Let's USE distraction to grow a business! Even with ADHD!
The Unexpected Edge: ADHD Entrepreneurs Making Distractions Work for Them!
Are you an entrepreneur with ADHD who feels like your distractibility is a curse? What if I told you it might just be your greatest asset?
Hey, I'm Katie McManus, your host of The Weeniecast, and in this must-listen episode, we're gonna flip the narrative on distractions.
Instead of fighting against them, I'm going to help you embrace these quirks and channel them into entrepreneurial gold.
The business landscape doesn't often cater to the ADHD mind, but who says we can't rewrite the rules? Right?!
In this episode, I'm explaining how to use distraction to grow a business.
I'll walk you through my personal experiences—from navigating the disarray of a busy workspace to expertly juggling family life alongside business demands.
I'll reveal the secrets of my 'idea bank' that captures those lightning-strike thoughts and discuss ways to turn the tedium into a catalyst for creativity.
But it's not just about me; this is about you.
I'll equip you with strategies for setting clear boundaries for both your dependents and your own wandering mind, transforming a world of distractions into a tailored entrepreneurial haven.
By the end of this episode, you'll hopefully be seeing your distractibility in a whole new light, and armed with a whole new arsenal of strategies to master it.
You'll learn how to transform distractions from your biggest challenges into your most potent opportunities. You'll be a wizard at setting boundaries, become more adept at managing stress, and curate your environment to suit the unique pace and pattern of your ADHD entrepreneurial journey.
Get ready to join me in turning what looks like a vulnerability into one of your greatest victories—all here on The Weeniecast.
Timestamped Summary:
- 00:00: Overview of distraction and its stigma with ADHD
- 02:15: Redefining Professionalism – my take on embracing workspace personalization
- 06:45: Distractions of Mess – managing workspace clutter effectively
- 09:30: Internal Distractions – tips for overcoming daunting thoughts and idea overload
- 12:55: Boredom as Distraction – how boredom leads to innovation
- 18:10: The Mental Load & Stress – techniques for a clear headspace
- 23:40: Challenges of ADHD Entrepreneurship – How to navigate the fatigue from responsibility and strategy
- 28:20: Physical Distractions – the impact of comfort on work and interactions with clients
- 34:15: Being Kinder to Ourselves – embracing distractions and how to refocus
- 38:00: Scheduling Downtime – why prioritizing leisure and family time is crucial
- 43:45: The Power of Distraction – how to see distractions as opportunities
- 50:50: Setting Boundaries – advice on creating a work-life balance that respects your ADHD traits
Your next steps after listening
Realizing it's time to work with me? Book your free intial strategy call with me - weeniecast.com/strategycall
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Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
In this episode, we're going to explore how
Speaker:adhd entrepreneurs can turn distraction into their greatest
Speaker:asset. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money
Speaker:mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast.
Speaker:The ironic thing about the topic today is that we have had to deal with
Speaker:multiple distractions before we started recording, which makes it
Speaker:so much fun to do a whole episode on on how to deal
Speaker:with distractions because my producer and I are immediately going to start
Speaker:getting self conscious. Distraction is one of those symptoms of
Speaker:ADHD entreneurship that is most perceived by the
Speaker:outside world. As people with ADHD, we don't really
Speaker:perceive when we're being distracted. Our attention
Speaker:is just kind of refocused on this thing and then refocused
Speaker:again on this other thing and then refocused again
Speaker:on another thing. It really comes
Speaker:up as a problem for us when we have a
Speaker:task that we need to do. And
Speaker:usually my clients who are starting businesses, they're
Speaker:breaking away from working a corporate job where there's a lot of
Speaker:structure. Distraction is one of those things that
Speaker:becomes a lot worse as a
Speaker:solopreneur. And it's also complicated because
Speaker:we actually love distractions. We
Speaker:love when we can find a creative way to
Speaker:avoid doing something that we think is boring or that we don't want
Speaker:to do. The only time I take joy in cleaning
Speaker:my space is when it helps me avoid doing
Speaker:something that I really, really don't want to do in my business, like taxes.
Speaker:And if you're my accountant and you're listening, I know I owe you some stuff
Speaker:and some paperwork. I apologize. The
Speaker:other thing about distractions for an ADHD entrepreneur, sometimes the
Speaker:distraction is actually a massive spark of creativity.
Speaker:It's a new idea that we have to jump into and
Speaker:play with for a little bit or else we're going to lose it. So
Speaker:as we talk through distractions, I'm not saying
Speaker:that there's a way for you to never be distracted again.
Speaker:In fact, I'm not even saying that you avoiding all distractions is good
Speaker:for you. I think being distracted is one of the major
Speaker:gifts of being an ADHD person. A
Speaker:good distraction can be the thing that recharges us enough
Speaker:that we can throw ourselves fully into whatever task we need to
Speaker:do. A good distraction can be the thing that inspires
Speaker:a brand new idea for our business, a new offer, a
Speaker:way to help our clients that we hadn't thought of before. And quite
Speaker:honestly, being distracted is actually how we are productive.
Speaker:There are all those reels and TikToks of the
Speaker:ADHD person who sees a shoe and they're like, oh, that shoe
Speaker:is out of place. Let me take it to the bedroom. They get to the
Speaker:bedroom, they're like, oh, this towel is on the floor. I should put this back
Speaker:in the bathroom. Then they get to the bathroom and the toothpaste has been left
Speaker:open and it's kind of squirted on the sink. And they're like, oh, I should
Speaker:clean that up. And then while they're at the sink, they're like, oh, my gosh,
Speaker:I forgot to take my antidepressant today. I have to take my medication. And they
Speaker:open the thing like, wow, there's a lot of old antibiotics here. I
Speaker:should be disposing of them, and so on and so
Speaker:forth. We don't do things in a linear way. We don't do things
Speaker:in a container. We do things randomly
Speaker:in a way that makes sense to us. But the point is that
Speaker:things generally do get done. The things that need to happen get done
Speaker:just kind of in a weird order. So if you're someone who really
Speaker:struggles with distraction, I'm going to give you some tactics,
Speaker:some real simple, doable tactics that you can
Speaker:use to manage distractions better.
Speaker:And I invite you to stop vilifying distractions.
Speaker:They're not evil. They're not bad. They just are. And
Speaker:when you learn to use them in a way that works for you, life gets
Speaker:a lot easier.
Speaker:I've broken down distractions into four categories. The
Speaker:first one is other people. The second one is
Speaker:dependence. The third is your space,
Speaker:and the fourth is internal you.
Speaker:I'm going to go through them. I'm going to be talking about the different things
Speaker:that can happen and what's really helpful, especially for those of you who are in
Speaker:the beginning stages of starting your business or who have
Speaker:just taken your business full time, especially when we're talking about
Speaker:your space and managing other people.
Speaker:One of the hardest things when I started my business and I went full
Speaker:time was that I didn't have anything on my
Speaker:calendar. I didn't have an office that I had to go to
:00 a.m. To 03:00 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 the 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 go to. Family would ask me
:for favors knowing that I didn't have anything planned. And
:I would say yes because 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 how dare they
:ask me to do this stuff? They know that 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. 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 something
: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 work day starts at 09:00 a.m.
:And ends at 04:00 p.m. I'd love to hang out with you. Can we go
:to a yoga class this evening 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
:because for them, you working looks like you going out of the
:house and going to the office. 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. 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. Someone posted a new Instagram ping, someone
:did a new TikTok. Someone texted you, oh, it's your mom. Oh, she
:wants to ask if you want to help her with something. 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 loved ones.
: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 whole group of people that
:have rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria. So you saying no, that you would
:rather sit under 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. Until 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. If you live with your partner and you both work
:from home or you both have a reason to be home, maybe your partner is
: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 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 across 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 sails. 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 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 respect boundaries, then good
:on you. 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 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 is the cutest thing in the world and
:I love playing with her, but I have to
:pay the bills. I have to be able 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 is distracting me from my,
:you know, I told you I'm not a know. Your
:kids may need similar care to Luna. They may just need exercise.
:They may need to 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 childcare. I
:know this can be expensive. Often for my clients who are
:parents, there's a stage in their business where the amount of money that they're
:bringing in is only covering their childcare 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, 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 who
: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 childcare, but it won't last.
:You'll start making more money if you stick to the
:strategy, if you keep up 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 expectations for
:yourself. If you have an eight month old and
:they've been consistently napping for an hour and a half every single day,
: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 eight month old is
:like, I don't want to take a nap or where they're going to nap for
:ten minutes and then wake up and be really upset. In setting realistic
:expectations for myself, I know I can't sit down and do 8 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 this is something that is massively different
:for everyone. Some people, to keep
:themselves from being distracted, need absolute silence.
:They cannot 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 is
: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 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 about, then I'm going to get completely sucked into eavesdropping on
:them. I'm very nosy. I'm going to want to know all the details. I'm
:not going to get any work done, but 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 to 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 ADHD ers, we have to kind of deconstruct for
:ourselves is this idea of professionalism
:in a workspace. A couple of 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 you 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 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 brought 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 bullshit. 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 explaining who she was going to be working with, she was sitting
: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 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 willing 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, shit. They're like, oh my God, I swore. And it's
:like, 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 have 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 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. We are
:our biggest obstacle. It's our mindset. It's our
:shiny 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 is what goes on in our
:mind and what goes on in our body. One of the best things about being
:an ADHD entrepreneur 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 entrepreneurs, we also have this
:underlying fear that this is the last idea we'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
:have a good idea in it. We are
:idea hoarders. And sure,
:sometimes we'll write an idea down and go back to it,
:but oftentimes 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 that you can get done
:in your business. And this is why one of the things that I recommend 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.
:So if you're cooking multiple things, you can't actively cook all of them.
: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 can 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.
: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
: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 one
:ear and out the other. So I apologize to those of you who've tried in
:the past. I just don't think 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.
:Can be that you need more stimulation. It could be that you need
:to go and give yourself like 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 ten 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 phone, 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.
:Oftentimes 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. I start doing them, and I'm like, I just don't have
:the juice for it. And so I kind of back off. 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 understimulated 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 in 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. When you're
:an employee, you go to work, you have a certain set
:of responsibilities. You 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 fucking
:exhausting. It's a lot more
:mental work than you are used to. But because we've been trained on
:a 40 hours 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, 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
:ADHD ers 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 this 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 it. If you're not drinking water,
:you're going to start getting really murky in your mind. 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.
:If you're wearing wool and it's itchy, why are you wearing wool?
:Stop it. 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 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.
: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
: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 things. 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. It's 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 because you missed day four
:failure. I know I say that and 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 have 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.
:Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. 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
:weeniecast.com strategycall.
: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 together.