243 - ADHD and the Shame of 1000 Tries

In this episode, we address the unique struggle of building consistent habits when your past is littered with abandoned attempts. How do you do a thing that you know how to do, but you can't do? How can you start trusting yourself again? It starts with showing up, even though. 

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.speakpipe.com/ADHDBigBrother - Leave me a short voice mail. What is your name, where are you from, and what do you currently suck at. I will respond in kind. 

$10 for 10 Days - no auto-renewal. 10 days of ADHDBB to explore and experience at your leisure. Come see what it looks like when people show up and keep their plans visible - promotion ended.

ADHD Big Brother on Substack

ADHD Big Brother Website with resources

Try the FREE ADHD Big Brother Episode Finder!  Type in your struggle, get two matching episodes. No emails, no sign-ups. Find your episodes →

For those of you that are wondering why nothing is sticking, why you read things and don't do the work, why you have epiphanies about what could work but it goes nowhere...Join myself and others at ADHDBB.  There is a 'team' component to managing ADHD. Join our team. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Oh man, does it suck to have to tell someone that we're going to do something? Knowing that we've let them down so many times, like the catchphrase that we're known for is, oh, is this this is just your next big thing? Ugh. It makes committing to anything super hard because we've adopted this gift of forward thinking everything to the point of failure. So you know why get started? I can just see myself failing at this. Oh my god, it's awful. Let's have a little chat ski poo and find a little workaroundie poo on that. 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 new. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Rush Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's crapastic. 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. Welcome to the podcast. Hey. How's it going? Hey, how you doing? Hi. Nice to meet you. I almost said let's dive right in. I literally almost said, all right, guys, let's dive right in. I'm gonna punch myself in the mouth. All right, ADHD Big Brother Wise. Uh the $10 for 10 days thing that was gonna go uh until May. Um, you know, if you get this podcast on Monday, take advantage of it. It's still going on. I haven't pulled it yet. I looked at my calendar and I don't have time to end it until Wednesday. I don't actually have the time in my calendar to schedule the work session to yank it. So uh I put the work session in for Wednesday. So it will happen on Wednesday. Um I was a good ADHD or I scheduled it into my calendar. Good. So if you want to experience what it's like to actually do the things that you say you're gonna do, if you want to experience what it's like to show up and admit things like that we're gonna talk about on this uh episode, come into the uh community, or you can just spend 10 bucks, download all my resources, watch all the replays. It's totally up to you. But you know what? It's a great way to jump in and see what all the fuss is about. All right, let's do the mental health report. Okay, so this is where we normalize talking about our Skull Spaghetti, right? The good, the bad, and the weird. We're not always fine. So it's good to just it's good to chat about it. My mental health seems to be doing pretty good at the moment. I find it interesting though that I'm doing these mental health reports like weekly. So I'm kind of giving you like a summary of an overall, but the ups and downs in a given week can be pretty uh uppy and down. When I was writing the podcast earlier in the morning, my kid was asleep, I was drinking a cup of coffee, I had a pretty good vibe. Mental health was good. Now, right now, I'm recording this podcast. I do not feel a lot of dread going on, so that's cool. And I'm actually feeling quite a bit free at the moment. I might have mentioned this last week that I was gonna do this, but I did it. I deleted all my social media accounts. Bye-bye. Got rid of LinkedIn too. Good design. Uh I'm on Substack writing articles. Uh, if you'd like to read them, great. They are the written equivalent of the podcast, I guess. So I enjoy writing and I also enjoy talking, which is what I'm doing right now, and helping, which is what I do at ADHD Bay Brother. If you actually genuinely want to connect, awesome. I would love to connect. I have a contact form on my website, adhdbaby brother.com. Done. Let us connect. And there you go. That is my mental health report. So uh I think it's safe to say that unmanaged ADHDers, even those of us that are quite proficient uh at the management of our ADHD, we suck at stuff sometimes, don't we? Do we want to pretend that we don't? I don't know. I mean, how do we grow then, you know, without an honest assessment to kick it off? What is our task succotude level? Maybe there's a delicate, less blunt way to say it. I don't know. I'm just that just requires mental effort. And uh, you know, I'm just fine calling it exactly what it feels like in the moment. It feels like I'm sucking. I don't really want to wear a mask for myself. You know, don't say that you suck, Russ. You're working hard and hard work, and you know you're doing the best that you can. I'm like, yeah, no, yeah, it's I I get that. Let's just call it what it is, though. Like, who gives a shit? This week I sucked at doing the laundry. How about that? I know I'm not a bad person, but I sucked at laundry. I punted that laundry forward big time. I also sucked at doing the dishes before I went to bed. Couple of nights I hit it. Always better to wake up in the morning to an empty sink, you know? But I sucked at doing the dishes. If you were gonna um tally it up, number of days that I did it, number of days that I didn't. Succitude was higher. But you know what? Big deal. That these are just the facts. It's not a declaration of my character flaws. You know what I suck really bad at right now? Oh my god, not eating bread, failing it that hard. But this is just my initial assessment. That's just an honest assessment of where I'm currently at. Doesn't mean anything good or bad about me, the individual, but holy shit, do I suck at not eating bread? Okay, so here we are. So the cool thing about sharing the things that I suck at with you, and also I do that inside ADHD Big Brother, is that it makes the personal sting of it so much less. Like I can whine, I can complain about how hard these stupid dishes are, and it's totally cool. It is hard to do that in the normie world, isn't it? For trivial things like the dishes. Like these dishes are so hard for me, and you know, that's often met with eye rolls and you know, suck it up. Everybody has to do the dishes. It's your turn, dude. Come on. And sometimes, guys, just knowing that you know how easy it is, technically, to do a dish, right? And you know, when I say dishes and laundry, that is the metaphor that I use for everything that is easy but hard to do, right? It's the stuff that we can do, but for some reason that we can't do. Even all you CEOs out there that are, you can apply this to your trivial, the shit you can't delegate, and yet you also can't suck it up and get done. You know what I mean? It's that stuff. This podcast, it's mostly late in lifers. If we're that's generally who I hear from the most. Like we've already read the books, we know on paper we're not broken, so what am I doing? We're we're gonna put on the mask of I'm not broken when everything in us relating to this thing that we're trying to do tells us that we're broken. And now we have to have that fight, like when we're where we convince ourselves that we're not broken first. Like, there's a whole production baked into doing the dishes, it becomes a whole thing. That used to be super isolating to me, by the way. Maybe that's why I have such an aggressive stance on it. It would be like I feel broken, but I'm not supposed to feel broken. I'm I'm so I'm I can't even struggle with my ADHD right. Oh, the nuances of it all is fucking unnerving. Like, how am I supposed to manipulate my perspective so that the world looks different than how I feel? It's a real battery drain sometimes. Can someone just please tell me how to rinse my fucking dish? How about that? By the way, I I'm coming from this from like this. I I know that this is an exaggerated, dramatic place that I'm coming from. I it's from my depression. It's my particular thing is doing the quote unquote dishes when I have this inner, like, well, what's the purpose of anything? It's like a real dramatic dread, you know? Like, why bother with the dishes? Fuck them. So I don't like that. I'm more of a yeah, I feel broken. It sucks. It's a shitty feeling for sure. So now, how does a person that feels broken do the dishes? You know, I know I'm not broken. I get I know it. I feel it though. So that's a big difference. This is reminding me of like this acting conversation that I had with Alistair. My son Aleister, he uh is really into acting, and we were talking about like the nervousness of performing in front of people, and I've done that for decades, and there there's just no just don't be nervous, right? Nervousness exists. You can philosophize it, you can hype yourself up, tell yourself that nervousness means that you care, but so what? It doesn't go away. Not for me, it doesn't. The best thing possible for nervousness for me was to get up on stage, even though I am huge into the even though concept. It doesn't necessarily take away the nervousness, but oh my god, does it get easier to show up and get on stage the more you do it and you live to tell the tale? Some days it goes great, some days you crash and burn, but they all started with nervousness. What is my option here? This is where it kind of like relates to the bigger ADHD picture for me. It's that thought of like, well, what am I gonna do? Do I want to spend an hour before I go on stage journaling about nervousness, meditating about nervousness? Or maybe I go on stage when it's my cue, even though, and then I save myself an hour of percolating in misery, even though it isn't about a willpower thing to me, even though it's saying that I accept this uncomfortableness and I'm not trying to make it go away first. Willpower to me is the act of like sucking it up and ignoring feelings, even though to me says I'm making the attempt without changing my feelings. When we get into the the muddy waters of yeah, but the moment, how do I get started in the moment? That's a different nut to crack. That's go to my website, get the ready set go framework for that. Um, there's that's a hack stink type situation in my world. Set a timer, easy point of entry. There, there's a process. So let's apply this to the shame of a thousand tries. You've tried this over and over and over and over again, and it's embarrassing to admit it now. You feel awful, nobody believes you anymore, and you can't do this alone. Oh my God. Even though you suck at the dishes or whatever the thing is, and I'll just use me currently. I suck at not eating bread, like I mentioned. I have tried many times to give up bread. It doesn't help that the flower tortilla and chips and salsa finds its way into that category. I could ignore it and hope that I get inspired someday when it's too late. I'll rely on that good old-fashioned urgency, you know, that so many of us herald is our gift. You know, that's what makes me so great. I can shit my pants in fear and anxiety, and ultimately I'll kick butt and finish the thing because I'm super focused, superpower, activate. I'm like, great. Okay, that's awesome. What's your underwear budget? Holy crap. Or I could put visibility on it to people that I feel comfortable with. For me, that's ADHBrother. I can keep it visible and I can iterate until it happens. That means facing the potential shame of it all, right? First of all, I'm admitting that something is a struggle. That takes a hefty even though. That's a hard thing to do sometimes for stuff that we've determined should be easy, shouldn't require support. I should be able to do this on my own. Yeah, it's tough. There's a that's that there's an even though in that one. Even though I have no business complaining about something, it's so trivial while the world is burning. I'm gonna complain about I don't know how to not eat bread. Yeah, exactly. Even though, even though I have no business soliciting the support of others for this thing that I am clearly not winning at. So what am I gonna do? I'm just wasting everybody's time. Even though I could feel stupid, embarrassed to be on the 50th attempt of trying a thing, I'm so frustrated with myself, and my brain keeps telling me to stop wasting people's time. Even though all of that, fuck it. I'm gonna share and keep it visible. Even though everybody else has important things that they're working on, and my thing is trivial and dumb, and everybody's gonna laugh at me and think I'm stupid, even though that's what my asshole brain is saying, I'm gonna put it out there. I'm gonna make it visible. What this does, at least that's how I play it, is it turns the shame of a thousand tries into the game of a thousand tries. It's like we're going after doing a thing, right? And let's also keep in mind, I'm assuming that you're in therapy, right, for your therapy needs. Therapy is the order of the day. That's I'm a huge fan of therapy and I love therapists. They are doing God's work, helping process through the bullshit of our lives. Cannot recommend that enough. You come to me when you want help doing stuff. I'm not gonna wait around for you to fix your life before you start moving the needle forward on your ideal vision of yourself. Nobody's getting over their childhood trauma and their decades long of failing with ADHD because you didn't realize it was ADHD and you thought you were a lazy piece of shit. I'm not waiting around for that for to get on the other side of that perspective to do the fucking dishes. We can do it. Let's do it now. Like, what does it take now while you're sorting your life out? Let's see how many tries it's gonna take, how many iterations, let's keep it visible. On my end, I don't have to worry about people giving up on me or the idea that they might. I've surrounded myself with non-judgmental supporters. You guys, you should you should come into ADHD Big Brother and see. We have been amassing an army of support. It's pretty rad. I'm gonna get on the other end of my bread issue. Get some of this unwavering support on the things that we say we want to do. One of the big differences here when you share is that you keep the dialogue open, you keep the process iterating until you get to your success. You got to keep it visible, though. A lot of ADHDers early on, we say what we're gonna do a thing, like I'm gonna make this change. Tomorrow I'm gonna make a phone call. And then we suck at it, right? We fail. We don't do it. And then we say, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna try again tomorrow. I'm gonna get this. There's no conversation about what happened, about what got in the way, about what will be different in the effort next time. No constructive reflecting. It's just I didn't do it. Got dang it, I'm gonna suck it up and do it tomorrow. And that suggests that we're just gonna somehow change who we are overnight, I guess. And now suddenly I'm willing myself, I'm I'll give myself, like I'm gonna try harder, I'm gonna be the guy that's different this time. And that approach will typically meet with failure. But you know, with the dialogue and with reflection and some curiosity, especially from others and with others, making it visible, that's when the ADHD or starts that process of doing the thing. So I'm confident that I will get to the no-bread situation. It will be happening. Your turn. You don't need me to tell you that your brain's wired differently, you already know that. Um, your neuroplastometers and the neutron coordinate of your left hemisphere are by ratio three dexadecimals longer than a neurotypical. We got it. That really makes the dishes hard to do. There, good. Now that we know it's not us, it's not our soul, it's not our spirit, it's the goop inside the brain case. So we gotta get outside the brain case. What are we doing today? What do you want to do? Here's a challenge for you. You want to play? I got a challenge for you. I want to help you get comfortable showing up. For those of you that need it, this could be super embarrassing outside your comfort zone. Perfect. Let's do it. Let's do it even though. I have this speak pipe thing that I got. Uh, I invite you. Invited. I'd like you to RSVP to my speak pipe link. Um I challenge you to click on that link and it will allow you to record a 90-second maximum message to me. People use it, I think, uh typically for fan mail, right? Or tell me what you want me to talk about. I just I don't do that. I don't, I'm too oppositional. But let's try it for this. Tell me your name, tell me where you're from, because that's always cool to find out. Uh, and then tell me something you suck at right now. Troy, I'm from Delaware. I suck at filing my taxes on time. I'm Stacy, I'm from Nova Scotia. I suck at texting my friends back. That's a good one. Try it. Try showing up and sharing something. Something trivial, even. I suck at taking a shower, whatever. You know, what is that shame-making succotude that you have? I already shared one of mine, so I think you kind of owe me anyway at this point. I put it out there for you. I suck at not eating bread. I don't care that it's dumb. I'm working on it, and that's visible. Send me a voice note and I will send you one back and let's see if it helps you put some visibility on your struggle. No positive reframes, no need to mask up and pretend that you have your shit together. Be you, however you are, and share whatever place you're at. Cool. And it's no big deal. I'm not gonna air it and I'm not gonna share it. Done and done. Just practice the art of sharing the shamaker. Let's play the game of a thousand tries together, and that'll do it. I hope you guys got something out of this. If you did, would you mind doing me the favor of sharing this with one other person that you know who you think might enjoy it? I'd really appreciate that. And I look forward to hearing your sweet, sweet voice note about what you suck at.

unknown 17:40

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

And have yourself a great week, and I will talk to you later.