183 - ADHD Money and Finances - Learning or Doing?

If you haven't listened to last week's episode with the amazing Tina Mathams, that's a great starting point to the conversation this month about finances.  We going deeper than "what's your budget software/app". This week let's talk about the assignment she gave us and dig into the differences between learning, and doing. 

And please, please, please, send me your book recommendations. The book on finance that had the most impact on you. 

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Transcript

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Last week we had a great conversation with Tina Mathams on our money story and our ideal vision of what financial management looks like. Did you do the work? Anybody? I did. Let's discuss our findings. Shout's twin. Excellent. Follow me. Right this way, single file, here we go. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and their depression and anxiety and 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 craptastic. Welcome aboard. Let's learn some stuff, laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the ADHD Big Brother podcast where we completely solve and cure you of the ailment known as ADHD, completely and entirely. Just kidding. Oh boy, we are in it for the long haul, aren't we? But we will be giving you the tools to succeed. But will you use them? This is my vision for you, particularly you. Um, and you know who I'm talking about. Um, if you're thinking, I wonder, I wonder who he's talking about. I'm talking about you. I'm looking right at you. I'm standing in front of this mirror and I'm talking right at you, so listen up. Okay, so let's kick this off first with some mental health uh update. We are doing our part to normalize talking about our skull spaghetti, the good, the bad, and the weird. The uh oh wow, that was interesting. Clear didn't didn't see that one coming. I'm doing quite well in total. I credit my increase in uh exercising to uh a bit of that, drinking a lot more water, sleeping well for the most part. Uh the stuff that is weird for me is that I'm super sensitive lately. That's what I'm finding. A little thing would happen, usually, like it's ADHD Big Brother stuff. Um, just a slight thing. And I will become so emotionally dysregulated. I think I called Emily a couple of times uh with needing to purge it all out. Um, Emily's my girlfriend. Shout out to Emily. Uh hi, Emily. We are we're very business in it. Hello, Emily. Good day. Uh just the facts. Uh hello. I think that you're great. Um, it is a pleasure being acquainted with you, and I do enjoy the time that we spend together. Shout out complete. Um she's my special lady. She's so great at like uh being a good ear. Sometimes you just have to like say what you're feeling, even though there's nothing to be done about it. That's my experience. I'm just like, this is how I'm feeling, and even just hearing it sounds ridiculous. But uh, it's good to have a non-judgmental ear. You know what I'm saying? On the other side. She's uh glorious, and I love her. Okay, so outside of being discombobulated emotionally, I'm doing great. And how are you doing? What's going on over on your side? Feel free to reach out, let me know. I'm all ears. Purge away. Uh, and in business news, let's do a business update real quick. Um, quite a few people are are starting to take advantage of the free 30-minute chat that I offer to everybody. Anyone that wants to chat for 30 minutes, maybe you have an ADHD issue you want help with, let's do it. Let's go. Maybe you want to talk about the services that I offer, do you know, let's do it. I'll tell you about the consistency crew. It's full right now. Um, but if you want to be on the wait list or maybe build up another one, I max them out at seven. So I like to keep it nice and tight. Um, or I can tell you about our award-winning uh methodology for getting your ADHD shit together. What award you you asked. Oh, thank you. Uh, if you just look behind me at my plaques, I got a we have a platinum award. It's offered by Circle. It's a community-building platform that we host our uh ADHD Bit Brother on. Uh, I'm certified in their foundational program. I'm hardcore about community. You guys should know this by now. I will not shut up about it. Maybe you guys are thinking, oh, it's probably just another meme sharing community where everyone says, Hey, does this happen to you too? Or everyone wants to discuss their medicines or something. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are building what is essentially an online ADHD coaching platform that puts you in the driver's seat for coaching yourself and the enormous level of accountability offered to support that journey. And that's what our award is for. It's for engagement. We are a highly engaged community. And it's working. It's awesome. If you listen to the podcast, you know I don't shut up about community. Um, it's literally the answer to aggressively getting on the other end of your ADHD struggles. Um, and we opened up a couple new spaces too. It's one of them is called Where Does It Hurt? And it's organized by ADHD struggle. You click on it, you're given the tools in one comprehensive post, uh, applicable uh event replays that we've done, podcast episodes, procured posts from inside the community challenges, and then it's followed with the action steps, which I really want to talk about today, and we will apply that to finances. And then the other new space is the accountability buddy space, which is awesome. It's where you can match up with a fellow member for one-on-one accountability. How freaking cool is that? Um, it's like uh I provide templates. So if people are like, well, I don't know what to do how to talk about it and do things. You know what? It's it's just standard coaching questions to ask each other uh when it comes to doing the things that you want to do. It's super duper cool, and I'm super proud of it. So that's pretty much that. If you ever wanted to see what it was like in there, uh join. Join now. I mean, you get seven days to decide if it's right for you or not. Otherwise, I'll give you your money back. I mean, I don't want your money if you don't want to do the thing, uh, and you won't hurt my feelings, I promised. Now, if you said, if you said, hey, I paid for this, it's not for me, and I hate you as a person on this planet, then I yes, my feelings will absolutely be hurt and I will spiral. Don't do that. You could just say it really super politely, like, hey man, I just God, uh, I'm not using the program. So I appreciate you giving me the seven days. I know it's technically nine days, but I forgot, and oh gosh, feelings won't be hurt. And I I'll say, don't even worry about it. I'll be like, hey, man, cool. I get it. Good luck. Here's your money back. Done and done. Uh, but the reason, uh, one of the main reasons I'm saying join now is that the price is gonna go up in May, uh, May 1st. And right now it's only 135 bucks a quarter. So it's 45 bucks a month uh for literally, for literally everything. I'm laughing because it's ridiculous. When I value it out, it's stupid. So uh if you show up, you participate, you will get shit done for only 45 bucks a month. I don't even know what else to say about it. So you know what? Come on, grab yourself, take it, come on down, see what the rods are all about. Um, okay, so I want to talk about doing the work. How many of you listen to the podcast and you did the work? How many of you guys listen to any podcast and immediately after you do the work? I did the work, but I know my I have my thing in I'm an ADHD big brother. But many people of our school spaghetti, we don't do the work. We stop at the learning. I see this uh too much to shut up about. So uh it's like we get inspired, we learn a thing about a thing, to do a thing, how to do a thing, and we go, yo yeah, I gotta do that. But then we don't schedule it. We don't plan on it. We just intend to in the moment. We just intend to do it. And because our brain doesn't hold information, we forget. No big deal, it's no shame. It's just it happens to me to this very day. Uh for a lot of stuff. It continues to plague me. But I know the answer to this. Or I'll say, okay, I'll know an answer to this. How about that? It's how I move forward. Um, okay, so number one, we have I have to have a methodology of capturing information. For me, that's the bullet journal. Um, when I have something I want to remember, I put a lasso around it and I put it in my one place. And that one place is my bullet journal. Number two is I gotta have a methodology uh of structure in my world. Not every second of every day, but a way to take something that I've deemed important and then dedicating time to do it. For me, my calendar app on my phone, it shows me where my time is going. Uh, like clients own my time block. I'll show up because they're in my calendar and I look at it in the morning to see where my time has been slotted. So perhaps there's a workshop, boom, time has been slotted. Picking up my kid from school, time is slotted. Many of us were stopping at the learning. And sometimes what we learn is that, okay, I can't remember things, so I'm a bad person. And isn't that bizarre? Because nothing would get resolved in that case, right? It's just, oh man, if I was just a good person, then I'd remember things. That's like, that's not how it works, but that's how it feels. Do you guys is that is that just me? I find that stuff fascinating because that's historically how it used to be for me. There has to be a thing that after the learning, and it's called drumroll, please. Oh, I I almost sound like the Buck Rogers. Bee beep. Uh the doing. And if that doing does not have the appropriate level of interest in some fashion, whether it's novelty or urgency or genuine interest, then it needs structure or tools in order to successfully move forward. And that plays into another issue that we see a lot that is waiting for a thing to feel right. So we'll keep moving an item forward. We'll just keep pushing it to later. Uh because right now it doesn't feel right. But I can see myself doing this thing later, so it gets delegated to later in the day me. And later in the day, me is like, what the fuck are you doing? I'm you, and I don't feel like it either. So give it to me tomorrow. Tomorrow me can deal with this. And tomorrow me is like, you guys are such idiots. We're all the same frickin' person here. Ugh. You keep piling shit onto me, and now I've got a this enormous overwhelming list of all the shit you never did. God damn it, fire up the Xbox because I need a break from this. And then that's that's me playing Minecraft now for five hours because I I just don't want to deal with the overwhelm. So we gotta get ourselves to the doings. Um, all right. Well, let's uh put a what a bookmark on that or a uh let's put a post-it note on that for right now. Finance homework. Some really interesting money stories coming out of ADHD Big Brother. Some of these money stories that people are sharing are intense. I found the work of the money story, it wasn't difficult for me. Uh, just to quickly recap, if you didn't uh listen to the Tina episode, the homework was the what's our money story? What what did we tell ourselves or did we learn about money growing up? And how did that color how we deal with money now? And briefly, mine is that we didn't really talk about money. When my mom was at her desk dealing with finances, she's never in a good mood. So dealing with money is bad. That was my takeaway. Um, but we were always fine, we always had food. Um, so even if we were on the edge of financial ruin, I would have never known. They were just super quiet about it all. And so I think that colors my money now is that I uh I act like I'm fine and I don't look at my money. And this is how I believe I got into really bad credit card debt in my 20s and 30s, that I'm paying off now, now that I'm almost 50. So the second part of the assignment was asking what our ideal vision of financial management is. And this was really difficult for me. God, I really didn't want to do the work. I could I was struggling with it to the point where I had to schedule this uh this a task to think about it. And I couldn't just set a timer. It was that difficult to do. And so I was really swimming against the current to get started. So I added it to going to a diner to uh get breakfast. So I was stuck at the diner, just me and my bullet journal, eating alone, eating a nice omelet, drinking coffee, and because I was there by myself, basically trapped, uh, I was able to sit with the uncomfortability of it all. And the results were really interesting because I was like, I don't know what ideal financial management looks like. I mean, like 401k and IRA and savings, and what does that even mean? My easy answer is okay, I I want to be wealthy so I don't have to look at my finances. That doesn't seem right. So to me, I need to deepen my education on finances, clearly. Another ideal would be to have no credit card debt. Everything is paid off, and I have a system that works for me to keep tabs on my finances whenever I choose to check in. So I'm less about fixing and scrambling, and I'm more about checking in and iterating where appropriate. But it's never from like that, oh shit, place, you know, like, oh my god, that's due. Oh my god, I didn't see that. And I added one extra task to the end of our to-do, and it was after doing the ideal financial management piece. What is one thing that I can do to move forward on that towards my ideal financial management? And the one thing I came up with is I need to educate myself more so that I can make effective steps that will work for me. And I'm thinking if I don't know or if I struggle to envision ideal financial management, then to me that means I've got things to learn. And yes, it is not lost on me that I just basically said the doing is the learning. So we learn and then we have to the doing is uh as a different type of learning. I already put it out to the community what book they recommend. It's something like let's hive mind this bad boy. And I'm curious, what are you guys reading? Are you a financial wizard? What do you recommend? Because I know our kind. And if you were a financial obsessed person, then you will gladly share and you won't shut up about it. So my email address is all yours, Russ at adhbigbrother.com. Tell me everything. You know I won't shut up about community and accountability and all that. It's because I'm passionate about it. I will talk your face off about it. So if any of you out there have the same thing for money and finances, I dare you to fill my inbox. I challenge you. It's like Tina. She's all about talking money. She's so generous with her information. She's giving us a workshop next week. She's coming back to the show at the end of the month. Of all the things that make ADHD so shetty, listening to an ADHDer talk unbridled about their thing, no cage on time, no lasso, just free to go on the most rambly, disjointed, chaotic pattern of information until the battery runs out. It is one of the most beautiful things ever. Normies don't get it. They're like, oh well, you once you get to the point, you're talking so much. Normies. Anyways, send me info, send me your word vomit, send me your book recommendations, por favor. And that's my big challenge to you guys this week. My challenge. Like, what are you gonna do? That's it. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do about it? I know this is finance month, but with anything, what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do to move beyond the learning and the knowing and graduate into the doing? The sweet, sweet dopamine of a do, of a doing. You know, get some of that do juice. Gross. That sounds gross. What are you gonna do? And if you need help, links are in the show notes. Sign up and get some good old-fashioned support and healthy serving of accountability. Hey, I'll get you an accountability buddy and move the needle forward. I believe you can do it. You already done did learned it, and now you gotta be done doing it. And with that, I hope you guys uh reach out and say hi. And I hope you have a fantastic week. And I shall talk to you later.