Ditching the Default: Designing a Life You Love with Kate House
Have you ever felt like you were living someone else's life? That the carefully constructed path you were on, the one paved with good grades, the "right" job, the societal expectations… it wasn't yours? Kate House did. At 25, she had what she calls a "quarter-life crisis." And what she discovered on the other side of that existential meltdown might just change how you think about living with intention.
Nikki and Pete sit down with Kate, a behavior change specialist and empowerment coach, to dissect the difference between living by default and living by design. It's a conversation that resonates deeply, particularly for those of us with ADHD, whose brains often feel wired for the former. Kate's story is one of transformation, from burnt-out corporate drone to energized entrepreneur, fueled by a simple question: "What's the next right step?"
This isn't about meticulously plotting out the next decade of your life. It's about recognizing the power of small actions, the ripple effect of tiny choices that can shift your trajectory from a life of quiet desperation to one filled with purpose and, dare we say it, sparkle. It's a human story, a universal struggle to break free from the inertia of expectation and embrace the messy, beautiful journey of self-discovery.
Kate shares her wisdom gleaned from hosting the Live by Design Podcast, where she explores these very themes with her own community. She helps high-achieving women reclaim their time and energy, setting goals with soul and building sustainable habits. If you're ready to ditch the default and design a life you truly love, this conversation is a must-listen.
Join Nikki, Pete, and Kate for a conversation that will leave you questioning your own defaults and inspire you to take control of the narrative, one small step at a time. Because sometimes, the smallest shift can unlock the greatest transformation.
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control VADHD 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:
I got big news this week, Nikki. An announcement for, this one's for members to let them know to please check their long dormant Placeholder feeds. There is a new Placeholder episode.
Nikki Kinzer:
New Placeholder episode.
Pete Wright:
Yes, and it is with our own community mod and all around great human being, Brian Brunel, who is a doctor of physical therapy. We talk all about the body and what our tech does to our bodies, as our backs curve and our hands cramp and all of those things that we're doing to our body thanks to the technology that we are using and I learned a ton-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, I'm sure,
Pete Wright:
... from this conversation and so I encourage everybody to grab it. If you are a member, make sure you check your feed. It's available to all members of our Patreon community. And if you're not, consider it because I guess Placeholder, you could say maybe back on a more regular schedule. So that's very exciting. That is my news today.
Now, our conversation today is going to be fantastic. I feel like it's a returning guest, but it's not really a returning guest because we were on her podcast. We're going to be talking to Kate House from the Live by Design podcast and we're going to be talking about what it means to live your life intentionally and what can we learn about that as ADHDers. Before we do that, head over to takecontroladhd.com and get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website, or subscribe to the mailing list right there on the homepage, and we'll send you an email with the latest episode each week. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at takecontroladhd. But to really connect with us, head over to the ADHD Discord community, that's where we live. It's super easy to jump into the general community chat channel, just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord and you'll be whisked, whisked I tell you, right over to the general invitation and log in.
Now if you're looking for a little bit more and if this show has ever touched you in a way that helps you live a new way with your ADHD, why don't you, we'll just say, return a favor. Head over to patreon.com/theADHDpodcast. This show is listener supported, and for a few bucks a month that you give to us, we keep going and thriving, growing and supporting the whole team that works to bring this show to you every week. I don't even know what episode this is now, 630... I don't know, 3? 633, 4, something like that?
Nikki Kinzer:
I like it. Yeah, let's go with 633.
Pete Wright:
It's up there. There are a lot of episodes and this is all thanks to you supporting members. Patreon.com/theADHD podcast to learn more.
Kate House, old friend, new friend turned old friend like that. Host of the fantastic Live by Design podcast. You are doing some incredible work over there with your own community and we are thrilled to have you join us today, Kate, welcome.
Kate House:
Oh my gosh, Pete and Nikki. Thank you so much for having me. I know I feel like I'm just sitting down and talking with old friends. It's the best.
Pete Wright:
The episode that we were on on your show just recently released yesterday as we record this, so two weeks ago for folks who are listening to this by the time it goes live, why don't you give us a little background on what you do? What is a behavior change specialist? What does an empowerment coach do?
Kate House:
Well, it's the person I needed 10 years ago. So when I was 25, I jokingly like to say I had a quarter life crisis, but I was very punctual. I turned 25 and looked up and was like, "What am I doing with my life?" And up until that point, I'd been a type A high achiever and I had ticked all the boxes that were expected of me, good grades, graduated top of my class from college, got the quote, right job, but I realized I was living into expectations that were external and weren't actually in alignment with what I wanted for my life. So that started this decades long journey of figuring out who am I and what do I want to do with my time on this earth?
So in that course of that journey, I started my podcast, Live by Design podcast, in an effort to hold myself accountable to just continuing to learn and to grow and to choose to live by design and not by default. So along that path, I became a behavior change specialist and empowerment coach, soon to be author, much like yourselves, and it's my hope to help high achieving women who have little time for themselves, set track and actually achieve their Goals with Soul, but to do it with both confidence and clarity and that's who I needed 10 years ago.
Pete Wright:
What does that look like practically? When you're sitting down and coaching someone, what kind of... You talk about what you needed in your quarter life crisis, I love that and I think that's more resonant today maybe than ever. What does the experience look like when I'm sitting down with you and looking for help?
Kate House:
Yeah, I love this question, Pete. So I would say the one thing I ask folks when we sit down first is where do you feel friction? Where do you feel this inner disconnect in your life? So is it career? Is it a relationship with an energy vampire where every time you spend time together, you just feel exhausted afterwards? We've all had that friend. Is that your physical health and wellness? So we talk about where do you feel this inter-friction and what would it look like if that were to change? And we do that using a framework I developed called the Live by Design Blueprint. I'm not quite 600 something episodes in, but I'm 350 or something, so in that time I created this blueprint.
What I like to do is set an annual intention with my clients and for myself, and an intention to me is just how do you want to feel? It's not a resolution, it's not a goal, it's just how do you want to feel a year from now? And then we drill that down into some quarterly Goals with Soul, and then we take that to the next level, which is daily habits. So the habits make the goals happen, and the goals support you in feeling the way you desire, A.K.A. your intention. So that's what I do with folks.
Pete Wright:
I like that Nikki, it's like it removes all of the inherent shame in not doing something-
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
... when you focus on how you want to feel about-
Nikki Kinzer:
Feel rather than this goal oriented thing. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
So I'm curious because I am assuming that when people come to you, they're not happy. Something is not in balance, but they may not know what that is. So how do you help clients figure out what it is that they want to feel and what they want? I guess the third question, which I'm sorry, did not mean to be stacking, but all these things are in my mind, where do you start?
Kate House:
Yes, well, I think it's only fair, because I stack questions when I interview folks because I always have so many things I want to know, so it's only fair for the tables to turn. Yes, so I would say the majority of the people that I work with come to me because they feel overwhelmed, they feel stuck. Or typically, it's a woman who's a high achiever who has figured out, she just keeps showing up and pouring more time and energy into whatever it is that she's doing. And eventually she burns out, because she's not getting support. She doesn't have the systems that can make it sustainable, so she gets to this point where she's just like, "Oh my gosh, I'm so burnt out. I don't even know what I like anymore."
That's what I hear from a lot of the women I work with is, "I don't even know what I like, I don't know what I enjoy, what is a hobby?" She's just poured so much of herself into her family, into her career, into caring for parents or grandparents, and she wakes up one day and she's like, "Gosh, I spend all day pouring into everybody else," and she hasn't poured into herself in so long that she just feels lost.
So as a coach, typically we look forward facing, but in this context, I do like to ask clients to look back and just reflect on when was a time in your life when you felt your best? Did you feel energized? Did you feel peaceful? Did you feel calm? Did you feel purposeful, right? And we think back to a time when they're like, gosh, "In that season of life, I just felt really connected. I felt really good." And we start to compare that to, "Okay, if that's how you felt then, what is different now and what can we layer back into your day and into your life that would support you feeling that way again?" And sometimes we have to come up with a whole new intention. Sometimes it's like, "You know what? Actually, coming out of a tough season with little kids," and for me, my word this year is energized. I'm like, "I just want to feel energized and empowered." I feel like for six years people have asked, "How are you?" And I'm like, "Tired." Because my kids are six and five.
Pete Wright:
Oh, dear.
Kate House:
Right, yeah, exactly. I'm like, I'm in the thick of it. They're finally both at school full time and it's very exciting. And so for me, I was like, "I want to feel empowered. I want to feel energized." So for me it was, "I don't want to feel tired, so how can I make that more positive? Okay, I'm going to say energized. I'm going to say empowered." And then we use that towards your second and third question, Nikki is we use that intention or that desire to influence the actions that we take, and it makes decision making a lot easier because if you get invited to something and you're like, "You know what? That's actually not in alignment with the way that I want to feel. It's going to make me feel the opposite, in fact," it's a lot easier to say no to things and a lot easier to say a full body yes to the things that you're like, "Oh, no, this is what I want to be doing. This will support that intention that I have for myself."
Pete Wright:
Okay, sidebar. May we take a sidebar?
Kate House:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
May it please be floor.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Kate House:
Let's take it.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's an ADHD podcast. It's expected.
Pete Wright:
Sidebar number, 10.243, part one. By and large, we don't have very many gendered conversations on this show. Sometimes we do. We have women in ADHD conversations occasionally because we know there are certain hormonal things that happen, particularly through menopause, that kind of thing. But nothing you have said, says anything that wouldn't be supportive to so many of the men that I know who are feeling the exact same thing. Why focus just on women? There are men who need to talk to you?
Kate House:
Yeah, that's a good question, Pete. I think I've just always really had a heart for other women. I've had a lot of really strong female role models in my life, so both of my grandmas were just incredible women who helped... Didn't help raise me necessarily, in my nuclear family, but they're very much a part of why I am the way that I am today. I had a grandma who went to college when women didn't go to college in that day and age and had a long career as a teacher and all these things, and they really inspired me. I looked around when I was 25 and saw a lot of my friends in similar situations, this crisis of, who am I and what do I actually want? So I think just because of that, and I have younger sisters, I have two younger sisters, and I think because of that, I've just always been surrounded by women and just have a heart for supporting them.
Not to say that I don't love the men in my life. I have two little boys. I'm surrounded by boys right now, my husband, my little guys. So yeah, I don't think it has to be a gendered conversation for sure, but I find that the women that I work with, we're high achievers to our own detriment. And there's a certain kind of person who had those expectations put on them, and I'm sure this happens for men as well, and you live into these expectations and then you wake up one day and realize like, "Oh man, I don't know if this is in alignment for me." And so I guess I've just had more experience coaching women. But absolutely, I think this is a conversation for all genders and identities.
Pete Wright:
I mean, I can't stop thinking about it just because of, first of all, I just relate so much, and second, because the changes that men go through as they age, they may look a little bit different, but they are in spirit the same. The same sorts of searching and questioning and feeling friction and out of sorts and then later, the hormonal changes that happen to men, and all of those things I think require a degree of thoughtfulness that this behavior change specialty can really poke at this. Men need empowerment too at certain part times of their lives. Everything's a facade. Let me just tell you. It's all fake.
Kate House:
It's all a mask. We're all masking
Pete Wright:
Whatever you think, it's all masking.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, and I think going back to the mission, living by default versus living by design, let's talk about that because I think that that is something that everyone has probably fallen into that you get into the kind of mundane of going to work or going to school or just everything's staying the same. Even though we know things are going to change at some point, we all have different chapters in our life, but living by default, verse design, explain that.
Kate House:
Yeah. So I think for me, that really came from as I went through this experience of starting to really be intentional about how I choose to spend my time when I realized maybe I need a career change, maybe there are different ways that I can pour my energy into things that feel really important to me, I realized up until that quarter life crisis, I was defaulting through life. I was checking the marks, I was doing what my parents said, and then my teachers, my professors, my boss even. I realized I just felt really unfulfilled. And so for me, it was about just pressing pause long enough to evaluate.
When I look back on my life, how do I want to have spent my days? Because how you spend your day is how you spend your life. And so I was like, I don't want to spend it having nightmares about my work email crashing. I used to wake up with these panic attacks that my email server crashed and I wouldn't be able to do my job the next day. And I was like, "I don't think this is healthy." And so for me, living by design is about just being really purposeful of how you spend your time. It's not about every single moment of every day being this super profound moment. I have to wake up and make my kids lunches just like everybody else. But it's about waking up and looking ahead at the day and saying, "Yeah, I'm looking forward to that, like I can't wait to talk to Nikki and Pete. I get to do this as part of the career that I've created for myself. How cool is that?"
And it's about taking ownership of your experience of life. I think a lot of times it can feel like life is happening to us, and we do get to have agency and we get to take ownership of it, and it can be a little scary. But what I learned in my quarter life crisis was that nothing changes if nothing changes. And it's such an obvious statement, but I realized, I even took it a step further, and in hindsight and in reflection, I realized what I wasn't changing, I was choosing, and I no longer wanted to keep waking up and choosing to feel the way that I felt in that season. Unhealthy, stuck. I just felt pretty blunt, and I feel like I'm a pretty sparkly person, and my sparkle factor was real dim.
So I had to figure out how do we sparkle again? And so for me, that's just about making these conscious decisions and the hope that perhaps in the future, the new default can actually be what I want it to be. It's the routines and the habits that nurture me and my family and help me show up in this life the way that I want to. Sometimes it's just a little bit of recalibrating from time to time.
Pete Wright:
Do you remember the experience of coming... First of all, did you crib quarter life crisis from John Mayer? Because I am singing Why Georgia Why right now in a way that I haven't in years. So shout out to John Mayer.
Kate House:
Maybe unconsciously.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Might be a quarter life crisis or just a turning of my soul, something like that. Anyway, oh my God. Do you remember what it was that turned you out of yours? Do you remember what it was when you woke up to find your sparkle again? I'm trying to figure out how to chart a path for people who feel like stuck is the only option from day to day.
Kate House:
Yeah, totally. So not all of us get to have this, aha, light bulb moment. I had to crash and burn before I had mine. So I was in the season of just total and utter burnout. I came home from work one day, and I remember just sitting on this hand me down leather sofa because it was our first place after college, so my husband and I had all of our families hand me down couches, and I'm sitting on this old couch and I'm just crying because I'm so stressed, and I just didn't know. Like you just said, I didn't know how to get out of that situation.
At the time, I remember my husband rubbing my back and saying, "I just wish I could make it better." And in that moment, I realized I needed a change, and not just for myself, but because the situation I was in was also affecting the person I loved the most in the world. And that's why 10 years now, and I can make these decisions for myself because I love myself, but at that time, I had to borrow some courage and some gumption to make this change not only for myself, but for my husband and for the family we wanted to create.
So for me, the best advice I have for somebody that's in that season of stuckness that can identify with the balling on the couch, ugly crying experience is, to trust yourself to take the next right step. And as much as we want to be able to plot out, here's my 10 year plan, in my experience, if I had set a 10 year plan 10 years ago when I was 25 having this experience, I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. I think I would've dream a lot smaller and you have to grow and evolve as you go.
So for me, it was just the next right step. So I became a yoga teacher, because I was like, "I want to get off the computer. I want to be around people. I love yoga." And I had this little voice in my head that was like, "What if you are a yoga teacher?" And then one day my husband said it out loud, "I think you should teach yoga." And I was like, "Let's do it." So I quit my nine to five. I started working at lululemon part time to just get into this athletic community, and I started teacher training, and then I taught all over the suburbs of Chicago for a year to figure out how to get the word vomit out and how to actually teach a good yoga class and became a manager and I loved that and then I wanted to go deeper with my students. They wanted more support, so I became a holistic health coach. And then from there, I wanted to connect with more people and that's how I started the podcast.
It's cool, you get to look back in hindsight and be like, "Oh, you know what? When I became a yoga teacher, I learned how to effectively lead an entire room of strangers for an hour, and I was the only one talking, right?" So becoming a podcaster felt really natural after that. I was like, "I can talk to myself all day."
Pete Wright:
Sure. Made things easy, right.
Kate House:
And that was the benefit of looking back and saying, "Okay, if I just keep trusting myself to take the next right step and to keep growing and evolving," and then each time you take that step, you get to look back and say, "Okay, what did I learn from that season? What skill am I going to pull forward?" Or sometimes more importantly, "What experience do I want to leave behind? What part of that did I not enjoy?" And to me, that's what living by design all about, is just taking the next right step and taking a little of the pressure off of like, gosh, if somebody asked me to have a ten-year plan, I'd be like, "I don't know, but I can tell you one year from now where I hope to be."
Pete Wright:
That, I think. Is a big awakening. And I think that's a lesson I want to poke at because I know with ADHD, you tell somebody with ADHD to define a ten-year plan and their head explodes. I'm just trying to reflect on my own aha moment, those days when I was just like, "Okay, I give up. I'm just going to play 12 hours of Onimusha on the PlayStation young and there's no future." And it turns out what broke me out, what allowed me to unlock the door to mental and emotional health was one thing, and you just said. It was when you stop trying to write a future from that perspective of complete uncertainty. You don't have to know where you're going to be in 10 years to figure out what you're going to do tomorrow. You just don't have to.
Some people do, some people do know and live to that. They want to be a lawyer and they start when they're five or they want to be a doctor and they start dissecting things when they're very young. No judgment. But I think for a lot of people with ADHD, one of those experiences of unlocking that mental and emotional help, the sparkle, is to stop trying to focus so hard on an uncertain future and just focus on, what could I do next to help someone else? A very small, simple question.
Kate House:
Absolutely. What I have found too with myself and with my clients is that action creates clarity. And so often, we want to have the clarity first, and then we want to take action. And as a recovering perfectionist, I wanted to take action and be the best at whatever it was immediately, which is hilarious now in hindsight. But I still wrestle with perfectionism, but now I have an awareness around it. In this journey I've learned action creates clarity, so by taking action, you can learn, "Oh yeah, this brings my sparkle back. This makes me feel alive." Or sometimes more importantly, "You know what? That was a cool experiment, but this isn't for me. And that's okay."
Even when I started my podcast, I remember starting it and recording it. I was so nervous. My laptop was propped up on an empty diaper box in my basement. I was nervous sweating, but very different than the setup I have today so many years later. But it felt like the next right step. And I kind of asked myself, well, what if I do this, and I get 10... I told myself, just show up for 10 episodes. Just see how it goes, see if you like it.
The thing I asked myself, and I learned this from Jenna Kutcher's podcast, the Gold Digger podcast, she talks about asking herself, "What's the worst that could happen?" And that helps get me into action a lot of times, because I'm like, "Okay, the worst that happens is I show up, I record 10 episodes, I nervous sweat in my basement and nobody listens and I decide this isn't for me." And that's fine. It was a learning experience tight. Or I do it and I keep showing up, but now four and a half years later, I'm getting to have amazing conversations with people like you guys, but we wouldn't be here if I hadn't have sat down and recorded using the wrong microphone and still publish the episode anyways because I was never going to get the gumption up to do it again. So we have to give ourselves permission to just show up imperfectly and to listen to that inner voice. I think a lot of times we listen to a lot of voices outside of ourselves, but if we can just figure out what makes us shine, that's sometimes the most important part.
Pete Wright:
Nikki, you ever have one of those crises of uncertainty? Have you had that quarter life crisis, midlife crisis? Where do you stand? What gets you out of it?
Nikki Kinzer:
So it happened a few years ago, and I'll tell you what got me out of it, and I still have the book.
Pete Wright:
Oh, it's a show and tell, this is a show and tell segment.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's show and tell, yeah.
Kate House:
I love this.
Nikki Kinzer:
The Universe Has Your Back from Gabby Bernstein.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Kate House:
She's awesome.
Nikki Kinzer:
And then I started following her, and now I'm part of her membership and everything. But yeah, no, I started reading this book because it's interesting what Kate is explaining because it was a period in my life where I wasn't not happy, but I wasn't happy. I could just tell that I was almost, not depressed, but just numb. And there wasn't a lot of joy or sparkle, and I remember one summer, I don't even know how I got into this book somehow, but the universe has your back. Somehow it fell into my lap and I started reading it and I really related to it and started doing some of the things that she practices with a lot of meditation and things like that, and it changed. It changed things for me for sure.
I think that what Kate is saying really resonates where you get stuck, but then how do you empower yourself to get out of it? And it is a choice, and it is, what do I need to do? And it's not easy. It's very subtle and it's not like one day you just wake up and you're like, "Okay, everything is great." But I had to look at, what am I grateful for? What are the blessings in my life? What does bring me joy? I think it was probably around the time that we did the Joy Show honestly, because I think that's where the Joy presentation probably came from, is we need to look for these things, not just expect for them to come to us. We need to, and there are moments looking at a flower or paying attention to how beautiful the sky is.
So I think that it looks different for everybody. For some people it might be a career change. For some people, I think they get so stuck in what they're doing in corporate life or whatever they're doing that they're not happy with. It takes a lot of courage though. I mean, it does take a lot of reflection. It takes a lot of courage to get inside and say, "Okay, what needs to be different?" Because with burnout, what we learned with Casey Dixon when she did Burnout, and we're going to talk about burnout again next week, it's not just about taking a vacation. Something in your life has to change. And I think that's what Kate is saying is taking that reflective of where are your values aligning with where you are right now? It's hard. It's hard to do.
Pete Wright:
I struggle a little bit with it because I know that in certain times in my life, I have been crashing so hard, there's no inner voice to latch onto. For those who are in that space, it's okay to find an outer voice. It's to listen to an author or a podcast or a sibling or a cousin or somebody who can just help you. Maybe the next step is not, let me figure out what I'm doing in 10 years, but let me figure out how to eat some protein in the next half hour that might allow my brain to latch onto the half hour after that. I feel like there's permission to take atomically small steps.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think about we get sucked into doom scrolling. What if just one evening you put your phone away? Let's just see what happens. I mean, I think it's those little subtle things that it gets you out of this habit that you've put yourself in.
Pete Wright:
It's funny, just to that point, we have someone in our lives who, when our kids were little and we were looking for some attention time, I would download an app on the iPad called, I can't remember what it was called exactly, it was a flip book animator. So you draw frames and it animates them. So you see little stick figures walking, things like that. So we had someone in our lives who was struggling was a teen and said, "What if just for this week you delete Instagram and Snapchat from your phone? What if you just deleted them for a week and just see what happens and put the flip book app on the iPad?" It turns out that they've never put the social apps back on, because it's funny,. What your brain attaches to. It will attach to something different. It'll attach to whoever steps up to the mic and that app in this case was a Flipbook app and then Procreate, and then these art apps, and it turns out, didn't even know, he was an artist. All along, he was an artist, but he'd been doom-scrolling, right? He'd been social scrolling. And that is the kind of thing that I reflect on often when I need to play tricks on myself, just how quickly the brain will adapt to a new scenario. It is a huge gift that we don't make use of very often.
Kate House:
I love that you mentioned that Pete, because it's this great reminder. I really appreciate the atomic steps that you talked about, going back to basics. At the beginning of this year, my word was empowered and my first goal was soul for the first quarter of the year was to get good sleep and to eat less processed food. And I'm a health coach, but we have to coach ourselves sometimes. And for me, feeling empowered wasn't like, I'm going to go conquer the world. I would just really love eight hours of sleep. And that's what I focused on for 90 days to start the year. It was like, "Okay, what does an evening routine look like where I'm not doom-scrolling, where I'm giving my brain a chance to slow down from the day and quiet that monkey chatter that goes on in my head at all hours? What would it feel like to wake up the next day feeling good because I actually got good sleep?" So I just really appreciate that reminder.
Sometimes we think about these intentions or these Goals with Soul, we feel like they have to be so big. We put so much pressure on ourselves. And sometimes it's like, "You know what I really need right now? I need to feel good in my body. I need to eat more protein. I need to get good sleep. I need to hydrate." Right now I'm drinking tea. I would much rather be drinking coffee, but I know that my body prefers tea at this time of day. So sometimes it's just those little decisions that add up over time. It's a cumulative benefit. It's not just that one little thing.
Pete Wright:
And none of those involve a massive career change. None of those involve moving to a new city. None of those are massive. It's just the reflection that living by design is the application of consistent movement and getting out of stasis and not operatic change.
Kate House:
Yeah, and the one thing too that I find that helps me when I'm in that stuck stage is when I think of Goals with Soul, I think of them being four things and this helps me get unstuck too. I think of them as being aspirational. So future Pete, future Nikki, they can totally do this, but maybe current you is like, "Well, is this just outside my comfort zone, but it's exciting." I think of a Goal with Soul though, of also being attainable. If we show up consistently, it's something that we can get a win. We can get that success momentum going. I think of a Goal with Soul as being meaningful. You can't spell meaningful without the word me, right. So it's like, what is something that lights you up, that's important to you? Not to your partner, not to your parents, not to society, but to you personally?
And I think that as being seasonally appropriate, I think sometimes too, we put so much pressure on ourselves and we're not being realistic to the season of life we're in. So me writing a book right now, a year ago would've been laughable. I would've had a four-year-old running around in the background, and a five-year-old off in kindergarten, coming home sick every other day and so we have to be realistic. We have to be seasonally appropriate with these goals and I find if we can set some Goals with Soul within these parameters, it allows us to get some momentum because they're doable, right? They're not so big or so far out in the distance that it feels insurmountable or we have so much time, I'll just do it tomorrow.
Pete Wright:
We're getting towards wrapping up. But because you made such a career change and got through your own quarter-life crisis, I'm curious what it would be like if the door opened behind you right now and a fifteen-year younger you walked through the door. Now you've got years of coaching experience and education and wisdom. What do you tell yourself?
Kate House:
Oh gosh. So I would tell sweet baby Kate, 20-year-old Kate, I would tell her to not put so much pressure on herself, to just enjoy the day and that your productivity doesn't equal your worth. I think for a long time I thought that if I just did more, produced more, that was where my worth was. So I think I would just tell her like, "It's okay. Just take a breath and you don't have to be perfect, and you can just be you." And that would be really beautiful.
Pete Wright:
Lovely. Lovely. Kate, thank you so much. Kate House. Mskatehouse.com.
Kate House:
Yep. There's another Kate house out there.
Pete Wright:
So you're wanting to go to mskatehouse.com. Use the links in the show notes and subscribe to the Live By Design podcast and do it right now because you'll hear me and Nikki. That's really exciting.
Nikki Kinzer:
We're there.
Pete Wright:
We're there.
Nikki Kinzer:
It was such a good-
Pete Wright:
We represent.
Nikki Kinzer:
It was so good. I re-listened to that episode, guys. I almost never re-listened to my own episodes because it's weird to listen to yourself, but I loved the conversation that we had. My kid was in the car, and my son's like, "Is that you playing through the speakers?"
Pete Wright:
You weirdo.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know.
Kate House:
That is so funny.
Nikki Kinzer:
Listen to Nikki guys.
Pete Wright:
Oh, that's so funny. That is so funny. Well, we sure appreciate it, and thank you so much for joining us over here on this side of the fence. It's great having you.
Kate House:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
And thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and your attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute, head 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, we're going to hang out and ask Kate a couple of extra questions, just for members. And if you're a Patreon subscriber, you can listen to all of the bonus content that is attached to all of our other episodes that you may not know is even happening. On behalf of Kate House and Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control, the ADHD Podcast.
