Hello Brains! Let's talk about failure. ♪ [Intro music] ♪ Growing up, a lot of those of us with ADHD heard a lot about how much potential we have and how, you know, how we're failing to meet it and when we failed to reach our potential when we fail to do the thing we thought
we were supposed to be able to do we would try harder and when that didn't work, we felt like
we ourselves were failures and a lot of the time it was blaming ourselves or blaming our efforts and I just want to put a bit of a
different perspective on it. What I used to do when I felt like I was failing was try harder, do more. Now I take a bit of a different approach because now I understand that failure is
kind of a systemic thing. It's rarely just about lack of effort. It's really not because I'm a bad person or I'm not trying hard enough for the most part It's usually a systemic issue. Sometimes I'm running into these invisible barriers because I do have ADHD and I do live in a world
that's not exactly built for
people with ADHD You can see my video on ADHD-friendly here Sometimes I need a little extra support, I need accomodations, I need body doubling,
I need whatever to help me be successful at the thing but sometimes no matter how much support I get,
or I give myself, I'm still finding myself failing at something So, I agreed to write a book. And I was really lucky in that I didn't
have to write a book proposal. I was able to sell it directly to a publisher and skip the part where I have to, like,
figure out exactly what the layout's gonna look like and, you know, write a chapter, and, like, I got to skip a lot of the work that normally would be
done before somebody starts writing a book. But, I was still given the same amount of time to write a book which was a year. Knowing I only had a year to write this book, I was like: Ok So what I'll do is give myself 2 weeks to write the first chapter because I figure that'll take a little longer and then after that, every time I went to write a
chapter I gave myself a week. And I planned out my whole year like this, right. And it was like, a pretty reasonable schedule, I thought. Like, cool, I did it. Like, I figured out how to get this into a year and as long as I can stick to the schedule, as long as I can stay on track then I'll have a book written in a year. Well, I went to start writing this book but I got into it and I realised: Oh, I need to figure out actually what the book
is gonna look like and what's the structure gonna be a
nd figure out a lot of logistical things and then by the time I started writing chapter 1, I realised I couldn't actually
finish that in the 2 weeks so I gave myself an extra week to write that first chapter It's a little failure, it's fine, we'll get back on track I wrote that first chapter and then I got notes on it and I realised I didn't like my first chapter. I wanted to rewrite it so, I thought about it more, and I rewrote it and then I rewrote it again and at this point I'm about 6 weeks
in and I was
only supposed to take 2 weeks to write the first chapter So I'm immediately starting this process off
feeling like an absolute failure. And just time after time, every time I went to write
this book, to do a portion of my book I was failing to hit the deadlines that I'd set for myself. And I felt scared because I'm like: I'm really failing at this like, I got to try harder, you know, let me give up my nights and weekends let me work harder, faster, or whatever, I didn't know but I f
elt like I need to be putting more
effort into this because I'm failing. Then I did the math. One morning when I was supposed to sit down and write I was so discouraged and just
absolutely in tears that I looked at the breakdown of, now that I understood what the structure
of the chapters and everything were going to be, I looked at how that was actually, realistically fit
in my schedule, and I know that I'm the kind of person who overwrites and so, if I need a 4.000-word chapter
at the end of
the week, I need to write like 12.000 words,
like braindump like 12.000 words And then I looked it up, I decided to look it up how many words does a professional author
write [laughs] in a day? And the answer is not 12.000. It was anywhere from 2.500 to like 3.500 max per day and I was expecting myself to braindump out
12.000 words in one day And I'm just like... That might be the problem My markers for success were not realistic. I was failing, not because I wasn't trying hard enough, and so ef
fort was not the issue the actual issue was that what I was asking
of myself was unrealistic. The markers of success that I'd set for myself
were so, so, unattainable that it was not gonna happen. And so, I decided to change my markers for success and this was scary, this was a problem because if I gave myself this realistic schedule, I wouldn't even have the first draft finished. I would start the first draft that week, but I would have to finish the first draft next week and then do the second
draft the next week so really, realistically, I needed 2 weeks to write a chapter and that wasn't going to be easy,
but at least it was doable. Looking back through my life, pretty much
every time I felt like an absolute, utter failure it was because of what I expected
from myself was unrealistic. Either it was because it was something that
no human was truly capable doing, or because it was something that I saw my
neurotypical friends or my neurotypical mom doing that was not something that I
could do. One thing that helps me be successful with my goals is CoPilot! CoPilot is a one-on-one coaching service where you connect with a personal trainer who designs workouts that work for you based on your current fitness level,
whatever equipment you have available and however long you want to work out. You meet via video calls to talk about
your goals and individual needs. Then your coach tracks your workouts and
keeps you accountable with regular check-ins. I love my coach so much. Her n
ame is Darian,
she's incredibly encouraging, checks in if I miss a day, and reminds me to do a video call once in a while So we can talk about my goals and progress
on a deeper level. The last call we had, she helped me figure out that
I was ready to change things up a bit. I realised I'd actually been so consistent,
I was starting to get bored. Which is kinda cool because it means I'm feeling confident
in movements that used to be hard for me. But my brain doesn't like to keep doing
things it f
inds boring, so she put together a whole new program for me where each workout I can focus on something different. Balance, power and agility, handstands. She also added in things like walking my dog on saturdays which my watch can track, or I can just check that I did. This is the longest I've ever stuck to any fitness program and I think it's because it's so ADHD-friendly I don't have to leave my house to do the workouts I don't even have to plan my workouts because
Darian does that for me. A
nd between talking with her and being
able to share my workouts with friends in the app I have the accountability and support I need to keep going. If you'd like to try it out, click my link to get 14 days free
with your expert fitness and health coach. It is available on IOS now, but starting june 27th
it will be available on Android as well. So i, I don't know, I just think it's really important
for a community to recognize that sometimes when we're feeling like we're failing,
sometimes it's b
ecause it's not a good fit sometimes it's because we don't have the support we need, sometimes it's because it's not actually doable,
no matter how much support, no matter how good the fit like, it's not... doable. And so one of the best things we can do for ourselves
is adjust the markers of success. And I did not want to do this, right. Because, I'm like: "Well, but I was gonna be so proud of myself",
like being done early, I wanted to be done by Christmas,
the books not due 'till January 31th
like, I really wanted to. Well that's nice, but, me refusing to acknowledge
that this actually takes me longer than I've given myself All that would do is make me feel like I was
continuing to fail throughout the entire writing process. And guess what: I still would have turned that book in late. By acknowledging early that what I had planned
to do was not gonna be doable for me I was able to adjust it and the last time
I sat down to write, I actually enjoyed it. Because I got to feel successfu
l. I got to hit that deadline. And that gave me the encouragement
and the motivation that I needed to be willing
to show up again the next day. For those of us who do have issues with
emotional regulation I think making sure that we're not setting
ourselves up for failure is really important. Or setting ourselves up for disappointment
or discouragement by setting goals for ourselves that aren't within our control, are too challenging, are really better suited to other people. I mean we put so m
uch emphasis on what
we're doing to reach our goals that we don't put as much thought into:
what are those goals though? Like, do those goals make sense for us? Are they achievable for us? Are they too easy? Which incidentally can
make things harder to do for those which ADHD because like, "I'm bored". Or are they too challenging, in which case
we get discouraged. We want to aim for moderately challenging. We want to be in the... in education they call it the proximal zone
of development, we wan
t to be at that point where it's
exciting and engaging and hard, but not so hard that we can't do it. Not so hard that we give up. So, a good way to figure out if your goals
are too hard is: "How often are you succeeding at them?" If every week you're missing your deadlines, there's something wrong there. Either it's not a good fit, you're not
getting the support you need, or the goals and your markers for success
are unrealistic. And it's important to remember that, even
if somebody else is hi
tting those goals, that doesn't mean that you can. Because they might be working with a
different operating system, you know, their brain works differently, they're in a different field. I think that sweet spot is, like, "Oh, we got time". "It's, I don't need to..." Like, then it's
probably not challenging enough and if we're, like, constantly failing,
constantly discouraged, constantly not hitting those goals, then they're too ambitious.
Those goals are too ambitious or outside our control, rig
ht? Like, it might be a perfectly reasonable goal but, like, they're goals about somebody else's behaviour or, like, you know, it's, it's something, if something is too far outside your control, that can be really, a really good way to
set yourself up for failure too. I got really frustrated once because I had
a friend who's neurotypical and I was dating this guy at the time, and I was like:
"I keep failing at everything that I'm doing". And he's like: "Yeah, everybody fails at stuff". And I wa
s like: "No, not my friend",
like my, this neurotypical friend I was like "My neurotypical friend
never fails at anything", like, everything he sets out to do, he does. And my boyfriend looks at me and says: "How many things is he trying to do?" And I realised: Not nearly as many as I was trying to do. So that's another thing to recognize too: Sometimes when we're failing at things it's because
we're trying to do too many things at the same time. It's almost like, a bunch of people trying to fit
through a doorway all at the same time it's not gonna go well, right?
Like, one at a time. One project at a time. One task at a time.
Monotasking. And often we try to do it as a way of catching up, as a way of making up for falling behind. But if we try and do everything at the same time,
OR we constantly switch our goals, we're not gonna really make a whole lot of progress compared to if we just pick one or two
or three and focus on those. So yeah, moral of the story:
If you feel like you're f
ailing, there are a lot of reasons for that
that don't involve "I'm a horrible human" and, like, "I suck at everything" and like,
"Who let me do this? I'm terrible". There are a lot of reasons for that failure
and they're systemic. It's: "what is the goal that you're setting?", "What kind of support do you have?", "How many things are you trying to do at
the same time?", "How interested in it are you? Like, really?" If we're interest-based learners, we're
interest-based doers. If it's something
that really, really,
really bores you, all the effort in the world is not, is probably
not going to help you toward that goal because it's just not how our brains work, and so finding ways to get ourselves
interested in it, or switching to something that is a better fit, is a better option than continuing to
essentially try to nail jell-o to the wall which is essentially what we're doing when we're trying to do something that,
like, does not interest us, at all. Remember, like, a lot of times p
eople will
make us feel like we're failing, when we're actually doing pretty well. Because their markers for success
might be different than ours. That's my 2 cents.
I will get off my soapbox now. Thank you to my Brain Advocates and
all my Patreon Brains for giving me a soapbox [laughs]. I hope this was helpful. I needed to hear it come out of my mouth. I needed to be reminded of it. Again, if you want to try out CoPilot,
I put the link in the description below. Like, Subscribe, Click all the th
ings and I will see you next video. Bye Brains! ♪ [Outro music] ♪
Comments