Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Burnout. That word probably means something to you. But for all the feelings the term conjures for you, there are so many feelings you just might have experienced yourself completely unaware that those feelings, too, are symptoms of burnout. And identifying where burnout lives, where it stops and ADHD begins, can be a tricky business, indeed.

Casey Dixon is an ADHD Coach who has worked with wide range of individuals living with ADHD over the course of her career. She’s the founder of Dixon Life Coaching, a site that is dedicated to the mindfulness approach to ADHD through simple daily practices to help you with everything from focus, to movement and settling. This week on The ADHD Podcast, Casey joins us to help us deal with the horrors and the terrors of burnout.

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

It’s case study day! Nikki has been working with a client struggling to get unstuck behind some big, challenging tasks. Those tasks are hiding behind other work making it tough to prioritize. After a few sessions with Coach Nikki, they settled on a pair of sessions they’re calling “Unblocking” and “Tackling” sessions. This week on the show, Nikki walks through the process with the aid of messages from the front lines in the form of client emails describing the challenges and successes that came from them!

Haven’t heard our trailer for the upcoming Placeholder podcast? Stick around to the very end to check it out!

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

• (00:00) - Welcome to Placeholder

Patrick McGinnis, the person behind the term "FOMO", is back. This time, he introduces us to — as he calls it — the evil brother of FOMO that can ruin your life. That thing is FOBO.

The Fear of Better Options.

It's the fear that there is always something better for you out there that holds you back from making the most important decisions of today. It foils any effort you might make toward commitment. It keeps you looking inward, at yourself, behind a veil of selfishness disguised as investigation. It can make you a lousy friend or partner. And it can make you hate yourself.

This week, Nikki and Pete dive into Analysis Paralysis. Here's your background reading from Patrick McGinnis himself.

Here an entry on Michael Crichton's Wikipedia entry on Gell-Mann Amnesia, if you're interested in further reading on the subject.

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

Never heard of PACT goals? You’re in for it today! We’re talking about a goal-setting metaphor with greater attention on outcomes than process and we think it has real legs when it comes to ADHD.

PACT is a goal-setting technique and stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable. Compared to other methods that focus on outcomes, PACT goals focus on output. What does that mean? Well, hopefully, but the time you get to work on your well-formed PACT goal, you’re doing it without all the shame that comes from feeling as if you’ve failed a process. This is a tool and a metaphor, and if it works for you, you’ll be building new habits in no time.

Links & Notes

• ‘Meet PACT: The Goal Setting Technique You’ve Never Heard Of’ by Tammy J. Salmon-Stephens
• Join the Pledge Drive! — Become a member in March for bonuses, live events, and help us reach our goal and launch a new podcast just for members!

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

Here's the case: a busy professional is struggling with 20-25 overdue, bright red tasks in their task management system every morning. But they have a great system! They know exactly what work needs to get done at any given time. So, why aren't they getting the work out the door?

Because of time, dear friends, time.

This week on the show, Pete has a walk through a few task systems in an effort to build our own, and help this busy client to get the most important work done without feeling horrible about the rest. Along the way, we talk about Getting Things Done, David Allen's system of stress-free productivity that appears to cause more stress than it curbs, The Eisenhower Matrix, Kanban, Scrum, and Agile Results.

There is a lot to think about in this episode. Remember, you don't have to pick one and roll with it for the rest of your professional life! In this episode, we're picking and choosing the systems that make the most sense for us with an eye toward managing our time, not our tools.

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

You can't do what you want to do. You never finish what you start. You aren't able to focus. Sure, we say this stuff to ourselves when our ADHD is getting the best of us. But how often is that really true?

This week on the show, we examine what lives between all and nothing and try to tackle the beast that is all-or-nothing thinking with some tools you can employ right away.

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

Kim To is CEO and Founder of Flair, a new platform designed to help you access a range of healthcare services to manage your life with ADHD. She's also Asian living with ADHD, and has spent much of her effort since her diagnosis exploring what it means to experience ADHD in a culture she describes as unaccustomed to the ADHD experience. She joins us today to talk about her ADHD coaching practice, what it means to share the responsibility of exploring ADHD in her community, and building a practice around inclusivity and understanding.

Links & Notes

• Own Your Flair
• Connect with Kim To on LinkedIn

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

We'd never heard of the phrase stinking thinking until Sharon Saline used it with us on the show this week. But we knew what it meant immediately. We live with it. It's the thinking we use about ourselves when we're compromised or when our reserves of resiliency have been tapped, and when what we need more than anything else is just a little bit of self-compassion.

But as ADHDers, finding self-compassion isn't always natural. We have to make a practice of it, integrating the language and behaviors of compassion into our days and hours such that when we need it, it's not so hard to find.

Dr. Sharon Saline specializes in an integrative approach to managing ADHD, anxiety, executive functioning skills, learning differences & mental health in neurodiverse children, teens, adults & families and she joins us again today to talk all about living with ADHD and still managing to find a dose of self-compassion under the weight of it all.

About Sharon Saline, Psy.D.

Sharon Saline, Psy.D. has focused her work on ADHD, anxiety, learning differences, and mental health challenges and their impact on school and family dynamics for over 30 years. Her unique perspective, a sibling of a child who wrestled with untreated ADHD, combined with decades of academic excellence and clinical experience, assists her in guiding families as they navigate from the confusing maze of diagnoses and conflict to successful interventions and connections. Dr. Saline funnels this expertise into her book, What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew: Working Together to Empower Kids for Success in School and Life. Heralded as an invaluable resource, her book is the recipient of two awards: Best Book Awards winner by American Book Fest and the Gold Medal from Moms' Choice Awards. She recently published The ADHD Solution Deck: 50 Strategies to Help Kids Learn, Reduce Stress & Improve Family Connections.

Find Sharon on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn

And, in case you're wondering, here's a little background on Alternate Nostril Breathing

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

Erik “Doc” Anderson is an ADHD coach who specializes in helping people become the hero of their own stories. Erik is an ADHDer and also has Cerebral Palsy.

Humans are wired for stories. Our lives, our desires, our hopes, and dreams, they’re all fueled by the metaphors that define who we are. Doc learned early that negative, limiting stories can be as damaging as positive stories are motivating. Today, we’re talking about how we can rewrite our own stories from someone who’s spent a lifetime rewriting his own, and in doing so made the choice to live in a much larger world.

About Erik “Doc” Anderson

Erik Anderson has been a long-time advocate for system change. In addition to serving on state boards and commissions, he coordinated state government efforts in Iowa to fight employment discrimination against women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. Later, he moved on to work as an advocate with a federal technical assistance program under I.D.E.A. to help parents of children with disabilities get services in public schools. Now he works independently in the field of self-advocacy as an ADHD coach.

Links & Notes

• Coaching for Creative Brains

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