local pub and grab dinner and have my laptop open and just start working. The key for me is it needs to be loud enough that I can't discern any particular conversation around me. If I can hear what the people next to me are talking about, then I'm going to get completely sucked into eavesdropping on them. I'm very nosy. I'm going to want to know all the details. I'm not going to get any work done. But if I, obviously, if I'm on a call, if I'm on Zoom, I need to have a very specific space set up for myself so that I can do that successfully. And there's no right answer here. It's whatever works best for you. Whatever works best for your business. So, for instance, if you're a copywriter and the work that you do that's paid to doesn't require you to be on a zoom call or on a phone call with someone. You get to work wherever you want. Whatever makes you most able to concentrate is going to be the best place. Other things that as ADHDers, we have to kind of deconstruct for ourselves is this idea of professionalism in a workspace. A couple years ago I went through this certification called Trauma of Money. And one of the things that they trained us on very early on is that wherever you feel comfortable and safe is going to be the best place for you to take the class. It's going to be the best place for you to do work. Sometimes that means from bed, sometimes that means in your living room. Sometimes working on the floor feels the best. I give you permission to work wherever the feels best for you. I had a friend in San Francisco and to prove the point that it really doesn't matter, I had this friend in San Francisco. He was the chief people officer at a tech startup. Okay. The CEO at this company was real difficult to manage. They had brought in so many different executive coaches to try to work with this guy and he was pretty uncoachable. And finally, as a last resort, they actually hired a woman who works with movie stars out of L. A. She was exorbitantly expensive, but she had this kind of smack you in the face approach that was no bull. And he was laughing because she charges so much money to work with her. And the very first call that he had with her with the group explaining, you know, who she was going to be working with, she was sitting on her bed in Malibu. She was sitting on her bed cross legged and she's laughing and she's talking and she's swearing and you know, she's talking about what she's going to do with the CEO and she was massively effective. And the key here is that she normalized it. She chose that that is the best place for her to take a work call and went with it. You are the boss of your own business. Wherever you want to work. Your clients are just going to have to get used to that. And any client who's not willing to work with you because you're working someplace that's comfortable for you, they're not the right client for you. So comfort rather than professional. We get to redefine what our standard for professionalism is. For me, it's that you're good at what you do and you deliver it. It's pretty basic. I always laugh when someone books a generate income strategy call with me. And they get on and we're talking about their business and they say something like. And they're like, oh my God, I swore. And it's like, have you listened to anything that I talk about? So yes, if you ever book a call with me, you are allowed to swear. I invite it. The last little bit about your space is mess. Different folks have different resilience to levels of mess. I'm pretty resilient. I'm a very messy person. I'm a clean person, but I'm a messy person. I just do not notice the piles of paper that are gathering around my desk. I don't notice the random doom piles of stuff until all of a sudden it becomes too much. If you're someone who gets distracted by mess when you start working and you're not taking care of that first, what you're actually doing is making everything that you're doing a layered task. Because for you to get to work, you have to clean your desk. For you to clean your desk, you might have to do something else, you might have to vacuum, you might have to do this, you might have to do that. If mess is one of the things that distracts you the most, and it's always something that gets added into your day because you have to deal with it before you can get to work, start prioritizing that first. Make it a must do in your business, dealing with a mess, because it's gonna have to get dealt with either way. If you're gonna get into whatever task you've assigned yourself for the day, it's better to plan around it and build a buffer of time than to let it kind of derail your whole day. And lastly, my favorite category for distractions is Ooh, what am I gonna say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. The Hyper Focus 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 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 fellow ADHD business owners. We will also have coworking sessions designed for the ADHD mind. Monday Get Organized Sprint calls to keep you out of overwhelm. Access to weekly Brave BizLab 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 hyperfocused and stop procrastinating the things that will grow your business that's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or click the link in the episode description. And lastly, my favorite category for distractions is you. In my intake form for my Generate Income strategy calls, I have this question and it's like, what are the top three things that typically get in the way of you reaching your goals? The number one answer to this question is me, Myself. And I. I cackle every time I see this because it's so true. It's we are our biggest obstacle. It's our mindset. It's our shiny object syndrome. It's our ability to shift gears so fast and completely lose the plot. So when we talk about the distractions that come from us, our internal selves, there are a few different things that happen. So there's what goes on in our mind and what goes on in our body. One of the best things about having ADHD is how creative we are. And also it's one of the most distracting things, because ideas strike us at any moment, in any place, along with all the ideas that we have as ADHD people. We also have this underlying fear that this is the last idea we're ever going to have. This weird belief like, there's no proof that it's true, because we're coming up with ideas constantly. But we tend to have an idea and think, oh, my God, I need to grab onto it right now and run with it, because if I don't, then I'm going to lose it. I invite you to look around your house right now as you're listening to this, if you're home and look at all the piles of paper that you don't want to throw away, because there's good ideas in it. There's good information that might have a good idea in it. We are idea hoarders. And sure, sometimes we'll write an idea down and go back to it, but oftentimes we don't. But I want to just call attention to the fact that you have never run out of ideas. You are an idea generator. There's a reason why there are so many people with ADHD who do things that are so innovative, because we are far more creative than neurotypicals. But you have to learn how to manage it so you can get done in your business. And this is why one of the things that I recommend to all of my clients who have this issue of, oh my God, I got this great idea. I'm going to run with that instead of all the things that I said I was going to do today is to create Some kind of idea bank. I also like to call this a back burner book. All right, so if you're cooking multiple things, you can't actively cook all of them. Okay. You can focus on one or two things at the most at a time. So sometimes you just have to put stuff on the back burner to keep it warm before you get to it. Now, a backburner book or an idea bank can look a lot of different ways. It can be a journal, it could be the notes app on your phone. Hell, you could have an email chain to yourself from yourself, where you're just sending back and forth different ideas. And if you're more advanced than I am and you figured out how to use project management tools like Notion or ClickUp, you can absolutely create a board in there to manage all of your ideas. I always tell myself I'm going to learn those things, but. But every time I try, it's just so confusing. It's like I know what I want it to do, but I don't speak the language to figure out how to make it do what I want it to do. And then I try and then I get frustrated and then I get mad and then I get discouraged and then I have to go for a walk and recover. It's just, it's a really ugly process. I just get bored and I tune out. So they explain it to me and it's like it goes in in one ear and out the other. So I apologize to those of you who've tried in the past. I don't think, I just don't think I'm destined for project management tools anyway. So on the one side, we have ideas that are distracting to us. On the other side, we have complete and utter boredom. Sometimes the boredom sets in for a task and you just can't continue with it. There are two ways to really deal with boredom. So boredom can be that you need more stimulation. It could be that you need to go and give yourself like a quick. A quick hit of dopamine. So maybe you need to go and do a really simple task like go and comment on five posts on LinkedIn to get your engagement up. It could also mean respond to an easy email or go take your dog for a 10 minute walk. It could be something that you can put on your to do list and very easily just cross off and get that satisfaction. Boredom can also mean that you are overstimulated, meaning that you're trying to do too much in too little time. You've taken in too much information and you actually need to go sit in silence without your phone, without a book, without a journal, and just kind of stare off into space and disassemble associate for a while. I've learned this about myself and I have to tell you, I'm not perfect at figuring out which one I need most. Oftentimes when I am feeling the boredom, that means I'm overstimulated. I get kicked into executive dysfunction. So it's hard for me to even get that get up and go to go and do other things. You know, I start doing them and I'm like, I just don't have the juice for it. And so I kind of back off. That's when I realize I have to just kind of push a chair in the center of the room away from everything and just sit there for a bit until I feel rested with the understimulated boredom. It's usually that I'm just really antsy to get to the next thing, and it's easy for me to get to the next thing. I just kind of like bounce off the boring task into the exciting task and do that for you. This is going to be different. The signs are going to be different. So pay attention to when you're feeling bored. Are you getting kicked into executive dysfunction and you have a hard time getting into another task, or are you feeling like a ton of pent up energy that you need to get out in some way and deal with it appropriately? The other mental thing that can get in the way that can distract us from the work that we need to do is stress about other stuff. This is one of the reasons why in the Monday sprint that I do three Mondays a month for all of my clients, I have them do a complete brain dump of everything that they're tracking in their minds that they have to get to that week. Anything that's stressing them out goes on that list. You want to fix world hunger? Great. It goes on the list. Anything that you feel like you need to be stressed out about that could be turned into a to do list item. Put it on the list, even if you never get to it. Something that we don't talk about enough is the mental load that we carry. You know, when you're an employee, you go to work, you have a certain set of responsibilities, you do those things and then you go home. You're not having to figure out what the responsibilities are and what the responsibilities of the other departments are and what the actions are of those other departments, and then you're not responsible to do the actions of the Responsibilities of the other departments as well. As a business owner, you have to be all the people, you have to be all the strategists and you have to be the prioritizer. Okay, that's fucking exhausting. It's, it's a lot more mental work than you are used to. But because we've been trained on a 40 hour week, we expect ourselves to do 40 hours of action every damn week. It's impossible because you're having to do about 20 hours of mental work. Now part of the mental load is keeping track of what all the work is. You know, getting it down on paper. Even if it doesn't make the cut for your priorities. This week is gonna be a way for you to offload it to free up some RAM in your brain, for lack of a better term. Cause we all know as ADHDers how our computers tend to like to crash when they have too many tabs open. The same happens in your brain. The last little bits about distractions that come from you are how you nourish your body and how you dress your body. If you're not feeding yourself properly, like is going to go wrong, you're going to have a sugar crash, your stomach is going to hurt, you're going to be so hungry that you're going to start getting hangry and clients are going to start firing you because they can't handle it. If you're not drinking water, you're going to start getting really murky in your mind. You know, you're going to start getting dark and depressed and things are going to start looking real bad real fast. If you're wearing clothes that are distracting, if you're wearing wool and it's itchy, why are you wearing wool? Stop it. You know, if you need to go through all your clothes and cut out all of the tags, go and do it. We talked previously about you getting to define your version of professionalism that includes your wardrobe. I don't care what you had to wear to the office when you worked in corporate. I care about what you want to wear now. I care about how that facilitates you being able to be in your business 100%. Sometimes it's going to look a little cozy. Sometimes it's not going to look flashy and professional. And that's okay. So long as you're showing up and doing the work and providing the services to your clients who paid you for them. Your distractions are never going to go away. New distractions are going to happen all the time. New world events are going to start Distracting you. New ideas for your business are going to distract you. You know, the occasional client who needs a little more attention is going to start distracting you. As a person who's running a business who also has adhd, the key here is to not punish yourself when distractions happen. When you get pulled off course to do something else, when you meant to get X, Y and Z done, that's okay. That's the nature of things. What doesn't help the whole distraction cycle is when you get distracted and then you start punishing yourself for the distraction and then you feel bad, like you failed and everything. And then you can't go back to the original task because it's now associated with failure. It's exhausting, but it happens to us all the time. I know I've talked about this in relation to New Year's resolutions with going to the gym. If you say that you're going to go to the gym every single day and then you miss on day four, day five, you're not going back. You already failed. Like, you're going to go to the gym and everyone at the gym is going to boo you because you failed. You didn't show up for day four. How dare you. This doesn't count. It doesn't matter if you work out twice as hard on day five. Still doesn't count because you missed day four failure. I know I say that and it sounds ludicrous, but we know how it feels. The most powerful thing that you can do for yourself, for your productivity, for your business, is to have forgiveness for all the times you got distracted and gently, kindly, with acceptance. Just bring yourself back so that you can do whatever you need to do. 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. I was sleeping on my stomach the other night and I woke up after a couple hours and Luna had been sleeping, like, kind of on my calf. So, like, my right knee had been hyperextended for a few hours, I think. And so it up my knee, which then up my hip, which now, like, has up my lower back and I have. I'm such an old lady. 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 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.