When you have ADHD, you are no stranger to struggles with task avoidance, task completion, managing energy levels, and finding balance in your daily life. If you are self employed or run a business, these struggles can really eat into your productivity, passion and profits.  

After hearing today’s guest share insights from her latest best seller, The Procrastination Playbook, in a webinar for Focused Space, I knew you had to meet her too. 

Risa Williams is an award-winning self-help book author, a licensed psychotherapist, a psychology professor, and a productivity coach. She's also the host of award winning “The Motivation Mindset Podcast.” 

Like her books and podcast, this episode is full of actionable insights and strategies you can apply right away.

Episode Overview:

Introducing the "Task Intensity Meter":

• Tool to manage energy and productivity by identifying personal limits for high-intensity tasks.
• Helps rearrange tasks to minimize stress by accounting for individual differences in energy levels.
• Encourages communication within families to better understand each other's stressors.

Strategies to Outsmart Procrastination:

• Identify sneaky forms of procrastination like the "halfway drift."
• Starting with the smallest, easiest steps to build momentum.
• Breaking down complex tasks into manageable parts.

Building Skill & Celebrating Progress:

• Small Steps Journal: Encourages listing three daily accomplishments.
• Reviewing accomplishments monthly to boost confidence and combat imposter syndrome.
• Building habits and confidence through recognizing achievements.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Focused Space (ADHD-ish code for 1 mo free + 30% off after that)

Focus Mate 

Want more Risa Williams in your life?  

Website - Instagram - Podcast 

If you are striving to manage your ADHD tendencies, it really helps to know which one is your biggest obstacle. Is it Time Blindness, Distractibility or Procrastination?  Click here to take my free quiz, “What’s Holding You Back?” to find out and get customized solutions for business and life.  

© 2025 ADHD-ish Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops  / Outro music by Vladimir /  Bobi Music / All rights reserved. 

G: So I'm a therapist and book author here in Los Angeles, and I started, from a different path. I started wanting to be a writer, but I was also a ballet dancer. I studied at School of American Ballet, and then I went to NYU on scholarship after winning a playwriting contest, a national playwriting contest. They gave me a full ride, so I had to pivot and decide, do I wanna audition for dance companies? Because you only have a limited time, you know, when you're a teenager to pick ballet as a professional career. Do I wanna go to college? And I chose college because I had this amazing offer from NYU to go study writing there.

And then I became a playwright, had some plays produced, wanted to go into screenwriting, came back out to LA where I'm from originally, and, navigated Hollywood for a long time doing different types of jobs and writing, assistant work, working in production, working for agents, working in copywriting. And, eventually, I found myself feeling really burnt out, and I was going to therapy myself. And in the course of experiencing therapy, I thought, oh my god. This is an amazing thing, this therapy thing that I had never tried before.

I wonder how people do it. I wonder what that's all about. And my therapist told me a little bit about she became a therapist, and I kinda got into wanting to study psychology then. Although I had taken a lot of psychology classes already in college, because as a writer, it's something it's always been a special interest of mine to how do you develop better characters? How do you get into the minds of these fictional lives you're trying to create right, so it was a natural fit. And then I went to school and got a master's and became a clinical therapist. And my road to working with people with ADHD has been kinda interesting because I started out just wanting to help people with anxiety.

It's something I've always had a lot of. I've always been super high anxiety. I was telling you earlier, I was a highly gifted kid. I was in super accelerated programs, and I was the type of kid who was a natural overachiever. Like, if there was an award, I was gonna get it. If there was a gold star, I wanted it. And I pushed myself so hard like, I never rested as a kid. Part of that was my upbringing, you know, I had immigrant parents who were very into, like, if you work hard enough, you can do anything, and I kinda took that and, you know, converted it into some kind of overachieving algorithm that never allowed me to rest.

So I was your classic overachieving stress case where I was racking up awards and big achievements on paper, but I never felt like any of it mattered. Like, I never felt good about any of it, and I never felt done with anything. So if I finished a big thing, I'd always have this feeling of what's next? What's next? What's that? Okay, what am I gonna do next? Oh, that's done. And it was a very dismissive way of viewing myself where I just push push push push. And so that's what my new book, Get Stuff Done Without the Stress, came from. This feeling of chronic burnout I had felt my whole life from taking on way too many things and going way too fast, too hard all the time, to the point where in my thirties, I was completely burnt out, like, knocked out. Adrenal glands were busted.

Everything was messed up. And I found myself in the emergency room completely knocked out from what I had done to my brain and body. And so that book is sort of about how I learned to re-envision time management and productivity from a kinder lens, like a self care well-being lens and not a hustle culture toxic productivity lens where we push ourselves until we drop, which is very prevalent in this country. And, unfortunately, if you have ADHD, you will be very prone to pick up on that. If you're a high achieving, superintelligent, highly gifted person, you will get sucked into that hustle culture mindset sometimes, and it can be deadly. It can be very, very bad for our brains and body and our life balance. We get really hyper focused sometimes on achieving things at the expense of our well-being and our general, like, state of mind.

H: So much relatable. So much is relatable about this. I absolutely mirrors my own childhood. I didn't have immigrant parents, but I was adopted. So I always felt like I had something to prove right? I had to.

G: Exactly. Yeah.

H: I made a good choice kind of thing. But, you know, what's kind of interesting about all this is that, first of all, I think, I have this fantasy that maybe one day I won't have to learn things the hard way, what I call the hard way. But quite frankly, I think it's the only way people that are wired like you and I, Risa, are able to learn that what we're doing has profoundly negative consequences because we're not only getting away with it for years, decades even, but there's so much, we get so much positive feedback for being so productive and being so prolific. And, you know, our identity forms around that. I always thought, you know, I was always busy. I could not stand to have any downtime. I needed to have things back to back to back to back.

And as soon as something was over, I was jonesing for the next thing. Like, I was coming down from a drug high or something. And now that I understand better about how the brain works, like, the dopamine, it was either high or gone. So yeah, it’s hard to let go of this. It's hard to unwrap your identity from all of this even when you do end up in the hospital with your adrenal glands flat.

G: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like you said, not only do we feel a sense of reward because that dopamine is there. Sometimes we're addicted to adrenaline and adrenaline to be as powerful as a drug. And so even if you don't have ADHD and you're listening to this, even if you're just a chronically busy person as I put it, you may be addicted to adrenaline and not know it. You may be functioning at such a high stress level all the time that your body has gotten so used to adrenaline and cortisol that when it drops, when you finally are sitting on that beach on vacation, it feels so uncomfortable and unbearable. Sometimes it almost feels like withdrawal.

You don’t know how to function without go go go, you know, pumping through your blood all the time. And underneath that, sometimes there's feelings of depression. Sometimes there's sadness. Sometimes there's a lot of self criticism and self doubt. So not only do you feel that crash, you start to hear what you've been telling yourself underneath them all. And that can be so painful for so many people that they'll just avoid it. They'll just sign up for another class or go, go, go, rush the kids somewhere else. And so that's how we get in the pattern of never slowing down, never really being in the moment completely, and just feeling our feelings and being okay with it.

And, also, I wanna I was so resonating with something you said, which is we get a lot of positive praise for being busy, but I want to also put that a lot of negative stuff comes with that too. First of all, a lot of us didn't get a lot of positive praise, you know, because our brains function differently growing up, and we had to make all these workarounds. And we maybe always had a sneaky suspicion like, why is this so easy for other people, and I have to do, like, 18 steps to do this? So there was a lot of beating ourselves up and also other people probably, you know, contributing to that with criticism and negative feedback and why can't you do this, and why haven't you done this right? So sometimes when we get an accomplishment, it's like the only positive attention we're getting right? So we get addicted to that.

Oh, I have to do more and more and more to get some kind of attention to get someone to notice. And it also creates this dynamic sometimes. I know in office jobs or corporate jobs that I had where people see you being the overachiever, taking on way too much, winning awards for the company, getting this, the department's happy. Okay, let's just dump more work on her. Let's give her more projects. Hey, let's take away projects from so and so who's not performing and give this person who's already stretched so thin 18 different jobs. And so that's where I want people to see how dangerous it can be, this not having boundaries, taking too much on, not understanding what your own body needs. And then that wanting to please people to get that praise can become so toxic that you can't even get out of it.

H: What can they do about it?

G: Okay. Well, the task intensity meter is something I teach everybody I work with, and it can be applied in hundreds of different ways and I've used it with my kids. I've used it with couples to talk to each other about what stresses them out. But, basically, it's acknowledging that tasks stress us out right? And all tasks have different levels of stress for us to do. And I'm talking about not just big tasks like work reports you have to do, but stuff like doing the laundry, you know, driving your kids to school, going to the grocery store. Everyday types of things stress us out. And I think the more of a high achiever you are, the less likely you are to admit this to yourself. Because you're just thinking, oh, that's nothing right? Like, I do this all along.

H: Is that all you've got?

G: Is that it? Doing laundry? That's not stressful, but it is. It's stressing you out and the irony is that people I work with who have the hardest jobs, like, I work with doctors who have to operate on people. I've talked to first responders. I've talked to people in all sorts of crazy stressful jobs. Sometimes the everyday things are stressing them out more than actually, like, operating on a human being. Like, going to Target, they will rate as higher stress than operating on a human.

So then how do you use this? Well, my rules are generally, you don't wanna put too many high intensity things in a row. So if you start looking at life through this lens, you'll start seeing, oh, when I come home from work, I'm trying to cook, do the laundry, help my kids with homework. Oh my goodness, all those are high intensity for me, I never even thought of it that way. Or maybe I should put a low intensity thing in the middle to balance it out. Or maybe you should take what I call a time buffer break, which is after you do a high intensity task. You have a buffer of space and time where you let the stress come down. We're talking about cortisol and adrenaline. That's a chance for it to subside on purpose.

So a lot of us are taking breaks, but they're not what I call real breaks. A real break is when you're actively letting the stress come down. Like, you are intentional and saying, I am very stressed out right now. I need to breathe. I need to go for a walk. A lot of people are taking breaks, but the stress level is staying exactly the same through your break. And that's why so many people, by the end of the day, are losing their temper, grumpy, feeling worn out, feeling burnt out, feeling like, oh my god. I had a lunch break, but why don't I feel relief from it? It's what are you choosing to do with that space, and how can we regulate our stress a little better in between things?

H: You're reminding me of something that I, teach my clients. And I used to teach clients when I was still working as a therapist is transition rituals.

G: Yeah. Transition.

H: Because if you've got you know, transitions are hard for everybody. They are especially hard for neurodivergent people. And it's one of the reasons why there was so much more family strife during the pandemic because people didn't have any time apart from each other. They didn't have any time to transition. Everybody was just always there and trying to get everything done at once. But yeah, it's this notion, especially for us overachievers, that we don't have to keep going until the job is done. Like paying attention to our bodies and actually pacing ourselves a little bit. The topic that I find coming up more and more and more is capacity. And, you know, because we all know about boundaries. We all know about we have to get the most important things done. But I think we all have had our capacity impacted by all the events that have gone off.

G: All the widespread trauma that we all live through.

H: Even currently right now, at the time of this recording, we are dealing with the fires in Southern California.

G: Oh, yeah. Where I am right now, I am surrounded by fires as we speak. So that is kind of a lot to wrap your brain around.

H: And it absolutely affects your capacity. And yet, when we in our mind that we need to be always busy, always doing, always achieving, always accomplishing, always getting things done. Even if you are getting stuff done, if you're not taking these breaks, and if you're not having transitions from one thing to the next, you are going to burn out. When you are introducing this task intensity meter to people, what do you find the feedback that you get is I mean, obviously, people and I love that you do it in a large group setting because there's nothing like having your experience normalized by recognizing so many people feel the same way. Otherwise, we always just think it's us and that we just need to double down and keep going. What kind of feedback do people give you when they start using this tool about how it actually helps them? What changes do they make as a result?

G: Yeah. Well, it's been amazing. I've taught it to so many different types of people, neurodivergent people, you know, more neurotypical people, people with all sorts of occupations, and kids and teens, my own teens and their friends. So I have them write out what they need to do in the course of one day. Like, we'll do a worksheet where we'll say, list all the things you have to do today and then rate them. And then start to see for yourself how you want to arrange it better so it doesn't stress you out. I don't tell people how to arrange it. I let them form that conclusion because all our brains are different. And some people can do a couple high intensity things in a row.

But I basically introduced it like you have a daily threshold of high intensity tasks. We all do. And you need to figure out what that number is for yourself and try to respect it. So when I first started doing this with myself, I was like, oh, I could do 20 high intensity test. Like, I had these unreasonable because I had been doing that right? About 20. 20, easy, a hundred things a day, no problem. And then I realized, wait a minute, but that's how I ended up in the hospital from having this attitude. Like, my body is not on board with that. My brain might be on board with that, my body is like, no. We could do, like, 3 3 high intensity tasks, and then we're done and then I need to take a break.

So I try to teach people, like, there might be this divide between what your brain sees and what your body can do, and you need to come up with the numbers. So often people say, like, you know what? I think I can only do 3. I think I can only do 2. I think I could only do 4. So then what do we do to start rearranging our time to make things a little gentler and easier? And it's a communication tool as well, I find, for couples, families, even my teenagers. We always assume as humans, we're so funny.

We assume so many strange, unstated beliefs that are not true in reality. First of all, we assume that we can do everything, and everybody else is doing it, and it's not stressful for them. That's clearly not true, things stress people out. People are more stressed out than ever right? And you won't know what tasks stress another human out unless you ask them. You literally have no idea. Just because someone, you know, is this high achieving CEO doesn't mean that they can go to Target and not freak out trying to pick something out for that they have to buy or that laundry isn't stressing them out.

We have no idea unless we ask people. The same is true of your spouse. The same is true of your kids. But what I see is we make a lot of assumptions. Oh, he's really good at that, so this should be no problem. His stress should be low. He loves doing dishes, so why this isn't stressing him out at all right? We do all this stuff, and it causes a lot of conflict. Even within a family, our brains are so, so different from each other. So you really have to custom tailor this tool for you and think about when do I feel better doing that high intensity test? It's not always gonna be the same. People's energies fluctuate.

H: Well, and also, you know, some other nuances are a lot of people say, oh, well, you have ADHD, so you probably have a hard time getting up in the morning and you get a burst of energy in the late afternoon or evening. Nope, that's not the kind of ADHD I have. I wake up with a brain that's fully charged and it proceeds to, you know, drain throughout the day. But by dinner time, I'm pretty useless. A lot of people, it takes them several hours to get charged up after they are up in the morning so they don't hit their stride. So I like that this approach, instead of some of the more conventional, suggestions about productivity where they say, do your hardest thing first thing in the morning.

G: Yeah. That only works for some people. It does not work for all of us.

H: Right. And so this idea, you should do your hardest thing in the morning. Well yeah but hardness and intensity or do your biggest task first, sometimes the thing that causes.

G: Sometimes the thing that causes the most stress.

H: Yeah. And sometimes the thing that causes the most stress is not the biggest thing. It's the smallest thing that causes you an enormous amount of stress. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna kick that can down the road. You're gonna procrastinate. You're gonna resist. You're gonna avoid, and then it's gonna be even harder. So procrastination and understanding, like, your procrastination styles and some of the sneaky ways that procrastination shows up that we might not even be. You're like, oh, I guess you're right, that is procrastination.

I know that's something that you talk about in the procrastination playbook. And when I think about all the different types of struggles that neurodivergent people have, I would say distractibility and procrastination are the top 2. I have a quiz for this, and those are the answers that come back most. But oh, yeah, procrastination, it holds us back and delays or denies us our success. So let's talk about some of the sneaky forms of procrastination that I don't think everyone listening is even aware of.

G: Yeah. Well, those are the ones I wanted to call out because often, people who procrastinate know the classical types of procrastination. Like, we're all well aware of time management problems, of task prioritization problems, or just avoidant task avoidance where you I mean, that's the most classic one. You don't wanna write that report, so you're not gonna write it. And you will openly tell everyone, I'm not writing this report. I hate it. I don't wanna do it. That's not the kind I wanna call out. There's no mystery, and everyone around you knows you're doing it too. The sneakier ones are ones I call, like, halfway drift, where you start something and you drift off halfway. And your brain marks it as done because maybe you've done a couple pieces of it that were hard, and then you just go away. Like, your attention like, I'm done, and you never finish the rest of the task. And I know everyone out there with ADHD has done this one before.

It looks like so many different things. It can look like not opening a box that arrived from Amazon. It can look like, you know, filling out a form, but not clicking send so that it gets uploaded so that it's so I had, you know, a client who filled out the passport forms, but then forgot to mail them in, so missed the deadline so that would be an example of halfway done. She did the hard part of filling out the form, which for her was high intensity. Put it in the envelope, put it in her car, and then never went to the post office. That is a sneaky form because your brain marked it as done before it was done. So for that one, I have a tool where we need to define halfway done and fully done. And we need to walk it forward a few steps past fully done in order to say it's done.

So an example would be like, I had a deadline for writing a book. Fully done, my brain might think, okay, I typed the last page. No, fully done is setting it off to my editor and having the editor say, I received this. It's out of your hands right now. That would be fully done and I have to train my brain. Okay, that's fully done. I'm only halfway done. Just because I finished that page, it's not done right? So there's always a few sneaky steps that we forget sometimes in our excitement to celebrate that we got through the hard part. And that's one that a lot of people fall into. Another one is waiting for motivation, and I talk about this in my book. Because that one has it's knocked me off course from so many goals, where you're just sitting around going, okay, I got this plan. I know what I wanna do.

I'm just gonna wait till I feel that energy and inspiration, and then I'm gonna do it. I mean, you could be waiting for years, and I really want to stress that because that's not how motivation works. Like, motivation works when you start moving. It is the energy of moving. It's momentum. So you gotta move forward a few steps. And it's it took me decades to figure that out. Like, I won't internally feel motivation most of the time. I have to go forward, you know, till I'm, like, 1 or 2 steps in, and then I get that speed and that feeling of, like, oh, I'm doing things. Oh, I'm going forward for a lot of us who have ADHD. We don't feel that internal motivation when there's nothing happening, when there's no when all you have is an inertia right?

H: I think of it as inertia. It's the body at rest remains at rest. So you gotta get moving, and then your momentum will become the norm that carries you forward.

G: Yeah, exactly. So it's like motivation will never strike an object that is not in motion. It only strikes you when you're moving. And as long as you forget that to yourself, you'll remember I have to do the first easy step. So a lot of times what I teach people is, it's so hard to get out of procrastination. Sometimes we're stuck for so many deep reasons. But oftentimes, it's because we're putting too much pressure on ourselves. Our stress is too high. All these things, you know, I talk about as important factors to address first. But then, really, you have to find the very first tiniest easiest step forward. And you have to make it sound so ridiculously easy that it almost feels ridiculous not to do it.

So an example would be, like, if I'm dealing with a client who wants to paint but has been procrastinating making a painting. We can't just jump right into making the painting. There's too much resistance. There's too much pressure. So easy step forward, your first easy step will be something like, I want you to go get your paintbrushes and just put them on the table, that's all you have to do. Then you can check it off and say you did it, and that's it, and nothing else. Or if I'm dealing with a client who wants to write a novel, but can't write, is stuck, has been stuck for years, all you have to do is open a blank Word document and type your name. That's it and then you're done. I want you to close it right away and don't do anything else.

And often they'll push back and be like, that's ridiculous, of course, I can do that. I'm like, okay, then do it. And then you're done, I don't want you to do any more. But sometimes when I say that, what oddly happens is they want to do more. So then what happens is the next session, they're like, well, I wrote 5 pages, see? And I'm like, good. We've tricked your brain into doing it. I don't know. All you had to do was type your name, but you wrote 5 pages and then it's sort of funny you know? But that's how our brains work. They will resist, resist, resist, and you say, don't do anymore. You're only write your name. Suddenly, your brain is like, well, you know what? I'm just gonna write I'm gonna write a sentence. And then you're writing a sentence, and then the motivation is coming.

H: Well, I'm also thinking about how it's so typical, Risa, for people with ADHD to get 50% done, 70% done, 90% done of whatever it is, and then just not be able to continue. But I think this really normalizes it so much. And when you tell people, no, you've made it too hard. But, also, it's not recognizing when you say, for example, on your to do list, fill prescription. Well, actually, that may sound like it should just be one item, but filling the prescription may be contacting your doctor

G: Exactly.

H: Submitting it to the pharmacy, then you have to go pick it up, then you actually have to take the medication. It's actually or laundry, just laundry on the list. You gotta wash it. You gotta dry it. You gotta fold it, and you gotta put it away. How many of us get 2 or 3 or we end up having to wash the same load several times because we forgot to push the button, or we didn't push the button.

G: Or leave it in the washer because we hate using the dryer. How many of you have done that? So yeah, this is a good segue into using the task intensity meter to address procrastination because not only can you use it for tasks, you can use it for steps of a task. Because what I find with most procrastination things is that we're not avoiding the whole task. We're avoiding a tiny piece of the task. That is the tiny piece that feels the most high intensity to us.

So an example would be, for example, a client was planning a trip. It was going to be a fun trip with a bunch of friends. So why was she procrastinating it? She kept saying, I don't know why. I love planning trips. I love it. I love it. I love it. Why won't I do it? I haven't even booked anything, everyone's depending on me, so we wrote out a list. Well, planning a trip is stressful. There are many things you need to do. There's a hotel. There's planes. There's activities. There's this and that. So we listed all the different things. And then she had to rate each line low, middle, high, and everything was low. I love booking flights. I love booking a hotel. Activities, oh, that's high, because this is a big group of people. I don't know what they all like.

There's some difficult personality. So then we figured out where she was getting stuck. So I'm like, that's the piece of this trip that you don't wanna plan, the activity part for one day. It was one day, one afternoon, that's it. But she wouldn't book the tickets over all the other stuff. So I said, okay, here's your mission for next time we meet. Pick a low intensity thing to do, and just do that. So you like booking flights? Go book a flight. Go find a cheap flight for everybody. You like booking hotels? Go find a fun hotel. So then we cut through all the low intensity ones till we got to the high intensity one. But by the time we got to there, it wasn't as high intensity because she already knew the other stuff was planned. And then we kinda reduced the expectations, like, you know, what's the bare minimum?

Maybe everybody just wants to go to a museum or everybody maybe they just wanna sit at a cafe and hang out. It doesn't have to be this big deal thing. Like, often when we're traveling, people just need time to take it all in right? So then we could lower the expectations a little to the point where she didn't have to plan this perfect thing that was gonna make everyone happy. Because often, as you know, that's where we're getting stuck. Not only is it high intensity, but we're putting all this pressure to be perfect at doing the high intensity part, the thing we don't wanna do. So it's lowering the expectations, realizing that you're putting way too much pressure on it, and then tackling the littler pieces of the task. So for instance, the prescription part right?

Often people will say, well, the reason I'm avoiding it is because calling my doctor is the part I'm getting stuck on. You'd be surprised how many times that's the case. It's the picking up the phone and having to talk to somebody. That's the hardest part and since that's the first step, that's where they're getting stuck. That's why it keeps getting pushed down, so then we just need to tease it out. Well, why is that hard? What would make it easier? What's a good time of day to call where you won't feel as stressed out? Obviously, calling on your lunch break or after work, maybe that's not great.

You're already feeling high levels of stress from work. So why don't you try it on Friday morning when work is light or something else? So then we look at the way the task intensity meter works to, like, best suit your energy to the part you don't wanna do. I've done this with, like, students in college who wouldn't write an essay. And sometimes what they were getting stuck on wasn't the actual writing. It was turning in the outline for the essay. Because they didn't wanna organize their ideas. They just wanted to jump right into writing. So then we look at why is the outline hard for you? What will make it easier? Do you have a template you can just copy and then go from there?

H: I'm just thinking, or they could go ahead and write the paper, which they're not.

G: Exactly. And then have the outline.

H: The PPT to create an outline from it.

G: Exactly. But see, we have to map it out in steps before we can get to the easy work around because they need to admit what part they're getting stuck on first so that we can say, hey, there's so many tools for that you know?

H: Now you are a therapist, I am a therapist turned coach. So we help people not only by providing guidance and support, but also accountability. Do you find that you know, oftentimes, procrastination can come down to an accountability problem even after they understand what their intensity meter reading is, what time of day they should be doing it. They've broken it down. They have identified exactly which step is hanging them up. But if they don't have a coach or a therapist or someone that can kind of hold them accountable or provide that accountability mirror for them, do you have any suggestions for how they can like, we've broken it down. We've identified what the problem is and how to address it, but they still have to pull the trigger.

G: Yeah. Well, that's why, you know, accountability is key. I think for me in my own life, realizing that I can't do everything by myself. And I think when you're a high achieving person with ADHD, you have this inherent belief sometimes. I need to do it all by myself because my brain works differently, and it's too much work to explain it to everyone. And you get kinda good at it so that it's like feedback right? Like, oh, well, I just did it last time like that, so I'm just gonna keep doing it.

You hit a point though where life gets so complicated or you're taking on or your business is growing or whatever, where you do need to acknowledge, I might benefit from letting some people in. Like, I might need some support so my first rule of thumb is try to get support. You can join focus groups like, FocusSpace or FocusMate, where people work on stuff together. That's a bit lighter maybe sometimes than jumping right into a coach or therapist, which I can understand why people might be intimidated by that.

H: For sure.

G: You can find focus buddies right? Or it's like online times everybody meets, and they work on something. And often in the beginning, they say, what are you guys working on and everybody says it. And then you go do it, and it's pretty lightweight. If you are scared of that or it's just too much, I'd say the best way is to start tracking things yourself. So the bare minimum is become accountable to yourself somehow. And the way I teach people to do this is every night, I do a small steps journal with people where they're doing a bullet list of 3 points of 3 things they did that they're proud of from the day, anything. I mean, this could be any goal you're working on, self care, work, creative, whatever.

But every day, you need to write it down because it's a habit that you build. And at the end of the month, I have people go back and do a monthly review where they read to themselves the small steps. That is the key piece. It's not just writing it down. It's telling your brain and showing your brain irrefutable evidence that you did something and you are making progress. And it starts to build this confidence, and it also helps people with imposter syndrome. If you're someone out there, it's quite common for people with ADHD to have imposter syndrome. I know I had it for many years, and tracking what I was doing and showing myself a visual map of my own progress is the one thing that helped me get out of imposter syndrome.

Because I realized no matter how much I wanna argue with myself, there's proof that I am doing things every day. Like, even during slow months, I still have stuff to write down. And it also teaches you to be really gentle with yourself because you will have periods where you're writing lists and lists of things you did and other periods where not so much is happening. And you learn that, like, you're a human. You're gonna be fluctuating. You're gonna be flexible. But you can see if you do this long enough, over the course of a year, you are hitting some of those goals. You are making progress. That builds confidence and that self esteem that a lot of us are looking for quicker than anything I know, but it is a habit you have to do every day, you know, over time. It does work, though. You start becoming your own friend and becoming your own mentor in a way of just encouraging yourself.

H: I love that because you're right. It's like, it's not only because we have a tendency to just drive ourselves to the next thing, Risa, but because we did it, it's not that big a deal. Oh, well, I've done it so now it's like, well, yeah, I expected myself to do it. I needed to do it. So why do I need to acknowledge it and we don't wanna celebrate. We just wanna check off the box and keep on going. But actually requiring yourself, every day, three things, and you can't use the same three every day. Really paying attention to how much you are actually accomplishing can help over time rewrite that default setting in your brain that is driving you to overcommit, overextend, overdue, and then not think any of it counts, even when you're burned out. Like, all undoing that and, like, re-unwinding that and then rewiring that so you are meticulously and consistently acknowledging every small accomplishment, that's a game changer.

G: It really is. It really works. And it gives you a sense of, like, don't dismiss what you're doing. Don't be dismissive towards yourself. Celebrate it with yourself. Say, yeah, that was hard for me. Today, I did a podcast. I showed up, I showed up on time. I talked about this. I'm gonna write it down in my small steps journal, and I'm gonna remember at the end of the month to be like, hey, I did that podcast on that day when Los Angeles was on fire. Wow, good job me, you know? Give yourself some credit already because no one is gonna give you credit if you can't give yourself credit.