SuccessFULL With ADHD

‘Unapologetically ADHD’: These 10 Strategies Will Build a Life you Love with Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer

• Brooke Schnittman MA, PCC, BCC • Season 1 • Episode 87

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In this inspiring episode, I’m joined by two incredible guests, Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer, the dynamic duo behind the new book, Unapologetically ADHD. With decades of combined experience in coaching, podcasting, and living with ADHD, Pete and Nikki share their unique journey of co-authoring their book and the lessons they’ve learned about failure, success, and working together as a team. We dive into their podcasting journey, strategies for navigating big projects, and how they’ve redefined ADHD productivity with compassion and practicality.

Nikki Kinzer is a professional certified ADHD coach through the International Coaching Federation (ICF). She’s been coaching adults with ADHD since 2010 and has built a business around supporting the ADHD community through coaching, teaching, and podcasting. She lives with her husband, Brad, in Springfield, Oregon. Pete Wright was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 28 and has spent the better part of his life since then studying and podcasting about his lived ADHD experience. He is a professional podcaster and co-founder of the TruStory FM podcast network. He’s a former journalist, educator, and public relations executive and lives with his wife, Kira, in Portland, Oregon.

 

Episode Highlights:

[0:00] - Pete reflects on reprogramming how we view failure.
[0:44] - Introducing Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer, their backgrounds, and the new book.
[2:35] - The origins of their podcast and the magic of their partnership.
[7:15] - Nikki’s journey into ADHD coaching and the transition to focusing on ADHD clients.
[13:20] - Pete’s perspective on working with a professional organizer and managing ADHD.
[17:03] - How their second book came to life and what made the process smoother.
[22:22] - Strategies they used to tackle challenges during the writing process.
[29:01] - Key takeaways from Unapologetically ADHD for managing big projects.
[37:37] - Pete’s deep dive into routines, executive function, and strategic friction.
[43:12] - Final reflections: reframing failure and embracing being unapologetically ADHD.

 

Links & Resources

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Want to be ‘SuccessFULL with ADHD’ by Activating Your ADHD Potential?
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Pete Wright:

Where did we learn the lessons of failure in our lives? They're not good lessons for most of us with ADHD like they're lame lessons, they're lousy and they're full of shame. But as soon as you separate, if you can make it a practice to separate the emotion from the act of the failure state, you can learn something about what it means to feel successful. Sometimes you can feel successful in a failure state, and that is the brass ring like let's just learn how we learned about failure and reprogram rewire ourselves. Because failure is not a personal judgment. It's not a litmus test for who you are as a human being. It's just an objective point in time.

Brooke Schnittman:

Welcome to successful with ADHD. I'm Brooke Schmidt, let's get started. Hi everyone. Welcome back to successful with ADHD today. I have two friends and colleagues, Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer here with me today. And Nikki and Pete just debuted their new book, unapologetically, ADHD. And if you haven't checked it out, go do it. It has so many amazing tools. We'll get into it in just a little bit. But Nikki a little bit about her. She's a professional certified ADHD coach through ICF, the gold standard. She's been coaching adults with ADHD Since 2010 and has built a business around supporting the ADHD community through coaching, teaching and podcasting. And she lives with her husband, Brad not Pete in Springfield, Oregon. Pete was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 28 and he spent the better part of his life since then studying and podcasting about his lived ADHD experience. He's a professional podcaster and co founder of The True Story FM Podcast Network. He's also a former journalist, educator and public relations executive, and lives with his wife, Kyra in Portland, Oregon. Very warm. Welcome to both of you. It's so nice to see you guys again. I had the pleasure of being on your podcast as well, and you guys are so much fun, and you've been doing this for so long. You know you are one of the original ADHD podcasters. I would just love to know from both of you, you've accomplished so much with coaching and authoring and podcasting. How do you maintain that momentum with ADHD? Do

Pete Wright:

you know? I'll just say, just to start before Nikki talks, it tells you know, my side of story, story, there is something just a little bit magical when a partnership involves someone who lives with ADHD and an ADHD coach like there is a certain level of implicit understanding that happens to keep things, keep keep the trains on the tracks,

Nikki Kinzer:

for Sure. Yeah, well, and you know, when we started podcasting, I didn't even know what a podcast was. So the whole thing came about when I was a professional organizer, and somebody had asked me if I wanted to do a once a week radio show around organizing your home, and it was a local radio show, and and Pete at the time. I mean, Pete's been with me in my business since day one, and so I call him, and I'm like, This opportunity has come up. What do you think? Is it something that I should do? And what are your thoughts? And he's like, Well, I wouldn't do a once a week radio show. I would do a podcast, like, let's do a podcast. And I'm like, What is a podcast? And for a long time, I really only thought it went into our website, and the only way you could hear it is if you went to the website. Like, I didn't realize that, like, anyone that had iTunes could listen to this, right? Sure. Or I don't know if I would have done it. I don't know, but it started off very organically, not even really understanding what it was. I

Pete Wright:

do actually have, I have this frozen picture in my memory of Nikki on camera when I told her that we had listeners from around the world who were listening. I mean, our reach was just so much broader than any local, you know, Oregon radio, right station, could have ever given us. And there's that, that look of shock, like when she says, I don't know that I would have done it, like, that's legit, like there is a, there is a real sort of reticence for, you know, how broad the reach actually was. It took us some getting used to to figure out, like, how do we want to do this? How do we want to portray ourselves on a podcast? Now, for you know, you know, almost I don't know, 650 episodes, 700 episodes, something like that. Recruiting, amazing.

Brooke Schnittman:

So you both have ADHD. Yeah, I do not. Oh, you do not. Okay, so that helps, I guess

Pete Wright:

part of your question

Brooke Schnittman:

not to say that if you both had ADHD that it wouldn't work, but I'm sure that helps in the organization and the executive piece of maintaining the podcast and writing the book. But how does Yeah, talk to me a little bit more so I don't know the backstory you said. Pete Nikki being an ADHD coach that helped in keeping the podcast going, even though, Pete, you were the one who had the confidence in making it happen and getting it started well.

Pete Wright:

And I had been podcasting for a while, like my first show went live while we were still trying to figure out what to call it. Right. It was, it was very much a what is a podcast right? We were still trying to figure out what the word was that defined what what we do. And so I already had kind of a bent toward independent audio publishing, and that started in the early 2000s and I was also a former journalist, and so it made it easier, like I'd had lots of on camera experience, it made it easier for me to to say, effortlessly, let's just do this thing right to anyone like, Come on, let's just make a podcast. I love making podcasts, and so by the time we started the organizing podcast, taking control the organizing podcast, and those episodes are still alive on our website, but they're not in the ADHD podcast feed anymore, because they changed right around episode one, I don't know 160 something, Nikki comes to me and says, I really love the people I love helping the most are people who live with ADHD. And she did not know at the time that I had ADHD, right. She did not know that we had never talked about it, and so I was an enthusiastic participant in making a brand change on that show, because I wanted to continue to learn about myself, and I had no idea that she was working with ADHD clients. So it was, it was so smooth, a pretty special, smooth transition. Yeah,

Unknown:

it really was. And that's sort of when I re branded my business, because it was take control organizing. And then I was like, Nope, I really want to focus on ADHD coaching. And so I went through coach training, through ATCA, and through coach U and got certified through ICF, and did all of that, like around 2011 I guess it was. So I kind of put my business a little bit on the side as I was educating myself to be a coach. And then we switched the podcast, and then we switched the name to take control, ADHD, and then everything just went from there. And I think for me personally, one of the reasons why I love doing it and why I want to keep doing it is as a coach, and Brooke, you probably understand this doing your own podcast too. It when you are coaching, that's one thing, right? You get that experience, and you get that one on one and and it's great. When you're podcasting, you're learning, you're learning from your guests, you're learning, you're researching whatever topic it is that you're talking about. And so it continues to, I feel like, make you a better coach. It makes you more informed around what's going on. Currently, you get different perspectives from other coaches, from other experts, these great conversations that we get to have, that people get to listen in on. And so it was something that was so easy for me to continue. It just became part of my business. It wasn't hard. It's not, you know, Pete and I have a great relationship. We have great rapport. He's like family to me. We've known each other for so long, and prior to any of this professional stuff, I know his family. He knows mine. So it he's like family, and it just has been such a blessing. So

Brooke Schnittman:

wow, I didn't know that. Okay, you didn't have, you don't have ADHD, and you wanted to make a niche with ADHD. You wanted to do a podcast on ADHD, and you wanted to coach ADHD people. So I definitely want to get into that. And I also then want to go back to the whole how do you continue podcasting after you have this great relationship with Pete and write a book together all these years later, but Nikki, how did you decide you wanted to work with ADHD people? Is there anyone in your life, besides Pete, who you didn't know at the time, had ADHD. That had ADHD,

Unknown:

no, it's interesting, because my daughter wasn't diagnosed until much later. My husband is undiagnosed ADHD, but he'll be the first one to tell you that he relates to everything in the book. Yeah, undiagnosed.

Pete Wright:

Wink, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Unknown:

But no, it really comes down to two clients that I was working with as an organizer, and they were, they were in person, and they had hired me to come in and help them organize their workflow. And they were both business owners, and they were very behind in a lot of different areas. And what I noticed is that after we got done with kind of the physical organizing piece, we started talking more around time management and these things that were affecting them with ADHD. And they were both very upfront about their ADHD. It was those relationships honestly that I was like, I love this work. I love working with them. I love learning about how they're thinking. And even though organizing is still a big part of my business, because I did it for so long, there was something just really magical about that relationship that I was like, This is it? This is what I want it. This is where I want to go. And I thank them, because, you know, it was those relationships that really and they were, like, my first clients, because I would tell them, like, this is what I'm doing. And so, you know, I charged them very little money, like, can I just try building a business? Yeah, like, I learned this, you know, method or whatever. And, you know, can we try this? And so they were great. I mean, they supported me, and, you know, I'm not in touch with them anymore, but I'm very grateful, very grateful for for those relationships.

Brooke Schnittman:

And what I find interesting is that you have gravitated to people with ADHD, like you didn't know Pete had it, you didn't know your husband was undiagnosed and you didn't know your daughter was going to have it. So clearly, this is part of your world. So it makes sense that you have an interest in helping people

Unknown:

with ADHD, absolutely. And then when my daughter became or when she was diagnosed, that opened up a different perspective, you know, than I had before. It's been a really interesting journey to travel with her, because now she's going into her freshman year in college, and you know, there's a lot of prep that we need to do to get her ready. And so I feel grateful that I do have the understanding and if in our podcast and doing shows like yours, and when we're at the conference and we're talking about ADHD, I hope that you know, we spread that message to other parents and people that live with ADHD to have that compassion and more understanding of why these things are so Hard and why they struggle, and be supportive and work with them and not, you know, hound them all the time. Of, why didn't you do this? Or this is the deadline, or whatever it might

Brooke Schnittman:

Yeah, and I think you make that clear in your book too. Here are some strategies, but like, do not shame people, because our brain works differently, and it might these strategies might work for your ADHD because of this, and it might not work for your ADHD because of this. And Pete, I'm curious, from your perspective, as someone who knew he had ADHD, working with a professional organizer at the time who did not have ADHD, what that was like for you.

Pete Wright:

Well, so I'm a nerd for storables, like, I low key, love storage supplies and and organizing stuff. Like, when I like, I get the chills, just kind of thinking about it, like my office closet needs some work right now, and I know there's going to be a day where I take the doors off, and I just go to town on this thing, and I get bins and cable ties, and I just, oh, God, you guys, it's so exciting to imagine a day of unfettered access to just like putting things together, because that's like, I won't eat, I'll just, and I know it's Coming, and it's going to be amazing, and then it'll end. So I all always knew that I had that one of my areas of hyper focus, like triggering areas of hyper focus, was in organizing. So it was super easy for me to imagine, you know, working with Nikki and helping her get an organizing business started. It was Kismet that it ended up being an ADHD, you know, planning, organizing, support organization, because that that just sort of feeds all of those beasts, everything. I also, you know, I'm, I, I'm a nerd for tech, like, I love technology. I love pushing buttons. I love supporting that side of the business. And so podcasting, as my you know, kind of number one focus. It was just an easy fit to be able to support in this area and to know that when my attention is fractured, it's usually fractured in areas outside of that expertise, right? It's when I'm asked to do other. Things that I struggle with, getting those done, but keeping the podcast going is routine. I have enormous and beautiful, I mean, really like Mount Rushmore of task lists to keep every episode going. Like it's just my checklists are perfect, and I just, I just know how to do that without having to stop and think and introduce friction. It's the other stuff that's sometimes hard. And we actually wrote a book a long time ago when it was still the organizing business, and that book is gone now. And I would say, Nikki, check me on this if you want to be less delicate than I am, I think that was hard the

Unknown:

book, right? Yes, oh, definitely was hard,

Pete Wright:

very hard. Yeah, it was really, really hard. And part of the reason it was hard is because it challenged I think it challenged me. I was doing more of a different kind of writing in that book, and it challenge me on the editing side, like our the responsibility that we shared in writing that book was was different than writing this one and and it it challenged me in the areas that I am not, that I don't do every day, that I don't have perfect checklists for. And it was a it was a struggle, and it took too long, and we finally got it out. And I think we're, we're proud of the work, but we had agreed after that experience, we're not going to do another book. Like, no thing that was no more. But we're done. We're done with we have a good thing until not screw it up. Yes, yeah. And it came out in a completely different way this time, right? Like, first of all, like, we're in a different place in our lives, right? We're more than a decade older and wiser, and we have a decade more of friendship and partnership in working together in the business, and I think we know much more about how each other works. And then the opportunity came to us, right? It was, it was, it came from the outside, and we thought it was a scam at first.

Brooke Schnittman:

Anything that comes from the outside, right? Yeah, right. It's gotta be click on and make a call with

Unknown:

you, yeah? And I thought they were gonna make me pay, like, you know, you pay$10,000 and we'll get your book published, right? Like, I didn't know what, what it was gonna be, yeah, it was not a scam. Which was

Pete Wright:

not a scam. It was a delightful, delightful acquisitions editor named Victoria, who is a wonderful light in the universe, and happened to listen to the show and already know us and know what we did, and wrote us out of the blue and said, I have an opening in my slate for an ADHD book, and I would love it if you guys would consider doing this. And so that started the process.

Brooke Schnittman:

So you had someone who believed in the content that you guys were putting out there, too. Makes a huge difference, right? Yeah, right. But I'm curious. So you have known each other for a while. The first book had its, you know, hiccups. It had friction, as you mentioned, Pete and this one less friction, besides knowing each other more, why would you say there is less friction?

Unknown:

I think, for my point of view is, I think that when he said, we know how we work. I think is is key, because we knew when we were thinking about how this book was going to be written, we wanted it to be similar to the podcast. So we knew that the method, part of it, the framework, the teaching of it, was going to be coming from me and coming from my membership that I have around planning, and I knew I wanted us to write something around systems, because that is something that we excel at, right? I mean, he's got the tech side and the living experience, and I've worked with hundreds of clients around planning and building their system, so I knew it had to be something around that it felt natural for him to have these essays put into the book in each chapter, just like we do on the show, like, here's the How to and then here's Pete, you know, talking about his experience, and doing it in a way that is creative and interesting. And, you know, he's such a great writer. It felt really good once we started kind of seeing it together, like, okay, he wrote this essay about ADHD the time zone. This fits perfect, because I can talk about what it is, and then he can talk about this is what it's like to live in it, yeah, and you know, and offer that inspiration and really good gold nuggets in his pieces too. So it just felt like we knew we wanted it to be like the podcast, and it just started working that way so smoothly. We worked really, really well. Together like there was never any arguments. There was never any Oh, I think this should be in here or whatever. I mean, it was just really smooth.

Pete Wright:

There was, there was plenty of talking each other off particular ledges of one sort or another, right? For sure, never at each other. I think the other thing that's different, and this is a thing that has come from the years of working together is we have, I think, exemplary boundaries, like we knew going into the conversation what we were going to do and what we were not going to do. And we knew the things that were lines in the, you know, in the sand. We knew what we what if the the publisher was like, Well, you have to do this. We knew that that might be a line in the sand, that we were like, this isn't worth it to us. There's less value for us doing this together. And we just navigated those boundaries, about responsibilities and deadlines and the things that would have and could have broken a book project, you know, co authorship relationship. We navigate those well because we have, you know, decades of actually navigating boundaries together. I love that. That's a key lesson for for me to to, like, say that out loud, is, is, I think, really important for the ADHD side of me that, like, we have learned something about each other and about working and about how, you know, my brain relates to relationships, boundaries, huge,

Brooke Schnittman:

and the fact that you tried again, you know, you said, Okay, we're not keeping this original book out there, but someone believed in you, and you have persisted all of these years of working together and created this amazing book using Pete your strengths of writing and storytelling and Nikki's strategies in her coaching and then setting those boundaries to execute A solid book that is hard for someone with ADHD to start, continue and finish. I think that's really inspiring for someone who's out there trying to complete something big with ADHD, or be in a partnership with a neurotypical who you know, who works differently

Pete Wright:

Well, and that's I mean, from my perspective, that nails it because, and that gets back to what I said earlier, about like, the the unintentional gift of having ADHD and having this partnership with somebody who is an ADHD coach means I don't have to suffer through the shame spirals of letting someone down who doesn't understand me right, like Nikki and I have a different vernacular, like a shared vocabulary around planning. And let me be very clear, we wrote this book using the system that is written about in this book, and about as meta as you can get right, like, that's how the book came about, with so little frustration and stress and like, we got it done because of the methodology that Nikki teaches.

Brooke Schnittman:

What about the times where you felt like you were on that ledge? Because I wrote a book too, so I get it, and I didn't have another person to help me, like you two thought for next time, but there was, have I remember when writing my book, I was halfway through it, and I'm like, Yeah, I'm done. I don't want to continue. How did you get through that? Forget the you know, using your own tools. But like, can you specifically state you know what those times were and how you made it off the ledge.

Unknown:

Well, I'll be honest, I think that having these external deadlines were extremely helpful, right? Because it never dawned on me to not finish it. It was going to be finished. And you know what I've learned about the process, though, that I didn't know during that time is when the first draft was due. I really felt like this first draft had to be as perfect as possible. I knew that they would have some editing and such, but I really felt felt like, oh, I it has to be as good as you know, getting ready to go into production. That's not true.

Brooke Schnittman:

I mean, like, big mirror of your life, hello, right? Yeah, yeah, that's not gonna be perfect to know the idea or the first draft. It's a draft on purpose. Draft

Unknown:

on purpose, and we still had, you know, a few months after that, first draft was due to do a lot of editing and a lot of like adding and things like that, knowing that now I would have relaxed a little bit in the month of January, January, I was in a room in my house away from my family, and all I did was write. A book to make sure that we could get to that to that deadline, because I realized that word count and word characters are not the same thing. Yeah, it is wild. So I thought that we had this book that was, oh, what that was going to actually be over the word count that they wanted, but when actually, in reality, it was like 17,000 out of 55,000 so there was a lot of writing that had to be done in the in the month of January, and a lot of stress that now I probably could have, you know, done things a little bit differently. But even then, I have to tell you, Brooke, I didn't think about giving up. I really for whatever reason. Instead of having writer's block and freezing, it was inspiring to me for some reason, and I think that part of it really is because I was writing about something that I knew and something that I had been practicing and experienced for so long, and I had so many stories that I could pull from that that made all of the difference. If I was writing something that I, you know, still needed to do a lot of research on, or I didn't have a lot of personal experience with it, it would have been really hard, yes, but I think because of the topic, it was just something that it wasn't so much about what to write. It was more of just how it was all going to come together. That

Pete Wright:

is a really important observation. It's the idea of of using deadlines to externalize the stress of the actual work. And for me, it was, it was very similar. It was this notion in the back of my head that was, I'm going to make this deadline, because that's the deadline I agreed to. And I I am in a state of sort of long arc, hyper focus, where I thinking about much else, even when I'm trying to think about much else, right? I'm I can't get it out of my head, knowing that that deadline marks a date of freedom, of intellectual, cognitive freedom, and at that point, it's someone else's responsibility. I had it in my head, and this is my imposter syndrome talking in my head. I was like, the stakes are so low, because I'm pretty sure our first editor is going to say, this is terrible. We're not publishing this book. And as soon as I had set that as the bar, I was like, this is easy. I'll just bang it out another chapter. Like, we're gonna be fine, because they'll probably hate no attachment, yeah. Weirdly that helped us get it done, like, having that mindset of they could hate it, as long as I was comfortable with they could hate it. It was pretty easy to kind of write a thing that told the importance of my story. If they didn't like it, it's not for them. It was for me. It was an exercise that documented parts of my lived experience. And, you know, people use the the term, I think a lot, the work of your life, like I'm producing the work of my life in the scope of books. It's like, you know, Norman Mailer is the Naked and the Dead is the work of his life, right? It's the thing that made the biggest impact. The other way to interpret the work of your life is doing the work of that captures the work that you do every day in your life. And that's, you know, Nikki, and I spend a lot of time thinking about ADHD. That's our life. This is represents the work of our life. And I think that represents the people who are going to be reading it, too. Yeah,

Brooke Schnittman:

that's amazing. Thank you for talking about, like, boundaries and external deadlines and not being attached to the outcome and doing it for you, not for other people. I think, with the experience that you both have as you know, being coached, coached, you know, talking to all these experts being in the field for so long, the lived experience that you're able to do these things. But for the Layperson listening, what are like some strategies that you would say that you followed from your book that you share with people that could help someone execute a big project, or including a book.

Unknown:

Well, I'll start Pete as my ADHD coach has just come on my hat. My hat is on now. One of the reasons that we we named the book unapologetically ADHD and Brooke. I'm sure you see this every single day, is so many people with ADHD are always saying they're sorry, and they're always trying to make up for however they think their ADHD is impacting them. And I think that the biggest thing that I would say to someone who is looking to do a big project, or something like writing a book, is really understand how your ADHD impacts you, and once you have a better idea of that, then work with it and partner with it. And so if your deadline is not reasonable to you, then ask for it to be extended. You know, if you need more time on a chapter, then ask for. That more time, instead of trying to just get it done, or try to do an all nighter, or, you know, whatever it is that you're working on to please somebody else, accommodate, get those accommodations for yourself and advocate for yourself. Because everybody does do things differently, and we all process differently. And we sometimes, if we have a big project, we need help to break that down. So ask for that help and process verbally, process that with someone. So you're not doing it by yourself. So I would just say, really look at you know, learn about your ADHD, learn about where it impacts you, and then work with it, partner with it, and make the process enjoyable, rather than it's something that you're always fighting and stressed about. I

Brooke Schnittman:

love the verbally processing thing all like so many ADHD ers are verbal processors, right? So whether it be a friend or a coach or a mentor, or if you're just sub vocalizing it yourself and knowing the right questions to ask yourself to get you to that next step that's so helpful, rather than jumping in without a plan, right? Knowing you know what you need, because, well, you are talking and saying, Oh, well, you know you might need extended time on your chapters or on your project. That's all possible, but we know sometimes that actually works against us too, exactly.

Unknown:

So there you have to figure out, is it going to work against me or not? And this is where you have to be really truthful. And we've talked about this on our show before our Who am I lying to? Yeah, right. And, and being honest about that for sure. And, you know? And that's where all of these strategies can come in, too, that you hear about, like body doubling, accountability, you know, these things work. Time blocking, it works. And so you know, if you can find these, these strategies that that help you get that work done, and not necessarily rely just on yourself thinking, oh, I'll just do it tomorrow, like we know that's not enough. And so what, what do we do to set ourselves up for success? But we have to know how our ADHD impacts us to do that

Brooke Schnittman:

100% so what you're saying is that someone can't just say, Okay, I'm going to use all these time management strategies if they don't know how their brain works and operates with awareness, right?

Pete Wright:

Yeah, yes. Okay, so one of the things I thinking so hard about all of the things that Nikki is saying and so much some of it for me on like approaching it from ADHD, is not just the strategies, like knowing the strategies, internalizing the strategies, but coming to terms with the emotional experience of comfort with uncertainty, right? And the awareness of how your routines work in your daily life, and your routines crop up out of nowhere. I spent, like, one of the things that was illuminating to me in the act of writing the book was, you know, thinking hard about routines, I wrote like, two and a half pages on how I make tea in the morning. And you think, oh, that's boring. I'm not going to buy the book, please. Like, look at the book, because this was illuminating for me. Like I documented this process of creating tea in the morning and went to the level of what brand of mug Do I like to drink out of. I wanted to capture that because it allowed me to externalize something that had been internalized and learn something about how my brain works. And that was huge, because it also let me reflect on strategic use of friction. Sometimes with ADHD, I want to remove friction when I'm capturing ideas brainstorming. I need no friction in that process, right? I have to have it as seamless, because I'll get distracted between point A and C. I'll get distracted and B, and never come back to the alphabet. But sometimes I have to introduce friction, right? I have to introduce friction to slow me the hell down, or else distraction will get in the way again. And so those things, understanding how my routines work at that level of intimacy, being able to talk about them and externalize what was internal allows me to see where friction works for me and against me. And I, you know, on that point of uncertainty, I've got a whole I mean, I went deep on understanding the budget of uncertainty, like, how much room do I have in my life to make room for things that I don't understand? And sometimes I have to make decisions, and I have to act when I don't understand everything, because that's life, that's humanity. And sometimes I have to introduce friction. So I can slow down until I understand it to that level of comfort, and those things work together to give me sort of an emotional grounding that I don't think I was able to to communicate until we sat down to write the book. That's

Brooke Schnittman:

amazing the amount of executive function that goes into planning your tea. Yeah, yeah, no, seriously, yes,

Pete Wright:

it's huge. It's huge. It's huge. And like, I didn't, I didn't sit down and write that. I don't think I could have. I had my voice notes open and I recorded talking about it and describing every single thing that was happening that I touched as I was, as I was making it sounds so dumb, like I really it really does, but this was a huge it was hugely illuminating for me to be able to talk through this process and talk through everything, like the sensory experience of everything that I did in order to go through my morning routine and that approaching everything we do With that is important to the work of our lives. With that level of introspection, I think, allows us to duck the some of the executive functioning challenges that we live with, right, some of the things that we can make routine, that that become unspoken. It is possible with ADHD to do that, and we do it all the time. We just don't think about it.

Brooke Schnittman:

Absolutely. I love that. And this, I mean, you basically took your internal brain and experience and put it on paper or audio, and then paper right? And with people with ADHD, we know that we have these big things that we get so ashamed of that we're not doing right. We're so focused on the huge gap over the gain or the huge leap over the small step. But when you talk about all those two dots, right, and all of the executive function that goes into each one of your morning routine tasks, or your night your wind down routine at night, or even some of your day to day tasks for work and family, there are so many decisions and so many actions that take place that are routine, right? So, if they are good routines and they're great habits, and they're great thoughts that you have, keep those, be aware of them, and then habit stack on it, like you said, but we need to give ourselves that credit, like you said, for the things that we think are small, but it really requires so much

Pete Wright:

well, and look what we're doing practically right From a coaching perspective, when we take these internal routines, these things that are in our heads, in our bones, in our bodies, and we externalize them, and we document them, we're engaging a new sensory appreciation for those routines. Maybe we're reading them as we write them. We're writing them. We get a tactile experience. We have them on audio. We're listening to them. We're engaging other senses. And you know what you notice when you engage a different sense, you notice where stuff falls apart or where the routines are bad. I, you know it was, I was in college, and I had a journalism professor who said, you know, for all of your stories when you're just starting out, make sure you write your story and then give it to somebody else to read it to you in their voice, you will catch more errors and omissions than you ever could by yourself as soon as you hear it read to you. And that is absolutely true of this context, and it was absolutely true of writing this book. As soon as you write it down, you realize that what I'm writing right now is something I don't even believe and I didn't know it, right? I didn't know it. Maybe

Brooke Schnittman:

that's why I'm afraid of listening to my own podcast after

Unknown:

I don't listen to ours. With you, Brooke,

Brooke Schnittman:

and I also love and I know we're coming up on time here, but I also love the friction, the external friction that you create for some of the things. Because we have a difficult time with benecognition. We have a difficult time slowing down, pausing, evaluating how things are going, changing them in the moment. So if you know that's how you are, and you could recognize that that's going to likely happen in this big emotional task that requires a lot of executive function, right? And it's new, and it's not routine, creating that external friction ahead of time. Yeah, is huge, huge.

Pete Wright:

And it's, I mean, like, what does that? What does that mean? Like, in its very simplest, I we always it's so easy to go back to the phone, right? If we have to get a writing project done, the friction that you can introduce is, well, it's a timer, but it's take your phone and put it in a different room, right? That's friction. You're introducing distance between you and a distraction between you and Instagram. Who are we kidding? Right? Yeah. So. So think about the way that you do the work of your life, that you actually contribute to your business, to your home, to your independent entrepreneurship. And think about where those distractions come in and introduce friction, by introducing space or time between you and those things and that, I mean, that's what all of the apps like, the screen, the window locking apps, the things that that hide your internet for a half hour, those are all methods to introduce friction, and they're incredibly important, right? Don't, don't sleep on those, because they're really, really important in allowing you to get to the other side of a deadline.

Brooke Schnittman:

And I would even say deadline or not, if you can go into let's say you have an iPhone right like right now people who are listening and look at all the notifications that come up programmed on your phone, like I have them coming up on my computer right now. I don't know how to get them off, but like all the news notifications, all of the WhatsApp and the text message. What can you just immediately get rid of so it's not coming up to the top of your phone. In life, there's 1000s of distractions, yes, and you have 60,000 thoughts on top of that, right, right? Absolutely.

Pete Wright:

And there's a really careful balance too, like I can remove all distractions in my office and make it a sensory deprivation chamber. And that's often worse, like I need some secondary addressing friction is I have to introduce the sound of a coffee shop, right? I have to to level up the baseline of noise, but not in such a way that I turn my full attention to it. So, you know, I can, I like to work with my window open, but sometimes my windows right by our front door, and people come to the front door, so I have to introduce friction by closing that off so I'm not disturbed. And those kinds of things are things that you don't think about. I don't think to get back to the tea process until you talk it out and talk about, how do I do my job every day? How do I get out of bed every day? How do I wind down and go to bed every day? At the level of detail to which you can you can really see points of problem, yeah,

Brooke Schnittman:

yeah, you can understand the executive functions and dysfunction of your brain, and then know how to work with the weaknesses, right, and the strengths as

Pete Wright:

well. For people who are like, I can. I'm never going to be able to do that. Let me assure you, you will, because there's one thing our brain likes to do a lot, and that's talk about to ourselves. Like, we really like to talk about ourselves. If you turn on your phone and start talking about, huh, how do I make my coffee in the morning? You got a half hour material right there, like, let alone at type five next time you hit the stand up stage, like, you're going to be great. You're going to be fine. You can do it. Yeah,

Brooke Schnittman:

I love it. So Pete and Nikki, what would be the number one thing in this conversation, or something you haven't mentioned that you would recommend to people listening with ADHD to help them execute

Unknown:

so corny, and I'm so sorry. I do not mean to do this, but it's just the first thing that came to my mind is unapologetically ADHD, that's it. You know you are who you are, and you are worthy, and you deserve to be happy, and you deserve happiness and love and compassion and shame is one of those things that just gets you into a deep, deep hole, and it's really hard to get out of, but we hope that you know, what we do is, is shining a light for people to see that, no, it doesn't have to be that you can get out of that hole and being who you are, and not not being, not apologizing for it. Love it.

Pete Wright:

I think for me, I've been talking about it a lot because I'm a little bit obsessed with it, which is like reframing how we think about failure and what failure means. Like, where did we learn the lessons of failure in our lives? And it is, like, of all the essays in the book, this is the one that appears in the book from me toward the end that is almost entirely untouched, like it came out at once in a rush after thinking a lot about how I learned the lessons of failure and what it means to fail and and they're not good lessons for most of us with ADHD like they're lame lessons, they're lousy and they're full of shame, but as soon as you separate, if you can make it a practice to separate the emotion from the act of the failure state. You can learn something about what it means to feel successful. It doesn't sometimes you can feel successful in a failure state, and that is the brass ring like let's just learn how we learned about failure and. Reprogram, rewire ourselves, because failure is not a personal judgment. It's not a litmus test for who you are as a human being. It's just an objective point in time. And let's, let's move on from from feeling like failures all the time. And I think that's, that's the one for me is, is go through the process, learn how you learned about failure and and what that says, and what can you do to rewrite it?

Brooke Schnittman:

Well, that's a Mic drop. So where can people find you if they want to get your book or listen to you all the things?

Unknown:

Well, you can get all of the information at take control, adhd.com, Pete, where can you get the book, and where can you hear the podcast?

Pete Wright:

Okay, okay, so the book, it's really easy there. We've got lots of URLs. Really take control, adhd.com/adhd, book, that's the that's where you can go get the book, and we've got links to all the stores. It's available in Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Apple books and bookshop.org. Support your local bookseller. It's really fun. We Nikki and her husband came up and we, all four of us went out to dinner and took pictures of ourselves next to the book on a bookshelf at our local bookstore. It's really, really fun to support your local bookstore, and the podcast is where you get your podcast. It's called taking control the ADHD podcast, and we'd be thrilled to share it with you.

Brooke Schnittman:

Awesome. And I'll put the links in the description. Thank you so much for coming on, Nicky and Pete. We need to have these conversations more often. I really love chatting with you both.

Unknown:

Thank you for having us pleasure. Thanks for

Brooke Schnittman:

listening to this episode of successful with ADHD. I hope it helps you on your journey, and if you need any additional support for you or a loved one with ADHD, feel free to reach out to us@coachingwithbrooke.com and all social media platforms at coaching with Brooke, and remember, it's Brooke with an E. Thanks again for listening. See you next time you.

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