← Translating ADHD
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- [00:02]
A
Hi, I'm Ash.
- [00:04]
B
And I'm Dusty.
- [00:05]
A
And this is translating ADHD listeners. This will be our last episode for this season. Dusty and I will be taking the months of July and August off, but we will have some favorite episodes replaying for you in those months. So if you still want to tune in, we will hand pick some episodes for you to listen to for the months of July and August, and we will see you back here in September. So, Dusty, so Ash, you want to tell our listeners what it is we're talking about today?
- [00:35]
B
Today we're talking about ADHD and mastery.
- [00:39]
A
Ooh. Say more about that.
- [00:42]
B
Yeah, so I mean, I think there's, we have an interesting relationship to the concept of mastery because so many people with ADHD are perfectionists. But I feel like as much as perfectionism can be a strength and, and a boon as far as mastery, more often it probably shows up as a block because unless you can do it perfectly, you won't start. And who can do anything perfectly at the beginning? So I feel like sometimes that, that high standard, that perfectionistic standard actually gets in the way more than it helps.
- [01:15]
A
Absolutely, Dusty. And I think one of the other things alongside perfectionism that can be a challenge for us is sort of appreciating incremental progress over time. Right. Our ADHD wants an answer now. We want to be able to do it right now. And so getting better at something slowly can be a really frustrating process and could be something that we, we lose interest or we drop it because we're just not appreciating or even remembering to kind of tap in and check in on the process. And so it can feel like we're not making progress at all and it kind of falls out of our purview without us realizing that's what's happening.
- [01:53]
B
Yeah, exactly. Like it's hard, I think with the. And there's different aspects of ADHD that clash here as well. Right. I heard a saying once that people with ADHD have interests an inch deep, but a mile long. So there's that piece. And certainly that's true for me where like you, you have a passing interest in something, you get just good enough at it to get the satisfaction and then you're sort of on to the next hobby. Because really getting, getting really good at anything, no matter what it is, whether it's a hobby or, or getting strong, you know, like, or building a, even a work related skill, it usually involves some grinding. Right. Like some practice over time. You know, there's that thing where they say like, you Got to have, you know, do 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. And practice is boring and repetition is boring. And so I see this with my kids where they really struggle to. They take to things quickly, but then when it comes to the part where they have to do it over and over, that's where they usually drop off and then kind of lose interest in the thing. And. And that was true for me growing up as well. And I've really struggled as an adult to feel like I'm good enough at things because I didn't put the time in to, like, really get to the skill level I want to be at. But at the time, I wouldn't have been able to. Right. Because I didn't understand how to get myself to follow through on something that felt boring. I see there being two issues, Ash. One is the perfectionism that stops us from getting started or that causes us to not be able to see incremental progress and give up too quickly because we get disheartened. And the other is not realizing that we're not building skills and that we're not working towards mastery when we keep, like, skipping around or we avoid the skill building part of it due to boredom. Right. I think there's sort of two different causes, but they lead to the same outcome because there are gonna. There are gonna be times in our lives where. Where we want to be really good at something.
- [03:45]
A
Yeah. Dusty. I've had some recent experience with that second one, actually. This sort of. I always had a complicated relationship with cooking. When I was married, I did not do most of the cooking in my household and was fortunate to sort of have that need taken care of by someone else. But now I'm the only adult in the household, so if I don't cook, we don't eat. And for quite a while, that was just a frustrating loop that I was stuck in where I hated to cook. I found it boring. I didn't like the process at all. And so, as you just said, what I wasn't realizing is I wasn't building any skill there. And so my frustration level remained really high. And so over the last several months, what is different is I've started putting some real intention, and I think this is the way around that thing you're talking about where we don't realize we're not building skill is to start to put some actual intention into skill building. That's exactly what I did, is I flipped my perspective from cooking being a life necessity to cooking being a skill and started putting intention into building different Types of skills in the realms of cooking. And I had this amazing experience last weekend where a friend came over for dinner very last minute. So there, this was not an opportunity to like go grocery shopping and have a plan. This was a. I already have the stuff in the fridge because this is what I was going to make for myself. And I was able to throw together a delicious meal for the two of us with no stress, no effort, because it's something that I've made multiple times and that I'm now very comfortable with making. And I've also honed the recipe to a point where I felt good about serving it to someone else. And I was just appreciating how far I've come skill wise to be able to have that experience. Because six months, a year ago, if I was having someone over for dinner, that would require a lot of advanced planning, a trip to the grocery store, like, I would need to be prepared for that in advance because I would never ever be the type of person that's prepared to serve someone a dinner, like on a whim, like, hey, we're, we're not done hanging out, we both need to eat. You want to come over for dinner? That would not have ever been a thing in my world before because I would not have been prepared to serve someone else a meal based off of what was already in my house. Yeah.
- [06:20]
B
Okay, first of all, amazing. Congratulations.
- [06:23]
A
Well, thanks.
- [06:25]
B
Secondly, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. I think there has to be sort of this conscious intention around the idea of practice and skill building and then figuring out how to get yourself to engage with it. Right? Because Lord knows we're going to avoid anything that's boring, hard, and not urgent. So practice of any kind, whether it's, you know, cooking or doing your makeup or playing the guitar, or, you know, going to the gym and trying to build a certain muscle, even, you know, getting better at folding your clothes, whatever it is, it's going to fall to the bottom of the list. And so I think then that's where we can add in. How do you gamify this? How do you make this something that's tolerable? How do you add some layer of non negotiableness or urgency to actually get yourself to follow through? Right. If I, if I tell myself, yeah, I'm going to practice, I don't know, I want to get better at writing haikus, I'm going to practice writing haikus for 15 minutes a day, I'm never going to sit down and go, okay, it's like haiku writing time. But maybe if I join a class that I have to pay for, now I've got some skin in the game, or it happens at a set time, or I set up a body double with my pal Asher right at, you know, 10 o' clock every morning we're going to sit down and write haikus for 15 minutes, right? That will work for me, right? Creating some urgency, some deadlines, some non negotiableness. But also what will work is creating some level of challenge or gamification. So it might not work for me to do this forever, but if I tell myself I'm going to do a 30 day haiku challenge where I'm going to write 10 haikus a day for 30 days, well now that kind of feels fun. Like now I want to see if I can do it and the skill building becomes secondary. Like the practice is in the background. It's more about the challenge. But through the challenge, I'll get myself to do it. And I improved my cooking in a similar way because I really, I don't like cooking that much. And so one of the things that I did during COVID is I would pick like theme months. Like I'd be like. Or theme weeks. I'd be like, this is going to be soup week. I'm going to look up all these kind of soups that I've never made. I'm just going to try to make soups or sometimes I would pick a certain ingredient. Like I'm, I'm going to pick lemon and I'm going to try to cook with lemon for the whole week or like basil or something. So I know for me, like a combination of gamifying things, adding some level of urgency and then usually breaking them down really, like I have to break it down really small. Like I can get myself to practice something for like 10, 15 minutes maybe. But I'm never going to be the kind of person who can spend a long time doing something it's better for me to do. Like to break it up and do shorter but more frequent sessions. But I usually have to kind of find some way to trick myself to follow through.
- [08:49]
A
So Dusty, what worked for me is actually a little bit different than what worked for you because trying to pick a theme would be overwhelming for me. So I've been doing one of two things. Number one, choosing something that I'm really looking forward to eating is always a winner for me. And that also gives me the opportunity to repeat and refine a recipe to the point where it does become second nature to make it. And that also shortcuts the cooking barrier for me. If I'm making something I'm familiar with, where I don't have to stop at every stage and reread the recipe and think about it too hard, if I can just sort of go through the motions, because I've made this enough times that I know how to do it without being glued to the recipe. I know the steps, I know in what order, so I don't have to think about it so hard. That can be really helpful for me, and it gives me the opportunity to get better at certain skills along the way. So one of the things that I have been making, the thing I made for my friend actually, is a ground beef stroganoff. And each time I made it, I was really trying to attend to getting a good sear on the meat before I put the rest of the ingredients in, because that makes the whole dish taste so much better. Better. And previously, when I would brown ground beef, I would sort of do the ADHD thing where I'm not paying that much attention, and I would just constantly be fiddling with it. No sear, right? Just sad gray meat. And so really putting intention behind getting that good sear is now a skill that transfers to other dishes that I make with that same meat alongside that dish in particular, now being something that I can make on a whim, no big deal. So long as I have the ingredients in the house, because I know how to make it, I don't have to think so hard about it. The other thing I've been doing is experimenting with different ways to make the same thing. So for me, experimentation can be really fun. So I've been on this mission to make a chicken breast that I like as well as a restaurant chicken breast. Okay. When I go out to eat, like, restaurant chicken is delicious. When I make chicken at home, it's always bland and boring, and that's frustrating to me. And so I have tried. We. We have chicken breast, like, once a week in my house. And over the last several weeks, I have set this intention to make the chicken breast differently every time I make it. So I've grilled it, I've pan seared it, I've baked it, I've made it in the instant pot. And I've taken the time to really pay attention to how do I like this? What if I try this method again? What might I try differently? And I think, again, with adhd, that's where we can get into trouble with incremental progress, is we don't take the time to pause and reflect and think about what a next step might be. You make the chicken breast, you don't like it, we'll throw the baby out with the bathwater and be like, well, that didn't work. Throw that whole thing out. Just, just forget it. I can't make chicken breast versus making it, not loving it and being like, okay, is this method worth trying again? And if so, what could I do differently here? And again, this is increased skills in multiple ways. The most tasty chicken breast is the pan seared one. It's also by far the biggest pain because it makes the biggest mess and it requires the most hands on attention in order to get it to come out well without overdoing it. Whereas the instant pot is absolutely the easiest method. You just chuck it in and then the instant pot does all of the work and it's pretty hard to mess it up. And so now that I know that I kind of rotate between those two methods for chicken breast, if I'm really trying to get the tastiest chicken breast, I'm going to pan sear it. If it's a weeknight and we just need to eat food and there are a couple of chicken breasts in the fridge, then marinating them first and chucking them into the instant pot is good enough for a weeknight meal and worth the trade off in terms of effort when I don't have the time to put forth more effort. And had I not tried that, had I not tried multiple ways, I wouldn't know that I wouldn't have that choice before me, if that makes sense.
- [13:04]
B
Yeah, I mean, just listening to your, your journey, you know, talking about it like, this is the thing about practice. Right. Too. Like our brains sort of collapse. I think when we think about doing a thing, we just think about being good at it. I use this example a lot. You know, like I say, like, people with ADHD tend to have really high perfectionism but really low frustration tolerance. So if I say to myself, like, oh, I'd really like to be able to, you know, play the solo to Stairway to Heaven. I'm just sort of picturing myself doing it. I want to be good at it now. I don't want like sit there and, and practice scales over and over and over. That's boring. Like, either I'm good at it now or I'm not doing it right. And so the process of remembering, you know, that, that our brain compresses time and that there's going to be several instances between me buying a guitar and looking up the, you know, tutorial to Stairway to Heaven and actually being able to play it, that there's sort of this time that exists where I'm gonna have to do this repetitious thing. That's the first step. Like, we have to remember that that's a thing. And then how do we get ourselves to do it? Like you're saying, you know, kind of deciding what you want to make a study of almost. And I think this. I think guitar is an apt metaphor. I do see this happening a lot with guitar players. Like, this is something that I think happens more commonly with musicians. Because what will happen is a lot of guitarists will just. When they're, quote, unquote, practicing, they're just playing songs. They're playing songs that they like, or they're, you know, they're doing what they like. And so if you look up sort of like guitar skill building tutorials, that's the first thing they'll tell you is sitting there playing whatever. Isn't practice like. Practice is actually like doing the. The scales, like, doing the basics over and over and over that will support the playing. And so many people just skip that. And they learn. They learn from doing it in the context, but they don't isolate out the specific things, like learning how to sear a piece of meat that will add to the whole. And so I think, as you say, like, remembering that, like, focusing on one skill will have greater applications, but I would even expand on that and say focusing on the skill of building skills or focusing on the skill of practice in and of itself is a thing. So again, like, kind of going back to my kids, when I see them, you know, they. They want to try this, they want to do that, they want to do karate, they want to do, you know, tap dance, they want to do ballet, they want to do whatever. I'm happy to put them in whatever. But as soon as it gets hard and they stop wanting to do it, that's where what I would like for them is to be able to build the skill of, like, stick sticking with a thing long enough to help them see themselves improve. Because if we never stick with the thing long enough to see ourselves improve, we don't. One, we don't know how to improve. Two, we might start to think that improvement is impossible. Or three, we might think that, like, the boring, hard part in the middle is just gonna be that it's gonna go on forever and it's gonna be intolerable. When someone starts playing a guitar, it's really hard on your fingers. Right. Like it hurts your fingers very hard. And if you're trying to make chords, usually the chords don't sound good. They sound like plonk, plonk, plonk. So if you're practicing guitar, it's very unsatisfying at first. And if you think that it's going to continue to be like that forever because you have no mental map for like improvement, of course you're going to give up. It's painful, it sucks, it doesn't sound good. If you don't sort of have a belief that like, at some point this is going to get easier. Because I've done that before and I've seen it happen and I know it's going to happen. It totally makes sense that you would give up. So for my kids, I want them to stick with whatever they're doing long enough to see improvement, just so that they understand the concept of the practice to improvement pipeline, so that when they do find something that they're truly passionate about or really want to do, that they'll understand how to get where they're trying to go, if that makes sense. Because I feel like I had to teach myself that as an adult. I'm still not great at it. And I wish it's something I wish. Learning how to practice is a skill that I learned younger.
- [16:49]
A
Dusty. I really like that as a concept, sort of learning how to practice, learning how to skill build as an intention itself. And I think that's really apt for people with adhd. Because listen, as, as people with adhd, we're always going to chase some amount of novelty in our lives. We're always going to be people who have multiple hobbies, multiple interests, who were into this this month and we're into that next month. And I think that that can be okay. I think that fight against our nature there is honestly not serving us. But I think this adds an interesting distinction to that is it's okay to let something go, but maybe see it through to the point where you've seen some improvement before. You let it go in service of that. Learning how to build skills, learning how to develop a practice, and so little perspective shift there that it's not necessarily about getting good at cross stitching or stained glass or whatever the heck your hobby of the month is this month. But it is about having a new experience as an ADHD person in terms of seeing some amount of improvement and growth. Even if this isn't a hobby that is going to be with you for the long term?
- [18:10]
B
Absolutely. It's not exactly the Same. But in a similar vein, I feel like that's what I did with, with exercise is for years, you know, I wanted to get in shape or lose weight or whatever, but I could never stick with anything long enough to actually see the physical changes. And so at a certain point, I shifted my focus from, like, my goal is X number of pounds or X amount of strength to my goal is consistency. I want. My goal is to be able to figure out how to become consistent with body movement. And when I shifted that goal, everything really changed because it no longer became about, like, well, I have to do this kind of exercise. And I'm like, if all I'm trying to do is consistently be active, I could do different things and I could, like, play to my, like, ADHD need for difference. So I started mixing it up, you know, doing different things in a week with the goal of being able to, say, do body movement three times a week and giving myself that permission to, like, do a big walk on a Monday, do yoga on Wednesday, go to the gym on Friday. Like, that was the level of differentiation and change that I needed to actually follow through. Whereas I could never get there because I was like, go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but the gym is boring, so, like, I can only get myself to do it once a week.
- [19:20]
A
Dusty. In a similar vein, I've had a number of clients for whom the. The topic at hand is I want to engage more with my hobbies, plural, rather than defaulting to things like social media, scrolling or binge watching tv or sort of doing those things that don't feel like they serve us right. And so something that has worked really well for a number of my clients is again, that element of choice. Like, rather than locking down and saying it has to be this hobby, it could be any one of my hobbies, right? The different experience I want to have is rather than scrolling social media, I want to engage in any one of my hobbies. It doesn't necessarily matter which one, because the different experience I want to have is not having this time sync. That doesn't feel good. I want to be using my time towards something that does feel better for me. And so that element of choice can actually, for some of my clients, be really helpful. Right? It doesn't necessarily have to be practicing my trumpet. It can be practicing my trumpet or journaling or this or that. And alongside that, something that really helps for these clients when we're developing a practice like this is having everything ready to go so that it's easy to pick up any one of Those things. So having the materials out, having the thing set up, having the journal out in the place where you might choose to journal whatever it is. So that, that way there isn't this setup barrier. Like you, you have this time, you have this intention to engage with some hobby and you could theoretically grab any one of your four hobbies in that moment because they're already set up and ready to go for you. So there's not the barrier of, oh, I have to gather the things, or oh, I have to set myself up for it. It's already set up for you. You just have to choose what you want to engage with.
- [21:18]
B
Yeah, that setup piece is a really big piece for sure. The last piece here, I think, and I know we don't have a lot of time, but I am curious what you would say is like, if you were a person with ADHD and you had a lot of different, like, things you wanted to get good at, whether they're hobbies or just life skills or whatever, like, how, how can a person tell, in your opinion or maybe just for you, how do you tell the difference between like a passing fancy and something that you have genuine interest in? Because this is something clients bring to me all the time too, is like they don't know if they're actually interested in something or it's just the novelty.
- [21:49]
A
Dusty, for myself, I'm just really careful about going all in on anything. So for me, like, what is the most low stakes way that I can engage with something new to see if it's something that might stick or something that is just a passing fancy? Because I think the typical ADHD experience is to go all in, right? So we buy all the supplies, we do all the things. Which, by the way, that messes with our dopamine, right? Like buying, buying the supplies for a hobby gives us the dopamine hit as if we have done the hobby. And so that alone messes with your adhd. And so I take the opposite tack is what is the most low stakes way that I can check this out and see if it's something that I want to continue to engage with or not? What, what is the bare minimum of supplies that I might need in order to try this out and see if it's something that I want to invest more time, money, resources, energy into or not? And that generally works pretty well for me.
- [22:56]
B
Yeah, I'd agree. And then I'd add to that. I'd say that for me, sometimes there's like an element of like, coping, coping with loss or like coping with Being okay with not being able to optimize everything. Like, there are certain skills that I, that I could have put time and effort into and built that very likely could have been like lifelong passions or I could have been really good at them. But I only have so much time and I've already got things that I'm however, sort of far down the road I am with. So I have to make a choice. Like, for example, when I was a kid, I was really, really good at drawing. And I never really pursued that into adulthood. But I'm still good. Like, if you ask me to draw something, people are always like, oh, you're really good at drawing. And so I could start investing a bunch of time into increasing my drawing skill. But. But I don't have a life built around that. I already have enough hobbies. I'm already trying to progress with the hobbies I have. So I'm just gonna be okay with kind of like letting that go. Maybe there'll be a season for it, you know, down the road, but even if not, like, it's okay not to be good at all the things that you hypothetically could be good at. For me, again, it's important to like, go to the gym and be in shape for my long term health and for my strength. But I'm not necessarily gonna get strong in this one particular way or get more flexible by going to yoga a lot. Like, there's, there's aspects of physicality that I could pursue, but I only have so much time. And so sometimes I think it is just an arbitrary choice, which the hard part for me, for my adhd, is like letting go, like expectation and outcome management. Because I think we do have that feeling like we want to do everything. And coping with that feeling of wanting to do everything and not getting to do everything is part of the hard part for me.
- [24:34]
A
That's a really apt point, Dusty. So if I'm hearing you correctly, sometimes the answer is to let go of the idea of building skill, to be okay with where you're at with that particular skill and make your peace with that. And I agree with you, that can be really challenging for people with adhd, but can also be really freeing when you learn to sort of let go of like, I'm good enough at this and I don't have to be better at it. I can be as good as I am at it and know better for me. Like you with fitness. Listeners of the show know that my, my fitness is going to my kickboxing gym. I don't ever intend to compete. And while I do like the skill building aspect in terms of, like, a way to measure improvement, I'm never practicing at home. I'm never working on skills outside of the gym. And I am okay with that because my primary goal is just the movement. I like the physicality of it. I like that it sort of COVID There's both strength and cardio in one workout that I find fun. So it bypasses the boring thing for me. But I don't need to work on skills outside of the gym. If I wanted to compete, if I wanted to fight, then I might need to work on skills outside of the gym and put some more intention behind it. But for what I'm trying to get out of that experience, it is okay for me to just show up for class and for me to often be the least skilled person in the room. And I'm perfectly comfortable with that because my primary goal is not to be a skilled kickboxer. My primary goal is to get a good workout. In that I also find fun. And so the skill building is nice to see, but it's not my primary motivation. And so I don't have to invest more time or energy into it than I have to invest into it.
- [26:32]
B
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head.
- [26:34]
A
And, Dusty, I think this is actually a good place for us to wrap for today. So, interestingly, the kind of moral of this episode being that one path is to start to put intention behind skill building in one of the many ways that we listed out in this episode, but the other is to maybe recognize areas where that doesn't need to be the goal, where you can let go of the idea of needing to get better, of needing to be able to do it perfectly.
- [27:04]
B
Yes, sometimes it's intention, and sometimes it's intention to not have intention.
- [27:09]
A
I love that sometimes it's intention to not have intention. Well said. So until next week, listeners, I'm Ash. And I'm Dusty and this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.