177 - The Wheel of Life!

Let's finish the goal setting, big picture, January situation with a talk about the Wheel of Life. 

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright, it's the last episode of January. So let's bring out the big guns. We're still talking about goals, big picture stuff, putting it all together. So what better episode than now to bring out the wheel of life? You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and their depression and anxiety. I'm your host, Russ Jones. I'm an ADHD coach and I run the Platinum Award-winning community coaching of the same name, ADHD Big Brother. And I also have ADHD and depression. It's crap-astic. Welcome aboard. Let's learn some stuff, laugh at some stuff. And ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast, you guys. How are you doing? Are you having a good January? We're wrapping it up. We're putting a bow at the end of January. We're saying goodbye and good riddance to you. I like to kick it off, as I learned on the Mental Health and Tech podcast, to uh, in an effort to normalize talking about our school spaghetti, the good, the bad, the weird. Uh, I like to, you know, talk about my mental health. And uh, you know, all things considered, uh, you know, considering all the things, the uh the entirety of all the things, some of the things that I think that you're considering, and you know, maybe some of the things that you're not considering. All of the things considered. We are considering everything. I'm feeling pretty good. All right. When it's goal setting time, if it if it ever even is goal setting time, do you guys do this? Where you just you grab the first shitty thing about yourself and you create some kind of a grand declaration about it. Like, this is the year I lose the weight because I feel fat right now, or this is the year I'm on time everywhere because people are mad at me. And then we think that that declaration basically transforms our mindset. Like all of a sudden, I think a new way, always. And I do the things differently because I had one moment of clarity on a goal. Or who knows, maybe I'm the only one on the planet that's ever done that. Are you guys you guys gonna do that to me? You're gonna make me stand alone on this branch out here? Thanks a lot. I'm the only one who's ever created a massive declaration about the new me. Wow. Not cool. So earlier in the month, uh, we talked to Alan P. Brown of Crusher TV on his recommended methodology for setting a goal. Super rad. You should check that episode out. Um, we played around with that. And I also hosted a workshop in the community where we went through a guided visualization on our future selves. That's fun to do. Uh, and then today I want to talk about another way to come up with a goal to work on. But here's the thing: like that, I'm we get tired of productivity words. I know I do. And in the community, we were talking about, I feel like I talked about this on an earlier episode, where if the words create boredom or they're not exciting, maybe we just make up a new word. Mix it up. Goals are absolutely a great thing. I'm never gonna be in the camp where I throw in the towel on moving our needles forward. My whole purpose with this endeavor, this solopreneurship of ADHD Big Brother, is to get adults with ADHD in motion consistently. Even if that motion is the inner motion of healing from rest because of the ADHD burnout, you know? But I'm where you go to to talk about forward motion. And so sometimes the word goal gets overdone. So it starts to mean nothing. It's like, hey, what kind of goals do you got, buddy? What kind of what you working on? I don't know, Troy. You know, I lose weight, whatever. I don't know. I'm just survived the day. Does that count as a goal?

unknown 3:36

Get off my back.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

So what do we do? In my world, I'm all about trying to how to make things as fun as possible. I'm a gamification person. And that sometimes starts with changing some words around. Goal sounds boring to me. Well, so depending on, you know, who you are and what excites you, you call it, call it whatever you want. What if you like the fantasy of this future version of yourself that has successfully become your ideal? Like it's a so it's a dream. Maybe you call it a dream. My dream, my fantasy is me walking around, you know, 30 pounds lighter. And that dream includes my doctor saying, Russia son of a bitch, you did it. I don't know how you pulled it off, but here we are, and there sir, there is no point in you taking your blood pressure medicine anymore. You don't need it! That's my dream. That's a cool dream. Maybe you're you're the most office working person ever. Like maybe you like the word like maybe you like the word deliverable. What's your deliverable? You know, by the end of the year, I will deliver 30 less pounds to the scale. I mean, I don't know. What it what is it for you? Maybe you're more into the universe and putting things out there. Maybe it's called a wish. You know, my wish is to be 30 pounds lighter, my will, or you know, my will is to be 30 pounds lighter. What I whatever the word is. Just pick whatever. There's no right or wrong way to do this stuff. It's it that's my big point here. We live in an age of really, really strong opinions with really detailed reasons why things are or are not capable of happening. And like we'll listen to experts and we'll grab onto their language and we'll use that language in conversations. But what's the what's the ultimate what's the ultimate deliverable here? Doing a thing. Like, are you or are you not doing the thing? Okay, so today I wanted to talk about another way of finding out what those deliverables are. I fucking love the word deliverables now. That's my new favorite thing. Uh like what's what's your long-term deliverable? You got a five-year deliverable? I challenge you to hand in that deliverable. You know what? It works. Deliverables have deadlines. When's it due? You know, don't fuck around with me on this. What is your lifelong purpose-driven deliverable? Anyway, one way to unlock a deliverable would be to use the wheel of life. That I mentioned that in the top with some reverb and echo that I was playing around with the effects option of the software that I use. Thank you very much. I learned about the wheel of life when I was getting trained in uh integrative wellness coaching. Yes, that was my that was my entry point into the coaching, quote unquote world. You thought I was just, I just started right out of the gate as an ADHD coach, didn't you? Hmm. Hmm. You assumed. Um, I'm really into uh, you know, the holisticizations of things, uh, the whole body stuff. Um so you can Google it, Wheel of Life. It's it's a way of looking at what aspects of your life are potentially out of balance. You know, what's less than ideal. Not what you'd like them to be, but just what the what are they? Are they in a shitty place? Um, is there an area of your life that's in a shitty place? Um I find it to be a helpful marker in where I might put the focus of a potential deliverable. Or it might help us to come up with a like a side quest or two on our journey to our big dreams. So the way the wheel works is it's just a big, big circle, it's just a big wheel. And the various categories of our lives are placed inside the wheel. We just create a bunch of wedges. You know, they can be different for everybody. You Google it, you'll get a million different versions of it. I use eight uh pie wedges, and they are health, friends, love, career, family, spirituality, leisure, and money. You know, maybe you have one for recreation, uh, it's leisure for me, or maybe you have one for community or physical environment, home stuff. It's whatever it is. You could have a thousand wedges. What are the areas uh you think that make a well-balanced life for you? And what you do is you rate them on a scale of one to ten. How satisfied are you in that area of your life? It's a fun exercise to me in getting like an idea of a goal that I might create for those areas that maybe seem out of balance. And it's cool to look at it as like a full snapshot visual. You get to see all parts of your life. So, for instance, right now, my lowest four wedges are spirituality, leisure, money, and health. You know, somebody needs to get their ass on a meditation cushion and make time to be around some trees. And I might want to look at some ways to increase my money and better my health. Sometimes doing a wheel of life, it'll open up creative new ways of looking at where we are at in our lives and where we might consider focusing some energy, some of our life energy, some of those rays of energetic energy that from with the month within amongst our innards. You know, create a deliverable. For me, this is just a good exercise in self-assessment of current conditions, right? So it gives me an opportunity to visually see my assessment of my world in front of myself, and perhaps I get an insight from it. And from that insight, perhaps there's a deliverable, you know, or a dream to be had, or maybe there's a side quest or a big goal. And I feel like I'm repeating myself now. Goals feel to me like they're they're awful hard-work things that pull us from the enjoyment of life and into quote unquote work. Do you ever feel like that? We have to quote unquote work on our goals. It's work. And I mean, I don't know if you agree with me here, but work sucks. Work is dumb. Work is a is a normie word that justifies what you do to get money. Oh, and my money thing is out of balance, so I probably need to work harder or do more work or get more work or work on getting more work. The normie language sometimes is just it's a very solid, it's very good at representing importance. Oh man, because work is important. Money is important for without it. What will we do? But our brains are wired for interest. We have ADHD, we are interest-wired brains. Talking about exciting things, talking about need stuff. That's why finding work that is interesting to us can be super helpful. Or jobs, right, that have aspects of interest. Because, right, nothing is perfectly perfect. I'm lucky that it only took 40 years for me to career shift into uh something that offers me high levels of interest. So yay, yay for me. Okay, that was a tangent. So back to the wheel of wheel of life. For me, it's a way of playing with my life. What does my life look like on a creative wheel? Uh, and I color it in nice and fun, get a view of things, maybe get my insights. One thing I noticed about myself that I wouldn't have created a large long-term deliverable for is my spirituality. I used to be a pretty consistent meditator, ass on the cushion, all formal like, and everything uh always seemed better to me when I had my meditation practice going. So this gave me an opportunity, this wheel of life effort exercise, to see where I'm at. And then the questions that that I could ask myself would be like, okay, well, what can I do to increase my satisfaction in that area of life? It's a pretty easy prompt. Quick solution comes to mind, right? Meditate every day. Okay. That's something that I can put in the books as uh as a goal. We did this exercise in the community, and one of the things that we noticed is that it's a process that we can create a large amount of stuff to do and change. Like, God forbid we find out that we're dissatisfied in every wedge of our lives, and then we can spit out all kinds of things to fix or solve. The fascinating thing that we experienced was that we uncovered all of this inside of a five-minute timer. We did a 10-minute timer initially to assess our wheel of life. And then we looked at our wheel of life, we set that timer for five minutes, we asked ourselves, okay, what could we do to move our needle forward in that area of our lives? So if our health was at a two, what would it look like if it was at a seven? What would need to happen? What would that look like? Or as an experiment, like what would it have to be for us to label it a three or a four? Just a little bit better, just a tiny increment. And that part was done inside of a five-minute timer. We were able to come up with exactly what things we would look like if they were improved for all of our wedges. That is no time at all. One thing that I'd really love to point out is with this stuff is that when you do the work, it's normal to feel overwhelmed by the results. Like, holy shit, I'm dissatisfied with everything, or oh my god, there's so many things that I came up with to fix. It's all too much. And then all the gears break down and we run from the progress because it's all just too much, so we don't do anything. I don't know if overwhelm is the enemy. I think overwhelm is a thing that's going to happen. And part of the reason I created the community is so that we have a comfortable, safe, you know, dare I say, fun place to experience those feelings of overwhelm, talk about it, and work through them together. Sometimes all it takes is someone encouraging us, someone to body double the experience with, or someone to help us keep accountable. And that's what we do in the ADHD Big Brother community. We're fraught with that. We're fraught with that, rot with that. Fraught. We have a lot of that. It's a we have a whole bunch loads, a couple of bushels of that. And if you want to experience it, here's my big advertisement for you. We're open for business. The promotion that we did in December was super successful. So I'm deciding to just keep it going for right now. I'll pull it whenever. I don't know how to I don't put timelines on it, but you know, it's there for now. Uh so if you just want to taste the community, you can get it for 10 days for $10. You can come hang out with us, download all the resources, watch all the event replays of all the workshops that we've done, experience what award-winning ADHD support looks like in a community. And then the best part is you're done. It doesn't auto-sign you up. You don't have to worry about that, like, oh, you're all of a sudden charged full price for the community. After 10 days, you booted. You gone, sucker. But I bet you anything you're probably gonna want to stay. It's that's how amazing it is. So that concludes January. January was all about the big stuff. So if you guys have any questions or comments or concerns about anything of the big goal setting stuff, putting together your big deliverable, feel free to reach out, connect with me. Um if I can help you, I will. That's how I roll. And then as we move into February, we're gonna be talking about routinerizing. So uh stay tuned for that. And that's it. Hope you got a lot out of this. Or a little bit. Hope you got a nugget. Hope there's an ad nugget that you got out of this. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic week. And I shall talk to you later.