256 - ADHD and the Path to Actually Doing Stuff

This is your episode if you are ready to put the books on the bookshelf for a little bit and you are ready to start the doing. 

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Transcript

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There's more learning in the doing, I think, than there is doing in the learning. So for an adult with ADHD, especially we need to talk. Can you please just come on in and we'll talk about it? Close the door. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD, their comorbid depression, their anxiety. Oh, it's just a nuke. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Rush Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's crapastic. So let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Let's make some commitments to do some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast. Super glad you're here. Hi, how you doing? I'm just gonna mix it all together today. Mental health report mixed with ADHD Big Brother, mixed with ADHD stuff. Let's go. Let's just put it all in the cauldron and swirl it around. Uh so the mental health report, why we do that. Um, great question. If this is your first time here, uh okay, we got to get comfortable sharing. My view on this is that we have to make our crap visible. Uh we're not always, we're not always fine, right? Society and its polite conversations. Hey, how are you doing? I am fine. How are you? Oh, look, we had we just had a conversation. I appreciate our discussion. Fancy weather we're having. Oh yes, there is a temperature, and it has a number, and there are appropriate clothing options for each individual number. What are we? What are we a bunch of C3POs? Or we can just be real. I don't know. I mean, I'll show you my turd sandwich. You don't have to eat it, but if you're asking what I'm metaphorically having for lunch today as it relates to my mood state, I'm eating a turd sandwich. So that's the mental health report. It's on my end, it's just me putting in the reps, sharing what's going on in my skull spaghetti, whether I like it or not. You know, we're normalizing it. Yay! So that's me. I sank. I really did. Uh this week was tough. I got sunkarized, if that's the word. The dark void got me. It sunk its teeth in. Um, today I'm currently feeling better. Although that fatigue deal, you know, where you're like, I just I I always want to be sleeping. Oh god. That's present still. But mood state's a little bit boostied. Um, so I don't really know what caused uh my particular low mood. Probably kicked off financially. You know, looking at finances is always a big pain in the ass. Emily's been in Japan, so I've been I was missing her. She's back now, though. So it's already my mood state is just it's automatically lifting just because she's back. Kids have been great. Time with them has been great. I think I maybe had too many Ugs in a row. Do you know, like an ug for finances one day where you're like, ugh, I gotta deal with that. Or like an Ug for dishes one day where you walk into the kitchen, I'm like, ugh, I gotta deal with that. Ugh for my ears being clogged, ug for laundry, an ug for doing marketing work for ADHD Big Brother, bunch of Uggs, all like colliding into a dramatic melancholy. Like, is this life a series of ugs all the time? And I can start to tell now when I'm sinking. There's telltale signs. What happens to me is things start slipping. That's kind of like if I'm self-aware enough, I can see it coming. So I feel like I kind of saw this one coming. I forgot to post in our daily accountability club in the in the ADHC Big Brother membership. So I had to reset my my day streak back to one. Oh, that is a mega ug. I completely forgot a Zoom meeting with a friend because Wednesday, because it was on Wednesday. Wednesday is my day off. That's the day that I take because I work every other day. So guess who never even thought to look at his calendar until randomly when I was like, I should just look at my calendar. And I was already 30 minutes late to a meeting, so that never ended up happening. That's ugastic. Come all the self-loathing. Didn't and I gotta do an apology. And then I had a meeting with Shelby Nolan. Oh my god. Great friend! She came to the community, she talked about the different therapy modalities. If you're if you're a member, go into the replays. It was a great talk on the different types of therapy. Um, we were supposed to have a conversation, uh, just hang out and shoot shit. And um, if I wasn't at my computer when the email from her came that said, here's your Google Infight, I would have missed that too. Full disclosure. I got lucky. I got real lucky. Anyway, so the mood state's been a little bit crappy, but something is going on. Maybe it's in the water or the air or the planet alignments or you know, something because there's a few of us inside the ADHD Big Brother membership. Um, and in my personal life, that we're all like sad sacking it right now, myself included, it's clearly. Like, this is one of the reasons why I love our membership. I don't love that people are struggling with their mood state, but like what I do love is the not aloneness of it all. Like, I don't wish for people to be sad, but it's interesting how like it's not just me in the community saying I'm sad and everybody else is feeling great. That would make me feel isolated and alone. But man, there's a few of us going through it for various reasons uh at varying levels, but then there's also people who are kicking ass and feeling great, and everyone is so fucking supportive and okay with everything. I love it. This is the greater purpose and vision of it all. Um, don't love the mood state, but I do love the people. Um, and one thing that I notice, um, especially when I'm in this type of situation, is I get super oppositional. Oh my god, and a little bit ragey, not outwardly at people, just inwardly at thinking about the world and things and stuff. I just get like I, you know, like a pissy attitude about it. So just know that in the rest of this podcast, I love you. This is uh unconditional support to you. Uh, this is just one man's opinion, and I'm probably full of shit anyway. So here we go. I'm currently in this particular headspace, I'm uh over learning anything new about ADHD. I'm kind of taking a break from learning new ADHD shit. Uh, it's mostly just a new spin on the same stuff, anyways. And I've pretty much read everybody's book on ADHD. I did the Simply ADHD Adka thing. I'm fucking spent right now. And I should tell you this about me. I am a hardcore lover of learning about myself. I I like it. Why do we love? Why do we hate? What's up with all these feelings? What are my chakras doing? Do I have a spirit guide? Why do I hate the dishes so much? I feel like learning how to play the banjo. What's going on with that? I love the self-reflection, the inner journey of it all. Um, and I'm I'm it's not like I'm declaring anything here. I'm still doing podcast episodes about life and ADHD and depression and stuff. But I mean, if you haven't heard, we I've got 250 plus episodes on that. So if you're struggling uh with something about ADHD that you're trying to get on the other end of and it's ADHD related, use my podcast finder, link in the show notes. You just type in your struggle and it's gonna spit you out a couple of episodes that might help. Super cool. At some point, we have to be like, now what? Right? Learning does not equal doing, it equals learning. The joke at our expense is like, oh, yeah, we never finish a book. Isn't that funny? Ha ha ha ha. We buy it and we never open it. Uh-huh. We skim it. And I'm very familiar with that. Maybe it's my mood state, but it's this is a real fucking problem. I'm supposed to believe that we can learn a thing and then translate that into the doing on our own, no help, just sucked it right up and did it. That's a crock of shit in Russ Jones Land. It's crock poo. I'll tell you that right now. What's left to learn? I mean, if you're just now finding out about your ADHD, then yeah, okay, got it. You know, binge your favorite ADHD influencer, get your books, hire your coach, whatever. Do your basic research, right? But how many years do we have to endure the learning? At what point do we say, okay, this is ADHD? I can tell you all the reasons why I can't do stuff. You know, I'd really like to do is my fucking laundry. I want to move beyond telling people why I can't do a thing, and I'd like to be able to say, I actually did it. I'd like my word to mean something to myself, and I'd like to be able to honor that word. And how do I do that? Well, learning does not produce doing, it's learning, it's like an idle absorption of information. And it's this isn't the matrix. You know, we don't live in a world where you just upload the information, stick a needle in the back of your head, and now you fucking know karate. You actually have to go to the dojo to practice karate FYI. You have to suck at karate first. You can't just be like, hey, I read a book on karate, and I was like, Yeah, this author knows me, this author gets me. I love everything they said about karate, and I think I'm gonna buy a black belt now because I had the karate epiphanies and now I'm a master. And then you know what happens? And then you just show up day one at the dojo, and everyone's breaking boards, and you get up there and that and you try to punch a board, and now you have bloody knuckles because you didn't practice the technique, you just read a book about it. I don't know if that does that. I think that analogy works. It's fun for me to think about too. So I'm I I I say that's a win. That's a good analogy. So that's that's the road to karate failure. And then normally we would just give it all up and say, I think maybe I'm a jujitsu person. I'm gonna read a book about jujitsu now. Uh, but you know, if you flip this, I absolutely believe that doing produces learning. Doing produces motivation, doing offers the reward of a job well done, and it provides the insights that we need that ultimately lead to the formation of our glorious systems. And this, so this is when we have like a bajillion reasons why I'd love to be able to do it, but I can't. I need to build a system, I need to create a routine, I need to make a habit, I need to read the latest research, get a glimmer of maybe a new way to identify with myself. Perhaps there's a subtype of ADHD, predominantly inattentive, that the latest research will show. And then I'll have one more thing that I can tell people about why I can't do the laundry. This is everything that I am. This, if there is a hill I'm dying on, it would be this. I you would roll my dead corpse down this hill. And that's an inside joke to the ADHD Big Brother people who all like my perspective on goals is that it's a roll down the hill. So you just roll my dead corpse down the hill. We need to find out what it takes to do. And to do that, you need other people. That's a personal opinion because the way to success here, as far as I'm concerned, is to find our unique way of making the world's shittiest things, things that hold us no interest to us, doable. Based on the level of difficulty, most of us need proximity to support. And then it changes. The same thing one day is easy, and the next day it requires more support. The day that I gave up my quest for the I did it all on my own and I didn't need any help from anyone uh award, which by the way is the world's most lonely award. The acceptance speech for that award would be so arrogant and douchey. I thank myself, I did everything on my own. No help from you, or you or that guy, or her, no therapists, no coaches, no friends, no family, no colleagues, nobody to root me on, it's just me. Just good old me. I don't need you. That's so frickin' gross. But man, lean into support? That is glorious. Such a weight gets lifted. So doing provides the learning that you need for you. Like I beat this up, I beat up on this on this podcast because like we're all going against the current of a million reasons why we justifiably can't do stuff, and an insane amount of psychoeducation that is constantly evolving. The fastest possible route to doing a thing is to do the thing. And that's off the table. We know that. ADHDers don't just do shit. It's not a reality for us, it's not really our jam. In my opinion, the fastest way to get your stuff done is to make your intentions visible to yourself and to others and keep it visible. It's not about did I do it or did I not do it. That's the mechanism. We tend to think accountability is about winning or losing the thing. Did I do it? Yes, I win. Did I not do it? I lose. I suck. That's not it. It's it's ongoing visibility. When you inevitably suck at the thing, you go after it with curiosity. I attribute this to my mentor. This is Dana Rayburn. She was huge on curiosity. And you guys will probably relate it to Ted Lasso. I know he said, like when he said that, you know, choose curiosity over judgment. That's genius. I love that. Let's apply that to dealing with ourselves. Try curiosity, be curious about what's getting in the way, invite others to be curious about us on the journey to an action plan. And so then let's tie this into ADHD Big Brother. Because this is a different kind of membership because I don't really do courses. The game of the doing, and it gets more fun with more people too. And we realize that we're not alone in the struggle. At the time of this recording, we've got 70 members right now, and we have a daily accountability club where we are all checking in daily. Yeah, it takes a whole three minutes if you're busy. This is the beating heart of this place. People share what's going on. Visibility is everything. I really just want a place where we can do everything that we can to support the actual effort of doing. A place where that shame feeling, you know, that of sucking at a thing and easy. It's the same thing over and over again. I keep saying I'm gonna clean the garage, but I never do. I keep saying I'm gonna work on my resume and I never do. I keep when when am I ever gonna start flossing? It's a place to feel that shitty feeling safely on the journey to getting on the other end of it. Visibility and curiosity is how that happens. If there's no visibility, you're it's out of sight, out of mind. You'll forget that you want to change. You try one day and then you suck, you go invisible, no change. Make you gotta keep it visible. If you keep it visible but you don't have curiosity, then you're gonna stay on repeat because you keep trying to suck it up and just do the thing. If you keep your shit visible with curiosity, then you have an opportunity to iterate, like come up with a new idea to try, name a hurdle, make a plan to overcome it. The way we operate inside ADHD Brothers is you share and we care. Because imagine having a problem. You go into a room and you share that problem, and 10 people give you a really stupid advice, and then one person gives you advice that was freaking amazing, and you thanked all of them, and you took one person's advice and it changed your world. That's pretty cool. And then how about being on the other end of that? Someone had a problem and you gave them advice, but you thought it was a stupid idea, something that everyone probably already knew, and the whole world is probably like, yeah, we already know that one already. But you know what? The culture in the community is we share, so you went for it. And it turns out the person had never heard that before, and it was the way that you said it that resonated and it changed their whole fucking day for the good. That's the culture that we're building in ADHDB Brothers. Like, and you're invited, you're always invited. But if you're ready to keep that thing that you want to do visible until you get there, and you need support over and over until you get there, then we're your people. This does not exist anywhere else. So I say that confidently because you know they don't have our people. But you have to be willing to be visible though, even when it's uncomfortable. Do that over and over again, visibility and curiosity over and over and over again on the same shitty thing. You will learn so much about the unique you that no book on ADHD could possibly know because it's you. And even though we're all kind of similar, we have we're relatable and stuff, you're the only you and your circumstance and your age and your location and blah blah blah blah blah. Long story short, do and learn through the doing. And to get to the doing, make yourself visible and be curious, and then you know, all your dreams come true. Yeah, it's the formula for your dreams. Um, all right. Well, that'll do it. I hope this helps. Please make sure you check out the show notes. That's where we keep things updated with you know what's going on inside ADHD Big Brother and the things that I'm offering. Um, reach out, and that's it. All right, guys, have a fantastic week, and I shall talk to you later.