squirel squirrel squirrel squir in this episode we're going to explore how ADHD entrepreneurs can turn distraction into their greatest asset hi I'm Katie mcmanis business strategist and money mindset coach and welcome to the weenie cast squ the ironic thing about the topic today is that we have had to deal with multiple distractions before we started recording which makes it so much fun to do a whole episode on how to deal with distractions cuz you know my producer and I are immediately going to
start getting self-conscious distraction is one of those symptoms of ADHD that is most perceived by the outside world as people with ADHD we don't really perceive when we're being distracted our attention is just kind of refocused on this thing and then refocused again on this other thing and then refocused again on another thing it really comes up as a problem for us when we have a task that we need to do and usually my clients who are starting businesses they're breaking away from working a c
orporate job where there's a lot of structure distraction is one of those things that becomes a lot worse as a solo priner and it's also complicated because we actually love distractions we love when we can find a creative way to avoid doing something that we think is Bor boring or that we don't want to do the only time I take joy in cleaning my space is when it helps me avoid doing something that I really really don't want to do in my business like taxes and if you're my accountant and you're l
istening I know I owe you some stuff and some paperwork I apologize the other thing about distractions for an ADHD is sometimes the distraction is actually a massive spark of creativity it's a new idea that we have to jump into and play with for a little bit or else we're going to lose it so you know as we talk through distractions I'm not saying that there's a way for you to never be distracted again in fact I'm not even saying that you avoiding all distractions is good for you I think being di
stracted is one of the major Gifts of being an ADHD person a good distraction can be the thing that recharges us enough that we can throw ourselves fully into whatever task we need to do a good distraction can be the thing that inspires a brand new idea for our business a new offer a way to help our clients that we hadn't thought of before and quite honestly being distracted is actually how we are productive you know there are all those reals and Tik toks of the ADHD person who you know sees a s
hoe and they're like oh that shoe's out of place let me take it to the bedroom they get to the bedroom they're like oh this towel is on the floor should put this back in the bathroom then they get to the bathroom and the toothpaste has been left open and it's kind of squirted on the sink and they're like oh I should clean that up and then while they're at the sink they're like oh my gosh I forgot to take my anti-depressant today I have to take my medication and they open the thing like wow there
's a lot of old antibiotics here I should be disposing of them so on and so forth we don't do things in a linear way we don't do things in a container we do things randomly in in a way that makes sense to us but the point is that things generally do get done the things that need to happen get done just kind of in a weird order so if you're someone who really struggles with distraction I'm going to give you some tactics some real simple doable tactics that you can use to manage distractions bette
r and I invite you to stop vilifying distractions they're not evil they're not bad they just are and when you learn to use them in a way that works for you life gets a lot easier I've broken down distractions into four categories the first one is other people the second one is dependence the third is your space and the fourth is internal you um I'm going to go through them I'm going to be talking about the different things that can happen and what's really helpful especially for those of you who
are in the beginning stages of starting your business or who have just taken your business full-time especially when we're talking about your space and managing other people one of the hardest things when I started my business and I went full-time was that I didn't have anything on my calendar I didn't have an office that I had to go to from you know 7:00 a.m. to 300 p.m. I worked really early hours when I lived in San Francisco where my manager would notice if I wasn't there I just kind of had
quote unquote free time and it wasn't actually free time it was work time but because it didn't have it didn't have this structure that I was used to I would get invitations from friends to go to lunch and another friend might ask hey I'm going to go work out you want to come work out with me there's a yoga class we could go to you know family would ask me for favors knowing that I didn't have anything planned and I would say yes cuz I'm an extrovert and I like spending time with my friends and
I like doing favors for my family and what I realized I was actually doing to myself is I was causing myself a great deal of anxiety because as I was out to lunch with my friend and as I was going to yoga with another friend and as I was helping my family member with something around their house I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn't doing the work I wasn't doing the foundational work to get my business up and running full-time and I found myself actually resenting my loved ones because ho
w dare they ask me to do this stuff they know that like I have a job but I realized that they actually didn't know that I had a job as far as they could see I just quit my job and I was unemployed you know and sure they thought I was like starting a coaching business but who knows what that means as a new business owner as someone who has to really buckle down and get those beginning clients figure out your marketing figure out how to do your sales funnel figure out a whole bunch of other stuff
from the outside it looks like you're not doing anything it looks like you're just hanging out playing on your computer all day and so the people around you are going to see that and think oh cool they're free let's invite them to do fun stuff and it's hard to say no because we all love fun stuff I'm a big fan of fun stuff personally and I bet you are too and it's hard to say no to something when you don't have an appointment scheduled when you don't have a client call or a sales call or somethi
ng on your calendar but something that you're going to have to get really good at is saying no I can't do that I'm working on my business right now no my workday starts at 9:00 a.m. and ends at 4 P p.m. I'd love to hang out with you can we go to yoga class this evening you know when your family asks you for a favor absolutely I'd love to help you can I come over this weekend and help you today I'm actually working you have to be the one who trains everyone around you that you are working on your
business they won't be able to see it otherwise cuz you know for them you working looks like you going out of the house and going to the office okay it doesn't look like you sitting on your couch in your pajama pants with a blouse on with your computer in your lap honestly that just looks like you've kind of lost it connected to this you know your phone notifications you are in charge of how many notifications you get you're in charge of what text messages can come through from who when you get
notified of them what social media notifications you get throughout the day as someone who's easily distracted you have to set the boundaries with your technology if you don't then you're just going to have this constant like Ping you know that someone posted a new Instagram ping someone did a new Tik Tok someone texted you oh it's your mom oh she wants to ask if you want to help her with something it's just it's never ending there are so many settings on different phone types for you to manage
this I'm not even going to walk you through it you can figure this out and I've already kind of touched upon this but you do need to schedule time with your love ones you know if they think that you have all this free time all of a sudden and you're not wanting to spend time with them during that time they're going to start feeling really rejected and especially if you have ADHD you probably have a lot of friends with ADHD and you probably have family members with ADHD which means you have a wh
ole group of people that have rejection sensitivity dysphoria so you saying no that you would rather sit on your computer doing what they perceive as nothing rather than hang out with them is going to be really bruising to their ego and their feelings so you do need to prioritize scheduling time to spend with them this will also help you decompress on a regular basis because as a new business owner you're going to feel this immense pressure to spend every waking moment working on your business u
ntil you're making enough money that you have your normal salary back you cannot spend every waking moment doing that you're going to burn yourself out so schedule off time with your loved ones you know if you live with your partner and you both work from home or you both have a reason to be home maybe your partner as a full-time parent you need to design with them that sometimes during your workday you're going to be on YouTube watching puppies learn how to do the stairs for the first time you'
re going to be on Facebook scrolling kind of you know stalking friends from high school you're going to be doing things on your computer that looks like you are slacking off but you and I both know in those moments you're not slacking off what you're doing is you're actually giving yourself a little dopamine boost so that you'll have enough dopamine to get to the next task and we need to find ways to communicate to our partners that if they come up behind us and make a comment that can come acro
ss as a judgment like Oh I thought you were working today looks like you're having fun it can completely take the wind out of your sales and you get to explain to them that things like that are actually productivity boosters for us so that is how we are dealing with other adults in the world now technically adults and dependents are other people but like dependents have different requirements because you know you can't have the same expectations for a four-year-old to respect your time and your
boundaries as you can your partner and if you have a four-year-old who knows how to like respect boundaries then good on you this is not I'm not speaking to you so when I talk about dependence I'm talking about children and pets any kind of living being that depends on you that's going to need care throughout the day now the key here is you have to set them up for Success first all right I don't have children so I'm going to use my dog as an example here if I'm expecting to get a good 4 hours of
work done in a morning or in an afternoon I need to make sure that she's set up for Success which means means I have to get her outside and exercised I have to go and run her I have to take her on a long walk because if I don't she's going to have this neurotic energy that just comes up and she's going to constantly want to play with me while I'm trying to get work done and I love my dog she's the cutest thing in the world and I love playing with her but I have to pay the bills I have to be abl
e to afford all the fancy treats that I buy her I have to keep her in a very good lifestyle I can't do that if she she is distracting me from my work now I you know I told you I'm not a parent you know your kids may need similar care to Luna they may just need exercise they may need to like get some energy out so that they can focus on other things while you're getting work done depending on their age you may also need to Outsource the child care and I know this can be expensive often for my cli
ents who are parents there's a stage in their business where the amount of money that they're bringing in is only covering their child care costs that's a really difficult thing to deal with emotionally as someone who is ambitious and also cares about your kids but wants to find that balance it's one of the reasons why it helps to work with a strategist who can help you figure out how you can make the most amount of money in the least amount of time and this is often what I do with my clients wh
o are stay-at-home moms or parents who share the responsibility of taking care of the kids if you have the right strategy sure you're going to go through a phase where your money all the money you're making from your business is going to child care but it won't last you'll start making more money if you stick to the strategy if you keep at the action plan so setting your dependence up for success is the only way to set yourself up for Success the other element here is you have to set realistic e
xpectations for yourself if you have an 8-month-old and they've been consistently napping for an hour and a half every single day guess guess what that's not going to happen forever you have to set realistic expectations you're probably not going to want to schedule calls in that time because there's going to be a day where that 8-month-old is like uh-uh I don't want to take a nap or they're going to nap for 10 minutes and then wake up and be really upset in setting realistic expectations for my
self I know I can't sit down and do eight hours of work because I'm going to have to take my dog outside to pee at some point I'm going to have to feed her I'm going to have to play with her I'm her one roommate I have to keep it interesting for her when you set realistic expectations for yourself you prevent yourself from going crazy and you also help everyone who has to work with you because you're not constantly having to change the game the third category of distractions is your space and th
is is something that is massively different for everyone some people to keep themselves from being distracted need absolute silence they cannot not have a single sound in their space for others absolute silence is deafening you need Ambient sound you might need music going on in the background you might need to go and rent a space in a co-working office so you can have background chatter hell you might need to go into like a busy Cafe and do work there you have to figure out what kind of space i
s most conducive to you getting work done and what kind of work you get done in that space for me I don't even drink but I find it's really helpful when I have to put together a PowerPoint presentation or hell if I'm if I'm plotting out a podcast episode to go to my local pub and grab dinner and have my laptop open and just start working the key for me is it needs to be loud enough that I can't discern any particular conversation around me if I can hear what the people next to me are talking abo
ut then I'm going to get completely sucked into EAS dropping on them I'm very no I'm going to want to know all the details I'm not going to get any work done but if I obviously if I'm on a call if I'm on Zoom I need to have a very specific space set up for myself so that I can do that successfully and there's no right answer here it's whatever works best for you whatever works best for your business so for instance if you're a copywriter and the work that you do that's paid doesn't require you t
o be on a zoom call or on a phone call with someone you get to work wherever you want whatever makes you most able to concentrate is going to be the best place other things that as adhders we have to kind of deconstruct for ourselves is this idea of professionalism in a workspace a couple years ago I went through this certification called trauma of money and one of the things that they trained us on very early on is that wherever you feel comfortable and safe is going to be the best place for yo
u to take the class it's going to be the best place for you to do work sometimes that means from bed sometimes that means in your living room sometimes working on the floor feels the best I give you permission to work wherever the [ __ ] feels best for you I had a friend in San Francisco and and to prove the point that it really doesn't matter I had this friend in San Francisco he was the chief people officer at a tech startup okay the CEO at this company was real difficult to manage they had br
ought in so many different executive coaches to try to work with this guy and he was pretty uncoachable and finally as a last resort they actually hired a woman who works with movie stars out of La she was exorbitantly expensive but she had this kind of smack you in the face approach that was no [ __ ] and he was laughing because she charges so much money to work with her and the very first call that he had with her with the group explained you know who she was going to be working with she was s
itting on her bed in Malibu she was sitting on her bed cross-legged and she's laughing and she's talking and she's swearing and you know she's talking about what she's going to do with the CEO and she was massively effective and the key here is that she normalized it she chose that that is the best place for her to take a work call and went with it you are the boss of your own business wherever you want to work your clients are just going to have to get used to that and any client who's not will
ing to work with you because you're working someplace that's comfortable for you they're not the right client for you so Comfort rather than professional we get to redefine what our standard for professionalism is for me it's that you're good at what you do and you deliver it it's pretty basic I always laugh when someone books a generate income strategy call with me and they get on and we're talking about their business and they say something like [ __ ] they're like oh my God I swore and it's l
ike Have you listened to anything that I talk about so yes if you ever book a call with me you are allowed to swear I invite it the last little bit about your space is mess different folks have different resilience to levels of mess I'm pretty resilient I'm a very messy person I'm a clean person but I'm a messy person I just do not notice the piles of paper that are gathering around my desk I don't notice the random Doom piles of stuff until all of a sudden it becomes too much if you're someone
who gets distracted by mess when you start working and you're not taking care of that first what you're actually doing is making everything that you're doing a layered task because for you to get to work you have to clean your desk for you to clean your desk you might have to do something else you might have to vacuum you might have to do this you might have to do that if mess is one of the things that distracts you the most and it's always something that gets added into your day because you hav
e to deal with it before you can get to work start prioritizing that first make it a must do in your business dealing with a mess because it's going to have to get dealt with either way if you're going to get into whatever task you've assigned yourself for the day it's better to plan around it and build a buffer of time than to let it kind of derail your whole day and lastly my favorite category for distractions is what am I going to say next well you'll have to keep listening to find out but fi
rst squir squirel squir [Music] squir and lastly my favorite category for distractions is you in my intake form for my generate income strategy calls I have this question and it's like what are the top three things that typically get in the way of you reaching your goals the number one answer to this question is me myself and I I cackle every time I see this because it's so true it's we are our biggest obstacle it's our mindset it's our shining object syndrome it's our ability to shift gears so
fast and completely lose the plot so when we talk about the distractions that come from us our internal selves there are a few different things that happen so there's what goes on in our mind and what goes on in our body one of the best things about having ADHD is how creative we are and also it's one of the most distracting things because ideas strike us at any moment in any place along with all the ideas that we have as ADHD people we also have this underlying fear that this is the last idea w
e're ever going to have this weird belief like there's no proof that it's true because we're coming up with ideas constantly but we tend to have an idea and think oh my God I need to grab onto it right now and run with it because if I don't then I'm going to lose it I invite you to look around your house right now as you're listening to this if you're home and look at all the piles of paper that you don't want to throw away because there's good ideas in it there's good information that might hav
e a good idea in it we are idea hoarders and sure sometimes we'll write an idea down and go back to it but often times we don't but I want to just call attention to the fact that you have never run out of ideas you are an idea generator there's a reason why there are so many people with ADHD who do things that are so Innovative because we are far more creative than neurotypicals but you have to learn how to manage it so you can get done in your business and this is why one of the things that I r
ecommend to all of my clients who have this issue of oh my God I got this great idea I'm going to run with that instead of all the things that I said I was going to do today is to create some kind of idea bank I also like to call this a back burner book all right so if you're cooking multiple things you can't actively cook all of them okay you can focus on one or two things at the most at a time so sometimes you just have to put stuff on the back burner to keep it warm before you get to it now a
back burner book or an idea Bank can look a lot of different ways it could be a journal it could be the notes app on your phone hell you could have an email chain to yourself from yourself where you're just sending back and forth different ideas and if you're more advanced than I am and you've figured out how to use project management tools like notion or clickup you can absolutely create a board in there to manage all of your ideas I always tell myself I'm going to learn those things but every
time I try it's just so confusing it's like I would I know what I want it to do but I don't speak the language to figure out how to make it do what I want it to do and then I try and then I get frustrated and then I get mad and then I get discouraged and then I have to go for a walk and recover it's just it's a really ugly process I just get bored and I tune out so they explain it to me and it's like it goes in in one year and out the other so I apologize to those of you who've tried in the pas
t I don't think I just don't think I'm I'm destined for project management tools anyway so on the one side we have ideas that are distracting to us on the other side we have complete and utter boredom sometimes the boredom sets in for a task and you just can't continue with it there are two ways to really deal with boredom [Music] so boredom can be that you need more stimulation it could be that you need to go and give yourself like a quick a quick hit of dopamine so maybe you need to go and do
a really simple task like go and comment on five posts on LinkedIn to get your engagement up it could also mean respond to an easy email or go take your dog for a 10-minute walk it could be something that you can put on your to-do list and very easily just cross off and get that satisfaction boredom can also mean that you are overstimulated meaning that you're trying to do too much in too little time you've taken in too much information and you actually need to go sit in silence without your pho
ne without a book without a journal and just kind of stare off into space and disassociate for a while I've learned this about myself and I have to tell you I'm not perfect at figuring out which one I need most often times when I am feeling the boredom that means I'm overstimulated I get kicked into executive dysfunction so it's hard for me to even get that get up and go to go and do other things you know I start doing them and I'm like I just don't have the juice for it and so I kind of back of
f that's when I realize I have to just kind of put a chair in the center of the room away from everything and just sit there for a bit until I feel rested with the under stimulat boredom it's usually that I'm just really antsy to get to the next thing and it's easy for me to get to the next thing I just kind of like bounce off the boring task into the exciting task and do that for you this is going to be different the signs are going to be different so pay attention to when you're feeling bored
are you getting kicked into executive dysfunction and you have a hard time getting into another task or are you feeling like a ton of pent up energy that you need to get out in some way and deal with it appropriately the other mental thing that can get the way that can distract us from the work that we need to do is stress about other stuff this is one of the reasons why in the Monday Sprint that I do three Mondays a month for all of my clients I have them do a complete brain dump of everything
that they're tracking in their minds that they have to get to that week anything that's stressing them out goes on that list you want to fix world hunger great it goes on the list anything that you feel like you need to be stressed out about that could be turned into a to-do list item put it on the list even if you never get to it something that we don't talk about enough is the mental load that we carry you know when you're an employee you go to work you have a certain set of responsibilities y
ou do those things and then you go home you're not having to figure out what the responsibilities are and what the responsibilities of the other departments are and what the actions are of those other departments and then you're not responsible to do the actions of the responsibilities of the other departments as well as a business owner you have to be all the people you have to be all the strategists and you have to be the prioritizer okay that's [ __ ] exhausting it's it's a lot more mental wo
rk than you are used to but because we've been trained on a 40-hour week we expect ourselves to do 40 hours of action every damn week it's impossible because you're having to do about 20 hours of mental work now part of the mental load is keeping track of what all the work is you know getting it down on paper even if it doesn't make the cut for your priorities this week is going to be a way for you to offload it to free up some Ram in your brain for lack of a better term because we all know as a
dhders how our computers tend to like to crash when they have too many tabs open the same happens in your brain the last little bits about distractions that come from you are how you nourish your body and how you dress your body if you're not feeding yourself properly like is going to go wrong you're going to have a sugar crash your stomach is going to hurt you're going to be so hungry that you're going to start getting hangry and clients are going to start firing you because they can't handle i
t if you're not drinking water you're going to start getting really murky in your mind you know you're going to start getting dark and depressed and things are going to start looking real bad real fast if you're wearing clothes that are distracting acting if you're wearing wool and it's itchy why are you wearing wool stop it you know if you need to go through all your clothes and cut out all of the tags go and do it we talked previously about you getting to Define your version of professionalism
that includes your wardrobe I don't care what you had to wear to the office when you worked in corporate I care about what you want to wear now I care about how that facilitates you being able to be in your business 100% sometimes it's going to look a little cozy sometimes it's it's not going to look flashy and professional and that's okay so long as you're showing up and doing the work and providing the services to your clients who paid you for them your distractions are never going to go away
new distractions are going to happen all the time new world events are going to start distracting you new ideas for your business are going to distract you you know the occasional client who needs a little more attention is going to start distracting you as a person who's running a business who also has a ADHD the key here is to not punish yourself when distractions happen when you get pulled off course to do something else when you meant to get X Y and Z done that's okay that's the nature of t
hings what doesn't help the whole distraction cycle is when you get distracted and then you start punishing yourself for the distraction and then you feel bad like you failed in everything and then you can't go back to the original task because it's now associated with failure exhausting but it happens to us all the time I know I've talked about this in relation to New Year's resolutions with going to the gym if you say that you're going to go to the gym every single day and then you miss on day
four day five you're not going back you already failed like you're going to go to the gym and that everyone at the gym is going to boo you because you failed you didn't show up for day four how dare you this doesn't count it doesn't matter if you work out twice as hard on day five still doesn't count cuz you missed day four failure I know I say that it sounds ludicrous but we know how it feels the most powerful thing that you can do for yourself for your productivity for your business is to hav
e forgiveness for all the times you got distracted and gently kindly with acceptance just bring yourself back so that you can do whatever you need to do squir squir squir s if you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes money then go ahead and book a generate income strategy call with me by going to weeny cast.com slst strategy call on this call we will talk about your goals your dreams and your frustrations in getting there and if it's a fit for both of us then we
can talk about different ways to work [Music] together I was sleeping on my stomach the other night and I woke up after a couple hours and Luna had been sleeping like kind of on my calf so like my right knee had been hyp extended for a few hours I think and so it [ __ ] up my knee which then [ __ ] up my hip which now like has at my lower back and I have I'm such an old lady squirrel squirrel squirrel squir
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