Shaping the ADHD Career with Shell Mendelson
Shell Mendelson has built her 35-year career in education and career counseling. There are a lot of career counselors, though. What makes Shell indispensable for us today is that she has ADHD herself and has spent that career helping others make career choices that reflect joy and passion for their unique ADHD brains.
This week on the show, Shell brings us new insights into jobs and the ADHD brain. We talk about finding the right match, how to target those deal breakers we've been thinking so hard about the last few weeks, and how to approach discussing ADHD with hiring managers. We review what it takes to find a career coach that can help you with your unique career direction and how to work with a career coach to get the most out of the relationship.
One other thing about Shell that is germane to this conversation: she was mentored by Richard Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute?: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success She's custodian of the methodology now and has taken it in her own wonderful direction to help the neurodiverse population. Even so, we're intrigued by just how well the Parachute model aligns to our thinking around ADHD and encourage you to check out the book. It's a classic. And Shell has an updated working for ADHD adults which should be available in the next two months. Keep an eye out!
Learn more about Shell right here, and make sure to connect on LinkedIn if you're on the hunt and need a coach!
Other Links
-
Pete Wright:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory fm. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer. Oh, look, it's Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, hello.
Pete Wright:
Hi, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Look, it's Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Hi. It's good to see you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hi, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Happy day.
Nikki Kinzer:
Happy day.
Pete Wright:
We're continuing our job series, and it's so delightful, and I have to tell you, and I can say this because our guest is here but muted and can't respond, Melissa posted this morning in our back channel that our guest today had listened to one of our previous job entries, and my first response was, "Oh crap, we must have done something wrong. I hope-"
Nikki Kinzer:
And she's canceling.
Pete Wright:
Yes, she's canceling.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, what I thought too.
Pete Wright:
That's what I thought. She was like, "I listened to it, and you guys are the worst. I'm done."
Nikki Kinzer:
That is so funny because that's exactly what I saw because I just saw the, from Melissa, and then I saw Shell's name and I'm like, "Oh, no, she's canceling."
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I don't even want to look. She's heard us.
Nikki Kinzer:
She doesn't want to be a part of it anymore.
Pete Wright:
Oh, we're so good at this.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right?
Pete Wright:
The RSV is like wow, off the charts. Okay, well, anyway, she didn't cancel. In fact, she's so nice. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Before we jump into it, you know the drill, head over to takecontroladhd.com. You can get to know us a little bit better, listen to the show there on the website or subscribe wherever you find podcasts are served. You can join us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD, and y'all, our Patreon community is the best.
Now, of course, you can get into the open public Discord server by just visiting takecontroladhd.com/discord, but that will allow you to sign in to the public channel, and the general chat is really great too. There's some other public channels we put in there, but to really get to know what this community is all about, visit patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. You're going to sign in there. You're going to start your program for a couple bucks a month, and you will suddenly get access to the magic behind the scenes, pull back the velvet curtain. The world is behind Patreon. You get early access to the podcast, you get members only access to the podcast. All the podcast episodes have extra content in them that is just for members only, a whole separate version of the show, and I should say, I know there are a lot of members who signed up and don't subscribe to their Patreon only podcast. Please message me or Melissa and we will help you figure out how to use that Patreon version of the podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
Don't message Nikki.
Pete Wright:
No. I didn't want to call you out, Nik, but-
Nikki Kinzer:
No, it's okay. I'm totally admitting to it. Don't message me because I'll just-
Pete Wright:
Don't message Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'll just forward it over to Pete and Melissa.
Pete Wright:
Absolutely, absolutely. Every now and again there's a public service reminder that you need to be there, but you could also access the live stream as we record. You could be in the chat room chatting along with us, asking direct questions to our guests. It's a really, really great experience, and that plus all the other stuff that we do at the different tiers. I mean, we're trying to do so much to continue to build this community and just make it grow into an even better place every day. So, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more. Thank you so much to all of our supporting members of the show. Okay, now we need to talk about jobs. My goodness, jobs.
Shell Mendelson has built her 35-year career in education and career counseling. There are a lot of career counselors though. What makes Shell indispensable for us today is that she has ADHD herself and has spent that career helping others make career choices that reflect joy and passion for their unique ADHD brains. Shell, welcome to The ADHD Podcast.
Shell Mendelson:
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and have this conversation. I already had so much fun talking to you before, so this is going to get better.
Nikki Kinzer:
[inaudible 00:04:01].
Shell Mendelson:
It'll just get better. Okay.
Pete Wright:
Well, but before we get to, I would love to get to our airing of grievances to the point where you tell us everything we thought we might have done wrong in the last couple of shows. But really, I want to hear a little bit about you because I feel like when I think about career coaches, I think about the big, executive career counseling kind of things. I don't have a deep understanding of what the relationship with a career coach looks like. I'm curious how you found yourself in this role some 35 years ago, and especially how you found yourself really helping to focus on neurodiverse brains.
Shell Mendelson:
Well, just to start out, thank you so much for that amazing intro. I started out as a completely lost person in my twenties who I had... I got my teaching credential. It was back when my mentor, Richard Bolles, who wrote what Color Is Your Parachute? and you'll hear me talk about that quite a bit.
Pete Wright:
Classic.
Shell Mendelson:
I was trained by him, he was my mentor.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Shell Mendelson:
And he says, "Oh, Shell, you were around when dinosaurs roam the earth." So, I've been around for a while.
Pete Wright:
I guess how nice.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right? Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
I don't know. Yeah, I guess it's nice and it's not nice. I always kind of have these mixed feelings whenever he said that. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2017, and I miss him dearly, and the whole legacy, as you will, of parachute, I feel like I'm helping to keep that going, and that is my mission because it is a thing that my ADHD brain responded to in terms of career counseling and coaching. But just to take you back a little bit before that, I started out getting my master's in vocational rehabilitation counseling, and I didn't even know what that was. I just knew I wanted to be in counseling and I wanted to be in a program with very few people, and I wanted to be in a program where counselors actually got jobs afterwards, and that was one of the few counseling jobs that did.
But I learned along the way that it was working with, it was career focused, helping people with disabilities who were in the workers' comp industry, which is the industry I went into, they could no longer continue in those jobs so we had to find a way to get them back into the market with their disabilities. So, you kind of came into this negative environment and they kind of entered the space with... A lot of them really liked their jobs, and they felt it was like a grieving period they were going through, and because-
Pete Wright:
That's like part of their identity gets ripped away because of circumstances.
Shell Mendelson:
It was ripped away.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. I had a lot of compassion for that, but at the same time, my mandate in this system was to help them discover what the next steps were and to help get them into something else. So, I worked with a lot of people with different disabilities, including ADHD, but at the time, I was far from being diagnosed, far from it. But I knew that at some point after 10 years of working in this field, I was just losing it. The system was getting to me. It was very adversarial. I was getting bored, and I was always one of these people, and I think that's part of my ADHD brain wiring, who started looking at things ahead of time, started thinking about what can I do next, right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
That's when I found the training by Richard Bolles. I immediately stepped into that and it changed my life, my whole identity with what I did. So, I stayed in the same field, and that's the thing I want to really mention is that I was always career focused throughout my career in voc rehab and I just continued on with that, and the general field I've always been in is education. The thing that I enjoy doing the most is educating people on some level and that takes many different forms, and we can talk about that, but what people don't understand is when they think about education very often is being a teacher in a public school in a certain kind of setting.
Well, I did that when I got my teaching credential and I hated it. I hated teaching high school kids, I hated being in the public school system, being limited, and I knew that I wanted to do something that was still using those skills but just not in that setting. That's one of the things we can talk about a little bit is about thinking about how you use your skills that you really love to use and find ways to do that in different formats. Okay? So, when I got my training, after I got my training with Bolles, I was still doing a little bit of voc rehab but was easing out of it. Then I had my son and everything changed. So, you know how it is.
Pete Wright:
It happens.
Shell Mendelson:
You have a baby, anyway.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, life changes. Can you give us a summary of what that book is about and that whole mythology around What Color Is Your Parachute?
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah, what it is, is the thing that I... Okay, let me step back and say that he is the OG, if you will, of career counseling. He is the guy who everybody recognizes as being the grandfather of career counseling. So, I used to go to these conferences and he would be always be the keynote speaker, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
But there would always be some other people in the field who would come up and do these assessments versus parachute model, taking all the assessments where you check blah, blah, blah, and I always knew that I hated that. I hated that.
Nikki Kinzer:
The personality ones, is that what you're talking about?
Shell Mendelson:
All that, that whole, and a lot of career people do that. They still use a lot of assessments. It's not always the only thing they use. They always, hopefully, do the follow-up to that. But the thing for me about assessments was it never was really asking you personally what was important to you, and often it didn't give you enough choices, and it always compared you with other people who were answering in a similar way, but did not enforce the idea of you taking a deeper dive and really looking into what is it that I want. Okay?
Nikki Kinzer:
And I always felt like they were tricking me. There was always a trick to it. Like, here is something, but it's worded a little bit differently, so I have to now think about how did I say, what was my response to the other phrase.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I get what you're saying.
Pete Wright:
Well, and because to me it's always been the game of when I take those assessments, is it trying to fit me to the job or the job to me, and I always want to fit the job to me. I want the agency in that equation.
Shell Mendelson:
Thank you. Exactly.
Pete Wright:
No assessment distributed by an employer does that.
Shell Mendelson:
No.
Pete Wright:
They just don't care, right?
Shell Mendelson:
Right, no.
Pete Wright:
They don't care about me having that agency.
Shell Mendelson:
No. I mean, we could talk a little bit about that as well but however. So, my attraction to parachute when I finally went through it twice myself and it all pointed to what I was doing, so it was very confirming for me. It was like two times, here we go, I guess I'm supposed to be doing this, right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Shell Mendelson:
And what it does is it does what our brains like to do which is to break things down and to ask very specific questions, not ask questions, but get you to identify the things that are important to you.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Shell Mendelson:
So, it's kind of the opposite of taking those assessments where you just check something. It's like what is it that you are attracted to, what is it that you are energized by, what are the things that really are meaningful and have value to you, and if you take away all the scary parts about if I answer this way, does that mean I'm not going to get a job that pays me enough money. That's always the big question that people have, and I have to kind of guide them past that so they can start really exploring what's out there, instead of cutting themselves off at the knees which is what happens. That's called what Bolles calls a safekeeping self. We have to talk about that a lot.
Nikki Kinzer:
Safekeeping self.
Shell Mendelson:
The safekeeping self, and that can be used in almost anything, anytime you're making a decision. That's that part of you, that's that little good angel, bad angel, it's the bad angel, right? It's the one that's going, "Ah, but what about this? And I can't do this, I won't do this, I shouldn't do this," kind of thing.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm. Interesting.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's so interesting because I have a couple of clients, one in particular that I'm thinking of who won't necessarily even apply or send the resume because they have already immediately ruled themselves out of the position.
Shell Mendelson:
That's a great, perfect example.
Pete Wright:
I hear that. You said it's the bad angel, and that implies that there's a good angel, and I imagine there're a lot of people listening to this who would say, "I don't think I've ever met my good angel. I didn't know there was one."
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, her name is Shell Mendelson.
Shell Mendelson:
Aw.
Pete Wright:
Aw.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, you have met her today.
Pete Wright:
Aw.
Shell Mendelson:
Aw.
Pete Wright:
But you know what I mean. Those negative voices and that negative self-talk can be so loud that you can forget that there's another voice.
Shell Mendelson:
You can forget, and this is what I work... When I'm working with people, I work in a very small group of four to six people at a time, I can't do it, my brain won't do any more than that, and this comes up throughout the whole process. So, this is where the testing sort of takes that out of it, or the assessments take that part out of it because you're just saying check, check, but still you're wondering what's going to come out of this, right? But if you're really going to get down into the weeds about who are you and what am I energized by, what am I really attracted to, what are the things that are going to sustain me over the long haul, what are those elements that I can bring into my work in some way. If I don't allow myself to just breeze somehow pass that safekeeping self, you're going to get the true answers. It won't be authentic.
I tell people right off the bat, you are going to be battling with that and I'm going to be helping you with that and reminding you at every step of the way to ask yourself if safekeeping self is entering the room, as I say. Is it entering the room now? And it does, every time you ask answer questions in any aspect of what we do. So, kind of going back to what you asked about how does parachute differ, it does break things down into all the different elements that are so important to us when we're making these huge decisions, and they're the things that very few people, I could probably, a mil or whatever percentage of micro percentage of people on the planet actually take those steps and do that kind of work.
Pete Wright:
But I'm really curious what some of those things are, particularly that ADHD folks tend not to think about, like the things that make it really difficult for adults with ADHD to find not just a job, but a job that matches their identity that they only realize they didn't think about X, Y, Z until after they got the job and were working in it for a while. What are the things that they naturally miss?
Shell Mendelson:
Well, I'll go through all the, I can give you all the little pieces that we cover, and the first one you talked about in that little intro to the jobs section that I listened to. You said skills, our skills. So, identifying the skills and the verb skills, the -ing ones, like planning, leading.
Pete Wright:
Organizing.
Shell Mendelson:
Coordinating, organizing, researching, all those things we all have a natural inclination to do and don't necessarily need training in. It's just part of who we are. But very often people go into jobs because they think that's the right thing to do. It's one that's going to make them the most... For whatever reason, people take jobs without considering what skills they truly enjoy using, and then with ADHD, they start realizing, they don't realize it all the time, but they realize something's off because they're not using those skills.
And so, part of the process I do is to break it down into, and I'll continue on real quick and just say it real fast.
Pete Wright:
Please, please.
Shell Mendelson:
Skills, the people you want to work for and serve, the working conditions, which is a huge piece of it, what I call special knowledges, the kinds of things you learned over the years that you really loved learning, and the industries you're attracted to, your base salary range that you need to just live like a human being, and the rewards and benefits that you want that are the most important to you in your work, and I can go on to a little bit of that. Then the places to live, we have a section called places to live, which is more of a geographic. Geographically, what's going to support you to do all this? And if you have a partner, you do that exercise with a partner. It's a whole exercise.
It doesn't mean you have to move. It's just knowledge, right? It's knowing, knowledge. And then the last part is life purpose, and you've heard that term many times, but in the context of what we're doing, it's always that your biggest purpose is like your umbrella thing. It's like the thing that you're really here to do overall, but your work always, whatever work you do, if it's not aligned with that purpose, it's a mismatch. It's always going to be a mismatch. So, knowing what that is, is key, and having a way to access that is what we do, yeah.
Pete Wright:
So, none of those things included the word ADHD, and this I find, we came up, it was actually Melissa as she was collating a lot of the feedback from our survey who had the observation that all of the deal-breakers and red flags that people were coming up with over the last two weeks, very few of them actually indicated ADHD.
Nikki Kinzer:
To work with ADHD.
Pete Wright:
These were values discussions. Yeah, these were all just much higher level, and I note that you as somebody who specializes in ADHD, none of those big categories involved specifically ADHD. I'm curious how that plays to your sort of calculus when you're working with individuals with ADHD. Where's the ADHD go?
Shell Mendelson:
Oh, man, I spent 15 years tweaking this whole process for people with ADHD. I'd say overall, I worked with neurotypical people for years before I started, when I had my own diagnosis and I had that very late in life, and I recognize, "Oh my gosh, I'm not the only one who's got all these issues going on, and I need to start working with people with ADHD." Once I started doing that, I didn't want to go back to... I was having too much fun.
So how does it ADHD come into it? It's the way it's broken down. So, the way I break things down is different for people with ADHD, and I've had to add and tweak the process quite a bit to make it palatable and to make it so that it becomes easier to recognize yourself as an ADHD person and to know that it's important to go through this process, and especially things like working conditions because the way he has it laid out for working conditions isn't nearly as detailed as it needs to be. It really needs to be very detailed so we do almost like a little accommodations plan. I call it a self-accommodations plan within the process. So many things are tweaked for people with ADHD to understand and broken down, and I've developed a lot of graphics. I've tried to make it more graphic for people so that when they're learning things, the instructions are graphic, and instructions. You know what I'm saying?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
It just is more interesting. So, there's a lot of elements to it that sort of help people move along in this process and really see it as being extraordinary for them, something that really helps build confidence. The process is the same for everyone. It really is. Like I said, and everybody needs to do this, not just people with ADHD, for sure. But the fun that I've had, it's just helped me in my career to just get creative. Personally, it was just a creative endeavor to really start bringing that ADHD element into it, like what would make it easier for me to digest.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Well, and I would think as a coach too, what you're bringing to the table is you're questioning your client and getting them to see and recognize what their skills are, what their strengths are, and maybe seeing it in a different way than what they are used to putting the word to it. What I mean by that is a lot of people might say, "Well, I'm not organized." But wait a minute, what do you mean by that? What do you mean you're not organized? And then really start digging into it, and all of a sudden, you might see, well, you're a very creative thinker. I mean, you can go down the road that still...
Shell Mendelson:
You may not be organized when it comes to organizing your clothes, your office, or certain things, but boy, when it comes to maybe something like a creative endeavor, you name it, you're excited about, you're going to organize like crazy. Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
That gets to I think what we're seeing which is the reason the word ADHD doesn't come up in all of these things is because you're self-selecting the career path that works best for you already. I personally would never say, "God, just help me become an accountant. Please, Shell, would you give me the guidance that I need to become an accountant?" because that would be horribly self-defeating. There's no universe in which that would line up with my identity. So, I think people with ADHD, and check me when I start lying, I think with people with ADHD, it's easy to think about the meta sort of approach to the job hunt, which is I should be thinking about ADHD because that's who I am, and lose track of the fact that if you just go through the job hunt, your ADHD will make itself known.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. I'm a firm believer that you don't have to disclose your ADHD to anybody. You just need to have a real understanding of the kind of work that fits you. Our brains are interest based, are they not? We need to be interested, we need to be engaged, we need to be energized. If we don't have certain elements happening for us, I call it the wind beneath our wings, the wind beneath our wings, or the push from behind, or whatever it is that inspires us and sustains us over a longer period of time, if that isn't there and we're in a job that maybe has 5% of that, you got to become familiar with what... You become familiar by going through this process with what the elements are that you need to take into consideration before you even apply for that job so you can have that conversation.
Instead of saying, "I have ADHD, how can you help me?" you would say, "Under these conditions, when I have these conditions, or however you want to put it, I am able to get up and move around. Maybe give me some headsets, noise cancellation, so I can really focus in on this stuff." Or, you can say, "When these elements are present, you will have the best employee ever," because it's true. When we're tuned in and focused in on the work that we're doing because we like it, we generally enjoy it, then we become the superstars. I want-
Nikki Kinzer:
[inaudible 00:25:31].
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Nikki Kinzer:
I was just going to say, I want to really be clear to our listeners that what you're doing here is you're requesting the accommodations that you need without saying why you need them.
Shell Mendelson:
Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, and that's really important to advocate for yourself, that it's okay to ask for those things but you don't have to put it in this formal way of, "I have ADHD and I need to have accommodations and this is what you need to do for me." It's a different conversation.
Pete Wright:
Related question though that I feel like is important for those who in the past have said they have ADHD or advocate for themselves as somebody living with ADHD at work. In your experience, do you find that it is a necessary good or ill? Can it be damaging at work to do that more often than not, or is it [inaudible 00:26:22]?
Nikki Kinzer:
It can be.
Shell Mendelson:
In a word, it can be. It can be. There is really no need. If you're in the right position and you're working for the right employer-
Nikki Kinzer:
[inaudible 00:26:34].
Shell Mendelson:
... and you're in the right environment, those things will naturally organically happen because you're aware of them and you can ask for them, but you need to know what they are and you need to in detail know what they are, not just I need a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I mean, we really drill down into the weeds of that. It puts you in such a more powerful, if you will, position where you can confidently go in and if you're in an interview and you say, for example, "When I have these conditions or when I'm able to," blah, blah, blah, and the employer kind of rolls their eyes or doesn't answer, just kind of sighs, that's your cue to say, "Honestly, thank you for your time, but this is not going to be a good fit, and I appreciate everything up to this point," without burning a million bridges.
But you really have to be able to say no to those because otherwise it's a big setup, and that's really having kind of the roadmap, the parachute roadmap basically gives you all the information you need to ask the right questions and to understand when you're potentially entering a minefield again.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I really like this because again, talking about that sort of meta approach to finding the fit, I know that about myself that I can get mired in the ADHD part and forget that if I go down one more level to the more sort of core identity pieces, I can find a match with... I think it took me much too long to find a match to what I do and what I love and to let go of the things that I'm not good at because I was so focused on the practical application of accommodation to ADHD diagnosis and symptom. Had I just started with, "Here's what I'm really good at when I'm at my best and do that," that would've been a different [inaudible 00:28:40].
Shell Mendelson:
Just know be able to articulate it because remember, you guys were talking about how do you describe the work that you do. Being able to say, "This is who I am, this is what is important to me in my work, this is what I'm doing," without having to say, "I am a blah, blah, blah."
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Shell Mendelson:
In order to do that, you have to really have a clear understanding in detail of what those things are and to work through it. It's not an easy... People who take the steps to do this are brave as hell. They're brave people because it's not an easy process. It's nuanced, but at the end of it comes so much more confidence. Instead of being what I call a job beggar, when you're going to apply for a job or if you're even trying to figure out what it is that you want to do as an entrepreneur or self-employed or whatever, you've got to know what those things are and be able to articulate that.
Pete Wright:
Sure, sure. How do you coach people through who have gotten themselves mired in the I don't have a choice, I need something that pays the bills?
Shell Mendelson:
I don't argue with that. I call it a means-to-an-end job. I always ask them is it a means to an end. People ask me, first of all, when they work with me, we do like this eight-week thing, and I say, if you have something major that you're shifting into or a job that you're shifting into, if it's anything other than a means-to-an-end job, this is not a good time for you to do this.
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Shell Mendelson:
Because the means to an end is what you need to make money and pay the bills. But there's also something to be learned about what would be the best means-to-an-end fit, certainly the things that you don't want that would probably get you fired right away in a means-to-an-end job, but there are elements, certain elements that need to be there. So, you still can benefit, but it can't be... you don't want to come into this process with a feeling of desperation, I need money, I've got to get a job right now, the job of my life. A means to an end and you have some interviews set up to do that, that happens all the time, but you've got to pay the bills, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, absolutely. So, if they're in that job and they kind of look at it as a temporary position, when would they be ready to do the eight-week program?
Shell Mendelson:
I think they can do it when they're doing the means-to-an-end thing, as long as they know that it is a means, it's not like something they're going to be in.
Nikki Kinzer:
The job.
Shell Mendelson:
That's not it. The main thing is they need to be ready to really dive in, get committed, and take the full eight weeks. Don't drop off because you didn't do the homework. I always tell them that. That's the time when you need to be here because I do coaching during that time, you get feedback from people. It's so important to get that support from other people who are going through this process. That's why I switched from just doing individual to start out with. I don't do that anymore. The baseline for working with me is this process going through parachute.
Pete Wright:
Small group.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah, because it gets you your roadmap, and then if you want to continue working with me after that, great, but they don't need to after that very often. They're just kind of off and running. They form their own little support with each other. And you know what? I'm good with that. Yay. I love that. I want to see people form communities. I love the community thing. When people are speaking this language and they're really starting to understand and say to each other, "Hey, is that safekeeping self coming up for you?" they can start coaching each other, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
There's something that you said on your website that Melissa actually pulled out, and I think it's really interesting and on point to what we're talking about. Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you'll enjoy it.
Shell Mendelson:
Absolutely. So, when they talk about strengths, I say skills. What skills do you want to use? Because you can have strengths in a lot of different things, but you may not love doing those things, and with our brain wiring, if we don't really enjoy doing those things and somebody says, "Oh, but you're so good at this," I'm just going to put you over here for a while.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, I think about that with industry. I can see somebody saying, "Well, all I've ever done is ever worked in insurance so I can't do anything else but insurance." But you're saying, "Well, wait a minute, let's look at the skills that you're doing in these jobs."
Shell Mendelson:
Yes. Break it down.
Nikki Kinzer:
It doesn't mean you have to go into insurance.
Shell Mendelson:
You can literally take your top... and we do a lot of prioritizing, prioritizing so that you get your top list in everything that represents who you are and what's most important to you. If you are going into something that will not allow you to use those top skills, for example, it's not going to be a good fit. But if you have strengths in something, very often the skills that go along with that aren't even going to show up at the top. If you have strengths in doing things like insurance but you don't want to be processing claims or doing administration or sitting behind a computer all day or doing all those little detail-y kinds of things. I've had a lot of people who it's really difficult for them to say, "I'm an artist. I'm an artist." And guess what? There's a lot of ways that you can bring art into your work. It doesn't mean you have to be what society labels as an artist, and always that poor artist or whatever comes along with them.
Pete Wright:
Starving artists. Right, yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
Starving artist, that's it.
Pete Wright:
Starving artist.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. I mean, there are different ways that you can bring that into it, but if you don't, that's where you pay the price. If you don't even look at that, if you put it on the shelf and say, "It's a hobby." It's great if it's a hobby, but you still are a creative person, you still have this creative mind going on. Things always come, and creativity comes in many forms, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Shell Mendelson:
It's not always just art, but people that are art oriented tend to be problem solvers. They tend to like break things down. There's so many of the elements of creativity that aren't just art, that those are things that you can bring into your work. It doesn't mean that it's that job title or the exact thing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
There's a movie, I can't remember the quote, I can't remember the source of the quote but I've sort of internalized it, and I use it on my wife all the time because I think she's very talented and she was stuck in a place that it wasn't very important. I kept telling her always fail at the job you don't want because that is the curse of failing up. She was good at something she didn't like, and they kept wanting to promote her to do more of it, and I think you've got to be worse at that. But then Jim Carrey, I think came back in his memoir and he said, "You can absolutely fail at the stuff you don't want, so you might as well take more risks at trying to find the stuff you love." That's better.
Shell Mendelson:
He's right. He's right. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Better. Yeah, a little bit less succession from my quote.
Shell Mendelson:
If I could find that quote, I like that, I might put that on my website. I like that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right, right. It's really good. You have an opportunity to take risks if it's something that you haven't tried and you don't necessarily want it. That's great.
Shell Mendelson:
And the thing that, now it's just occurring to me, the thing that that I wanted, the point I wanted to get across is that when you identify your top skills, which are the -ing verb kinds of things, that you can apply those skills in almost any industry. So, if you're working in a field that bores the hell out, you're just bored in that field, but you've always been kind of attracted to this other field, you can take those skills and find work as a first step to just go into that industry and be surrounded by people who are doing the stuff that... They're speaking the language. They're even dressed the way you like to be dressed. They're the kind of people you want to be around.
It's the first step towards transforming your situation. Even though you're using those skills, and you could be using the ones that you don't love so much even in the beginning, but being in that environment, a whole different environment can be a game-changer as a first step, right? It doesn't always mean making a 180. It can making incremental shifts in the right direction. So, I always say 65% of doing what you love is better than 5.01 or 5%. There's a big difference.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, I have a question for you, something that comes up more frequently than I'm sure my clients would like it to come up. So, there's been a couple of times where people have been put on different plans and because they need to do something more, these performance plans, so they're on this verge of they might get fired.
Shell Mendelson:
Ugh, don't get me started, yeah. Don't get me started, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. So, there's that, and then there's also-
Shell Mendelson:
The PIP.
Nikki Kinzer:
What?
Shell Mendelson:
The PIP preppers.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, professional improvement plan. Yeah, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, yes. And then there's also the people that actually do get let go of and now they're looking for something new. That's really all of the RSD that goes around that and low self-esteem and just feeling so... That self-negative talk, I forgot already what you said, the bad guy, the bad coach.
Shell Mendelson:
Safekeeping self, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Safekeeping self.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So loud. So loud. How do you work with people? And I'm not even going to say with someone because I know a lot of people deal with it. It just is...
Shell Mendelson:
Well, generally at the beginning, I will often, not always, but often ask the question, how many of you have been in a PIP program? And always, at least one or two people will raise their hands.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
When people are in the middle of one, it's not always a great time to take the class because there're too many conflicting things going on. But what I can say about that is they're in the wrong job and they need to get the hell out, ASAP, before they get fired because they're about to get fired. It's not a plan to improve anything. It's a plan to get you fired. I even got the definition from the HR website on what those performance improvement plans were meant to do, and they're the complete opposite with everyone I've ever worked with who's been in them.
Yeah, the safekeeping self comes up in really, really sad ways, in ways that are almost incomprehensible and make it really, really difficult to work past that. I will work with people, as long as they understand that this is a job they want to get out of and if they're willing to ask themselves do I have enough money to sustain me while I go through this so I can get out of this. If anything, I just want to beat down their door and just drag them out of their job because it's-
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm. I appreciate your answer because I think it's a very honest answer.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah, it's the truth though because I've been working... I'll never forget working with this one woman who's an engineer, and she was in the middle of, well, two people that come to mind, but every single week she would show up and her face would be... It like you could feel the weight on her shoulders of what she was going through. My heart just, because I have this compassion thing going on that a lot of us tend to have, extra hormones or whatever it is, compassion hormones, it made me so sad. It worked out in the end, but I couldn't get her to leave that position during the... I really do push to just say get out. Just get out. Yes, it might be about the money. So, you need to ask yourself, how long can you sustain for a while, or do you have a partner that you can work with, or whatever. Sometimes it's not always doable, realistic, but it is very difficult.
I don't say, I said don't do the class, it really depends on what stage they're in and if they're willing to look at the idea of leaving. That has to be there, and I'll say that, "Are you willing to look at the idea of leaving?"
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Especially when you've internalized that the place you are, however antagonistic it is to your wellbeing, is the safest feeling place at the time.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. Exactly.
Pete Wright:
There's an emotional leap that you have to be-
Shell Mendelson:
Safekeeping self.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. You have to be able to just take that first step off the ledge.
Shell Mendelson:
It is. It's really difficult. It's scary as heck because a lot of times they've been indoctrinated to think there's something wrong with them or they're the ones causing all the problems, and when the truth is they're just in the wrong job. It's just not the fit that they're meant to be in, and they need to discover what that is, but it's not you. You're just in the wrong job. It's so simple.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, is that what you would say to somebody that's been let go too-
Shell Mendelson:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
... is that it wasn't the right fit, it's not the right job.
Shell Mendelson:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, we need to find you a better fit. Let's explore that.
Shell Mendelson:
Well, the whole process is to start to recognize who you are, and it's incremental. This is a nuanced process. Like I said, it's not always clear. Sometimes you have to put connections together. You have to look for repetition in information. You have to dig back into the things. We talk about what did you love to do as a kid. You've heard that one. I have a whole exercise that we do around that, but that very often will inform you of the things that you'll come back to if you gave up on them, you did something completely different, because that's really the true essence of who you are, and it doesn't leave you throughout life. All those things we're attracted to as a kid, there's certain elements of that that just never leave, and it's discovering what those are.
I have different things that help them to start to recognize that and piece things together to get that aha kind of, oh yeah, here it's again, oh my gosh, it's coming up. Here's safekeeping self going, "No, no, no." Right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
So, it is a process of kind of clearing the way over time. There's no escape.
Pete Wright:
There's no escape.
Shell Mendelson:
There's no escape.
Nikki Kinzer:
In this program, or maybe this is what they do after the program, do you help them with the actual job hunting process, like a applying, resume building, interviewing, all of that stuff?
Shell Mendelson:
I don't. That's not my forte. I don't even end up referring people because very often the work that they do creates the map that they can ask all the right questions, know who to go to for the right jobs, be able to interview, have the confidence to do.
Nikki Kinzer:
To do that, yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
Not go in as what I call the job beggar, but more as a job developer for themselves.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love that.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. You're going in interviewing them, you're not going in...
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. You are like, "Hey, are you the right fit for me?"
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. It's so true because I was telling my 17-year-old daughter who's looking for a new job, and she actually declined one of the places because she knew it wouldn't be a good fit, and I'm like, "That's exactly right. You just keep doing that, keep doing that."
Shell Mendelson:
Yes. Keep doing that.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
A job is a partnership, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
You're creating a partnership, and both sides got to be able to give something in order for both sides to get something out of it.
Shell Mendelson:
That's why when you feel that confidence, you can walk in and if it's the wrong fit, you can say, "Thank you so much, but this just isn't the right fit for me." You can tell the looks on their faces, the way they respond to things, just the process of interviewing that they make you go through, jumping through all these hoops, the questions that they ask, are they relevant or not. Hmm, you can start to ask yourself, "How does this feel? This does not feel great." When you go in as the job developer versus the job beggar, you are so competitive. You're top of the line to them. They want people who know what they want. Employers, can you imagine being on the other side of the desk, somebody walks in who can tick off all the, yeah, you've got the background, you've got the experience, but they're desperate and they just want a job.
Pete Wright:
And you can smell it.
Shell Mendelson:
You can smell it. But then you have the person who comes in, picked you for a specific reason, because this position ticks off your box, not theirs, and you're trying to find out by having this personal meeting whether or not it's the right fit for you, and you can articulate all of these things that are important to you in the work that you do, and they're like, "Whoa, this person knows what they want. That's what I want. I want somebody who's clear about that." The right employer will respond in that way.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm. A hundred percent.
Shell Mendelson:
So, it's the right people that you want to be working with that gets to that people portion of it. So, anyway, that's, yeah.
Pete Wright:
How long do you work on average? I mean, you have this eight-week program. Do you work with folks beyond that or by the time the end of the eight weeks, they're pretty much done?
Shell Mendelson:
Sometimes I do, yeah, but generally they're pretty much done. But I ask them to keep in touch with me and let me know how things are going, and of course, give me a review, write those reviews for Google.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, Google loves them. So hungry.
Shell Mendelson:
With people with ADHD, you got to just keep like, "Please tell me about your experience." But the reviews, I'm very proud of the reviews I have on my website because they really do kind of tell a story. They're not just, "Oh, this was a great experience." They really go into detail and talk about where they were when they came in to where they came out. That's what I want. That's what gives me the energy to keep doing what I love is when I see that transformation. It's not me. It's about the process. The process that they're going through will illuminate certain things for them, and then they'll start getting it and they'll start recognizing, now I've got the tools, now I can articulate it, now I have the map in front of me. So, anything that I am looking at potentially doing, I can sift and sort. Yes, no, yes, no. Right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Shell Mendelson:
And just go to the things that kind of are exciting to go through. And then when you have that excitement going into an interview, how much of a difference does that make to how that goes in general?
Pete Wright:
What's your assessment of the job market right now? We have all this about, oh, you should be able to find your passion and do your thing, but there's a lot of kind of pervasive fear that job access is deeply inconsistent right now.
Shell Mendelson:
That's a tough one to... I always say, this process, you have to know what you want. You have to know what you want, and that's going to make you more competitive no matter what the job market is, no matter whether it's great or terrible, because it will take you through the terrible parts a lot easier than it will the people that are desperately trying to keep up and afraid of AI and all this stuff. That's a real thing, by the way. So, we do kind of talk about that a little bit. But I always say, try and make sure that you're this full person, this full package, so that the human part of you is more important than whatever that AI can create.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
For sure.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah, because oh my gosh, haven't you heard some of those things with... You just know they...
Pete Wright:
Well, just a brief story. Just this morning I watched a video from the Corridor Crew, and they're a visual effects house, and they found a tool that allows you to take an actor with no green screen, no nothing, you have footage of an actor, here's an actor, literally drag a 3D character onto that actor, and it replaces the actor with a 3D moving character. It took about an hour to render out. This guy had done the calculation and said, "You know what? Two years ago, I made a short film with 200 shots that included a single CG character and that took three years to do." They ran the calculations and said, "Had we used this new tool, had that existed, it would've taken eight days to do."
Shell Mendelson:
That's scary.
Pete Wright:
Well, it's scary, except for I love the way they looked at it. They were like, "Okay, so now this is a challenge. Can we make a good film in another eight days that has a cast of CG characters? What would that take? How much more can we do with the new tools?" I sort of like that. This is a group that is saying, "Okay, I can't not use the tools. I can't remain competitive if I don't understand the tools, but man, I could create some really cool things with this kind of flexibility." And that, I think is the sort of the plasticity that we need to approach these things with, not out of fear because fear-
Shell Mendelson:
Oh, I see what you're saying. So, you're saying that the person, it doesn't take them three years to develop a character or anything.
Pete Wright:
They can do it in [inaudible 00:51:38].
Shell Mendelson:
So, they can go in and do it and do more and still be, because they still need the human part of it, to do that.
Pete Wright:
Right. So, they're just [inaudible 00:51:46].
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. That's a really good example, I think, of how it can be used for good. You know what? I'm always going to be exploring that, and I'm going to encourage everybody else to do that as well because it is a reality. It's coming and it's coming fast.
Pete Wright:
So fast. It is, I'm not going to lie.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and I'm going to say, I also think it can be really helpful for people to build their resume because all you have to do is what does this person do, these are my skills, how would I put this in a resume, and it's amazing what it comes up with. I wouldn't copy and paste it, but it gives you a starting point.
Shell Mendelson:
So, they have a starting point, but also know that I've seen people get work without a resume where the resume, they'll say, "Oh, by the way, we need your resume for our files."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right. Yeah, absolutely.
Shell Mendelson:
That's kind of where I go with the resume thing. Although when I say people do a resume, I like Yana Parker's model. I don't know if you've ever seen her, Yana Parker, Damn Good Resume. She did it years and years ago. The thing I like about it is that it really customizes whatever you're going for, and it's not just a bunch of jobs that you've ever done, every job. It's the ones that just relate to what it is that you're going for that really make you stand out more as an expert in that area versus being all-
Nikki Kinzer:
Generic.
Shell Mendelson:
No generic. Forget the generic. Those go in the wastebasket.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Right. Right.
Shell Mendelson:
And HR, their job is to just eliminate those resumes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And they do it quickly because I was one of those people.
Shell Mendelson:
They do it fast.
Nikki Kinzer:
I did it very quickly.
Shell Mendelson:
That's why I'm saying the more you have, you're armed with the ability to articulate who you are and what you want and what you're going for. What do I want? Ask people what they want, nobody can answer that. But when you go through a process that breaks it down, you can start to build that and be able to easily, eventually answer that question.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's great.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Great stuff. Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Well, this has been wonderful, Shell. Just as we wrap up, where do you want people to go learn more about the work you're doing?
Shell Mendelson:
So, my website is careercoachingwithshell.com. It's also whatcolorisyourparachute.com. It's also passiontocareer.com. So, whichever one is the easiest, I have all those.
Pete Wright:
You figure out who you are, and then what URL resonates with you and pick that one.
Shell Mendelson:
I am careercoachingwithshell. I just want people to get to my website, so I just found, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Love it.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. And so, look for the masterclass which is, there's a little video on the front page and watch the video, and then it says, learn more and click on that. It takes you right to the masterclass. I sent Melissa the link to that.
Pete Wright:
Perfect.
Shell Mendelson:
Can I also talk about the workbook I'm doing real quick?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Workbook is coming, sure, yeah. What's going on?
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah. So, I am in the process now of working with a publishing company to develop the first parachute-inspired workbook for ADHD people.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, that's great. That is great.
Shell Mendelson:
A lot of the things that people get in the class is going to be incorporated into it. It's going to be spiral bound, so it lays flat. It's going to have tabs for easy... I tried to think of all the easy access things. It's going to be in color, so it's going to cost more, but I don't care. It's got to be in color for our brains.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, it needs to be. Yeah, for sure.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right, [inaudible 00:55:26].
Shell Mendelson:
Our brains need color, so that's all there is to it, yeah. I don't think there's going to ever be anything like it out there, at least I've been told. My goal is to see it translated into so many different languages, and for all those ADHD people globally that are out there. I'm sure you have people-
Nikki Kinzer:
When are you expecting it?
Shell Mendelson:
August, hopefully
Nikki Kinzer:
Of this year?
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
It's coming.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, then you need to come back on the show and we need to talk about it.
Pete Wright:
Give us a tour.
Shell Mendelson:
Yes. I mean, it's really, I'm just in the beginning of having them finally figure out how to do the designs the right way. You guys have probably done books and work with trying to-
Pete Wright:
Books are hard.
Shell Mendelson:
They're hard. Oh my gosh.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, books are hard.
Shell Mendelson:
This the first time I've really gone through this process. But I'm having fun. I like it. It's fun.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That's good.
Shell Mendelson:
You just got to sync up with these people, but once we're synced, we're doing great. Anyway.
Pete Wright:
Well, the nice thing is it ends. It's a project that has a reward at the end, [inaudible 00:56:25].
Nikki Kinzer:
Beginning, middle, and end, it's a mission. It's a mission.
Pete Wright:
Yes, exactly.
Shell Mendelson:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's going to help a lot of people.
Shell Mendelson:
Well, we sure appreciate you.
Thank you. Yeah, I think so. I think it will, yeah.
Pete Wright:
For sure. We sure appreciate you coming and hanging out with us this morning and answering all our questions, and our just great thanks for your guidance in helping those who are looking for finding their best fit at work.
Shell Mendelson:
Thanks, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Thank you everybody else for downloading and listening to the show. We appreciate your time and your attention. Don't forget if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're heading over to the show talk channel in our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level, or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and the great Shell Mendelson, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
