Quick disclaimer,
This is not medical advice.
I'm not a doctor.
This is for informational purposes and the beauty of all this is that it's tryable.
You can try it and see for yourself.
If it works,
Great.
If it doesn't,
File it away.
In part one,
We did the brain dump.
Part two,
Took care of the urgent fires.
And then part three,
We talked about prioritizing for the week.
Ideally,
You've spent a week working on this.
So now we have some data to talk about.
So let's talk about it.
If you did every single thing on your priority list,
And please send me a message and tell me all about it.
You might very well be the chosen one,
The rare unicorn of ADHD,
That is amazing.
Most likely,
If we're placing bets,
I would wager that maybe you forgot about most of the things,
Forgot about that you even scheduled it,
Other things cropped up that you deemed more important,
Maybe you literally forgot the moment the part three talk was done,
Or maybe you didn't even do the work from the beginning and you just kind of clicked to listen to each one and binged to the content.
I'm usually guilty of that last one.
Binge it all and have my aha moments and then off to my next thing without putting in any practice.
And then we just write ourselves off like,
Ah,
This stuff doesn't work for me.
So let's take this talk to discuss the practice.
Insights come from the doing.
You can read a book or I can say something to you that hits you in a profound way.
You'll have an aha moment,
But these don't make ADHD go away.
They're temporary feel goods or feel hopefuls.
There is a practice to put in.
So let's look at this from the meditator standpoint.
If you read a book on meditation,
That does not give you the benefit of a 10-year daily meditation practice.
It just makes you good at talking about it.
And similar to ADHD,
We don't successfully manage our ADHD by learning about dopamine and executive function.
It's neat,
It's helpful and interesting,
But in this case,
When we name it,
We don't tame it,
We just name it.
So there's aspects to successfully managing ADHD in terms of this overwhelm.
And it comes from ongoing visibility,
Accountability,
Vulnerability,
And curiosity.
The homework was easy enough to do with a body double.
I'm assuming it is.
It's easier for me to do it.
I'm confident every one of you can do this with a guided talk,
But Wednesday at noon,
When you said you were going to go to the post office,
But nothing bad was going to happen.
So the package still sits in the backseat of the car.
The old version of us forgets that it exists.
And on those occasions,
When we do remember,
It's just never the right time.
So we say,
Oh gosh,
I'll do that later.
And maybe we'll throw in some self critique or self loathing,
But we push on.
It off.
The new version of ourselves prioritized it for today.
We knew that we had the time to do it at noon.
And so this part is where things can change with visibility.
Meaning you told someone you were doing this,
You made it known accountability that comes with that.
They might ask you about it and then you might have to speak to it later.
It's out there vulnerability.
This is what allows you to make a big deal out of something seemingly trivial.
You feel safe enough to declare things like this.
I'm going to go do my laundry today.
Even though I'm a grown up and I'm 50 years old and I know how to do the laundry,
I'm going to make a big declaration about it,
Even though I feel embarrassed.
Declaring it to the right people is such a big deal.
And then curiosity is what we replace judgment with.
When I don't do the laundry,
I don't attack my character.
I ask questions like,
Huh,
I wonder what got in the way.
What could I do tomorrow to make this work?
ADHD,
It's not about finding a system that takes the tension away.
It's about acknowledging that this can be hard and turning it into a team sport.
So for the past week,
I'm curious,
How did it go from that lens of curiosity?
What got in the way of doing what you said you were going to do?
And then from that same lens,
What specifically was behind the successes you had?
Those are the insights,
Any insights into what you could do differently next week or what you could double down on down the road.
That's huge.
And a lot of times that is going to be unique to you.
So seven days has gone by now and you've added to your brain dump and you've I'm taking a black sharpie to it.
During your weekly planning,
Try repeating this process.
You may very well find that as you adjust the cadence of this process,
Like as you get creative with your list and as you iterate your scheduling,
Over time,
You may find your unique system manifests.
It's my belief that it is more effective to grow a system naturally from the doing than sitting back and imagining a system from scratch,
Building one on a spreadsheet,
And then trying to implement it.
We don't learn and then do.
We do,
And from that doing comes the learning for ourselves.
I hope this has been helpful.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about any of this.
ADHD is a team sport,
And I'm grateful that I got to be on your team.
