121 - One Year Goals?!

It's hard enough to a daily goal. And weekly goals are tough to motivate toward. Have I mentioned how easy it is to forget monthly goals? So let's talk today about these things people call "one year goals"! What?! How?! 

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Transcript

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It's a new year, it's 2024, and this is when we're supposed to declare what's going to be different this year. Like, what's the plan? What's the big resolution? So I'm thinking uh this is the perfect time to talk about our one-year goal. One year goal. What does it even look like? You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of The Stending to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff, let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome! Welcome to the new year. If you're listening to this on the day of the release, this is the new year, this is day one. Welcome to it. How was last year for you? How'd it go? Did you guys get done what you wanted to get done? Did you do the did you do your long-term goal stuff? Do you guys do any long-term goal stuff? I've done five-year goals before. I've done 10-year goals multiple times, but it's usually just if it feels like it's just an exercise for the moment, never really blossoms into a thing. What I think I've come to and what I'm proposing today, this is what I'm proposing to you today, is what I'm going to do for this year. Then I'm wrangling the forum people into it for those that want to participate. Here's the thinking. And it's based on my own reflection of last year and specifically ADHD Big Brother. As many of you guys know, my long-term, long, long-term five-year goal, which I'm sure we've discussed multiple times in here, but uh, you know, let's give it a little something just for the first timers. If you guys are here for the first time, check this out. This is my dream of dreams. This is my big dream. It's to live full-time in an RV, a fifth-wheel RV, doing this, doing helping adults with ADHD and depression through the podcast, through the forum, through one-on-one, big brothering. And so there's like a financial goal to that. So that to me means that I can full-time it with you guys. And my youngest will have graduated uh high school and I can get the if out of here. So that is kind of the light at the end of my tunnel. And ADHD makes it so difficult to navigate towards that because it's lofty, it's got a billion components to it, it's like a project like no other, and the work that has to be done, it's not urgent because the deadline is five gosh darn years away. It's not in my face. How are you guys with that stuff? Are you guys capable of the work it takes to chunk down your big ass goal? It's obvious how we're supposed to do it, but if it's not obvious to you, it's really like the the idea for me is you daydream. You take some time to dream ideally. If things were how you want them to be, then who are you in five years? Five years from now, that's the playtime. It's fantasy work. It's the daydreaming. And if you're daydreaming practically, then that's kind of that's the bummer part of it, where you're like, oh well, in five years, I'm my my house is probably gonna be worth less than what I paid for it, so I'm gonna have to lose money on that deal. And by that time, my car will be a piece of crap, so I'll have to get another car, and there's a new payment, and my company will probably lay me off. So I'm pretty much looking at being homeless in five years. It's not about that. It's about daydreaming. What's the best version of everything? Here's the me example. My daydream is like I said, it's like living in an RV. It has slide-outs. I'm not talking about some cramped, claustrophobic trailer that's, you know, fun to take camping for a long weekend. I'm talking about a mo vanga and home on wheels. And then my dually Silverado that I can hook unhook from and, you know, explore should I desire to peruse the local village. If that's what I don't know that there's city villages in the United States, but I think we call them towns. Village. Do we have villages? That to me makes me think of like uh mushroomy type houses with hay as roofs. Like Smurfs lived in a village. A village that's like an evil lord comes into town and says, Give me all of your stuff, or I'm gonna shoot a flaming arrow on your flammable roof. And we're like, no, Tim, go get the stuff. Mom, we can't. We can't afford to give him the stuff. Do it, Timmy, do it. You know what happens when Timmy doesn't bring out the stuff. It happens in the movies all the time. The evil lord then uses Timmy as the flaming arrow, and it's just That's usually the start of the movie. Uh but later on, Mel Gibson or somebody fights back and you know rallies the entire village and the evil lord is overthrown. So just there's a happy ending, guys. But what are we talking about? We're talking about what? Uh flaming arrow. What if I'm trying to backtrack? Flaming arrows, evil overlord. Hmm. Anyway, we're off track. Wow. Poor Timmy. The so the anyway, so the me of last year, I did two things to uh do like a long-term goal. The first one was that I made a promise to myself that I would, regardless of my mood and my raging imposter syndrome, I would release uh a podcast every Monday with the intent of helping my fellow ADHD or in depresso people. And then the investment that I made was to hire Sarah Vermont to help me frame out the business side of all this stuff. That I suck at business. And she kicks ass at business, so it's a good partnership. Um, so my website, the emails that you may have received if you downloaded uh any of the stuff from the website, the ebook, she helped me build all that uh infrastructure, I guess. But I'm never really asking myself in the moment, what am I doing today to reach my goal of the RV life? I'm just sort of doing the thing that I said I was gonna do that day, knowing that it fulfills the bigger picture. And then so this year I'm gonna try something out. And I'm wrangling the forum members into this with me, and we're gonna give a thwack and a at a deliberate one-year goal. A long-term goal. What the fudge? In the forum, we do monthly goals. We'll do a Zoom chat, we check in at the beginning in the middle of the month on a one-month goal. That's still a pretty long-term situation, easy to forget after the first day, super easy to forget. But a one-year goal, there's so many parts, so much to do. Here's how I'm uh suggesting, and I I don't know. If you if you guys want to try this out with me, uh it might work, it might not work, but here's my theory. It's all this self-help stuff, all this therapy stuff, the guru stuff, it all works. If you do them, if you do them the way they say for you to do them, they will all work. The problem for me though, is this little pesky thing called the ADHD and the depression. And I keep the depression and the ADHD married up together. They're like bros. These two hang out all the frickin' time. And last year, 2023, I felt like I was riddled with depressive episodes. It seems like I had a few of them. And easily I've gained 20 pounds. That tends to happen when I say fuck it. Fuck it. I don't care. Sorry. But I'm chugging along. We're all hey, we're chugging along here. And for those of you that are interested, uh, this usually is comes along with all this territory. I'm unmedicated, I'm au natural. Very nearly opted to get back onto medicine uh this last year. I'm pro-medicine. I'm into it, you know? I'm so into it, guys. I dig it. Medicine works. It's just the thing that I'm dealing with is that to get on medicine for my skull spaghetti, it requires a commitment uh to like a trial period because I won't go back onto the medicine that I was on that worked. It gave me nosebleeds. Long story short, got me out of my depression, gave me random nosebleeds, surprise nosebleeds. Never knew when they'd strike. So to get on a new medicine, you know, where you have to spend a couple of weeks figuring out if this medicine is working. It's got to build up to that therapeutic level, gotta check it out. Or what are the side effects? Is this manageable? Is this worth it or not? And then if it's not, it's like, okay, let's start a different medicine and go through that whole process again. It's grueling and it's not fun. And the the you just the thought of it to me is is too much. It's not like how we would want it to be, right? Where you take a pill at 8 o'clock a.m. and by 8 30, the depression is but a whisper. It is but a memory. And we skip and we dance and we look at the sky and we we hug trees, you know, all the things that happy smiley people do. It's not like that. So I'm just basically, I don't currently have any of that in me. Things would have to be ultra dark for ultra long, the thoughts, the dark thoughts would have to be ultra pervasive and intrusive. And uh for me to be like, screw it, let's go for it. Anyway, so I'm still white-knuckling the holistic stuff. But it's super hard to do the holistic stuff when the mood is blue. That's I will acknowledge that. And if I thought two weeks to build up medicine was deal breaker, man, the holistic path, it is a lot longer. And I can't even attribute scientifically exactly what the change is. So, like if the holistic stuff was working, that's where the holistic stuff gets murky. Because I I can say with positive confidence that when I'm meditating daily, good things are happening to me. My outlooks are always better, but is that directly because of the meditation? I'd be like, okay, me, prove it. I can't I can't. Maybe it's because I'm sleeping better. Okay, really? Okay, prove it. Prove that it's the sleep, the sleep alone. I'm like, ah crap, I can't do that. So what's the answer then to all this? It's for me, it's community. Uh, in person when I'm up for it, and online when I can when I can't muster myself, when I can't muster up the could the uh motivation. Muster's an interesting word. Muster. What does that mean? Muster? What does that mean? Hold on a second, let me just Google this real quick. Wikipedia dictionary online. Okay. Oh, it originally means to gather soldiers, and then they added the word up to mean it's like gathering up anything, like some motivation to a task. You gotta muster up some motivation. And side note, muster is also the name of a group of peacocks. It's a muster of peacocks. That's just really I think it really should just be a flock for everything bird-related. Flo like a muster of peaco- No. It's a flock of peacocks. And you have like, oh, it's a murder of crows. That's so it's it's a flock of crows. Come on. Oh my god. Check out all these different and check this out. These are all these different bird group names. It's a sedge of cranes. What is a sedge? A cast of falcons, a duel of doves. No, it's a flock of doves. You know what else is called a flock? It's a flock of lice. That is ridiculous. No, call it what it is. It's a problem on a grade schooler's head. So if you're gonna be weird about it and make up these crazy names, why don't you call it a school head child of lice? Or it's like a head of lice. That makes sense to me. Anyways, animal groups are weird. Happy 2024. Okay, one year goal. Let's go. So I did the daydream. Okay, I know what I want. Next year, for me, and okay, this builds towards my RV dream, it's the year of money and food. I think technically it's the year of the dragon, but for me, it's the year of the money and the food. I will be aggressively paying down debt and I will be aggressively improving my eating habits. There's so many things that go into these two, and it's I I struggle with words. I don't know if you guys can tell that about me, but the word goal, and then oh, what are the rules of the goal? Is it a smart goal? Are you following the rule of it? I'm not very good at that. Um, my personal belief about goals is that I'm this person that is doing this thing. I'm not Russ, the 20 pounds overweight guy trying to force myself into a diet. I'm Russ, the guy who eats a certain way because it's good for me, and it's how I envision myself, and the results come because I'm living the life of a guy who is 20 pounds lighter than I currently am. And this year I'm focusing on the foods that this guy eats, and it builds to my RV dream because this is how I see myself eating when I'm in the RV. I'm eating healthy food, simple recipes, easy ingredients, and what are those, you know, like ADHD friendly cooking. For money, this means growing ADHD Big Brother, ideally the forum, because I can't express to you guys how important I think that place is, what it represents, what it's becoming, what I want it to become. Um, and as I build that, I will be able to pay down my debts, and then that will go towards my vision of being debt-free. It's not realistic for me to think that being debt-free can happen in one year, but what I can do is focus on my finances, and then the more I nail down my budget and the more I put my debt top of mind, the less likely I'll be to do things like impulse shop. The tricky thing about these long goals is that they can be quite meaningless in the moment. One year from now, it's such a long way away. So there's no harm in me buying one last ridiculous item that I can't afford. There's no problem with me eating three corn dogs and four taquitos at 10 p.m., just one last night? Because it's just one more night. But for those of you that are similar to me, that that one more night, that one more purchase, or one more whatever, it can happen quite often. And I forget about it. So when it's done enough times, it creates the chaos that then we have to undo. Financially, going out to eat for me is not that big of a deal once or twice. But I will once or twice it ten times in a month. All for very good reasons, but if I'm not paying attention to my finances, I get hit with quite the surprise in spending. So that's the financial part of this one for me. I don't really believe in right or wrong goal setting. I think there's only effective for me and not effective. For me, I can't hold the goal in my head. I have to put it in front of my eyes where I can see it, uh, like in my bullet journal daily, where I can see it, where it's not buried as soon as I get to the next day. So there's going to be a work session to cut out inspirational photos, put them on my whiteboard, uh, things that will remind me that I'm focusing on money and food. And so then the goal would be that by the end of the year, I'm living the life of the person who has his finances in order. Whether or not they're good or bad in the moment, that's not as relevant as whether I'm living as financially responsible as I deem it as I can. And then when it comes to the food, the goal would be that by the end of the year, I'm living the life of a person who's eating healthy and has a solid routine in place for eating. So now that I have this vision of the year, I'm going to break it down into monthly increments. And so the question I would ask myself to find out what I want to focus on for the month would be like what skill do I want to focus on this month to become more in alignment with this person that I'm seeing. For food, and I'll talk about this in our forum Zoom chat, but it'll be about meal prep and meal planning. Uh, planning out the meals out like a week in advance, working on building that routine. And then for finances, it'll be about paying attention to my finances, which would mean like a daily check-in on my accounts, just to take a boring peek so that I'm constantly aware. For me, the farther I get away from my awareness to my finances, the more cavalier I'll get with my credit card. It'll it's just, it acts as though it's magical money. And I simply must have this thing. And my vibe is that I have the money, so I'm gonna act on my vibe, you know? The only way this year-long thing can work is if I constantly have it in front of me. And I will absolutely utilize the power of external accountability in the forum. And if all in the forum, if we muster ourselves, if we muster into a group of ADHD folks, what would a group of ADHD folks be called? I mean, if we're gonna get weird about it, it's probably what, a chaos? It's a chaos of ADHDers, or maybe it's an overwhelm. Hey, look at that big group of it looks like an overwhelm of ADHDers. So much fidgeting amongst them. Do they all have to go to the bathroom? They're weird. My challenge to you guys is to create a one-year goal. Go for it. And then come up with some plan to remind yourself about it daily. What does that look like for you? How are you gonna see it? It's literally only 365 reminders. No big whoop. And then how are you gonna externalize that accountability? We're doing that in the forum. We've got daily accountability, we've got monthly accountability. And honestly, you guys, reach out if you need help hashing it out. All that info is in the show notes for how to reach me. I'm here to be of service. You can even book a free 30-minute zoom chat with me. Everybody gets one free 30-minute zoom chat. If you just want to hash some stuff out, if you just want to shoot the shit for 30 minutes, I love meeting you guys. Meeting new people is probably one of my favorite things. So you'll be actually doing me a favor too. And for any of you guys that are have been on the fence, like you, you're like, oh, I've been meaning to join the forum, but I just haven't got around to it. ADHD, blah, blah, blah. Join the forum now. Get in now. I'm gonna be raising the price in the next, I don't know, I don't know when it's happening in a month or two. Anyone that has gotten in for the uh price that is now stays. So it's like your grandfather, Dan. So if you're ever thinking about joining, join now. Now would be the right time to do it. Anyway, that's the greatest version of external accountability on the planet, I feel. Alrighty, that's gonna do it. I hope this is helpful. I hope you guys set your one-year goals. One year, one year goal. That is, I just when it comes out of my mouth, it just uh I'm I'm in it to win it. Let's do this together. We can achieve one year goals, I believe. Oh god. Oh my god. All right, you guys, I hope you have a great, fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.