When Productivity Advice Ignores Capacity with Brooke Schnittman
Most productivity advice was built for brains that start on demand, stay consistent, and prioritize logically. That's not us.
This week, Brooke Schnittman returns for her third visit to the show to dig into one of the most frustrating disconnects in ADHD life: the gap between what we think we can do in a day and what our actual capacity will allow. Pete and Nikki walk through the familiar trap — fifteen red-line tasks, two hours of actual focus time, and the stubborn belief that somehow we'll get it all done anyway. Brooke names it for what it is: magical thinking backed by people-pleasing, propped up by shame.
Together they explore why ADHD brains need to plan to plan, what "sampling the no" actually looks like in practice, and how masking shows up in our task lists in ways we rarely notice. Brooke introduces her STOP framework for sorting the week — Stressful, Time-consuming, Ordinary, Passionate — and makes a case for the kind of white space most of us have been taught to see as failure.
There's also a frank conversation about burnout: what it looks like for neurodivergent people, why it lasts longer than we expect, and the 1% action that can keep momentum alive when everything else has stopped. And a reminder that if you're showing up at 40% battery, then 40% is your 100% for the day — and that's enough.
GUEST SPOTLIGHT
Brooke Schnittman, MA, PCC, BCC is a nationally recognized ADHD coach and the founder of Coaching With Brooke. She's the author of Activate Your ADHD Potential, a roadmap for high-achieving ADHDers who are tired of running fast and getting nowhere. Brooke trains ADHD coaches through her 3C Activation System and is passionate about bringing ADHD coaching into universities to support students directly. This is her third appearance on the show.
LINKS & NOTES
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
What are we even doing today, Nikki? I feel like we teased this concept out of order because of your vacation. I feel like the tease of this concept is actually going to come later. But I'm telling ya, it's hugely important and I can't wait to dig into it because it's all I'm thinking about right now. We're talking about productivity guidance, advice, and our capacity to do anything with it today. Are you ready for this?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, ready.
Pete Wright:
Are you sure? You don't seem as jazzed as I am.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think so.
Pete Wright:
I am fired up, and you are giving me like a six out of ten.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, because you're probably not gonna love what Brooke and I have to say.
Pete Wright:
Oh, for crying out loud, you guys. Okay, well, before we get in and actually do the proper introduction, this is our Patreon announcement, because we love Patreon so much and we love our patrons so much. And that is the community that you can join to get access to even more from Taking Control. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. That's where you sign up. Members get early ad-free access to every episode, access to the members-only channels in our Discord, a seat in the live stream recording of the show where you can ask questions directly to our guests in the chat as we record. Plus, we're always throwing in some sort of special events along the way.
But honestly, the thing we hear people talk about the most is that the community itself is really, really special. These are people who are living with ADHD who show up for each other every single day. And if you've ever wanted to be more than just a listener, this is where it happens. Again, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more and join the crew.
If you're not ready for that, fantastic. Just find us at takecontroladhd.com. You can connect with us on socials, join the Discord on the free side, or sign up for the weekly email. We'd love to have you wherever you land.
Brooke Schnittman is nationally recognized as an ADHD coach and the founder of Coaching with Brooke. Her book, Activate Your ADHD Potential, is fantastic. It's a roadmap for high-achieving ADHDers who are tired of running fast but not getting anywhere. She's back with us today for the third time to talk about the thing we all share but no one really knows how to kick. What happens with our efforts to be productive when they completely ignore our capacity to do so? Brooke, welcome back to the show.
Brooke Schnittman:
Thank you so much for having me. Third time's a charm, hopefully.
Pete Wright:
Third time's the charm.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right.
Pete Wright:
That's the truth. Alright.
Brooke Schnittman:
You guys are great.
Pete Wright:
So, Nikki, why am I gonna be real upset today? Why did you set me up for that?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, I don't think you're gonna be upset. I think that a lot of people with ADHD have really great intentions and have a lot of what you might call magical thinking when it comes to what they can do in a day. And it's trying to figure out what is a realistic expectation, what is not settling, but what's giving yourself grace. It's so murky. And the traditional advice—I don't even know, Brooke, you can tell me if this is advice—but where do you think we get this idea of what productivity is? What is it supposed to look like? Where do we get that from?
Brooke Schnittman:
Well, I think most of the productivity advice is built on neurotypical consistency-first brains. And ADHD brains don't work like that. We're capacity-driven, like you said. We're energy-driven. We're interest-driven. So if we follow the traditional systems, it becomes more than just struggle—we start to identify as the problem. And then the shame gets built into that as well. And then we get into that disruption spiral of feeling overwhelmed and shutting down and identifying as the problem.
So productivity advice assumes that we can start whenever. We can initiate. And we know that that's one of the biggest problems with ADHD—to start on demand. Or we can stay consistent, or we can prioritize logically, or follow through just because we decided to. But it doesn't work like that. So we end up stuck in that cycle of trying, then we get overwhelmed, then we shut down, then there's shame, and then it repeats.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's the disappointing piece, I think, Pete, is that cycle that we're going through all the time every day.
Pete Wright:
Absolutely. What we had started talking about on another episode—maybe it's already come out, maybe it'll come out next week, two weeks—
Nikki Kinzer:
We're not really sure because we're recording in all different kinds of orders right now.
Pete Wright:
We're not really sure right now. We're living our best lives. But what we were talking about was this trend that I run into. I just had a conversation with somebody who's a professional, who has a life and family and, by all intents and purposes, is doing okay. And they were complaining that they had a lot of really important things, these red tasks on their task list, that they just have to get done. And I said, "Well, how many?" "Oh, I guess fifteen or twenty that I just have to do today." And I said, "Okay, so how much time do you think they'll take to do?" He said, "I mean, it's a day of work." I said, "Really? Okay. So how many clients are you seeing today? What kind of time do you have to invest?" He said, "Well, I've got, I don't know, hour and a half that isn't directly client-related." And I said, "Okay, so some of the things that are hot, steaming hot on your to-do list, are probably not gonna get done." And the response was, "Oh, they have to get done." I said, "But they won't get done." "Oh, but they have to." And that's the wall. The wall is: I can't believe in a universe in which I don't get these things done because of all the people I'm gonna let down.
Brooke Schnittman:
Right. There's that urgency of "I have to get it done today," and I don't know what the rest of my week looks like. So that person's planning just for today, and that's the problem. So now he has to stay up until all hours of the night, and may or may not get it done well. And then the next day is completely burnt out and takes days to recover. And then all these other tasks that he's committed to are still getting longer and longer. That's the problem with "now or not now," not planning for the week and just planning for today and all those red-line tasks. It's just unrealistic.
Nikki Kinzer:
How do you think an ADHD brain can push back against it? Or can they? Do they even see what's happening here?
Brooke Schnittman:
Well, I think it takes a lot of proactivity before reaction. When you don't know how to create systems because you've been taught how to do systems in a neurotypical way and not one that works with your brain, you plan on urgency and you wait until the last minute because, again, you just don't know how to be proactive. So it's more of reactive.
But if you can learn a way that operates with your ADHD, your energy levels—you mentioned some days we're not at 100%. So we have to show up at 40% battery and do 40%, which is our 100% for that day. But also have the time and space for other days throughout the week to carry over the tasks and the appointments that we couldn't get to on that day. Otherwise, you're constantly living where you feel like you have to do the now, or else there's no other option.
So if we can plan to plan—which we don't love to do with ADHD—it might not feel as sexy in the moment, but I promise you you'll have less anxiety afterwards, because now you can have some sort of reliable schedule with gaps that you can push things over to and not feel shame and dread that you couldn't get it done that day. And now you can get to the other things that you are committing to as well, like family and friends and life as you know it.
Pete Wright:
I want to dig into the root of that shame. It's something we've talked about before. It's something that I think is hard-coded into the identity of our ADHD brains. It's the act of living our lives as people pleasers. Because my assessment is that most of the reason that we get so frustrated with ourselves and have that hard barrier that says, "I have to get all this done, even though I don't have the capacity, even though I'm violating all reason by imagining I can get it done," is because I want to please all the people with whom I am working or living or in family relationships with, and let them know that I'm okay, that I can get these things done, I can do hard things.
I had this conversation with a friend of the show, James Ochoa, just earlier this week, and he said something that really stuck with me. He said, "Learning how to disappoint others is a highest order good." That's hit me so sideways, just hearing that language, that I wonder if we can parse a little bit what it means to live so closely to the identity of having to please everybody that we work with and owe things, but also knowing that it's a highest-order good to be able to be clear and let them down when you know you're not going to be able to live up to those expectations you have of yourself.
Brooke Schnittman:
I know it's not as easy as saying no when you don't feel confident about yourself and you are a people pleaser and you don't understand your ADHD and you don't understand what you are good at and you don't see success and you're constantly in that spiral and dread loop. And if you have a community, whether it's working with a coach or being in a group of other people who get it, then at that point you could start to feel a little bit more confident. You could start having some small wins that give you that momentum, that then give you some confidence, to then say, "You know what? I'm doing these things. I'm learning about myself. I understand what's important. And I like the state of my nervous system right now. So I'm gonna just sample the no, or I'm gonna sample the 'maybe let me get back to you' type thing and see how that feels."
Nikki Kinzer:
I like how you said "sample the no" because you like where your nervous system is right now. I think that's really important to highlight.
Brooke Schnittman:
I think we need that positive reinforcement. Dr. Hallowell talks about it all the time. We need the reinforcement that "oh wow, we said no, and that's disappointing other people, but look, I did something hard, and look at all the things that now I get to say yes to. And good job."
Pete Wright:
How good does it feel to take that list of 15 things and actually be able to accomplish two of them, and not hate yourself at the end of the day because you actually got two things done, but you healthily dodged the other 13? You healthily put off the other 13. How do you coach people who haven't had the experience of this, who live so firmly in the space of no reason, to begin to sample the no? That is a hard thing to introduce into your daily life.
Brooke Schnittman:
So I think that you need to have a system that works for you already in planning. I don't care how you plan, what calendar system you use, but you need that in operation. So for me—
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm glad you mentioned that, because before this comes out, we've talked a lot about planning. So I think it reinforces the things that we've been talking about. I love that. So please go on.
Brooke Schnittman:
You have to. So for me—I might have, we might have talked about it last time, but I'll take all my appointments from my phone. I'll put it on the week calendar. And then I'll write my to-dos for work and personal as well on the bottom of the calendar. And then I'll move them into spots throughout the week. And then I'll make sure that there's empty spots too. And if there aren't empty spots, then I know that I'm overcommitting and I know what happens at that point where I get anxious and I get strung out. So that signifies to me that something needs to slow down. I need to push something off, wait for it. I need to stop, simplify, and select at that point. I need to prioritize something. I need to eliminate it off my list. I need to modify it. I need to delegate. Or I need to wait. But there needs to be that planning in order to do that proactively and not on the day of.
So there's that. So that planning happens. Then Joe comes in and he's like, "Hey, there's this thing going on, it's this conference, I want you to speak, and send out all these emails and blah, blah, blah. It's going to be a great opportunity for you." "When is it?" "Oh, it's in two weeks." Well, now I have to take a look at my calendar and my goals for the quarter. What time does it take to go into this? So instead of saying yes at this point, now it's like, "Okay, this sounds really great. Thank you for thinking of me. Can I get back to you?" Instead of "Duh." And then I literally have to sit, I have to look at my calendar and be like, "Okay, if I say yes to this, what needs to go from my calendar?" And the things that I've already said I've committed to putting on my calendar usually has to do with the goals that I've set. So am I going to dismiss those for this other opportunity? Is this other opportunity worth it? Does it align with what I am trying to achieve, or is it just a shiny bright object? Can I do a different conference in two months from now? Those kinds of things have to be reflected upon.
But when we have a difficult time with metacognition and we're only seeing in the now, we have a hard time stopping and pivoting and simplifying and selecting and moving on.
Nikki Kinzer:
I appreciate how you went through your thinking process on that, because what you just displayed or really showed us was that it's not just a "yes, I'm gonna do it," and it's also not just "I'm gonna pause and wait to give you an answer," but I'm actually going to reflect on this and how does it fit with my goals, and how does it fit with my values. I think that's really important to see, is that it's not just a quick answer, especially when you have a full plate and you're already feeling overwhelmed with all of the things that you have to do. But to be able to coach yourself: "Okay, let me ask myself a few questions here before I say yes."
Brooke Schnittman:
Yes. And when I start to feel really stressed too, when there's double-booking or lots of emails coming in, I just coached the coaches that I train on this activity called STOP. And it's kind of like the Eisenhower Matrix, but different. So STOP stands for: S is Something that stresses you out. T is Time-consuming. O is Ordinary. P is Passionate. So write down all the things that you have going on for the week and put it into the quadrant. So then not only do you take a look at "okay, what are some things that are stressful that I could delegate, eliminate, modify, prioritize, whatever? What are the time-consuming things that I can modify?" But what am I putting on these lists that I'm just putting it on there because I'm masking?
Nikki Kinzer:
Ooh, tell us more about that.
Brooke Schnittman:
So are there some things in my S category that I think have to do with my goals, that I think have to do with my values, but it really has to do with someone else's values and goals? They are really excited to have me present to this conference, and I worship this person. So now I'm gonna put my mask on, and I'm gonna people-please, and I'm gonna over-prepare, and I'm gonna do it just because this person is so cool, and I wanna be cool like them, and I wanna be in the same room as people like them.
So asking yourself, is this something that you really truly want to accomplish for yourself and your goals, or is this other people's? And that's where some of the masking might come in. Another thing that could be masking is the time commitment. So, like you started out, Pete, "I'm gonna get these 14 red-line items done today." But wait, I have future myopia and temporal discounting. How long do these things actually take? Am I gonna 2.5x them? And then, if I did do that, because I haven't done these before, I need to over-extend the time that it's probably gonna take. How much time is this really? Am I lying to myself that I can say yes to these things? So that's when the reflection, the metacognition, has to come back in. We have to take a look afterwards and see what's happening with the tasks and the things that we're committing to.
Pete Wright:
On how effective we are at lying to ourselves, because we know that our highest order is to have a strong opinion of ourselves, because we're all fundamentally driven by ego interpretation. And being able to say, "I think that I can do all of these things, like do the speaking and over-prepare and do all of that," because I have a high opinion of my capabilities. And because I'm living in a fantasy space, because my plan is probably not in complete lock—I allow myself to paint pictures of my identity that are unreal.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah. And you can't plan for a day like you're gonna be at 100% with ADHD, because we know our energy and our mood and our stability change day after day. And hormones change, our capacity just changes. You're talking about energy drivers. If we think the only way we can get something done is if we're at 100%, and so we commit to it because we're going to be at 100% tomorrow, we're lying to ourselves.
Pete Wright:
When I go back to this discussion of what is capacity, I'm thinking about my friend who said, "I have about an hour and a half to two hours of capacity time." I'm using that word now—that's not what he'd said—but of time to get all these 15 things done. But you just said something that complicates the equation of how we determine capacity. Because sometimes I'm at 40%, and my 100% that day is 40%. That might be an interesting calculation against my capacity, because I'm probably getting about 40% of those two hours of effective time to actually get those things done. I don't think I have a great sense of how to calculate my own capacity when it comes to the commitments I make to my task list.
Brooke Schnittman:
So that's where a check-in—and it's gonna sound simple, but it's not—where you have some sort of timer or alarm go off to check in. Pavlov theory. You can put a bell on your door. Every time you open the door, that signifies to you to stop and think about what you're doing. And then you could say, "Is this what I had planned? How do I feel?" You could just have those check-ins with yourself. You could put it on the cabinet in your kitchen. Every time you open up the cabinet: "What am I doing right now? What am I supposed to be doing?"
Nikki Kinzer:
You're almost redirecting.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
When you learn how to meditate, if you learn the practice, they'll tell you that your focus is going to drift, and the practice is to notice it and then come back to where you want to be.
Brooke Schnittman:
To the mantra or whatever.
Nikki Kinzer:
And that's kind of what I'm getting from you, is that this little bell is just that little moment-in-time reminder: are you where you want to be, and do you need to redirect?
Brooke Schnittman:
Exactly. So supposedly I read something where the most successful people out there check in with themselves every hour to see if they're being intentional with what they had planned. Now imagine an ADHDer—people who are those neurotypical people—
Pete Wright:
That's so great for them.
Brooke Schnittman:
We're not going to those standards.
Pete Wright:
They must be very proud.
Brooke Schnittman:
We're not gonna shame ourselves for that. However, there has to be some sort of check-in.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Because the day can go away from you—and especially what Pete is saying, naming it as time blindness—it can go away, and you can get into hyperfocus. There's a lot of different things that can happen that will derail you.
Brooke Schnittman:
And I want to be very clear. I think we are very privileged in the fact that we are entrepreneurs and are able to even think about these things in the capacity of "okay, I'm gonna check in with myself, and if I am dysregulated or I need a break, I can actually take it, because I'm in control of my schedule." I recognize that for people who have bosses and who work for government jobs or whatever, things are slightly different. You don't have as much control.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, because you can still somehow make that happen, even in an office. It could be something that still catches your attention.
Brooke Schnittman:
Were you able to block something off in your schedule where that is your time to take your break, eat, and hopefully not get interrupted? To take the walk down the hallway to get the glass of water, to take some deep breaths.
Nikki Kinzer:
So I have a question for you. When you're talking about "okay, I'm not at 100%, I'm at 40%"—how do you accept that?
Brooke Schnittman:
Good question. So that is where the momentum and success from earlier things and really understanding yourself comes in. So if someone was to come to me and be like, "I want to be more productive, teach me your productivity systems now"—and you guys have productivity systems in your books too—I wouldn't start with productivity. I wouldn't start with the systems. I would start with understanding themselves first and understanding the boundaries that they're setting too.
So what is your optimal focus time? When are you able to start doing good work? When are you starting to shut off? One of the best things I got from a really expensive business coach—and she was neurotypical—was, "If you can't start before 10, don't. If you can't continue deep work after 4, don't." I was like, "Oh, that's funny, you're cute." Because I came from this high-masking productivity hustle culture in New York.
Nikki Kinzer:
You're so pretty.
Brooke Schnittman:
But I have to be honest: when I committed to deep work between 10 and 4 is when I did my best work and I became most productive, and I was able to really have a bigger picture of my company, my life, myself. And then I was able to expand in many ways rather than being stuck in the weeds.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, if I understand you correctly, you did actually take her advice in the sense that you worked within the 10 to 4.
Brooke Schnittman:
I did take her advice.
Pete Wright:
But you weren't happy about it.
Brooke Schnittman:
I wasn't happy about it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Brooke Schnittman:
I'm like, "I'm paying you all this money to tell me to stop working?"
Nikki Kinzer:
But I think that is something that I say to my clients too. If you know the afternoons or the evenings are not going to be the best time for you because you've been busy and you are exhausted, then give yourself that grace, and let that be your downtime. And I think it's really hard for people to be okay with that, because they still are hanging on to, "But I didn't get this done, and I didn't get that done."
Brooke Schnittman:
And that's where the trust of your week and your systems come into play. So if you have more and more results and you are accountable to those results, and you actually take a look at all of the things that you have gotten done, and you see the progress and the to-dos coming off your list because you have a schedule and a calendar system that works for you—that's when you can say, "Okay, I can really take off at four, because I have this gap Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at this time." And for me, it's like I get so excited to see that gap, because then I reward myself for not saying yes to the things that don't align with what I've already committed to.
Nikki Kinzer:
So you almost have to be comfortable with the gaps. You have to be comfortable with the white space and seeing that in your calendar.
Brooke Schnittman:
Like yesterday, I did not have any white space. It just so happened I was jumping from meeting to meeting. And literally at four o'clock—I know that that is my time to wind down anyway, but I could still do little tasks—I was trying to push through, and my eyes were dry, and I had a headache, and my focus was totally gone. I'm like, "There's no way I'm gonna do good work right now. I can't even send an email and try to make sense of it." So I went outside, collected my thoughts, and I'm like, "You know what? I'm gonna watch The Testaments." And I watched three hours of The Testaments. And I was lucky enough to be able to.
Nikki Kinzer:
There you go.
Brooke Schnittman:
So it's full circle here. But I committed to that before I got into burnout.
Nikki Kinzer:
Love that.
Brooke Schnittman:
And then today I'm feeling a lot better, and I have the energy to commit to the things that I was gonna do yesterday.
Pete Wright:
One of the things we started talking about, I feel like fifteen years ago on this show, was we started talking about organizing and the parallel between living your life being organized does not look like the pages of the magazines. We have to disabuse ourselves of the reality that sometimes our organized does not mean clean and photo-ready.
I think that's the thing we need to do with productivity culture. You said that the advice that you got from somebody was like "go, go, go, hustle culture." And that is, I think, the standard that many of us believe we're aspiring to when we say the word productivity. And it's what makes productivity, in my view, ugly. It is an ugly way to look at how we manage our time by saying we always have to go. We have to answer our phone anytime, because that's what productivity looks like—hustle. And I think that is a damaging way to approach what we aspire to when it comes to trying to live the most productive life we can. Does that make sense?
Brooke Schnittman:
And when you are in a heightened state of arousal and your nervous system really hasn't shut down—to your point, I was in the hustle culture. I was waking up at 2 a.m. answering emails. I got commended at the end of my time there: "Oh, Brooke got an email at two o'clock and she responded at 2:05. She's such a hard worker." And I masked. I didn't know I had ADHD at the time, but that's how I identified as a hard worker, because I might not be as smart as anyone else, but I could outperform everyone. But to what cost? I didn't have good relationships, I wasn't sleeping, all those things.
But when you start to understand what regulation can look like through coaching or therapy or whatever, then you start feeling less stressed, less anxious, less depressed, and that feeling is so good. And then once you start to change that feeling—because then your nervous system gets amped again and your amygdala gets hijacked—you're like, "Oh, wait a second. No, no, I don't like this anymore. What do I know that works?"
Pete Wright:
And just to say, as a parenthetical, a lot of our technology tools like email and messages now have a schedule-send feature. So you can actually write an email and schedule it to send at 9 a.m., even though you're up at two in the morning and responding at 2:05. You guys, that is not a way to heal your nervous system. Even though it's performing boundaries, it's not boundaries. You still wrote the email.
Brooke Schnittman:
Well, I could tell you where it is a boundary. Whenever my husband and I used to get into a fight at night, I would be like, "All right, here we go."
Nikki Kinzer:
She's ready.
Brooke Schnittman:
I'm ready.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Brooke Schnittman:
And then I'm like, "Schedule send, 9 a.m." And then it's 8:55. I'm like, "Oh crap. Unschedule send, unschedule send, unschedule send." But it felt really good getting it off at that point.
Pete Wright:
Sometimes you gotta get it out. That's good. That's a good boundary. I'll buy that.
You also mentioned burnout. I don't think we can leave the conversation without talking just a little bit more substantively about what burnout looks like in this space, around the emotional cost of people aspiring to and working toward unrealistic capacity goals.
Brooke Schnittman:
It could look so different. Burnout could be doing the same repetitive task over and over again, and being burned out from the ordinary task. It could be a bunch of things that are being built up—these microaggressions or stressful tasks that are little and little and then all of a sudden become big. It could be a bad night of sleep and you pushing through and not listening to your body.
So burnout for neurodivergent people can last for days, it can last for weeks, it can last for months. And that is why it is really important to check in with yourself before you hit burnout. And if you do hit burnout, to somehow have that schedule that you rely on, and use your team of people to just start getting rid of tasks, getting rid of things. Just undercommit at that point, and ask yourself if you can give yourself permission to wait on whatever it is that you said you were going to be doing, if there's no deadline in the immediate future.
So burnout is a physical stopping of all things in motion. It can look like a headache, it can look like lack of sleep, it can look like anxiety. It could look like breaking down at the smallest thing that someone says to you because you have no capacity. You have no battery left. So we talk about 40% battery, 100% battery—you're at zero at this point. So it's not about doing more, it's about listening to your hierarchy of needs at that point and trying to re-energize, whether it be mindfulness, reliable sleep if you can, eating, talking to friends that make you laugh. Not being around people if you can't and you're overstimulated, but getting that energy bank back up. And also, at the same time—I know you guys love this—doing that 1% action that by the end of the day you'll be thankful for. So it's not like you completely stop everything, but you're doing 1%, whether it be putting on your shoes and just sitting outside. So you still have a little bit of momentum that you're giving to yourself.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love that. So if someone is listening and they recognize themselves in our conversation today, what is the first or most honest thing that they can do differently this week? What would you advise?
Brooke Schnittman:
I don't think we need more discipline with ADHD.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. You mean you can't just do it?
Brooke Schnittman:
I think we need—
Pete Wright:
I don't know what you mean by that. That doesn't sound like me.
Brooke Schnittman:
I think we need less friction. I know you guys love to talk about friction. Clear entry points. Systems that match your actual capacity. And when we stop forcing productivity and start working with our brain, that's when things can finally start to stick. So trust yourself, and rely on the things that have worked for you in the past, and use your resources at that point. But just know you're not neurotypical. So don't try to pretend.
Nikki Kinzer:
Love that, Brooke. Thank you so much.
Pete Wright:
Yes. Brooke, we just love having you on the show, and thank you for sharing the wisdom. Where do you want to send people? Is there another book coming that we can talk about? What are you doing?
Brooke Schnittman:
No. Everyone thinks I'm having another book coming out. No, there is no other book right now.
Pete Wright:
It's because the first one was great.
Brooke Schnittman:
Oh, I love you guys.
Pete Wright:
Just saying, you gave us a sniff and now we want the whole order.
Brooke Schnittman:
Thank you all. Okay, so the book Activate Your ADHD Potential is part of my 3C Activation System, which you guys have heard about. And I train ADHD coaches on that to carry out the system. And it has evolved a lot since. There's a lot more neuroscience in it, there's a lot more emotional dysregulation tools in it, a lot more masking tools. So if I have another book coming out, it's going to be part two of that.
Pete Wright:
Perfect. I'll take a part two.
Brooke Schnittman:
But I can't promise when that's gonna be.
Pete Wright:
It's fine.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, we understand that.
Pete Wright:
That's fair, we do. Where do you want to send people to actually learn more about your fantastic work?
Brooke Schnittman:
Coaching with Brooke, with an I. My biggest thing right now that I'm working on is training coaches. Training ADHD coaches to help students. I also have a program to help adults for ADHD coaches. And so I'm passionate about that, and getting that into universities as well.
Pete Wright:
Awesome.
Nikki Kinzer:
Very needed.
Pete Wright:
That's a big order.
Brooke Schnittman:
Thank you, thank you. I'm up for it.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So that's where people need to go. We'll put the links in the show notes. Definitely go get the book. Find out what Brooke's up to. And that's perfect. Thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. Thanks for 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 the Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Brooke Schnittman, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
