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Hi, welcome to ADHD Friendly. I'm Patti. I'm an ADHD and executive function coach and I get up every day looking for ways to create more ease in my life so that I am thriving more and struggling less. And I love bringing them here and sharing them with you in the hopes that maybe there's something that you find that will help you do the same. This is episode 242 and today ADHD Friendly we are going to continue kick it off with a celebration that I have around planning my summer. And then I have a tip from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, that I'm going to share about relationships. And my product of the week is about chocolate, which I'm super excited about. And then our main topic is a state at the Union for your relationship. I'm going to share some ways to do an ADHD Friendly annual check in. If you're looking for a way to kind of see where your relationship stands and what you want a little bit more, a little bit less of. All right, let's kick it off as we do with my celebration for this week and that is that I have planned on all of the summer content for my ADHD Friendly membership. That means all of June, July and August is planned week to week. Doesn't mean all the work's done, but I've created the outline for the content for every single week for the summer, which is something I really tried to do more than a month ago. I just kept lingering on my task list and this week I did it. So I'm super excited to have that. And if you're looking for more support, I invite you to check out the ADHD Friendly membership this week. We are focused on planning your summer schedule around your energy, not your perfection. So if you're looking to get more from this summer of 2026 and thrive more, check it out and see if it's a good fit for you. All right, onto what I purchased this week. This ties in with my product of the week because I have become such a fan of of the Trader Joe's Pound plus chocolate bars. If you you've already already know this and kind of upset you didn't tell me earlier, but I have really been into dark chocolate for about 10 years now. Now they do come in milk chocolate and dark chocolate and dark chocolate with almonds and milk chocolate with almonds and maybe even something else. But those are the, the kind that I noticed. But I really like the dark chocolate because it's less sweet and it's very satisfying and my Favorite favorite of them to show you what this guy looks like is the dark chocolate with almonds pound plus. It's like the Willy Wonka bar. The Wonka bar from Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory. This thing is huge. It's 1 pound, 1.6 ounces. So pound plus it's a little over a pound. It is heavenly. I'm gonna.
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I'm gonna crack this guy open so you can see. It took a lot of willpower not to eat this before recording, and it's
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one of the reasons why I'm recording,
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even though I feel like I didn't
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really have time to do my hair or anything because I swam laps this morning. And it's just a ponytail, but look
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so thick it's hard to break a square off.
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So it's really thick chocolate. If you're listening to this, check out my YouTube channel.
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ADHD friendly for anything I share.
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Look at those almonds. They're typically whole almonds in here.
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Oh, I broke it in the middle.
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So I can kind of pull it out and show you. It is just a chunk of goodness. So if this is sounding like something
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that is right up your lane, here's the amazing thing about the cost of this guy. I've now ruined it. I'm gonna have to have to get a different rep for it because I have torn the lap apart.
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So I'm always looking for dark chocolate at a price that doesn't make me like, you know, put up barriers because it's so much money that I'm just like, no, I'm not doing that. It's a bar of chocolate. But chocolate has really gone up in the last, I don't know, at least six months that I've noticed. And if you look at like a Giardelli dark chocolate, they are charging $5.89 for a little 3.5 ounce bar. That's a $68 per ounce lint is the same price for their dark chocolate. 3.5 ounce, exactly the same price. I don't know if they're made by the same company, but exactly the same price. Herses it ranges anywhere from 63 cents an ounce to a dollar 37 an ounce. So there that. That's like the low end. And then, you know, Giardelli's lint is more of a higher end. A bit higher end dark chocolate. This Trader Jones pound plus dark chocolate with almonds is $8.99 for the 1 pound 1.6 ounces. That's 51 cents per ounce. And if you get the milk chocolate, it's only 7.99, so it's a dollar less. And it doesn't cost at least the one that I at my Trader Joe's. It's the same price with or without almonds. It's just a dollar more for the dark chocolate because it's higher level of chocolate in there. Really good chocolate. Really feel like it's such a great find that sustains me for a long time. I just eat. All right, let's be honest. I'd like to eat two squares because that's the serving size, but I typically eat three little peanut butter. And it's just so good. And it really is satisfying. So that's my thing I purchased this week and my product of the week, the Trader Joe's pound plus chocolate bars. All right, now for my tip for this episode. And this comes from James Clear. And if you don't receive James Clear's newsletter, he sends it for free. It comes once a week. It's always what I always refer to as good value. It always has some great insights, even if I've read them before. It comes at a time where I just feel like I need that little reminder. And because I'm doing relationships this week, I thought this was so timely, which is what I just seem to notice that happens when I read James's newsletter. So this is his three ways to think about relationships. So I'm sharing this as a tip to think about as you think about your relationship. And he says, number one, the first way is deepening. You know each other better this year than last year. So if you, if you're in a longer term relationship, it's thinking about, is your relationship still deepening? Are you getting to know each other and deepen that relationship? The second way is holding meaning. You're at a steady state, but mostly comfortable, familiar, and unchanged. So you're kind of chugging along. The third state is drifting. And this is where he says contact is fading and the relationship is starting to slide. So he said the point isn't to judge where you are, but to notice what you need next. And I would say my husband and I are celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary this month. And whenever I think about what has helped us to stay happily married for 34 years is tied to exactly this. It's checking in when we start to notice we're drifting. I never called it drifting before, but that term makes sense where I think of it as, as peaks and valleys and, you know, a lot of, like, in betweens and those in betweens. While they're comfortable. If we don't do something to adjust, can it can lead to a valley. And if that happens, it's recognizing, huh. I'm not feeling as connected right now. What, what can we do to try to get that back to a place where we're excited about seeing each other and looking forward to our time together again? So that led me to this idea of doing a State of the Union for your relationship. I am sure I'm not the first person to think of this, but I'm coming at it with a ADHD friendly slant towards how to do an annual check in for your relationships. Now, you can take this in any direction for any relationship that you're in, whether it's a romantic relationship, a family, you know, relationship with your siblings, with friends, with parent and child. But for my purposes, I'm going through it with that romantic relationship slant. But again, adapt it so it works for you. So as a child, I'm going to go way back to the first time I ever heard of the State of the Union was the annual State of the Union that the President and our country here in the United States does every year. And I always hated it. And when I was younger it was on every channel. Like you couldn't escape if you were going to watch tv, it was on and it was just a bunch of stuff I did not find interesting. And to be honest, I still don't like. It's just politics is just not my thing. And what I do like that was taking something I don't like and looking at it through a different lens and making interesting for me. And that's where a few years ago I thought, wouldn't it be fun to do a State of the Union for our relationship? Like my husband and I am like just to kind of like check in as a fun way to acknowledge our anniversary with, you know, kind of lightness and fun and, and playfulness and not just, hey, we need to talk kind of serious that might shut one of us down and make it hard to connect. So as my husband and I are celebrating our 34th anniversary this week, I thought it would be fun to create a little bit more structure for us to use meaning my husband and I. But I thought I'd bring it here and share with anybody that's checking out this episode in case you're looking for a way to create a little more awareness about where you would like to focus your energy and your time if you're looking to strengthen your relationship. So here's a full disclaimer before I dive in. I put my little sticky note here to remind me to do this, because this may be something that is helpful to explore with a therapist. So I am not a couple's therapist. I am not a therapist in any way, shape, or form. So this is literally just something I'm sharing that I find sparkly to do just for fun in my relationship. But I do understand that, especially with ADHD brain wiring, that relationships can be a real challenging area for us. So I am sharing something that is sparkly and fun and helps for me. Please let go of anything that I share that doesn't work for you or, you know, move on to another episode. You're like, yeah, Patty, this. This isn't my thing. It's too hard to think about my relationship, whatever. Or it might be a way for you to explore. I don't even know how that would look for me. I'm going to talk to a professional and get some advice about how, you know, I can do that in my relationship, but I am not that person. So I am an ADHD trained professional coach, but I'm not a therapist. So I'm not offering any kind of mental health therapeutic advice here. This is just a fun tool. So when I think about what's in it for me to do a check in, because some of the things that I learn aren't always fun to hear. Right there could be a little uncomfortable if something isn't going as well as I want it to go. And the idea is for me to get into that space that could be a little bit uncomfortable, is to make it fun and playful and create space to celebrate what's going well and maybe highlight one or at most, two areas. This is not an opportunity to kind of do like a score chart of. All right, you. I give you a three here. And I give me, like, we're not, you know, looking to compare or judge. It's talking about things that we want to remember positively from the past year, but also what do we want more from in the coming year or less of in the coming year? Because ADHD brains struggle to remember progress. So that's something else that I find very sparkly about this process. And this year, because I'm making it a little bit more structured, I thought it'd be fun to kind of keep almost like a little, like, anecdotal record of what we were talking about at different times. Because I hope to be with my husband for another 34 years, if that even mathematically is possible. I think it is. Yeah. So a yearly check in can help to create awareness of what you really like or what you're not loving so much or what you feel like you might get tired of after a little while, before it becomes something that just absolutely drives you nuts. It can help you to reconnect intentionally. And it can be a conversation starter, just a way to kind of broach a topic. Even if you're not ready to go deeper. It just might be a way to say, hey, I just, like, love to put this on our radar, that I'd like to do blank more. I'd like to, you know, spend some time doing this sometime this summer or whatever. It's not a chance to get, like I said, to keep score. It's not a way to fix your partner. We're not trying to fix anything with this. It's just exploring a conver, a way to have a conversation. And again, it's not therapy and it's not a complaint session. So for me, this is a sparkly way for us to connect, not a way for us to end up in an argument at the end of it. That is not the goal. So some possible structure to explore. If this idea interests you, I'm going to give you kind of the what it could look like. Like, where you might do it, when you might do it, how you might do it, just to explore again, notice what feels sparkly to you or what occurs to you that might work better or differently than what I'm sharing. So that you're noticing if this is a sparkly idea for you, a way in for you to try it. So where you do it, think about, you know, having comfortable chairs. If you want to be in a public restaurant, you know, like maybe a romantic dinner, or you want to be at a coffee shop or sitting outside, you know, just thinking about, like, where would a good place to have this conversation be? For me, anytime that we've done this very informally over the years, it has been where the kids are not going to be coming in and interrupting us. Even from when they were younger. We always used to have. Because we have four kids, so getting babysitters when we had no family living near us was really challenging. So we didn't go out an awful lot when the kids were younger. And so we would have just a date on the deck or date on the porch where the kids knew they weren't allowed to come outside and interrupt us because it was our date night. So think about, like, where. Where would be a good environment to have this conversation and then when. So if I'm like dragging my husband into something that I didn't give him any notice for. It's not going to go well. He needs a bit of time to adjust his brain to my expectation that we're going to have this conversation because this is definitely a me thing. He's not coming to me going, how do, can we do our, our State of the Union check in? That's not how he's wired and that's okay. But he's willing to do it for me and he does typically find it interesting once we get going. But I have to create the structure to do it in a way that feels comfortable for him to engage with me in this conversation. And part of that I know, is giving him a heads up that, hey, I told him, I said, I created some new, new structure this year. I'm really excited about trying it. Just want to give you a heads up. And I even gave him the structured sheet that I created with a bunch of questions that we can ask each other. So again, it just kind of makes it easier for us. Notice what would work for you. I don't want to plan it when we're tired, hungry, distracted, and I want to look at the time that we're doing it. Meaning is it better first thing in the morning or at the end of the day? Is it easier like in the afternoon after lunch? Is it better on a weekend versus a weeknight thinking about when and then also the amount of time. So if I tell my husband this is going to go on without any end in sight, he's not going to last very long. But if I set a timer and I'm like, we won't, we'll do this for about 15 minutes and we'll see like if that's enough, like we can wrap it up at that point if we need to, because that's going to work better for him than some kind of open ended. We're going to be talking for a couple of hours here. It's not going to work. Excuse me. And then the next thing that I noticed is for, for me and for my husband and our relationship, a rating scale is better than open ended questions. So instead of what helped us to connect this year or what helped us work like a team or when did we work like a team, trying to think of that over the course of the past year is like, I don't know, like we're not going to get anything from it except frustration. So we might say on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being not very satisfied and 5 being going really well, how Supportive. How supportive? Have supported have you felt by me, meaning like overall you feeling like I'm supporting you and what you're trying to do or if you're trying to implement a new habit or whatever. Just generally, how supported do you feel? Notice what works for you. If you want to give specific examples to an open ended question, great. That's not my brain and I would get overwhelmed and it wouldn't be a very productive talk unless I had like time to prepare and like make a list which would take a lot of effort. And again, this is about creating connection in a light and sparkly way, not in a heavy. Like I'm gonna have to do a lot of work to prepare for this way. We like to keep it really light. Other ratings questions that I wanted to share just in, in case it helps you to explore what might work for you. If you like the idea of rating. And any of these can be turned into open ended questions if that works better for you. But you might ask, how appreciated do you feel in our relationship? How happy are you with the way that we spend our time together? Right? So it might be like when we're, what we're doing in our downtime, how we're filling our evenings and our weekends, how happy are we with the way that we're allocating that time, how much fun are we having together lately? Or how satisfied are you with the balance of our responsibilities? It might be chores, childcare, money management, you know, a way to check in and see again, not to keep score, but to see are we feeling supported or am I feeling a little bit like I'm doing the majority or he's doing the majority of the chores around the house. How safe and comfortable do conversations between us feel? Like, how comfortable am I bringing things up? I'll get my own head sometimes and it'll be harder for me to ask things not because of anything that he's done, but because of my own brain wiring and stories that I'll tell myself. And so I have to say that out loud and say this isn't a you thing, it's a me thing. But here's something that I'm noticing I'm not doing and I just want to make you aware that I'm working on it. So I'm, I'm kind of highlighting it and shining a light on it, but not asking him to fix it, just letting him be aware that it's something that I'm noticing as a pattern that I'm falling into that I'm working on getting out of and then how satisfied are you with the level of physical affection in our relationship? And that again, if you're in a long term relationship, might have, you know, peaks and valleys. So coming together and discussing that in a way that feels comfortable can be. And from rating it can be really nice because then if you have a rating and it's let's say, you know, five being the highest, most satisfied, one being the lowest, least satisfied, and let's say we give it a 3.5 for any of these, might be like what would make it a four, right? So you're not looking like what would bring it a little bit, you know, that might be like perfectly like that's great. I don't need it to be any different. But if it's something that you're like, yeah, you know what, I'd like that to be a little bit higher or I'd like that to be, you know, stronger. What would that look like? What's one thing that, that might move the needle a little bit in the direction you're trying to go to. So you're defining what is possible, not trying to do everything all at once. Or it might be what support would help here? Like what, what would, what would it look like if you were getting more support from me? What's one thing I could do that would help you feel more supportive? If that was a area that gave a little bit lower number than, than you would like? Some open, open ended questions could include what activities would you like us to do more often? That's one I feel like I could answer open ended. So I, I like that one. When do you feel most connected to me? What do you want more of in our life together? What activities feel draining or obligatory to you? Is there something you'd like to try together? What helps you feel most loved and appreciated? And then these are the more the I would have a hard time with. But if you gave me time, maybe I could think of it. But what was your favorite memory of the year? Or what do we want to repeat next year? So maybe you did something, you're like, let's make that something like a goal to do that every year going forward because you just loved it. The sparkly stuff for me is what helps create awareness in a way that opens me up to the possibilities instead of shutting me down from the expectations. So it's for me it's all about creating a touchstone, like a touch point to notice the state of our union. And I am just sharing this in case it, it creates a sparkly way in for you to have some fun playing with ways to check in on the state of your union. All right, now to my book of the week. This is it. It's JFK Jr. An intimate oral Biography by Rosemary Tarenzino. Terence Terenzio.
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I don't know.
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I gave this 4 out of 5 stars. I listened to Being an Oral Biography. I thought it'd be most interesting to listen to it. They did have different narrators reading for the different people who were interviewed for this book, and I found that really engaging and interesting because they had males reading for males, and some of them actually sounded like the people if I knew their voices, but then others didn't. So. But overall, I. I didn't know enough of the voices for it to be distracting if it wasn't the real voice. But I did really enjoy. I learned. I thought I knew a lot about JFK Jr. And his wife, and I learned a lot of really interesting things. So I'm just going to read you a. A short little description. This is the first oral biography of J.F. kennedy, Jr. It is extraordinarily intimate and a detailed look at the real man behind the myth. Sharing never before told stories, his closest friends, confidence lovers, classmates, teachers and colleagues paint a vivid portrait of one of the most beloved figures of the 20th century who still captures public imagination 25 years after his tragic death. This came out this year. I think it came out in February of this year. And I've been on the library's waiting list for it since I heard it was coming out. It has really good reviews online. I really enjoyed it. So if the Kennedy family is something that interests you or just JFK Jr. Or if you don't know anything about him but you'd like to, I really did enjoy learning. Well, enjoy is a hard word, but I found it very interesting learning some insights into his life that I had never heard and some perspectives about what it was like to be him that I've never thought about before. And it was surprisingly informative. All right, so now for my quote of the week. And this is from David Dack. He is an endurance athlete. And this is his. A quote from him on running. He's a runner and he says no one tells you running is 10% cardio and 90% negotiating with the Voice begging you to quit.
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I love that.
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First, like, okay, nobody tells you that the whole time you're going to be running your head, the voice in your head is going to be telling you, just stop. Like, like, why are you doing this? Just stop. So I think that that can be true for a lot of us with adhd. Brain wiring is our brain might tell us. You.
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You.
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Oh, my gosh, this is too hard. Stop. But it's not listening to the voice when it's not serving you. So I just wanted to share that. And again, I'm going to tie it back to relationships. The. The longer you're in a relationship, you might have a escape plan, right? Or like a you know what? I don't know if this is worth it. Thing goes back to my State of the Union. I wanted to share. I forgot to hold this up. I made a little like a life chart, a life coaching wheel. Like a life wheel where you write different things. And I thought that's what I share with my husband. I'm like, oh, I made this online and I thought it would be fun to check in just on a scale of 1 to 5, just like you do on a life wheel where you can see, like, how well we communicated this year, how balanced is our schedule, how connected have we felt? And I thought that would be a fun visual way to kind of notice where our numbers are in a.
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A little tool.
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So all comes back to my. My whole focus on the State of the Union. So that's it for this episode. I have. You have hope. You have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will see you next week. Until then, tally ho.