Alan P. Brown's 5 Mindset Shifts For More Doing and Less Stressing

Join our host Shane Thrapp, Operations Director for the Men's ADHD Support Group, and Alan P. Brown of ADDCrusher as they talk about effective strategies for managing ADHD. Alan shares his insights on focusing on practical and science-based approaches around productivity. They discuss topics such as energy management, the importance of mindset shifts, handling negative self-talk, and ways to stay motivated with mundane tasks. Additionally, they respond to audience questions on managing productivity, routines, and other ADHD-related challenges.

If you're interested in seeing the slides and video for this show check it out on our Youtube channel! 

01:20 The Power of Mindset Shifts

03:03 Understanding Simple Mindset Shifts

07:53 The Science Behind Gratitude

14:15 Energy Management vs. Time Management

18:03 Self-Care Over Self-Comfort

21:16 Embracing a Growth Mindset

25:37 Harnessing Anger for Change

29:15 Future Self vs. Present Self

38:09 The Power of Asking Questions

38:49 Overcoming Negative Self-Talk

40:37 Energy Management Strategies

46:18 Prioritization and Time Management

01:00:37 Saying No and Setting Boundaries

01:06:37 Balancing Structure and Flexibility

01:09:44 Pathological Demand Avoidance

01:11:09 Staying Motivated with Mundane Tasks

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Chapters

• 0:00 Alan P. Brown's 5 Mindset Shifts For More Doing and Less Stressing
• 1:42 The Power of Mindset Shifts
• 3:25 Understanding Simple Mindset Shifts
• 5:53 Mindset Shifts in Action
• 8:15 The Science Behind Gratitude
• 9:32 Principles for Successful Mindset Shifting
• 14:37 Energy Management vs. Time Management
• 18:25 Self-Care Over Self-Comfort
• 21:38 Embracing a Growth Mindset
• 25:59 Harnessing Anger for Change
• 29:37 Future Self vs. Present Self
• 31:55 Recap and Closing Thoughts
• 38:31 The Power of Asking Questions
• 40:23 Overcoming Negative Self-Talk
• 42:11 Energy Management Strategies
• 47:52 Prioritization and Time Management
• 1:02:11 Saying No and Setting Boundaries
• 1:08:11 Balancing Structure and Flexibility
• 1:11:18 Pathological Demand Avoidance
• 1:12:43 Staying Motivated with Mundane Tasks
• 1:17:05 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

 Welcome, welcome, welcome everyone to the Men's ADHD Support Group. My name is Shane Thrapp, Operations Director for the non profit Men's ADHD Support Group, and I just wanted to say thank you for everybody who was able to make it, and I wanted to say a special thank you to Alan P. Brown for joining us tonight.

Alan P. Brown is the founder of ADD Crusher TV. He is an ADHD Productivity Coach, and he has really given us something really cool tonight. He's gonna be talking about Five Mindset Shifts For More Doing and Less Stressing. And I just really, really want to say that  this has been a really fun conversation with him.

 Just a heads up. There's a little, wonkiness with the audio about four or five minutes in his headphones kind of cut out. So we had to switch audio. So you'll hear that shift. Sorry for those with sound processing issues.  But with that being said, Alan, I really want to say thank you for coming and we really appreciate the support that you give the Men's ADHD Support Group and let's get started brother.

 

Great. Thank you. And thanks everybody for being here. So let me share my screen  and I designed this. I just got this new jacket and I designed my power point to sort of be a middle point between these two colors there.  

The Power of Mindset Shifts

So listen, this is Five Mindset Shifts  For More Doing and Less Stressing. Yes, I am Alan P. Brown. I'm an ADHD productivity coach. I'm a business coach to other coaches and I'm the speaker slash author. It's my number one best selling book Zen and the Art of Productivity.

Some of you may know me as the creator of ADD Crusher.  at ADD crusher dot com where you can get my free ebook. Five things we're doing every day that make our ADHD worse. And yes, my friends, we're all doing them all. All of them.  I'll have another goodie to share with you later on. And this presentation is a preview of my proposed presentation to the 2024 International Conference on ADHD.

Ten simple mindset shifts for more doing and less dressing. So this is a preview. Today I'll be sharing with you five of my favorites. Now,  what got me interested in mindset shifts? I'm going to define that in a little bit. Years ago, I watched a public television special By Dr. Wayne Dyer, some of you may have heard of him, personal development guy.

And it was called Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life. And I bought the companion CD set, I still listen to it once in a while.  His main premise was, if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Ah, that's like a mindset shift.

And I thought, now that's a powerful concept that I can use. And his content was based on the 2000 year old Tao Te Ching, which I recently tried to reread. And it's still way too deep for me. But, I was intrigued by some of Dyer's interpretations, and I began experimenting with some simple mindset shifts.

Understanding Simple Mindset Shifts

Now, what exactly do I mean by simple mindset shifts? Well, if you know anything about me, you know that I like science and evidence based strategies, and I'm all about simple, learn it today, do it tomorrow, do it now.  Hacks, solutions, et cetera. So I'm not talking about dramatically altering, for instance, one's psychological relationship to a major trauma or overcoming low self esteem or becoming Tony Robbins or a triathlete.

I focus on smaller, easier shifts that can help us now in the moment in our daily doings. I'll just give you one very quick example, several few examples, but first, let's just think about this.  You're driving at night, it's raining out and you're all alone and you get a flat tire  and you have to get out of the car and you have to, you know, if you don't have AAA or something, you got to go and you got to, get the spare out and the tools out and you have to do all this stuff and you could be, this sucks, I can't believe this happened to me, I hate this, I'm getting wet, I'm cold, I'm getting my clothes dirty, this sucks, this sucks,  Or you could be, you know what? 

This happens to people all the time and it just happens to me. And it just happened to me right now. And so I can either make a big deal about this or I can just change the tire. I don't have to be happy about it. But  neither do I need to be, you know, throwing a hissy fit and if you just make that shift, I'm not saying it's easy, but that's a simple mindset shift that will burn less energy, probably get the job done more quickly, and then just not have all that negative, you know, neurochemistry going around your body.

Now in the world of ADHD  productivity,, when we start Our day by looking at our long to do list and our endless email inbox, and we feel totally overwhelmed because all these to do's feel urgent and threatening. We're in a kind of a holy crap.

I'm so overwhelmed mindset, right, which the science tells us increases our cortisol production reduces our oxygen to our brain. Which makes it more difficult to prioritize or think about our many to dos, let alone do any of them.

Which, again, when you, when we get freaked out about something, we're in that mindset, it's like, holy crap mindset. 

Mindset Shifts in Action

We are making it more difficult to do what we need to do, and we have a choice to continue freaking out, or we can learn to pause and realize, for instance, that, hey, in reality, of all these to dos and unanswered email, none is actually a problem right here in the now. 

 Right. So none of us has a real problem right here in the now. Otherwise, we'd already be taking care of it, right? If my sister called me and she said, I'm on the Jersey turnpike and it's raining and I'm all alone here and my phone battery is about to die. Can you send Joey Spoons? I'm gonna have to take that call.

There is a real Joey Spoons. I was just talking to him earlier today. And if you call him and you got something you need done, he'll go do it. I kid you not.  Seriously, if that were happening right now, I would get up, have to excuse myself. That's a real problem now. But when we look at our long to do lists and our long email inbox, we get freaked out and we go, I got all these problems and I need to handle all these right now.

But rarely. Is there were actual an actual problem sit, you know, right here in the now, right? So I hope that that makes it. That's a little mindset shift getting into the now. All right. Next.  Okay. And by the way, another way to look at this, too, is in addition to, you know, we're all sitting here right now, and none of us has a problem.

Otherwise we wouldn't be here right now. But also last night we each slept hopefully seven or eight hours and all of our problems. All of our crises. Sat unattended to all night long while we,  you know, just slept like a bunch of, you know, slackers. But then we wake up this morning, we go, Oh my God, here are all these problems.

Well,  why were we sleeping for eight hours if they were real problems? All right. So, There are no problems here in the now so we can shift to a it's okay dude, right? There's no problem here in the now. That's a better mindset. All right. So the couple of examples of right in the moment. So, and that can give us the opportunity if we can get into that now.

to just be more in that mindset, right? Now, some mindset shifts like these two that I've shared you use them in the moment, but some mindset shifts you work on over time to ingrain that mindset. 

The Science Behind Gratitude

And a great example of that is what's known as a daily gratitude practice. There's plenty of research on this, but by taking just a minute or two each day to write down three new things for which you're grateful.

You do that for 21 plus days in a row. I'm going to quote the research quote, your brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive. First,  you actually rewire your brain. Allowing it to work more optimistically and more successfully. Our brain at positive, when it's optimistic, is 31 percent more productive than our brain at negative, neutral, or stress.

Salespeople perform 37 percent better. Doctors are 19 percent faster and more accurate at coming up with correct diagnoses when positive instead of negative neutral stress. All right. So you can tell I love science. I love the science. So just based on these few examples, do you think that a number of mindset shifts might be able to help you with productivity, time management, beating the overwhelm, attitude and mood, even better relationships, maybe, or as Shane said, getting shit done. With things like this, or at the very least,  more doing and less stressing, which is sort of the subtitle of our presentation. 

Principles for Successful Mindset Shifting

Now, two important principles with regard to having success in your mindset shifting.

First of all it can be hard, but  it is way easier than you think.  And if you think about this, we shift how we feel about things and people all the time. A very quick example when I was working in New York at one of the big agencies I worked for, I kind of had the hots from a distance for this Other account executive and I asked my boss who was her former boss.

Hey, what do you think about carol? Do you think that blah blah blah? She said well, i'll check with her. She came back a few days later and said nah, she's not interested Alan. I said, ah, that's too bad But two weeks later this hot babe was online at the New York Opera to get tickets. And right behind her was another colleague of ours.

And they started talking and it turns out that Carol had just gotten back from a trip to Vietnam. She went with her sister and she said, Oh Mike, our mutual colleague said, do you know Alan Brown? She just went, yeah. He says, well, he just got back from Vietnam too. And he went by himself and he did this.

He did that. He says, Oh, that's all of a sudden. I look like a different person now since she changed her mindset about me and then she just agreed to have a date and then we were hot and heavy for a while so anyway, that's we change our minds about people and things all the time.

So, new information or insights.  give you the opportunity or perspectives, the the opportunity for a mindset shift, right? And you've shifted your mind mindset countless times in bigger ways, right? You've had a child. Oh my goodness. You lost a loved one. You just gotten done taking care of your parent in hospice care or something.

You know, and, and all of a sudden, well, this other stuff doesn't matter. Those are serious mindset shifts. Right? Have you gotten an ADHD diagnosis? Might that have shifted your mindset about some things? All right. So what we're talking about today is shifting our mindset about our tasks and ourselves, right.

To help you get more done  and something that makes mindset shifting easier. is to embrace what I call imperfect consistency, right? When you're trying to adopt any new way of thinking or any habit for that matter, remember that you don't have to be perfectly consistent seven days a week or 52 weeks a year.

When you fall off, just keep getting back on that pony,  right? And over time, this is what you get. Which brings us to the second principle for success. And that is you gotta have a reminder system, right?

We all know this about our ADHD. We gotta have reminders, but if you're trying to do a mindset shift on something, you have got to have a reminder that's what you're up to, that you're trying to do this, right?  And it should be something that is in your face every day. I am working. I continue to work on this mindset shift.

This is my planner and here's the mind. 1 of the mindset shifts. I'm working on right now. You can see it says, but 1st, and then a line through it. So that means no, but 1st thing. And that, and then it says, get straight into action. What this tells me every morning, when I was the first thing I see every morning is, Alan, you do not go and do a bunch of miscellaneous stuff before you work on your one, one of your biggies this morning.

So that thing has been here for over a year. And until I own this mindset, until I don't need to look at this, it will stay there. And then today is over. So tomorrow  that will go there. There's Thursday, and that is where I will see it first thing tomorrow. So it's got to be in your face every day. And believe me, you're going to see some of these shifts and you're going to latch on hopefully to one or two and you want to come back to this.

All right, do what works for you. If it isn't, if this reminder, some reminder is not working, change it. Make it louder, make it bigger, make it in a different medium, et cetera. All right. It's whatever works for you. And I'm actually at the end, I'm gonna do a quick little treatment on how to make reminders work, and that can be applied to anything in our A DHD world.

I try to focus on one single sticky at a time,  as I mentioned and I talked about the one that, one of the ones that I'm working on now. I'm really working on like one and a half. All right, you combine that just a constant reminder with imperfect consistency and over time you're going to own that new mindset.

It's a great quote from, I forget who said it, so the name is here. Yeah, Clement Stone. Big doors swing on little hinges. You just keep swinging that door with them little hinges and over time you can't help but get big results. All right, let's dive into mindset shift number one. So here's a scenario. 

You've got your calendar set up. Maybe you're using a planner. You use alarms and reminders,  maybe you've been working those to do list apps and time management tools. All great things to try, by the way, but you still don't have enough time in your day to get anything important done.  

Energy Management vs. Time Management

I invite you to shift  from a time management mindset to an energy management mindset.

This is a shift I have made. Why? As Kevin Cruz wrote in Forbes, he's a great author. He's done a lot of great productivity books. Energy is everything. You can't make more minutes in the day, but you can increase and you can also renew your energy, which will increase your attention, your focus, your decision making and overall productivity.

Right. So more energy equals more willpower, getting to the gym more often, more quality time with your kids, getting that promotion, making more money, being happier. Another quote, this from Tony Schwartz of the energy project. He says, energy, not time is the fundamental currency of high performance. 

So how can we make this mindset ship? What does what does it look like? We'll start with a few simple things.  First of all,  Know your mentally strong and weak times, right? We all have relatively strong and relatively weak day parts. I am the crusher in the morning. I am a marshmallow at night or even in the afternoon late in the afternoon.

You have your strongest day part and you need to schedule your toughest tasks in that precious time and not be doing miscellaneous BS in your strong time. Save that stuff for your weaker time.  You got to guard your strong time. Block that off in your calendar. And don't be setting appointments or running errands in your strong time.

I've got mine blocked off 7 a. m. to 11 a. m. Because that's when I, my strong time is. And that's when I do my writing. I don't take doctor's appointments in there. I don't take meetings. I don't take clients and I don't run errands. I only try to reserve that on now. If the brain surgeon says, Alan, I can only work on your brain tomorrow at 8 30 a.

m. I'll begrudgingly say, All right, fine, but make it quick. All right. Here's another one before sitting down before a tough task. Do a work session ritual with protein. In brief, this means before you sit down to work on a tough or dreaded task, get 20 grams, of protein in your tummy.

Guzzle a pint of water to hydrate your brain and declare out loud what it is you're going to be working on. That's called an assertive declaration. Then, set your timer, take Hey, Siri, set a timer for one hour  and then go  right? Whenever you hit a wall, by the way, this is just one more thing in the energy.

You can see I'm not talking here other than this little alarm. I'm not talking about time management at all. I'm just talking about energy. All right. So when you hit a wall and you become tired, fatigued or frustrated or whatever. Use recovery rituals, which I'll explain in mindset shift numero dos. 

You've been working on something for a while and maybe even made some good progress, but then you hit a little wall and you decide just for a few minutes, I'm just going to check just real quick, just going to check a little social media, going to check the scores, hope the Mets are beating the Philadelphia Phillies et cetera.

Or, you know, I'm going to go check on my check my emails again, even though I checked in 15 minutes ago, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, just for a few minutes and then 15 or 20 minutes go by and you're like, oh, crap, I got to get back to that project. But now you're not feeling it so much because you have burned more energy doing this stuff, right?

So you blow it off till tomorrow, right? We blow it up this weekend. I'll get to it. So we need to shift from a self. 

Self-Care Over Self-Comfort

comfort mindset to a self care mindset. What do I mean?  Our outlaw brain, which is our primitive brain that drives many of our behaviors, it wants to avoid difficult work and it loves distractions.

That's our outlaw brain. Whether you've got ADHD or not, you've got an outlaw brain. Ours just  has bigger guns, let's just say.  So when we don't feel like working on that tough thing, we sense discomfort or we don't know how to do it, or we hit a wall of fatigue or frustration, we will take a break or we will avoid that difficult task.

But as I mentioned, these breaks tend to be escapes Into BS activity, social media, news, sports, games, other unimportant things that are comforting, right? But these self comforts are neither restful nor restorative. They are energy burners. What we need when we hit a wall is self care in the form of restorative breaks, not escapes into BS, but restoration,  what I call recovery rituals. 

A few very quick examples, get up and stretch for even 60 seconds. It gets your circulation going, fresh oxygen to your brain, tidy up your workspace. When you reset your environment, you basically reset your mind in your body. Get up and grab more water and protein. Energy mavens eat multiple small meals across their day.

I'm definitely in that camp.  Another good one. And there's plenty of research on this. Take a walk around the block, particularly if you Live where there's some green walk around the block and then come right back and get back to it Stay away from this thing These are self care because they save and restore your mental energy so you can get back to work and get shit done today  And nobody's saying you can't pursue your guilty pleasures, right?

But don't do them while avoiding legitimate work. Don't do these especially in your strong time, but don't do these things during your work hours, right? Do them in your mentally weak time of day, right? That's where you want to be. This is called guilt free time to do your, you know, zipping around on things.

There's nothing inherently evil, but set scheduled time for that, for those kinds of things. All right.  Next is mindset shift number three. All right,  we suck at this. We're terrible at that tech stuff. I'm useless keeping my kitchen organized forget about Being consistent with anything. I totally suck. So you don't want, why bother? 

What do you suck at? I would love if you got going to pop something in the chat, just right off the top of your head. I know tech for me is a thing that I suck at. That's why I sometimes need Shane's help. But Seriously, if there's something that really resonates with you, you know you suck at and whenever you think about it, you just go, I suck at that, right? 

And the terrible thing about this is that we're sort of beating ourselves up.  So  beating ourselves up is the opposite of your brain at positive, right? You're hobbling your mental performance. 

Embracing a Growth Mindset

So we want to go from, I suck at this, or I suck at that, or I suck at everything to, you know what? I'm trying, man. I am trying. So again, you beating yourself up because you suck at this or you blew it or whatever. It's just, it's, it's the opposite of self compassion. By the way, and you're hobbling your mental performance. And self compassion ain't, as some think, just a bunch of woo woo. If you look at the science, it's really quite powerful.

The simplest of self compassion interventions have been shown to decrease the odds of depression and increase general happiness, and it saves energy.  It saves energy, self compassion. So, I'm trying is self compassion. I suck at this, or I sucked at that, or whatever.

That's The opposite of self compassion, that's berating yourself. And this kind of mindset shift is akin to the growth versus fixed mindset, which Carol Dweck at Stanford uses to describe people's beliefs about their learning and intelligence. I'm sure you've all heard about this. Those with a growth mindset believe that quote, their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work.

That's a quote from Carol Dweck. Contrast that with a fixed mindset in which people believe they are either smart or dumb, lousy or great, and no amount of effort can change whichever it is that they see themselves as. And our research shows that those who embrace a growth mindset learn more, faster, and perceive failures as opportunities to improve. 

Belief is the key here. When we believe we can improve, we do. But constantly beating ourselves up, that I suck mindset, is self loathing, even worse than a fixed mindset. And here's how to start this mindset shift.  Watch your mind's language, right? After a setback or a screw up, we might think or say, I'm a failure.

I'm an idiot. I, I suck at this. And a lot of us do that under our breath, like literally sort of out loud under a breath. I used to say to myself, and I used to walk around doing this, you dummy, I used to say, you dummy, because that's what my alcoholic father called me when I screwed up.  For a while I thought my name was dummy.

Start trying to catch yourself in any kind of language like this and switch it to something like, Hey,  I'm trying. I just tried. I just put a lot of effort into that. Or I fail. I, you know, I, okay, I failed, but I'm going to try harder next time. Or I'm going to try to learn from this and watch especially what you call yourself.

Switch from any negatives like this dummy thing that I used to do to a term of endearment and like a positive nickname or.  As I do now, I say, Hey, buddy, you're trying to keep on trying to say, Hey, buddy, I call myself buddy. Now, just like I call my cat Livingston. Hey, buddy.  Yeah. How you doing, buddy? Yeah, he looked over.

All right.  The to paraphrase one of the top experts on self compassion. Name is Kelly McConagall. She says, Which self do you want to be tomorrow? The one that screws up doesn't meet your high expectations and doesn't deserve compassion, or the self that is your friend who's imperfectly, but ultimately, who's imperfect, but ultimately wants to and will do the right thing. 

Now we can take this mindset shift to the next level with mindset shift number four, and that is  That was my exercise along, but we're going to skip the exercise today. All right. So mindset mindset shift number four,  I was late again. I embarrassed myself and my daughter again. I lost my phone again.

I'm so humiliated, humiliated. I'm scrambling to finish that thing at the last minute. Once again,  I blew it yet again. Can, can anybody here relate?  Anybody here, you don't have to raise your hand, just nod your head, even though I can't see your head nodding. But, this is, this is classic, right?  I invite you to shift from an I blew it again mindset to an I am pissed off about this  mindset, right? 

Harnessing Anger for Change

Yes, get seriously pissed off about something from your recent past, whether days ago or just an hour ago, particularly something you did or continue to do that gets you really frustrated. And we're not talking about getting pissed off at yourself. We're getting pissed off at the result of what happened. 

See, every day, the reason pissed off is important is every day we generate a range of emotions, anger, joy, frustration, worry, et cetera. And these can be either an energy drain,  like, you know,  self loathing and beating yourself up, or they can be high octane fuel for our productivity, because most emotions have what's known as adaptive value, meaning they can be leveraged into correct action. 

Negative emotions in particular, anger, has massive adaptive value. Because at the heart of anger is an underlying sense that something has got to change. This cannot stand. That's what authorism, that's what, sorry, that is what anger is all about. There's a writer named Solera Green. She says,  Anger is the tip of passion.

You wouldn't get upset if you didn't care so much about whatever the thing was that you messed up. You lost keys again. You lost fun being late again. So if there's something that matters, there's some energy there to deal with it. She says, put the anger and its energy in front of you. What's triggering me?

What's underneath it? Why do I care about this? And what is it that I care about that's making me angry?  And how can I use that energy to move forward on this thing that's making me angry? So when you blow it again, instead of beating yourself up, get pissed off. Yeah, not at yourself, but at the results of, you know, the mess up. 

All right.  And then get fired up to, you know, about what must change. This must change. I did this. Years ago with regard to being late, I just got pissed off enough about the consequences of that. And I just started to, it was a mindset shift. I started to think differently and I would stop doing these silly things like, Oh, I got plenty of time or, Oh, you know, the traffic shouldn't be bad this time of day.

Or let me just listen to one more segment of that podcast or whatever that is. And I just quit because I got pissed off enough. I got pissed off enough. All right,  here we go with mindset shift is finally mindset shift number five  So  oh man, I gotta start on my taxes But hey, I still got two weeks and i'm not really feeling it right now So i'm going to start on it next week  and then two months later You're writing the check for the penalty fee and you're cursing yourself.

Why didn't I just start it back then?  the answer to that rhetorical question is You Temporal discounting where temporal refers to time and discounting refers to the fact that we discount or value less that which is further out into the future. All right. Gets us every time, right? Just think about the, the 32 year old saving for retirement.

Well, yeah, I got plenty of time versus the 52 year old. Holy crap.  I better get busy.  So. And this is something that we all do to some degree or another. It's a big reason for our procrastination. We comfort ourselves by saying, Oh, I'll have more energy tomorrow. Or yeah, no, I still got enough time, et cetera.

Future Self vs. Present Self

I invite you to shift from a present self mindset to a future self mindset.  See, we are hardwired to prioritize short term over long term needs. There's a top researcher at UCLA, his name is Dr. Hal Hirschfield. He says, we weren't designed to think into the further future. Again, this just goes back to our old brain, the outlaw brain.

We're not thinking about the future because he says, we needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now. And our brain has not evolved significantly since 200, 000 years ago. All right. So we default. to present self care.  But what present self does or doesn't do today impacts, of course, our future self.

And present self is more inclined to act on behalf of present self, i. e. your present self is always screwing over your future self.  Hirschfield's research even suggests that we tend to view our future self as a stranger.  And he did this with brain imaging. He says, when we procrastinate, parts of our brain actually think that the tasks we're putting off are somebody else's problem. 

I can see how that takes place in my brain. If I am doing temporal dim, go, yeah, now worry about the other me or that whoever that person  is going to deal with that the night before we'll deal with it then, right?  All right, and present self will happily escape into TikTok or news headlines or needless email checking. 

Then the night before that project is due, your future self is infuriated, right? Why didn't I start this sooner? What was I thinking?  But here's the good news.  Research shows that the more we think about our future self  The more responsibly our present self will act.  So next time you catch yourself kicking back and saying, I don't feel like doing that right now.

And I still have plenty of time. Invoke your awareness of temporal discounting and make this shift, this mindset shift, by asking your present self, Hey, how is future me going to feel about present me blowing this off? That is enough often to change course, per the research. 

Recap and Closing Thoughts

to help prompt that maybe put a little sticky somewhere where you'll see it every day that just says what about my future self a number of my group coaching peeps have done that to great effect and you know put that somewhere where you'll see it whenever you're working all right  okay and to keep these all fresh in your magnificent minds let's just do a real quick Mindset shifts recap.

All right, time from time management to energy management. Your single best time management tool is knowing and guarding your mental energy strong time. Plus a couple other things I shared. Two, shift from self comfort to self reliance. To self care. Stop taking comforting escape breaks and start taking restorative breaks.

Get outside and walk around the block. You can then be more likely to come back, sit down and bang out some real work. Three shift from I suck to Hey, I suck. I'm trying  for shift from. I blew it again, too. I am pissed off about it. I don't know if you caught that. I try to mumble that soft. And number five shift from present self care. 

Oh, man, I got plenty of time to future self.  Right? What if, how pissed off am I going to be at 11 o'clock the night before, etc, etc, by simply thinking through how you're screwing yourself over.  And any one of these will bring you the gift of more doing and less stressing. And with that, a bit, just a bit of closing advice.

Our friend Bruce Lee says, knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do. So I'm all about taking action on things that we've learned and I've just shared. You know, a handful of simple mindset shifts that could really help you in the coming months and years. And I hope you've taken some good notes on all of them, right?

But I invite you to forget them all, except for just one. I usually, when I do a presentation, I say, I invite you to forget them all, except for maybe two, but in this, because we're talking about mindset shifts, I really suggest if you got fired up about one of these really resonated with you, Just create  a sticky note or something, some way to remind you to try to work that inconsistently being imperfectly consistent.

Try to work that mindset shift over time. You're gonna own the mindset shift, right? So really it's the, it's one thing to learn something new. It's another thing entirely to implement something new, let alone build a new habit around it. We must focus in on one thing at a time, especially when trying to adopt a new mindset.

Alright, so looking again at the.  the five here,  which one just think about and you don't have to put it in chat or anything, but just, or if maybe you want to I'd be curious to know, which one mindset shift will you work to adopt? Right. And then you can just, you can print this out.

You can watch the, if there's a replay or whatever, or you can do a screenshot of this right here, and you can come back to the other four. Once you feel maybe you've made some progress,   and here's one, one key principle for success in shifting that mindset. Again, you got to have that reminder. So I'm just going to share real quick that remember this principle number two, we need reminders.

Stickies  can be effective, but they quickly become invisible. As you guys, I'm sure know that's why you may have a thousand stickies all over the place, none of which you actually see. But you got to keep a reminder of your desired mindset shift in your face and see it daily.

So work on one mindset shift at a time, create brightly colored stickies or other reminders. You know,  this is not a bland color. Here are a couple others. These aren't mindset shift stickies. But I like brightly colored ones because I don't want them to become invisible.  What else here? Keep in your line of sight, but isolate it from  your other gazillion reminders. Don't stick it in there with a bunch of other ones on the bulletin board. And then if it becomes invisible ask.

Is this thing that I'm trying to do, is it still relevant to me? Because it may not be. And don't joke, don't waste your time on something that's not relevant to you anymore. Or that frankly, you know what? I'm not having luck with it. No problem. Get rid of it. Don't have a bunch of, a bunch of reminders that aren't reminding you of anything that's of interest to you.

All right, change it, move it or anchor it to an existing routine or behavior. What do I mean by that? You know, if you make coffee every morning, like a lot of folks do if you were to stick, if you wanted to really make sure you saw this sticky every day, you go put this sticky on your coffee pot.

So that every morning when you go to the coffee pot to make your coffee. Oh, that's right. That's I'm trying to do this thing. All right. So  here's a freebie in addition to that ebook that I mentioned on addcrusher. com. This is from my presentation last year at the ADHD international conference where I shared small and easy things that get big results.

So this is the cheat sheet for that. Now it looks like a lot, but they're all, each of them is literally a small and easy thing to do and literally gets big results. And in each of these You'll see the the back a little bit of sort of context what it is You're going to put into action and then what the results are that you could potentially get from it So you can either scan that or just go to ad crusher.

com slash easy with that Let me shut up at least until I get a question and forgive my weird sunlight coming in over here. So and I apologize again for the sound thing. I got to figure that one out. How can I be of service to you? I hope you got lots of questions and Shane, if you can help me because I'm a very painfully slow reader and I might get lost. 

First off, thank you so much for the presentation. I'm going to definitely take the energy management because it's something that I think about constantly. However, I keep forgetting about it constantly as well. We did get some questions from a couple of people in the chat, but they didn't want to say them out loud.

So I'll ask those here in a little bit. But just kind of open this up to the group. If anybody has any questions that you want to ask out loud or anything like that feel free to raise your hand and we will call on whoever asks.

Don't be bashful. By the way, my favorite questions are the ones that Begin, well, this is sort of a silly question. 

The Power of Asking Questions

Is this kind of a stupid question? They always end up being the best questions.

So if you're like, I don't know man. Everybody's gonna think i'm  Go for it. You're good. You're probably gonna end up with some gold  And you'll be in my question asking hall of fame.  

There you go. All right, gary. Go ahead with your question boss  

All right, so, I am curious and by the way, I love your presentation.

Thank you. And I love your energy as well. We don't always get a lively and engaging presentations, you know, within this world and I don't mean our organization, but, you know, within the, a lot of the  ADHD stuff's kind of, 

Overcoming Negative Self-Talk

bland, I'd say.  for the extra flavor today and the pizzazz.  I, you know, a lot of what you talked about is related to negative self talk and, you know, the crippling negative self talk, which  I certainly was overwhelmed by that most of my life until I started practicing mindfulness, like hardcore for years and years and, and practicing self compassion and self care.

 And I  like all but got rid of that negative self talk,  yet   I still feel there's like a very subtle I'm calling it somatic,  overwhelmed and,  the things that, you know, all the ADHD blockages,  if something feels like homework to me, I'm just gonna put it off to the last minute,  that kind of thing.

So. It's really hard to pinpoint until after the fact, you know, I mean what like my  job that i'm at right now  I'll just i'll distract myself doing a whole bunch of little small jobs and at the end of the day It's like oh,  you know that there was you know that that and that the big to do list stuff.

I didn't do it again  So, I'm just curious, you know, without the, without that kind of obvious negative self talk if you have any kind of advice or any kind of strategy  or trick or something like that, that I could 

I like that you're coming at this from really two angles. One is that negative self talk angle, but also on a more practical angle. 

From a more practical angle, which is, I get done at the end of the day. I've been working all day and I go, Oh my God, I did these miscellaneous things. I still haven't done. I've managed to avoid, you know, these big important things. And that is, in part because of the negative self talk that negative.

Energy Management Strategies

And this is why I'm a really big fan of energy management because.  The less energy we have, the less fueled we are. And when I say fuel, I'm talking diet, you know, protein, hydration, you know, no sugar and carbs, but also exercise and sleep. Those are brain fuelers, right? But the less well we do on that, the more susceptible we are to the negative thinking to the negative self talk and to the resignation.

You know what? Screw it. I'm not going to deal with this now. Let me go work on these other little easier things that don't cause me any discomfort or whatever. But coming back to the energy thing, I just, I want to take off a couple real quick things with regard to energy. First of all, again, do you know when your mentally strongest time is of the day? 

Yeah. Like, Five to 8 p. m.  

I knew you're going to the moment you sort of laughed. I was like, so maybe there is something you can do with that. I don't know what it is. I don't know the nature of your job. But if there is a way for you to maybe do a little bit of work on one of your tough projects in that time and not be doing, you know, what most people are doing five to eight, which is probably eating dinner and watching some TV or whatever. 

But just consider that. And see if you can identify a second strongest, you know, time. It may not be ideal, you may have, but maybe you need to experiment with it. But what we really want to do is we want to sort of, martial up The best energy we could have at a given time of day and say I am only going to work on One of my biggies one of those tough things and by the way I don't have to finish that thing All I got to do is get in and start it and if I work on it for 32 minutes, I am fucking thor Sorry about that freaking thor.

Seriously, and if you do that You lay yourself off the hook from having to finish or having to accomplish a lot or just I should be able to get this all done Why can't I you know what i'll try it over the weekend when I have more blah blah No, just get in there and start it and just blast away and You know kick the can after 20 minutes you get the score and I Victory and go.

All right. You know what? I just did that for a little while Let me see if I can do a little restoration go walk around outside or whatever or just get up go top off my coffee or do some stretching or a power pose or whatever and then come back and maybe give it another shot I love setting the timer.

I love asking Siri to say, you know, to set a timer for me so that I go, all right, because I still got 31 minutes left on this thing, man,  just that 31, I could have gotten a lot done in that 29 minutes, right? That just, so anyway,  don't give up. I suggest that  you look into the energy side of things. I think there's a great opportunity for you.

And again, I say that because the energy supports both your psyche  And your ability to do the heavy lifting when you need to. Great question. Great stuff. And  well articulated, I'd say too. Nicely done.  

Well, thank you. And that I would say that was a solid fucking gold. So thank you.  

You know, so a few years ago I developed fibromyalgia in 2018, and it was just kind of one of those things where  your body kind of dictates what you're going to be capable of doing, because once it hits a certain point, Stress and frustration and general things are going to start causing pain, right?

And energy management really became a big part of my focus. Then it's just because    at some point my body's going to just stop and I'm not, I'm not going to be able to do anything. And so I really appreciate that you bringing that up. It really resonated really strongly with me. And it just, it's one of those things where I just keep having to come back and reminding myself, because I know that if I don't.

My body will. Yeah. And just, it's really unfortunate whenever that stuff happens. 

Yeah. Hats off to all of our peeps who battle autoimmune  chronic fatigue, chronic pain stuff. And I'll tell you, it would be no coincidence that, and I work with a fair number of folks battling one, one kind or another  of one of these conditions.

And we of course, focus most on energy management. We're not playing around with, you know, time management tools and this and that. We are just focused on where can I get some energy? And sometimes it's very unpredictable where your energy shows up. So sometimes we, we develop a little system to sort of gauge our energy at a given time and see what kind of work can be done then.

So yay for you for figuring that out quickly, I guess you were.  

You talk about the gratitude journal. Part of my journal is like, as a one to 10 scale, what's my pain level? What's my energy level. And  I have to circle it. Then I get to take that to my doctor and say, Hey, I had three weeks where I was really solid sixes and sevens as far as productivity, but then I also had two weeks where I was also at five and my pain level and  it just really helped me really gauge.

Also what you said about when are you most productive and when are you able to be most productive?  Gaging that out and being able to look at that trend that I had what really helped me out with that. So really solid on that 1. got a couple of questions in the chat, but I did somebody did ask this 1.

I want to go ahead and ask it.  they also appreciate the energy versus time management thing. They said their biggest struggle is how to prioritize things that they need to get done. And how much that they can get done in a day. 

I love that. I love both of those. 

Prioritization and Time Management

So let's let's talk about prioritization on a micro level. And I mean, that's like a day in, day out, like, okay, what's going on today? What should I work on today? Because the macro level is when somebody, when you're asking the big prioritization question, the first thing I go to, what is your goal, right?

What is it you're trying to accomplish at your job or in your life or in your side hustle, whatever, but I'm, we're just going to go with the, the my flow. Level here. And that is what we what we want to be able to do is have a morning pause. I don't know if you have that in your life, but I can tell you that every super successful every CEO, every super productive person has.

Some kind of morning ritual or what I like to call it a pause and plan because it doesn't sound as Oh my god, I got to do a ritual. I got to sit on a bed of nails for 45. No it just means you're going to pause before you dive into your emails Maybe it's while that coffee is brewing Maybe there's a little sticky you put on your coffee maker that says pause and plan so that when you see the coffee maker You're like All right, while that coffee's brewing, I'm going to sit down and just do these three questions.

All right. And Shane, remember the second, I'll need you to remind me of the second part of this because it was something intriguing. I'd forgotten what it was when I dove into this end of it. So, the three questions to ask ourselves, and they only take about 60 seconds. Question one is, What's going on today? 

Where do I need to be? Where do I need to show up and at what time? Right? We've got to pause to just ask that. And I won't go into the many benefits of it, but some of them should be obvious. I will less be less likely to forget things and to be late for things, right? But just doing that gives us a sense of the day, of what is good, what the shape of the day is. 

And then question number two is all right. Great. I know where I got to be for other people or for meetings or errands. I got everyone.  Where is there a block of time or two maybe where I can work on the me stuff and the me stuff is our biggies the stuff that We know we got to do the tends to get pushed.

Oh, well, I ran out of time today. I couldn't work on that big fricking thing. So where is there some blocks of time and ideally a block of time in my mentally strong time where I can work on one of my me things, one of my biggies. And then the third question is simply, okay, I've got this. I'm pretty strong in the morning from say eight to 11.

I've got this block of time from nine to 11. So I'm going to work on. Okay. What? What is the one? That's the third question. What's the one thing I'm going to work on in that strong time doesn't mean you have to work those whole two hours. It just means that at nine o'clock, you're going to sit down and you're going to begin work on it.

So that's just one little quick snippet on a micro prioritization thing. Shane, what was the second part of that? 

The second part of the question was how can they get a better idea of how much stuff they can get done in a day? 

Okay, so this is really key. And let's start with the reality that what we tend to do is we, we love to plan out the perfect day, right?

Hey, yeah, I planned out my day. I planned out my whole week and Monday from this time to that time I'm doing that and I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And so first of all,  that never works because life never happens the way we plan it.  I forget who it was that, that some professor somewhere said that, any plan becomes obsolete.

Obsolete, obsolete, the moment it comes into contact with reality. So you can plan the perfect morning, and the odds are it's not gonna go exactly like that. So first of all, stop pretending that you can plan the perfect day. It will, it never works out. The second thing that we do all the time is we do magical thinking we go Well, I should be able to do this here  and that there and it should only take me this long to do blah blah blah blah We human beings, ADHD or not, are terrible at projecting how long it will take for us to do anything.

I don't know how long it will take for me to write an article or a presentation or a blog or even a social media post. I really don't know. And so I never assume, hey, I should be able to do this in this amount of time. Now that may seem crazy, or it may seem like a very unsatisfying answer, But I just prefer to go with that reality.

And so I put emphasis on not worrying about what's going to be the perfect day. I try to keep keep it light and loose. I don't try to do more than two biggies a day. I have a little space in my planner for biggies. And you can see yesterday, I'm sorry, today, two biggies, Day before that, one bit, two biggies, day before that, two biggies, day before that, one biggie.

I used to do three biggies because that's what the rule of thumb is in productivity. I don't do it anymore. Why? Because I wasn't working on the third biggie. So why am I putting it in my account? Right.  And then, so what I target is not accomplish this or get this done. I just accomplish. Do, I just target.

Do a work session on this, just like I was saying for Gary, just set that time and I'm just going to go work on that. And now you're not worried about whether you can finish it or not. Now you're not sitting here looking at the clock on, Oh my God, how am I going to fit? Now you get dispirited and you go, you know what?

I'm not going to be able to finish it in time. So let me just do it on Saturday. And then you have it carried. You know, carried along into the next week or whatever, stop doing that. Just set time for you to be sitting down with a work session, ritual, hydration, your hot beverage of choice, 20 grams of protein in here, pocket full of Ritalin.

If that's your drug of choice, right. And then just start working on  

it. I love that. That definitely echoes a lot of the stuff that I have to do. Now one of the things that I want to say, thank you, by the way, because I learned this from you was that pause in the morning, you wrote a blog on it.

I want to say last year, but I don't hold me to that. But my thing is Alexa.  I have it in every room of my house.  And what I do is every morning at 9. 30, which I start work at 10, she goes off in my entire household. Shane, look at your calendar and your to do list for the day.  And at night, she does the same thing.

Because I got things done through the day that may not have been on my list, and I make sure to put them on my list so that I feel like I actually accomplished something. That's 

great.  

But it's that stop and pause in the morning and that stop and pause in the evening, which makes me feel more prepared for the day and less stressed out.

So I learned that from you and I wanted to say thank you for that. 

And this is a great example of, What happens when you get somebody who's tech savvy? Of course you do. It never would have occurred to me in a million years to use, Siri or Alexa to provide that reminder. Never in a million years.

Me, I'm like, I don't want to have nothing to do with these machines. All right, good stuff. 

Alexa is my second wife because she tells me to do when to do all my chores and things like that because I can yell at her and tell her to shut the fuck up. If I did that with my wife, I would be on a murder show in 10 years whenever they sit here and say she snapped.

So, now we got a question in the chat so. My wife and I are both newly diagnosed ADHD. What is the best way we can encourage each other in shifting our mindsets? 

Wow.  Well, the great news is that you guys, you know, you were already partners.

Now you've got this other thing to partner around,  so being on this journey together, you are, I think that you're way, way better off than, for instance, a couple where one is ADHD and the other is not because that can create a lot of friction. Sometimes it works but I just think that you're better off fighting this fight together.

And so, What I like to do and my wife is she's not clinically ADHD, but she's got some of the traits She's definitely a little she's her brain is a little bit more organized than mine. But What we do is we like to make What we call personal policies they're like little contracts or little agreements. 

And so for instance, we just made an agreement this afternoon that Livingston over there a little hairless Sphinx cat does not get any more cream. It's sort of a little indulgence and we just never neither of us ever We just agree. We're never doing it again. I know that sounds trivial another one that we do is we're wine lovers.

 Like high end Wine and just ridiculous, but I have a policy that I do not drink wine during the week only am I allowed to drink on the weekends and i'm only good for like a glass and a half two glasses tops anyway  But we made a personal policy that we will only drink during the week if we have friends over or if it is a holiday and that has worked pretty good.

Alcohol doesn't affect her as much as it affects my sleep and my productivity the next day. So she cheats a little bit during the week, but I'm okay with that because she's still. You know my accountability buddy on it. So I invite you the two of you to identify One mindset shift that you want to try to work, right?

And it may not be one of the ones that that I shared it may be something that you guys came up Well, I want to shift shift my mind from from this kind of attitude to to whatever Make a big deal of it. Put, let's put them on the refrigerator. Like here's what I'm doing. Here's what you're doing. I mean, seriously, it may sound silly, but this little stuff, these little reminders and that, that sort of agreement, that little contract that you make is, can be super, super powerful and work on it together and hold each other accountable.

Say, Hey man, and you don't, you never get like, you didn't do your thing. It's more like. Hey, you didn't do that thing, you know what i'm saying? And you don't have to do it in a jersey accident if you don't want I mean It's more effective if you do it that way because there'll be less fucking around people want if you're doing you do that thing It's gonna I think that's a lot better.

Hey, did you do that thing? You know  I'm, just saying. All right. Good question. Thank you for asking 

Oh, man, I hear you so another question that just popped up is how do you feel about the pomodoro method as a way to kickstart productivity? 

Yeah, it's, it's great. And I'd say I've never used the Pomodoro, but I'm a fan of the concept.

And what I do is I basically do the Pomodoro with Siri over here, I've got 16 and a half minutes left on my thing, but I'm doing a Pomodoro. three times every day. Because I'm saying, Hey, what's your name? Set a timer for one hour. And then I have, the sort of the pressure or the challenge to stay in this task for one hour.

And then when that goes off, if I've got a little more energy, I just hit repeat, right? If I'm done with that thing, I hit stop.  One of the limitations with the Pomodoro, as I understand it, is that it gives you 25 minutes on five minutes off. Well, what if you're 25 minutes in and you just, you're like, you're in motion, you're doing great.

You're in the flow. You don't want that thing going off and interrupting me and saying, hey, take a break. So,  I feel like you can if the pomodoro works and you want that little tomato thing, God bless you. Go for it. But I feel that if you get serious about using a timer that you can have the same sort of effect.

I will say that that part of the the methodology of the pomodoro is that five minute break. And what's cool about that is what they want you to do is do something other than that work. Ideally something that's restorative  so that you're taking a little bit of a break and then coming back to another 25 minute work session.

So if you're not going to use the Pomodoro technique,  per se, make sure that when you, that alarm goes off and you do need a little break, that you are doing something restorative, not an escape, not something that is just going to burn more. Come on. Even my phone doesn't want to talk to me anymore.

You know, not something that's going to burn a bunch of gas in here and will not, will not have you feeling like returning to the task. But again, walking around outside, getting up, getting some more protein, et cetera. Great question. 

Yeah, and that's one of those things that I see a lot of people having that issue is like, why do I have to do the 25 minutes?

Because what if I hit the groove, right? And I'm like, okay, cool. Do 35 minutes or 40 minutes. The 25 and five is only because they're trying to play in you for one hour's worth of work. Like that's the whole concept around it.  You can be ADHD about it and do whatever the heck you want. There's nothing wrong with that.

You're it's just a, it's just a gate. It's just a starter. For whatever productivity system works for you, whatever 

works for you,  never spoken. That really is key for all of us. You know, if you're a tech guy like Shane man, but if you're a non tech guy like me, don't don't try to force technology upon yourself.

Kind of thing, whatever works for you. 

Yeah, there's actually, I got a little octagon clock that I just flip it and it restarts the timer, flip it again to, you know, to set the timer for my rest time and then flip it again. Like, because I don't want to sit here and just say Alexa every 30  minutes and it's annoying, so it's just easier to use that.

So there's plenty of analog systems out there for that as well. I love your cat. My wife hates those cats.  . She won't let me get one. 

I think you showed me that, that little eight roll. Mm-Hmm. . 

Yeah, I did. Yep. Yeah. Got another question just popped up in private. So I'll ask it real quick. This one,  no.

Okay. This fits I find it hard to say no to requests from others, even if I'm already overwhelmed with my own stuff.  

Saying No and Setting Boundaries

How do I manage saying no to people?  

Yeah,  that's me too.  It's it's something that in a way, it was a good thing when I was in the corp, when  I was an ad exec for many years in New York city.

And being the guy who's like, yeah, I'm down with that. Yeah. I'll help you with that. Of course I worked long hours. Work weekends, but, that was my, I was gonna be doing that anyway because I just take so long to do everything. So I've always worked long hours. But yeah, especially when we're working for ourselves or when we are already overwhelmed at our job.

Let's first just talk about the, the reasons that might be for this.  I'll just tell it from my perspective. Low self esteem feeling valueless  until a certain point in my career when I realized, hey, I actually, I could do a few things, and not wanting to offend anybody, not liking confrontation, not wanting to say no to anybody because you don't want people to judge you or think this of you or not like you or whatever.

All that stuff, man, made it real easy for me to say yes and real hard to say no.  What I learned over time was a serious a handful of non no no's.  So ways to say no without saying no,  the ways to say no without saying no. One of them is just, you know, what?  Okay. I would love to help you with that.

Let me check my calendar or let me check with so and so. Let, just let me check.  Right now that requires a little bit of impulse control because you may be impulsive and go. Yeah, of course Yes, i'll help you with that But if we can just build in a little bit of a pause when we hear somebody asking us for something just go You know what man i'd love to help you with that.

But I I got to check with my so and so or I got to check with my wife or I got to check with Whatever that is  So that's a really good one. And you may end up deciding, hey, you know what, I can help, or I want to help with this, but it allows you to, put a little bit of a cushion in there so you can think about it more.

But also you've already said when you say, let me check, it means that you need to go and consult with another authority. So it sort of allows you to do the good cop, bad cop thing. You know, you can say, my cat.  It's funny, I've been studying Italian again because I just went to Italy. And there's this whole little exercise on the app that says but I can't  because my cat needs me.

It's  really funny, like excuses why I can't go to the party because my cat needs me. I won't try to do the Italian, but you know, to have a good cop, bad cop thing. Another thing that we can do, and by the way, the other thing that happens when you that is you are signaling that you are busy. And so further to that,  What you can do is say, you know what?

Let me look at, let me look at my workload or let me look at my calendar.  Etc. That one is a great one too. It's related but that's a great one too because you are again signaling I have a bunch of other priorities. I would love to help you. I just want to check on this Let me take a look at my workload.

Let me take a look at my calendar Let me see what i'm doing that week or whatever that is And you it makes it a lot easier for you to come back and say, I'm, you know what, I'm so sorry. I would love to help you with that. But that, you know, those days I have to be working. I have to be finishing up this so and so.

Can I help? Maybe I can help you with something else at another time. And then the last one, there are a bunch of these. I'm just going to share one more. And that is the yes.  But and so I use this a lot  in back in the ad agency days where I would go, You know what?  I can help you with this part of it.

But after that, I'm not going to be able to help. So if  I can help you get it started. And then maybe you hand it off to so and so or whatever. Or I can help so and so with this part of it. So there can be ways to say no without saying no, non, no, no.  Yeah, 

that is very helpful. It is. It's one of those things that I really people pleasing.

That's our thing, right? That's one of the things that we really enjoy doing. And there's some ways where it's okay. Right. We make really attentive partners for a lot of situations. One of my things though, is always clarifying questions. Cause you kind of talked about it, but my favorite is like, no problem.

When do you want it done? And how well do you want it done?  Right. Because if they come to me and say, Hey, I need this done as soon as possible. All right, cool.  How well do you want it done? 

Yeah, 

well, I needed, you know, I needed, I needed a perfect copy, right? Say a blog, like, you know, okay, cool. You know,  if you want it done in two days, I don't have the time to do it in two days.

I can't give you a perfect copy. I could get you a rough draft. In an hour, if you wanted, that's how much time I've got right and I'm kind of giving them the understanding. I am very busy. If you want me to just run out a real rough draft for you to clean up. Cool. I got you there. But if you want it perfect, and I don't have the time, can't really help you check with Evelyn in HR.

She does that kind of stuff. 

And if you take that 1 to just 1 level high, the next level of that 1 is. I would, I would love to  and this came up just recently because I was asked to be on the board for something.

And I said, you know what? I would love to be on the board for this organization, but I just don't feel I can do with the time I have available. I don't think I'm going to be very good at it. I will, and if I'm going to do that, I want to be able to dive all in and really kick ass on this thing. So that's another way to say, you're saying no, but you're, you're giving a legit reason on that.

All right. More questions. All right. Let me see. I  wrote down one.  Oh,  okay. This is a good one. Thank you very much for asking this one. 

Balancing Structure and Flexibility

 I know routines can be helpful, but I resist them because they feel restrictive.  How do I find a balance between the structure and flexibility? 

Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask  the, the writer of the question.

Are you a rebel? You can see yourself a little bit of a rebel. So you don't have to answer that. 

I paraphrased. There's some language that was being used in that way. 

So this is this is a pretty common thing. It's definitely not a majority of folks that I work with, but it's a very common. I'd say 10 to 15 percent of folks. I work with had this. rebel thing where any,  any suggestion of a routine  or a pattern I have to fit into or some regularity with which I have to do this or a certain way of doing it or something that someone else has asked me to do because someone else has asked me to do is like I bristle.

At being told what to do and or I bristle at just the idea of I have to be part of a some routine. What am I? I'm not a machine. I want to have the freedom. Now, some of that may come from and I was just working with someone in my group coaching about this this because she has a real real is serious issue with routine.

And so I, I suggested that. It may be that may come from sort of the rebel thing because they're definitely people that are rebels and even when they assign themselves something and say i'm going to do this tomorrow at this time they get to that time tomorrow and they go who am I to tell me what to do i mean i'm serious so and they keep revolting and rebelling but The thing that I, I asked folks to investigate is, is a reason that you are sort of bristling at routine,  caused by the fact that you have had failures in adopting routines or being consistent in the past.

And therefore, when you're given the opportunity or the challenge to be, , you know, do some routine. You're like, I don't fucking deal with  that. Can be that. Like I'm terrible at this.  I, I suck at that. So that's, I know that's only sort of a partial answer, but I think that a part of the solution is definitely trying to figure out why it is that you bristle at the routines.

Are you more of a rebel? Is it because you've had a lot of failures with routines in the past? And then the last thing I'll say on this is,  You know, don't forget that imperfect consistency is really powerful. So what? You didn't do it seven days out of the week. So maybe you did it four days out of the week.

Go and take that victory lap. If you did it three days, as long as you keep trying to do it and try to get some regularity with You know, it's like working out. Well, I'm gonna work out five times a week blah blah blah You know what if you only get in two for the first two months or whatever Great don't beat yourself up because if you do two for a few months You're more likely to do a third one in the third month,  though It might take a little tempering little  playing around with it  

Pathological Demand Avoidance

Yeah, this is actually something I've also seen.

If this is a severe issue, and I'm kind of speaking to the person. If this is a severe issue where you constantly find yourself having issues with any kind of demands or anything like that, you may want to look up pathological demand avoidance. This is actually seen fairly often in autistic people. And if you have ADHD, there's a high likelihood of autistic tendencies in there as well.

So this may be something where you want to kind of explore a little bit more about pathological demand avoidance, because this is very rooted in our overwhelm feels that  we start stacking so many demands that we have on ourselves, including self incriminations and, the self negative talk and things of that nature. 

You, you start to build an actual resistance to any kind of demand at all. And even yourself, and it's very hard for you to put any importance on that because a, if you have this, you may also have autism and we already have a. Issue with other people's needs and things like that that kind of can come off callous and not caring.

So that's another thing. You got time for 1 more question or 

1 more. And then, and I really got a bogey. I've got a 90 minute master class. I'm giving in 30 minutes. 

Staying Motivated with Mundane Tasks

Okay, how do you stay motivated when facing tasks that feel boring or tedious, even when you know they're important?  

That's a, that's another great, you guys have asked great questions. Thank you so much. And you guys. Just a great audience and I appreciate Dave's comment. Before.

Thank you for that. So These are are I call these mundane tasks. There's just like it's not like gotta get done i'm dead if I don't do this And they tend these also often fall into sort of routine things maintenance things You know, it's like doing the dishes doing the laundry getting the oil changed in your car You You know, yard work sometimes it's just they don't hold really any interest, but you know how to do them and you know They're not necessarily difficult.

They might they're more like a pain in the butt or they just they're mundane Right and the classic way at this is to take a close look at the inherent value of the action. And I'll give you the example I use all the time. I have a pickup truck. That's right. I'm a city guy. I bought that pickup truck when I lived in Brooklyn.

I was parking a pickup truck in Brooklyn, but I only have it because that's how I get my race bike to the racetrack. It's the only reason I have a pickup truck. Anyway, I still got, I just got a new one, but my, my old that I had for I don't know, 15 years or something. Ford F 150. I, you know, would always say, oh man, I got to get the oil changed or, um, you know, and it's just, oh man, I don't have time for that.

I don't want to do that. And I started to realize that  This was a mundane task. I knew how to do it. It's relatively easy to do. I just drive the truck up, you know, three exits on the five freeway. And there's a frigging babbling place right there. It cost me 90 bucks. They'll take 15 minutes to get it done.

And I could be home and, in half an hour or something like that. But what I did was I tied the oil change to the resale value of the product.  And I started to maintain a binder with every receipt for every oil change that I did over those 15 years. And with the idea being  the value of this thing is that I'm going to have, a file that says to any prospective buyer and I will sell the truck at some point that says, Not only is this, you know, the body in pretty good shape and the interior in pretty good shape They don't actually drive it too much but the engine is has been absolutely babied with the highest cost oil every time and I change it Thousands of miles before it's supposed to be changed and I had the proof right here Well,  that was what motivated so I sort of it became a game and that's sort of like all right I'm gonna go change it now, even though I don't have to change for another thousand miles or two thousand I'm gonna go And true story in February of this year, I drove that old truck.

It was a 2009 to a dealership where they had sort of the same truck base model. And I said, let's, let's by the way, I'm a very fast shopper. I said that one over there, let's go, let's do this. And so we got down to negotiating over how much they were going to give me for the trade in and we're going to be this.

And I've said, no, man, no, this is, no, no, no, no.  No, it's worth it's worth more. And he said I think we went off to the sales manager and he was there for a few and he came back out and said Here's the best we can do. I said, you know what and I whipped out my binder and I said I want you just do me a favor take this over to the sales manager.

All right, show them these  Effing receipts for the oil changes that I did over the last 15  years.  And then, then come back and tell me what you're up. So he did that and he came back. All right, we'll give you this.  All right, now let's just take that to doing the dishes or doing the laundry. What we can do is we can pause to evaluate what is the inherent value of doing the dishes?

You know what, there's a self esteem thing. Do I want to be the person that has this  sink full of dirty dishes? Do I want my kids to see the piles of dirty laundry just because I'm not motivated to go do the laundry? You could quickly find energy and motivation in that inherent value. There are a bunch of other examples I won't get into, but that's the short answer.

I hope that serves your your question. Well, 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

yeah, definitely brother. All right, Thank you so much, Alan. 

Thank you guys for being a great audience. So great to see you, Shane. And thank you guys for supporting this amazing organization. Yeah. All right. And my my, my blessing to you. God bless everybody. Take care. 

All right.

Thanks everyone.