240 - Visibility is the Answer

For adults with ADHD, try putting visibility on your troublesome tasks to make them more likely to happen. Visibility requires vulnerability, courage, and community. Let's discuss! 

Mentioned in this episode:

Lindsey's speech after reaching 100 days in the ADHD Big Brother daily accountability club: https://adhdbigbrother.circle.so/c/welcome/what-is-possible-at-adhdbb

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It is impossible to drive like during a whiteout storm. Can't do it. It's hard to navigate in a pitch black room. If any parents here who've stepped on Lego pieces checking in on a child in the middle of the night, yeah, it hurts exactly. It's hard to do stuff when we can't see. To succeed in navigating the thicket of our lives, we also need a little thing called visibility. Let us discuss. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD, their comorbid depression, their anxiety. Oh, it's just a nuke. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Roger Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's crap tastic. So let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Let's make some commitments to do some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Alrighty, welcome to the podcast. Hey man, welcome to the to the ADHDB Million podcast. Let's do a show. Um let's let me just get right into my mental health report. This is okay, so every episode we want to do is what we're trying to do is normalize talking about our school spaghetti. That's what we do here. We are open and vulnerable, and we're talking about the good, the bad, and the weird. So what's going on? Uh my mental health is good right now. I have really all the standard uh anxiety for taxes. That that's it is, you know. I'm not gonna say it is what it is, but it certainly is. It is. Uh a couple of nights ago I did the wall push exercise, you know, to reset the Vegas. Reset the old Vegas nerve. Get my veil all polied up. I don't know. Got my veil poly. Why do we come up with these words for things? How's your Vegas hanging today? Excuse me? I beg your pardon. I will not be discussing my Vegas with you. But yeah, I mean I do the work. I'm doing the I am doing the resets. Um, I just gotta make fun of it because it's just also ridiculous. Uh, I do like the wall exercise, and I shared a link in the last week's episode. So if you're interested, you can go go peruse last week's episode, check her out. Um, for the most part, I'm spending most of the day pretty good in a pretty good headspace. And how about you? You want to share? I dare you to go to adhcbaybrother.com, click on contact, and literally tell me how you're doing. That's it. Nothing else. You don't have to, you know, no conditions, no expectations. Just hey, I'm gonna put it out there how I'm doing to some dude whose podcast I'm listening to right now. Great. It's not like anything crazy is gonna happen. I will reply. That's part of the deal with email exchanges. That's it. You get to get it out and get it visible, and that is what we are gonna be talking about today, uh, in terms of getting shit done. Yes. ADHD Big Brother wise. Okay, we got stuff going on, so listen up. Uh, a few months ago, I did these turd mountain workshops and they were good. Oh my god. So I'm gonna do them again. They're called School Spaghetti 101 this time. So I'm gonna be walking you through uh a five-point audit, which sounds very clinical, but uh usually when it comes to productivity and ADHD, I found in the years that I've been doing coaching is that there's typically a leak in your productivity bucket somewhere in one of these five areas. And because I don't want to just be uh I don't want to be just like a webinar, it's not that fun for me. I mean, it's definitely fun not being center of attention. Yeah, like that, and people watching you and what you're saying, but it's like I want to interact with you. That's what I'm in it for. So I don't want to scroll the chat and see who's got a question. My brain can't do that, anyways. That is really freaking hard to do. Um, I want to share what I know, and I want to understand you, and I want to know you, and I want us to both do all this together. And that's such a big part of my philosophy about managing a life with ADHD, is it works best when we do it together. And so I guide it's really small group, seven people max, through the five areas. We talk about who we are in those areas. There's a little education about that area, but then we go one by one, we discuss with each other. It's a conversation. Some of us are doing great. Some of us are like, what do you mean? I don't do anything for that area. We're like, oh, interesting. Small group, no shame, no judgment. Curiosity is welcome, and some good old-fashioned self-awareness. Nothing to prepare in advance. It's it's a conversation that we have. So I only offer these to current ADHD Big Brother members. I'm just not currently in the space. I don't know if you can tell, of hey, here's a free webinar, and then I'm gonna pitch the community to you. I just do that. I pitch the community every day here. We get it. I'm sure you get it. I want to work with people that are like at the point where they're committed to making an attempt at doing the work. So if that's you, let's go. If you're ever on the fence, you're like, oh, I'm thinking someday I'm gonna get in there, do it today. Get right on in there today. There are uh I'm doing the workshop in three different uh times. So three different days. It's all happening this coming week. If money's the obstacle, join for a month. A month. Hit the workshop, get my free coaching call that I give every new member, and then bounce, y'all. See you later. It's a pretty damn good deal for the price. I think what I need to do is stop calling it a community. We'll see. Some people still call it the forum. When I first opened up ADHD Big Brother, it was a forum on a different platform. And then we graduated to community. I think I need to start calling it a gym. It's a place where you go to work on the doing of the work that you're doing. Just happens to be that there's a bunch of other people. Instead of showing up to the gym, you know, and you have one trainer, it's Troy. And what is Troy gonna tell me to do today? Here, you show up to the ADHD Big Brother gym, you get a whole gym full of people rooting for you, encouraging you, showing you how they do stuff, asking you how you do stuff, and everybody's cool with whatever level you're at. You're not much of a talker. Okay, cool. You just want to lurk, watch other people do it for a while. Totally cool. Jump in whenever you want to tell everyone how you do a thing, great. Then you get to hang out with people like Louve and Lindsay. They literally just got awards in our community. Or sorry, I'm sorry, gym in our gym, for doing the things they said they were gonna do for 100 days in a row. Excuse me? I'm sorry, what? Yeah, that's insane. Lee awesome. Oh my god, and quick shout out to Lindsay, who she wrote the most epic Skull Spaghetti Master speech. So people, when they reach 100 days, that's they get the award of Skull Spaghetti Master, and then we invite them to write a speech about, you know, how the fuck did you do that? How many of us have been trying to get a routine going or be consistent in some way, and we just can't do it? And at 88 Cheaper Brother, we do it. We have the engine for that. It's like an implementation engine. Anyway, I cried three times reading it. I am a sensitive guy. I am prone to weeping, but holy balls, she's a good writer. Inspired the hell out of me. She gave me permission to share it. You want to read it? It's good. Uh I put it in the free section at ADHC Big Brother. So the link will be in the show notes. Huge shout out to Lindsay. Um, alrighty, let's talk about visibility. Visibility is how you make the things more likely to get done. I'm a big nerd for what it takes a person like myself, uh like you, to do a thing. Even though there's so many reasons why we don't, why we can't, why we won't do a thing. So, what does it take for to do that thing even though? Oh my god, the curiosity, how do we remain objective and like zoom out and be non-judgmentally curious about it during those times when we feel so frustrated, so helpless, so hopeless, so riddled with like I'm tired of trying and failing. How do we do a thing even though? How do we do a thing even though? Even though there's a danger of failing, and emotionally it's more safe to not even try. How do we do it? And a massive component of that, I believe, is visibility. What is visibility? Oh, that's an excellent question. I'm so glad you're asking me this. It is making the thing you want to get done visible. Thank you for coming to my speech. I mean, that's literally what it is. It seems pretty easy when we make it really freaking hard, don't we? Because there are actually some ingredients to this that we are often not quite willing to put into the pot to make that stew. There are three main ingredients here that I'm talking about to make something successfully visible. Uh, and the first is vulnerability. You have to be willing to share something that might feel uncomfortable. So many things that we struggle with are things that are that we know how to do. We have done them before. We are expected to do them, and talking about them makes us feel stupid. Hey, I'm gonna do the dishes. Okay, so fucking do the dishes. Why do you have to tell me about it? Why make it into a thing? I'm trying to make it visible. Like there's a big eye roll. That's sort of how we feel about ourselves about these things. So it requires uh the willingness to be vulnerable and share even the most simplest of things. Visible means it's seen, or it could also mean seen can also be heard in this case. It's out there, it's been put out there. And then the second thing required is courage. Bravery is required. We are potentially going to get an eye roll. That's how we feel. We are potentially going to fail at something easy, and we're going to potentially have told someone, and we are not gonna want to fail yet again at something that we promised again. There's a lot of fear to putting visibility on things. Visibility, it sounds easy on paper, but oh my god, there is uh there's a lot going on just to declare something out loud. It's like we have to face all of our past failure trauma. It's literally like, hey, I'm gonna file my taxes on time. Oh god, now I made it real. I know myself I won't do it. And then this will become just another thing that I didn't follow through on. Courage! We must have courage, bravery to declare publicly that we're going to do the dash as. Or we'll die trying. And then community. Let's say someone or anyone besides yourself, that's what that means. That's a necessary ingredient. Someone has to see what you made visible. Otherwise, who cares? Just don't do the thing because there's no ramifications. If urgency hasn't naturally set in, then who cares? Who is gonna be your other person or your other persons? I like multiple people for this. It makes the visibility stew so much more rich in flavor. And then I don't think this is necessarily an ingredient. I think actually this is gonna be the spoon, the stirring spoon. The big I'm we are working a cooking metaphor here, guys. You have to stir the stew, you have to stick with it. You know, this isn't a crock pot recipe where you don't set it and forget it. You have to be dedicated to the dish. How many times do we throw all the ingredients into the pot and then we just say, oh god, it didn't work. I failed at this. Like you didn't even turn the oven on. And then we walk away and we're disgusted with ourselves. That's not how behavior change works. We have to keep this stuff visible until we do it. We have to stay curious while we are working on the behavior change. It really looks like this it's fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed. Oh my god, fail, succeed, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed, fail, succeed, succeed. It and on and on and on until we die. And when I'm coaching you guys, when I do one-on-one coaching, and also this we do this in group coaching, it's about systematically working through the obstacles after each failure, right? Quote unquote failure. You don't start coaching and then you do it right. Why would why would you even need coaching? You don't join a community and then suddenly it works. That's why I'm so confused when uh somebody will say, I don't know if the community's I don't know if community will work for me. I don't know if I'll use it. It's as though like you would join the community and then your ADHD goes away because you naturally easily somehow have behavior change, and this is the new way of ADHD that eliminates all the frustrations and the failures, and and like it's the doing of the community that works or doesn't work. Like the community is the gym. Our particular community exists so that you can have a safe place to suck, to suck at this big time out loud in front of everyone, and to do it wrong, and to be frustrated and face that frustration, vocalize it and experience staying with it, even though, like we say, I joined a gym, but I never go. But if you hired a trainer, you would go to that gym. If you hired me for one-on-one coaching, you're gonna show up for the appointment. So, like I it's like I mentioned earlier, like if you join ADHD Big Brother, we collectively are your trainer. You get your free coaching call, that's great. Get in there, and then you get ideas and iterations and support from everyone. Show up. And if showing up is what you suck at, then that's the thing to deal with, especially on our one-on-one call. I can help you with that. I'll get you in that room. But that's the beauty of it, guys. I will stay with you and your failures non-judgmentally until you get it. I will root for you, I will share ideas with you, I live in that place. I sponge as much as I provide. But if you don't show up, if you don't make anything visible, nothing can change. It's like when I was working with Lindsay. If you read her amazing journey, like when she started out in coaching, she did not succeed at everything. But what she did was she showed up to every appointment. She was vulnerable about her struggles, she had the courage to share. We went after each obstacle until she had it, and now she can coach herself. And then she joined the community and she just showed up and put it out there. She made her goals visible, and voila, we have someone who is getting shit done and is a school spaghetti master. The simplest way to put this uh is most of us have so many things we want to change, right? So many things we want routines for, systems for, etc. Pick one skill to work on. What's the thing that if you improved it, it would just kick ass for you? And not even like what you have to do, not what someone else thinks you should do. Like, what do you want to do? Practice these ADHD skills for an ideal thing for you. Lindsay wanted to finish her novel, didn't want it to be like yet another unfinished project, right? Cool, done. And let's learn ADHD skills as they pertain to moving the needle forward on that. Then you can apply those skills to whatever bullshit you have going on in your life. Is it laundry, is it dishes, is it taxes? What is it? So, yeah. Visibility. My challenge to you is like, what are you gonna make visible this week? How are you gonna be vulnerable and have the courage to share? And with whom will you share it? If you need your community, you know where to find me. Uh or if you would like to just go to adhgother.com, click contact, share there. I will reply. I literally enjoy the bejingles out of this. This is my happy place. You know what? I know that I'm doing the right thing because I find my I found myself getting emotional. Talking with someone about their planning. I got I got so giddy. Lisa, I'm talking about you. We're working through her planning for the week, and I'm getting giddy seeing someone successfully plan their week. I love watching you sons of bitches figure it out. It's it's cool. I just like to be around it, man. Like that, you know, they say that you're not supposed to spend more than like two hours a week in your online community, and I basically live there. When I'm not in a client appointment, I'm usually in the body doubling room getting work done. Like, I hate marketing. I don't want to do it alone. You put mics off, go into a body doubling room when I write these episodes. Shout out again to Lisa. She's in there while I was writing this one. I don't want to get my work done alone. Big deal. They have super inexpensive services out there for body doubling. Um, I just use mine because it's part of my ADHD Big Brother gym. I use my own equipment. Alrighty, guys, that's gonna do it for this week. Hey, remember that this week we are doing the School Spaghetti 101. Learn where you may have leaks in your productivity. Come, let's talk about it. Five-point audit systems check. Seven people max per event. Join the community and I'll walk you through exactly how to RSVP to one. If you want to get shit done, I want to help you do that. If I can be of service, I will. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I shall talk to you later.