Financial Friday's With Rick Webster of Renafi.com - Routines, Rituals, & Systems

Thanks for listening! We are going to be talking about Financials with Rick Webster of Renafi. Today, we are going to be discussing Routines, Rituals, and Systems needed for managing ADHD and financials.

Rick Webster is the Founder of Renafi.com. A financial ADHD Coaching group that has a ton of resources for people with ADHD who struggle with their finances, and they approach things from a behavioral standpoint. Like us, they are a small ADHD-friendly community organization, and they currently have several courses going on, even one based on our discussion today on Routine and Systems.

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Transcript

We are going to get started here in a little bit, but as all of our meetings seem to work out, everybody is late. So we look forward to seeing those who signed up for tonight. Going from there we are going to be talking about routines, rituals, and systems when it comes to finances.

 Rick Webster is the CEO of rentify. com, a financial coaching group that we partner with. And you all seen him definitely in the comments giving advice on finances and other mindfulness and mindset changes that people need to have about ADHD. And we're just going to have a lot of fun talking about this stuff today because they have an amazing course.

That they've been working on specifically around rituals and routines and systems, and it's part of an ongoing course that they've been working through with various members of our group and others who have signed up for it so this is going to be pretty exciting, just to do some house work as far as our house thing as far as that's concerned.

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Share the memes, let us, let us repost your memes. it's a lot of fun that we have with this organization and we're really trying to start really supporting men going forward with some really cool programs that we have ideas for. And I just want to make sure that everybody understands that we are here for you.

And, this is the reason why we work with Rick Webster, the reason why we have our weekly calls, the reason why we do all of the different things that are out there that we're planning on we're working on a program for addiction, we're working on programs for doing group coaching within the men's ADHD support group itself on our website.

And we're really looking forward to the international ADHD conferences coming up in November and December, November 30th to December 2nd in Baltimore. We are going to be featured there as one of the innovative programs that they have, and we're going to do one of our men's ADHD support groups.

panels where we talk about various aspects of masculinity and the social structures and environments that we grow up in that can wind up having some toxic effects on our upbringing and how we view the world and how we perceive the world as people with ADHD or autism or both. So we really hope that y'all can join us there in Baltimore.

We'll have a lot more information about that as we kind of move forward with it with links to The website to sign up and, we're also going to really need your help because this is not an expensive trip. We're flying the, the people who are speaking and we've got a couple of volunteers that were, they're going to come help us with the table there.

And, all of this costs money, travel expenses and things of that nature. So. Again, we hope that y'all can help us. Please check out our website www. mensadhdsupportgroup. org slash donate if you can donate, but otherwise just check out our blogs and things like that. We've got some really cool blogs in there.

We're streaming this live on the Facebook. You'll also find this in our guides whenever it gets done. So, and then we're going to produce this as a podcast out there as well. All right, Rick. Yep. Let's talk about routines, rituals, and systems. First of all, what is the routine? 

As I see it, metaphorically, it's a cascade of dominoes.

It's basically not one domino in that whole thing has to think, but you, you get up, you have breakfast, you brush your teeth, you go to the gym, whatever happens to be, you have a set of things that you do in a particular order over and over and over again. And. The benefit is, it takes a tremendous amount of load off of your mental bandwidth.

You don't have to think about what comes next, you just do what comes next. And with ADHD, we have initiation issues, and this dramatically reduces that. Because part of, part of initiating is switching from the thing you were doing to the thing you're trying to initiate next. And if you don't have to think about what's next and how's next and any of those other things about the next thing, it just happens.

It happens. It's not hard right when we develop a routine, an order for things, things just happen. So, not only does that make it easier on our own mental bandwidth, but now we have that conserved or saved bandwidth that we can use for other purposes something more useful. So, so yeah, a routine is.

Basically a series of habits, tasks, one step things that you, repeat. 

And why is it so hard for people with ADHD to build up a routine, in your opinion?

Well, the secondary answer, which is correct, is they're not doing it right. But the first answer is... It's an executive function and we have executive function deficits. And so you're using the part of your brain responsible for conducting the orchestra for deciding what's going to be done for learning how to prioritize different things.

We're using that part of our brain to do exactly what it doesn't do very well. And so in that respect, it's very difficult when we start out of the blue and say, I need a routine. I need a morning routine. I don't know what it's going to be. I think maybe I'll get up and have breakfast and whatever.

One way to create a routine, which is in my opinion, the right way for something like that, something you're already kind of doing is if you want to create a morning routine for a few days, just take the time, take a little notebook. write down everything you do in the morning. You got up, you had breakfast, you brushed your teeth, you went to the gym.

Just write down what you're already doing and then you create your routine out of that very close to what your behavior patterns already are. Maybe you pull out something you're eating for breakfast that isn't very healthy and you switch in something else, but you don't make huge changes. Small moves stick, big ones fail.

So I think that's the bottom line is that's why it's so difficult for us because people With ADHD, it's now or not now, it's all or nothing, and we just want to fix this big problem that's a pain in the neck for us instantly. And that's not how it works. ADHD is a lifelong condition. Not necessarily all negative by any means, but it's a lifelong condition, and we need to look at the long,  it's a marathon, we need to look at the long view and work on our issues, expecting small, increments of practice of progress with practice.

Right. How important is it to being like how important it is to learn from the mistakes and the stuff that you make? What do you, what do you think is the most detrimental aspect of why people stop doing the routines? Or they Stop maintaining those routines for any length of time. 

There might be a little bit of a boredom that sets in.

We don't like tedium. And there's also the shiny penny thing that sets in and say, Hey, this is boring. I'm at this exciting thing I could do instead of doing these things that I normally do, I think I'm going to rush off and do that exciting thing. So I think there's definitely that to it. And as you mentioned in the very beginning, learning, learning doesn't come automatically.

There's that saying that some people have 25 years of experience and other people have one year of experience. They've repeated 25 times. And I see that a lot in the ADHD world. They've frequently comes out of the guise of refusing mainstream medication. That's the first clue right there.

But there, they comes out of the guise of refusing treatments that we know they work. And I'm not trying to talk about medication. I'm talking about mindfulness practice and I'm talking about an ADHD friendly living environment. We know these things work. And yet, part of ADHD is we always want to strike out on our own, right?

We're the frontiersmen, we're the hunters, so we say, oh yeah, yeah, well that might work for everybody else, but I'm special, I'm different, so I'm going to try something different. And the different feels good, especially if it's a placebo effect, it works for a little while. Next year, same person. I, I, I have hosted Chad support clinics for over 25 years now, and I literally still have people there that have been with it that group from the beginning that have not made much progress.

And it's sad, in my opinion. So it's the big issue, because progress is possible ADHD is not a death sentence, we can. Do a lot of things with it. I'm not saying that life's easy. I mean, everybody on the planet has challenges of one sort or another. And this one happens to be ours. And it, we still people, the first steps to get fully diagnosed, it comes with other co occurring conditions.

And if you don't know what they are, you don't know what you're fighting, what you're working on, what you're, what the solutions are going to be. So. Yeah.  In my case, it was ADHD. Yes, that was there, but there's bipolar two that I didn't recognize and there was depression, which I was steadfastly in denial about.

So if I hadn't gone to get the diagnosis, I wouldn't have known about those things. 

I completely understand that. It took me three years and three different psychiatrists to actually get a psychiatrist who would listen to me about, like, I have, I'm fairly certain I have ADHD, and I've studied it for a very long time.

I hit every single criteria there is about it, and the first psychiatrist is like, Well, adults don't have ADHD. That's not a, that's not a thing. And I, I mean, like, of course, like my social justice thing immediately kicked the fuck in and I was just like let's talk about that. Cause that's actually not true.

I mean we know two to five percent of adults in America have, ADHD or some sort of,  and even higher for autism and other stuff like that. So yeah, that's not accurate. I think one of the biggest things I struggled with was the shame and the guilt. For not being able to maintain it.

I always did that comparison thing because my wife is super organized, like lists, charts, things on the wall, reminders, everything. She's super organized. And I just felt so ashamed for a long time for like with dealing with that. And which was really, looking back at it, it was really dumb of me because as a project manager, I know.

That I need to be able to set in place these,  the tools and stuff like that, and we'll get into systems here in a little bit, but I knew that I needed to put those in place and learn from. My mistakes and learn from my failures and things along those lines. And you were talking about the, like, it takes, it takes time to learn and everything.

One of the things I've learned is for people with ADHD to create a routine, a steady routine that they can maintain and keep going forward so that it becomes this mindless,  habit that we just do can take up to 10 months. And that blew me away. Neurotypical people can do it in 90 days, on average, and I thought about that, and I was like, that has to be one of those most discouraging things to deal with, and part of what I actually had to process was, my goal isn't to do it perfectly, my goal is to do it more often than I don't, and be, and be, like, and work to do better, but, like, again, my goal is only to do it More often than I don't, because the more that I do that, the more often I do that, like, the better I get at it.

What's that, what's that phrasing?  Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Yeah. And, and that's one of the things that really helped me so much. That kind of goes into the next subject that I kind of wanted to talk about though. When we talk about rituals, and you and I were talking about this beforehand, rituals are important and rituals aren't necessarily religious practices, even though there definitely is a lot of value in the religious practices that are out there that help with mindfulness and meditation and kind of processing through the emotions and different aspects of, bringing your minds into the now and focusing on.

meditating on how to learn from the mistakes that we make or how to process the anxiety, the shame, the guilt. What's some of the rituals that you've had in your life that you thought was super beneficial for you? 

Yeah, and I want to get that but I want to quickly go real back to where you were talking about that your doctor who said adults don't have it.

The fact is that it's old news or old idea. If you had ADHD as a child, you still have ADHD I don't care how well your life is going you might not be diagnosable because there aren't any problems now you've solved them with good coping skills and such. You don't outgrow ADHD. You can outgrow the negative symptoms, the manifestations of it, but it is a physical difference in the brain.

Once the brain is matured, that's what you are, right? That's what you've got. I'm six feet tall. That isn't going to change. I can do things in my life to compensate for where I'm... Too short or where I'm too tall. I can do things to live my life in a way that makes it work for my height, but I'm always going to be that height roughly.

So I think that's just bad information is so slow to die, even in the medical community. It's old information and we need to completely recycle up. So ritual. I. can think of one off the top of my head when I was diagnosed probably 25, 27 years ago. I was really a mess. As a lot of, I mean, you don't go to get diagnosed because your life's going well, right?

So I'd hit what I consider to be rock bottom, although it was still farther to go. But the fact is, I got myself a coach couldn't afford it, but I cajoled her into working with me. And, and I did pay her. I think you should do that. When you get back on your feet, you, you pay the people that help you. No, they may start off helping you at a very reduced amount.

So what I did with her, among other things, but I journaled, I wrote pages and pages and pages in email processing my life, all the things I was thinking about, and just a huge amount of processing. And I'd send it off to her, and I know she didn't read the whole thing, but she'd make a little comment here and there, and I felt, okay, I have a witness to my life.

I did that for, I'm gonna guess maybe, I mentioned two years earlier, I think, it's probably more like three or four years, to the point where she said, you really ought to Print all that out, staple it up, send it to a publisher. You've got a book, all right? And at that point, I had gotten to the point in my life where I said, no new projects.

I have the three things I'm going to do in my life and a book isn't one of them. It's an interesting thing. And if this was 10 years earlier, I'd say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a zillion things going on, but I'll write a book. I can do that. So, so anyway, but that processing, that ritual processing of my emotions and life was absolutely 

huge.

Do you feel like that needs to be a part of our routine is like taking the time to, when we're dealing with those kinds of feelings, dealing with those kinds of struggles and things like that? Do you think that that needs to be a part of our everyday life or,  part of our, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or when we're feeling those certain feelings?

Do you think that that needs to be a part of our routine? 

I think it's good that it's in the toolbox, and for myself I don't journal. Now, I once in a while I will if something's really bothering me or if I'm going through some kind of emotional turmoil. I'll journal because it helps me process, but I don't do it all the time so I think there's.

phases and seasons of your life. And it's good to have a pretty full toolbox so that you can pull out the proper tool for the job that needs to be done, just like a carpenter, right? We want to be able to pull out the proper tool at the time. And if that's processing through a lot of emotions, you might consider going to therapy and journaling at the same time.

Those would fit together really super well. On the other hand, if things are going pretty well, and there's no real emotional angst going on, but you're, you're, I don't know, getting behind on your payments, for example, or you've lost your job. And those things do cause emotions, right? But they're quite situational based on what's going on in the moment.

If that's the case, then I'm probably going to take a more mechanical view of it and say, okay, lost my job. That's definitely sucks, right? It's not a good thing. There's a set of things I can do to do something about that. I don't need the process. I might need to, but I don't need to process how I feel about losing my job.

I know it sucks. I know I'm not happy about it. What I need to do is would be in my case is make a plan. Where to from here, Carolyn Mace would say, where to from here. I'm here. I'm unemployed. I need work. I can only survive for three months before things start to fall apart on the income or the reserves that I have.

So I need to find something and I make a plan and that plan is. We talked about this at Runify. It's abstract goals, concrete objectives, and a series of tasks underneath each objective. When you break it down that way, you break it down to the smallest actionable step at some point, and it's just easy to run that playbook.

Relatively easy. 

Right. I actually, yeah, that's one of the big things I work with a lot of my clients as a coach. We, we deal with time blindness. That's one of the biggest things. And like you were talking about, abstract, abstract for us is six months to a year out. It's very difficult for us to look at ourselves in a year and, and have a very firm idea of what we wanna do, unless it's like a very specific type of goal.

Like, I, I'm going to Disney World, right? Like I'm going to Disney World. That's a pretty specific thing. But if it's like, I want to work my way through losing weight. Right, that's a little bit of an abstract idea until we start breaking it down like you said, and so I kind of like I kind of tell them like look so you're starting with your, your one year idea, and then you need to break that down into six months, and then you need to break six months down into the month.

And then you need to break that down into a week, and then start figuring out what the specific things that you need to do, starting with the very first thing. And then developing a task list week by week until you start fulfilling your month by month. And that's, that's a huge part of creating that, that routine of what you're wanting to do and the routine that you're trying to build should follow along the same kind of timeline.

One of the biggest things that one of my, some of my clients deal with is the, the inability to understand like priority of tasks or why do I need to do tasks lists and things of that nature. And I'm like, Because like that's, that's part of, the routine that you need is to have a system where you're putting in task and prioritizing them and then moving forward from there.

And I've seen a lot of really big improvements in a large number of my clients when they actually were starting able to put at least that aspect of routine in their system. Like my Alexa will go off at nine 30 and eight o'clock at night, nine 30 in the morning to say, Hey, look at your task list, look at your calendar, look at your journal, and then in the evening it goes off and says, Hey, look at it for tomorrow.

And that's one of those systems that,  we have to have in place to be able to break up our day, to acknowledge I need to either do this or not. And by simplifying it. into making the decision to do it or not, I eliminate a lot of the issues I have with my time blindness.

What? Let me respond to that before we move on. Yeah. So yeah, I essentially have the same kind of plan. I've got my five year mountain that I'm claiming. That's my abstract goal. That's where I want Renafai, for example, to be in five years. But it's a mountain. It's abstract. I don't know what the top of the mountain looks like.

I don't know what Renafai will actually look like in five years. I have an idea. But I know as I get closer and closer, that's going to be modified and gets modified every month, it seems like, but, but not revolutionarily, but we evolve as we get closer, we see more things more things show up that weren't available to us before.

So for me, the concept, I do have that big bucket list, but the concept is big abstract goal. That's the mountain. That's where I want RANIFI to be in five years. And then there's a series of objectives. Objectives are not abstract. They are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound, right? They're just, remember the acronym.

They're clear. And an objective We have objectives in marketing. We have objectives in the educational product that we're putting out there. We have objectives in employment and that sort of thing. We have objectives in our mission. So those are all clear. And underneath the objective because that objective is a project, and we're never going to do a project because it's too many steps.

I mean, it's just all in our head at once. The only way you're going to accomplish a project is to get out of the project by having a whole series of. Discrete tasks, so that I can say to myself, okay, if I do all these discrete tasks, I'm going to achieve that objective. And if I do all the tasks for all the objectives, I will achieve the goal.

And I know there's such a tremendous amount of learned helplessness in the ADHD world, that half the people hearing this is, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I can't do that. It's not true. I mean, it becomes true if you say you can't do it, but it's not true. It isn't that hard. And, and even if it was hard, it doesn't matter because easy and hard should be irrelevant to you.

What's right or wrong should be the relevant decision points. So you may need to get some help. You may need to get a coach. You might need to talk to a friend. You might, if you've got  coworker or something, you might want to talk to that person. You probably want to get outside influence because we get into our own bubble and we can't, we're looking through our own lens, but we all can do it.

And if you want to achieve anything of significance, That's the pattern. You can put different names on it, but goals, objectives, and tasks, you're planning with the end in mind. There's the top of my mountain, now I'm down to get up in the morning, tie my shoes. So it's a task, I do it. Once it's done, I get to the next one, the next one, and we're into a routine at that point, because this task has been written out in such a way that if I do these tasks in this rough order, I'm going to achieve the objective.

So it all folds together. Like I say, this is not new information, goals, objectives, and tasks. Trainers have all kinds of different words for it, but it always comes down to those three 

categories.

Absolutely. I definitely understand where you mean, where you're coming from there. So like sometimes it's like my biggest struggle often turns into. Me just kind of like just being in my head, I like, even as somebody who understands that it's really important for me to spend time processing the feelings that I'm dealing with.

Like if I don't have that external tool or if I don't have that external reminder, I just kind of like wallow in that. One of the, you were talking about journaling earlier. One of the biggest things that I found was just having a notebook next to my bed Because my thing is that,  12 a. m., 1 a.

m., 2 a. m., or I went to sleep, but then I woke up at 4 a. m., just my brain racing with all of the different imposter syndrome thoughts. Well, why can't I lose weight? Why can't I do these basic things, all that shame and stuff like that. And so my journal that I have there is essentially just a brain dump.

It's just me taking the time to just literally like throw out all of the feelings and emotions and stuff like that into as fast as I can think and write. As fast as I can get it onto the paper. And it doesn't matter if it makes sense, because while I'm doing really, is it just expunging that negativity that's in my brain onto the paper that, Hey, sometimes I just throw it in a fire the next day.

I don't even look at it because it's not relevant because I'm, I'm just working on getting rid of it and kind of looking at other rituals. A lot of people, whenever they're doing meditation, that's a large part of Buddhist meditation is. essentially just expunging that negativity and using breathing exercises to bring back positivity, positivity and being mindful.

And if you're going for a walk outside, or if you're going for, doing things that kind of you enjoy and you find happiness in doing, if you're spending time with social circles and having fun with people within the capabilities that you have, whether you're an extrovert or introvert or things of that nature, those are all like rituals for.

And,  honestly, in my opinion, because when we are struggling with such a big issue with mental energy, all of that negativity costs us mental energy that we already don't have to to spare. And so getting rid of it, getting rid of all those negative mindsets and getting rid of all the different things.

And then turning around and looking at our values and our strengths and focusing on making decisions based on those instead of our fear. That's another ritual so that you're able to kind of make sure that you're staying in who you actually are and staying true to who you are. So one of the biggest things I see is a lot of people really don't understand the systems that they have in place to kind of manage their finances.

What kind of tools do you suggest people to use within your. Courses out there for them to manage their finances in a way where they're kind of staying building that routine of looking at their budgets and so like what's the, what's kind of tools and systems do you see valuable there. 

So much of it comes down to mindset. And I don't care what the tools are, if your mindset isn't in the right place, it, none of it's going to work. You're, it is literally your unconscious mind compromising your conscious mind. Your conscious mind says, we want to do this and this and this, we want to be out of debt, we want to get a job, etc.

If your unconscious mind isn't on board, isn't going to happen. Right. So first we got to get our mindset aligned properly. There are a lot of tools that we and they come and they go, I would, and they get perfected to sometimes they're the Model T and we have a Tesla right so things change as time goes by.

But I would say, some of the apps. And full disclosure, I don't use them, and I'll explain why. There's nothing wrong with them, I just don't. Mint is owned by a billion dollar company. They're going to take really good care of your data. Whenever something goes wrong, they fix it right away. Or when someone makes a suggestion, they implement it right away, if it's a good one.

So, they really know what they're doing. That might get overwhelming. That's, what the old... Kiss acronym, right? Keep it simple, stupid. So I, I think you don't want to overcomplicate this. But Mint's good. And if, if you're app friendly, that would probably be a good one. You Need a Budget is another one that I hear all the time how good it is.

I would tend to not do that one if I was looking for an app because from what I understand it is the envelope method gone digital, which is an interesting thing, but there are far better ways to handle your finances than the envelope method. But at least that's digital. At least you don't use, you're not using cash for any of it.

So there are those, there are a whole bunch of them. One of the apps actually that I might be very interested in doing, and I would recommend it to most people with ADHD who have impulsive spending issues and I think it was called Truebill. I think there's like five or six of them now, but basically you download it, you give it your information, and it says Hey, you got a subscription that's about to expire and it's going to be 270 bucks to I don't know audible in two weeks.

Do you really want that. And if you don't want it,  evidently help you cancel it really easily. So, when people come to me for coaching or to rentify especially because it's a different kind of level. A lot of those people have got subscription services, they're not even using, they haven't been using for years.

And even sometimes they know that they're not using it and they see the bill and they get upset, Oh, I missed it. Did they do something about it? No. They say, well, nothing I can do now. It's good for another year or two months or whatever happens to be. ADHD has an issue with, with activation. And so, , we have to, we're not going to change the ADHD.

What we're going to do is come up with much better coping skills. And one of the coping skills is to automate. Your finances as much as possible. And that doesn't take an nap. That would, that simply is, , you go to your utility company and say, here's my credit card information. Bill me every month I have a card with a 5,000 limit.

I keep it at zero 'cause that's what you need to do. And so my, my utility bill will always be paid. I'm not connecting it up to a checking account where, oh my gosh, I forgot to put the money in it. Now I've gotta pay the utility late fee. And I've also got a non, non-sufficient funds fee, so I'm gonna put it on a credit card.

I'm gonna keep the credit card down to zero. That's just a tried and true principle and it's good as gold. It'll build your credit as well. So I want to talk, I want a couple things you said that really struck me. It's funny, we talk about the psychiatrist. I told him that I think that I'm OCD and he told me, no, no, that's only kids.

I said, well, no, I don't think so. When, when I lost traction in the dirt to get out after I just gotten a speeding ticket and the cop was still in back of me shaking his head, I could see him in the mirror. That's oppositional defiance. That was a totally irrational thing to do. Or the time I was coming back from Oregon, I got a speeding ticket and I got so irritated that I said, okay, we're only 15 minutes from the border.

And 10 minutes later, I got another speeding ticket. Same, different cop, but same, , so don't tell me that oppositional defiance. Maybe you want to call it something different, but we have it. And sometimes that's a very difficult thing. So I want to, the thing I wanted to get to was you mentioned no more mental energy to spare.

I take exception to that. And, , maybe it's because I've been dealing with this for so long at this point in my life. I don't have any mental energy to spare, no matter how good my life is going, because I have purposes for what I want to do, and I'm not just going to say, oh, okay, I got an hour to kill, , I got an hour to kill, I think I'll just do Facebook Reels for an hour.

No, if I have an hour available, I'm going to put it towards something that helps my life, which might be as simple as taking a walk and listening to, , a nonfiction audio book. But basically, I don't look at time and energy as something to spare. We all have a limited amount, and we might as well be using it to its best advantage.

And something else you said, getting rid of it. We just need to get rid of all the junk in our minds, all the debris. People come into my chat meetings, some support groups and you for thinking about what's good about ADHD says, Well, yeah, I have this variable fountain of new ideas every day. I'm a fantastically creative person.

And, okay, in some sense that might be a benefit, but not if you're doing something different every day, and your life, if you look back for the last 10 years, hasn't gone anywhere because you've started. , 3000 different ideas. So know that that's an, you're addicted to these ideas. They're not worth anything.

And so, yeah, I want to get all the, get rid of all those things. And not all ideas are worth our consciousness. Even if it's a good idea, it may not be what you're doing. I might have an idea for a fantastic steam engine, but that's not my life. I don't know anything about steam engines. So why would I spend any time on that other than to call a mechanical friend of mine and say, Hey, I got a great idea and give it to him in two minutes and be off the phone.

But, but basically I'm going to let those ideas go. Like I want to wear blinders. If an idea relates to something that's important to me, then I want to delve down into it. If it doesn't, I want to let it go. And I want to make that decision as quick as possible. 

Yeah, that's that's another thing that I see a lot of people who struggle with is letting that kind of stuff go.

Because we don't, like, there's a mindset that's out there that has this concept of, I'm supposed to fix everything. This is a common thing that men have to deal with because it's part of our 5F's of our amygdala. Right. Fight, fight, fright, or fear, fawn, and fix. And I think that, like, we, we feel like we are supposed to fix everything.

We're supposed to, like, put everything in place that we have. And I love the idea of, like, having this brilliant idea about an app and then going, I don't know how to program an app. I'm just going to give it to a friend and say, hey, have fun with that. In fact, I probably need to do that because I have an app idea and I just need you to let it go because I don't know how to do app development.

Any app developers out there, I've got an amazing idea for an ADHD app if y'all wanted to help me with it or just take it from me. I don't give a shit. Or 

anybody with ADHD that just wants another idea. Right. 

Y'all can have it. No, but I think one of the things that I really want a lot of people to help or start working on with themselves is like the, like, if you can't.

Like control a thing, right? If you can't, , and don't want to learn app development or how to fix a car or things like those natures, and you can't control those things, you need to let other people take care of it or let it go now, granted, you can't like let your car break being broke down and go like, and let that go, but you need to find a mechanic instead of trying to do it yourself, if you don't know how to do it.

, there's a large other things. Like I had a client one time go like one of his like goals, like, and he was being very serious about it. He was like pure world hunger. And I was like, that's a really lofty goal. And now, of course I went through the same acronym that you did smart. And, , , is that like, okay, that's kind of broad.

It's not very specific. How do we measure ending world hunger? Like every person in the world having food. Okay. That's the, okay. We're, we're there. Is it attainable though? Is it an actionable goal that you can actually achieve? Like, do you have the billions and billions of dollars to put in place the programs they would require to help feed or, , help , create sustainable systems in different areas for product food production and different things like that in the logistics behind all that I've thought way too much about this since he brought it up.

Like, but like in like what kind of timetable, are we looking at, , and, and I saw his mind going through it and he realized the situation I was like, look, there's some things that we can't control. But there are some things that we can do where we going and working at a food bank, volunteering at a food bank, , making sure we're donating food that's in, , good condition to a food bank or making sure that we're doing kitchen work and helping with the, , the food kitchens that are out there, like providing that kind of stuff.

If we think are these really lofty goals that we see or think about. And break them down into smaller things that we are actually able to attain. We can like actually make a difference and not be paralyzed by why can't I do that thing and having a lot of guilt and shame for not being able to do those super out there, abstract ideas that we want to end.

If we start doing those things, if we start recognizing some of these are too lofty and we can drop them down a little bit and then start working on them in small chunks like we were talking about earlier, we may actually get to a place where. We do create the business that we want to run. We do create a million dollar idea that's out there, but the first thing that we have to do is learn how to do the thing that we want to do.

So if I wanted to create an app, I could go online and, and go through the app courses and start learning how to do app development and do all, , there's a big chunk of stuff like that, but if it's within my. Passions, something I actually wanted to learn part of the ADHD system is our hyper focus and ability to learn things very, very quickly and have a firm grasp on it, not random memory issues and stuff like that, but for the most part.

So one of the things that we were kind of, we kind of brushed on it by the way, I love this. You mentioned true bill and I had mentioned rocket money earlier before we started up. Truebill turned into Rocket Money.

I love that so much. I just happened to look up Truebill because I was going to put it in the in the comment section below. Check it out, y'all. 

Recommendations for that. If it might. Interrupt just a tiny little bit. There's this thing about guys wanting to fix everything. That is for two reasons and we need to understand them both if we want to get past it.

One of them is pure biology. That's how we evolved, right? Women were more valuable because they're, they can only have a certain number of babies every year and men can have like 500 babies. So men were expendable evolutionarily wise and women were not. So we were the ones that went out and fix things, including.

fought the battles and, , hunts the foods and all those kind of things. So it's biological. It's programmed into our genes. Doesn't mean it's a death sentence. I mean, we're stuck with it. It just means that's part of it. If you want to change, you got to recognize that part of this is natural to us.

And then the other part is cultural, huge cultural aspect of it. The thing that I, The first thing I feel about that is the airlines say, put your own oxygen mask on first. If you're trying to help everybody else, and you're a mess, guess what, your help is impotent. But if you've got your life together, like the world hunger thing, then maybe you can actually have a meaningful piece in solving world hunger.

You're not going to do it all, but you can have a meaningful piece. But if you can't get yourself out of bed or if you can't get yourself to work or whatever, what meaningful piece are you going to play? So to me, this is like Stephen Covey's planning with the end in mind. If I want to do something like that, I better get my act together.

I better get my life together. And that's. Harder than it sounds for sure. We all know that, but it is part of that triage of working our way through things to get

better.

100%, 100%, , kind of going back to systems like, okay. So I'm going to say this to, this is mainly for the crowd out there. I know a lot of y'all roll girls eyes when we talk about journaling. Okay. I get it. Right, but it's not just journaling and you don't have to do journaling every day can just be a sporadic thing that you do every now and then, especially when you're dealing with a lot of stress and frustration.

But the biggest thing about journaling. And making sure that we're taking time to, , journal how we're feeling at certain times, especially if we have a, , emotional dysregulation moment, we snap at somebody for something that they triggered us on, or if we're dealing with a lot of really, really bad imposter syndrome for things that work and things along those lines.

The thing about journaling is it's a tool for you to use that you can take to your therapist, or you can take to your priest, or you can take to your,  imam, and, or you can take to your buddhist , guru, or whoever is there supporting you, and you can sit here and show them what you're dealing with, and that gives your therapist an actionable thing that they can work on because they know how to do those things.

They know how to get you to process through those things. They know how to dig into it to find out where these issues come from in your past, especially if it's a cognitive behavioral therapist, a dialectical behavioral therapist, a trauma informed therapist. All of those are really good for ADHD.

Psychotherapists are really good as well for Processing through emotions and things like that. Cognitive behavioral therapists are good for putting, helping you put in place, , systems and coping mechanisms for the things that you struggle with. And it's really, really important to understand that these systems aren't just for making sure that you're, you're getting up on time.

Systems are in place for you to get to actually manage your ADHD through therapy, psychiatry, because. If you're having an issue with medication, if you're having an issue with the health thing that's popped up because of the side effects or something like that, taking that to your psychiatrist and being able to actually say no three days out of seven last week, I had this horrifying migraine and I don't know why and that gives these doctors and therapists and understanding that maybe you're dealing with severe burnout, right?

And if you're dealing with severe burnout, like the number one thing that you have to have is rest. Thank You've got to have rest because it's like the broken leg of the mind, , you can't keep pushing yourself running on a broken leg. You've got to spend time and I know a lot of y'all are like, I can't afford to spend time, , healing from this brain thing.

Like, if you don't, you're going to lose more time in the future. And it's really important that y'all understand that the nature of that. So we're going to wrap it up a little bit earlier. We didn't have a whole lot of people asking questions or anything like that. 

I want to address that for a second, if I could, I guess it's really important point,

the old thing of slow down to move faster. That's what my first coach told me over and over again. We might feel like we can't pushing hard, hard, hard, because, , we're going to get evicted or, , things aren't going to work out. Right. We have to find the bandwidth to, as you said, rest and recover to recuperate.

We need to find the bandwidth to actually. Begin to make a plan. Otherwise, our frenetic vibrations are going to get us nowhere. Just a lot of burned energy. And this is the thing we teach at Renify. There's two skills in money management in a sense. If you think of ourselves as swimming in a lake and you're Going under and you're 10 feet under the surface of the water, you will do whatever it takes to get oxygen.

So whatever it takes, you will get to the surface. And that's what we call in, in financial terms, treading water. You've gotten to the surface. You're able to breathe. It's an entirely different skill to learn how to get out of the water and fly. But if we don't master that skill, we're treading water until the next problem comes along, and there will be a next problem.

Maybe, maybe you get, you're entirely earned income based, and maybe you get sick and laid off, and maybe, maybe your employer lays you off, you didn't expect it, or for whatever reason. Maybe there's, one of your kids has a medical bill. So we have to learn, if we want to have a good life, to get out of that water and swim.

We can't just tread water. With no reserves, no, just barely breaking even. And that's what happens when people say, I don't have time to plan. I just got to work, work, work and pay the bills. And I understand the mindset, but we've got to find just a little space to begin planning our way out of it in a way that gets us beyond the surface of the water.

Absolutely. As a crux, that's probably right at the crux of what ratifies about teaching financial stability, teaching how to go from earned income based to asset based. And , having a very stable financial life, which 61 percent of ADHD years have a very unstable financial life. They're in financial crisis at any given time.

61 percent it's probably worse now. That was Russell Barkley, 2008, probably worse now, but yeah, we have to learn the skills it takes and it's all they are. They're just skills. It's not rocket science. Anybody can do it, 

man. I really appreciate you and the work that Renify does. What are, , where do they go and what can they do to to sign up for the courses that you have?

Like, where do they go as far as that's concerned and how, how do they navigate? To understand how the coursework works. We were talking about that earlier. 

Yeah, yeah. First of all, we just added eight new courses. One of them is wrapped up, but it's in the library. And the other seven are rolling along.

We're starting in one week. They're six weeks long. And one of them is session three is probably Sunday. I'm not sure, but coming right up. Three of six. Is all about systems and routines, because we're not gonna get anywhere unless we put systems and routines in place for ourselves. That's the only way we're gonna get consistent about things.

And the eight courses are designed to be a, a pretty comprehensive overview, not a deep dive, but a comprehensive overview of A D H D and what to do about it with an, with a concentration on money. But it's, it's everything. It's relationships. Everything comes into play. People go to our website. And it's renafi.

com. R E N A F I. com. And just sign up. It is about twenty two, twenty five dollars a month, I think. Unless you do the five month thing and then it's probably seventeen. I don't know. It's all... It's not a huge amount of money. I promise you it's worth it. And if it's not worth it to you, , we just refund your money.

Just tell us. It's a fourteen day guarantee and we're not tight on the fourteen days. , we want people that we can... Help out and plenty of people like that. So it's not working for you. We just assume you got your money back so you don't go complain somewhere, right? We're not gonna, we're not gonna hold you against your will.

So what they do is they go there, they sign up, and then one complicating step, and it's not hard, but we don't know what to do about it yet. We will on our next phase. You'll get an email and it'll invite you to Mighty Networks, which is a platform where all of our educational things are. And you can get to Mighty Networks without doing that, but then you're saying, please let me in and we're not letting people in unless they go back and pay the bill.

So, so, so go to ratify. com, pay the bill, get the email. Sign up for rentify. And then when you first get in, it'll seem a little bit daunting, like anything does and like riding a bike is a little bit daunting, but it'll, it'll clear the cleanup pretty quickly. And we do have hosts that are there to help you and we've got a couple of tutorials.

It's not that hard. So what you're going to want to do is go into the. events or courses, one or the other, and choose the courses that you want to take. And then you say, yeah, I want to take that one. It'll say, do you want an RSVP? And you'll say, yes. You want to add it to your calendar? You say yes. And do you want notifications?

You'll say yes or no. And that's it. Goes on your calendar. It's as simple as we know how to make it. The next phase, because we're small, the next phase, we will eliminate that step. But right now we can't do that. I'm not taking the risk with the company because it's A failure would be catastrophic for us to move it like that.

We are a partner, an affiliate partner with Men's Group. So we credit back 15 percent of the lifetime revenue from a client who is sourced from Men's Group. And the way we know that, Is either you get a link that had a bitly link, which I don't know that men's group uses those too many times, but we'll know if that happens.

Or better for you is to simply type that MENSGROUPMEMBER into the promo code section when you're buying our product. And it will save you 50 percent on the first order. We're a recurring thing. You can, you can sign up for one month, two months, or five months. So, if you wanted five months, you'll get those five months, which I think is like 97, but you'll get it for half price.

If you want one month for 25, you'll get that for half price. So basically, we, if you're a men's group member, we obviously want you to save the money. We really want you to identify yourselves as a men's group person, because we want to support the men's group and, , obviously 15 percent of one membership doesn't matter much but 15 percent of a couple hundred, that's going to make a difference.

I don't know how many of you have ever tried to administrate nonprofits, but you're always begging for money in a way. I don't mean to be pejorative, but money can be really hard to come by until you get yourself up into a, , more elevated level. It's really hard to get nonprofits going and imagine all your people are volunteer workers and all that.

So we're happy to contribute something. 

And we really appreciate it. The other side of this is you said this earlier, I want to make sure that we talk about it again. Like, they don't just get access to one course, they get access to all of the courses, correct? 

Yeah. Yeah, we advertise a course at a time, because if you give people too many choices, they don't sign up.

That's just marketing 101. But when you sign up, if you were to find an ad for one of our courses, You would sign up for the course, thinking that was worth it, and then you get in Mighty Networks, oh my gosh, we get all the courses. We get the library, we get the events, we get conversations with Melissa, all those kind of things.

There's a lot more to Renify than, than I can really explain right here. And we're not huge, don't get me wrong, but you'll find plenty to keep you busy. In fact, we actually want people to not be too busy, , take it in a measured way. Don't spend your whole life on it. Just, , a couple, three or four hours of classes per week be enough to move the needle forward on a lot of things.

But yes, it's, we don't partition it much. The only things that I think of that are partitioned are, are group and individual coaching. And we obviously, we can't do that for 25 a month. So that is an upsell, you would call it if you want that. And frankly, coaching was one of the things that literally saved my life, I think.

I completely agree with you. That's exactly that was one of the things that helped me recover from a breakdown I had in 2018 was going to as specifically an ADHD life coach and working with them and ironically enough, becoming an ADHD life coach myself just because I actually had all the knowledge and training and all of the different stuff.

So definitely understand it. It's a pay it forward 

kind of thing. I think for a lot of us, 

Thank you, Rick. It was great having you on. 

Thank you, Shane. Always a pleasure. Bye bye.