I lost my Internet while we were recording, and it got me thinking: setting goals is hard enough, but add ADHD into the mix, and it becomes downright challenging.

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...

Let's be honest - for those of us with ADHD, it's not just about setting the goal; it's about remembering it, staying focused, and not getting overwhelmed.

Join me as I unpack strategies to make goal setting not just possible but actually achievable for the ADHD entrepreneur.

In "Goal setting with ADHD? Entirely possible!" we'll talk about why traditional goal-setting methods often fail us and how to flip the script.

I cover how to keep your goals front and center, the importance of having visible reminders, and why big goals often lead to paralysis by analysis.

Plus, I share personal stories, like my own goal (that will hopefully one day see me interview Oprah) and I explain why it’s crucial to break down massive goals into manageable, bite-sized pieces.

We’ll also go into the concept of "now games" versus "long game" goals and how focusing on actionable steps today can set you up for long-term success.

If you’re an ADHD entrepreneur and goal setting feels like trying to climb Everest in flip-flops, this episode is for you.

Timestamped Summary:

00:00 Katie McManus dreams of...

03:45 Focus on now game for long-term success.

09:03 Overwhelmed by to-do list, lacking focus.

12:14 Hope isn't a guarantee; take action. Build systems.

13:30 Create and repurpose content to reduce pressure.

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

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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

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In this episode, we're talking about goal setting, but in the

ADHD friendly way. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business

strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast.

Full disclosure, we actually started

recording this episode last week, and then I completely lost Internet. So we're

re recording because I forget what I say pretty much the moment it comes out

of my mouth. We figured that it would just be easier to start this

episode over, then try to get me to refresh on, like, what

actually was said, you know, just five days ago. And this is a

great example of why goal setting is so hard for people with

ADHD, because goal setting is essentially saying

something that you want and putting it out into the world

and then pursuing that thing. But the key here

is that once you say it and you put it out there in the world,

you have to remember that you said it and that you put it out

in there in the world. And you have to remember to actually continue working towards

that goal. For people with ADHD, as you know,

we don't remember everything that we say. We have

some object permanence issues. If something is out of sight

and isn't calling our attention to it constantly, then

we can completely forget that it exists. Doesn't mean that we don't want

it. It just means we've forgotten about it. This is why when you go

to the grocery store, you end up buying more angel

hair pasta, even though in your pantry you have 17 bags of

it, because you didn't see it, you didn't look for it, you didn't do

the correct assessment for what you needed. When you went to the grocery store, it

was out of sight. And because it's something that you tend to like, you're

just like, cool, I'll get some more. And soon you can start your own store

of angel hair pasta. Very limited selection,

obviously, but you could absolutely make some money off of it. People with ADHD

need to have a different approach to goal setting than neurotypicals.

When we set big goals for ourselves, we have to

continuously talk about it. We have to have some

reminder out there in our space that will call

attention to it constantly that this is what we

want. And when I work with my clients and we're identifying

these massive goals that they have for themselves, we have to be careful

about overwhelm, because going after a massive

goal can create so much pressure of all the things

that need to be done to get there, that you'll just stop in your tracks.

So, for instance, one of my big goals that I have

for my career is I actually want to have my own tv show.

Live from New York at the Weenie

studios, queen of

ADHD business ownership,

Katie McManus.

I want to be able to travel the country and interview

different business owners who are doing interesting things, who are

having unique impacts on their communities, who

just have great stories, and I want to interview them and I want to showcase

them, and I want to show the audience exactly how they're doing, what they're

doing, so that all the business owners and want to be business

owners in the audience can see how there's so

many ways to build a business. There's no one way that works for

everyone. I want to demystify it all, and I want to help people

in the process. But of course, that is a massive goal, and I'm not expecting

to reach that goal in, like, the next ten years. Like it's something that I

am going to be actively working towards throughout my

life. But the other thing that I know about myself is that

big goals like that feel overwhelming to me. And

if we were to slap a label on it, it is a long game goal.

Oftentimes when we're talking about goals, we think about long game and short

game. I actually don't like that terminology

because the short game indicates short term wins, right?

Short sighted wins. Wins that help you

now, but may not help you in the future. When I think

of my long game and the goals that I want to reach, you know,

decades from now, what I do for myself and what I do with my clients

is we come up with a now game. We come up with

actions you can take each and every day right now

that will get you the results that you need in

the next year or so that will create the foundation for you

to reach your long term goals. We're not going for

short term wins that aren't going to lead to your long term goals. So, for

instance, a couple episodes ago, I broke down exactly what it takes for you to

build a business that has digital products, digital courses, group

programs, so on and so forth. And if you want to go listen to that,

it is episode 88. You have to start with one on one

clients. Now, the best part about starting with one on one clients

is that your one on one clients are always going to be your fastest path

to cash. It fulfills your short term or

now goals. But in working with those one on one clients,

you're learning what each and every one of them struggles with

that's similar, and that helps you decide what your group program is

going to be. And as you're rolling out your group program, you are

iterating it. You're iterating your marketing for it, changing little bits,

having it go better, having it go worse, recorrecting back to,

to the way you were doing it before. And once you have that dialed

in, then you're launching a digital course on something

very specific. And eventually all of that builds up

to your long game goals. There's that question, you know, how do you eat

an elephant one bite at a time? But also, let's not

eat elephants. They're endangered and they're really sweet and they're very smart. We're

not eating elephants. But if you were to eat elephants bite by

bite. One of my other favorite movies, when I was

like a child, when I was a toddler, was Cinderella.

And you know that, like the opening salvo where

she's waking up and she's stretching and there are birds all around her

and she starts singing. A dream is a wish your heart

makes. You know that was a fairy tale.

You're not gonna sit around dreaming and wishing for something

to happen and then have some magic, like fairy godmother show up and

wave their wand and have everything happen the way you want. We have to set

goals. But a goal without a plan is a weak ass

dream wish that your heart makes. It's never going

to happen. So when you're thinking about goal setting, here's what

I want you to do. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll

have to keep listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel.

So when you're thinking about goal setting, here's what I want you to do. I

want you to really figure out what that big dream

is. What's that big dream and that big goal that gets you

excited that kind of scares you, but it's the thing that you

know you're destined to do. What is that? Because

if we're not excited for our goals, we're never going to go after them. Like,

I'm personally not excited to ever run a marathon,

so I'm probably not going to put that on my goal sheet.

And from that big goal, we have to reverse engineer

it into what needs to happen the year before that and the year before

that and the year before that and the year before that. And we need to

reverse engineer it until we get back to where we are

exactly now in this moment. And whatever it is that you have to do in

that year, that is your now game. Those are the things that you

have to focus on in the here and now to be able to reach that

greater goal down the line. This sounds easy,

let me tell you. I can do this for all my clients. I can't do

it for myself. I need help to do this for myself, and I do this

shit for a living. So as I say this, you're gonna sit

down with your little journal and you're gonna write it out, and you're like, I

have no idea what I'm doing. Join the club. There's a reason why there are

lots of business coaches out there. Another struggle adhders

run into when they set goals for themselves.

Is this complete, all or nothing approach.

So if you have a fitness goal, say you want to get into a certain

shape by a certain time, you'll set up a workout

regime that has you working out every single day for like an hour and a

half a day, and you have to do it perfectly, and you have to have

a perfect diet, and you have to sleep, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You're never going to stick to it. But as an adhder,

once you fail at one little itty bitty part of that

plan, the whole thing is ruined. So we need

to very consciously have a balanced approach

to the actions we're assigning ourselves to reach our now goals

and our long goals. We need to set ourselves up for success,

and we have to be realistic about

what we can accomplish in a day. Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You have a to do list, and then you go through your to do list

and you're like, cool, I'm going to get 17 of these things done today. And

then you get overwhelmed, and then you start spiraling, and

then you sit in your office for about an hour in executive

dysfunction, kind of messing around on LinkedIn because, you know you have to do that

one thing to get started, but it feels like such a big task that you

can't really wrap your brain around where to start. And then it's

lunchtime and you figure, okay, well, I need to eat. So you go and you

have lunch, and then maybe your dog is, like, begging you to take them out.

You're like, okay, I should probably go for a walk. That'll be good for me,

too. And then you come back and you're like, kind of tired. So you find

something easy on the list, and you do that one little easy thing and you're

like, well, that wasn't enough. And then you probably go

and answer some emails, and then it's like, time to start making dinner

and thinking about the next food that you're having. On days where I'm in executive

school dysfunction, all I can think about is my next meal, and then the day's

over. You know, like, you might try to push yourself to do some work in

the evening, but really what you're doing is you're just sitting in your office stressing

out, not really getting anything done. And then the next day, you look at your

list and it's like 16 and a half things that you didn't do

yesterday. How does that feel? I know. I know. For

me, it feels so painful and it feels like I failed, and it feels like

nothing I do is ever enough. When I talk about being

realistic about what you can do, you're never

letting yourself assign 17 things for you to do in a

day. You assign three. Three realistic

tasks that you can get done in a day that will help you

reach your now goals. Because, I mean,

three is way better than one little measly task, right,

that you barely got around to and you felt really shitty while you were doing.

You know, once you finish the three that you've assigned yourself,

you're going to have this whole flood of dopamine. You're going to feel like you've

won the day and you're far more likely to be like, oh, cool, what

else can I get done on this list? Oh, let me just check this one

off and this one off. When you limit how much you assign to

yourself every single day, you actually get so

much more done because you create this

positive momentum that keeps you going in your business and in your life.

You also avoid burnout because you're not constantly feeling like,

oh, my God, I'm behind, I'm behind, I'm behind. And stressing out about what you're

gonna have to do next. I mean, unless you have anxiety, then you're stressing out

about everything, in which case, join the club.

Side note, I feel like if anyone didn't know that I had anxiety, they'd know

it based on the elephant comment where, like, I said that and then I got

stressed out that people might think I was encouraging them to eat elephants. And I'm

like, no, don't do it. Like, of course people aren't going to eat elephants.

Why did I worry about that?

The common trait I notice amongst ADHD people

who are also entrepreneurs is they have this internal

optimism. You know, there is this unshakable belief

that things are going to work out, right? And part of it is that, like,

we have ADHD, so we're really comfortable with risk. You know, we're pretty

impulsive, and things tend to work out for us. So, like, why shouldn't

it work out for us in our business? And then we set these massive goals,

and we're like, oh, yeah, I can do that. And something

you want to be careful of is to not

mistake a hope for a guarantee. I can't tell you how

often I do this and my clients do this, and we have to kind of,

like, bring ourselves back to reality, where we map out,

like, how much business we want to do in a year and how many

clients we want to serve and how much money we want to make, and

then we start operating as if that is guaranteed.

Just because you want it doesn't mean it's going to happen. This

is where a lot of manifestation practices miss the mark.

Sure, you can sit in your room writing in your journal about

all the things you want, but that isn't going to do shit if you're not

also going out there and taking action towards making it happen for yourself.

And remember this other key point as a business

owner, as you're building

your business, yes, you're going to have to be the first person to do most

of the stuff. But as you're building it, also be

building systems that can continue doing this stuff for

you in the future. For instance, one of the things that I'm having all of

my clients in my build your own business group programs and in my one on

one build right now is a four month social media

content book. So they're literally creating four

months worth of content that they will be able to

repurpose every four months and the

next four months and the next four months and the next four months until they

need to refresh it or update it or swap some things out so

that they can take the pressure off of themselves from promoting their

business every single day so they can focus on delivering

to clients, to creating new programs, to making more

money. Always think about how you can make this task easier

for future you. And that, my friends, is goal setting for the ADHD

business owner.

I refuse to eat octopus because they are so smart.

There's a beautiful, like, documentary movie

on, I think Netflix called my Octopus teacher. I

started it, and I was like, wow, this is gonna be boring af. But oh,

my God, I just cried. Crying. By the end, it was such a good. It

was such a. Like a moving, beautiful story. If you eat octopus,

maybe question if you want to eat octopus. Not going to tell you what to

do, but just throwing it out. There. Squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.