When ADHD Meets the Artificial Structures of Work with Dr. Kourosh Dini
"Without time, you don't have attention; without attention, you don't have time."
This week on the show, we're exploring the artifice of bureaucracy and administrative structures of traditional work and how it can be difficult to navigate with an ADHD brain, and we have the perfect guest to help us do it. Dr. Kourosh Dini is a board-certified psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, author, and musician, and most recently, he created the Waves of Focus course and community for those struggling with ADHD and other "wandering minds."
Along the way, we look at the social and administrative contracts at work and how to positively adapt our behavior toward managers and other authority figures while dealing with anxiety, fear, and RSD. We discuss Dr. Dini's concept of the wandering mind, how it applies across domains, and the struggle of “holding it all together” for the world while deeply struggling internally. Finally, we explore the idea of “hiding” ADHD at work for those trying to find a place to fit in.
If you relate to any of this, you owe it to yourself to listen to this show and check out the robust catalog of Dr. Dini's fantastic contributions to the world of productivity with kindness.
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD podcast on True Story FM. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh. Oh, hi, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
How you doing-
Pete Wright:
I did not even see you there.
Nikki Kinzer:
... today?
Pete Wright:
I'm so well. I'm doing so well. I'm a little bit giddy. We're continuing our job series today with a concept. You know most of my life is searching for metaphors to relate to my struggles. That's pretty much what I live my life to do. I think I stumbled on this metaphor. I did not stumble. I stalked on this metaphor from our guest today that really made a change in how I think this last couple of weeks, and I'm eager to share it. I'm eager to have our guest here to talk about it because I think it aligns so perfectly with everything we are talking about in our job series and where some of the ADHD struggles come with how we live and work. So I'm very excited to get started on the show.
We got to get through all of our front matter first, and that is this. You want to know us, get to know us a little bit better? Head over to takecontrolADHD.com. You can listen to the show right there on the website, or subscribe to the mailing list, and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest at @takecontrolADHD. But to really connect with us, jump into the ADHD Discord community. It's so easy. You just jump into the public community chat channel by visiting takecontrolADHD.com/discord. You will be whisked over to the general invitation and login.
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Nikki Kinzer:
All I have to say is the intro is creepy.
Pete Wright:
That was some of the most fun-
Nikki Kinzer:
It's creepy.
Pete Wright:
... audio work I've done. It's AI Pete talking to AI Alex. Yeah. I'm just going to spill it because I'm so excited about the concept. I was struggling with a way to introduce this podcast on exploring AI technology, so I had ChatGPT-4 write a script between me and an AI taking the Turing test. The objective of the AI was to convince the human that it was human, as you do in a Turing test, but both participants were AI. It was just an enormously viscerally satisfying and terrifying experience.
Nikki Kinzer:
Terrifying.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Mostly terrifying for you. I apologize for that. But it was really, really fun.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's very interesting, for sure, so check it out.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Hopefully. Hopefully. Do we have any news?
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
We don't have any news, so-
Nikki Kinzer:
We're good.
Pete Wright:
... let's dig right in. Kourosh Dini, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, author, and musician. It's pretty rare that we've had a guest on the show for whom I have personally consumed as much of their published catalog. He's author of "Workflow Mastery: Building from the Basics," and "Creating Flow with OmniFocus," and "Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink," and "Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus," and now his latest work, "Waves of Focus: Guiding the Wandering Mind," and the associated course and community. Doctor Dini joins us today to explore the nature of the wandering mind at work and how we can find peace by better understanding how our brains are working to sync with the systems we did not create. Kourosh Dini, welcome to the ADHD podcast.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here. This is great. Thank you.
Pete Wright:
First, let's talk about the wandering mind as a way to reflect on ADHD. How'd you land on this as your way to bundle the ADHD experience?
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Right. Wandering mind does a number of things. First, I do like, as you do, I think, metaphor and story. It's a wonderful way of communicating. I think it's a great way to convey information. There's something romantic to it, but there's also something that removes the medical aspect of ADHD. As soon as you have something medical, it's just, "Oh, what's wrong?" I feel wandering mind tends to open up things that I think your community tends to know very well, that there's a strong, positive, creative, exploring, discovering kind of spirit that is there in ADHD and what I'll say are other wandering minds. ADHD is a part of that grouping.
If I can nerd out a little bit on it, the idea is that thought and emotion, whatever those emotions are, are flowing past this part of our mind, this working memory part of our mind. This is our consciousness. This is where we put things together. This is where we decide on the options. It flows past that. With ADHD or wandering mind, it flows fast. We have a fast mind. As a result, it becomes difficult to hold onto those ideas, those decisions, those options, and make some decision with them that feels like, "Okay. What do I do with this?" Sometimes it winds up being impulsive. Sometimes it flows past and turns into kinetic energy. Sometimes it flows past and turns into just daydreams and thoughts. It becomes all these different paths.
Then what are those emotions that come in? Often, with ADHD in particular, I find play and boredom. There's a powerful spirit of play. Without it, there's that boredom, or perhaps depression. But then there's also anxiety. There's also trauma. There's also creative spirited, just I'm really interested in things, and the absent-minded professor. There's all of these really ... What other ways are there for thought and emotion to just fly past? Plus, I like the idea of not only does everybody's mind wander, but maybe we can say there's thresholds beyond. There's the ADHD level or whatever. But there's the time of day. There's the day of the week. In the morning, you might feel one way. In the afternoon, you might feel another.
Particularly for those who are struggling, like ADHD and such, let's say somebody has a conversation and says one thing that triggers a certain association, and you remember this particularly shameful moment, and then you're scattered. You're in that scatter for hours, maybe days. The thing with ADHD, it's fine to have it. I diagnose it. I work with it fine. But there tends to be a flattening of it. Like in music, there's a compression of it. It just exists rather than I want there to be waves and flowing and to different days and more.
Pete Wright:
Well, isn't the whole point of it is that it is a spectrum, right? It is a spectrum. Our ADHDs are vastly different from one another.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
As well as within ourselves through time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Yes. I was going to say, from day to day, it can be different. If you had a good night's sleep. If you've been eating well. Have you exercised? Are you managing your stress? All of those things, if you're not having good days on those things, your ADHD is going to be louder.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's exactly it. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
This piece on your blog, you wrote this question that I thought was particularly provocative. You said, "What if it's not about being wrong so much as it is about being out of sync with the increasingly artificial structures of time that surround us?" Now, I really related to that, almost immediately, especially in the context of work. But let's start with time and our ADHD relationship with time being out of sync. Then I'd like to explore this idea of artificial systems and our ADHD brains being out of sync with artificial systems. Let's talk about time.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Time and attention, these are very important concepts in the ADHD world. I'll actually combine them. I'll think of them as time attention. Without time, you don't have attention. Without attention, you don't have time. These are unified. We have a sense of that. We have a sense organ, if you will, like an eye. We see things. What happens is that the myopia, the attention, the hyper focus, if you will, is we see that time attention in a tightened sort of ball, a magnified way. For whatever reason, in that deep world of that, we engage nature better.
I don't know how or why, but somehow I think there's this connection with nature that I often see. Maybe it's not everybody, but I see it quite often, where you're in nature and a lot of that scatter tends to dissipate. The now matters most, and the not now is not so ... That's there, but it's periphery, and it's okay to be periphery. That sense of inner critic tends to decrease a bit. There's more of a flow state that's not just a flow of like, "I'm in my work." It's like you're in some tune with your surroundings.
But it's not just about the leafy green kind of nature. Time itself is a part of nature. The time that we discover that we have with ourselves, that we flow with, is more the time of our breath, the time of the day, the morning, the afternoon, the wee hours of the night. Those are more, at least, in my sense, natural divisions. Not only that, our time of our thoughts and emotions have their own building, cresting, and decaying types of time, that they move through these phases.
As a result of that, that's what we tend to ride on best. But the trouble is, we have these, if you will, artificial constructs of seconds, minutes, and hours. They're not real. If you want to call real ... I don't know what we would call real. We could debate that one. But in terms of human history, it's what, a thousand years old? I don't know. More than that. I'm sorry. I'm messing up the times. But in terms of that exact what our second is, that's within the last century that we've said, "This is what a second is."
Pete Wright:
Well, I have to interrupt. You tossed off as something just given. Without time, you don't have attention. Without attention, you don't have time. You made that sound so facile, as if everybody knew that. But I had a little bit of a mind-blown moment here, too, because time, these minutes, seconds, and hours, those are actually, when you look at it this way, again, when you get rid of the binary time or not time, ADHD or not ADHD, minutes, seconds, and hours are measures of attention.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
They're a part of our attention. They're together. There was a physics teacher that I had years and years ago in my senior year of high school. I tried to find his name, and I can't find it. I wish I could give him credit. Anyway, momentum is mass times velocity. He said that "it looks like, by the equation, P equals M times V, it looks like mass and velocity are more primal or more central than momentum." But he said, "No, no, no. Momentum is more central. We are artificially dividing it into mass and velocity." That blew my mind. I've carried that with me. Somehow I think that same idea that he gave me there is the way I look at time and attention.
I don't know what to call time attention other than put a hyphen in it, and maybe I can come up with a word. Every once in a while I play with the word ravon, but I don't know if that's right, this Persian word that's a simultaneous river and mine, if I have it correct. So anybody out there who speaks Farsi and can correct me, please go right ahead. But I used that same metaphor or that same idea he gave me to say, "If we can look at time and attention as something together, I just feel like something about that just resonates for me."
Pete Wright:
Yes, for sure. Now, I interrupted your flow state by hijacking you and reflecting on that, without time, you don't have attention. Without attention, you don't have time. That is crazy that I've never thought of it that way. I'm suddenly so unlimited. But you were in the middle of talking about the artificialness of time. If we transition into the artificialness of the structures that we create, again, if time is a manmade structure to allot attentional ability, work is a manmade structure to focus time and energy toward an end. We often find, with our incredible ADHD brains, we struggle to find sync at work. How do you help people think through this?
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I mean, we need it. We need these constructs. I mean, another example of besides time is money. It's something we made up.
Pete Wright:
I guess my bent is always the counter. It's like, "Oh, human-made structure? Burn it down."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Let's do that. Who is that man that made that? He's stupid.
Pete Wright:
He's stupid. Burn it down.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
But then I wouldn't have my video games. I need those.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Yeah. There's a trade off. There's always trade-offs. If we didn't have that, I wouldn't know when to meet with my client. I wouldn't know when to ... All that stuff. We need these structures. So how do we? One lesson that I try to teach is this idea that I'll call the visit. The visit is when you show up to a piece of work or play, or whatever it is that you're thinking about engaging in, and you just show up, you move distractions aside, and you're just fully with the thing. You don't have to do any of it. This is often a shift in a way of approaching something, although I'll point out that this is not unique to me. But it's this idea that you just show up. You're just there with it, and particularly things that are difficult, things you don't want to do, procrastinating on all that. What happens is you start noticing. So particularly if the deadline is far away. All right. I'll add that bit. You start noticing how awful it feels, especially something you've been procrastinating on.
Pete Wright:
Oh, yeah. That's 8:00 a.m., day one, for me. Right. Absolutely.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
It's the shameful, whatever, all those negative things. But what starts happening, too, is that you might start noticing that there's these little windows. There's windows of challenge, windows of not too boring and not too overstimulating. I'll just write my name on this thing, maybe. Maybe I'll just write that one little something. The example of somebody says, "You want to start a jogging habit? Put your shoes on, and stand outside, and you start moving." Same idea. What happens, then, though, with this deadline particularly far off, is you start noticing your own thoughts when you start finding that challenge window, where play can start taking seed and take root and you can really get into it. I can describe play in a bit, but you start noticing that your thoughts, and I'll say this, thoughts take time. Thoughts always take time. Thoughts exist in time. That same idea. Time and attention.
So you start noticing your thoughts and the time they take, and how that starts to be more in sync and in tune with the type of work you're doing. There's a type of flow, rhythm, something to the work. I think everybody notices when they're in flow. They notice, "Oh, this thing is ..." You get into its unfolding state. This is why I say it should be distant from the deadline, where you're pushing hard and really trying to make it happen. No, it's just happening. When you start practicing that, which starts from that visit idea, then you start noticing, "Oh, this is the rhythm at which I can connect with this thing. I go at this pace. Oh, the deadline is over there. Okay." When you start that and you only need to visit, you don't have to do it.
That also starts to lift some of the I-don't-want-to feelings, where you get scared of the thing. I got to write the report now. No, no. You just have to show up. You don't have to do any of it. You can just shut it right down and bring that same exercise for tomorrow if you want. So again, you start noticing that inner clock, that inner pace. Then you're starting to, like, "That is due on that date. That's where the alert needs to show up. Okay. Meanwhile, I can go at my pace."
Pete Wright:
How does this notion of hyperfocus relate to this concept of flow? This is something I appreciate about the way you approach so many of these concepts. It's with an approach of gentleness and I think, fundamentally, kindness. But I also think that the notion of hyperfocus can be seen as unkind. The fact that we get into a flow state that can become dangerously close to a time-attention blackout.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Yeah. The answer to that, I've used a couple of metaphors on that one. You go past the event horizon, like a black hole. You don't even know there's an external world. You don't even know there's an option to not be where you are. That can be an awful place. I think of it as something of a spectrum. In some ways, flow might even be called that. There's just an extra level of that. It's where you lose sight of it all. I think there's a practice to it. I don't think it's just an on-off sort of thing, because sometimes I'll read about it as if there's structures in the brain that are not functioning and whatever. Okay. Maybe. Maybe not.
I'd prefer to look at it as there is a practice to this. If we look at it as play, coming back to play, I'd alluded to this, play is deeply meaningful. If you look at a toddler in play, they are in this world in which internal and external are in flow with each other. They're asking questions. They're in exploration. They're discovering. As a result, they're making meaningful changes within themselves. It is a connection to meaning. So when I say play, that's what I'm referring to. I tend to look at success as a union of play and work. It's this flowing state, work being that which we do such that the world supports us in return, whether that's financial or caring or spiritual or whatever it is, that somehow the world is supporting us as a result of whatever we're doing.
We're aiming for that union. We're aiming for that harmony between these two. The trouble is, often with ADHD and wandering mind is that play is strong. Play is powerful. I love the metaphor that I've said said already two times, the race car. It's like, "I've got power." Well, I think it was Hallowell and Ratey-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. It was Hallowell.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
... in their "ADHD 2.0." It's like a Ferrari car with bicycle strength brakes.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I love that. I love that. But I think the only trouble I find with that metaphor is that it feels like that's a given, and you can't do anything about it. I switched the metaphor to a boat. There are no brakes on a boat in many ways, but you can do something with it. You can navigate with it. You can shift. You can have something you can do with that momentum. So I think you can practice it. Maybe you start practicing with what are the natural breaks in what I'm doing? Maybe you start practicing with learning how to set timers in a way that feel more meaningful, rather than something you just throw at future you, and just, "Eh, future you will figure it out. I'll set it for this time." Future you comes around and looks, "They didn't think about me. I'm not going to listen to that."
Pete Wright:
That's so true. Well, that's one of the reasons the idea of the visit is, I think, so tantalizing for me, because it's a tease. I can tease myself with this future productivity. In that way, I'm sending my future self a love note that says, "Oh, you did write your name on that thing that one day. I love you. You're great, past you. You did a good thing." I low-key love the idea of being able to send myself a love note in the future.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I love the idea of a love note for the future. That's great.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, certainly, it opens up the opportunity of getting started, whatever that looks like. Whether it's just opening up the document, putting your name on the paper, or whatever it might be, yeah, I like it, too.
Pete Wright:
Well, yeah, because that metaphor of the boat, yeah, you can steer the boat, but you can also beach it. That's one of the things we call out, I think often, which is like, "What do we need to do to make this a practice?" Going from practice to pattern recognition, that's another thing that I think we sometimes struggle with when we're talking about work. The things that we run into at work with the ADHD brain are striving for potentially play, and the order of the human structure with which we are presented sometimes runs headlong into our drive for creativity and improvisation. Does that ring any bells for you?
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I think, if I'm hearing it right, the example that came to mind as you said that, and you tell me if I'm off, is, at least for me personally, when I'm in a creative state, interruptions are very difficult. It throws me off.
Pete Wright:
Context shifts are a disaster.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Yeah. But it depends on the type. For example, growing up in, let's say, junior high, high school time, I needed to entertain myself. So the way I would do that is I would do the homework of another class while I was in this class, whatever class I was. So I'd be switch tasking between the two. Even though there was a context, for me, that worked, whatever that was. Or I would be doodling or something. That was something like that. But what I was just describing, if I'm playing at the piano or if I'm writing, or writing in particular, somebody asks something from me, I'm like, "Ah! I just had this idea." I'm like, "It's going to go away." At least, that's what came to mind as you described it. I think, if I understand it, the question is, how do we manage that? How do we deal with that in our work environments in particular in context of the subject?
Pete Wright:
Right. Because look at all the things that conjures up. That distraction can lead to, "Oh, I just had this idea, and now I'm full of that rejection sensitivity that I'm never going to be able to find it again, and I'm self-loathing about it. Also, I resent you for interrupting me." It can be a cascading and, again, unkind way through it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay. As a coach-
Pete Wright:
Uh oh. We got a flag on the field.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Right away.
Nikki Kinzer:
As a coach, I'm putting my flag in. I think it starts with how you are thinking about it. When you said, Pete, that it's a disaster, that to me put a red flag, because immediately you've already determined that it's going to be a disaster.
Pete Wright:
When I'm sitting here on the podcast, it's super easy for me to say, "Yes, of course, we have to have positive language. We got to get rid of those limiting beliefs." Yet, when I'm interrupted while I'm in the middle of writing something that is the next great thing in the world, that I'm about to give to the world, and I'm interrupted, that is one of the times when making it a practice becomes so important because my instinct is triggered.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. You're angry. Mad.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Frustrated. Whatever the word might be. Right, right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So I'm sorry to put a-
Kourosh Dini, MD:
It is frustrating.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
No, no, no. Not at all. It's frustrating. It's like, "Ah! I was doing something there." I'm thinking about the comment, Nikki, that you'd made about the approach, like, "How are you thinking about it? Is this necessarily a disaster or not?" In some ways, I think you make a good point because sometimes, the idea that I'd had might still come back later, and in better form. This actually speaks to that visit idea I was talking about earlier. When you start making visits, those aha moments between visits are much more prominent because you've been with it. Let's just throw in that as one more positive for it. Still, in context of work, when you're trying to deal with this sort of ... so, for example, dealing with, let's say, one of those messenger ... You guys use Discord, I think.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Is that right?
Pete Wright:
Absolutely.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I would need to figure out a way that I could parse out Discord if that were part of my work. Or some people are using Slack or other types of ... I have to figure out how to make it so that I only have visits to that for particular periods of time because, for me, those are like parties, and I'm not a party person. They're things going on. If you don't mind me jumping, one thought. I was at at a party once, and the photographer was sitting down on the side. I walked up to the guy and said, "You doing okay?" He told me, "Yeah, I'm just a little extroverted out right now."
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, I so understand that.
Pete Wright:
I love that.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I know. It's such a great phrase. I love it. But when it comes to any of those, it's like this. Anyway, with work, they might expect you to be at the party all day. This is where I have to be able to know, whether through visits or through whatever method of work, I have to know my own internal rhythms, my own internal paths of creativity and what works for me. Then I have to sense, know what supports those. What helps me, for example, distance from interruption, would be an example. Not only that, I have to then sell that idea to whoever's in charge of that, meaning I have to make it super easy for them to be okay with that in some way. I have to make whatever coverages that need to be in place. I have to find the resources for all that and then also say, "This is even going to be better for the product or for you or for whatever it is." It makes it so it all they got to do is say, "Okay. Fine."
Then you're still not done because then what happens is you're both taking a risk at that point. They are taking a risk on you because they're making whatever accommodation and all that, and you're taking a risk on yourself because you're not sure if you can deliver now that they've ... So now, like, "Oh, pressure's on." But that is how trust is formed, because the foundation of any relationship, work relationship, your relationship with your environment, relationship with your folks, with your friends, with whoever, the fundamental part of it is trust. Trust versus mistrust is the first stage of Ericsson's developments, the psychoanalyst. It is there throughout our days and all that.
Trust is a developing belief that requires time, a developing belief that something will continue to behave as it has been such that it may be relied on. Say that again. Trust is a developing belief that something will continue to behave as it has been, such that it may be relied on. Now, the way you grow trust, then, is through risk. Risk is the little things where you don't know, can I rely on this or not? So you take these calculated risks with your coworker, with your employer, with whomever it is, in a way that you're saying, "Look, here's the calculated risk. Can you take this with me?" As you do that, you build trust. You build the relationship. You build the environment around you such that you are starting to have a better and better workspace. So that works for you and works for them.
Pete Wright:
It's like a stress test.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
How do you mean?
Pete Wright:
I just mean when you push on the boundaries, when you're talking about taking risks, it sounds very much like, "We're pushing on the boundaries to see if the internal constructs we built are resilient enough to allow us to trust them next time."
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Yep. Yeah. You're doing that, hopefully, in a calculated way. That comes back to that idea of the fusion of play and work. You're trying to find where your inner creativity or powerful self is in those. As you do that, you develop trust in self, which is confidence.
Nikki Kinzer:
What would you say to someone who doesn't have the trust in themselves to even go with the idea to the other person?
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I tend to think of that as starting to develop it on your own, preferably, rather than in the workspace. But these things might happen simultaneously. Sometimes you get a win at work in whatever way, and that really gives you some boost. But sometimes you start just at home. It might be there's a bunch of stuff sitting on the floor, and I just don't want to do it. Those I-don't-want-to feelings really grip hard. Then you're in that state of confusion. "I want to pick up the stuff from the floor and toss it in a hamper, but there's a part of me that just, I don't want to." It's starting to learn how to navigate that, that I think, maybe with a visit, maybe with some other method of doing it, that you start developing little bits of confidence that eventually start to hopefully become cohesive, and you can start presenting yourself at that huge jump sometimes of being interpersonal. Sometimes it's a monstrous jump. How do you start doing that in a smaller way? Not easy. I think it's different for each person.
Nikki Kinzer:
Sure. But I love that. I love that it's visiting the other areas of your life that can build the confidence. In a work area that feels like it's a higher consequence, it feels like the outcome could be worse. I don't know if I'm saying that right. But yeah, I love your approach. I think it's nice.
Pete Wright:
The outcome is like calcification. It changes from "I don't want to" to "I'm not going to," when, with the force of practice, can go from-
Nikki Kinzer:
How can I visit?
Pete Wright:
... I don't want to ... Yeah. I don't want to, but I'm going to visit. I don't want to-
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm going to visit it. Yeah-
Pete Wright:
... but I can. It's possible for me to do this thing. Again, one of those words that we've talked about so many times on the show is the should. It's like, "I know I should, but I don't want to, so I'm not going to." That's the defeatism that we're trying to break out of and not get calcified in, if that makes sense.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
It makes perfect sense. The idea of the visit, what you're doing is, oftentimes we're very focused on the attention aspect of things, or the time aspect of things, and for good reason. But there's a vital aspect that's often missing, which is decision. Decision needs to be supported. Any productivity system worth its salt centers on a huge part of it being decision. What happens when you show up, when you go to the visit? You are paying something. You are paying the visit. You are going to the thing, moving distractions aside and sitting with the thing. But you are not forcing anything to happen. You don't have to do anything. So you are putting yourself in a position to make the decision, "Do I want to do this or not?" If you do want to do it, you are now at the edge of action. At least, I like that phrase, edge of action, where all you need to do is barely nudge it forward.
You barely nudge it forward, and now you're in the next position. Do I want to nudge it forward again? Well, maybe I will. Okay. Now I've nudged it forward twice. Any rhythm is built on two beats. So you've done it twice. Now you've got a bit of a rhythm. Now you've got possibly the initial flow. You still have the agency. You have the decision. You have every right to say, "I don't want it," at any stage. As opposed to what's very often, I think, systems that are very frequent with ADHD in particular, are these enslaving, forcing, anxiety-based systems that are, "I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to procrastinate until I get to the deadline. I have to just push myself harder." Whereas, this is about, "No, be honest with where your emotions are, but be there at the place where it would be easy to make something happen if you chose to do so."
Pete Wright:
We're nearing the end. I have a couple of more things I want to just poke at you about.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Please.
Pete Wright:
One of them is this idea of hiding ADHD at work. I don't necessarily mean answering the binary question, "Should you tell your boss at work that you have ADHD?" But when we talk about trust in self, it's the same approach. When you are hiding ADHD at work, who are you hiding it from? When you're hiding your ADHD from yourself, you're dealing with that struggle to find a home at work and just appear like you're holding it all together when you're deeply struggling internally. That sense of inner conflict, how does one go about using some of the concepts we talked about today, the concept of flow, finding flow and pushing on systems and taking risks, to start to absolve that conflict at work?
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I think it's right in tune with it. I like the metaphor of the word mask because when you put on a mask, you are creating a wall between yourself and the world. You are disconnecting an important part of yourself, that part of you that is meaningful. When you use the word home, to me, that means ... Maybe I should ask you, "How do you define that?" At least, the way I hear it, I don't know. Do you want to define it?
Pete Wright:
No, I'd like to know how you hear it.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
All right. Here's how I hear it. I hear it as a place where you can discover play. I hear it as a place that you can discover that playful sense of self in a way that lets you start creating and be that powerhouse. I think it needs to be a developmental process. I think it needs to be taken over time, just as we're talking about this idea of those incremental risks, because there might be situations where it is unwise to reveal something. There might be somebody who is punitive or a bully or whatever. They exist. So it is, I think, those gentle risks that you're like, "I'm really worried that such-and-such might happen if they knew." Okay.
Another approach might be, rather than labeling anything, I tend to be very cautious with labels, and rather than label, why not work with just the symptom, the issue? Like, "Okay. I have troubles with deadlines. Okay. What if I did this instead of this? Or what if I started here? What if I ask them to give me the information at this time? Then you're not talking about ADHD. You're just talking about a specific. "I'd like this to help me out here, and that'll help you there." Labels don't become a part of the discussion, necessarily.
Pete Wright:
I love the idea of that because, again, it reminds me of one of my favorite metaphors on this breaking something down and finding the reward. It's a carnival game. You're picking up an air rifle, and you're shooting targets. You're picking up beanbags, and you're throwing them at bottles. Whatever the case, the more you toss, the more you shoot, the more you throw, the closer you are to getting a giant stuffed bear. Eventually, there is reward at the end of approaching these at a micro level, and making a practice of thinking micro in order to achieve macro.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I would agree. Yes. When you say that, I think of the piano.
Pete Wright:
Oh, please. Let's talk about the piano. Sure.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
I didn't know you played. I'm excited to know this.
Pete Wright:
I do. I was this close to moving my whole rig out onto my piano.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Well, that's wonderful. I'd love to geek out on it. The way it came to mind, though, is when you are able to sit at the piano, I learned this from Kenny Werner. Kenny Werner wrote this book. He's a jazz pianist who wrote "Effortless Mastery." He's this, I feel, unsung hero in the productivity world because it's not written as a productivity book. It's a piano ... Anyway, when you're able to take a deep breath and barely touch the keys, and just learn how to play a single note really nicely, just that you can hear the music behind one single note, everything you play in that practice session becomes so much better, becomes so much richer. The way you hit each key, the velocity of each key, the phrasing of each thing, the timing of everything, the little tiny things makes a huge difference in the large. Anyway, that's what came to mind.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love that.
Pete Wright:
I'm just giddy with that. I'm teaching my son right now. Okay. Whatever you think about parents getting in the middle of the teaching process for music, it comes with its own little red wagon of baggage that I'm bringing around. But he has a teacher, and she's great. She's very nice. But sometimes I wish she would think about concepts that are a little bit broader. To me, it's all about shapes. It's the same way you learn chords on a guitar. When you think of learning the shapes of the chords as you play them to better increase your ability to match patterns when you see them on the page, it's an incredibly powerful metaphor to just learn the basic shapes for your fingers so that when you barely touch the keys, as you say, you have an anticipation of what's going to happen next. You know what that shape will yield, and you have confidence that taking the risk of actually pushing down and making sound will actually yield positive results.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
That's great. That's great. Oh, man. I could keep going.
Nikki Kinzer:
[inaudible 00:42:47] Pete.
Pete Wright:
I definitely could, but at the risk of being too presumptuous, we might just have to have another conversation with you, Kourosh. This has been really just wonderful. Talk about the absolute luxury that I feel like I have to be able to play in this space with you both, it's a deep honor. Thank you so much for doing it. I can't let you go without talking a little bit more detail with our people about what you're doing right now with the Wandering Mind book and group and what you're trying to accomplish there.
Kourosh Dini, MD:
Sure. Oh, thank you. Yeah. That idea of the visit, I've basically structured an entire way of working around it. I call it Waves of Focus, is what the system is. wavesoffocus.com. If I can plug that, I hope that's all right. It is about how do you bring play into your day-to-day in a way that feels responsible, in a way that feels like you are engaging the things that are meaningful to you, and such that you can enjoy yourself? As we're talking about it, I continue to play piano every day despite everything I do, and with everything I do. It still informs and flows into everything I do. I want to, in very clear, directed ways, presenting what are the exercises you need to get there?
It's not like I can just say, "Here's the thing you do." It's not like, "Here's a list you create." I tend to look at these as exercises, things you develop over time. It's like, "What do you get out of lifting a heavy object over and over again? Or why do we run in circles over and over again?" It doesn't make sense in one way, but in another, once you start exercising, you start building certain ways. Then new things start opening to you. New health starts opening to you. New places you can go start opening to you. Anyway, I realize I'm waxing very general at this point. I'll stop.
Pete Wright:
It's one of the things that is so attractive about the way you approach all of these concepts, whether OmniFocus or DEVONthink, or, in fact, the wandering mind, again, gentleness and kindness and expansiveness. It is a unique niche for you, Kourosh. It is just fantastic reads, all of them. Thank you so much for your contributions today and elsewhere. Everybody, definitely go check out all of these resources, links in the show notes. It's been fantastic, both of you. Thank you so much.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
We appreciate all of you for downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for your time and attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're heading over to the show talk channel in the Discord server. You can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Doctor Kourosh Dini, I'm Pete Wright. We'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control, the ADHD Podcast. Oh ...
