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- [00:00]
A
Hey, listeners, it's Dusty. It's our summer break, so Ash and I are taking this time to plan the future of Translating adhd. And I have picked some awesome and fun episodes to rerun for y' all for the summer in the meantime. So we're going to be starting it back up in September. Don't ask me when, because I don't know, because I'm super duper organized. But anyway, I hope you guys have an awesome summer, and I will see you in the fall.
- [00:27]
B
Bye. Bye. Hi, I'm Shelley.
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C
And I'm Cam.
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B
And this is Translating adhd. This week, we are going to talk about a phrase that has become sort of part of my philosophy for life. Cam. Not to overstate it, but it really has. And before I dive into that statement and what it means to me, I want to give credit where credit is due. So this is not a philosophy of my own invention, but an organizing colleague came up with this. My good friend and colleague, Janine Adams, who is a professional organizer here in St. Louis. And this was something she brought to our local chapter of the national association of Organizing and Productivity Professionals at a time when the workload had gotten so onerous for the board of directors that we were having trouble finding people to sit on our board, and the chapter was about to fold. So she came in and served as president for a term, and her philosophy for that term was, Let it be easy. Yeah. And so in the context of that board, what happened is a lot of things were simplified. Processes that had been a certain way for a very long time were revisited, and things were kind of cut down to the easiest and simplest form. And the changes she made. This was many years ago. This must have been, like, 2013 or 14. The changes that she made based on this philosophy are the reason that the chapter still exists, and the chapter is still run that way, which makes it easier to find people to fill these roles. So I find Let It Be Easy really fascinating, because I think people in general are bad at letting it be easy. And then you throw ADHD into the mix, and it's even worse. Like, we're super bad at letting it be easy. The neurotypicals are bad enough at it, but we are awful at it. And I think those challenges come in two parts. There's the first part, which is true for everyone, neurotypicals and ADHDers alike, and that is the failure to zoom out enough when we're looking at a challenge. Now, throw ADHD into the mix. This is the second part. And you have our Contextual processor that sometimes takes us down false roads and tends to want to make systems and processes more complicated than they need to be, or sometimes tends to want to add things to the project, making the scope bigger than we initially intended. So combine those things together, and we really struggle to let things be easy. Let me give you an example, Cam, if I can, of a recent client for whom letting it be easy turned out to be the perfect solution. What do you think?
- [03:49]
C
Sounds great. Go for it.
- [03:51]
B
So this client is an attorney and her big challenge, and what she came to me primarily to work on was paper and the state of her desk and the sheer amount of piles that she's dealing with. So we started to break down what is in these piles. What categories of paper will we find in these piles? So there were a few that were action items and a few more that were things that her paralegal wanted her to review. So actions that her paralegal took that she wanted to make sure that the attorney reviewed and signed off on. And then there was this massive category of things that fell into a general FYI, sort of, I did this. I just want you to see it, or here's some notes. FYI, right? That was the biggest category. Is this just FYI. So my client came with the perspective of how do I deal with all the paper and how do I get through all the paper and organize all of the paper I proposed? Does this general FYI stuff even need to hit your desk? It's already passing through your paralegal, and right now you're not looking at it at all. So what if instead, the only FYI, materials that hit your desk are the ones that your paralegal actually wants to make sure that you double check much smaller amount of paper in the first place, and, you know, if it hits your desk, it's something she really wants to make sure that you look at and review. Cam, this client kind of thought I was a genius for coming up with that idea.
- [05:46]
C
You are a genius, Shelly. You are genius.
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B
But that's just an example of it's a really simple solution. We could have dove straight into trying to systemize all of the paper, but we didn't need to, because the better, simpler, easier solution was let's pare it down to the paper you actually need to see, and then, you know, if it's on your desk, it's yours to deal with in one way or another.
- [06:13]
C
I really appreciate you that this is your illustration. The fact that this is a challenge that everybody deals with, those with ADHD and Those who are neurotypicals too. And so it begs the question, why is doing the easy thing so hard for the person with adhd? And as you said, it's that the desire to I guess the default mode of to over contextualize to add more. We will often see this in email exchanges when there's a simple ask and we reply with more information than need be. And then the answer is buried somewhere in paragraph three. And it's a fascinating concept. And listeners are probably asking why? Why do we do this? So over contextualizing is one thing that we can do. There's a couple other things. Over contextualizing is kind of related to that Big idea generator. We can be very additive to add more. I have a client who just kind of one of his sort of mos is to I want to make it better. I can make this better. And he's confusing better with more complicated. It's kind of like you're accessorizing your vehicle and adding weight to it where it becomes really unwieldy. It's just sort of adding this bell and this whistle and this piece and that piece. And so a lot of different things can come into play there. 11 is we've got all this information in our head and we want to put it somewhere, so we're going to put it in this exchange to somebody. What we're doing is actually kind of doing our own processing, but we're then sharing all that processing to get to that answer with that person, that recipient, that poor recipient.
- [08:27]
B
I love email as the example for over contextualizing. And Cam, let me add a second one that I see and this one is true for everyone. This is from my organizing days is the looking for a product to solve the issue. So you said sometimes we add too much. So this is parallel to that. Starting an organizing project by going out and buying a bunch of organizing supplies. Why would you do that? If your goal is to sit, simplify, you're adding to and you're often adding to and purchasing those organizing supplies without really knowing what you need. So containers and other organizing supplies are a wonderful thing, but they should never be the first thing.
- [09:18]
C
You said it's not the first thing. So I'll follow up with, okay, so don't go out and get the planner. What do you do? I think what you do is you be curious about your experience. And this is where I like to make a distinction between practice and systems. There's the I need a system or I need a yeah, I need a system. I need A system. I need a strategy. It's like, what's the practice? What is less moves or defining what the actual problem is? Yeah, you just said that's not the first thing, so I would say. So then what is the first move? What is the first thing to look at?
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B
So the first thing to look at is what is it that we're actually trying to solve here? What is the challenge that we are trying to solve? Back to my client with the paperwork. The challenge she was trying to solve is too much paper on her desk. And again, the natural inclination for most people is to start by systemizing that paper. But we took it a step farther by examining what kind of paper it is. So eliminating some of the paper before it could even come in was the biggest part of that system and something we would have missed entirely had we jumped straight to, what categories do you have? What folders should we create? Sort it into these folders, use these trays, this rack, these products.
- [10:49]
C
Yeah. And so that's taking Janine's principle of let it be easy. And you really led with that. Let's let it be easy. The other thing is, I think that it's very natural to have this assumption that, okay, here's a pile of stuff. I need to do something with it. Right. We're not really looking at sort of the steps beforehand or what is really called of this situation. You said earlier about what both people with ADHD and neurotypicals don't do well is zoom out. And when I think about zooming out, I'm thinking about the mechanics of that. The zoom out is about pausing, stopping what you're doing, and kind of taking a step back. So there's a pivot there, there's a stop, a pivot, and a backing out. Those are really tough. When your go to is to kind of like, you know, light that rocket at the beginning of the day. You get into the office and it's due time, it's go time, and we can miss those exits or those opportunities. We just blow right by them. And then we're mired in. It's kind of. Then the. What happens is then we're kind of stuck in the limited thinking with why is. You know, this is so hard, and I hate this. And as we do that, guess what? We move farther and farther away from being capable and creative and resourceful. We're kind of like, I hate this. Rowley.
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B
Yeah. So you just described the challenge for those listeners who get stuck in the doer in the reactive mode is taking that pause Taking the time to zoom out, to examine questions of do I have to do it this way just because it's the way it ought to be done? Another example from the same client that highlights this is, is as the courts are starting to reopen, she suddenly has double the workload. And the office manager at her office asked her to document what's going on with her cases in the form of a spreadsheet. Now, most people would have said, okay, I'll make a spreadsheet. Well, my client did attempt to make a spreadsheet, but it was frustrating and it felt onerous and it felt more difficult than the end product was worth. So she came to me and said, I organized some other cases this way. Is it okay for me to organize this type of case this way? I said, I don't see why not. But do you see how she almost asked me for permission to do something differently because we're so inclined to just do things the way they've always been done or do things the same way that other people do them. So again, an example where she stepped out of the box and looked at the problem in a bigger way. What do I need to solve here? What information is the system trying to relay? And how can I do it in a way where the effort to maintain and use the system doesn't outpace the product?
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C
Right. There's another piece there that we talk about the doer and maybe the doer missing their opportunity to zoom out.
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B
Exactly.
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C
Gain some perspective. There's also the planner who tends to stay in planning and makes it more complicated, more convoluted by staying in this sort of planning or research phase. I don't have quite enough information. Just a little bit more information that's could be indicative of covering for a glitchy activator to be able to move from that planning state into the doing state. So that's sort of the opposite problem. It's being able to extract yourself from the planning and to get into the actual activity.
- [15:13]
B
Absolutely. And I see this with a lot of my clients where they get stuck in the research phase, sort of. I want to try and find the exact right way to do something. And that's really dangerous in the era of the Internet where there is no one right way to do most things. So two examples here. One, I have a client who is getting ready to defend her dissertation. So this is a couple of hours of being asked questions about the paper that she has presented. Well, she got really hung up in Googling. How do you prepare for this? How do you Prepare for being questioned for two hours on a massive paper that you wrote. I don't know. But what I do know is the Internet doesn't know either. You're not going to find that one. Oh, this is the exact right way to do things. And I find my clients looking for that a lot when they don't know, when they can't find that point of entry. I have a client who calls this having a knowledge gap. So there's some knowledge gap between where I'm at now and where I need to be to get this project moving. And with that knowledge gap, we often default, especially if we're prone to being stuck in the planner. And for that inattentive type, we often do just that. We go looking for someone to tell us the exact right way to do it. And it's no wonder, because who are we? We're people that want to know the context. We want to know our role. And when we don't know those things and when we have to define those things for ourselves and figure out what works best, best for us, it's not easy. And it's really not easy if we're not practiced at doing it. So for this client who was struggling to find the exact right way to prepare for this, guess what we did during that session? We zoomed out a little bit and talked about what we know about her, the client, and we started developing a plan from that place.
- [17:25]
C
That's a great plan. That's a great perspective. And it again, puts the focus on something that's within control of what the client can do. Right. It's like getting a sense of. And again, I think we've talked about this before. When we are identifying resources, we often will not see ourselves as resources in the problem. The dilemma we're so focused on, well, there must be a right way with that little perfection streak going on. It's like there must be a. You know, there's one thin road to success. That's another way that we will overcomplicate things is finding that exact or right path going forward. I'm really enjoying this topic, and I've got another example, if I could share.
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B
Sure.
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C
It comes into. It's related, but again, it's either overcomplicating or kind of getting stuck where things need to move forward and we kind of run into roadblocks. And again, it's like whether it's over contextualizing or not seeing the option that is in front of us. And so this is a client who runs a company of about 30 folks and he came to me because what he tended to do was in order to manage things, he liked to be able to put his hand on things. So the term I like is as the information comes over the transom comes across his desk, this desire to get his hands dirty and look at this stuff, to pick it up. And in a way that was the way that he was actually tracking this stuff was to actually pick it up. He had a secondary challenge, though, and the secondary challenge was this very fluid move from picking something up into jumping in and doing it. So you see the dilemma as an individual running a multifaceted company with 30 folks and we've got a challenge at the top where the CEO is jumping in, pitching in. He's a pitch in guy, he's a can do guy. But that pause to sort of think about, okay, is this my best role here? So, yes, there's certain things that he does need to do, but he was missing that opportunity to think about his people and the art of delegation, which is often, again, delegation is another challenge area that we can do a topic on or an episode on, because that is employing the art of tracking and accountability and follow up. They can all be challenge areas with respect to adhd. And so that awareness piece of just. I really appreciate what you said about bringing the focus back to the client. We did that too in the sense of looking at his behavior, that this desire to manage and be in touch with what's going on in his company. He wanted to look at things, but in looking at them, he tended to jump in, pitch in, pulling him away from these other duties that he needed to be doing. Sending signals to people around him that again, again. Oh, I guess we're focused on this over here now. Oh, I guess we're over here and focused on this. And so starting to distinguish very similar to what you were saying about your attorney client is sort of distinguishing things that we need to be aware of, but that we're not necessarily directly engaging in. There's information like that sort of FYI pile, it's there, but do I really need to put eyes on it? Do I need to make a decision about that? Who else can I hand this off to? What needs to be worked on to a completion point? So starting looking at these kind of categories of work, what is it that I need to have eyes on? And just that what is it that I need to be directly engaged with? What is it I need to hand off? And that developing that muscle of the handoff in some way, it was fascinating. He thought handoff meant failure. If I hand this off, I'm somehow failing my people. And being a failure today in this moment, that's a strong emotion. And to sort of really challenge that, really. Is that the case? How can we really celebrate and acknowledge the handoff, see it as a really savvy business move on your part is again, that kind of that moment to stop and remember and recognize, oh, I've got a new tool in my toolkit here. The handoff and how to partner with his people around that accountability and tracking piece that he, the guy of the add is not the one remembering who's doing what, but it's more of a shared responsibility. But when we pause for a moment and really consider our own interaction with our stuff and be curious about the process and the practice as opposed to the system, I'm on a slap on this thing. The system comes later. It's really looking at how do I engage with it, how do I want to engage with it? And that kind of queuing up that idea of what's a simpler way, what's an easier way. I'll say one more, Shelley, I think I was just thinking about this earlier today when you reminded me of this topic is that we will take an expectation and supersize it. We will hear something an ask, and then we take that and turn that an expectation into something bigger than it is. So black and white, thinking up on the slopes of Rainier at causation to kind of supersize that into a bigger effort that it need be. So then we, like, get all this energy and effort to meet this expectation that we've created in our heads. Meanwhile, here we are working on this thing when we've got all these other things that we need to be working on, too. This reminds me of Client Rosemary from several episodes back, right? She's the music teacher, and she was showing up at school thinking that she needed to apply herself 120% at everything. Not only teaching her classes, but all the advisee stuff, all the administrative stuff, 120%. And she barely got through the day. But that recognition of. Wait a sec, you mean I can sort of dial up in some areas and dial back in others to really think about what is the expectation here and to assume it's probably less than what you're making it out to be.
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B
I love that you brought Rosemary back into this conversation, Cam, because that brings up the subject of distinguishing, which is what Rosemary had to do, distinguishing between what things required and were worth putting that much effort into and what things didn't necessarily need that level of effort and that is something that we're generally not good at. And since we tend to live very much in the now and very much feeling like we are behind, we always feel like we're half a step behind. We don't stop to do that distinguishing. We just feel like we have to do and we have to do everything just so to make up for the times that we didn't get things done on time or we were behind enough for other people to notice. And letting go when you are in that perspective, delegating or reducing the amount of time or effort can be really excruciatingly difficult. I have a housekeeper, Cam, but it was two or three years from the time that my husband and I decided to hire a housekeeper until I actually took the step of hiring the housekeeper. And most of the barrier had to do with my feeling like I, I should be able to clean my whole house myself. I work from home. What's wrong with you? You should be able to do this. Well, guess what Cam, I could do it. I'm capable, I'm able bodied. But I'd rather be doing almost anything else. And it is the best investment I made not just in my business, but in myself for self care too. Because not only do I have more time to work on my business, I also have more time to do other things for myself and in my home.
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C
That's really wonderful. And it is, I think it's a matter of as you said, letting go, releasing. And back to what Janine said, right. It was the board kind of releasing sort of this idea of we have to do certain things. The shoulds we've talked about, we talked about I think last week. So listeners, okay, here we are. And what can you do out there around letting it be easy? So here's an idea. Go easy on yourselves here. I think that we can often say, okay, I'm just going to go ahead and make it easy. Well, things take time and especially around this transition between planning and doing. And here's a little trick. The trick is to allow for some transition between that kind of thinking planning state and moving into the doing the action. And it's going to be a little painful too, right? We actually, we call this sort of a, there's a pain point here between moving from that thinking planning into the actual engagement and go easy and allow it to be a process that you're not going to just turn on a dime. Right. Whether you're a doer and want to pause and zoom out or you're a planner and about engaging. But there's a little rule that I like and it's modified from ones that I've seen out there. I call it the ten minute rule. And the ten minute rule is to really just commit to ten minutes of this activity. Whether it's the zoom out, do it for 10, you can do this for 10. And at the end of 10 you can choose not to do it anymore, try again another time. This especially works well for getting into an activity to take that first step. You've done enough research, put down the tablet, put down the research and okay, what can I do here? And to just commit to 10 minutes, probably about two or three minutes of that's going to be a struggle to try to get into that mode. But you can and you will. And what's important about this is this is a muscle you're developing other than that urgency muscle, the adrenaline response cycle muscle, this is that again becoming ambidextrous. So using our method of understand, own and translate to be curious about an opportunity for you where you can hit a transition and look for that easier option, look for that easier choice and aim for it and maybe seek some support in getting there.
- [30:09]
B
The last thing I'll say on the topic of Let it be easy, which is so near and dear to my heart and who I am today, is that for me, it's more than just a way to approach problems. Although that's where it started. So as Cam was saying, which ever challenges yours, whether it's taking the time to pause and zoom out, or whether it's shifting out of the planner into the doer or something else entirely, Let it be easy is something you can ask yourself when approaching any problem. What's the easy solution here? How can I let this be easy? But more than that, I've noticed over time as I let more and more things in my own life be easy, that I don't feel guilty about that anymore. It's just who I am and it's okay. Not only is it okay, it's awesome. It's awesome to let things be easy. And it's so screwy in the society we live in that puts so much value on productivity and output. You can really feel bad about yourself for letting it be easy if you let that stuff get in your head. But guess what? Stuff doesn't have to be hard for the sake of being hard. It just doesn't. And I guarantee you if you start letting it be easy, you'll become as addicted to it as I have.
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C
You know, Last week we were talking, you said, you know, my big agenda is still a work in progress. This is a part of your big agenda.
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B
Right. That's kind of who I am. At the core is let it be easy. When it's easy, I'm happy.
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C
Yeah. And I, I subscribe to that too. Is the recognizing along with the lack of completion, is the lack of, excuse me, is the propensity or the habit of over contextualizing. And so it's an effort really be thinking about that easy choice. And so I appreciate you taking it out. It's not just a strategy. It's a way of being. It's a way of being going forward in this world. So it's really well said, well stated, in a great place to finish up, I think.
- [32:32]
B
Absolutely. So, listeners, if you like what we're doing here on the podcast, you can help us out by leaving a rating or review wherever you listen. If you have feedback to share, we want to tell us what you think about less letting it be easy. You can hit us up on twitter@translating ADHD or on our website, translatingadhd. Com. And until next week, I'm Shelley.
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C
And I'm Cam.
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B
And this was Translating adhd. Thanks for listening.