The Visit with Kourosh Dini, MD
This week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast, we welcome back the insightful Kourosh Dini, MD, for a deeper dive into the surprisingly simple yet profoundly effective concept of "the visit." Since his last appearance, we've been hearing incredible stories from our listeners about how this technique has transformed their relationship with tasks, and we're thrilled to have him back to share more. “The visit" isn't about powering through a to-do list; it's about gently engaging with a task, even just for a single deep breath, and building trust in our future selves. He breaks down the two essential elements: showing up (fully present with the task) and staying (lingering for just a moment), emphasizing that this seemingly small act can spark unexpected breakthroughs.
We all know the struggle of force-based work – the urgency, the shame, the last-minute scramble fueled by a desperate need for a dopamine hit. Dr. Dini offers a refreshing alternative with the visit, suggesting that it opens us up to a wider range of emotions and allows us to tap into our innate playfulness. This shift, he explains, can transform work from a dreaded chore into a more sustainable and even enjoyable experience. He also addresses the common worry of "over-visiting" a task, assuring us that repeated visits can actually deepen our understanding and pave the way for real progress.
Ever feel like you're staring blankly at your task list, overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you need to do? Dr. Dini gets it. He explains how visits can combat that dreaded task blindness and help us regain momentum. By regularly checking in with a task, even briefly, we maintain a connection and avoid the sense of being lost or overwhelmed. He shares a relatable analogy from his experience as a musician, highlighting how stepping away from a challenging composition can often lead to unexpected insights upon returning.
Finally, Dr. Dini reminds us that real progress isn't always measurable. In a world obsessed with quantifiable results, he encourages us to value the internal shifts that happen during and between visits. These unmeasurable moments of insight, he argues, are the true building blocks of meaningful work. Join us as we explore the power of the visit, not as a quick fix but as a pathway to a more fulfilling and sustainable way of working.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and 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:
As we record this, it officially feels like fall now. Did you notice, it's just like somebody flipped a switch?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, it's colder in the morning for sure.
Pete Wright:
I love it. I love it so much. It's light sweater weather, which as you know is my favorite weather.
Nikki Kinzer:
Is it? I did not know that.
Pete Wright:
It's already burned through all of my light sweaters and I am now back into-
Nikki Kinzer:
Into flannel.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, but believe me, I'll come back around to light sweater weather.
Nikki Kinzer:
Once you've done laundry.
Pete Wright:
It is delightful. Yes. Yeah, well is it is a very exciting day. We have a fantastic return guest who surprisingly was surprised that he was even asked to be a return guest. We'll deal with that in therapy. But before we dig in, we need to tell you to hang out at takecontroladhd.com. You can get to know us a little bit better and see all of the things that we have on offer. You can listen to the show, of course, right there on the website or subscribe to the mailing list. We'd love you to subscribe to the mailing list and then we'll send you an episode every time it goes live. Every week, you'll just get it in your mailbox where you can listen to it. You can connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest at takecontroladhd. But to really connect with us, hang out in the Discord community.
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Kourosh Dini is back with us today. I am thrilled because as I am want to say, I'm a massive fan of the work of Kourosh Dini. I learned that I am three, four, four on his books that I have read and I am shamed by it. I must remedy this immediately. I didn't even know, as excited as I could be that there's another book to read. So I'm very excited about that. Today we're going to talk about one of the principle concepts that he brought up last time he was here that people keep talking about, which is the idea of the visit. And this week we're going to amplify that. We're going to talk about the visit, we're going to talk about force-based work, and we're also going to talk about fires-based work. Oh, I'm excited to talk about habituating emergencies. Kourosh, welcome back to the show.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Pete, Nikki, thank you so much for having me back again. I'm really honored. I'm excited to be here. Thank you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Welcome.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
I'm happy to get into it. I'm ready to take your lead. It sounds like visits. Yeah, no, that is kind of the centerpiece of things and I'm happy to run with it. So look-
Pete Wright:
I mean I'm already seeing it, Kourosh, in the chat room people are saying, Christina, "Visiting a task has changed my life." Right? I don't even know what you do with that kind of, I mean it's fantastic. So can we start by just giving us a bit of a replay? Might as well have you do it rather than us read from the transcript. Tell us again what the visit is.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yes. So just as a very concrete quick sort of overview of a visit, a visit is this, is that you choose some work or play, whatever it happens to be, and you show up to that thing or bring it to you, one or the other, whatever makes sense. And you preferably have distraction set aside or your environment set to whatever you'd like, preferably. And then lastly, you stay there for one single deep breath. There are two binds if you will in this. The bind number one is to show up or have it come to you, whatever, to actually be there with it. And the second bind is the staying there for a single deep breath of time.
But what that then does is that it releases and relieves your sense of agency. You get to decide what to do mentally. So optionally beyond that single deep breath, you can nudge it forward. You could not do that. You could not nudge it forward a couple of times and stumble into a flow. You can stop at any time you want, but simply being there with the thing and that single deep breath begins exposing you to the direct emotions that are related. And that's essentially what the visit is.
Pete Wright:
How'd you figure out this language? In terms of you stumbling into a process, how'd you land on this? When did it occur to you?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Oh my. It's a long-term running thing. So the original word I would use and still maybe occasionally interchange with it is session, which I think comes from my work as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. And what I started to do back in, I think 2012, 2013, as I was writing what was originally called Workflow Beyond Productivity, I was trying to figure out what is the unit of work. And so I stumbled into session and the session had these parts, it had this opening, had a being, had a closing, at the very beginning has this decision. So decision goes first, I said it out of order. But eventually, I'm trying to think of how I stumbled into the word visit specifically. I think it's that I was aiming as much as possible, which is I think summarizes so much of my work, to support the sense of agency and to define that is, it's one's skill and ability to decide nonreactive, be able to reflect on what are the emotions, the worlds that are coming at your world of your consciousness and make a decision from there.
That's where you exercise that degree of free will, if you will, and I'm trying to support that. I'm trying to say how do we make that the strongest part because that's so much of what gets injured in ADHD and other because we constantly bump into things, stumble into things and wind up not being able to trust ourselves. We wind up being able to say, "I have to do this. I have to wait for the deadline. I have to be told this, I have to..." Blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the visit was a way of saying, it's a way of trying to develop the relationship with oneself to be able to say, "I'm going to show up there and I'm going to start trying to develop trust in that future self." When they show up, they will make their own decisions as to what's a good idea or not in that time and I don't have to twist the arm.
That's why I bring up the two binds, why I call them a bind, showing up and staying for that single deep breath. Those are the requirements. If you can make those two binds, you can make the visit and then develop actually an entire system around using that visit as a unit of work. One last thing I'll say about it is that it introduces as a unit of work, a different way of work rather than units of time, like 30 minutes of work or units of finishing the work or milestones of work. So this introduces a third type of work. Anyway, little off your question, sorry.
Pete Wright:
It was perfect and what's blowing up for me right now is, and Nikki, I'll bet you're thinking this too. When you stop and say I am in some way developing trust in my future self, that is shining bright with the atomic heat of the white-hot sun for me, because that I feel like is a thing we struggle with so deeply.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Just day to day, is how do I trust myself?
Nikki Kinzer:
I was just going to say and how do I trust myself to not have to wait for the deadline or to not have to wait for the severe consequence to happen in order for me to get started?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Absolutely. Because that is, trust is with Eric Ericson, a psychoanalyst, described that as the very first thing we develop in our world is trust versus mistrust out of those stages of life. And it doesn't stop in that infancy stage. It's what we do with our environments and it's what we do between our past, present and future selves as we develop our tasks and tasks being this stored intention, this thing that we hold and say, okay, hey, tell my future, put it in a message in a bottle that future you get. And that really is the centerpiece of it because what happens if you don't, you lose out on all these different layers of relating to your future self.
If you can't trust future you, what you start doing is you make demands. You say, "Okay, I have to wait for the deadline or I'm going to put out different trip wires for myself everywhere. Okay, I'm going to have to remember to do this and I'm going to remember it by putting it right here in my way." Or things like that where suddenly future you is going to have to act immediately and you're essentially twisting their arm, which is why I describe this as a force. We often resort to force-based ways because we don't trust that person. We're forcing ourselves when we don't trust them.
Pete Wright:
So when I come back to, I'll say my lived experience with ADHD, I'm curious at what point, what is it about the tools inside the visit and we'll call them the two binds, as you said, the two binds. Which one is it that is addressing my wandering fireworks attention span? Is it the deep breath that's getting me there? What is it that's connecting to that part of me?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
It is allowing that part of you. It is rather than saying I have to act differently, I have to think differently. It is since those are the only two binds, you are allowed to be, you are allowed to think in whatever ways you think. And the idea is that you'll, as you absorb and connect with the emotions that are happening in that moment, that's where you heighten that sense of agency, of that ability. I can decide, I can decide which way I want to go. And when you do that, that's where the interaction with what I call playfulness. Sometimes I can't say this is always the case, but sometimes I think of ADHD as an overabundance of play, that it's the playful spirit is particularly strong and it's the dance between agency which can be reflected as a parent in some ways and child's, and what's their relationship. That is what you're forming.
So I like to sometimes think of our contexts where we work as a playground or a workspace, but I like to think of it as we're trying to develop that sense of how can I play into work? How can I make things move forward as I play? And so the binds are our way, is the parent designing the playground. I'm creating this world around which you can now sit down and have that, go ahead and have that. And the more you can design that environment to help yourself be in that playful state to move things forward, I think the more I think fulfilled, we tend to be, at least I do, I view mastery and meaningful work to develop from guided play. And so that's what I look at those two binds as doing, I look at it as being a part of creating that play space that eventually is that weds play in work.
Pete Wright:
It also seems to resolve feelings of tension, as I'm just hearing you talk about this, on externalities, the stresses of externalities. If I'm in a state of play in my work, then I'm able to at least for a little while, maybe let go of the fact that there are people waiting on me and ideally move toward better work. Which to me makes an able segue if I do say so myself back to forced based work methods. Because like Nikki said earlier, what are we waiting for? We're waiting for dopamine to kick in so that we can actually get something done at the last minute. And so I'm curious how you see the visit really relating to this force-based work and these habits that we get ourselves into.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yes. So one example, one exercise that I suggest is, and it relates to the one that I didn't come up with the entire exercise, some of it came from Mark Forrester, so I want to make sure credit where it's due. But the idea is let's say you list out a bunch of things that are due in your world and you choose the one that's furthest out there. All right, whichever one's the furthest out, choose that one. Okay. And that's where this comes in now. Now you start a visit based approach where you show up preferably on the day it's assigned if you can, but just with this exercise, you start it with this exercise and make a daily visit, show up to this thing once a day. You don't have to do any of it. You can nudge it forward if you want the same things that I just described.
I'm willing to bet quite often you'll beat that deadline far in advance, such that you'll have a new problem that you don't want to tell that person how far you've beaten it because you might get more work to do, which is a good problem to have I think.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
But what happens is that dopamine, so that's what I wrote down here, the word dopamine. Is while it's a chemical, it's also a metaphor. It's also a thing that symbolizes the things that get us going. And that can come from many emotions. And that could be play and that can be urgency. We've taught Dr. Dodson has those five, one of my clients put it into a mnemonic of chin up, which I like, which is challenge, interest, novelty, urgency, passion, right?
Pete Wright:
That's good.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yeah, that's great. But I think it goes beyond that. It's whatever the emotion is that's powerful. You can look at danger or you can look at lust or you can look at caring. These are all powerful emotions that can really grab us. And what happens when you make a visit is that it becomes more than the single term of dopamine. And dopamine is this, what gets us going. It becomes more of a varied fabric of emotion. It becomes the ecology of what our internal world is about. And oh, this is interesting. Oh, I see that. Oh, how about this?
I like to think of we start meeting these windows of challenge. Window meaning it's not too boring and it's not too over stimulating. We meet right in the, it's that entry into flow idea. And so you meet that first step and then maybe another and then in another and then another, and now you're in it. And that's what this starts to invite you to do. And then you start realizing, you start developing a trust within yourself that you can find those things without the deadline, without the urgency, without the harshness that comes from that. Where from feelings of shame for example, there's another force-based method, shames. If I only shame myself hard enough, maybe I'll start and sometimes-
Pete Wright:
Because so many of us, I look at that chin up mnemonic and for us it's chin ADHD. That urgency is what we're waiting for as a tool to live, right?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
And that's how we get anything done, not by thoughtful meditative approach to looking at our things every day and making that adjustment is catastrophically difficult.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
So we all look, absolutely, so that you of the chin up is like what we're all waiting for. But if you look at that chin up sense, challenge is something we can adjust deliberately. And that happens by showing up. By being in the visit, you start seeing, oh, I can write my name over. That's about as far as I can do right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
I just want to be clear about what visiting is because I can look at my task manager and visit a lot of different tasks that I'm seeing over and over and over again every single day. But that doesn't feel like what it is that you're talking about. It feels like it's not just looking at it on the list, it's actually opening up a file that has your brainstorm list that you already did that you need to see where you left off.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yeah, that's the first bind, that's being with it. You have to be in the midst of the stuff. You have to open the files, be there with it, again, preferably with distractions set aside or your environment set in a way that gives you the stimulation that would help you out. That's just preferable. That's not a have-to because you can easily procrastinate in any direction with that one. And yeah, being there absorbing it, feeling it for that single deeper.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I feel like that's spawned a question for me. That takes me back a minute. I should have asked this way earlier. Is there ever a point where you've over-visited something? Because I know task blindness is a legitimate thing. To Nikki's point, we are looking at, we know the things we have to do. Let's say we visit it, we take our deep breath and then we still don't move it forward. I mean, I'll answer what I think I want you to say, which is that movement happens imperceptibly as long as you're taking the deep breath and doing the visit to form, is that fair?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
That is fair. So the example I gave of the regular visit every day, that starts the second tool, if you will, of things and how I approach things, this waves method of approaching things. Is that as you visit something, as you expose yourself to the emotions, it starts to create, things start bubbling up and they happen between sessions. You're not or between... See, there you go. I've used the word session. It happens between visits. That's where aha moments start to happen. That's where you kind of go, "Oh wait, what if I did this? What if I tried that? Okay, I'm going to do it this way." And then you show up the thing and every time you make that visit, getting to the work or having the work come to you becomes easier. Ideas become more real. You start dispelling the anxieties of the unknown, which are a huge part of what tends to keep us away.
And so it's that transition of realizing that showing up and doing nothing, not anything that appears to us is actually not nothing. It's one of the things that I can get on a soapbox about quite a lot is where we often tend to privilege things that can be measured and most of what is meaningful cannot be measured. That's the theory that I put forward. And thoughts just bubbling on the unconscious and it's coming up. I don't know how you're going to measure that. If you figure out a way, fine, go for it. But to me that's a substance of our experience and that's what starts to go, "Oh, what about this? Oh, what about that?" So maybe you come up with an idea and I have, for example, when I'm writing a book, I have a visit every day, I'm visiting this thing and I have an area that I call thoughts to add.
It's a project that's sitting in my task manager and I'll be walking along, "Oh wait, what about this?" And then I just add it there, it sits there and it waits for me at the next visit. When I show up at that visit, "Oh, maybe I could write about that. Oh, what about this? I hadn't. Well, what about that?" Anyway, they're all, so what then actually winds up looking like with several of my students and clients is they will tell me that more often than not, after about two or three visits, things start moving if it's particularly tough.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and because what you're breaking free from is that when you avoid and avoid and avoid, you forget. You forget how far you've come, you forget what you've already done. You forget all of those fresh ideas and you just keep avoiding it. So you're actually doing, when you're looking at it and visiting it every day, you are eliminating all of that. It's still going to be forefront in mind, which is so important.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
And that's a great point. You're also avoiding the sense of loss. Let's say you've started something and it's now sitting there and it's shaming you by sitting on the edge of the dining room table and this pile that you've... I'm like, you've lost the momentum and there's this feeling of I won't be able to get back to what was there. But what you miss is that you create a new one. You create a new momentum that is fresh and has new ideas that are who you are.
Pete, you'd ask where I'd get these ideas. Part of that comes from writing music. So I'm sitting there, I'm writing a piece, and sometimes I get into a thing and it's starting to give me a headache and it's like it's not a good piece of music and I don't like it but I have to keep pushing and I've lost it. I've lost the momentum. And then now what? So I set it aside and I come back the next day and I'm still angry at it, and then the next day and then whatever, and then eventually I might scrap it or I might find something new. But what happens is I'm back and I'm fresh and what I had done creates the kindling for something new. I can take those ideas and now, oh, I have a new one. Oh, and only in retrospect do I look at it and say, "Oh, that idea that I had there was fertilized for what came later."
Pete Wright:
It seems like just the act of visiting absolves you of the emotional baggage of the fear and the regret and the uncertainty and anger and doubt that comes with things that, well, that we carry emotional baggage behind. I think that leads to an effort to soften the blow of the anxiety based work, right? I mean, am I making a model out of this?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yes, no, it-
Pete Wright:
Am I understanding the model that exists?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
It softens that anxiety, definitely. It does not. And this is where it's hard, soften the anxiety or worries or thoughts or any of the emotions that are in the work itself. So that's the part that the bravery comes in. That's the part that I look at it and I'm like, "Okay, now what?" But you wind up often, that's where you start titrating to the window of challenge. That idea of, I'll write my name on this and then what happens is I'll brush the dust off of this. Okay, fine. And what about this? And that window, what you can start taking on starts shifting and changing. And you might start actually finding, oh, I can take, can do this part. Okay. And then you start realizing maybe on visit number 38 or something, oh, I can actually get through this. And so it removes exactly what you're talking, like the anxiety of, it's not just anxiety. All right, I'll say this. It's also again that part of us that says I don't want to, it's the anxiety's-
Pete Wright:
That's all capital letters for us too, right?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I don't want to.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
I don't want to. It's a strong part of us that we've only reinforced by using force-based methods. And when we wait for the deadline over and over or shame ourselves over, there's this part of us that says, "I don't want to deal with that feeling." And that thing over there represents all of that feeling. So if I force myself to, so usually what you do is you create this sort of anxiety based system where it's like, okay, I'm going to wait for the deadline. I'm fine, I'm still fine, I'm still fine, but I'm still fine is just a brake pedal on the anxiety system. It's still fueled by it. When you do this instead where you start at a visit, preferably the end of the day it's assigned, you remove that, it's no longer the anxiety. And so you remove, you lessen tremendously the I don't want to feeling, as long as you can make those two binds.
Pete Wright:
We've talked about the visit, we're talking about force or anxiety-based work methods. I would like to talk about in a little bit more detail the fires-based work methods. I have a loose theory that we teach ourselves to live in a space where we are only able to put out fires in our days. And in the most absurdly sort of pathologically, deranged way of celebrating, we celebrate that all we do all day is put out fires. Putting out fires removes all space to visit. How do you break that cycle?
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
So the technical ways to start a visit is basically to choose some work or play, whatever it happens to be. Write it out if you want. Write out a list of some things that you, it could be something easy and fun if you want to make it that way, whatever you'd like. And have tons of fires, do your fires, I'm not going to say don't do your fires [inaudible 00:28:36] But introduce somewhere in the day a single visit, which is again, that single deep breath. If you can do that single deep breath of time, that's where you start creating the crack in the foundations of that. And with this stipulation, this part of it that moves it from just visit to what I call a guide, you can change this at any time. You can change what you're visiting at any time. They'll preferably do so at the end of a visit.
So let's say you're choosing to, I don't know, read a particular book and at some point you're like, "I'm sick of the damn book. I don't like this book. I don't want to do it anymore." Fine. At the end of picking up that book, deep breath, that's when you say, "I'm closing this, I'm not doing this. I'm putting this back on the shelf." And maybe if you want to choose something else to take its place as the next visit to continue forward. You start doing that, you wind up having a thing that you can visit and develop and all that, but you start having a practice within yourself that you can start doing things in your time. So it teaches you in a very experiential level, which is where you need to be learning. Knowledge is great and it's fine, but all it's going to do is going to tell you what structure. It's going to help guide you to create the structures to experience things as part of what the visit does is it helps you start to experience. I can make things happen in my time and it doesn't require fire.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think I relate to this because we hear this all the time and as you're talking, I'm thinking about what do people say when you tell them, well, you can start developing a muscle to get yourself out of the fires-based approach. They say, "Well, I have too many people coming at me with too many demands. My boss really is counting on me to do these things. This is what I was hired to do. I have this responsibility." And it starts to sound like really they're just using more words to say I don't want to, I don't want to for many reasons. And one of those reasons is I don't understand change. I don't understand what my life would look like. And because I can't picture it, I am not able to make that transition.
Nikki Kinzer:
And I just want to be clear with what you're saying, Pete, when you're talking about change, you're talking about taking that minute in the middle of the day to visit, that that it seems so foreign a concept. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. You're telling me that there's a future in which I'm not working fire to fire to fire in which I don't feel stress, anxiety, uncertainty, doubt when I am working every day, I don't know what that looks like. I know that this is my job to feel like this and I'm not going to change because I can't picture it.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Absolutely. Yeah. So don't picture it, fine. Show up and try it. See what happens. See what happens if you have that single deep breath. It's in that way more of I'll sometimes rail against goals. I know we all get very excited-
Nikki Kinzer:
Me too.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
... and goals, goals can be fine. They can be very helpful.
Nikki Kinzer:
They can be harmful too.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
But they can be very harmful, absolutely. And I like to think of a vision more than a goal. And the vision that I describe it, what's the difference, is that it can be very blurry. It can be very just a sense, it's just, oh, in that direction, I'm going to go that way. And that's usually how I write things or build things or create whatever I wind up creating. Let's go there. I don't know what's going to happen. I'll figure it out as I go at that time, at that visit. What we're looking for is, there's a couple of forces that I think you're describing in this work environment, a few forces. One is it might be impossible, it might be an environment that requires constant fires and that's all the job is and that's what you're in.
But barring that, and to your point of how much are we colluding with that? How much are we creating that? How much are we making? Is our sense of identity. If I'm not that, who am I? I'm scared of who that person might be. Would I just be a lump on the couch and not function? That might be one idea. Would I, well, who knows what, but it's also the lack of skills in other ways, it's I don't know how to delegate to future me in a way that's not about twisting their arm. So the visit begins a process of invitation instead of delegation or instead of forcing, it's, hey, I'd like you to show up to this thing. I don't remember if I used this example on the last podcast, so if it's all right, I'd like to just share it with you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, please.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
So the example I'd give is showing up to a person's house. Did I describe this?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
I did.
Nikki Kinzer:
But please do it again because I think again-
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Do it again, okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
... this is really important. Yeah.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Yeah. So we want between the past, present and future selves, we want to honor past self, care for, I mean respect current self and care for future you. Those are the ways I described it. So the way we do this, we write this invitation to future you. "Hey, I'd like you to make this visit. I'd like you to come over." And to honor the past self, and we often think of past self as who the hell is past? Past is gone. We don't care. But to honor them, we make that visit, we show up. And if we're not feeling it it's much better to that host, that past self to say, "You know what? I'm not feeling it today. I can't be here." It's much better to do that in person. It's much better, you can call them, you can text them. But if you show up on their doorstep and say, "Look, here's a gift for the party." I don't know whatever you want to say, but I showed up, but I can't be here today for whatever reason.
It affects you, it affects you, it affects past self, it affects present self, and it affects future because you start developing a certain trust for yourself. It's a very basic developing, it's the nascent level of trust. Trust is a development thing. Trust, I don't know if I saw this before. Trust is a developing belief that something will continue to behave as it has been such that it may be relied on. Say that one more time. Trust is a developing belief that something will continue to behave as it has been, such that it may be relied on. Developing means that it's developing, it's taking time. You have to take that time. That's where, it's another word for confidence. Confidence is trust within oneself, trust within one's skills, trust within the other. And it's not something you can fake. You can take calculated risks to develop that trust, but when you start showing up to the invitations you make for yourself, showing up at their doorstep, you start that initial fabric of building this skill, this muscle and saying, "Wow, I can trust me."
Pete Wright:
You get yourself out of the ADHD-critic hot water by leaning in on developing. Because I think, so the knee-jerk response is that that's impossible. I live in a state of constant distrust of myself. But once you, I think those who hear that and hear that voice in themselves, if you just shoehorn or shiv that developing in there, it gives you permission to be who you are in the moment. It gives you permission to be and know that you're not perfect and you're not going to be perfect tomorrow and you weren't perfect yesterday, but you're on a journey that implies motion. And you have said multiple times, and I think this goes with your whole aquatic vibe, but you have used mist as a way to define uncertainty. And I think developing is in the mist and it's okay to be in the mist. It's okay to be in the mist as long as you're still moving. That's what I get from you today. That's beautiful.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, it's great. This was so good, so good. I want to share something with our audience too. This is a little bit different from the visiting the task, but I just think it's important because it's very relevant to when you get stuck. And I had a really great conversation with a couple of members of my membership and we were both talking about our motivation and how is it that you can love what you do, but you don't feel like doing it and where's that coming from? And one of the things that she said to me is she said, "Well, where's your joy in the work that you're doing?"
And so I actually wrote it down on a sticky note and it says, "Where's my joy?" There we go. And I put a little heart and I drew a little flower on it. And I'm using this as a reminder so that when I am getting stuck or I haven't quite visited yet, because I haven't done the two things, but I'm getting ready for it. I'm keeping this in mind that where's the joy? So I just wanted to add that because it feels really relevant to our conversation today.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Totally. Just where's the joy, that to me speaks of that playfulness that's like, I want to find that play within this.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I mean so much of it, we spinning off of Sean Blank's writing and his learning about margin. We had an episode a long time ago about how we find margin with ADHD. And that goes right back into this, which is if you're constantly in anxiety or force-based or fires-based work, then you're not giving yourself permission to find margin for yourself. And margin, this becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. If you can break that through visitation, if you can break that open to be mindful and playful and thoughtful about the work, you're actually buying margin back into your life to help you when the fires do occur. Because we know they do, fires come up, but you have to have space and heart and mind to be able to approach them. And I think that's really, that's a lovely message.
It is ADHD awareness month, as I'm sure you're aware because as a celebrant of neurodiversity, that's why you're here. Because I know you're also a musician, you're not going to have trouble improvising a little bit here. If we're sitting at a dinner table full of ADHD folks and we ask you, Kourosh, raise a glass, offer us a toast to ADHD to celebrate this particular month.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Offer a toast. All right, yeah. Okay. You are putting me on the spot. Now I got to come up with something that sounds all profound and stuff. Oh my, I've got the glass, second, all eight, let's see.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, yeah, we all have the glass. We're all ready.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
All right, so Dr. Hallowell, I believe wrote the ADHD 2.0 and along with, anyway, he had said, he made the comment of a Ferrari strength engine with bicycle strength brakes is we're often dealing with. And so the importance of inserting the pause is there. What is that pause? That's the brakes. The pause, which is part of the visit, you open it up and you're there with it and there's several places you can pause. The pause is about letting yourself be, I can let the waters be themselves as they are. Angry at myself, I'm angry at the world, anxious, I'm scattered. I'm thinking of 37 different things at once. To pauses. There you go.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. I love it.
Pete Wright:
To pauses.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it. That was great.
Pete Wright:
That was wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. We sure appreciate you. Visit all of and get all four. Find all four of Dr. Kourosh Dini's books at Kouroshdini.com. We will put the link in the show notes. Thank you for being here, friend. It's great to have you.
Dr. Kourosh Dini:
Thank you so much for having me.
Pete Wright:
And thank you everybody for listening to this 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 Dr. Kourosh Dini, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you next week right here on Taking Control, the ADHD Podcast.
