Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Maggie Isley is a designer, coach, and speaker. She’s the co-founder and creative director of 929 Studios, where she works with businesses around the world to form cohesive brand identities. She is also the co-founder of Be Unemployable, a podcast and educational brand for neurodivergent entrepreneurs with our new best friend of the show, Jamie Cutino. Maggie joins us today to talk about her work with neurodivergent entrepreneurs and how to get unstuck in our professional growth.

In her recent TEDx Talk, she discussed her revelation that business plateaus are rarely just business problems. Working exclusively with a neurodivergent population, she found a connection between people becoming stuck in their own professional growth and their current state of healing from past trauma.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

It's not easy to get out of bed every day with your eye on building and growing your own business. Whether you have people depending on you as a part of your own team, or you're working as an indie contractor, the responsibilities, emotional, and intellectual weight on you as a business owner is simply different than it was when you went to work for someone else. 

This week, we're talking about the experience of owning your day. We talk about the pros and cons of hustle culture and the value of time blocking. We talk about finding the support you need to get the work done and the challenges to memory and organization that come from the outside -- the state, licensing entities, and regulators. 

It's not easy, being the boss, but it's incredibly rewarding if you find your way forward. From two people with more than a decade each owning their own businesses, we bring our hard-won experience to you this week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

At first blush you might think that ADHD would hinder your chances to successfully start a business, but this week's guest has something to say about that. Jamie Cutino offers occupational therapy based coaching for women with ADHD and sings the praises of ADHD as a bouquet that can truly benefit the entrepreneur.

Jamie Cutino is a Master of Occupational Therapy and founder of Outsmart ADHD and co-founder of Be Unemployable, an educational brand and podcast for entrepreneurs. We talk about her journey discovering ADHD in the face of trauma in the family, her work as an Occupational Therapist and how that practice helps with ADHD. We lean into rejection sensitivity and how we can heal through normalizing past rejection to get through future rejection.

Check out Jamie's TEDxCWRU talk here.

But most important we dissect what it takes to pull apart the lessons of your ADHD and how it can help you when starting and running a business, and where the sharp edges are for you to care for as you march your way toward being unemployable!

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Nikki's daughter is in recovery from an eating disorder, a condition that impacted her emotionally, physically, and made for some dark times in the family. She also lives with ADHD. It turns out, those two things are frustrating bedfellows.

Trigger Warning: This episode describes the experiences of a minor living with an eating disorder, as well as exploring the details behind eating disorders and its relation to ADHD. Listener discretion is strongly advised. If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, you don't have to go through it alone. Help is available: National Eating Disorder Association Helpline: (800) 931-2237

Trigger Warning: This episode includes a brief discussion about suicide. Listener discretion is strongly advised. If you or someone you know is engaging in self-harm or contemplating suicide, there are people who want to help. Please reach out: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US): Dial 9-8-8 to talk or send a text to 988 If you are outside the US, please click the link to find a helpline for your country http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html

We've got something of a special show this week, one that is — we hope — as impactful and educational a conversation for you, as it is personal for us.

Nikki's daughter is in recovery from an eating disorder, a condition that impacted her emotionally, physically, and made for some dark times in the family. She also lives with ADHD. It turns out, those two things are frustrating bedfellows.

In fact, research has shown that those with ADHD have a greater risk for developing binge eating disorder or bulimia nervosa than their peers without ADHD and a 2007 Harvard study found that girls with ADHD were almost four times more likely to have an eating disorder than those without ADHD. Why is someone with ADHD more likely to have an eating disorder? That's our work this week.

To help us out, we've invited Dr. Roberto Olivardia to join us. Dr. Olivardia is a Clinical Psychologist and Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In his private psychotherapy practice, he specializes in the treatment of ADHD (particularly with comorbid disorders), Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and in the treatment of eating disorders in boys and men.

He graciously agreed to talk to Nikki, and our very special guest, Nikki's daughter, Paige, who shares her experience in her own voice.

Learn more about Dr. Olivardia and check out his book, The Adonis Complex: How to Identify, Treat and Prevent Body Obsession in Men and Boys.

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

Parts of this episode contain discussion about addiction and/or substance abuse. If you or someone you know is dealing with addiction or substance abuse, there is help: Substance Abuse National Helpline 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

How’s your phone? Good? You might just have it in your hand right now, right? Well, if you’re in the camp that feels your phone behavior is getting in the way of, you know, living your life, the community comes to the rescue today.

Along the way, Pete has a bit of a rant on using the word "Addiction" when describing our use of technology. Yes, he feels strongly about it. No, he's not an Addiction expert. But he does have some people who are experts who are as frustrated as he is about the use of the word. Our collective hope today, though, is that you hear a different perspective that might give you a new lens through which to view your own use of technology without reducing your agency when it comes to getting it under control.

Special thanks to Matt Raekelboom for giving us permission to use the audio from one of his TikTok videos in this week's show. You can check out our last episode with Matt here, and if you don't have a social media issue you're trying to get under control, visit his Insta here.

Links & Notes

• The Social Dilemma
• Reeder
• What is RSS?
• One Sec App
• News Feed Eradicator
• Amazon Kindle
• Day One Journal

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast!

Is this the year to work harder, get tougher, and go further? Maybe, for you, it is. We’re not here to judge. But if you’ve struggled with traditional resolutions and using the new year momentum to make significant change in your life, then we’re here to present an alternative. 

Emily Ladau shared her perspective on FUN goals as an alternative to SMART goals on Mastodon (link) pointing to her full piece on WaPo. How well does her perspective as a disability rights advocate translate to the neurodiverse? Turns out... pretty well. Listen in and see for yourself! 

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Not everyone is a cook, but we all deal with food at some point or another. And if you’re frustrated with how your ADHD brain functions when it runs headlong into meal planning, this week’s episode is for you. 

We talk about the importance of the recipe reset and the power of cleaning out the system in favor of meals you actually eat. We talk about how important it is to think of meal planning as the organizing system that it is. Plus, we offer a few new apps that might meet your needs for organizing and scheduling your mealtime fun!

Links & Notes

• Download the TCA Meal Planning PDF
• Plan to Eat
• Mela (iOS, iPadOS, macOS)
• Paprika Recipe Manager (iOS, macOS, Android, Windows)

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

Discord Mom Melissa Bacheler is here! And she brings a ... what's that? A GAME SHOW pitting Pete and Nikki against one another to the bitter end? Plus questions from listeners about focus and tab overload and what we would do at the end of the world! Join us for our very last episode of 2022!

Along the way, we answer YOUR questions: what’s the value of coaching for ADHD? What do you do when your tabs are overloading your browsers? What do you do if the electrical grid fails? How do you focus at work? How do you overcome test stress in college? What does it take to settle on task AND project management tools? CAKE OR PIE?? These are huge questions that merit serious reflection and we’re taking them on today. 

Thanks to TextExpander for once again sponsoring this show!

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

Ok, let's get this out of the way: We're big fans of You Need a Budget. Like, huge fans. Massive, life-changing kind of product fans. So you can imagine that we're a bit beside ourselves this week.

See, for someone who has had struggles with money in the past, discovering a tool that has the capacity to rewire your brain around budgeting and spending is a pretty big deal™. That's YNAB, a budgeting tool like no other. Even better, while the team had not intention to make a budgeting tool that can work for folks with ADHD brains, for a lot of us, they did just that.

Jesse Mecham is the Founder of YNAB and personal finance expert. He hosts the You Need A Budget Podcast, the Beginning Balance Podcast and is the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the book of the same name, You Need A Budget. The Smart Money Mama herself, Chelsea Brennan, introduced us to YNAB in 2020 and the tool quickly landed at the top of our list of favorite, life-changing services, so Jesse is here not only as a budgeting guy we think you might like to meet, but because we are legit fans.

YNAB isn't a sponsor of this show, but we encourage you to visit right away and sign up for their 34-day free trial and see how it works for you.

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

David DeWitt is a Certified Financial Planner living with ADHD and joins us today to walk through some of the challenges of building — and sticking to — a holiday budget with ADHD.

But that's not really the whole story. David takes us on a tour down history lane. It's a tour that starts — and ends, actually — with the concepts around envelope budgeting, a classic in the budgeting universe that focuses on categories and cash. Well, we're note using cash anymore, but the idea of building your budget in a way that allows you to track what you spend, when you spend it, and keep your credit intact is central to budgeting for the ADHD brain.

And that helps us to figure out where our impulsivity is taking hold, where it might not be healthy, and where it might be costing us a bunch of money. And when is that important? When our patented hyper-generosity is on edge: The holidays.

• DeWitt Capital Management
• ADHD Money Talk with David DeWitt
• 'The ugly truth behind your fancy rewards credit card' — Emily Stewart, Vox

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast