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.