The Hidden Struggle of ADHD Business Owners: It's Not What You Think

Katie McManus: 00:00:00

I'm going to tell you the thing that ADHD business owners are really bad at, and it's not what you think. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast.

The number one thing that people with ADHD are the worst at is not time management. It's not overwhelm, it's not getting distracted. It's being bad at stuff. We're really, really bad at being bad at stuff.

We're so bad at being bad at stuff that if we try something once and we're not perfect at it, we will just give it all up. We're also really bad at staying on task, but not as bad as we are at being bad at things.

And I want to talk about, like, where this comes from and how it fucks us up in our business.

So this comes from the fact that when we're interested in something, when we have a new hobby or a hyper focus and we have to try a new skill, we are miraculously, magically, really good at it. And it's not miraculous and it's not magic.

It's the fact that, like, we've been interested in this thing for a while, so we don't realize how much we've been paying attention to the methodologies and the good ways to do it and the bad ways to do it.

By the time we've gone out and gotten all the products that we need to do this hobby, we have subconsciously learned so much about it that once we start doing it, we're just good at it. Our brain has absorbed so much information on this topic and synthesized it into know how before we even consciously even try it.

But unfortunately, when you start a business, there's a lot of stuff that you have to learn how to do, and usually none of it is stuff that you are naturally inclined to want to try. Most business owners don't realize how much writing goes into running a business. And chances are you didn't naturally want to be a copywriter before.

No thanks. You didn't wake up one day and be like, oh, my God, you know what would be so much fun right now is to go write copy for a website. No thanks.

Oh, my God. You know what would be so much fun right now? Is to go write a gazillion LinkedIn posts that are designed to get someone clients. No thanks.

Chances are you did not have that hyper focus. You were busy building wood furniture that no one needed, knitting hats that no one wanted, and painting watercolors. Of fruit.

Those were the things that you were really interested in. Maybe you were also researching World War Two, but nowhere in there where you're like, yeah, I really want to get good at creating content.

That's marketing material. You also probably didn't think, you know, what would be really fun to learn and do right now is sales.

Like, let me just learn how to sell stuff just for funsies. You maybe got into a role where you're in sales, but it probably wasn't your hyper focus doing your accounting. I don't know.

A lot of people were like, receipts. I would love to take some receipts and put them in an excel spreadsheet. Oh, my God. They would just scratch the itch I have right now.

That'd be so great.

If you are this person, I would like to invite you to come hang out with me for a bit because I have a whole box full of receipts that, you know, I'm not going to input. We're just gonna have to play detective on me in a few months with my accountant, who is not a fan of my process of doing my taxes.

She's actually very against it. So we take someone who's naturally really talented at being good at something that they're really interested in.

So the things that they have naturally tried for, like, one time, they're usually pretty good at that one time.

So what happens is they get that dopamine hit, and they get used to that because they're not trying stuff that they don't want to do, because we don't do that. That doesn't do anything for us. If there's something that we don't want to do, we generally are just really good at avoiding it and procrastinating.

But when you start a business, that's not really an option.

Unless you're independently wealthy and you can hire someone to do all of these things for you, you're gonna have to learn how to do them yourself to begin with. And how this goes is you're starting a business and you're thinking, okay, cool, I need clients, so people need to know that I exist. Great.

So I'm gonna post on LinkedIn. You write a post on LinkedIn, and it gets crickets and no comments and, like, one, like, from your mom. And then you feel really.

And you're like, well, that didn't work. And then you give up, right? Because it's not something you wanna do anyway. You didn't get any dopamine from it, and it didn't get you any clients.

The trifecta of this sucks. I quit.

But then you're kind of forced into a corner because you go off and you try a bunch of other stuff that you don't want to do anyway, that you don't know how to do. And it also doesn't work. It also doesn't give you that dopamine hit. It also doesn't get you a client.

It also doesn't give you any engagement from your audience.

And you hold this whole paradigm of stuff that you have to do for your business up to that one time that you tried underwater basket weaving, and you were perfect at it from the very first start, and you think, oh, my God, I just suck at this. There's just no way I can do this, because that's been the story of our lives. We're raised in a world where pass fail is the ultimate test.

We're raised in a world where most of us went to a school where the goal was to do perfectly on the exam, right? And if you didn't do perfectly on the exam, it's not like you got to keep taking the exam until you learned how to do it really well.

It was just like, oh, God.

Well, then you have to do perfectly on the next thing and then perfectly on the next thing and perfectly on the next thing so that you can make up for that bad grade. We've been socialized to hold ourselves to the standard that we have to do perfectly on the first try.

We all know that saying, like, this isn't my first rodeo. That also, like, yeah, sure.

But that also implies that by your second rodeo, you should be perfect at riding bowls, which I'll just, like, drop a fun fact about my family. I have family members in Idaho who are involved in the rodeo scene. It's hard. It's really hard to ride a bull. Anyway, I digress.

So it's not your first rodeo, and you're not going to be good by your second rodeo because you don't want to be in the rodeo. You don't want to ride the bull. You don't want to write copy for social media or for your website or for newsletters or for all these other things.

You don't want to be on camera doing this and doing that and doing the other thing. You don't want to do sales.

So the fact that you've never wanted to do these things means that your brain has never paid attention to how these things were done or badly, which means your brain has had no synthesis time to figure out how you would do it.

Well, you're starting from square one, you're usually, without even realizing it, starting from like, square seven, it feels bad to you because you're usually an overnight success at anything that you try because you want to be good at it, because you've been paying attention to how to do it well all along without even realizing. And that's why it feels gross. That's why it feels like such a massive failure.

Because we've both been indoctrinated into this mindset that, like, you have to be perfect at it the first time you try it. Any school project, any essay, any test, like, it has to be good, and you have to get the good grade immediately.

There's no take backs, there's no try agains. And if you do fail once, you have to do even better the next time.

Added to our whole life experience of being really, really good at something that we try for the first time, because we only try stuff that we're good at and we avoid the stuff that we're bad at, it feels awful.

And when you put yourself in the position of doing something that you're not naturally good at, that you haven't been paying attention to, that you kind of suck at for a really long time, and because you have this expectation of yourself that you should be good at it, you actually put yourself in this massive dopamine deficit. It takes a really long time to get to the point where you're good enough at the thing that you get the dopamine hit from doing it.

And this is why it is so critically important to hire help and guidance for the things that you aren't interested in doing.

Usually by the time someone gets on a strategy call with me to learn about my programs, they're convinced that they suck at sales, that they're terrible at creating content, that they're just garbage at marketing in general and a whole bunch of other stuff. They started this business. They tried it once on their own and it didn't go well.

And maybe they tried it a couple more times and it kept not going well. For those of us with ADHD, we don't realize that's like normal.

That's normal to try something and not be good at it and try it again and not be good at it and try it a few more times and still not be good at it. That's generally how, like neurotypicals, people without ADHD do things. We don't have the patience for it.

And this is why when my clients work with me, I train them on the basic skills of these things in a way that feels aligned to their business, their goals, their personality.

Because folks with ADHD don't need a cookie cutter like one size fits all program that tells them exactly every single, exact step that they should do. Just like everyone else to have a successful business. They can actually put that together pretty well on their own with a little bit of guidance.

But they can only do that when they have the skillset of marketing, when they have the skillset of selling, when they have the skillset of designing offers that people want to buy. That's why when I work with clients in my build your own business group programs, I'm training on those aspects.

I'm not saying this is the exact same way that you need to do it across the board. I'm saying, here's the skillset now, run with it. Make it your own.

Because once we get good at something, we can create so many incredible things from that one skill.

But it's the business owners who hold themselves to the standard that they have to be good on it on their own first, that they have to show themselves that they can figure it out. Those are the ones that actually never make it off the ground.

Because when you don't have any training in something and then you try to figure it out and you have failure when you've never experienced failure like that before, and then you have to keep doing it without understanding what it is that you need to be doing to be successful, and you keep failing. For someone with ADHD, that is just so crushing to our self esteem. And add on to that the fact that you're doing this publicly.

You're marketing, you're posting, you're inviting people to be your client, and you're getting rejected because you don't know how to do that in the right way. Let's activate a little bit of your rejection sensitivity dysphoria as well. And it is soul crushing.

And this is why a lot of ADHD businesses don't make it off the ground, because they don't hire help, because they don't get the right training to give them the pieces of the puzzle that'll help them make the bigger picture real. So there are two things that you can do to get over this. Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out.

But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. So there are two things that you can do to get over this. Number one, if you're starting a business, you need to hire help.

You need to get trained on how to do the things that you've never been interested in doing before because you're not naturally interested in it. Your brain is not naturally going to pay attention to it and absorb all the things and synthesize it into, oh, wow. Here's how we do it right?

And by the way, if you need help with sales or marketing or social media content or creating an offer, figuring out your pricing and all that stuff, that's what I do with my clients. I invite you, nay, I urge you, book a generate income strategy call with me.

Because you continuing to try to figure this out on your own without any guidance is actually just being massively unkind and unfair to yourself. Get help with this, whether with me or with someone else. And if you want to book that call, go to weeniecast.com strategycall.

The second thing you want to do, and we talked about this back in episode 95, you know, you have to get good at being bad at stuff and, you know, we have to build this resilience. We have to build this thicker skin to being mad at stuff.

And that means you have to try stuff that you're going to be bad at if you have no athletic ability. Go golfing. Golfing's hard. I can't hit the ball in golf.

I mean, I can't hit the ball at most places, but I wanted to build a resilience to being bad at something great. You know, for a while this summer, I was playing tennis again. Again? Like, this is classic ADHD. I'm gonna get back into tennis. No, you're not. Liar.

No, I'm still convinced I'm gonna get back into tennis. I've kept my tennis racket in the car all summer. That's probably really bad for the tennis racket now that I think of it.

But I'm not that good at tennis. I played tennis in high school and I wasn't good then. Do things consistently that you can see in real time that you're not very good at.

Missing the ball on tennis court where a bunch of people are watching you. That's a great immediate feedback loop. If you're not artistic, try doing some arthem. Try doing watercolors.

Go get a banana out of your kitchen and try to paint it or draw it. Be bad at it. Accept that you're bad at it. Do it again and again and again and again and then hold it all up and see if you improve.

Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you don't improve at all. And we have to get used to that. We have to understand that the world doesn't end when we're not good at something.

Our worth as a human being doesn't go down when we're not good at something.

I wish I remember which Olympic athlete said this, because this TikTok showed up on my for you page so many times this past summer, and it was, I think, a gymnast who was sharing that right before the Olympics, she had the absolute worst practice, and it was so bad. She went to her trainer and was like, I think I should quit. I don't think I should go to the Olympics. That was so bad.

What if I perform like that at the Olympics? Her coach trainer said, no, this is the rule of thirds.

Whenever you're doing something that really matters to you, where you're pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, where you're really pushing your ability, where you're learning and really always going after that edge, there's always going to be one third of the time where you're average. It's fine. It's not special. It's not terrible. It's fine. There's no pizzazz in it. You're just kind of phoning it in, but it's fine.

There's gonna be another third of the time where you are excellent. You are inspiring. Like, you make babies cry. You're so good at this.

I mean, babies cry really easily, so maybe that's not a good example, but you know what I mean. You make grouchy old men cry at the beauty of how good you're at.

And then there's gonna be one third of the time where you massively suck and you wanna quit. Her coach goes on to tell her, if that third where you suck is too big, if it's more of, like, a half of the time, then you need to dial back.

You need to stop pushing yourself too hard. You need to bring it back to what you're good at and build some more skills, like what I do with my clients.

If you're too perfect all the time, then you're not trying hard enough. You're not pushing yourself to your edge. This goes for sales as well.

I tell my clients this all the time, especially new clients who come to me, and they're so proud that 100% of the people that they speak to about their product and their service say yes to working with them. They're shocked when I'm not impressed when I say, okay, cool. That's a really bad sign. And what do you mean? They love me. They give me their money.

It's like, cool, but how much money? That's a sign that you're not charging enough. That's a sign that you're massively undervaluing the service you provide.

That's a sign that you need to really tackle some money mindset stuff and charge more, because people are seeing you as a deal, and you shouldn't be a deal. You should be an investment. Only a quarter to 50% of the people you speak to should say yes to working with you.

That tells you that your pricing strategy is correct. Any less, you might be charging too much, and any more, you're charging too little.