Nikki & Pete Summary Fun for March 2022
We’ve had a busy month around here at Take Control ADHD. This week, we’re introducing a new episode in to our podcast calendar. We don’t have a great name for it yet, but rest assured a great name is inbound! For now, we’re talking all about lessons we’ve learned in March.
We started with a conversation on managing tasks against a visual representation of our time. It’s not easy, but sometimes stepping back from all the things you think you have to do on a given day and starting instead with the time you have to do things is the best way to get started with smart prioritization. From there, we introduced PACT Goals (Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable). Patrick McGinnis, the originator of FOMO, introduced us to FOBO (Fear of Better Options) where we learned the value of asking the universe for help to get a true gut-check on our feelings. Unblocking and Tackling helped us split our attention between getting ourselves unstuck and doing hard work, and finally, Casey Dixon helped us face facts about burnout!
We finished our March Madness Pledge Drive having met our goals with your help and we’re off to April with a bunch of behind-the-scenes work and the launch of Placeholder — Pete’s new tech and systems podcast starting this week!
This week’s episode is brought to you by TextExpander. Keep your message consistent, save time and be more productive, and be accurate — every time — with TextExpander. Visit TextExpander to sign up today and get 20% off your first year as a supporter of The ADHD Podcast Community. And if you’re looking for how you can get started, just check out our February Workshop with Vic Martinez, trainer on the TextExpander team, for a video walkthrough!
Episode Transcript
Brought to you by The ADHD Podcast Community on Patreon
Pete Wright: This week's episode is brought to you by TextExpander. Keep your message consistent, save time, and be more productive and be accurate every time with TextExpander. We're going to tell you more about that in a bit.
Pete Wright: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and the floating head on the live stream right next to me is Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer: Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete.
Pete Wright: Do you want to hear my name pun joke for you this morning?
Nikki Kinzer: Sure.
Pete Wright: Sicky Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer: Oh, geez.
Pete Wright: Am I the first one that's ever done that to you?
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, yeah, you are. In fact, my family right now wants nothing to do with me.
Pete Wright: I believe it. I believe it. Because you've wasted now all of your COVID tests on flinging drops about the room.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes. Those things are... I don't know.
Pete Wright: Oh, you poor thing.
Nikki Kinzer: I don't know what I think. But yeah, the first one I was like, "I don't think I did it right."
Pete Wright: Well, that's what they say. We're all going to get it, so it doesn't even really matter. You take care of yourself.
Nikki Kinzer: Regardless.
Pete Wright: Yeah, that's right.
Nikki Kinzer: Absolutely.
Pete Wright: That's right. We are going to be doing... This is an unprecedented episode today because we are doing something new. We have decided that as we run through these series of conversations that we're going to have, that we have been having for 12 years, that we're going to start introducing these kinds of summary episodes. We'll see how it goes.
Pete Wright: The whole idea is that we just want to review how the episodes in each series that we do have landed on us now that we've had some time to integrate some of the lessons that we've talked about, change some of the thinking, some of our own thinking, you working with clients on some of these issues on things that we've talked about in the show and do a review hopefully to help cement some of these ideas and concepts for you as well as you are listening to the show.
Pete Wright: We don't really have a branded title for it right now in our show rundown. It's just called Nikki and Pete Summary Fun. That is officially the working title of these episodes. Summary Fun.
Nikki Kinzer: We're so creative.
Pete Wright: We're really nailing it. Just nailing it. We'll see if that evolves over time, but this is our March Summary Fun episode. Before we dig into it, I think we've officially put an end to our March Madness pledge drive.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes.
Pete Wright: How do you feel about it?
Nikki Kinzer: Oh, it was fantastic. I'm so grateful for everyone that has come on board to the community and people who've upgraded. It's so busy in there, and I love it. I love it.
Pete Wright: I know. My cup runneth over. It is an unbelievable... It just makes an unbelievable impact on my life to see that there are people in there who are making changes for the better in their lives as a result of some of the stuff that we're doing. Thank you so much for your vote of confidence on all of the things that we are doing around here. It was a really fun month for us do some new things and see that, in fact, in the month of March, we made our goal. We exceeded our goal, which was to beat 250 members, and we more than did that.
Pete Wright: For those of you who've been thinking about becoming members for a long time and used March as an excuse to finally turn it on, you did it. You helped us all reach our goal. Thanks to all of you for joining and for sticking around. That's the thing that matters even most is that you join and that you stick around and you become a part of the community and engage with others. It's just really, really important to us. Thank you from all of us who work on this community and this show.
Pete Wright: Thank you so, so much. We transition. We transition into a new month. I have to tell you our sponsor, once again, this week. It's one of my favorite tools. It is TextExpander. What can you do with more hours every month, repetitive typing and backspacing your keyboard like just a savage trying to correct little mistakes and searching furiously? You know the feeling. You're searching through your sent mail for answers to questions that you know you've already written to somebody.
Pete Wright: If only you could find the answer to copy and paste it into a new email, it's all taking precious time away from you and your work. With TextExpander, you can take back your so you can focus on what matters most in your day. Here's how it works. All you do is you drop commonly used content into a TextExpander snippet and just give it an abbreviation, couple of characters, create an abbreviation.
Pete Wright: Then as you're writing or filling out your common forms or anywhere you use text, you just type that abbreviation and trigger your snippet and all your words expand anywhere you type. Now, we've been talking about TextExpander for a long time and one of the big questions that has come up several times is this, if I'm using TextExpander, how will I be able to edit my responses so that my messages sound original? I am a beautiful butterfly and my messages should be as unique as I am. Okay, so nobody actually ever said the butterfly thing, but...
Nikki Kinzer: It's cute though. I like it.
Pete Wright: It is cute. It's cute. But the trick is this, and this is the real beauty of TextExpander, you can make it whatever you want. Build a snippet that contains the text that you type over and over again, but have that cursor positioned exactly where want to start typing once you expand it. You can add your custom message to every snippet, form field, email, document, whatever you use for text. Now, if you're a regular listener, you know me. You know that I have a vested interest in how I use the limited resource of time that I have.
Pete Wright: When I find a tool that helps me get over the hump of maintaining focus and attention that I live with every single day, I'll take it. One of the features of TextExpander is their personal statistics dashboard. You can see how many snippets you've expanded and in using snippets, how much time you have saved rather than retyping all the texts that you used from scratch. In the last 30 days, I've saved 42 hours and nine minutes.
Nikki Kinzer: Wow! That's a lot of time.
Pete Wright: 42 hours in a month. That's like a work week of writing.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, a whole day.
Pete Wright: A whole day. Yeah, it's a work week.
Nikki Kinzer: It's a work week.
Pete Wright: It took me a lot of time. I mean, I've been using TextExpander since it was first released well over a decade ago. It takes a lot of time to build a library like that. Certainly to build a library that I count on the way I count on it takes years. Don't wait. You've been thinking about it. It's time to jump in and support yourself with an investment in TextExpander today. TextExpander is available on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad. And for listeners of The ADHD Podcast, you can get 20% off your first year of service.
Pete Wright: At that rate, it's a couple of bucks a month for the individual plan. Little bit more for a team plan if you want to get into it, it's an amazing service. Worth every single penny. We have this link from TextExpander, but I got some feedback that it's kind of long for people to remember, so I built a shortcut. All you have to do is visit takecontroladhd.com/textexpander, T-E-X-T-E-X-P-A-N-D-E-R, and you'll be whisked over to the page on their site where you can get started. And again, if you start now, you'll save 20% off your subscription.
Pete Wright: The way we work is changing rapidly. Make work work the way your brain works by saying more in less time with less effort using TextExpander. Our great thanks to TextExpander, the whole team over there for sponsoring The ADHD podcast. Oh, and if you want our review, if you want to jump into our deep dive that we did with Vic Martinez from the TextExpander team for our February workshop, that is a public available workshop. I'll put the link to the video in the show notes. Thanks, TextExpander. All right, Nikki, here we go.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes.
Pete Wright: Lessons learned. Now, as a new and unprecedented thing, I thought that we would just walk through some of the episodes that we talked about in the last month and see what stuck. The episodes that we talked about in the last month, we talked first about our managing time not systems review. That was a little walkthrough of project management systems. We did PACT goals. We introduced PACT goals. We talked about FOBO, fear of better options.
Nikki Kinzer: FOBO.
Pete Wright: We did our football episode, unblocking and tackling, the worst football episode ever, and we just wrapped our Breaking Free of Burnout with Casey Dixon. That's what we did in the last month. The act of writing up these episodes made me so happy, because I realized every single one of them I have been thinking about in some degree over the last month. To start with our managed time not systems episode, the central theme there is just assessing what...
Pete Wright: We know what we want to do, and we know how much time we have, but many of us with ADHD don't align those two things together. Don't align the work that we have to do with the time that we have to do it. I went through a semi-exhaustive review of GTD and the Eisenhower Matrix and Kanban and Scrum and Agile Results and all of those things to just talk about how we can better align the work we do, the projects we have, the tasks we need to get done with the time we have to do it. What stuck for you?
Nikki Kinzer: I think more than anything, it's more reason to practice these different systems or to review them and see what pieces really resonate with you and to figure out what works best for you and be okay with changing things up. That it doesn't have to be exactly the way GTD wrote it. It doesn't have to be exactly how Eisenhower made his matrix. You can tweak that. You can make it your own. If you get bored, it's okay to look around.
Nikki Kinzer: But I think we also talked about the time that that can take and really making sure that you're setting everything up again. Because if we do too many things at once, that can cause chaos in its own right. I think what also stuck with me is when you were talking about prioritizing the day without the dates, but just really looking at what needs to be done today under priorities and not looking at deadlines and focus more on just, this is the important urgent task.
Nikki Kinzer: So many times when we put a deadline, it's not a real deadline anyway, so that it's making us feel bad because we didn't get it done today, when really we don't have to get it done today. Practice. I mean, I think it's about practicing and prioritizing and figuring out what works best for you.
Pete Wright: I think so too. For me, the transformation over the last I would say number of years has been around letting go of the rigor of following a system, someone else's system. GTD, David Allen, he does this system. 43 folders. There are things out of David Allen's system that work and a lot of stuff that doesn't work for me. That started to sort of break down this idea for me that you have to do all of a recommended system or a book or something like that, you have to do all of it to really make it work.
Pete Wright: That's just objectively not true. For me, the idea of building bespoke systems, using as much of an expert system as works for you and your life and your work and your worldview, and then dabbling with other systems too to create something that is really unique and really works for the way you live your life is the most important thing for me, right? You are not an algorithm, right? You are an organic living being, and you can create the thing that helps your brain interact with the world in a special way. You are a beautiful butterfly.
Nikki Kinzer: You are a beautiful butterfly.
Pete Wright: I got to wing it on that hard. Yes. I think that's really important. I personally struggled with that for a lot of years, and I think that transition for me was like realizing that the system was breaking down when I was doing it as whatever expert said I should do it. It's breaking down because not all of it worked for me. The stuff that was working was great. I could do a core dump all the live long day, but actually getting stuff done was hard until I started embracing the multi-system lifestyle and creating the Pete OS.
Nikki Kinzer: That's right.
Pete Wright: That really worked. We transitioned from managing time, doing the repositioning of your work box that is free of dates, but really leaning in on priorities, building this bespoke system. We transitioned from that into PACT goals. This came off of something that you were introduced to through part of your coaching, introducing PACT goals. It was a goal setting technique that was better than SMART goals for us. A PACT goal, it's a goal setting technique. It stands for purposeful, actionable, continuous, and trackable.
Pete Wright: One of the things we loved about PACT goals is that compared to other goal setting methods, PACT goals focuses on output. For me, this aligns with my objective to ship. Every day I want to ship something. I want to introduce and create something into the world that I didn't have yesterday and refining some of my daily objectives. The way I talk about projects that I'm working on in terms of PACT goals has been...
Pete Wright: It turns out has been really eyeopening for me, not the least of which around this idea that the way I was talking about goals before were not aligned specifically in the area of purposeful. I can create actionable, continuous, and trackable things all the live long day, but often until we started talking about it this way, I didn't have a real sense of why I was doing what I was doing. That was the eyeopening thing for me.
Nikki Kinzer: I agree, for me too, especially when I first heard about it and I'm thinking, purpose, well, how did that get taken out of SMART goals? I mean, we want to be specific, sure, but there isn't anything about purpose. Why are we doing the thing that we want to do? That definitely I think was something that resonated a lot with me, but also continuous. I think that as a coach especially, I want everybody to be in that practice mode.
Nikki Kinzer: Don't be tied to anyone result because we don't know what it's going to be until you practice and figure out what works. We set goals and it's okay to change your mind. We won't know that until we're practicing and seeing if it's something that still serves its purpose. I think having it be something that's more of a work in progress, especially when we're looking at habits, because a lot of times people will put goals that are habits and habits don't end. They don't have a beginning and an end.
Nikki Kinzer: They're always constantly going. I think having that continuous piece was really big for m. as you were talking and I was rereading what you of these things meant, trackable is interesting to me because I have kind of a love-hate relationship with tracking. Because sometimes I will track specific habits, and then I feel bad if I'm not doing them, and then I'll stop tracking. And then sometimes I'll say, "Okay, different mindset. I'm just going to track when I do them," and then I see some marks and that's fun.
Nikki Kinzer: But what's interesting to me about trackable that kind of just dawned on me is it's not just about tracking, it's remembering.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer: It's just remembering to do it. I think that when I don't have a tracking system, I am less likely to remember to do it.
Pete Wright: Yeah, I think so too. It's as much is it something that's definable so that you can track it like in a system or on paper with check boxes, whatever, but can you also track it internally in time and space? If I were to ask myself, what am I working on right now? Can I deliver that list? Because how often are you asked that question? Well, how often you're asked that question?
Pete Wright: Maybe not very often, but if somebody were to ask me that question, which I don't have to answer very often, I almost guarantee I could not tell you all the things I'm working on in a clear and concise list without having some attention to how I track these things, like how I actually track the stuff that is on my list at any given time.
Nikki Kinzer: Well, and I'm just even think about like when I track when do you take your vitamins? Take your vitamins every day. Well, the time that I would not be taking my vitamins is when they're either not in front of me, or I didn't look at the tracker. It's all memory. It's like I just forget to take them. It's not that it's hard to take vitamins. It's just you forget. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting, but I love PACT goals and it's definitely something that I will continue doing for myself and talking to my clients about.
Pete Wright: Well, that takes us from PACT to FOBO. We had back to back acronym weeks. FOBO, it's been around for a little bit, but it was new. It's an evolution of FOMO that was coined by the same guy, Patrick McGinnis. The central theme is this. FOBO is a fear that there's always something better for you out there that holds you back from making the most important decisions of today. It foils any effort you might make toward commitment, keeps you looking inward at yourself.
Pete Wright: We walked away from it feeling that it's naturally sort of a selfish act FOBO that can make you a lousy friend or partner. And also, let's not forget, it could fill you with self-loading, as you struggle to make decisions. The thing that stuck for me was this idea of asking the universe. It was an evolution of something I had talked about already, which was the flip the coin bit. I'm not a big guy on like it's written in stars. It's the fates.
Pete Wright: Asking universe is a little bit of a misnomer for me, because my feeling is saying that I'm going to ask the universe actually is merely a trigger for me internally to recognize what my choice is all along.
Nikki Kinzer: Explain that.
Pete Wright: I'm going to flip a coin on this and I'll call heads, it's choice. Tails, it's choice B. If it's choice B and it's tails, then I'll know immediately if I have to live with this, then it's the wrong choice, right? I'll have a gut sense of what's right or wrong once I put myself in a place to actually envision living with whatever choice it is going forward.
Pete Wright: You talked about it last night in Coaching with Nikki, which I thought was a really great way to frame it, which was I think taking this even further, which was, check me when I start lying, put yourself in a position where you imagine living with it for a week.
Nikki Kinzer: 24 hours.
Pete Wright: 24 hours.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Pete Wright: Just go forward 24 hours. Live your day as if you'd made that decision and just see if you can internalize it. Am I saying that right?
Nikki Kinzer: Yes. Yes.
Pete Wright: That's different than mine because mine is just that gut, like immediate. I flipped a and I feel it, but yours is like let's really make a 24 hour sort of meditation out of it. Let's go through the day.
Nikki Kinzer: I just have to say where that came... Where that came from was a client of mine and we were just talking about it this week. It's also tied into your gut, because what was saying is she was choosing between two different therapists. What she did is she took the advice of one of her former therapists about let's make this decision like you've made it and live with it for 24 hours. But one of the things that she was doing is she was checking her gut on it.
Nikki Kinzer: Do I feel like I am missing something if I don't choose this other therapist? What would that experience be like? She made that decision by saying or by thinking that she feels like who she chose, she would not have any regrets.
Pete Wright: Right.
Nikki Kinzer: And that was all off of gut instinct. It's kind of this combination of both, trusting yourself, trusting your gut, but then also like living it, right, and really practicing it and seeing if you can let it go
Pete Wright: I started thinking about out what this helps us address is the emotional side of making a decision, because that's often where we with ADHD get stuck, right? The FOBO is the fear part. It's not the data part. If you really go back and look at features, if you're trying to buy a car and you have three cars next to one another, you can create a spreadsheet that highlights the most important feature, mileage and horsepower and whatever it is that's important to you.
Pete Wright: You can make all the choices around color and fabric interior and whatever you want for a car. All the observable traits of a car, you can do that, but you can't quite land on... It's hard to spreadsheet emotional response, right?
Nikki Kinzer: Right.
Pete Wright: It's hard to spreadsheet that, and that's what we're talking about here. That is I think the FOBO piece. I think in terms of technology right now, I think about it a lot in terms of computers. There are just radical changes in personal computing going on right now. It's hard to look at the market and say, "Okay, should I buy now? Should I wait a year because things are changing rapidly? I know the future of cars is moving toward more electric.
Pete Wright: Should I buy a combustion engine car right now, or should I wait just a little bit longer and see if the prices change for an electric car?" Those things are hard to get over right now. I think what we're talking about here, FOBO, and asking the universe might help push you over the edge.
Nikki Kinzer: Absolutely.
Pete Wright: Recognizing choices are hard.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes.
Pete Wright: Then we went to our worst football episode ever, unblocking and tackling. The central theme, this was a case...
Nikki Kinzer: Do we block or unblock.
Pete Wright: Right, exactly. Yeah. I guess we'll never know.
Nikki Kinzer: We'll never know/
Pete Wright: The case was that you've been working with a client struggling to get unstuck behind some big challenging tasks. When one task is stacked behind enough task and another task, it makes it hard to prioritize. This hearkens back to our clogging task discussions that we've had over the years.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes.
Pete Wright: I've been thinking about it a lot. Maybe it's because we found unblocking and tackling as kind of a metaphor for splitting your efforts toward hard tasks behind two sessions, right This idea of separating an unblocking session from a tackling work session. The metaphor aligns with the practical act of planning for me very well. It's been hard to let this one go too.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad, because one of the things that I loved about this is that this came from a client. When things come from clients that are like this, where they have kind of figured out... He took the time to really reflect like, "What's going on here?" Or he was thinking about what was going on in our conversations, but then taking that further outside of just the conversation. It's a great reminder of the power of reflection to do that by yourself and to be able to...
Nikki Kinzer: Well, as a coach, what was so wonderful for me was to witness how much I'm learning from him. And that there is just no right way or wrong way to approach things and things can change and look different depending on what it is that you're avoiding or what you're trying to get unstuck around. For me as a coach, that was really awesome to witness and looking at what was working here and not playing it down. Because it's so easy to say, "Well, it wasn't enough.
Nikki Kinzer: It wasn't enough. That first session wasn't enough. I should have done more," and that's not what was happening. He was really saying, "Wait a minute, I did unblock something. That was a big deal." One of the lessons, I think, that I have continued to talk to this particular client about and a lot of ADHD struggle with is that all or nothing. It doesn't have to be all done. The progress being made doesn't have to be big. It can be just opening up the computer.
Nikki Kinzer: It can be figuring out what the emotional pieces that's pulling you back and reflect on that, and then have the next day saying, "Hey, I can tackle this now." It goes into what Casey was saying, I'm the driver of this bus. I can control this.
Pete Wright: Right.
Nikki Kinzer: That meant a lot to me. That whole thing was a big deal to me.
Pete Wright: Well, and I think it ties back to our PACT goals discussion really nicely too, which is this idea of continuity, right? Making something continuous. This unblocking and tackling sessions work I think at their best for me when I make them a practice, when I make them something that I'm doing regularly. It's not just, I'm going to do this once and just roll the dice with it. And oops, didn't work. I guess I failed, so moving on to something else. No.
Pete Wright: When it really works is when you say, "Okay, every Tuesday, I'm going to really go through the work that I'm doing and evaluate for me, what is my clogging task? What do I need to tackle to make room for other things to flow more easily?And then another time I'm going to do the work," and making a habit out of that, something that you can track I think makes it more useful. Not at all discounting the fact that it's hard to do with ADHD. How easily I get stuck in my own systems because I will...
Pete Wright: I mean, this is just my moth to flame thing. I can totally see how I get in an unblocking session, either hyper focusing on the work or hyper focusing on the system I'm using to track the work or whatever. I just know that, Nikki, like you just said, the act of making it a practice and the act of giving yourself the grace to say, "I did one little thing, even if I got lost in a bunch of other even smaller things."
Nikki Kinzer: Right, right.
Pete Wright: "It's okay. I did okay. I'm moving the ball down the field," which I think is something you can say in sports.
Nikki Kinzer: It is. Good job.
Pete Wright: Finally, breaking free of burnout. Casey Dixon, she's just delightful. There was a lot of us this month. It was just us for a lot of stuff. Casey was great to have back on the show. She was fantastic. The central theme of our conversation was around burnout, but not just, "Oh my gosh, I'm so burned out at work." For all the feelings that burnout conjures for you, there are so many feelings you just might have experienced yourself, completely unaware that those feelings too are symptoms of burnout. The whole premise here is that burnout's a complex animal.
Nikki Kinzer: It sure is.
Pete Wright: Let's learn a little bit about ourselves to see how we are handling it at any given time. The thing that stuck for me and that continuously sticks for me around burnout is that burnout doesn't just happen at work. I feel like I can be burned out just living. I can be burned out with just the world gestures broadly.
Nikki Kinzer: Dinner. I'm burnt out by having to make dinner every day.
Pete Wright: So burnt out at mealtime. Totally.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes.
Pete Wright: The way these feelings and this experience trickles into all these other areas of my life, that's the insidious nature of burnout for me and that's the thing that stuck. It takes work and practice to learn how to give yourself a true recharging break that is bespoke to you and your brain and your heart and your life. And that stuck for me. How about you?
Nikki Kinzer: Yes. I loved the explanation of the 5Ds that she talked about, and the one that she talked about that really resonated with me that I'd never heard of was the disappoint. It was cool because in our Coaching with Nikki last night, we had a listener who actually practiced disappointing someone this week. I just think that that is awesome that people are listening and they're saying, "Hey, I can do this because this is setting a boundary around my own self-care, what I need." You're the driver of the bus, right?
Nikki Kinzer: That is something that I definitely want to practice. It sounds weird, like, "I want to practice disappointing you this week, Pete." That sounds strange, but what it is it's really just about you knowing what your limits are and knowing that it's probably better to disappoint Pete this week than to disappoint him in a month when I haven't been able to do what he needed me to do.
Nikki Kinzer: And now it's late and I haven't talked to him and I've avoided him and all of the things that can happen when you're in the shame spiral, right, of taking on too much. Time estimation is a fluke when it comes to ADHD. It's so hard to know how long things are going to take. When you say yes, you probably really think you can do it. You're not intentionally trying to deceive anyone. I think the disappointment was just really taking a step back and saying, "Okay, what is being asked? And is it reasonable?"
Nikki Kinzer: It goes back to your values too. Is it something that I need to do right now? Is it something that when I say yes to this, I'm saying no to something else? Can it look differently than what they need right now? In this particular situation, do I go and see the person right now, or do I see them in the morning? It worked out better for her to see them in the morning. It's a form of self-care.
Pete Wright: Well, it is.
Nikki Kinzer: That's what I love about it.
Pete Wright: It's such an extension of our sort of gated boundaries conversations that we've had, right? We've been talking all along about building a practice of saying no or having a waiting period before you say yes to new stuff when people lob stuff at you, right? Just say, "Hold on. Let me think clearly about what I am capable of doing, if I'm capable of doing it." That's step one. But none of that takes into account the stuff you already said yes to that you're actually not going to be able to do.
Pete Wright: And that's what I like about this so much is that this says, "Okay, I'm going to take ownership of what I agreed to and I'm not going to be able to do at all. I now recognize that circumstances have changed for any number of reasons and I'm not going to be able to do this thing. I'm going to disappoint whoever is the stakeholder here, whether it's my mother or my wife, or my kids, or my business partners, or my boss, or my employees, I'm going to disappoint them on terms that are mine.
Pete Wright: I know it's going to be hard, but it will be less hard if I disappoint them on terms that are theirs, that are unmet expectations with no communication. I mean, it's weird to say, "I love disappointing people now with Casey. Oh, it's so great," but it really is. It's really a conversation around ownership of your own boundaries and which side of agreement that happens.
Pete Wright: Does it happen before the agreement when you say, "No, you can't put that on my task list," or does it happen after the agreement where you say, "I'm sorry, things changed and I can't be the person to do that anymore."
Nikki Kinzer: Well, and I think that that was the key from Casey's interview is that something probably has to change if you're feeling this type of burnout. She does talk about the separation between, is it burnout or ADHD and how do they work together or how they're separate. I definitely recommend if you haven't listened to this episode to listen to her speak about that. Something has to change.
Nikki Kinzer: Whether it's that delegation, that delay, that deleting, diminish, breaking things down smaller, those things are important because something has to change. Otherwise, you're going to stay in this burnout phase and that's a terrible place to be.
Pete Wright: It is. I just want to highlight, that final disappointment is the last on the list of things of, D's for a reason. It's the one we love because it's the new one.
Nikki Kinzer: It's the new one. It's the one that she brought to us. Yeah.
Pete Wright: Once you used all the other D's, then you can really face the final D. And that's really important because we know how hard it is to live with yourself through disappointment, right? We talked extensively about RSD last night in Coaching with Nikki. We talk about it all the time as a result of living with the shame that goes with letting people down, because we are generally optimistic people, right? We like being yes people.
Pete Wright: We like being able to say that, "Yeah, we can do it all. We have the ability and the energy and the creativity to do everything that we need to do." By the time we've said yes to something, it is a killer to live with yourself through disappointing other people. I totally get it. That is as much a practice of disappointing others as just the act of being able to do it on your terms in the first place. We know how hard it is to live with that shame. Absolutely.
Nikki Kinzer: There you go. We did it. We went through all of the shows this month. Fantastic.
Pete Wright: Well, I liked this. I like being able to tie these together. It helps me. I hope it helps you listening that at some point you're able to think, okay. Maybe you find that you listened to one of these summary episodes, the Summary Fun episodes, and you think, "Okay, I got a shortcut. Maybe I don't have to listen to all five of the other episodes. But oh dear, you've said something that's triggering. I need to go hear the source of that material. I need to go listen to Casey's episode." Maybe we've given you a shortcut or an index. That's what this is, is a monthly index, summary fun index episode.
Nikki Kinzer: Let us know what you think.
Pete Wright: Yeah, let us know what you think. I hope this is useful. Thank you as always for downloading and listening to this show. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute, you can jump into the show talk channel. You contribute to the conversation over there in our Discord server. We're going to be in the show talk channel in the Discord server, and that's where we live online. Jump in there and join us. You can do that by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better.
Pete Wright: Special thanks to TextExpander for supporting The ADHD Podcast this week. Once again, head over to takecontroladhd.com/textexpander to learn more and save that 20% on your first year of service. Thank you all for your time and your attention. On behalf of Sicky Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
