Are you dealing with those pesky inner voices that try to tear down our ambitions and keep us stuck in our comfort zones? Yeah. Me too!

Hey, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and this is my podcast "The Weeniecast!"

Pssssst! Not sure if you've heard, but I'm inviting new members to the best community for business owners with ADHD - the Hyperfocused Community! You can join here - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Now, back to this episode...

I was in a French class the other day, struggling with the words, when this fascinating woman piped up, and we began chatting about our careers.

She's an opera singer from Toronto, who sings incredible pieces in French and wants to understand the language better.

What floored me was her question about my business: "How did you find the courage to start your business?"

Here’s this opera singer, someone who performs in front of audiences night after night, with impeccable bravery, asking me about courage.

That got me reflecting on how our inner voices - especially the critical ones - shape our perceptions of success and potential.

In this episode of The Weeniecast, I’m diving into exactly that: 5 signs you're under attack from the ADHD voices in your head - and how you can tackle them.

What if you could recognize the voice of doubt and saboteurs in your mind and learn how to manage them?

Here’s what you’re learning in this episode:

• Spotting the signs of your inner critic
• Understanding how ADHD plays into this
• Actionable strategies to keep those voices at bay

Listening to this episode, you'll gain insights into not just recognizing these voices but pre-emptively setting safeguards to protect your entrepreneurial journey from self-sabotage.

By the end, you’ll be better equipped to steer your business with confidence and minimized self-doubt.

Timestamped summary

00:00 Dealing with doubts and fears in business.

03:20 Brené Brown addresses shame, vulnerability, and wholeheartedness.

09:27 Building without market research leads to failure.

10:55 Artistic insecurity leads to lack of validation.

15:21 Saboteur seeks to keep you from risk.

18:20 Invisible business signs and blind group leadership.

22:43 Self-care crucial for sustainable business success. Avoid comparison.

25:06 Recover from negative thoughts for personal growth.

Your next steps after listening

Realizing it's time to work with me? Book your free initial strategy call with me - weeniecast.com/strategycall

Get more support in your ADHD entrepreneur life by joining my hyperfocus community! - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Wanna get this content earlier, and totally unbleeped? Subscribe to the Apple Podcasts premium version of this show - https://weeniecast.com/winners

Want to just buy me a coffee in return for some helpful insight? Thank you! Here's where you can do that - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katiethecoach

In this episode, we're going to talk about the five signs

you're under attack from the ADHD voices in your head and tell you how to

shut them up. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money

mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast.

I promise I have a point, but we have to start with a little random

story that I promise will make sense when we get to it. I am

currently working on learning French. I speak French, but I'm not that good. So

I'm taking classes every single day, and I'm doing it through this new

program that has been really incredible, but it's also new, so there aren't

that many people in class. So there's this one woman who I've been in class

with five times over six days. You know, she's super nice. She's

actually this opera singer in Toronto, and she's learning French because

she obviously has to sing in French and she wants to be able to understand

what she's saying, which I imagine. I imagine is important

because you want to put the right emphasis on the right syllable.

We were in this class yesterday and we were talking about our

jobs. Like, that was the vocabulary lesson, is all the vocabulary that has to do

with applying to jobs and having a contract and submitting

for resignation and, like, showcasing what your talents are.

And the teacher was really fun. She had, you know, because there were only two

of us and she wanted to get us speaking and practicing. She had us asking

each other questions about our jobs. And Daniella,

who's, by the way, an opera singer, and absolutely incredible, asked me how I

had the courage to start my business and to run it.

And, like, this was astounding to hear from her because she's a fucking opera

singer. She's getting up in front of hundreds of people

every single night, singing, having to

perform, knowing that all these people are paying a ton of money

to watch her. And here she is wondering how I'm being

courageous in starting a business. After I explained the whole stop being a weenie

thing in French, which I don't think they understood. I think they think I'm

just obsessed with sausages. It really got me thinking about

all the doubts that we have to deal with, all the

fear that we have to deal with when we're starting a business. And

of course, I'm six and a half years in. The fears I have about my

business are, like, next level from where I started, but they're still

there. One of the most correct indicators of

your potential success in your business is how you deal with those voices of

doubt. How do you deal with the fear

in coaching? You know, there are a few ways that we talk about that fear,

those voices of doubt. In my style of coaching, coactive, we refer to them as

saboteurs. They're the voices in your mind that want to sabotage

whatever you're doing that's outside your comfort zone, because they want you to

stay safe. And for the saboteur, in your mind, staying

safe means being fine with the status quo. Like, it

might not matter that you hate your house and roof leaks. At least you have

a roof over your head. It doesn't matter that your friends are assholes to you.

At least you have friends who cares that you hate your job. At least you

have a paycheck. You should be grateful. Like, the saboteur is kind of an

asshole, but they're there. It's funny because it's so much easier

for us to, like, think of what that saboteur voice would say

to us than it is to tap into what our higher self would say to

us, what our inner leader would have to say. I love how

Brene Brown actually talks about this. If you're not familiar with Brene Brown, she does

all this work on shame and vulnerability and wholeheartedness.

She started her career and she would kind of announce, like, yeah, I'm a shame

researcher. And she jokes how, like, if you're sitting next to someone on a plane

and they ask you what you do, the best way to shut down a conversation

is say that you research shame, because no one really wants to

talk about that. Right? But I mean, shame, if we think about

it, it's like we feel shame when we're hearing these voices of doubt and we're

believing them, right? Because these voices of doubt are telling us that

we can't do things, that we're not

good enough, that we might actually be terrible

at what we want to do, and they attack in every

way possible. Right? If you're a parent, this voice of doubt, these

saboteurs are constantly going to tell you that you're doing terribly and you're screwing up

your kids and that you're not being a good parent, you

know? And look at all these other parents who are doing way better. If you're

a woman and you have grown up with a lot of the messaging that we've

gotten in magazines and tv and movies, I bet

you have a few saboteurs or fear gremlins

about your image, about how you dress,

about maybe your weight or your appearance.

This starts for girls around age eight. They start

having body image issues, which absolutely

blows my mind, but also is not surprising because that's when I started having body

image issues. And if you're a business owner, especially if

you're just starting out, these saboteurs are going

to attack based on everything that they're seeing your

competitors do. People who are years and years ahead of you, they're going to compare

you to everyone. Any metric that you're not succeeding in, if you're not

bringing in enough money, that is going to be proof that you're not good at

this. I don't have any research to point to for this, but from talking to

my clients and my own experiences, having

ADHD makes this worse, because you know how when you talk

about that inner monologue and everyone's like, oh, yeah, the voice in your head, the

narrator, you know, who kind of talks about everything

that's going on in your life and kind of, you know, speaks through all the

sequence of events in the future and kind of refers back to former things. Yeah,

ADHD people don't just have one voice. We have numerous voices, and they're always

talking all at the same time. You're not good enough, which is

especially painful when a bunch of them are your voices of

doubt, fear, gremlins, saboteurs.

Cause we're not just getting one of them telling us that we suck. We're getting

17. Is this true for you, Neil? Oh, my

God, yes.

Can that please be in the episode?

And I want to own that. Yes. There are absolutely going to be

things in your business that you're bad at doing. Most people are

bad at selling when they first start their business because guess what? They never got

trained in selling. Lots of people are bad

at social media when they first start out because guess what?

They've never done social media before, and they're figuring it out.

There was a period of time in your life where you sucked at using a

fork, but what happened? You practiced and you got better. Hopefully

you didn't. Then, you know, I'm sorry for your dry cleaner who has to

deal with all those stains. And I just want to normalize that. These voices of

doubt, we all have them, really. I mean, the only people

who don't have them are sociopaths. So congratulations, you're

not a sociopath. I hope you get yourself a cupcake to

celebrate. So I want to go over some signs that you're actually

letting your saboteur or voice of doubt drive the bus in your business.

And then I want to go through, like, the steps that you need to

take to overcome them, and

I want to set the expectation here. There's no getting rid of them,

that you're never going to completely eradicate these voices of doubt.

There's no way you could be that confident in yourself that they're never going

to show up. You're going to deal with a fear in one way, and

then it's going to, like, just pop up in a different way. Because your voices

of doubt are you. They're just as smart as you

are. You're basically playing a game of chess against

yourself. But the key to success in your

business is learning how to always be a move ahead

and recover when you're at a disadvantage. So

here are five signs that you're listening to your voice of doubt, and

it's probably slowing your business success. Number

one. Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening

to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

So here are five signs that you're listening to your voice of doubt,

and it's a probably slowing your business success. Number

one, you're spending a lot of time on back end

work. I can't tell you how many times I've

spoken to someone who was thinking about hiring a coach,

but they really wanted to finish the digital course that they

had built out for their business before they hired a coach.

And if you want to hear my advice on how to launch a digital course

in your business, then go check out episode 88. I lay it all out for

you. But in that episode, I really go into how it's the worst

idea in the world to start with a digital course

because you have not market tested your idea.

Sure, you may sell this digital course, you may get clients for

it, but more likely than not, you won't, because

you haven't sold it as one on one, teaching yet or coaching. You

haven't sold it as a group yet. Your voice of doubt is really, really

clever. Your voice of doubt is going to tell you that the only way for

you to be taken seriously is to have

all of your expertise planted somewhere where people can learn from

it so that you can kind of shove it in people's face and be like,

see, I'm an expert. Here's proof. And while sure that

can be a boost for your ego temporarily,

it is like a house of cards, right? Because you build it and you build

it and you build it, and all of a sudden, it's this beautiful thing that

you spent a ton of time on ton of energy, probably a ton of money.

But it all comes crashing down when no one buys because it

wasn't what your market wanted. Your voice of doubt knows it's not going to

work. Your voice of doubt is always going to have you

waste time on stuff that is going to keep you in your

comfort zone, right? Because what is missing in the whole act of

designing a online course? Marketing,

putting yourself out there, telling people you're starting a

business, actually being brave and going and doing the

thing. Building an online course for a coach or

consultant or online trainer is kind of similar to

an artist. Only ever painting in private and never

showing someone their work, never getting feedback on it,

never getting direction, how to do a technique better or

learn a new technique that will help them get the results they want. And

sure, you could be a prolific artist and be

bad.

We all can remember the paintings we did in school where the

top left corner of the page has the sun and it's just

kind of like this round circle with the shiny bits pointing

out. And then there's a weird blob that's supposed to be a cloud,

and then there's the stick figure standing in the middle. Like, could you imagine being

an artist and sitting in your room all alone and just churning out

like dozens of those, hundreds of those, and then going out in

the world and being like, see, I'm an artist. And everyone being like,

wow, that's good.

You worked really hard on that, didn't you?

That ends up being the exact same thing. When you focus on the, the

back end work of your business without going and market testing it

as you go, your saboteur sets you up for this all

time, and I'll be real. I get sucked into this a lot,

but I also have some of the tools that brings me back from it, which

I will be getting to in a little bit.

Another sign that you're trusting your voice of doubt and not actually going with

your inner leader or your higher self is you are

constantly throwing money at the problem. This happens a lot, and

I've totally been guilty of this, especially earlier on in my business,

anytime I felt insecure about something, I'd be like, okay, cool, there's a course for

this. I don't know how to do Instagram. Cool, I'm gonna buy a course

for this. Oh, I didn't do that course. It didn't really fit me. I'm gonna

go buy another course. And another one. And another one. Did I

do any of them? No, of course not. The problem with this is when we're

throwing money at something, we're not doing it strategically. Right? When we throw money

from. Because our voice of doubt is undercutting our

belief in ourselves, we do it from a place of fear. We're doing it

from a place of, I'm not enough, and I'm not smart enough to figure this

out on my own. And of course, like, it is super valuable to invest

in the right help. But when you're in a fear place,

are you able to discern what the right help is or

not? I want to also give a shout out to all the fear based

marketing in my program. One of the things that I train on is empathetic

marketing. And of course, empathetic. Like, you're empathizing with where your

clients are, you're empathizing with how they're feeling in their business. That's not always

a positive feeling. There's this belief around ethical marketing that,

you know, you should only focus on the positive. I'm not a believer in that.

I think we have to be realistic and we have to normalize the struggle for

a lot of people. But there's a line that you cross when you start pushing

things that people need to be afraid of. And there are a lot of people

marketing their services or their courses in this way. And

unfortunately, it works because it speaks directly to that voice of

doubt that you have, that you're not good enough. They never have the secret. There's

no secret. Anyone who tells you that they have the one unique secret

that's gonna help you solve everything, they're full of shit. They're teaching

pretty much what everyone else is teaching. They're just trying to make it sound really

mysterious, but feeling that way, reading that and

thinking, oh, my God, that's what I'm missing, you know, that speaks directly to

your voice of doubt, your saboteur, who fully believes that there's a big part

of this that you don't have. So one of the signs that you really want

to pay attention for is when are you inclined to throw money at the

problem? And I have nothing against you

investing in the smart thing for you to move your business forward. But are you

making this decision from a place of fear and insecurity,

or are you making this decision from a place of, this is the right thing

for my business.

The third sign that you're being driven by your saboteur in your business

is what I like to call mindset mania. We

get so wrapped up in doing mindset work to help us

be in a success mindset so that we can go and be successful

in our businesses, that we jump over the fact that we don't know how

to do a lot of shit right. It doesn't matter what your mindset

is, if you don't know how to sell something, you're not going to sell it.

It doesn't matter what your mindset is. If you don't understand how to use

social media to market your services, like, you're not going to be effective going

on social media, marketing your services, working on your mindset only

in your business is kind of like those people who are like, quote unquote,

manifesting their dreams, but all they're doing is sitting in their room

journaling about all the things that they want, but not actually taking action to make

them happen. Yes, mindset is absolutely

important, but it's not the only thing that's

important. It's very sexy to think,

oh, cool, well, if I just get my mindset in the right place, then I

can go and do everything I want. It is a piece of the puzzle. It's

not the whole puzzle. But again, your saboteur

is a crafty mofo who knows that you love doing

this mindset work and wants you to spend all

of your time working on mindset work so that you don't actually go

and risk public embarrassment by announcing that you started a

business and potentially failing in front of a bunch of people.

You know, it's way safer for that saboteur to get you

journaling and spending time really working on your mindset, meditating, doing a lot

of stuff internally rather than risk the bullies from high

school seeing what you're doing and having a good little

giggle over it, that's terrifying to your saboteur. Your

saboteur wants to prevent any risk of that. And by the

way, your mindset for your business, there's no way

you're going to be able to be fully in the mindset of success unless

you also learn how to run the business. If you don't know how

to ride a bike and I hand you a bike and say cool bike to

the store, it's 2 miles away, and get some milk, you're going to look at

me like I'm nuts. You know, you're not going to feel confident getting on that

bike. You've never ridden a bike before. You're going to look at it like it's

a death trap because for you, it is. However, once you learn how to ride

the bike, once you understand how to get on, how to start

pedaling, how to turn, how to stop. Once you understand how to do

that stuff, you're going to feel so confident riding to the store, it's not even

going to be a question for you. Your mindset is going to be in the

right place for you to go and acquire the milk and bring it back.

The fourth sign that you are following your voice of doubt and

not your higher self in your business is that you are hiding in

plain sight. And I'm talking to you.

You know who you are. You've designed a website and you put it out

there and you're waiting, and then you don't get any

clients from it. So you go and you edit the website and maybe you

change your niche. So then you go and edit it again and then you get

new pictures taken. So then you go and upload the new pictures on the website

and then it doesn't look quite right. So then you re edit the whole site.

Unless you are pouring thousands upon thousands of

dollars into SEO and ads to drive people to your

website, which most of us, when we're starting businesses, cannot afford to do.

People are gonna find your website through you being visible on social media,

through you being proactive and putting yourself out there. You know, people are going to

go to your website to verify that you are who you say you are. No

one's going to, like, stumble upon your website just magically on

the interwebs and think, oh, my God, this is like so

serendipitous. I was just talking about needing a coach for this kind of

problem. It's not going to happen. You're hiding in plain sight. It feels

like you're being brave. It feels like you're putting yourself out there.

But that's bullshit. You're not doing anything like that. You're basically putting

up a sign that your business is open and then hanging it in your garage

with the door closed. No one can see it. How are people supposed

to know that you have a business if the sign is not visible to everyone?

The fifth and final sign that I want to talk about today, that you're

following your voice of doubt in your business, and I used to be super,

super guilty of this, is you're investing a whole bunch

of time in groups where the blind are leading

the blind. And I'm talking to you, member

of an accountability group with other people who don't know what the fuck they're

doing now. There's nothing wrong with having support. There's nothing

wrong with having a community of people who are really pushing

themselves to do the brave thing. They're holding each other accountable

and they're figuring it out together. The key here is that

someone needs to be showing everyone what they

need to do. Now, it could be that each and every individual in this group

has their own respective coach or consultant who's helping them build their

business. It could be that one person in the group

is just being a very generous friend and kind of guiding everyone along. Here's what

I did. They're kind of mentoring everyone, but without that key piece,

without someone showing you what the next step is, you're

literally all just there like hamsters in a hamster wheel, spinning, like,

just spinning around, around and not going anywhere. I was

so guilty of this when I first started my business and I was the ringleader.

I organized these groups and they went nowhere so

fast because none of us knew what we were doing. And the bravest thing you

can do in that scenario is call bullshit on what

you're doing and push everyone outside their comfort zone. Dealing with

the saboteur is one of the hardest things that you're going to do in your

business. And this is going to be harder than you going out and getting clients.

It's going to be harder than you marketing yourself. It's going to be harder than

that first time you're going to have to fire an employee, and there's no alarm

system that'll alert you to when they've taken over.

So you'll be going about your day and this voice will start and it'll start

telling you all the things you suck at and how this isn't going to work

out and how. Here's evidence that you know that opportunity is no

longer available to you. You know how you're not good at this and you're not

good at that, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's just the voice

in your head or the voices in your head. In the case of having

ADHD, there is no

mayday. We've been taken over by bad people. We need to dial it

back, do some meditation. Reset. Drink some water.

There's no alert system. Like, you literally have to start

becoming good at noticing when these voices take over,

and that is really hard. Okay, so one of the things that I want you

to start working on, if you've never done this kind of work before, is I

want you to identify what are the things that that voice of doubt says to

you? What are all the ways that it believes

that you're not good enough? What are all the reasons why

this voice of doubt thinks you should hide. And for the first month or

so, as you're really making an inventory of all these awful things,

you're going to look back and be like, oh, my God, the saboteur ran

that whole week. It's all going to be past tense. You're just going to be

looking at the past and seeing how the saboteur has run your life.

And you're going to start feeling really frustrated because you're going to be like, oh,

my God. Well, I know about it now. Why didn't I catch it? And

you can't catch it right off the bat, right? You have to start building

awareness around how it showed up previously. You know, the more

you do that, the more you're going to be able to catch yourself when

it's happening right now. Oh, cool. I'm starting to talk

really negatively to myself. I should stop that.

We're never going to get rid of these voices completely, but you can do things

to set yourself up for success. So for one,

the saboteur has like an open invitation into our heads when

we don't have enough sleep. And for folks with ADHD, we tend to need

more sleep than the average person. We tend to need about an hour more

than the average person because our brains are working so hard every day. So when

you don't get that and you start feeling really down on yourself, that is why

if you're not eating enough, if you get hangry, that's another time that saboteur

likes to come in. If you're like me, I get hangry all the time. So

make sure that you're fueling your body enough. Also drinking enough water anytime

you're sick or burnt out or injured and just not

feeling your best. That is when this voice is going to just start taking

over. So self care is one of the most important

things in developing a business. Cause if you're not taking care of

yourself, a, you're gonna get sick and the business isn't gonna

be sustainable for completely other reasons.

If you're constantly in that state of burnout and too tired and not

eating enough and you're getting sick, well,

you're constantly running your business from a place of fear and

that's not a strategic place to start and run a business from.

Another preventative thing that you can do to really keep these voices at

bay is to not compare yourself to anyone else.

Don't constantly be going out and looking at what other people

are doing in your space. Those voices of doubt are

just going to hop in and be like wow. Their pictures are better than yours.

You're not good enough. Their website's better, their offer's better.

This is better. This is better. Like, you suck, you're not good enough.

What are you doing? You should just quit now. You're not good enough.

One thing is that every single client of mine doesn't matter what they're

doing. At some point they come to me and they say, Katie,

like, my whole industry is saturated. There's so many people doing what

I'm doing. I'm like, I can't compete. And

I have to tell them, like, actually your industry is not saturated

because most of the time it's not. It's just that you talk about what you

do a lot online and the Google machine is paying attention.

People are buying ads to show to people who have interest in these

things. So if you're, for instance, like Neal, if you're a podcast

producer and you're talking about podcasts all the time, guess what?

You're going to be shown a fuck ton of podcast ads.

Here's how you do this and here's how you do that. And I can help

you get start a podcast. You know, thankfully for Neal, he's one of the best

people in the game. So he's not going to be made insecure by all these

charlatans out here who are selling awful services and awful

programs. But if you're just starting out and you don't know

that the other people aren't as good as you, or maybe they're, they're really,

really good, you're going to really start believing that this market is saturated

because it's all you're seeing online. Trust me, your clients

aren't only seeing them. So don't compare yourself to anyone else.

Stay in your lane. Help your people and

invest in help. If you need help figuring out all the pieces, like I

keep saying, you're never going to eradicate these voices. They're going to

happen. Even if you don't compare yourself, even if you take really good care of

yourself, even if you become a pro at catching that voice as soon

as it happens, right? Your mind just, its job is to

think thoughts and it's really good at it. And sometimes those thoughts are

really shitty. The key to your success is how quickly do you recover from those

thoughts? How quickly do you recorrect? It

takes time. And I have to tell you, I'm not perfect at it.

There are days where I totally get taken down by myself, saboteurs.

But the more work I do on myself, the more I delve into my

shadow work and really understand the things that I have shame around and unpack

those things and stop letting them have power over me,

the faster I recover when they start taking over. And here's

where it is actually really beneficial to have a coach.

If you're ready to stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes

money, then go ahead and book a generate income

strategy call with me by going to

weeniecast.com/strategycall.

On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams,

and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit

for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together.