Ever felt like you were pretending to be "normal" at work when your brain is a FDA-unapproved jittery mess? You'll love my conversation with today's guest, Kristen Stelzer of Weirdly Wired Women (how cool is that name?). We're exploring how finally embracing our ADHD diagnoses helped us quiet the noise and design careers that work with, not against, our unique wiring.
Can't-Miss Moments from This Episode:
If you've been feeling like everyone around you knows something you don't, this one's for you. Listen now!
Kristen's bio:
Kristen is a former engineer and project director turned entrepreneur. She specializes in helping women create or streamline businesses to fit their lives…regardless of what those lives look like.
After a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, she founded weirdly wired women to provide coaching, consulting, and community to women who’ve never felt they “fit” the corporate mold, whatever the reason.
And in true “I make my own business rules” fashion, Kristen will also partner with anyone she likes on fun and interesting short-term projects that tap into any of her absolutely random skill sets.
Get Kristen’s free Break Free and Bloom Masterplan for Cultivating a Livelihood Rooted in Your Life on her website at weirdlywiredwomen.com.
Resources and links mentioned:
Let's collab:
Let's connect:
If you dig the show and want to help bring more episodes to the world, consider buying a coffee for the production team!
Ever felt like you were pretending to be "normal" at work when your brain is a FDA-unapproved jittery mess? You'll love my conversation with today's guest, Kristen Stelzer of Weirdly Wired Women (how cool is that name?). We're exploring how finally embracing our ADHD diagnoses helped us quiet the noise and design careers that work with, not against, our unique wiring.
Can't-Miss Moments from This Episode:
If you've been feeling like everyone around you knows something you don't, this one's for you. Listen now!
Kristen's bio:
Kristen is a former engineer and project director turned entrepreneur. She specializes in helping women create or streamline businesses to fit their lives…regardless of what those lives look like.
After a late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, she founded weirdly wired women to provide coaching, consulting, and community to women who’ve never felt they “fit” the corporate mold, whatever the reason.
And in true “I make my own business rules” fashion, Kristen will also partner with anyone she likes on fun and interesting short-term projects that tap into any of her absolutely random skill sets.
Get Kristen’s free Break Free and Bloom Masterplan for Cultivating a Livelihood Rooted in Your Life on her website at weirdlywiredwomen.com.
Resources and links mentioned:
Let's collab:
Let's connect:
If you dig the show and want to help bring more episodes to the world, consider buying a coffee for the production team!
Welcome to Permission to Kick Ass, the show that gives you a virtual seat at the bar for the real conversations that happen between entrepreneurs. I'm interviewing all kinds of business owners, from those just a few years into freelancing to CEOs helming nine figure companies. If you've ever worried that everyone else just seems to get it and you're missing something or messing things up, this show is for you. I'm your host, angie Coley, and let's get to it and welcome back to Permission to Kick Ass with me today is my good friend, kristen Stelzer.
Angie Colee:Say hi, hello, sorry, I went off book, see rule breaker from the very beginning, and I mean we almost forgot to hit record because we were comparing the color of our hair. So for everybody that is watching the video, of course you will see Kristen's lovely blue shade and my lovely red shade, and it's a lot of maintenance to do this shit, guys, but the vivids are worth it. That's what I have to say. Only, it looks like you know Kristen murdered Smurfs and I just committed murder in my shower. It's the price of hair color. Anyhow relevant to what we're about to talk about, please tell us what you do.
Kristen Stelzer:Well, one of the things that I do and what I'm focusing on now is I work with women who want to start their own businesses because they don't feel like they fit in anywhere, or they haven't felt like they fit in the corporate world and are wanting something that works with their lives. Because, as we all many of us have figured out that corporate life doesn't really fit with regular life because it wasn't designed to fit with where we are now. And you know I want to help them start so that they can have a life that fits, a livelihood that fits in with their life, and that they're not. You know that the work life balance doesn't have to be this big juggling act, that you know they can be built together and they can work together. And I focus on women largely because that's, you know, my experience in the corporate workplace feeling like I didn't quite fit in in male dominated fields.
Kristen Stelzer:And then also, just with a lens towards neurodiversity, because I realized, as I was going through my own entrepreneurial journey which didn't start with this, it started with another business and has evolved that you know, through that I realized I had ADHD and that's some of the things that I was struggling with and was beating myself up. And was beating myself up for, like you know, why haven't you gotten over this? You've read all of the books, and all of the books tell you to do all of the things and and you can't seem to do the things. So clearly you're not cut out for this, and. But now that I know I'm like, oh well, that book wasn't written for me, so of course it wasn't going to work, and so I want to make sure that the people who might not fit you know the typical, you know pop culture, self help, business book Are included, because we've got great brains and awesome ideas and more of us should be in business.
Angie Colee:Yeah, absolutely, and we should be able to design a business or create working relationships or participate in situations which work for us, right, not have to change the core of who we are to fit a situation that doesn't work. And I think that's at the root of a lot of the suffering and stress that we come through, like trying to fit yourself into a very uncomfortable, not good fit, not good fit type situation. Like you mentioned, habits for one, and as somebody like recently diagnosed ADHD myself, that made it a whole lot easier, in my opinion, to find solutions that work for me, because now I understand why all of the other things have failed that I have tried. I've tried habit development, I've tried 90 day challenges, I've tried habit stacking. I've tried everything that you can think about. Some days it's still something that I have to remember to brush my teeth or to take a shower, and that's just the way my brain is wired, and that doesn't make me deficient in any way and it gives me superpowers and a lot of other ways because of things like hyper focus and hyper production and things like that.
Angie Colee:So I don't know that awareness has just added a lot of grace in my life, surprisingly enough, like I'm able to forgive myself for what society told me I lacked, and I think that's what I loved about when you were like I come on the show and I was like hell, yeah, please, please, I don't want to, I don't want to spoil it. Please tell us the name of this community that you are building, because I love it. Weirdly wired women yes, that's a moment to cheer. If I knew how to do sound effects, we would have the audience raving, but right now it's just. I love weirdly wired women, to the point that when Kristen and I met up earlier this summer at an event, she had these stickers that are like tactile, and a lot of us that have ADHD love to fidget and touch things and like stimulate ourselves in other ways in order to stay present. I've got the sticker on my laptop. So if you ever see me in person weirdly fondling my laptop, blame Kristen.
Kristen Stelzer:I know I have one on my laptop as well and my phone. So oh, oh, oh, my electronics, you know.
Angie Colee:I used to get in trouble with that stuff, because I would come up with ways to stay present in various situations, first in school, then in jobs, and I would constantly get reprimanded for what looked from the outside to be being distracted, things like playing bubble shooter or solitaire on my computer or doodling on a pad of paper, and I would tell people that's actually me listening, that's me.
Angie Colee:Or once I was in class making potholders Do you remember that craze from the 90s? Yes, I would be sitting there just quietly and it's not like I, you know, in the middle of class, like went to a table and extractingly got out all of my supplies and made a big production. I'm like quietly weaving under my desk so that I'm present in my body and I'm listening. And I distinctly remember one of my teachers I think about fifth grade being like Miss Coley this is science class, it is not arts and crafts class. Please put that away. Which point I completely tuned out Right, and I was just asking me to sit here in this desk and just listen. It's just not a thing that my brain does. It's just not Right.
Kristen Stelzer:Right, exactly, yeah, I was the very big doodler in meetings, because, you know, most corporate meetings are unnecessary and then unnecessarily long, and I would be drawing because that's the only way that I could pay attention. But, yes, and I wasn't taking notes because there was nothing more, there was nothing noteworthy happening. But I'm doodling and so, like my pad has all these little flowers on it and of course that looks like I'm flaky and you know just not with it. But yeah, it's definitely knowing the diagnosis has helped. But I just had this thought while you were talking about it too, because you also were diagnosed late and after you had started your entrepreneurial journey. That's where I was too.
Kristen Stelzer:Looking back, I'm like, okay, that's why the things that I found hard were hard. Now I can use that and I can change it. But I almost wonder if I had found out earlier, when I was still in the corporate world, how I would have felt about that. Would it have been okay? Now I know how to adapt, or now I have to mask even more. Now I know what I'm masking, but I have to do it because I'm in this system that's not designed for me. I hadn't really. There were times where I was like well, I wish I had known this earlier, because I think of all the things I could have done. But now I'm like I don't know if that would have helped me or hurt me to know earlier, like if I would have felt even more stuck and less likely to go out on my own, because I would have thought that it hindered me in some way.
Angie Colee:I think that is such a brilliant thing to bring up, because I often talk about timing and I don't believe in luck, but I often do think that timing works out the way that it needs to, like whatever universal power controls that, or if we're somehow controlling that unconsciously. But I've had that same thought myself like how could life be different if I had been diagnosed earlier? Then I immediately had a counterthought which was more along the lines of but if I had been diagnosed earlier, the stigma would have been heavier, because the fact that I was diagnosed in a time when the climate was changing allowed me to embrace it and learn from it, versus seeing it as a personal failure that I was born with the brain that I was born with. Now we are having this conversation and people can openly say that sounds suspiciously like what I'm going through, because I know that one thing that happened with me is I had that negative stigma attached to it too. So anytime somebody suggested maybe get tested for that, I was like oh no, I don't want to do that, I don't want to go on the meds, I don't want it Like you can just decide to not want it.
Angie Colee:Refusing to acknowledge reality doesn't really help and yet we convince ourselves that it does sometimes. But it was an honest conversation with my best friend, alex Penning, who's been on the show a couple of times as well, when they told me about their diagnosis and being medicated for the first time and it was the way that Alex spoke about and guys listen to this with the context that I'm intending it you have a harsh internal tax master, a little voice that's speaking to you most of the time, most of us anyway. There are some folks that don't hear thoughts, but a lot of ADHD people hear their thoughts being narrated like you're speaking to yourself inside your head, and Alex articulated thoughts that I had had myself, like used exact words about I'm a loser. Why can't you just get your shit together and get this thing done? You're letting everybody down.
Angie Colee:Everybody thinks that you're a disappointment. Everybody thinks that you're a fuck up. Like these are the things that would play in my head when I could not get myself to do something executive dysfunction. I know I Okay, abrupt left turn. I heard the most brilliant analogy for executive dysfunction recently, and a good thing. The show is already marked explicit, because here it comes erectile dysfunction. You want it to work and it just doesn't.
Kristen Stelzer:That's exactly what's happening up here, when I can't get myself to do a task and it doesn't matter how much you want it to work, if it's not going to work, it's not going to work.
Angie Colee:Yep, medication is the only solution in instances like that, or giving it time and trying again later, right? So for those of you who are like it's all in your head, just like ED is all in your, in your nethers, there, sometimes things just don't work and bodies are done.
Kristen Stelzer:That's the philosophy, yeah well, and the thing that, yeah, that is because you hear people that are like, well, nobody likes to do X, y, z, but we all do it, and like, well, yeah, but it's not just that I can't make myself do things that I don't want to do or aren't fun. There's that definitely. But I also sometimes cannot make myself do the things that I want to do, like that benefit me and that the day before I really wanted to do and I still want to do, and I just cannot do it today. And it's yeah, it's Like I can understand how that's kind of hard for people who don't experience it to relate to. But for a long time I just thought I like had crappy will power and I just didn't have grit and I was just lazy and I'm not enough and the thing was Slogically Right, exactly, although at the same time, I mean I also never would have suspected I had ADHD until I started seeing how it presented in women or learning about that through just various things, because I was a high performing student.
Kristen Stelzer:I was a absolute good girl, rule follower, same, you know, good grades, went to college, did great college, had a job, had Like I, I job, hopped within my field. It started because I was where my circumstances were such that I was moving every couple of years and that just aligned perfectly. It was my desire to have a new job every couple of years. And then, after I had been not moving every couple of years and I would feel like, oh my gosh, it's been like three years, I can't be here anymore. Like I thought it was just like I had learned that from all of the moves, but then I realized it's no, I am just so bored. And I look at people who had been in companies for 20 years and were doing virtually the same thing. I mean maybe they'd moved up a little bit, but I'm like, oh my like, how are you doing it?
Kristen Stelzer:Like I've never been able to understand that, yeah, so I would change companies and move up or get into different areas within the fields. And even then I was like I just can't stick to it and I just don't have it in me and I'm gonna look flighty because my resume is so long and all the things that you then beat yourself up about, even though I was doing well, like Well, that's why I'm glad, like I said, that the timing worked out the way that it did and this is becoming more of an open conversation and more people are saying I think that's me.
Angie Colee:Wow, that sounds really interesting Because right on the one hand we've got the people who are saying, ooh, suddenly we're having more diagnoses. No, I think that suddenly we're having more open conversations and people that might not have otherwise gotten a diagnosis or sought a diagnosis or sought treatment of any kind whether that is talk, therapy or any other practice or medication but it just made it possible for people to identify with that and say, maybe that's what I've got going on. It doesn't mean that there are suddenly more people, it just suddenly means that the people that already existed are more aware. So I did seek a diagnosis and I got prescribed extended release, adorab, and it was like a five milligram dose, Super, super, tiny, tiny. And I was paranoid because I grew up in South Texas, dariculture. Everything was gonna lead you to being, almost under a bridge, addicted to heroin.
Kristen Stelzer:My dad was a cop. The fear of drugs in me was so strong.
Angie Colee:Oh my gosh, the first time I got a little high, when I moved to California and had a total body high where I was obsessed with the ridges in my fingertips, I was like wait, this is illegal and alcohol is not. I've had worse experiences on our own than that. Suck experiences aside, I went through this process. I got the diagnosis. It turns out that I meet basically every single marker for both inattentive and hyperactive.
Kristen Stelzer:Double-edged fever.
Angie Colee:Yeah, straight A's in the highest possible diagnosis, which will surprise nobody. That is really close to me and has seen and I mean, just listen to this show and how we are looping around shiny topics. I promise that all makes sense to an ADHD person. So I got my medication when I was on a vacation. So, like my quarterly vacation that I schedule Once a quarter, I take an entire week off just because, because I need to schedule that in and make the work fit around my life. So I decided to try it on the first day of vacation because I don't know what this is gonna be like, I don't know how and I'm paranoid. This is going to make me like like Corn Holio from Beavis and Butthead, like I'm gonna well, because this is stimulant right and so clearly you're gonna you know.
Angie Colee:Yeah, I'm taking a bow for my impression of the year. That's what I was scared of. So I waited to get it until I was on vacation let's try this when I'm not on, so to speak and Haleck's contacted me my first day and said so how did it go? And then we took our meds today and I was like it was mind blowing in the best possible way, because I realized at one point that I needed cat food and I got up and I went and got cat food.
Angie Colee:Lux goes sounds like there's more to unpack there. I was like you're right, because normally that process would have looked like I need cat food. Well, if I'm gonna leave the house, I might as well get everything else that I need, which means I need to hit stores A, b, c, d and E. And if I'm gonna hit all of those stores, then I should probably make lists for every single one of those stores so that I don't forget anything, because classic Angie always forgetting things. And if I'm going to go to all of those stores and I'm gonna make lists, I might as well create the perfect route so that I'm not like doubling back and zigzagging all over town and that means that I'm probably gonna be out of the house for several hours so I should plot lunch. But, like here's 20 different places I could potentially go to lunch and I picked one that feels right according to the mood and the budget.
Angie Colee:But now that messed up the whole entire route. And so now, like we're two hours into the planning process, for me to go get some fucking cat food and the voices start kicking in and saying loser, just grab your wallet and get off the fucking couch, why can't you just go get some cat food? Like blah, like all of the judgment compounds. And about four hours later, when I finally created the perfect plan, I no longer have the energy to go. Right, no, I can't. Five milligrams. And I told Alex the experience was really interesting because, if I had to describe it, I could feel it kick in. A lot of ADHD people say they can feel it kick in, and what it felt like for me was being in a noisy cafe with someone where I'm straining to hear what they have to say, and somebody went to the wall and just turned down the noise on the cafe and now I can hear you and I went wait, what? Like? That was the first time I realized in my life just how fucking loud it is in here. Yeah.
Kristen Stelzer:Yeah, I noticed with my experience when I took it, like it was more like at the end of the day, like I had a productive day and I have productive days even without medication, but this time it was like I was productive and also just not exhausted trying to do all of the things. Like I explained it to one friend, like I feel like I was able to just be a person without having to try to be a person, like it was just so much easier and less exhausting and I had no idea how much I was, how much all of that was taken out of me, because how do you know? It's in your brain, you just assume everybody and yeah, so I am very grateful that things have gotten more open about that. And then, and it just kind of tied into like the other things that I was thinking about, as far as like the workplace is just not. You know, it was created when you know one person.
Kristen Stelzer:It was first of all you could live on one salary and have a family and someone was home doing all the things and there weren't even that many things to do, and now it's just so, like you know, you almost can't live on one salary if you're a family I mean, unless you're very fortunate and then if you're both working, then you have to juggle all of these things and you know we've got to a point where Things have gotten so efficient, workers have made it more efficient. But who's benefiting from that efficiency? It's not the worker. It's not like if I figure out something or the company gets a tool and I am now I can get all of my work done in six hours versus eight. It's not like I get to go home for those two hours.
Kristen Stelzer:They're just like oh, now you can just get more work done in those extra two hours that you have, and then it's just exhausting, whereas when you work for yourself, if you create a system that makes you more efficient, well then you either benefit from that time or you can decide, maybe, that you want to use that time doing something else. But it's your choice and you're doing it for you and not for. Yeah, I just think about the way it is and how everybody is. I don't know a single woman who isn't just exhausted.
Angie Colee:Oh, yeah, I mean you brought up two great things that I really wanted to highlight. One was like the energy that it takes when your brain is kind of on a loop like that. I like to think of it as and forgive me Anybody who's like techie in the audience who hears me watch this analogy and get it wrong, feel free to write and correct me, but don't come at me in the comments, I don't fucking care. I think of it like the memory on a computer. There's one program that for some reason is hanging up and taking up most of the memory. Everything else is going to lag and suffer and you're probably not going to be able to operate some programs until you restart or force close some things. That's what it's like to have your brain on this loop that you can't seem to stop and you want to stop again. Like ED, you want it to stop, you can't. So this brain is over there taking up energy and if you think about it from an electrical standpoint, right, it's taking up a whole bunch of electricity, a bunch of juice, a bunch of fuel that your body needs. So even if you are not out there pumping iron or hiking 20 miles, your brain is taking up the equivalent amount of energy by just constantly cycling and looping and jumping from thought to thought and chattering just the constant background noise.
Angie Colee:And the second point to what you were saying about efficiency I know I've ranted about that before, but think about the amount of time that it used to take to, for instance, keep house before we had vacuum cleaners, before we had dishwashers, when we had to make clothes, when we had to make all of the food from scratch, like taking care of that. And it still is pretty much a full time job to take care of a high function household with a lot of people. But when you think about having to sweep things up after sewing a ball gown, after cooking all of this stuff from scratch, that is what we used to do. A lot of that stuff can be done in an hour or two these days, and so instead of enjoying that time and thinking, wow, I got a lot done in two hours, we just fill it with more stuff and say I'm not doing it at what. What? You're not doing it at what.
Kristen Stelzer:Yeah, and so what's interesting there is? It's funny because there's very much the hustle culture and especially when you're talking about working with people who start their own businesses or coaching people who are starting their own businesses, often they are having to do that on the side, but still you can't do it. You can't hustle all the time. You still have to figure out a way to make it work and be balanced, because if you burn out, you can't do anything, the flame is gone, nothing's getting lit, but there is just this hustle culture.
Kristen Stelzer:What's your side hustle?
Angie Colee:And I know that's just the vernacular and some people have made it into an entire lifestyle and use it as a club to beat people who are less productive with. There's somehow a failure on society. I don't like hustle culture. I say I'm pro-hustle because I think that there's a time to hustle and there's a time not to. You can't hustle all the time, otherwise hustle loses its meaning. It just becomes the norm. So there's a time to hustle and there's time to chill. I'm pro-hustle, I am anti-grind. The grinding part is what bothers me. You have to sacrifice yourself on this wheel of capitalism. Grind yourself down, feed the machine Bullshit.
Kristen Stelzer:Yeah, I was trying to explain the difference between. Owning your business is work, but it doesn't feel like toil, and often working for someone else is like toil. There's no relief, there's no. Maybe something is fun or maybe you enjoyed it once, but toil, which is like that grind If you never get a break, if all you're doing is working, then I don't want that.
Angie Colee:The beauty and the struggle of building your own business is that you get to build it however you want to. Exactly that's what makes it enjoyable, especially as a person, as a neurospicy, as I like to call it, as a neurospicy individual. It allows me to build the business in a way that taps into my natural abilities to hyper-focus, to jump into multiple projects and multiple different disciplines, to stay stimulated, to go different places in the middle of the day, to kind of I call it a hitting reset on the brain. Sometimes, if I'm stuck looking at a particular project on the computer, literally all I have to do is pack it up and go to a coffee shop and it was like reset, cool, I'm not serious.
Angie Colee:Whereas in the job, we are stuck with somebody else's processes and somebody else's to-do lists, and even when they don't make sense or most, a lot of the ADHD people that I know can really find efficiencies, which I think is really cool, and the way capitalism is currently structured seems like it penalizes efficiency in some ways. Like we said about giving more work, then I just don't understand the thinking. I think it's a backwards kind of thinking where people are like well, you're working less hours, so we need you to work the hours, okay, but I achieved the results, and if they don't want to give you that extra time back for finding an efficiency, not only are they being wasteful in terms of your time and the money that they're investing in all of this. We're stuck in outdated processes that no longer work for us because we're attached to hours that you have your butt in the seats, or number of meetings that you attend versus the outcomes.
Kristen Stelzer:Right, yeah, I mean, definitely there are some things that you have to be present for, or you have like shifts or like creating things, and you know, like if you're working in an ER, you can't be like, oh you know, I'm going, like I finished my paperwork and you know, good luck, maybe an emergency comes in, like. So there are definitely positions like that, but a lot of knowledge based stuff, just it doesn't need that strict structure. And then a lot of people who have neurodiversities also, like their time structure is just different, like they operate, like I am definitely a night owl. If I could function like half my normal day function from, like you know, 10 in the morning to two at night, that would be great.
Kristen Stelzer:I can't because I have to get my stuff to school, but I can do work in the evenings if I want to. And it's not like I'm making up work, it's like I chose not to work during the day because I will be more productive tonight. So you get to play to your strengths and you know, we all know what they are. It's just that if your strength is not the normal strength, then it's considered, you know, bad or deficient, or oh gosh, you aren't wide awake and ready to be at this meeting at 9am. Clearly you're lazy, oh yes.
Angie Colee:Something's wrong with you if you don't want to do it this way. I think that's what took me so long to give myself permission there we go Theme of the show again to not take calls before noon. And I still. That doesn't mean that people don't ask me. I just don't tell them that's an available spot because I don't want to have calls before noon and I say, well, that's the only time I'm going to be able to meet for a couple of weeks. Then that frees me up to say I don't usually take morning meetings and in this case I'll make an exception because I want to get this meeting on the books as much as you do. Now I have communicated I don't do morning meetings. I'm willing to do it for you because I value your business and this relationship Like you. The great thing about the business that you build is you get to set the rules, which means that you get to break them too. We made it all up, guys. We made up everything about our society.
Kristen Stelzer:I mean even the idea that you have a company. It doesn't. You know, I have an LLC and I mean that's, it's me Like it's-.
Angie Colee:Somewhere along the way somebody had that conversation and said that should be a rule, that's what we should make. I'm gonna make a law about that. And then it was made up. Money is made up. Time is a construct. It's all made up. We can change the rules. We don't have to live according to the rules. There are some rules that I agree should be in place.
Angie Colee:Don't go around murdering people. That's not what we're saying here. But you don't have to work eight hours a day, 40 hours a week for the rest of your fucking life. I can do, and it took me a long time to be able to admit that too. The hyper focus aspect of ADHD especially when I have put unreasonable time pressure on myself, right Part of executive dysfunction for anybody that is new to this topic or you know you are neurotypical and haven't had this happen to you is not really being able to make yourself do a task unless you amp up the interest or you amp up the urgency. And I think there was like a third thing, but it's not coming to me right now, and most ADHD folks neuro-spicy folks that I know amp up the urgency by a little thing we like to call procrastination. I call it procrasturbation Because it feels good in the moment until you realize you're only fucking yourself.
Angie Colee:Yeah, that happened from college. We put it off until the last minute, at which point the urgency amps up. The deadline is creeping closer and we can tell me how many people you know who are neuro-spicy, who can stay up all night doing a project that would have taken people a month and like cram it in, and so I, like I, can produce more work in two focused hours than most people could do in 10 to 12, sitting their ass at a computer all day. But does that get rewarded? No, it's add more work and even more impossible deadlines until burnout and you mentioned earlier about burnout. One of my mentors, john Carlton, called that it's like hitting a wall, and you've got to be careful about hitting a wall because there's not a guarantee that you come back from that Right.
Angie Colee:And I remember hitting my own burnout after about three, four months of working 12 to 14 hour days on this catalog. Impossible deadlines, skeleton crew, toxic work environment Same old story that many of us know and I burned out so hard I was so not present and checked out at the job that my boss at the time said okay, you're taking comp days. This is not a request, it's not a suggestion. You're taking comp days. I need you to go home and rest, and so I spent three days literally sitting on my front porch staring off into space. I was gone. I don't ordinarily I would be bored out of my skull sitting still for that long doing nothing, but that's how burned out I was and that's what started to get me thinking about that, like my own experience with burnout.
Angie Colee:My mentors discussion about there's no guarantee that you'll come back from that, and I started to think about how many of us have a story about. It's okay if I push a little bit harder, because when I hit that wall I'll get to rest, and hitting that wall at speed could also be the end of you. Right, don't hit the wall if you don't have to Steer around it. Slow down, do something. Don't hit the wall, you don't have to.
Kristen Stelzer:Right. But and the other thing, though, like you said, if you have those impossible deadlines that are imposed upon you by someone else because they know that you perform in those deadlines, because that's the other thing it's like it's terrible about the procrastination is the reason we don't learn the lesson about the procrastination and the long nights is because it works. Yes, it's not like we're doing that and we're producing crap, we're doing it and we're rocking it and then so we get rewarded all over the place for that. But then you get that extra pressure. But if you know that's how you work well and you are doing your own thing, and you can say, okay, you know what.
Kristen Stelzer:I have that a set of ridiculous deadline for myself and I'm gonna write this book in three days, or whatever it is, and you do that. But you can also say, and then I'm doing nothing next week, like you have the ability to work with your strengths and then compensate for what that costs to you, because our strengths, I mean, they do cost something, they all do but you have the control and autonomy to schedule things the way that you know will work for you, and so you can take advantage of those things that seem maybe negative, like procrastinating and trying to work three days straight and not sleeping and eating. It's not the best. But if it works for you and that the next week you get to chill out and catch up, and if that works for you, more power to you.
Angie Colee:Like, yeah, use the strengths that you've got and the advantages that you've got available to you. I think my one word of caution would be and this is the danger zone to this, right Is it's easy to see a pattern of something that has worked, like you said procrastination and then producing this great work on a deadline and then believe that to be true. It's not necessarily true, but then if you start telling yourself that that's the way you work, then you will believe that and you will unconsciously set about making that true for yourself. Right, what you see, what you seek, is what you believe.
Angie Colee:And this I saw, and the reason this popped into my head was you were telling that story and I started thinking about a situation with a gloss that I won't name names, but I happened to overhear this person talking to another person in a meeting, another business leader, and say I really try to get ahead for the team and think about this, but there's nothing quite like the magic of that last minute rush and I just never found anything to be good as what comes out at like the 11th hour, and I just remember that was never meant for my ears as the person on the execution team that brought that 11th hour vision to life.
Angie Colee:But I immediately was frustrated because I started thinking that you could get that same 11th hour inspiration if you set like a fake deadline for yourself a week ahead and I could start working on that in the interim. Like it's not fair to me that you have convinced yourself that you can only work at the 11th hour and you need that rush of genius. And so I'm very cognizant, as somebody who's both neuro spicy and who has been on the other side, of someone who truly and I, like I said, I don't fault him, I just don't think that he was aware of the impact and certainly wasn't aware that I overheard him, right, so like there's an impact to what we do, things and so like, do the things that work for you and also be cognizant of what's happening around you as a result of that. Because if you do need the procrastination, if you do need the 11th hour magic, okay, how can you build a system for yourself that allows you to have that last minute rush 11th hour magic but doesn't make it everybody else's fucking friend?
Kristen Stelzer:Well, yeah, as I was saying that, I was thinking like I mean, if I were to do that, I would add in like a rough draft date or like something that would like a pre deadline, so that it wasn't like the end all be all deadline.
Angie Colee:Artificial deadlines totally work. Your brain believes what you tell it to believe, so believe it.
Kristen Stelzer:Right, or if you, you know, then it's a little easier as well. Like, if you are, if you're like I'll get you a rough draft by this day, and then something happens and you absolutely can't, and like it's a little bit easier to go to someone and be like, yeah, something came up, the rough draft is going to be a day late, rather than the finished product that you've been waiting on is not done. Like you know, if you have these like waypoints in the, you know that keep you motivated and you can get that little bit of pressure. But it's also not the you know I'm so.
Angie Colee:I'm glad that you mentioned that because that's something that I coach a lot of creatives, a lot of freelancers who have tried to build bigger businesses and not and struggled right and run into a wall a capacity wall, a client wall, an earnings wall, whatever and we're going to do the wall analogies today. That's where we're going and they there's a program that I teach, where I teach a client management module in an onboarding module, and it's all about communication and it's all about setting expectations and it's all about knowing your process, the deeply unsexy work of having a business, the systems, stuff, right. But knowing all of this stuff allows you to set up those steps, like we're talking about, where you can kind of short circuit your natural tendencies. I highly suspect that those people that I coached who are struggling, struggled like I did once upon a time, which was I couldn't motivate myself until the 11th hour.
Angie Colee:This thing is due tomorrow. By the time I get working on it, like I haven't left myself much time, so I might get it to like 80, 90%, but the fact that it's not done, or, like my favorite thing with writers, first half is polished to perfection and the back half is rushed and sloppy and repetitive and like you can tell that this was rushed. That was how I was letting down my clients a lot, because I was waiting until the very last minute to turn in the finished product and I wasn't giving myself time. So how this connects to what I teach is that I came up with a process that sets all of these interim mini deadlines and hitting each of those deadlines is really critical, which means that I have done 60, 70, 80% of the deep thinking and the planning and the research well before this thing is due. So I can still have that last minute creative rush before the deadline.
Angie Colee:But I've already done all of the foundational work. That actually sets me up for success To be able to do that last minute rush and turn over something quality. So I mean that was a little mini side rants, but like and I'm not saying Angie's process is the end all be all process for all nervous, spicy people. The point is that you have to be able to know how you work and set up a system that you can work within that also doesn't negatively impact the people around you. It can be done. There's lots of different methods, right.
Kristen Stelzer:Well, and that's the other thing by breaking for it. Well, first of all, breaking the task into smaller bits is often something that helps us keep from getting overwhelmed, because that's that's another thing, like the paralysis of you know too many things that I don't know where to start, so I'm just not going to start.
Angie Colee:We heard of goblin tools. Yes, I'm going to put that in the show notes. That's a little thing that if you don't know where to start you just you put in the task like clean the house, and say, and it'll spit out a list of all of the tasks to do and you can pick an individual task in that list and ask it to break that down into steps and like it reduces the mental load a lot. Anyway, continue.
Kristen Stelzer:Yeah, but so when you but if you break that project up and you've got like these other little mini milestones, then you're getting like that sense of like you're accomplishing something too.
Angie Colee:Like you're like, no way.
Kristen Stelzer:And then and then you get like it's more, like maybe smaller rewards but more frequent. Like oh, you know I did it, yay, and oh, I got this on, yeah, and now I'm halfway done and like it's, it's again, it's all figuring. I mean, that's one thing that you really do have to do if you're going to start your own business is you really got to get comfortable knowing yourself and your life your strengths and and how to take advantage of those.
Kristen Stelzer:And and then what you're not so good at. You know whether you want to call it a weakness. I think that's just. There's just things that people aren't good at.
Angie Colee:It doesn't make them, it just means you know they don't want to do it and like that's the, the, the, the synchronicity that's coming up for this week. That seems to happen like every week. The synchronicity this week seems to be strengths and leaning into your natural talents and innate strengths. It took something called a strengths finder recently that told me that my top two strengths are our activator and strategic. And activators are people that can bring an idea into reality, like they know all the steps to take it from inside somebody's brain to a real, tangible thing. And strategic. Obviously, I've got a strategic plan for just about everything out there. And the funny thing is when I was talking to somebody like we, there's 34 strengths in this assessments and my bottom two are literally consistency and discipline. Ironic, since you're listening to a show with over 100 episodes that regularly, consistently releases every Wednesday. There's some discipline and consistency there. So when I talked to my coach about this and said that's the place where I struggle most just discipline and consistency. What's what's up with me being able to produce a podcast? And she said you used your activator strength and your strategic strength to pump up those lesser strengths and make those possible for you. So, like you created a podcast process out of thinner where you didn't know anything, and then your strategy side used that to make a series of repeatable steps and find people that you could outsource different things to. So now you've got consistency and discipline taken care of within your strategy and your activator strength, and so I like that.
Angie Colee:You brought that up like strengths and weaknesses. I don't like thinking of it as weaknesses either. Like I think of it as leverage. You've got some inherent, innate, natural talents and skills that come to you, your natural strengths. How can you leverage those to lift up other areas of your life where maybe you need a little bit more help and a little bit more focus? Like it's always worth it to me to and if you can't figure that out on your own with some journaling or some long hard looks at the way you operate, coach, find somebody that can help you work through this. Like there are ways forward, no matter how your brain works and I guess that's the point to all of my rambling on this show Like whatever way your brain works for you, that's the way that works for you. Let's make the most of it and love it.
Kristen Stelzer:It's a good break and you can turn that into something like it doesn't. You know there isn't one right way. There are some best practices that might guide you. You can certainly look to people for advice to see what they've done, but in the end, you have to do what's going to work for you, because if you're going to I think I mean you, and I have talked about this before If you, whatever you're going to do is the best option, like it's better to do something than then just not do anything because you're not doing it the right way. Like, yes, do it your way, but do it like yes, you know.
Angie Colee:I think that's the perfect note to end it on Do it and do it your way. Amen, amen to that. So, kristen, if we want to know more about working with you and weirdly wired women, which I love, tell us more about where we can find you online and check you out.
Kristen Stelzer:You can find me on the website weirdlywiredwomencom. There's the links to the socials and the email lists and all of that kind of stuff there on Instagram and everything. But it's all weirdly wired women Awesome.
Angie Colee:Thank you so much for being on the show. This was such a wonderful conversation.
Kristen Stelzer:Let's have, let's do another one.
Angie Colee:I want to go more into brain stuff and interesting things where I'm not gesturing wildly and hitting the mic.
Kristen Stelzer:That's part of the brain things, yeah.
Angie Colee:That's all for now. If you want to keep that kick ass energy high, please take a minute to share this episode with someone that might need a high octane dose of you can do it. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Permission to Kick Ass podcast on Apple podcast, spotify and wherever you stream your podcast. I'm your host, angie Coley, and I'm here rooting for you. Thanks for listening and let's go kick some ass.