What do we business owners share in common with beavers? You're gonna kick yourself!

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...

How do you beaver up your business?

I was scrolling through my social media feed the other day when I stumbled upon the most peculiar video: a beaver diligently collecting household items to create a dam inside someone's bathtub.

It struck me how instinctual it is for these creatures to obstruct the natural flow of water—and then I realized, isn't that what we often do in our own businesses?

I’ve now coined the term: "beavering your business as a result of this lesson I've learned."

Often, ADHD entrepreneurs unconsciously create energy blocks that prevent success, clients, and money from flowing naturally.

How do we create dams in our own success?

It's all about the stories we tell ourselves—stories about our ADHD, our relationship with money, or our skill sets.

Instead of treating these as minor hurdles to overcome, we magnify them into insurmountable obstacles.

For instance, constantly blaming ADHD for our challenges not only limits our actions but also keeps us in a perpetual state of powerlessness.

We even use our "bad relationship with money" as a convenient excuse to avoid asking for the compensation we deserve.

By acknowledging and tackling these stories head-on, you’ll learn how to redirect that blocking energy into something more constructive.

After listening to this episode, you'll gain valuable insights into recognizing and dismantling the barriers you've been unknowingly placing in your own path.

We’ll cover practical strategies for transforming your mindset around ADHD and money, empowering you to step into a position of control and opportunity.

You'll be better at identifying the sabotaging narratives you tell yourself, and more equipped to make decisions from a place of strength rather than weakness.

Whether it's overcoming your fear of failure, rejection, or just breaking a long-held belief that you “can't” succeed because of your ADHD, this episode will arm you with the tools to stop being a weenie and start running a successful, profitable business.

Timestamped Summary:

00:00 - Introduction: How beavers and business blocks are connected.

01:50 - The concept of "beavering your business" and the negative impact of energetic blocks.

02:49 - Common self-imposed barriers ADHD entrepreneurs create, stemming from blaming ADHD.

03:49 - The power of shifting away from blaming ADHD to taking control.

04:54 - Specifics on how untreated ADHD symptoms can impact business tasks.

06:06 - Discussing the myth of insurmountable obstacles, especially around money.

07:09 - Steps to improve relationship with money and move past paralyzing beliefs.

08:54 - Overcoming my "I'm bad at writing dialogue" block.

10:10 - Breaking down the psychological mechanisms behind magnifying obstacles.

12:34 - Empowering yourself to overcome the beavers in your business.

This episode is your guide to stop letting beavers dam up your path to success.

Click play, listen, and let's break down those barriers together!

Your next steps after listening

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What's the beaver that's damming up your business?

Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And

welcome to the Weeniecast. If you go on

Instagram or TikTok and you search beavers,

you're gonna find a whole bunch of videos of people who for some reason have

beavers in their home and how these

beavers randomly, like, just out of instinct,

will start gathering things, taking things from all over the house to

create dams in hallways, in doorways. It's like they

cannot help themselves. There is one video

that I saw where the beaver literally, like, dammed up the tub

with just random objects he found all over the house.

They have this innate desire to

stop the flow of water, of people, of

movement. They cannot help themselves.

And like beavers, a lot of people do the

same, but energetically, well, hopefully you just do it

energetically. Hopefully you're not just, like, moving all of your shit to be in the

way for people to not be able to get through. But also, if you're an

engineer and you actually build dams, then, you know, good on you. You probably

studied really hard for that, and you probably benefit society by

allowing us to generate things like electricity and prevent floods. So thank

you. Anyway, back to Beavers and how this is relevant to you as a business

owner with ADHD.

If you're beavering your business, which is the term I just made

up, what you tend to do is you tend to create this big

energetic block that prevents clients from coming

to you, that prevents money from coming to you, that prevents

a success in all its forms from coming to you. And how do

we do this? A classic beavering move for the

ADHD business owner is to constantly blame your

ADHD and to make your ADHD this

insurmountable obstacle that prevents you from doing what you

want. And that's not to say that we don't have challenges. That's not to say

that we don't have genuine things that pop up for us, that makes life

hard. Your executive dysfunction will prevent you from doing

things in certain days, you don't have enough dopamine to actually get

the to do list done. Your rejection sensitivity dysphoria

will absolutely make it really scary for you to get on

those first dozen sales calls because you're terrified of hearing no. Your

hyper focus could also get in the way of you being successful because

you might hyper focus on the wrong thing. And that is absolutely

valid to. What I'm talking about here is taking

it all and just saying, oh, my God. Well, I want to do this thing,

but my ADHD is just too bad and I can't do any of it. And

we don't just do this with ADHD, we do this with our

money story. Oh, I just have the worst relationship with money. I could never ask

for more. We do this with skills. Oh, I'm just the worst writer. I can't

write anything for social media or for emails. No, no, no. I'm just

not going to do that. Holding up one of these things

and making it the big ass obstacle that's preventing you

from having all the things you want is like damming up a

waterfall. It's like being that beaver that can't help

itself but create a dam to prevent things from flowing

through. And I understand why we do this, and I'm totally guilty of

having done this in the past as well. The reason we do this is because

we're terrified of actually going out and doing the thing and

failing. We're terrified of the rejection that'll come. We're terrified

of embarrassing ourselves by trying something and having it not work out

and having people know about it. That's really scary and that's a valid

fear. And the reason we pointed this big thing, we say, oh,

well, this is the problem. This is the thing that's preventing me from getting all

the things is because it actually empowers us

to have an excuse for why we can't do the thing.

This is one of the reasons why when I'm on the phone with a potential

client and, you know, we're talking about the different persons programs that I offer

and they say, you know, I'd really like to sign up for this, but I

just don't have the money right now. I never try to convince someone to spend

money that they don't have, but I don't want

people making decisions from a place of powerlessness, you know, so someone

genuinely does not have the money to work with me, that is absolutely fine.

But I always say, okay, cool, can we find a better reason for you to

not work with me? Can we find a more powerful reason for you to not

work with me? Because saying you can't do something because you're just powerless

by circumstances and everything that just trains your brain that you're

just going to continue to be powerless, that you're going to continue to be a

victim of all the circumstances of your life. When you start making

decisions from a place of, actually, this is what I want

more. Here's what I'm going to focus on for the interim. I'll come back to

this later. When we put ourselves back in that chair of power,

that's when opportunities start presenting themselves. That's when we

start seeing things in a completely new light.

And that's when we give ourselves permission to actually solve the fucking

problem. So let's talk about the example of you have a shitty money

story. You have a bad relationship with money, you have this belief that you're terrible

with money, and so you never have enough of it to do what you want.

You're just always at the mercy of your bank account. Imagine if you start

working on your relationship with money. Imagine if you no longer use that

as the excuse, use of your life to not do the thing.

When you speak as though the fact that you have a bad relationship

with money is just a fixed fact and it's always going to be true. There's

no fixing it, there's no changing it. It becomes the obstacle of

your life and it prevents everything you want from coming to you. And the

beauty here is that it's not your fault you're not getting what you want.

No, there's just this big obstacle that's always in the way. It can be really

scary to look at that obstacle and see that you actually have more

control over it than you have ever admitted to yourself. But

everything changes when you realize, oh, cool,

I can actually solve my relationship with money. I can improve

it, I can do some really brave ass work, I can stop

being a weenie and I can make this better. I have

several clients right now who are really diving

into a lot of uncomfortable work on their relationship with

money because they realize that they are not powerless to

it. And they realize that when they do this work and they're intentional about their

relationship with money, they open up far more opportunities to

themselves. They bring in far more money. They

feel far better having that money and spending it than they did

previously.

If you listen to this podcast, chances are you're not the person who uses

ADHD as your big excuse, right? Because you're listening to a

podcast right now that's showing you how to improve

things and be able to work with your ADHD better so you can be more

effective. You see that you have power here and

you're taking active steps. Even if it's just listening to a podcast,

you're taking active steps to make yourself better in a lot of

ways. Personally, I've had this novel kicking around in my

head for years. When I first moved to

Philadelphia, there was this house down the street from me. And I won't share too

much because you're not supposed to share too much about your idea. But when I

first saw it and heard it, in a weird way, you're gonna have to read

my novel when I finally write it to find out what I mean by that.

When I first heard and saw this house, it just

clicked for me. This is the book I wanna write. And the big

excuse that I was using to keep myself from doing it, because writing a novel

is really scary. Especially. Cause, like, writing a novel is not just something you're supposed

to do for yourself. Like, you're supposed to send it out to publishers and maybe

get it published and have other people read it and have opinions about it.

Terrifying. My big excuse for the longest time was, I suck at writing

dialogue. Terrible at writing dialogue. Just can't do

it so bad. And it was kind of a weak ass excuse.

Cause when someone said, oh, well, why don't you just write the novel? I'd say,

oh, terrible at writing dialogue. They'd be like, you know,

there are classes that show you how to write dialogue. There are

people who can show you how to write dialogue. I finally got real with

myself and decided, okay, cool, if I want to write this novel, if I actually

want to share this story with the world, let's invest in a class. Let's

get better at writing dialogue. And what's funny to me is when I started

that class, I realized very quickly that the reason

I sucked at writing dialogue is because I had never tried writing

dialogue before. It was just this big excuse, like, oh, no, I'm just terrible

at it. Can't imagine doing it well, no, no, no. I'm actually

not. I mean, I'm not good, but I'm not the worst at writing

dialogue. And the more I practice, the more I learn about

how to make it go well. It's a very weird

coincidence. I'm actually getting better.

Like, who would have guessed? So there's

this, like, really weird phenomenon where we

get so obsessed with this thing that we've built up

as the reason why we can't have what we want, that we start assuming that

it is an actual obstacle for us. We start believing that it

is insurmountable. And it could be like, my ADHD is just

holding me back. It could be my relationship with money is holding me back.

It could be, oh, I'm just terrible at writing, selling,

whatever, and it's all holding me back.

But the thing that's actually holding you back is you deciding that

that thing is holding you back. The thing you're actually doing here is you're making

that thing far more powerful than it actually is. And you're putting

yourself in this powerless position where you can't do anything about it

because this is just the truth. And it's always been the truth, and it'll always

be the truth, so help you, dog. And if you're doing

this to yourself in any way, it could be something like a hobby,

like a hobby novel that you want to write a. It could be in your

business, it could be in your personal life. Maybe you have a story that you're

just really bad at relationships. I'm calling bullshit right now. I'm

calling bullshit that you're powerless in this situation. Now, full

permission here to continue making that the obstacle. But I want you to be

aware that you're making it the obstacle.

You're the one that's placing yourself in the backseat here

and letting this obstacle determine where you drive to.

When you are ready to be more powerful, you just

have to start working on those things. And I know that can be confronting

and scary and super uncomfortable, but you know

what? You're a brave ass weenie. You do things

scared. You have a business or you're starting a business.

You work on bettering yourself every single time you listen to to

a podcast that shows you how to do something better. This thing

does not have power over you unless you let it. So

whatever that big block is, however you are

beavering yourself. Cut that shit out. You're

the only you that exists in this world,

and you are the only one who comes with your unique set

of gifts. And if you continue to let your

damn hold up all the things that want to come to you, you're also

going to prevent all the good impacts you're going to have in your

life. You're going to keep yourself from helping a whole bunch of people.

You're going to keep yourself from having a whole bunch of amazing

relationships and making a ton of money.

And you're going to prevent all the good things you could do with that

money. There might be a charity that helps people

survive life that you could start ten years from now.

If you get over yourself and get over this belief that your money

story just sucks and there's nothing you can do about it,

beavering yourself is the most selfish thing you can do. So cut it

out. 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 strategy call

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.

Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel, squirrel.