Jenna: Hello, happy people, and welcome to Office ADHD. All right, let’s get started. Today we’re going to talk about a lot of stuff. First thing, though, I actually have to go back on something that I said in my last ADHD episode. So I remember talking to you about how the name is the name, right? And I still feel like names are what they are. But I was watching this video from the Holderness family and if you haven’t watched any of their videos, they are hilarious and I love them. One of the cool things is that they’re very open about the fact that the dad on those videos has ADHD and he makes videos about ADHD, which are hilarious. I’m sure I’m going to be sharing more of them with you. But one of his recent videos is about ADHD needing a new name, especially for children, because two of the words are deficit and disorder, which are rather negative. So they talked about ADHD needing new branding and I thought that was really fun and I thought that would be really funny if we all put in some cool ideas for new names for ADHD and he’s going to make t shirts. I put the link in the description and I’ll put it on the blog too, just in case you’re interested. It’s a short video, but it’s fun. So I’m going to be completely honest with you. I had intended for this episode to be about organization tips. That was going to be the next thing I was going to cover. But I stopped and started thinking about it and honestly, a lot of my problems with becoming organized and becoming on track with schedules and things has not just been because people with ADHD naturally have problems with that. It’s been my inner voice and it’s been my relationship with that state of being. There have been different times in my life where I’ve felt like my worth was tied to my ability, or lack thereof. More appropriately would be stating it. My lack of an ability to be able to keep my areas clean, to keep my place organized, to be able to remember everything and get places on time and do all those things that other normal people seem to have a lot easier time doing. And my desire to feel loved and wanted just for who I am in a way kind of sabotaged my ability to be able to be organized because I started pushing that part of me away, saying subconsciously, will they still love me if I can’t do this? Will they still care about me even though I am broken? And that made it so that it was difficult for me to fix that broken part of me because I wanted to keep it to see if I would still be loved, if that makes sense. And so, long story short, I know that that’s something that can be an impairment to a lot of us. And I thought that before we really dive into a lot of tips and tricks and things, it would be really good for us to stop and address the elephant in the room, which is the fact that people with Add and ADHD, we’re great at seeing everything going on at once. We are terrible at seeing ourselves. There’s another video that I’m going to link into the description, and it was just kind of a stop and think moment for me when I first found this video. What it is, is it’s an interviewer asking two children the exact same questions. One child has Add and the other child doesn’t. The questions they ask are things like, do you think you’re pretty? Do you think you’re smart? And the child without Add has a normal view of they’re about six year old children and normal view of, yeah, I’m the smartest, I’m the handsomest. And the child with Add is like, I’m just normal. I’m just normal. I don’t know, I’m kind of in between. I guess part of that is we are just really terrible at seeing ourselves. We are very terrible at being able to kind of see the whole person without taking every single parameter. When we actually come down to judge ourselves, we’ve seen so many people and we see so many things without thinking about it, that when we come to judge ourselves, we judge ourselves against way too many factors. I actually noticed at one point in time that I felt like I looked a lot more attractive for some reason when I was sick and when I had a cold. And part of that was because when I looked in the mirror, I stopped looking at all of the little things on my face, or like, oh, how does this little part of my eyebrow or whatever look? And I would see myself as a whole without seeing all those little things, because I wanted to see how I was looking. I wanted to see, do I look pale? Are my eyes okay? And when I would step back away from the little things and see myself as a whole, then I could see myself as beautiful. We do the same thing with ourselves all of the time. We are very good at being lie detectors and being able to tell when something is off with somebody because we notice a million things at once. When you’re looking at a person and you’re having a conversation with a person and you have ADHD, you don’t just notice what they’re saying. You’re noticing little things about the tone of their voice, a slight twitch of their lips. You’re noticing their eyelid twitches. You’re noticing all of these little ear wiggles. There’s nothing that you could necessarily put your finger on, but you’re noticing everything at once. You do the same thing to yourself. But oftentimes we judge ourselves negatively also, especially those of us with adult ADHD and those of us that weren’t diagnosed until we were adults, we’ve lived comparing ourselves to a normal person. We’ve lived in a life where we weren’t like I said before, our car being broken meant a way different thing than somebody else’s car being broken, and we didn’t understand that. It’s time now for us to stop and heal that inner voice. We need to stop and say, yes, I am amazing. Yes, I can do great things. Okay, I’m going to tell you about a self help book, but first I am going to digress here onto this tangent and tell you my feelings about self help books. I’m sorry. Feel free to just skip ahead two minutes if you don’t want to hear this rant. But I am generally not a self help book person because it drives me insane when they either, one, repeat themselves over and over again, or two, when they continually try and sell you on buying the book that you have already purchased. I’m like, dude, I already bought the book. You don’t have to tell me again why I need to buy this book. If any of you are looking for a business idea, honestly, I think somebody could make a bundle if they were a Cliff Notes person just for self help books. And they said, here, I’m going to get to the point and here is the point of all of these books. Instead of being like at the end of chapter one, and they’re like, and just wait because we’re going to give you the secret soon. And it’s not until the end of chapter five that they finally give you the secret. Okay, soapbox stepping off. All right, so I actually like this self help book because I can listen to it as an audiobook. It still works out as a story. So any self help book that I recommend, I’m going to tell you whether you can listen to it as an audiobook and it’s a good one or if it’s one of those weird repeaty ones. This one I like. It’s called you can heal your life. It’s by Louise Hay. I will warn you, it gets into kind of some metaphysical healing type things, but overall, I really enjoyed it and I really enjoy her take on your ability to change the way your thoughts work, the way your thought patterns. And one of the main ways she does this is she talks about using positive affirmations, which is something that we have all heard about, but not all of us actually use them all of the time. I am going to tell you guys something that I thought is amazing. I actually have just recently been since I read this book, I was like, okay, I’m going to try this. I looked up and there are actually a lot of free audio tracks of positive affirmations out there. What you’re supposed to do most of the time is listen to the track and repeat the phrases after they say them. To yourself. If you want extra brownie points, you want to do it the best way possible. Stand in front of a mirror and the audio track will say the phrase. Then you say the phrase out loud, looking at yourself in the eye so that you’re saying this to yourself. And that’s really very powerful. I have been going the easy way. I turn it on as I’m going to sleep, and I just listen to it as I go to sleep. But I’m going to tell you, wow, doing that even just for a week, will change your whole outlook on your life. It’ll change the way you feel about everything. Just change your whole attitude, even when you wake up in the morning. Since this has been such an amazing, powerful thing for me, I wanted to give that gift to you guys. I’ve actually created a positive affirmations track. That’s why you may have noticed two episodes came out at once today. Episode seven is literally just straight A positive affirmation track. I made it separate so that you can listen to it separate, and I made it so that what it does, is it’ll say the positive affirmation once and then there’s an echo of the positive affirmation so that you can hear the positive affirmation and have time to repeat it to yourself. If nothing else, you need to hear it twice. And even if you’re just like me and you go the lazy way and you turn it on before you go to sleep, it has nice, relaxing music with it. So feel free to nap along. Like I said, that’s going to be amazing and it will do great things for you. Highly recommend it. Like I said, give it a try. Just give it seven days. Seven days, no more. And then see how you feel. You’ll notice a difference. I hope you enjoyed that brief musical interlude. I recorded this at two different times and I didn’t feel like making it match up. So you got a little bit of music instead in between the two halves. I want to read you guys a quote, just kind of as we’re talking about correcting that dark inner voice that we sometimes beat ourselves up with. This quote is by Martin Luther. And I first read this quote. Actually, when I read the Screw Tape letters, it’s often in the front of that book. There’s a lot of editions of that book, so I don’t know if it’s in the front of every edition or not. I love this quote. He says, the best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to text of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. So basically to laugh at him. It’s. Also, if you’ve ever read the book Something Wicked This Way Comes. I actually really like that book. I listen to it as an audiobook, obviously, because that’s what I do. I’m an audiobook person. One of the things they do to fight the evil in the book is actually to laugh. That is one of the best ways to fight the dark inner voice. Because we are often so tempted when we’re beating ourself up to then beat ourselves up for beating ourself up. Be like, no, you’re not supposed to have those thoughts. And that’s actually just making it worse. I know, strange, right? But it is. So one of the best ways is to just have kind of an attitude to laugh at yourself and to say, oh, it’s that thought again. No, that’s not right. And you don’t necessarily resist the thought because if you just try and say, oh, I can’t think that, I can’t think that, it’s like telling yourself, don’t think of elephants, don’t think of elephants, don’t think of elephants. And the only thing you’ve been picturing right now is an elephant. So one of the things that you do is you say to yourself, okay, hold on, stop that thought. Kind of stop that train of thought. And then you give yourself a new train of thought and you say, I realized that was our old pattern. Here is what our new pattern is. So you kind of acknowledge that that was the thought that we used to have. But now here is how we think of ourselves. You give yourself the time to say, I know that that used to be what we thought would make things better. Because it used to be that you thought if you told yourself, oh, I’m just never going to leave my socks in this weird place again. Why did I do that? Oh, I’m such a terrible person for being so dirty. Somehow you thought that telling yourself that was going to correct the problem, that somehow that punishment would make you remember it, but that’s not the way you work anymore. Now you’re going to say, oh, wait, stop. That’s not how we think of that anymore. Okay, now I’m going to say, that is so silly that my sock ended up here. That’s crazy. Okay, now maybe I need to think of a good place to always put my socks. Or maybe I need to just do something with my socks right away because I know I’m going to take them off because I like being barefoot. So I’ll just think of a plan to start off with. Maybe I can attach that habit to some other habit that I already have so that instead you think of it as more of a positive light and in a positive way. This can also help with going back in your life because one of the things especially when you’re reevaluating your whole life and trying to think back at how just relooking at your life through the lens of realizing that you have always had Add. That’s one of the things you have to realize when you’re looking back through your life. You were born with Add. This isn’t something that happens to you. It’s not something that has become. You’ve always seen the world through this lens. You’ve just never understood that nobody else around you necessarily sees the world through that lens, that you were supposed to see the world through a different lens somehow, but you didn’t because you don’t, and that’s fine. So when you’re looking back, it’s okay to just laugh at the misunderstandings. It’s okay to say, oh, wow, if only we had known. And it’s okay to go back and laugh at yourself and say, how could I have not seen that? So for me, there are some people who get bullied because of the way Add affects them. For me, I was lucky. And during school, when I was growing up, it kind of gave me a quirky charisma. And people were my friends and I didn’t see it. I honestly never saw it. I never saw myself as popular. I never saw myself as the person that a lot of people liked. I mean, I knew I had friends when I got older and things, but I never really saw the potential I had to spread information and to do things or to spread kindness. I just never really saw what I was and who I was growing up. Now I can laugh at that and say, well, now that I can see my potential, I can use that. You can laugh at the times that can. I tell you, one of the things that I think is funny about Add is that a lot of times we will tell jokes that other people don’t get. So don’t give up on telling jokes. Just don’t. Just laugh with them when they’re laughing at you because your joke made no sense. Because here’s what’s happening. They just didn’t have those five other steps to make the joke funny. So you’re in a conversation with somebody, they’ll say something, all of a sudden your mind grabs onto that and you go like five steps away. So that then the joke that you made is funny, but only if you knew these five other steps. So then you have to explain the joke and it’s anyway, just laugh with them when things like that happen. And I think that is the biggest thing that I can share with you for correcting your inner voice is learning to laugh with the people around you, learning to be able to just laugh at yourself when you do. Things. And to say, isn’t it great that I have this beautiful mind that thinks differently and that has this quirky, funny way of seeing the world? I’m just going to laugh with it, and I’m just going to enjoy it, and we’re going to learn to live in a world of normal people together. The more that you’re able to be grateful for your brain and be able to see the goodness in the world and see the goodness in others, the more you’re going to be able to correct that inner voice. And the more other things will fall into place, the more you’ll be able to take advice on how to put things into place. Speaking of gratitude, there is one more habit I am going to give you that will really improve the way you think about the world and just the thoughts in your brain if you go and grab yourself a little memo pad. They used to be $0.50. Probably with inflation, they’re $0.75 now. I think you can still probably afford one. If not, grab some cardboard from a box that gets mailed to you. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing on or what you’re writing with, and just every night, write down five things that you’re grateful for from that day and make them specific. For example, I don’t just write I’m grateful for my son. I write, I’m grateful that I could play this game with my son today, or I’m grateful that my son is very creative and thought of funny things to say. So kind of be a little more specific with some of the things you’re grateful for. And like I said, just write five before you go to sleep every night. It’s one of the things that they’ve really found in every happiness, how to be happier, is that gratitude really is huge and it doesn’t have to be a big gratitude tree. I know our brains want to do this. Our brains want to take a little idea and make it giant, which is one of the amazing things about our brains. Sometimes we have to help ourselves pare it down. So just grab a postit note stack, or like I said, just get a little memo pad, set it by your bed with a pen, write down five things every night that you’re grateful for and be done. Actually, if you’re having problems sleeping, if you have two of those, it’s nice, because then you can write down those thoughts of things that you remembered. Or suddenly the great idea that you had just before you went to sleep. You can write it down and get it out of your head. But we’ll talk more about those ideas on a different episode. I just thought if you were going out and buying memo pads, you may as well get to as long as you were out there. I think that is probably quite enough to be getting on with for this episode. Just a quick recap. Remember to listen to the positive affirmations. Try it for at least a week. You’re going to write down five things you’re grateful for at night before you go to bed and laugh at that inner voice, except you have that thought and say, well, thank you for trying to make this better. Let me show you now, brain, how we are really going to work at trying to make things better and have an amazing day. As always, thanks so much for listening and if you want to know more about anything we talked about today or if you want to be part of the discussion, join us at officeadhd.com. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.
