I think I found the solution to my executive dysfunction. And

I don't want to guarantee that this is going to work for everyone, but I

want to share it with you because I'm having so much fun playing with this

new concept. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money

mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast.

I'm finding it's really changing how I do life

and how I enjoy life and how I actually get done from my to

do list. And so far, it's been pretty magical. So

here's what it is. We're nixing the whole best

self lingo. It's done. We're no

longer thinking about our best selves. If you're a personal

development junkie like I am, I guarantee you

have several books on your bookshelf, if not like dozens,

that will refer to your best self or your

higher self as the, like, guiding spirits that you

should be following. And I don't know about you, but whenever

I think of my best self, I don't feel

good. Like, my best self doesn't inspire

me. It makes me feel so much shame about not being good

enough. So let me tell you about my best self.

My best self went to Harvard. She got straight as

all through elementary school, middle school, high school, has maybe like

a business degree or something. She owns a home in

Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a super hot husband

who's just ripped like Ryan Gosling ripped. They have a

perfectly trained dog, which. How boring. She works out every single day. She

eats salads every lunch, and she's super regimented

in how she runs her life, and she never, never

procrastinates. My best self is completely unattainable to me.

My best self has circumstances in her life that I'm way past.

It's not like I'm going back to elementary school, middle school, and high school at

this point to get straight a so I can get into Harvard. That's not how

it works. And also, the way she does life has never been a way that

I could do life. I can't eat salads every single day. I

really like bread and sandwiches and

cheese. And every time I've tried to live a

consistent routine for too long, I get bored

and it loses its zhuzh for me. Whereas

one particular participant of the Brave biz lab calls said,

the goose loses its juice. And by the way, if you've never been to Brave

Biz Labs, it is a free group coaching call that I do every fourth Friday

of the month. I open it up to my whole community. It's absolutely

free. You can show up and ask any question that's happening in your business.

No judgment. There's no such thing as a stupid question on Brave

Bizlab. And it's literally anything that comes up for you that

keeps you from doing what you want to do in your business. And if you'd

like to join one of these calls, then please go to weeniecast.com,

brave biz Labs,

and of course, that link is in the show notes. But anyway, back to why

we're nothing playing with the best self anymore when we're referring constantly

to our best self. We're thinking of someone who doesn't exist.

We're thinking of an idealized version of ourselves who's absolutely

perfect in every single way. And we all know that perfect doesn't

exist, right? That person does not exist.

And so when we try to live our lives to a standard

that is based on someone who doesn't exist, guess what happens?

We fail. And we fail again. And we fail again and we fail

again until it just becomes like this cesspool

of shame that we're constantly letting run our lives. And I've been

there and I've done that and I have many t shirts from it. And it's

not worth it. Because when you're running your life from your quote

unquote best self, the thing that drives you is the

shoulds. We are the shoulds.

I should be doing this. I should be doing that.

I should be doing this every single morning. I should have this

already. And that's not helpful, especially for those of

us with ADHD. We've been shooted our whole life by

everyone in school. It's, you should be able to sit still. Why can't

you? You should be able to do your homework. Why can't you

sit down and do it? You should be able to focus in our first

few jobs, or maybe even right now, it's, oh, you should be able to meet

deadlines, you know, you should be able to focus in meetings.

You should be able to respond to all the emails in a timely manner, to

which I say no, Sharon, if you want me to respond to your email, don't

give me a scary subject line. At least put an emoji in it. Come

on. Even in keeping up our houses, even

in doing our everyday routines, you know, you should be eating healthier.

You should be tidying as you go, you know, you should fold

your laundry, which, no, no, I refuse.

So the best self model, like well intentioned,

actually doesn't do anything for us, it actually sets us

back because it makes us feel like we're already behind. And when we feel

like we're already behind, guess what? Nothing we do from there

matters because we're already behind. We've already failed.

Right? And what happens when the thing that you're doing every day doesn't matter?

You don't get any dopamine from it. And when you don't get any dopamine from

it, you're basically constantly in a dopamine deficit, which

means your executive dysfunction is going to be that much worse.

So instead of turning to our best

self for inspiration, let's turn to something

else. Let's turn to something better, something more enjoyable, something that we have

far easier access to. And that is our

favorite self.

Your favorite self is so different from your best self.

Your favorite self is the version of you that you

are so excited to be in any

moment of any day. I want you to think about your favorite self

in friendship. You know, it really boils down to who do you want

to be? Who do you want to show up? As for the people that you

love? Your favorite self in romantic relationships, your

favorite self at work, your favorite self with your pets, your

favorite self with your bedtime routine. Your favorite

self gets to show up to every aspect of your life and there's no

prerequisite to becoming your favorite self in any given

moment. Hell, I want you to imagine something simple like going to the grocery

store. Who's your favorite version of yourself? Who goes to

the grocery store? My favorite self who goes to the grocery store,

has music on, is listening to music in her

Airpods, is smiling at people, is really excited to see what

produce is freshen. Takes her time to really think

about what she wants to make for dinner and lunches for that week.

You know, my favorite self picks out a treat for herself cause

she deserves it. My favorite self loves making conversation

with my cashier as they're checking out all my stuff. I love bagging

for myself and there's like a bounce in my step when I'm being my

favorite self at the grocery store. My not favorite self

is the one that goes in distracted by something

or frustrated with the bad drivers that I encountered

on my way to the store. Which if you've ever been to Cape Cod in

the summer, you understand it's miserable. My not favorite

self gets frustrated when they're out of something that I really wanted

instead of getting creative about how I can substitute for it and when I'm

not being my favorite self, like without fail, I forget

something. It's like I subconsciously know that I want a redo

of how I was at the grocery store. And I'm not saying that favorite

self doesn't forget stuff, but favorite self, like, figures out ways

to work around it. I've been playing with this

concept recently, and let me just give you an idea. Ooh, what am I gonna

say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

I've been playing with this concept recently, and let me just give you an idea

of, like, how insane my life is right now. So I'm currently

volunteering on two and a half different political campaigns,

local to me, a state senator, and state rep, as well

as our national senator. I'm running my business. I'm running the

podcast. I'm starting a second business. I've just started

a nonprofit, which I'm super excited to announce in a few weeks. Once everything's

official, I am actively looking

for a boring business to buy. I'm working on

not one, not two, but three different books. I'm about

to launch myself on a serious pr campaign

for the nonprofit and for my work in

ADHD. And of course, I'm trying to be a modern

woman who has it all together. So I'm trying to meditate, and I'm trying to

work out, and I'm trying to take my dog for a walk and train her

and have fun with her and make sure that she feels loved because she's basically

my child trying to spend time with loved ones. I'm trying to stay in touch

with friends. All the things. Oh, and I'm trying to get eight

to 9 hours of sleep every night. That is how insane my life is right

now. And of course, like, under each one of those categories,

there's a whole laundry list of that I have to do. And let me

tell you, I have been in executive dysfunction on so

much stuff for the last few months, and it wasn't

until I started shifting into my favorite self that I actually started

getting things done. When

we look at our to do list and we think of prioritizing it from a

should place again, it is shame based.

We should be doing this, and if we don't do it, we're a failure.

You know that either or is given to us a lot growing up as

ADHD folks. And it's no wonder we talk to ourselves

in that way. It's no wonder we should the crap out of

ourselves. But when you look at your to do list from a point

of what would I enjoy doing in this moment. It completely

changes. You know, I started introducing this concept to my clients, and it

was interesting. A few different clients have come up with this, but one in

particular answered, okay, what? My favorite self only wants me to do jiu

jitsu and like, eat this snack that I love, to which I

asked, okay, cool, like, could you do jiu jitsu for 7 hours a day?

And he said, absolutely not. I would die, you know? Cause that's a

pretty intense workout. And could you eat that snack all day

long without stopping? I said, no, no, no. Like, my stomach would explode.

It would not be good. But I loved that he brought this up. I loved

that his first instinct was, no. The favorite self can't

be trusted because the favorite self wants me to do stuff that is not

productive, quote unquote productive. But I actually think that the favorite

self is the most trustworthy version of ourselves that we have. Our

favorite self. And I'll use this client as an example.

His favorite self wants him to get exercise before he starts work. His

favorite self wants him to be well fed

before he starts something. Right. Once he goes to

a jiu jitsu class and goes and has one of these snacks, what

will his favorite self want to do next? This individual that I'm thinking

of, you know, his favorite self got him to sign up for BYOB, my build

your own business group program.

His favorite self knows the work that he wants to do,

knows that he doesn't want to stay in his job, knows that

he can have a major impact on his clients lives

if he just stops being a weenie and goes

for it, which, this person is really, really brave and

they're doing an incredible job. They've already signed, I think, two high paying

clients in their second month of BYOB.

You know, we have this innate distrust of our favorite self, thinking

that our favorite self only wants us to go and do, like, the quote unquote

fun things. But like, yeah, of course our

favorite self wants us to go and do the fun things. You know, the fun

things are things that give us dopamine. There are

things that make life that much more enjoyable. You know, I don't know about

you, but when I do something really enjoyable and fun in the

morning, like maybe go and have breakfast with

girlfriends or take a really fun exercise class,

or I, like, have a really, really sweet, like, play session

with my puppy, I bounce into my day.

I have, like, this really, really buoyant energy that

carries me through every task I have to do that day

versus me being my best self, where I feel like I've

shouldered myself all morning and still not met the

standard. I start my day feeling behind. I

start my day feeling less. We don't trust our favorite self

because growing up, our world told us

that this isn't all fun and games, that life

has to be serious, that we have to get stuff done, that we have to

sit down and focus, that we have to be quiet, especially if you

were disruptive in the classroom like I was. I was a big

talker. It's one of the reasons why the more work I do

on ADHD and the more clients I work with and

the more stories I hear from clients about their childhoods,

the more I believe there has to be a different educational structure

for ADHD people growing up that's more

supportive of how our brains work, how our chemistry works,

because how the educational system is set up right now gets us

completely out of touch with our favorite self. It sows

distrust between us and our favorite self.

It teaches us that our favorite self is this irresponsible,

flippant, awful, kind of, like, lazy

person who shouldn't be allowed to drive the bus. But

actually, when we let our favorite self drive our bus,

our favorite self knows exactly how we need to

do what we need to do. You know, in prepping for

this episode, I was talking with my producer, Neil, and we

were talking about, can I out you? Of course. And we were talking about our

favorite selves and, like, the things that they want us to investigate. And he was

talking about how he just went down this rabbit hole on ghost hunting

and how, like, he had. He just spent hours

researching different methodologies and different haunted dwellings and all this

stuff, and he was so interested. And as we were talking through the favorite self

paradigm, he was saying, you know, if I had been given this lens

to study history, I would have aced every single history

test. And how true is that? Think about it. Like,

how. Like, what is the thing that interests you most? And

how could it have been applied to help you learn something

better?

Like, I'm convinced that if they had related math to either

money or knitting, I would have picked up math

way quicker. I would have had less struggles. I would

have found ways to learn that not

only gave me a deeper understanding of the

concepts, but also useful for the hobbies that I was

really curious about, you know, making money and knitting. The

cool thing about shifting into your favorite self is it can happen at any

moment. There was a moment this

week where I was looking at my miles long to do list with all

these massive projects that I'm currently working on. And as you can

imagine, I got super overwhelmed, and I couldn't prioritize, and

I felt myself kind of shrinking back and thinking about all

the shoulds. We are the shoulds.

Like, I should be working on this, and I should be working on this. And

they're all competing. They all seem important and urgent. And I stopped myself, and I

was like, okay, cool. Like, let's touch base with my favorite self. What does my

favorite self think? We need to spend some time on the. And my

favorite self stopped me in my tracks and was like,

and not just your desk. Like,

that has made the room cluttered. And go

and spend ten minutes just putting stuff in a garbage bag. Just

get it out of here. You don't have to clean, but just get the clutter

out. And so I did that, and it took about five minutes. And then I

noticed, oh, there's a lot of mugs up here. There's a lot of mugs

and cups up here in my office because they tend to just collect. You

know, I don't know if you have this experience, like, your flavor of

ADHD. It's like, once you're done with something, it ceases to

exist to you. So, like, once I finish drinking

coffee out of this mug, the mug will just not exist.

Like, it doesn't need to be taken back to the kitchen to be put in

the dishwasher because it no longer is there. It, in my

mind, its usefulness to me in this moment is

done. So why would I? It's one of the reasons I think also we

are really bad at, like, closing drawers and cupboards

because we've gotten the plate out of the cupboard. Like, what do we need to

do with the cupboard then? You know, we got the socks out of the drawer.

That was it. Like, there's no next step. You just needed

socks. Like, the drawer being open and needing to close, not a thing.

My favorite self, you know, had me gather up all the mugs and all

the cups and take them down to the kitchen. And I realized, oh, the dishwasher

is full of clean stuff. Put those things away. I loaded up the dishwasher with

some things, gave the dogs a treat, and then came back. My favorite

self knew exactly what I wanted to work on first. And it was

the thing that was most urgent,

that had the highest priority, that had the most important,

and I was able to start without that shame looming

over me, without that should. Without that expectation of how it should have

gone. And since I've shifted into this favorite self

way of doing life. I

have not struggled with executive dysfunction. The only

reason I have not gotten things done since shifting into favorite self is

because I just kind of run out of time. You know, I'm realizing just how

unrealistic I am in assigning work to myself. And as I spend

more time with my favorite self, I realize how much of

her I already am. And as I realize how much of my

favorite self I already am, my confidence levels grow.

I stop questioning myself at every

front about, oh, well, should I do this? And should I do that? I know.

I know what I need to do and I know what I want to do.

I know who I want to be in every moment.

And it's not based on who I need to mirror

to pass as normal, to pass as neurotypical. You

know, something that those of us with ADHD, especially

those of you who are diagnosed late, I was lucky enough, I was very lucky

to be diagnosed early on in my life. Something that we

are raised to do for our own well being, for our own

safety. But when we're mirroring everyone else

person we're not being is ourselves. And when we spend that much

time not being ourselves, it's really hard to be confident in who we are.

It's really hard to be confident in what it is that we want to do.

And I think that's one of the reasons why it takes people so long sometimes

to realize that they want to start a business because they spend so

little time actually being themselves and

thinking about what they want, that it can take years, if not

decades for that deep want of starting a business, running

a business, having real impact on the world, and having the freedom and

flexibility that comes with it. It takes so long for that

message to come through and for it to come through strong enough for them

to actually get started. So I'd love to

hear from you, my listeners, who is your favorite self

and my favorite self right now reminds me that I'd be remiss if I didn't.

Thank you. This is

our 100th episode of the Weenie cast. This

is the 100th time, if you've been with us from the very

beginning that we've talked through, how you

can run life better with your adhd while still

pursuing your dreams. And I

am honored every time I talk with my producer and hear how

many people are listening to the podcast, every time I get a message from

one of you about a tip that you got

that helped you be better in your work or something that you

learned about yourself or just the fact that listening to this

podcast made you feel understood and seen. Thank

you for listening. If you're ready to stop being a

weenie and actually run a business that makes money, then go ahead and book

a generate income strategy call with me by going to

weeniecast.com strategycallen.

On this call we will talk about your goals, your dreams, and your

frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit for both of us,

then we can talk about different ways to work together.

It teaches us that our favorite self is this irresponsible,

flippant, awful, kind of like lazy person

who shouldn't be allowed to drive the boat or who

shouldn't be allowed to drive the bus. I feel like buses are more utilitarian when

it comes to life. Like, who spends life going around by boat unless you live

in a place like Venice. Personally, if I had to run my life by boat,

I would get really, really tired of it really fast. Cause like,

okay, so think about it. You get into your car or you get into a

bus and you drop your keys. They land on the ground, you can pick them

up. You get into a boat and you drop your keys. You're going

for a swim and maybe you're not even getting them back.

Maybe it's too deep. It's very inconvenient. I

don't know why I brought boats up.

Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.