Squirrel. Squirrel. By the end of this episode, you're gonna know how to stop
overthinking on demand. Hi, I'm Katie McManus,
business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weenie cast
Squirrel in a session with a client yesterday, we were
talking about how she's kind of stopped worrying about the future and
how she's assessed her money, and she's doing pretty well, and
she's pretty happy with the track that her business is on and things in
her life are looking great. And even though there's still a lot of
unknowns, she's not concerned with how
things are going to go down. And we talked about how.
Isn't it funny that everything has always
worked out for the better up until
now? And it did not matter how much
worrying and stressing and overthinking you
did in the past, none of it actually helped things work
out for the better. It just made you miserable while things
were working out. I come from a very proud, long line of
overthinkers. For Christmas last year, my dad actually bought me a t
shirt that said, hold on while I overthink this. The
McManus line has an
uncanny ability to talk for
hours on end on the most simple,
tiny. Oh, no. Did I say that thing? Was
it perceived? Weirdly. What do they think of me?
And of course, like, overthinking happens in your life, right? Especially if you have
ADHD. And we'll talk about where that comes from.
During the pandemic, I reached out to this boy that I went to fifth grade
with because ever since fifth grade, when I didn't
invite him to my birthday party, because for whatever reason, I was kind
of a jerk. Back then, I was in fifth grade. I think most of us
are jerks. Back then, fifth grade, me was an idiot. It didn't matter
why I didn't like him. But ever since that
day, I have literally carried the guilt of not inviting
him to my birthday party. And so I think it was in, like,
2021, I was on Facebook and I saw his name pop
up in a people that you may know, and I was like, oh, my God,
this is the moment I have to apologize. And so I
friended him, I sent him a message, and I said, hey, michael,
I don't know if you remember me. We went to fifth grade together at this
school in California. And I owe you an apology.
I have carried around this guilt since fifth grade, and I'm so sorry
I didn't invite you to my birthday party. He had no idea what the I
was talking about, he remembered me. He had no recollection that I
ever even had a birthday. And we had this very funny little
exchange, but he was like, have you been thinking about this ever since
fifth grade? To which my answer was like, yeah, I
have. Absolutely. Which I'm sure he thought a little
crazy, but, you know, we left it on a good note, and we're still
connected on Facebook. We never rekindled the friendship, but, you
know, we were never friends to begin with, so there we go. God, now I'm
gonna start overthinking that. But there's overthinking that happens in your life over
that thing you said at dinner or you were upset that one
day and did people think that you were mad at them and I overthinking
what other people say to you. Oh, my God. Like, your boss said
something in a weird tone, are you about to get fired? As
a business owner? When you get a text from a client who's freaking out
about something, it's so easy to start spiraling, thinking, oh, my God, they're about to
fire me. Especially if you're a coach or you're a lawyer or you're a
copywriter, know that you are your client's
peer. You're probably one of the few people your client can
turn to to freak out about stuff, right? They can't go to their spouse and
be like, oh, my God, I think I'm running out of money. Their spouse is
going to freak out then. And then they're going to have, like, a very stressful
home environment. But you know who they can freak out to is you.
And meanwhile, you're going to start overthinking. Oh, my God, they're never going to be
able to pay me. They're going to have to stop working with me. Oh, God,
I'm going to have to find another client. And here's the thing about overthinking, is
that it doesn't help. It doesn't help a
situation get better. It makes you feel guilty enough decades later that you
apologize for doing something, sure. But every time I've gone
back and apologize for something that I did decades ago, the person I
apologize to has no recollection of it, has no memory
of the instance that I spent years
consumed with freaking out about your clients. When they
send you something that you perceive as, oh, my God, they're gonna stop working with
me. Does that help you serve them when they get on the phone with you
and they need to talk about their own problems and the
support that they need. Are you actually listening to them for their
sake, or are you listening to them for your sake because you're worried you're gonna
lose the business? There are a lot of
theories about overthinking in the psychological space, which I am
not trained in psychology. I'm not a therapist. I'm just
talking about this based off what I've learned on TikTok and from reading articles and
from talking to my own therapist. But overthinking in psychological
terms is generally referred to as rumination and worrying. Right.
When you ruminate, worry about something. You're just consumed with the
negative thought around it. It's like this endless
loop in your mind, and it can get really obsessive. It's like it's
the only thing that you can think about.
Your mind cannot move forward from it.
Your mind cannot focus on anything else. And, of course,
like, you can ruminate and obsessed and stress over
really serious things. I know I got really sucked into
this when I had my own personal financial crisis. When I
first started my business, I was $50,000 in debt. I had
no money to my name. I just signed up for a $20,000 program.
And this business that I had just started wasn't going great
because I had just started, like, businesses don't go great when you
first start. And we have this weird expectation that, like, we start and then we
should be making hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's not how that goes.
Right? It wasn't until I was able to stop
ruminating, until I was able to stop overthinking it, that I was
able to get to work and actually make my business successful. When we
overthink things in our business, we
actually prevent success from happening. And how this
shows up is like, have you ever created an offer? And maybe. Maybe
you haven't yet? Maybe you're listening to this, and I say this, and you're like,
oh, God. Like, there's. I have so many ideas, I'm not sure which one's going
to be right. So I'm just, like, trying to figure out which one's going to
be right in my own head, and I'm obsessing over it. Honey,
that's overthinking, and that's not helping you get clients. That's not
helping you make money. That's not helping you start your business. You
know, it could be your marketing. I can't tell you how many of my clients
and they start with me. They're not posting to social media. They're not sending
emails. And when they do. They spend days
agonizing over where a comma should go, what word they
should use. They run it up the flagpole to
their spouse, their best friends, anyone that they can ask who has good
grammar to make sure that their post is absolutely perfect. And
what ultimately happens is they end up posting like once every month, which
is not enough to gain any traction, to gain any
visibility, or to build trust with your audience so that they are convinced
that you're the person that they should hire.
People also, really overthink their pricing. The
classic overthinking fallacy when it comes to your pricing
is, oh my gosh, I'm new and no one's going to trust me because I'm
new and I haven't done this as a paid service before.
Mind you, you've been a professional for how many years at this point?
So instead of, instead of charging real money for my services, okay,
well, here's my plan. Here's my strategies. I'm going to give my
services away for either really, really cheap or free. And then
the clients that I get, they're going to be so impressed by my work and
they're going to get such great results from my free work, my cheap work, that
they're going to go and write these glorious testimonials, and then I'm going to have
these testimonials, and then I'll be able to raise my prices by like a.
Then I'll just inch it up every time I get a better testimonial and then
eventually I'll make money. That's exhausting.
That's exhausting. Also, honey, it doesn't work that way. The clients that
you get for free or cheap will nothing value the work that
you do. And because they won't value the work that you do, they will not
see results from the work that you do. Which means there's no testimonial
that'll come, just it's not happening. And the
endless worry about how things are going to work out. The
endless, the endless loop of oh my God, this isn't
working. And this isn't working. And this isn't working. That's not helping
you either. Because instead of looking up and out into the
world to see all the opportunities in front of you, and instead of
tapping into your creativity to see how you can grab hold of those
opportunities and make them worth something to you, you're
obsessing over things not happening the way you thought they would happen.
Which, here's a little news flash, things will never happen
the way you think they'll happen? The universe has
a wicked sense of humor. And I always like to remind people of this,
like, how did you meet your best friend? How did you meet your
spouse? How did you get your favorite job you ever had?
And before those things happened, before you met those people or you
got that job, did you know exactly how it would happen?
I bet not. I bet you couldn't have
planned for how you met your best friend.
Personally, how I met my best friend was I broke up with a
boyfriend who paid for where we lived, and I wasn't making a whole
lot of money. So the very expensive gym that I used to pay for a
membership for, I had to start working at because I didn't want to give up
my membership. But I also couldn't afford to pay the monthly
fee. And she was on the sales team there, and we really didn't talk much
when I first got my job there because I was working at the front desk
like two days a week and they weren't days that she normally worked. But
at one point, the regional sales manager came up to me and was asking
me about the other jobs that I had because I had a lot at the
time. And he. I heard that I did sales for a video
production company. He's like, oh, my God, we're opening up a new club. I'd love
to have you on the sales team there. Do you want to apply? And I
kind of said, oh, you know, I'll think about it. And then Jess
walks around the corner after he leaves and asks, like, how my day
is going. And I said, oh, well, Ray just told me I should apply to
work at the new club that they're opening on the sales team. And she's like,
oh, my God, you totally should. And I'm like, really? Like, I don't
know if I want to sell gym memberships. And then she's like, do you know
how much money you're going to make? And she legit walked back to her office,
printed up what the commissions were for the people who were at the most
successful clubs, and told me how much money I could make selling gym
memberships. And we ended up being colleagues. And we didn't
become best friends until about a year and a half later after working
together for a really long time. But I couldn't have planned on
that. I really couldn't have. I couldn't have planned that there would be
someone who worked at that club that would just
become my best friend. We've been best friends for almost
a decade now. I'm not married yet, so I can't tell a cute story about
meeting my spouse. But I bet you have one. I bet
you have a cute story about how you met either your spouse or your long
term partner. And, I mean, you've
heard how I've gotten jobs in the past. I could not have
planned on any of them. But here's the crazy thing, is that we still
try to obsess around how things will happen in the future.
It's like we think, okay, well, if I make a plan and do the
plan, and everything goes perfectly to the plan, everything should
happen the way I want it to. How's that ever gone for you? I can
tell you that's never worked out for me ever in my life. So
worrying and stressing and ruminating and
overthinking everything actually does not help you. It hurts
you. And here's my
theory on why we do this, especially as people with
ADHD. Most ADHD people that I know
are extremely sensitive individuals, and we have
to be. We walk into a room and we can
immediately read the whole vibe. We know who's
mad at who. We know who's having a good time. We know
who's safe to speak to and who we want to stay away from.
And we know this within seconds of looking
around. When we have conversations with people,
we know exactly which version of ourselves we should be to get
a good response from them. We've been masking our whole
lives, and we learned this very early on because
if we didn't mask, that's when we got in trouble. If we're sitting in
class and we don't have our interesting face mask
on, the teacher would get mad at us. If
everyone around us was laughing or happy and we weren't,
we would still have our happy, laughing face on.
And when we were really, really upset, we
learned that that wasn't always appropriate. We had to hide
it. We have spent a lifetime gaslighting ourselves
out of our own emotions. We've also spent a lifetime having all these
emotions that either were ours or that we were picking up from the people around
us and then being told that's not appropriate.
Calm down, don't get upset. And what ultimately
happens is that we learn to ignore
as best we can the actual emotions and feelings
that come up in our body. And because we learn this from the outside world,
we think that we can think through it, that we can logic ourselves
out of feeling certain ways. This is honestly one of the reasons
why a lot of people with ADHD struggle to find the right
therapist for themselves. Because we have
such an innate talent for
intellectually processing our emotions,
we can make sense of how we feel certain ways. We can
come up with storylines. We can talk about causation
and how other people impacted us and why it
makes sense that we feel a certain way, and yet we still
struggle to move past those emotions. You know, a lot of therapists will
just lap that up. Oh, cool. This person is really self aware.
Meanwhile, we're there on the other side, just continually
obsessing about whatever the situation has been. And the reason we
cannot get out overthinking is because
we never actually learned how to process our emotions. We
never actually learned how to let them move through
us. In coach training, one of the things that we
learned is that, like, in the western world, people get
very scared when we talk about emotion. They think, okay, emotions go to
therapy. Right? Emotions bad, like, go to therapy, get them
fixed. And while, yes, like, there are absolutely
some emotions that, like, especially if it's related to trauma or
depression or really serious anxiety, you should have some medical help for.
Just the fact that you have emotions is not a bad thing.
It doesn't make you less than, it doesn't make you weak.
It doesn't make you broken. One of the best definitions of
emotions that I have ever heard is that it's really energy in
motion, right? Think about when you're angry. Where do you feel that energy
in your body? For me, it's like. It's like this heat in my chest, and
it goes up towards my shoulders, and then it goes up my neck, and it's
like, if you look at me, it's like neck down is just, like, flushed red.
Physically, like, my body literally has a reaction to being
angry. And yet, do I ever let my body process
that out? I mean, I didn't used to. I do
now. It used to be that I'd have to think about, well, why am I
justified in being angry? Why am I justified in being pissed off at
this person or at this situation, and why is it wrong? And blah, blah,
blah, blah? And none of that ever helped me move past it. It
just helped me latch onto something that I would just completely overthink and
talk about ad nauseam forever. I'm sorry to all
of my friends and family who had to listen to me back then. I didn't
know any better. So here's the choice you have in this
moment. You can continue down this road of being an overthinker,
of ruminating, of being a constant worrier about the future.
That is absolutely an option for you. Or you can learn
with me. I'm about to tell you how to move past
that. If you're good being an overthinker, then the
podcast is over. Now go continue your life. Enjoy
overthinking, enjoy your ruminating, really give your
worrying, your all have a good life. If you really want to
learn a new skill and you want to stop overthinking and stop worrying
about the future and actually start living, then
here's the really simple exercise that I practice and that I have my clients
go through. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep
listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,
squirrel.
If you really want to learn a new skill and you want to stop
overthinking and stop worrying about the future and actually start living,
then here's the really simple exercise that I practice and that I
have my clients go through to get out of their
heads and back into their body so that they can take action and
actually build businesses that they're really proud of. And this practice
is really simple. So when you're overthinking, you know that
the energy is all in your head. You know, it's like you have a ping
pong ball that's just bouncing around inside your skull, activating different parts of your
brain. And of course that internal narration that happens, that the voice
that just goes on and on and on and on about all the things that
are going on, just notice what it's saying.
Just notice all the what if scenarios that it's coming up
with. Just notice all the negative comments it has
about you in the past or you right now and how it's never going
to be good enough and so on and so forth. Now, that
ping pong ball that's bouncing around your skull,
activating these different parts, I want you to imagine
that you're slowing it down, you're just bringing it to
kind of like slow motion ping ponging. And I
want you to slowly draw it down through your head, down
your neck, and bring it down into your body, into your
heart space. Now, this ball is your consciousness.
This ball is actually where you do your thinking and you get
to control where that thinking happens in your body. Now,
something that they've discovered over the last several decades is that,
yes, we have neurons in our brains. We can do thinking in our brains. We
all know this, we do a lot of thinking in our brains, but we also
have neurons that do thinking and store memories in our heart
tissue and throughout our digestive tracts. This is one of
the reasons why when you're sick and you have a stomach
upset, your short term memory is bad because
literally a part of your physical brain that's not just
in your head is offline. It's working on
recovering. So you've brought that ping pong ball into your
chest, face, and whatever it is that you're concerned about,
you're going to ask your heart, you're going to ask your body,
what do I actually know about this situation? Now, here's
where you're either going to get an answer or you're going to notice there is
an emotion coming up that will not let you have an answer
yet. So when we're getting information from our heart
space and from our gut, we have to remember first and foremost that there's no
language center. Right? Our brains have a language center. Our heart and our gut
do not. So oftentimes these messages will come
up visually, they can come up almost in a smell. They can come up
in just a sense or a sensation and just trust
yourself that you will understand what it means.
Now, if you're getting an answer, beautiful. If you're not getting an
answer and you just feel like, tight or like you're going to
vomit or there's something else happening in your body,
like when I get angry, I have that heat through my neck, down into my
chest. This is a sign that you have energy that you're
not letting move through your body. This is an emotion that you're actually
not giving yourself permission to feel through. And what
we need to do in this moment is very simple. Just focus on that
feeling. There's this practice that I got really annoyed with when I
was a kid where, like, if you stub your toe, like, you know how, like,
it really, really hurts and you're mad and you're swearing, you're saying all these bad
words, and you're like, kicking the chair that stubbed your toe and then you're hurting
your foot again. Like, sure, that can make you feel a little better, but
a trick to actually make the pain pass faster is to
simply focus in on that pain and feel it to the
fullest extent you can. And it's really painful.
It really is. Like, when you are in pain and you really focus
in on experiencing that pain fully, it's
agonizing, but it does go faster. You don't
have to focus in on the pain of your stubbed toe and be like, go
away pain. Like, I'm numbing you. That doesn't work.
It doesn't work. It just makes the pain last longer. So I need to
imagine there's an emotion that's coming up. There's a sensation in
your body and set. Your stomach feels very tight and grippy,
and all you're gonna do is you're going to feel into what that feels
like. You're going to notice, like, if it feels tight, like, does it feel like
I'm wearing a cordental? Does it feel like someone's, like, jammed their hand through
your stomach and they're holding on to your intestines with their fist?
Is there a temperature to it? Is it hot? Is it cold? Does it feel
like a snake got in there and is wrapped around you? And as you
focus in on the physical sensation, notice what emotions come
up. Is it fear? Is it frustration?
Oftentimes, these physical sensations are really trying to tell us something.
It's like an alarm system that it just has very poor
communication style. Is the fear trying to tell you,
remember that we failed that one time, and it didn't feel good?
Is your subconscious trying to tell you, oh, my God, like, I really don't want
to fail again? Or is it trying to tell you that you don't want to
look stupid? Or is it trying to tell you, actually, this does not matter.
We don't want to worry about this. We want to worry about something else. We
want to go do something else. This is not the right fit for us. And
once you get that message, receive it, understand what your body's trying
to tell you, and then again, refocus back into the physical sensation
in your gut. What's there now? You're not trying to
make it do anything. You're just noticing. And again, we want
to ask, what's the emotion that's coming up from this feeling?
And you want to go back and forth on this until you get to a
point where you're able to ask, cool, what do I know about the situation? And
you actually get an answer. When I work with clients one on one,
my clients get unlimited on demand support with me,
meaning. And I have it in three tiers. 311 is, hey, I have
a cool idea. I just want to brainstorm it. Can we chat for a few
minutes? Six one one is, I have a time sensitive
question. I have a proposal that I want to send out to this big corporation.
It needs to go out tomorrow. Can we hop on in the next 12
hours and look over my proposal? Or can you answer a couple questions for
me? My favorite. My absolute favorite
on demand call is the 911. It's. I'm freaking the f
out. I don't know what to do. I'm crying. I'm hiding in a bathroom
stall. Things aren't going well. I need to talk to someone.
And I can tell you the clients who use 911
calls the most in the beginning of our work together
are the ones who become successful the fastest. Because
instead of getting in their own heads and overthinking everything and
ruminating and worrying about and thinking, I have to figure this out on my own,
and I have to logic myself out of feeling this way. They're brave enough
to get on the phone with me and just barf it all out. Here's how
I feel. Here's all the shame and fear and anger and frustration that
I have, blah, blah, blah. And while we're on the call,
I talk them through some kind of exercise like this, and I help them process
this emotion. Now, these emotions will come up forever.
We're not getting rid of them. It's not like you're going to get really good
at processing emotions so that you never feel them again. Sorry. Actually, the more
you feel them, the more they come, because, like, they realize that they're safe with
you. So the goal is never to get rid of them completely. The goal
is to process through the ones that hold you back
faster. And this is really hard to do on your
own because you don't have an alarm
system that tells you, oh, remember, like, when you feel this
way, go and do this exercise. So my clients who, when they
feel this way, they think, oh, call for help, call your coach,
get past this. They learn really quickly. Oh,
okay, cool, here's how I'm feeling. This is not good. I need to move past
it. And in the beginning, they'll call me a ton, and I love it.
I can talk them off the ledge. They feel so much better afterwards.
They process through the emotion, and after a little bit of time,
when they have that instinct to call me for help, they realize, hold on,
I know what to do now. I can process this. This isn't that
scary. When you train yourself to do this
through having help, you're not only allowing yourself
to do the work to become massively successful,
you're actually doing a lot of work to heal some self
inflicted and society inflicted trauma that a lot of us with
ADHD suffer from. Because so many of
us, especially millennials and older, were told that our emotions were
wrong, that we were upset for the wrong reasons, that we shouldn't get
this upset. Everyone else is fine. Why are you being a problem?
And when you give your adult self permission to feel all those things and just
process through it and to not shame yourself for being there and to
tell yourself it is okay. This is telling you something. This is part of
your alert system. We're gonna give it the microphone for a
little bit and everything will be fine. You actually open
so many doors for yourself out there in the world and you get to walk
through them without being a completely overthinking basket
case. Squirrel. Squirrel. 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 strategycall.
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.
This is Ben from Facebook. I didn't get an invite to the birthday party
either. It's okay. I forgive you.
Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel.