Wanna be a better public speaker despite your 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. 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 I, Katie McManus, stepped out of the weenie and into the winning Hi, I'm Katie McManus, and this is business strategy for Weenie ADHDpreneurs. Squirrel, one of the reasons I talk so often about you needing to stop. Stop being a weenie is because I have so much experience being a weenie. I was that kid growing up who lived on a hill, and all my friends would come over with their bikes, and they'd be so excited to ride their bikes down the hill. Like, they would just, like, pedal and pedal and try to go as fast as they could down the sidewalk, and there I'd be behind them, going about two miles an hour, scared for my life that I would fall. And actually, I was probably more likely to fall because I was going so slow. Like, my balance would have been off. There was just this massive lack of confidence. I always got this feedback my whole life that I come across as so confident. And there's this funny thing that happens when people see you as confident and you're not confident, is you create this special brand of imposter syndrome. And it manifests as you constantly see yourself as not living up to other people's expectations. Now, this was a double whammy for me because where I was the biggest chicken, where I was the most massive weenie, was being seen by other people. And what I'm talking about is public speaking. I was terrified of public speaking from a very, very early age. The only times I would successfully speak publicly were at funerals for people that I deeply cared about, because in those moments, the only thing I cared about was honoring that person. I wasn't worried about the people, people in front of me. I think it also helps that usually when you're speaking at a funeral, like, you know, everyone in the audience is so wrapped up in their own sadness that they're really not paying attention to you. But any other setting, doing presentations for school, speaking at nonprofit events, speaking at town meeting, which if you've seen Gilmore Girls, the TV show, those town meetings actually do happen in small towns in New England. And yes, they are full of drama. Now, the fears that hold people back are different. And it usually happens in this up way where the thing that you're most afraid of is actually the thing that will make you most successful. And this obviously is different for everyone. For me, it was public speaking for another person. It could be writing for another person. It could be painting and letting your paintings be seen. It usually has to do with how other people perceive you. So it's kind of hard to talk about how to become brave unless you're actually talking about a story. And so I'm just going to share my personal journey with becoming brave. And like how I stopped being a weenie. My biggest fear was public speaking. And just to give you an idea of how bad I was at public speaking, I once got voluntold by a professor at my college to read a letter at a literary luncheon with about 300 people in the audience. This letter was from one of the authors who was going to be honored at this luncheon but couldn't make it. And so this professor, because I was well spoken, one on one, assumed that I would be really good speaking at this event. I told him no. I absolutely put my foot down and said, I'm not doing that. And he kind of blew past that. He was like, no, no, no, you're going to be fine. He soon regretted that. I will never forget getting up at that podium, looking out at the 300 plus people at this luncheon. It felt like there were thousands of them. Just so, you know, sweat just trickling down the sides of my neck and down my back. I was so nervous, my hands were shaking holding this letter. I had reprinted this letter in bold font, double space. I had practiced it. I had read it over and over and over again. And let me tell you, I was so terrified that I stuttered and stammered through this whole letter. I was so bad that people in the audience came up to me after I read this letter and apologized to me for how bad I was. It was the most mortifying experience of my life. And I'm saying that as a person whose skirt has flown up over her head in front of a bus full of tourists in San Francisco, I would do that every day for the rest of my life before I relived this one experience. After that event, I literally Went home. I bagged up all the books this professor had lent me. I wasn't in any of his classes. And at 2 o' clock that morning, I drove to his house, knowing that he and his wife would be fully asleep. And I left these books on his doorstep. And I never spoke to him again. He also never reached out to me again, which tells me he understood what he had done to me in that moment. And I hope he felt really guilty about it. I hope he took that, you know, through to the rest of his life. I actually don't know if this person's still alive, but, you know, if they're not, I hope they felt really guilty about it till their dying day. This is a long time ago. I'm realizing the more I do this podcast, I actually have kind of a petty, vengeful side for former teachers who treated me badly. So now you have a picture of how bad I was at public speaking speaking, and that I had a right to be terrified of doing it now. One of the things I always knew about myself is that I wanted to help people, and I didn't want to help people just volunteering on the weekends. I wanted my job, my career, my calling to be in some way helping other people. This landed me in a bunch of different sales roles. Because when you're working for a company, one of the most direct ways that you can help clients is, is by selling to them and selling them a solution to the problems that they have. One of the things about being in sales is sometimes you have to give presentations. Sometimes you have to do a standup with your regional sales manager, with your boss, with all of your coworkers and people on the marketing team, and you have to explain every single thing that you did that quarter. Sometimes you have to be in a room with dozens of other salespeople and explain a process that you implemented that was really successful. And for me, these were the most painful experiences of my work. And so I recognized that learning to speak publicly was going to be the be all end all of me breaking that success ceiling that I created for myself. I also, deep down, knew that sales wasn't going to be the thing that I did forever. I knew that I was going to become a coach at some point. I knew that at some point I would want to stand on the stage and show people a better way to be in some fashion. I didn't know at the time that I was going to be a business coach, a better way to be, to make their lives better or to improve their lives. So what did I do about it? Well, first and foremost, I had to get over this fear of just being in front of people. And so I decided to enroll myself into some improv classes. And if you're from the San Francisco Bay Area, you'll recognize the name Bats. Bay Area Theater Sports, one of the best schools for improv on the West Coast. In these classes, I learned that, like, you can make mistakes and no one cares. You can stutter and you can stammer and you can screw up your words and you can use the wrong word and you can forget what your character is supposed to be doing, and you can walk in the wrong direction, or you could, like, treat someone else as if they're a different character than what they are. You, you can screw up in a million different ways, and it's okay. One of the beautiful things about improv also, is that you learn how to take whatever is given to you in the moment and turn it into something else, right? Because it doesn't matter if you're giving speeches and you have a speech that you have memorized word for word. You don't know when an audience member is going to shout a question at you and interrupt you. You don't know if, like, someone's going to open the side door and the fire alarm is going to go off. You don't know when a waiter is going to drop a whole tray of drinks making a crash. And as the speaker, as the person who is controlling the energy of the room by being on stage, you're going to have to acknowledge that in some way, there's always going to be moments of improv when you're speaking publicly. So learning to improvise in a really fun environment that was really safe helped me improvise better in my day to day and be more comfortable in front of people. Now, one of the things that improvisation does not do is get you comfortable being yourself in front of people, right? Because when you're improvising, you're usually pretending to be like an alien from a far off place who's discovering zippers for the very first time and is also learning to ride elephants. You know, something absolutely ridiculous. So you're outside of yourself. You're not standing on stage as yourself, looking out at the audience, sharing your own thoughts or your own processes. That is not improv. After going through all these improv classes, that was still incredibly scary for me. You know, improv got me to the point where I was comfortable on stage being someone else, comfortable on stage, speaking and being involved and taking what was given to me and, yes, handing it and creating a whole storyline. It didn't give me the confidence to get up there and be Katie McManus. It didn't give me the confidence to think that I actually had something worth saying. So the next step I did is I actually joined a Toastmasters group. And if you haven't heard of Toastmasters, it's an amazing nonprofit group. They are everywhere. If you want to get better at public speaking, you can look up Toastmasters in your area. And I guarantee you there will be several meetings at several different times on different days each week. It's kind of like aa. If you want to join a Toastmasters group, I can't recommend it enough. Now, in Toastmasters, everyone there is there to get better at public speaking. It's the most normalizing environment for someone who's afraid of being seen on stage. Because you look at this group and you have CEOs, and you have VPs, and you have entrepreneurs, and you have people who are just starting in their career. And everyone has one thing in common. They are terrified of speaking publicly. And they're also usually really bad at it, which is this massive boost to you. Because you're not the only one. It doesn't matter where in your career you are. You're not the only one who struggles with this problem. And everyone in that group, their one goal is to support each other in getting better. And so through Toastmasters, you volunteered. You give special speeches. They have different exercises that you do throughout the meeting so everyone has a chance to get up and speak in front of each other. They make it fun, but they also give really helpful feedback. It was the best experience. I actually ended up through being in Toastmasters. I got to the point where I actually won a Toastmasters Award at one point for a humorous speech contest where I talked about the time I sold Barry Bond's gym membership. Not knowing who Barry Bonds was. Joining Toastmasters got me to a level where I was okay speaking in front of people, but I wasn't great. I didn't have the confidence that I knew what to do. I didn't have the confidence that I could build an experience in speaking that would have me to the point where I could be a keynote speaker. Which throughout this process, I kind of realized that was my ultimate goal. I wanted to be someone that people would reach out to and say, hey, listen, we need a keynote speaker. We love your story. We love what you talk about. We want to bring you in for this. And isn't it funny that things that we're most afraid of are usually the things that we most want. Except for spiders. No one wants spiders and death. Actually, I'm going to take that back. The things that we're most afraid of in our businesses are really the things that we most want. Gonna edit that broad stroke statement that I made. I love it when I say something, then I think it through and I'm like, that was a really dumb thing to say. I wanna just go through the steps here. So I got comfortable being on stage as someone else, and then I got comfortable being in front of people and speaking as myself. But I still didn't know the nuts and bolts of public speaking. I didn't understand the different nuances, how I could use tactics and build my skill set to be a better speaker. And so the last thing I did to become a better speaker is I signed up for this class through Own the Room, which I don't know if they're still in business. I know the pandemic really hit them hard. But Own the Room was a public speaking course that you could take in San Francisco Bay Area. And through this four day intensive course, I learned how to use space on the stage. I learned how to change my intonation. I learned how to structure a talk so that you could build up the suspense to like a major moment and then lead people into a place where you wanted them to go. Once I kind of learned how to do that stuff, it's not like I learned it and now I strategically plant them in how I talk, right? It's very much like learning how to ride a bike. You learn the nuts and bolts of how you speed up and how you turn and how you brake. It's not like you're consciously planning that when you're going for a bike ride, right? You just know how to do it as you ride the bike. And because you know how to turn, you're so much more comfortable turning. And because you know how to brake, you feel so much more comfortable speeding up. And because you know how to speed up, you're also not falling over like I was going slowly down that hill when I was a kid. Knowing how is one of the best things to build your confidence matched with this next thing, which is practice. Knowing how to do something is absolutely useless if you're not doing it constantly. Here's what I did. 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. Knowing how to do something is absolutely useless if you're not doing it constantly. Here's what I did. I constantly did improv. I constantly was speaking at Toastmasters. Anytime we had an all hands meeting at work, I would raise my hand and ask a question. And just to get myself comfortable speaking in front of that many people, I would volunteer to make announcements at events that I was helping with. Announcements like, we found someone's phone. The phone has this color cover. If you're missing your phone, come and see us at this part of the event. Silly things. But that was necessary for me to build that comfort level with speaking. Now, when the pandemic hit, this wasn't possible. And one of the things that I was most afraid of was I would lose this skill over time. I would lose my comfort. I was afraid that that fear would take over. And so in working with a coach, one of the things that I realized I could do is go live. Now, the scary thing about going live for me is that you couldn't see people's responses. You were speaking without any feedback, right? And as someone with adhd, feedback is so important, right? Because we're constantly looking to other people to see how we act because we unconsciously mirror everyone around us, right? So I want you to imagine a standup comedian stands on stage and tries to do a whole set while they are blindfolded and have noise canceling headphones on. Like, they don't know what's funny to the audience. They don't know what's landing. They don't know if people are shocked or angry or laughing their asses off. Now, I'm not a stand up comedian. I wasn't trying to be one. But I did want to know that people didn't think I was an absolute idiot. And usually when you're standing in front of a group of people and you can see their faces, you can gauge how much of an idiot you're being and you can change it in the moment. So one of the best challenges that my coach at the time gave me was just go live and don't have anything to say. Go live and just improvise with whatever is going on around you. And so if you were my Facebook friend back then, I apologize for the cringy lives that I did while I was out on a run. And I just randomly go live on some random street, and I'd talk about the street, and I'd talk about, like, the foliage, and I would talk about my run, and I would talk about the thoughts I was having. It was not interesting. But what it ultimately did, and this is important, is it showed my brain that I could do it and not die. Because when you're really, really afraid of something, what's ultimately happening is your nervous system is thinking, oh, my God, if you do it, you're going to die. This is going to equal death. It's like Eddie Izzard's whole thing like death or cake. And your brain is constantly going like, well, it's going to be death. It's going to be death, it's going to be death. So if you haven't heard Eddie Izzard's whole death or cake routine, here it is. Squirrel. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

But you can't do that in Church of England. You can't say, you must have tea and cake with a vicar or you die. You can't have extreme points of view. You know, the Spanish Inquisition wouldn't have worked with Church of England. Talk, will. You talk. But it hurts. Well, loosen it up a bit, Will. That's what it would be. Tea and cake or death? Tea and cake or death? Tea and cake or death? Students with me. Tea and cake or death? Tea and cake or death? Little red cookbook. Little red cookbook, you know, because Cake or death? That's a pretty easy question, everyone. Anyone can answer that. Cake or death? Cake, please. Very well. Give him cake. Oh, thanks very much. Very nice.

You.

Cake. Oh, dad, cake for me, too, please. Very well. Give him cake too. We're gonna run out of cake at this rate. You, cake on death.

Death, please. No cake.

Cake. Cake. Sorry, you said death first. Ah, death first. No, I meant cake. Oh, all right. You're lucky I'm Church of England.

So here's the really cool thing about practicing and showing your brain that you can do this one thing and not die, and then you can do this next level thing and not die is that the comfort level keeps expanding out until you're really comfortable doing a lot of things. And at some point, that comfort level goes beyond what you even thought was possible for you. That comfort level, like, allows for you to do whatever it's going to take for you to build this business. It's also really helpful for folks with ADHD to work at things in these incremental ways, right? Because for people with adhd, tackling a massive project, like, if I had gone from that girl who is terrified of speaking because she just finished failing massively at that luncheon, if I had tried to get ready to do a keynote talk in front of thousands of people, that would have been way too big of a project for me. It would have been overwhelming my fear. Gremlins would have been popping up all over the place and the project would have just been too much. Right? Because we have to remember our ADHD brains do really well with short sprints. They do really well with. Here's the one skill you are learning right now, you're going to become an expert at this. And because we have ADHD and we learn things really quickly, we actually move faster when we break it down into smaller bits. And by breaking it down into smaller bits for myself, unconsciously, I got to the point where I'm perfectly comfortable standing in front of thousands of people. Now, I don't want to say, like, I'm like hanging out up there, not sweating. I'm sure, like, you can bet that I'm wearing extra deodorant if I'm standing in front of a few thousand people. But I'm not going to be that stuttery, stammering, terrified mess that I used to be. And here's how that impacts my business. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're an ADHD business owner having a hard time building consistent habits on social media to promote your business, I have something for you. One of the biggest challenges for ADHD products nerds is that our dopamine levels often dictate how much stuff we get done in a day, along with our available time. On low dopamine days where we also don't have a lot of time, it's really easy to fall off the social media posting wagon, which leads to a downward spiral, thinking that you're a complete failure and that your business is going to go nowhere. So to fix this, I have actually designed a social media consistency matrix that helps you discover what you should be doing every single day, depending on how much dopamine you have and how much time you have available. This is perfect for those days where your executive dysfunction has taken over and you're feeling like there's nothing that you can do in your business. It's also amazing for those days where you have all the time in the world and feel super inspired, but aren't sure what you should be spending your time on. To download this matrix, please go to weeniecast.com ADHD social media. When you submit your name and your email, we'll be sending that along. And in case you didn't have a pen handy, you can find that link in the show notes. Now, I don't want to say like I'm like hanging out up there, not sweating. I'm sure, like you can bet that I'm wearing extra deodorant if I'm standing in front of a few thousand people. But I'm not going to be that stuttery, stammering, terrified mess that I used to be. And here's how that impacts my business. I now get clients by speaking. I now have a podcast that you're listening to right now. How meta is that? I'm so comfortable going live on Facebook that I then branched out. I now go live on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, also Twitter. I'm not that I have any Twitter followers, but whatever. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Coming to you today with a bit of a rant. And I want to be clear, this is a rant about something that is systemic in the personal development and coaching world. And of course it shows up in individuals. I am not on a rant about this individual. I will not name this individual. I am not trying to paint them in a bad light because here's the thing, they are just victim to a crappy system. Just drives me crazy. So there's, if you, if you're not in the coaching world, there's this thing called pay to play. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. And I don't even have to plan usually for how I go live. I don't have to create a script. I come up with a general concept and I'm able to ad lib whatever it is that I'm going to talk about. Then if 20 year old me heard me say that, she would think I was nuts. She's like, what are you talking about? You don't have flashcards with every single word underlined. You don't have people apologizing to you afterwards for how bad you were. Like, people actually come up to you now and compliment you on what a good speaker you are. Like, that would be completely inconceivable to her. But here's what's possible for you. If you're really afraid of something and you're willing to do the work to get better and you know that this is going to be the one thing that's going to be the key to your success in whatever it is that you want to do. This is the dramatic arc of where you can go from and where you can get. There's another element to this to tackling bravery, to stepping out of being a weenie and facing the fear and doing it anyway, is you have to dare to believe in yourself. You have to be willing to believe that there is a world in which you're not going to be afraid of this thing anymore. There are a couple different exercises that work in coaching. You know, you can actually create a Persona that you become when you're about to do something that's really out there and out of your normal comfort zone. Beyonce actually did this really early on when she was starting off as a singer. She was terrified of performing Squirrel Squirrel.

So, like, when you're getting ready to.

Go on stage and perform to Sasha Fierce, when does she show up? Usually when I hear the crowd, when I put on my stilettos. When, like the. The moment right before when you're nervous and that other thing kind of takes over for you.

Uh huh.

Then Sasha Fierce appears, and my posture and the way I speak and everything is different. And how is Sasha Fierce different than I am? Definitely wearing that bodysuit. I could never walk and do that.

Yes.

Does Sasha Fierce ever go home? Like, sometimes, but I.

It wasn't Beyonce performing in that moment. It was this Persona that she had created, and she would consciously turn herself into that Persona so that she could deliver a performance that people would celebrate. Now imagine Beyonce, the Beyonce that we know in this moment in time where she just conquers the world, she is the queen of everything. Imagine her being younger and terrified of getting on stage. Now, the Beyonce who was terrified of getting on stage, who needed that Persona, she believed that there was a world where she could perform. And those of us with adhd, we do this all the time without realizing it. We constantly believe that there's a world in which our superpowers are going to be really valuable to others. Anytime you're jumping from one topic to another and tying them together and creating this new idea, you're believing in yourself. Whether you know it or not. You're believing that you can find creative solutions to problems. So what do you have to do to step out of being a massive weenie and actually do the brave ass thing that will change your life? First and foremost, you have to identify what it is that you're afraid of, because you can't fix it if you don't know what the problem is. You also have to identify what it is that you want that's on the other side of conquering this fear. Because if what you want isn't something that you really, really want on a soul level, it's not worth it. You're not actually going to get over this fear, because it won't matter as much to you. Let's talk about spiders for a second, right? So many people are afraid of spiders, and yet you don't see spider masters popping up all over the world where people get together and they confront spiders all the time. And, like, you know, different people bring tarantulas and other people bring black widows, and other people just bring, like, those weird little brown spiders that end up in your house that actually aren't dangerous, but we're still terrified of them. Because overcoming your fear to spiders really doesn't matter unless you have this massive fear of spiders. And you also, conversely, want to be a spider expert. And that is like your dream, which I can't imagine that ever happening. Right? There are the fears that are worth getting over, and then there are the fears that, you know, no one cares. If your dream is to scale a skyscraper and you're terrified of heights, yes, you have to get over your fear of heights. But if you're just afraid of heights and you live a normal person's life that stays mostly on the ground, who cares? My mom is terrified of heights. She absolutely hates them. So I do that typical millennial thing where I go on to Zillow and different real estate websites, and I look at mansions that are, like, way outside my budget. And my. In my brain, I'm constantly looking at what the stair situation is, because if the stairs are open and it goes several flights up, I know my mom would never, ever come over and visit me in that mansion. My mom has never had a reason to get over her fear of heights because it's not tied to any big dream she has. So you have to identify what fear it is that you have that is holding you back from building this business. Once you've identified it, you have to do what I instinctively did early on with public speaking. You have to figure out, like, what is the first step to getting better at this? What will at least get me on the stage and not want to vomit? What will at least get me comfortable? So stuttering and stammering if it just happens. I'm recording this podcast. I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled over my Words. My producer, Neil, will edit them out for the sake of your listening pleasure. But it happens, and it doesn't throw me like it used to. That's thanks to improv. I had this one improv teacher who anytime we messed up a scene or messed up speaking about something or we couldn't think of something to yes and with, he'd make us buck like a chicken. And let me tell you, there's nothing that gets you over a fear of speaking publicly than standing in front of dozens of other adults and bucking like a chicken. Once you conquer that one basic fear, you have to think of what is the next step? What is that next marker for success? For me, it was standing in front of a room and being Katie McManus and sharing my own thoughts and believing that my thoughts were worth sharing. And finally, I needed to figure out the skills. I needed to just learn the nuts and bolts of speaking. I needed to see from the experts what would make me worth hiring as a keynote speaker. And underneath it all, I had to believe in myself. I had to believe that there was a part of me that could potentially go from being someone that people apologize to for how bad they are to someone who's really confident standing on stage, delivering their own thoughts and staring into the eyes of audience members and not wanting to crawl under the stage to hide. I also had to pair that with my reason for doing it. My desire, my calling to help other people. And I want to just point something out. You don't actually have to know exactly what that dream is. Right. I didn't know that I was going to be a business strategist and money mindset coach who works with ADHD people. That is really specific. Right? Back then, I just knew I wanted to help people, and I knew that being comfortable being on stage was gonna be a major part of it. Right. So I don't want you getting all flipped out about you having to figure out every single part of this, because I know your ADHD brain is going to get super overwhelmed by all the different pieces of this puzzle, and you're going to back away from it, and you're not going to start that. I want you just tackling that next level, finding that edge of your comfort level and just inching forward a little bit. And I want you to know that you're going to figure out the other pieces of the puzzle along the way. I want to share with you the moment where I realized that all this work had paid off. So I mentioned briefly that I won an award for Toastmasters for a humorous speech contest. Now I had entered this kind of on a dare. My friend Forrest had pointed at me in this meeting and been like, you need to do this. And I was like, ugh, fine, like I'll do it, whatever. And so I volunteered. We were competing against another club, even though we had people that we didn't know that weren't in our club, that like we're going to be competing against us and wanting us to fail, who are going to be present as I gave this speech. And so at the time, I woke up really early. Like I would wake up at 4 o' clock in the morning and I would be at work by six, right? And this is back in the pre pandemic days where you'd actually like shower and do your makeup and do your hair and get dressed nicely for work and then you'd have to travel places, right? So I was tired by the time this event came around. It started around like 6:30 in the evening. And of course, you know, you have multiple different people giving speeches and then you had. They have to deliberate about who won. So I gave my speech, I listened to one more speech and I turned to my friend Forrest and I was like, do you think it'd be rude if I just went home now? Because I was tired, I needed to go to bed. Cause I had to be up at 4 o' clock the next morning. And he was like, well, that's kind of weird. But yeah, sure. I don't think it's a big deal. Like, go home. And so I went home and I'm getting ready for bed and I'm brushing my teeth and I get. My phone starts blowing up, and my phone starts blowing up with a picture of a trophy. And I remember I'm like standing in my bathroom brushing my teeth. I'm in my pajamas, taking my makeup off, like I'm about to go to sleep and my friend Forest is texting me saying, you won't. You won the humorous speech contest and you're not here to accept it. So I accepted it for you. It's on your desk. The trophy is on your desk. I remember looking myself in the mirror and being like, huh? Like the other people were really funny. The other people's speeches were really good. Like one girl, I'll never forget, she wrote this speech all around someone in her office microwaving fish. And it was hysterical. She was able to turn this really benign, normal thing that happens when you have an asshole in your office into an incredibly funny story. And in that moment I realized wow. All the work that I have done has literally paid off. I'm getting an award for how well I showed up in front of an audience and told a story. The next moment that told me that I had really gotten better at this was during the pandemic. I had gotten really comfortable doing lives. I would go live pretty much every day. I'd pick a month and just go live every single day that month. And I remember getting on a sales call with someone and the first words out of their mouth was, I've watched every single live you've ever done. Like, this guy had binge watched me like a Netflix series. And the next words out of his mouth were, I didn't get on the phone with you to say, no, I want to work with you. I'd gone from being mortified wanting to crawl under a rock and die, to actually making money, to actually assigning clients because they've seen me show up. And I share this, not to brag on myself, but to give you hope that this is possible for you in whatever way you need to develop bravery. You're going to have that moment, too. You're going to win some kind of award or you're going to get some kind of massive feedback that's going to signal to you that you've been successful in working on this. You're going to grow your business, and you're going to have that moment where you realize that all the work that you've done is paying off in actual monetary dividends. But I want to give you kind of a rude wake up call right now is that none of that is going to happen if you don't start now. Because if not now, when. If you haven't started working on this thing that you're afraid of now, when the hell are you going to do it now? One of the skills that I've learned throughout this journey is actually eft tapping. And I really wish I had learned it earlier because it's one of those things that you can do and it's so simple to ground you in the moment and to rid yourself of fear. And I'm actually going to be doing a recording of this in my paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. So if you. You want me to guide you through a tapping routine to release fear and to gain that bravery that you need to take the next step, I want you to go and subscribe now. To subscribe, you can go to weeniecast.com winners. Can I just say, like, I've started in our recordings making all the sound effects that I do to myself throughout the day when I'm just by myself. I do have chicken. 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 exclusive 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. 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