The Unreliable Narrator: Self-Observation for ADHD

ADHD Symptoms

Oct 1

You'd swear you sent that email. You can picture yourself writing it. And then you find it, unsent, still marked unread.

This week, Pete and Nikki borrow the literary idea of the unreliable narrator to explore why ADHD makes us shaky witnesses to our own lives. They look at how working memory, time blindness, and mood bend the story we tell ourselves, and at research showing how far self-assessment can drift from the record. Then they turn to practical ways to get a clearer picture: asking the people around you what they see (RSD and all), capturing moments while they're fresh, and letting the data you already generate tell you what you actually accomplished. Along the way, Nikki shares how coaching helps clients notice their own patterns, and why a log should help you see instead of grading you.

Links & Notes

Accuracy of Self-Evaluation in Adults with ADHD: Evidence from a Driving Study, the 2005 Knouse, Bagwell, Barkley, and Murphy study Pete discusses
The Fragile Dance of Memory and ADHD with Dr. Daniella Karidi, one of the three episodes referenced
ADHDtime, Daniella Karidi's coaching practice
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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:
Do you drink your mixed cocktails out of cans?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That's too bad, because that is a standing trait of the unreliable white woman narrator in a whole catalog of books and movies, most of them starring Emily Blunt. The Girl on the Train is a great example of this. If you've ever read it, all she does is reach into her purse and pull out cocktails that she drinks from a can. Over and over again.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, yes.
Pete Wright:
And it makes her a very unreliable narrator. And that's what we're talking about today. Not mixed drinks, but the unreliable narrator. Are you so excited about this?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I thought we were going to talk about mixed drinks too.
Pete Wright:
We're talking about a literary mechanism. If you need to shoehorn mixed drinks into this conversation, we could do that. I promise.
Nikki Kinzer:
No, but I like how you set that up, because that's actually a really good example. With The Girl on the Train, if you read the book before you watch the movie, you have no idea that that's what's happening.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
You think it's all real.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So that's really good. I love this. This is good. Great start.
Pete Wright:
Perfect. All right, that's what we're going to do today. I'm very excited about this topic because it has literary roots, and I like talking about literary roots.
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All right, Nikki, here we go.
Nikki Kinzer:
All right.
Pete Wright:
A little history. Will you indulge me in a little history?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
All right. So here's something for context that you've probably done. Somebody asks you about an email, and you tell them you've already answered that email. You can picture yourself writing that email. You would swear to it in court with one hand on the Bible. I swear I wrote that email. And then you go look for that email, and it's not written. It's sitting there, maybe it even still has a little blue unread dot on it.
Nikki Kinzer:
The opposite would happen to me. I would have sworn that I didn't write the email, that I forgot about it, and then I would feel bad because I didn't do it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And then I would go look, and I actually sent it.
Pete Wright:
You sent it maybe twice.
Nikki Kinzer:
But I didn't remember. Yeah, and I didn't remember it.
Pete Wright:
Right. The thing is, you weren't lying to anybody. You told them what you remembered. The memory was wrong, and nothing inside your head ever flagged it as wrong. It felt exactly like every other accurate memory you have ever had.
In literature, there is a name for this. In 1961, a critic named Wayne Booth wrote a book about how fiction works called The Rhetoric of Fiction. He introduced a couple of key terms that have been used in criticism ever since, and one that has really broken free of literary criticism is the unreliable narrator. It describes a storyteller the reader can't take at face value.
Most of these unreliable narrators are not liars. They believe what they're telling you. Nick Carraway opens The Great Gatsby by explaining he doesn't judge people and then spends the book judging everyone in it. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" keeps assuring you that he is absolutely sane while he describes a dead man's heartbeat coming through the floorboards. The girl on the train was just a plain drunk all the time. You didn't know that when the book started. You do find out at the end. Booth's point was that the reader has a very important job in these stories. You have to notice where the narrator's account and the evidence on the page stop matching.
So we go back to this email situation. Nobody in that moment asked you how you knew you had or hadn't sent it. If they had, you'd have said you remembered. But we had three guests last season who told us, without knowing the others had said it, that memory is not a good enough answer. Dr. Daniella Karidi, Dr. Brandy Callahan, and Linda Roggli were on to talk about three different things, and each of them said the same thing. You are not a reliable witness to your ADHD. And that is a problem for us, because most of what we talk about with each other in the community, on this show, and across the broader spectrum of ADHD material starts with paying attention to what you're doing.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's so true. Self-awareness. What are you noticing? What are the patterns?
Pete Wright:
Exactly. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about where else information might come from, and how you find out exactly what happened when the person reporting on it is you, the unreliable one.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
And there's actually some more research that makes me even more sad about my own ability to self-report. So that's the whole context.
Nikki Kinzer:
Let's dig in.
Pete Wright:
How do you reflect on your self-awareness? Because self-awareness changes whether you live with ADHD or not.
Nikki Kinzer:
Like, do I have it?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Do you have it?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, it depends. If you ask me, I would say, yeah, sure I do. If you ask my husband, he might say, no, she doesn't. So I think I do, but I also know that sometimes it doesn't matter.
Pete Wright:
Oh, tell me more about that.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, for example, we did our quarterly planning workshop yesterday for our GPS members. We do this every quarter, and you choose one to three focus areas that are outside of your everyday activities. Well, I need to focus on movement. I know I need to do that. I'm very aware of all of the reasons why it's important and why it's important right now. But it's still really hard to do anything about it. So I'm aware, but I'm still working through it.
Pete Wright:
Right. And what's interesting about that is how often that awareness actually bubbles up to the surface, the sort of proprioceptive "I'm aware and I'm going to go move," versus how often you're able to make a judgment that says, "I'm going to rationalize this away. I'm aware that it exists, but I don't need it right now."
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
And the short game comes at the great expense of the long game. I'm not working out today, knowing that I'm not going to build a habit that leads me to want to work out tomorrow or the next day. And the cost does not come tomorrow or the next day. It comes in five years when I struggle to get out of bed in the morning.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.
Pete Wright:
And a lot of that plays into working memory issues. For ADHD folks, a lot of what happens during the day, as we talked about last season, never gets stored long enough to remember later. So at the end of the day, these working memory issues come up where I didn't have a note card to write down that fleeting thought, and so it's gone like a vapor.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
It's gone forever. If it comes back, it will be incidental, accidental, and probably not actionable at the time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Time blindness is one of the other components to this. Of course, we talk about it all the time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
You know a thing happened, but you probably can't say when or how long it took.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And this, for me, is when I'm reaching into my handbag for the canned cocktail. Whether I remember the thing or not is the first big question. But if I do remember it, my experience with it doesn't get hard-coded into something that's repeatable. So I'll say, yeah, that task took me 15 minutes, when it took me 45.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
But the next time I'm asked to remember it, I might say it took me an hour.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.
Pete Wright:
Does that make sense?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, absolutely. It's very skewed.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. The swing of time blindness is incredibly challenging, because I can know it happened, but the how, the why, the expression of it in time is malleable every time I think about it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, for sure.
Pete Wright:
I want to talk about moods a little bit. I had done some work with a guy named Fernando Flores, who really codified the experience of moods at work at a time when mood was considered to be a kind of squishy, non-business topic. And now mood is being talked about as something absolutely key to our performance.
So I wonder if you would reflect a little bit on mood as it relates to your experience with your clients. That could be a mood of curiosity or provocation, or a mood of straight-up Eeyore, you're just depressed, or a mood of feeling beaten down and oppressed. How does mood connect to self-observation with ADHD when you think about your clients?
Nikki Kinzer:
All of those things, yeah. Well, when you say mood, I relate that more to emotions. Just the emotional state that you're in. I know it's probably the same thing, but that's how I connect to it. It's the emotional state.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
And I would say that when I'm seeing clients, especially for the first time, the mood is somber. They're not coming to me because they're excited. They're coming to me because they need help. They're challenged and they're overwhelmed, and they're probably scared that they're going to lose a job or lose a relationship, or something bad is going to happen. So they're reaching out.
With the emotional part of that, you have to sit with it. When I'm working with clients, I'm observing how they're coming into the meeting. And if they're not feeling very well, and I don't mean physically, but emotionally and mentally, I'm not going to come in with, "Hey, hi, how's it going?" I'm going to match them a little bit, because I can see it. I notice it. I witness it.
So you sit with them in that and explore it. And I'm not a therapist, so it's different than therapy in the sense that I need to acknowledge it and we need to talk about it, and then we also need to figure out where we are as far as what we do next. With a therapist, you're going to sit with it probably even longer and explore everything that's coming up.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
As a coach, you really have to acknowledge it, but also ask where we're going with it.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So based on that foundation, how does a client's mood impact their ability to self-observe, to notice their accomplishments or their shortcomings related to their ADHD in a given week?
Nikki Kinzer:
If they're in a good mood, they're going to see a lot of it. Not all.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't think any ADHDer sees it all, unfortunately. I wish they would. But if they're in a more down mood, they're not going to be able to see any of it, because all they're going to see is the shame, disappointment, embarrassment, overwhelm. It's hard to see.
Pete Wright:
It's hard to see. That's a really interesting connection, because one of the articles that I found in the Journal of Attention Disorders is titled "Accuracy of Self-Evaluation in Adults with ADHD: Evidence from a Driving Study."
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
Now, this is a really useful context for dealing with ADHD, because we've been using this example of ADHD behind the wheel for as long as we've been doing this show. I can't remember who the first person was that said it. Maybe it was James Ochoa. But you're driving down the road, and somebody with ADHD might be in the left lane even though in two blocks they have to be in the right lane to make a right turn. And it doesn't hit them until it's too late and they've already careened through the light, or it's almost time and they careen into the right lane at the very last moment to make the turn, causing disruption and potentially accidents for everybody. It's a standard trope in ADHD conversation.
Well, this study actually looked at the data of people diagnosed with ADHD and their driving records, and interviewed them about their self-perception of their driving experience and their driving habits. This research was done by Laura Knouse and Catherine Bagwell, with Kevin Murphy. This is fascinating.
ADHD adults, objectively, have more collisions, more citations, and use fewer safe driving behaviors than the control group. And yet, when asked about their own driving, they say, yeah, I'm pretty good. I'm about the same as the control group. They overestimate more than any comparison group. They're not lying when they say this. They believe that is the truth.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Their experience is that they're about the same as everybody else. Now, that could be because of two things. One, they literally don't remember the accidents and citations they caused, because they're fleeting, or they were so far in the past. Or two, they believe their experience is so universal that clearly everybody has the same kind of—
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's going to lean more toward B.
Pete Wright:
It's kind of a mix.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And I don't have an objective answer to this. The data doesn't actually deal with it. Later work from Laura Knouse comes back and says this overly positive or optimistic outlook may contribute to further impairment and not to self-regulation skills. It may just be strictly a measure of the ADHD. We don't know the answer to that one. I just think it's really interesting, again, if we're working to notice that experience and that potential cognitive bias that we have to deal with.
But it also goes back to the practical day-to-day. If I go in with a good mood, I'm more likely to remember the positive accomplishments and to squash down the negative experiences. If I go in with a negative mood, I'm likely to think even the positive experiences of the week were not enough.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
They were not enough to actually make the week better. But in some ways, doesn't that fly against this driving research? I look at that driving research and I think to myself, I would like to be blissfully ignorant of all of the bad stuff that just happened in the last two weeks. I'd love to just move forward and think that clearly my experience is the norm and we're all in this boat together. So I find this a really interesting set of wobbly experiences. Go ahead.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm sorry. It's so interesting because it can go both ways so easily. When you were talking about the driving history, the reason I said I think it's more B is because they don't know any different, necessarily.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
If you think about it, you're driving well a lot more than you're not driving well, because of the amount of time you're on the road.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So you're thinking, well, I'm doing pretty good. I've only had one accident in the last six months. That's not bad. So I can see how you don't know any different.
But on the flip side of that, I missed an appointment with one of my clients. It was totally my fault. I didn't put it in my calendar. Completely out of sight, out of mind. She sends me a text: "Are you coming? Where are you?" And I, of course, apologized. And she said, "No, I'm actually really glad to know that you also miss appointments sometimes."
So it also goes the other way, where it's nice to see that, nope, you also do this too.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So yeah, it can go both ways.
Pete Wright:
It does go both ways.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Again, with our email example, some days it might be, "I'm sure I sent that," and other days it's, "I'll never do anything on time, ever."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And when you look at the range of that swing in the neuronormative population, it might be closer to down the middle. For us, a really good day might end up being just a middle to low-grade fever for somebody in the neuronormative spectrum.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
And Daniella Karidi said last season that we with ADHD hold on to negative feedback about three times more easily than positive feedback. So to your point, the second one tends to stick more.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And our assumptions end up leaning toward "everything sucks."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.
Pete Wright:
So, just notice. We say this all the time. I say this all the time. But building a muscle to just notice requires a lot more than imagining that your eyes are open all the time and that you're taking in everything. It's ridiculous to just say "just notice" without building a muscle around habit and behavior to help you notice. Noticing stuff is in itself a core executive function, and it's one of the things that ADHD absolutely makes harder. So we're asking people to develop a skill that is obviously in short supply.
Again, think about your coaching engagements. You compare a client's description of their week with what you've watched happen across several months of behavior. How does noticing evolve? How does their ability to become more self-aware evolve with the aid of an external coach like you and the external tools that you teach?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. That's the beauty of coaching, because you've got somebody else who's asking you questions that have you reflect.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And we rarely ever do that self-reflection on our own. So I really think that's the heart of so much coaching. It allows a safe space for someone to come in and process and talk. There's not an agenda, there's not an apology needed, there's no judgment. They're just able to process and talk out loud. And then if I'm noticing a pattern, or I notice they're using a word over and over again, I'm noticing it for them. Then I'm bringing it to their attention, and we can have this conversation.
Pete Wright:
Mm.
Nikki Kinzer:
And that really is the heart of it. It's not just me giving you a bunch of strategies and ideas. I mean, that's some of it, but the heart of it is that conversation and partnership of reflection. And not only noticing, but then, what do I want to do with it? Now that I see this and I'm aware of it, is it okay to keep it the same? Sometimes people push themselves to change it, and I will push back and say, why do you need to change it? Maybe this is fine.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Kinzer:
Maybe this is working. Where is that coming from, that you feel like you need to change it?
Pete Wright:
Oh, I love that you said that, because often we want to change just because our internal experience says not changing must equate to bad.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. Right. And sometimes it's not. It's not bad.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's who you are.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And so then there's this other component of who you are as a person, and why are we trying to change that? You're doing good. It's also giving them insight from somebody who's not in it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Who can say, no, you're actually doing great. This is really great progress. And over time, what I see with a lot of my clients, which is really great, is they'll start the conversation by telling me what's going well. It's been this organic thing where, before we get to the meat of anything, it's, "Well, I did this, and this happened, and this is really good." And that's great. That's what we want.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that's really important, and, not to burn the phrase down, it's important to notice how those changes actually allow you to build bigger, stronger, attentive muscles, even in the experience of ADHD.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
The reason I wanted you to dig in a little bit on the coaching experience is because that's one of the key ways to begin building this structure: to work with someone else. And it doesn't have to be a coach. It doesn't have to be Nikki. This isn't a plug. This is just to remind you that so much of ADHD is about your relationships with other people and how they help improve your experience in a way that you can't do alone.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So a partner, a body double, a coach, your micro networks. Ask someone else, what do you see? What do you see in me? What is your observation of how I get things done? How did I do on this thing that I just completed for you? What did that look like?
They'll give you maybe a grade, and you might be pissed off at the grade. But you just get to look at it and visit with the idea of that experience, the idea that maybe that grade wasn't as glowing as you thought it was in your head. Why does that gap exist? Can I spend 15 seconds acknowledging the gap so that next time the gap will be smaller, and my experience will match what actually happens?
Nikki Kinzer:
So I have a question for you, though. When you explain that, it all makes sense logically. But then where does RSD come in? Rejection sensitive dysphoria.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Rejection sensitivity is all over it.
Nikki Kinzer:
So are we saying, then, be prepared for that? If you're asking for feedback, it may not always be the feedback you want to hear.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
And with emotional dysregulation, that could definitely make a person spiral.
Pete Wright:
This is a tricky area, I think, because the easy answer is, yeah, you should be constantly searching for feedback. And the truth is, no, you should not always be searching for feedback, because only you know your experience with RSD. But at some point, if you want to improve some things in your life, you have to ask for feedback. Often, as adults, the world does not just give you the feedback that is going to be helpful.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
At work you might get a 360 evaluation that might or might not be useful. But the real, practical, day-to-day, most compelling feedback is: I just did a task for someone else. If I'm going to get better at that task, do it more thoroughly or on time, or understand where my understanding of that task breaks down, I have to ask for the feedback immediately, when it's fresh.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
And I have to do it acknowledging that I might feel bad about it because of my experience with RSD. And that goes back to Dr. Dodge. It's not my fault. It's not my fate. But it is mine.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, agree.
Pete Wright:
It is mine to bear. So I can't get around to saying you should live your life in its entirety avoiding feedback because of RSD, because RSD sucks, and we're all terrified of it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I get it. I have it. I live it. I've been the balled-up-on-the-couch person.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
I totally get it. I relate to it in every way. And also, I don't think it serves us, ultimately, to be completely beholden to running away from RSD.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I agree.
Pete Wright:
I don't think that's good for us.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. And I just want to say, Pete, great job not living in the all-or-nothing. Really. We just witnessed you say, no, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both. It can be an "and."
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think that's great. I love it.
Pete Wright:
Well, thank you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Good job.
Pete Wright:
Thank you, coach. I appreciate that. So that's one of the three approaches.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
The next one is super practical. I think I've taken for granted so many of my own reminders and habits that I've built in over 25 years and now live in. The research has challenged me, and it's also forced me to recognize my actual behavior, not my perceived, aspirational behavior.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
And that is simply capture. At one point, the researchers who study ADHD were doing end-of-day questionnaires. They just said, at the end of the day, report on your day. Report on the things you did during the day.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
And that gives a certain set of data. But you know what's even better? Checking in with people many times throughout the day, because the answers are vastly more accurate. At home, that might be a one-question check-in on a timer, a one-tap log on your phone, a voice memo instead of a mental note, or a picture of your desk. All of those things throughout the course of your day will help you build a better day tomorrow, and help you better understand what you've done today.
I go back to the old field notes approach. Have some sort of easy-access shortcut on your phone, whatever it is, so that when you complete something, you make a note of it, rather than waiting six hours until four o'clock in the afternoon and trying to remember what you did and your experience with it.
When we think about time tracking, we have an exercise where we ask people to track their time over the course of the day. We don't ask you to do it forever, because it sucks forever and you'll never do it forever. But commit to it for a few days or a week.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
That's the kind of habit we're talking about. When you want to get better at noticing, do what the ADHD researchers did, and have the tools at the ready at any second to write down what you're experiencing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And I say "write down" intentionally. For me, it's on my iPad. I have my Notes app on my iPad, and I write things down all day long. That's my behavior, even though on my calendar I have a recurring event, "Plan Tomorrow," which is effectively "Review Today, Plan Tomorrow," every day at four o'clock. That's not how I act. I actually do this all day long.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
And that's the thing to remember. Absolutely stack your workspace, your car, your kitchen with places to make notes that eventually end up in one place.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Do what the researchers do. The researchers figured out how to work with us.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
We can do it ourselves. So that's the next thing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
And the last is: look at what got tracked automatically. This is super useful in our age, and it's something we all have access to if we do any sort of knowledge work, if we spend our days at our computers. Your calendar history, your sent email, your screen time, all the notification statements, your step counts from your fitness tracker, whatever it is. None of that stuff needed you to notice it. It was completely ambient.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. It was just there.
Pete Wright:
It's just there.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
So what are the things you can track automatically to help you keep up with this? I will tell you, as somebody who is experiencing life with the aid of AI, I have a skill for Claude that allows me to say, "I need you to go look at what I accomplished today." And where does it look? It looks in my email. It looks in Todoist. It looks in all of the places that I track my time. It looks at Coda, the database for all of our show work.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
It does a collection of all of the activity I did there and gives me a very concise report on the specific projects I've done. And that has been enormously helpful for my brain.
Nikki Kinzer:
How does it feel when you see it? I'm curious. How did it feel the very first time you did that analysis?
Pete Wright:
Honestly, most of the time it goes back to this discussion of mood. It improves my mood.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm sure it does, because then you see, wow, I got a lot done today. There's a lot of movement going on.
Pete Wright:
That's a hundred percent right. And that is the punchline for the entire experience. When you see this third party just collecting the data and telling me what I was able to accomplish, it reminds me how much I forget throughout the day.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
I did a thing which included so many different tasks, so many different problems solved, and so many different things shipped, and I forget them the moment I do them, when I move on to something else, or get distracted, or just go eat another bowl of cereal.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
And when I look at it in the end, it tells me, oh, I contributed somewhere to someone.
Nikki Kinzer:
You sure did.
Pete Wright:
Some days it's not like that. Some days it's, "It was pretty quiet today, Pete. You okay?"
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Some days it reflects that.
Nikki Kinzer:
But that's okay. You're probably recovering.
Pete Wright:
Maybe.
Nikki Kinzer:
And that goes back to what I always say. We're not meant to be productive every single minute of the day.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And not every day is going to look the same. And that's okay.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
That inconsistency, we need to just know is okay.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I just hope this unreliable narrator conversation, the ways we don't trust ourselves, doesn't make us feel bad, and that we don't fall back on that old trope of "Why can't I just whatever? Why can't I just do more, track more, be more?"
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
That is not effective for anyone, and most certainly not effective for us.
Nikki Kinzer:
No, I agree.
Pete Wright:
And I think you said something back in June that was really important. If a log starts making you feel bad about yourself, it's being used to grade instead of to see and to understand. So stop, reset, and go back to seeing. That's really important. And I used the word "grade" earlier when I said to ask for feedback.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, you did.
Pete Wright:
I used the word "grade" because I know that's how we're going to hear it. We're going to hear it as a grade.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And maybe sometimes that's useful as a relational thing. Somebody gave me what I interpret as a C. What's it going to take for me to interpret it as a B?
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Maybe that's useful. Maybe that's not language that works for you. If that's the case, I encourage you not to use it, and to really lock in on this ultimate point: feedback is not destined to make you feel bad. It's just an observation, something to separate emotion from reality, because we live too often with our emotions connected so heavily to reality.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So that's what I have been thinking about.
Nikki Kinzer:
Great. I love it.
Pete Wright:
Did we do okay?
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it.
Pete Wright:
All right. So I'm going to go put my head down and just hope that this was okay for somebody out there.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's going to be great for many. For many, yes.
Pete Wright:
That's how I live. We sure appreciate you hanging out, and definitely go read some unreliable narrator books. I guarantee you they will make you feel better about your life. That can generally be taken as truth.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We appreciate you downloading and listening to the show. Thank you for your time and your attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, head over to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server. You can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.