173 - End of Year Reflection, Future Projection, And a Tribute to Stephanie!

It's the end of the year! Let's talk about what happened and what's to come, and I am going to read a speech and honor one of our awesome community members who has achieved the unthinkable with ADHD! Have a listen! 

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Transcript

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It's the final episode of 2024. Where'd where has time gone? Let us do some reflecting and some projecting. Let's do a little reflective project. And I'll throw in a little uh ADHD hackeroonie for you. Alright, let's go. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Rush Jones, author of The Stending to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast. My God, where has the time gone? This is an entire year. All right, we're done with it. 2024. See you later. Not gonna miss ya. That's for sure. Let me start this first by thanking you guys for your for your ears. This has been really the the podcast aspect of this year has been super fun for the comments that you guys have sent. I just I really appreciate uh the fact that you guys tune in every week. And thanks to those of you guys that have rated it and reviewed it on reviewed the podcast. And if you haven't, I'm thank you right now for going there and leaving a review on iTunes. That's you guys are awesome. Should we reflect a little bit? I think that's seems appropriate for this episode. A lot has happened in 2024. Uh, this year, it's the year that I got laid off. So that happened. I got I got my department to operate at 95% efficiency on a plan of 70%. So yeah, kick ass. Pat myself on the back for that, and then I got laid off. But it was the perfect kick in the butt, I think, to to full time it with ADHD Big Brother. It's very scary, but it, you know, it's at the core of my purpose. And, you know, and now I work twice the hours, but I have eight times more purpose behind it. It's a thousand times more rewarding, and I'm a billion times happier. And those are just, I'm just giving you guys rough statistics here, but I'm I'm pretty close to accurate when I say this. This is also the year that I discovered how important building community is for adults with ADHD. You guys obviously know if you listen to the podcast that community is this magical elixir for ADHD. Community ADHD coaching kicks ass. And in terms of uh ADHD Big Brother, the highlights for me uh were I got nominated for a podcasting award. What? That kicked ass. I got the platinum award from the circle platform, and that's where I run the community because we have a significant level of engagement from the community. People are in there getting their shit together together. It is it's beautiful. I'll admit, like so it's really difficult and stressful in uh running my own solopreneur operation. This is uh, for those of you that are interested, it's kind of in what that kind of stuff takes. I've been helping people since the pandemic. Um, so it was like my part-time purpose gig uh while I worked at UPS. And so the podcast itself is four years old and it's taken a bit of time to grow, but it's the most rewarding endeavor that I've ever been a part of. Like I'm getting paid to uh help adults with ADHD. I mean, how fun is that? So I'm really looking forward to 2025. Um, we're theming out the months next year. January is about the foundations for change. We're such a jump in the middle type of people. So in January, we're gonna be zooming out. We're gonna be looking at our big picture, we're gonna be making plans that mean something to us on a bigger scale. Like, so we'll do the Wheel of Life worksheet uh to see how balanced our life is and where we might make some goals to address being out of balance. Megs Crawford is coming back. She's a the ADHD organization expert, but she's also a certified manifestation instructor. So she's gonna give us a workshop on manifesting. How badass is that? We're showing each other that we can do long-term goals, we can stick to them. So the podcast episodes are gonna reflect that. And I want to kick it off uh with you guys and ask you like, what is what is your big goal for 2025 or your big goals? Like, who do you want to be? Do you wanna be, I want to be in better shape, or do you want to make more money? Do you want to be less overwhelmed or you have less stress? Shoot me an email. Let me know what you guys are uh working on, and I'll respond with some ADHD Big Brothering on it. I'll poke at you a little bit. I'll say things like, yeah, that's an awesome goal. So what are you gonna do to achieve that? When are you gonna dedicate the time to that? Or what day or days of the week are you gonna put that effort in? And at what time during those days of the week? Or you can just ask yourself those questions. Here's an end-of-the-year ADHD hackeron ski for you. If you are not completely specific, you won't do it. And there we go. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye. Just kidding. Unless you're intrinsically excited about it, you unless you have like a true interest in the task, you will not move forward on it if you are not specific. Good day. That period, end of sentence, no debate, that is the truth. Here's what I know about us. If you say any of these things, you've already determined unconsciously that you're not going to do it. Like if you ever say, like, oh, I'll have to figure that out, it's not happening. It's not happening anytime soon. So you're probably just forgetting to figure it out. Uh if you say, I'm gonna try and get that done, uh, no, you're not. No, you're not. Uh, if you say, I'm gonna do that tomorrow, and I go, oh yeah, when tomorrow? Uh at some point in the morning. No, you're not doing it. You are already determined that you won't be doing it. Not purposefully, not maliciously. You just it statistically, you're 99.9% not gonna do it. So the ultimate the ultimate hack for ADHD is to put in the effort to be as specific as possible. And this is for stuff that you aren't naturally motivated to get started on. So, in order to be more likely, not guaranteed, but more likely to do it, be appointment setting specific. That's ASS. Appointment setting specific. Ass. You have to be an ass about it. You have to be an ass about it to yourself and to everyone around you. You have to be a big fat major ass about it. Sorry, guys, I can't go out with you at 10 o'clock because I have an appointment to do sit-ups. What an ass. Yes, be an ass in 2025. You'll thank yourself for it. Don't be a jerk, just be an ass. All right. Some of you might want to know what it takes to do the thing that you said you were gonna do. What does that what does that look like? And I'm gonna double this as a shout-out to one of our community members. Her name is Stephanie. She knows this is coming. And she gave me permission to read her post in the community. So she is one of nine people so far who have achieved the honor of calling themselves a Skull Spaghetti Master in our community. So to earn that title, you must post in daily accountability and successfully accomplish the thing that you said you were going to do that day 100 days in a row. 100 days of doing what you said you were gonna do. Could just be one thing, could be a couple of things. You know, I'm gonna fold my laundry today. Day two, I'm gonna make that doctor's appointment. If you do the thing, you get to post the next day. And if you forget or you don't do the thing, you just start up day one again. You're going after a streak, it's and gamification here. It is a big deal to me, and I model a lot of what we do in the community around games and earning badges. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes to activate our interest-wired brains. So Stephanie is not just a skull spaghetti master, she also got to day 200 in a row. So we had to create the badge school spageti. It was we try to squeeze the word Jedi in there, and then she went ahead and got to day 300 in a row of doing the thing that she said she was gonna do. So again, we had to create another badge, so school spaghetti Zen Master, it is, and now she's mere days away from the recording of this episode, from hitting one year straight of doing the thing that she said she was gonna do. And I'm not gonna reveal the title of that badge because she doesn't know what it is yet, and so it won't be revealed until she earns the badge. Stephanie is proof that adults with ADHD in the rocky ups and downs of a year can get shit done. And so to honor Stephanie, I'm gonna gift the entire ADHD Big Brother audience with her Skull Spaghetti Master Speech, which she again gave me permission to do. This once we reach 100 days, if somebody earns the Skull Spaghetti uh Master badge, we have Skull Spaghetti Master Speeches. We have a whole space dedicated to people talking about how they got there. So, Stephanie, you're amazing. I'm super motivated and excited that you're a member of the community. And so without further ado, I will now read her speech. Uh I'm not gonna use a voice. I'm not gonna Myphany. Here's what I'll do. I won't I won't be doing that. Um, but I'm I might chime in with thoughts, I don't know yet. So here we go. What is the secret to doing what you say you're gonna do for a hundred days in a row? Just do it. Duh. Thanks for coming to my talk. Have a great night. Okay, so that I had to perform that one a little bit. Um, Stephanie, that's you write so nicely, it's like hard not to perform it. Um she continues, okay, okay, that's not the secret. But man, if I had even a penny for all the times I've heard that advice, I'd probably be on a beach somewhere with an umbrella in my drink, and someone on one side of me feeding me grapes, and someone on my other side fanning me with palm fronds. Anyways, here's my journey to Skull Spaghetti Mastery. Before I found my way to this community, I was pretty much the master of winging it in life. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. All times I was too tired to give a fuck. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until just before my 40th birthday, so I had zero tools that I knew of consciously. Even after diagnosis, I stumbled a lot trying to find my way mostly alone. When I finally joined the forum, that's the community that they used to call it the forum. Um, when I finally joined the forum after binge listening to the podcast, the one you're listening to right now, thank you very much. Uh, I kind of felt a bit overwhelmed. I looked around uh all the different sections and uh read a ton of posts and comments. I for sure didn't feel ready to make a one-year goal, and even the month goal felt like a big leap from starting at zero. So I went with just the daily accountability. For the first couple of months, I only had about an hour after work when I could realistically get anything truly accomplished. I'm really bad at doing anything once my husband gets home from work. So that one hour from when I get home to when he got home was all I had to do all the things. Posting things in here for accountability really helped me figure out priorities. I knew if I posted quote unquote all the things, I would never get past day one. At one point I realized I could post things just for me. I didn't have to always be quote unquote productive or always be cleaning or doing some other horrible adulting type things. So I started picking one I don't want to do it thing and one thing that was either a hobby or some other self-care thing. Sure, somehow things got behind when I cut into my one hour of alone productivity time, but since I did things for the inside part of me, the outside chaos felt less overwhelming. Then chaos took over everything, inside my brain and outside. Work became a living nightmare, and I basically rage quit. Yes, I remember that. Oh, that's a side note from me. I remember that time. Normally that would have caused full panic in my brain to lose income, but I suddenly felt really calm instead. I suddenly had all day to do things I had been trying to do in my short hour after work. You'd think that would be awesome. But I lost urgency, which means I lost all motivation too. I had no idea how to fill my days anymore. I didn't want to spend all day cleaning, but I also didn't want to spend all day with my ass on the couch. So picking something to post every day started to be more difficult. My solution was it gave me something to focus on each day without being overwhelmed by options or feeling like I needed to do everything every day. It's been about seven weeks since I officially quit my job, and about five since Rodney and I decided together that it might be better for us to have me stay at home versus finding a new job. There have been plenty of days where I feel like a lazy, good for nothing waste of space, but more often, thanks to the daily accountability and all the other support in this community, I feel like I'm slowly finding myself. Making myself pick something to do so I don't lose my streak has helped me gain momentum to do other things. Momentum is definitely needed when there's no urgency. If I do the thing right away in the morning, everything else feels like a bonus. Bonuses are cool. It also helps me actually relax when I need to. I did the thing, now what else can I do? Or I did the thing and that's good enough. So to boil all this down to how to get to 100 days and beyond. Oh, she gave us some bullet points. Let's go. Here's the cheat sheet. Uh pick things that are simple enough to do, but hard enough that you need the accountability push. That's solid. Listen to your physical and mental cues for energy and take that into account when choosing to what to post. Sometimes less really is more. That's super smart. Um, don't only post the shitty things you've been putting off. Fun things and self-care relaxing is important too. Burnout is a bitch. Zero out of ten would not recommend. I don't. Yeah, burnout sucks. And finally, half assed is better than no assed. Five minutes is better than zero minutes. Starting but not finishing is better than never starting. Couldn't agree more, Stephanie. Here's two the next 100 days. Hopefully. I know that she put hopefully in Prince's. And you know what? She's now on almost day 365. So this was written more than 200 days ago. And she's still going strong. Wow. She's almost at one year. Stephanie, you kick ass. And so we are all looking forward to your one-year speech. All you other ADHD adults out there, you kick ass. Here's to a 2025 of using your tools, practicing your skills, adopting new skills, iterating your process, having fun with your process, and being cool with yourself along the way. If you need help with any of this, I'm open for business. Whether it's through the community or if you're looking for a group program, I'm gonna be in the new year, I'm gonna have group uh group program. So the if you want to be a part of shaping that, the link to uh a short anonymous five-minute survey, it's in the show notes. If it's if the link is down there, then the survey's still going. So yeah, be a part of helping me shape that. I'm here for you guys. I help adults with ADHD do the things they want to do and do the things that they don't want to do, but they need to do. I teach the skills and I provide the necessary support, that accountability that is crucial for success. Guys, we are our best when we work together. So feel free to reach out. And in the meantime, have a phenomenal end of 2024, and I will see you guys enthusiastically in 2025. Let's go.