Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Rach Idowu was diagnosed with ADHD Combined Type in January 2020, just before her London ADHD clinic closed down due to the pandemic. Undaunted, she started AdultingADHD on Substack and began to document her own personal experience and the research she would go on to do about her ADHD.

Since then, she has been featured in the New York Times, Inverse, and Mashable, and has been a featured panelist at Facebook, Ubisoft ComicCon London, and other organizations talking about ADHD in the workplace.

Along the way, she created a series of flashcards designed to help those with ADHD and supporting ADHDers to better understand details of ADHD that reflect the research she has engaged in over the years. You can find them at ADHDTraits.com.

Links & Notes

• Subscribe to Rach Idowu on Substack
• Follow Rach Idowu on Instagram
• Follow Rach Idowu on Twitter

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

KC Davis is a licensed professional therapist, author, and speaker. She is the creator of the mental health platform Struggle Care, where she shares a revolutionary approach to self and home care for those dealing with mental health, physical illness, and hard seasons of life.

She's with us today to talk about her role in the neurodiversity community as a TikTok influencer, how she stumbled into her favorite video community.

We love KC not just for her TikTok, though. She's author of the book How to Keep House While Drowning, where she catalogs her approach to healthy living while embracing your struggles as morally neutral, not personality judgments. Her approach to living, shame, and struggle is, frankly, a breath of fresh air.

Learn more about KC and her work at StruggleCare. And, of course, buy the book in your favorite format now.

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

For the next few weeks, we’ll be talking with ADHD influencers. You might have seen them on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram talking about their experiences with ADHD — we want to talk with them about their experience leading them to become creators.

Kicking off this series we welcome Matt Raekelboom. Matt’s a Toronto-based influencer predominantly on TikTok and Instagram sharing his tools and strategies around ADHD, fitness, and healthy living with his 300,000 followers. What you don’t get if you just stumble across Matt’s one-minute videos, though, is any taste of the long road he had to take to get it posted.

He was an ADHD kid of the 80s, when we were wandering the wilderness of ADHD and medication, and ended up over-medicated and misunderstood. He battled substance abuse and homelessness, but regained his footing with an explosive passion for discovery of how his ADHD had played a part in all his troubles, and how it would play a part in his future successes, too.

You can find Matt on Instagram and TikTok, naturally, and check out his community at Journey2ADHD.

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

With hundreds of episodes of Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast, it can be dizzying to figure out how to get started. That’s why we — Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright (your fair hosts) — recorded this episode. It’s for you, new listener, a brief guide that can help you get the most out of the podcast and the fantastic ADHD community that runs through everything we do. Thanks for joining us on this ride. We hope you find what you’re looking for!

This week we’re tabulating lessons learned from our recent series on overcoming obstacles. Over the last month, we met Mallory Band dug into imposter syndrome, RSD, and ADHD. Aron Croft shared his experience through higher education when his expectations ran straight into undiagnosed inattentive ADHD. And Christina Avallone shared her perspective on thriving in a digital world and building healthy relationships with your tech.

If you haven’t listened to these episodes yet, check them out in your podcast app or listen on the web right here:

• Imposter Syndrome, RSD & ADHD with Mallory Band
• When expectations meet your ADHD with Aron Croft
• Thriving in a digital world with Christina Avallone

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

This week on the show we’re talking with Christina Avallone, author of Thriving in a Digital World, to discuss the pitfalls many of us face when technology starts to take over.

For Christina, it started at home as she navigated the massive technological shifts as a parent to her now-grown daughters. This experience led her down a path of research and exploration into technology, how a pathological use of our tech can impact the brain, and how systems presumably designed for productivity and connection can actually cause increased distraction and disconnection.

Her book is driven not by a call for technological abstinence, but for understanding. For Christina, that means raising her children safe, in her faith, and aware of the tools in their pockets to do good in the world, while understanding their perils at the same time.

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

Aron Croft was set up for success: Great college, high expectations from an education-centered family. Then ADHD stepped in. Aron lives with inattentive ADHD once the structures of his early education were left behind on his journey to college, the struggles set it.

In fact, he struggled non-stop for 15 years before he discovered his relationship with ADHD. In spite of years of struggle, he's since built a career of his own, from finding success in major corporations to starting his own coaching practice for students with ADHD.

This is a story about the conflict that exists between desire and expectation for success, and the reality of running into the brick wall of shame with a coach who has seen it from both sides.

You can learn more about Aron and his work at Hidden ADHD, and make sure to check out Aron's Masterclass: "Get Sh*t Done With ADHD — Without Constant Stress and Self-Criticism (A Proven 3-Step Process)" while you're there!

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Here we are. Episode one of our new podcast. This week, we're talking about how we capture ideas, how we make room for new things in our lives, and how we make sure the things we really want to do have air to grow and flourish, while the things we don't are allowed to evaporate.

Along the way we talk to two of my favorite brains, Doc Anderson and Brett Terpstra.

We talked to Doc some months back on The ADHD Podcast about The Hero Engine. Since then, he and I realized we have a lot of nerd stuff in common and it is in fact Doc whom I credit for the term "Vampire Projects" in this show.

Brett is working on a few projects in addition to his newish gig at Oracle. Bunch is his text file automation app, and Doing is his command line activity log. We'll talk about both this week.

Listener Susan wrote in with a question about creating fillable PDF forms. I go into more detail in the show this week but here are direct links to what I recommend: Adobe Creative Cloud, PDF Pen Pro from Nitro.

Finally, if you’re listening to this show on the website, thank you. But if you want to get it wherever you listen to your podcasts, I recorded a video to help you out.

Update: We've got the transcript of the show up now. Sorry for the delay. Click here to check it out! 

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You know it, you live it, you suffer through it: It’s IMPOSTER SYNDROME! This week on the show, executive function coach Mallory Band joins us to talk about the weight of the imposter on our shoulders and how we might use the lessons of executive functioning to shake free of it.

We start with a walk through imposter syndrome and how it manifests in our lives. Because it's not just the imposter weighing on us, it's the compound pressure of anxiety, fear, compulsive behaviors, and more that all play a role in how we see the person we see in the mirror.

Mallory wrote two pieces for ADDitude over the course of the last year on the subject. 'How my Imposter Syndrom Sapped Me of Myself,' which she followed up with, 'How the Pandemic's Uncertainty Forced Me to Become More Secure in Myself,' both available to read for free. Connect with Mallory on LinkedIn and learn more about her work at Essig Education Group.

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

We’ve had a busy month around here at Take Control ADHD. This week, we’re introducing a new episode in to our podcast calendar. We don’t have a great name for it yet, but rest assured a great name is inbound! For now, we’re talking all about lessons we’ve learned in March.

We started with a conversation on managing tasks against a visual representation of our time. It’s not easy, but sometimes stepping back from all the things you think you have to do on a given day and starting instead with the time you have to do things is the best way to get started with smart prioritization. From there, we introduced PACT Goals (Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable). Patrick McGinnis, the originator of FOMO, introduced us to FOBO (Fear of Better Options) where we learned the value of asking the universe for help to get a true gut-check on our feelings. Unblocking and Tackling helped us split our attention between getting ourselves unstuck and doing hard work, and finally, Casey Dixon helped us face facts about burnout!

We finished our March Madness Pledge Drive having met our goals with your help and we’re off to April with a bunch of behind-the-scenes work and the launch of Placeholder — Pete’s new tech and systems podcast starting this week!

This week’s episode is brought to you by TextExpander. Keep your message consistent, save time and be more productive, and be accurate — every time — with TextExpander. Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/textexpander to sign up today and get 20% off your first year as a supporter of The ADHD Podcast Community. And if you’re looking for how you can get started, just check out our February Workshop with Vic Martinez, trainer on the TextExpander team, for a video walkthrough!

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