Asher and Dusty revisit the core coaching model—understand, own, translate—and show how it helps people with ADHD move from surface symptoms to real, usable solutions. They emphasize that common tips (planners, timers) often fail because they don’t address individual causation. Through concrete client stories—one about “hard emails” that caused compulsive inbox checking and another about preparing for a job interview— they show how coaching discovers the hidden emotional or cognitive drivers, creates language that makes sense to the person, and builds actionable, personalized strategies (calendar blocks, transition rituals, playlists, prepping materials).
The hosts also explore ownership and self-advocacy: accepting ADHD as an ongoing part of life without falling into “all my fault” or “not my fault” extremes; learning to separate past patterns from present progress; and translating self-knowledge into clear requests and boundaries with others (partners, coworkers). They describe how externalizing—talking aloud, journaling, or “talking at” someone—helps clients notice patterns, pause reactive cycles, and practice communicating needs so supports can be reshaped rather than expecting to simply “fix” oneself.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:01:11] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:02:19] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:03:18] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. [00:07:19] Dusty: Listeners, I’m going to be hanging out with y’all live on Wednesday, October 29th from 6-7pm EST or 3-4pm PST. This is for our Patreon and Discord followers only, so we’re going to be dropping a zoom link in the Discord. You can use it to join and just hang out with me for a live chat.We can talk about whatever you want. You can ask me questions about ADHD. You ask me questions about where I get my hair done.
So if you’re not already a subscriber or follower, consider joining our Patreon and our Discord and then we can kick it, which I would love to do.
[00:40:01] Asher: I will also put a post up on the Patreon page for those of you that are subscribers, but aren’t in the Discord for whatever reason. And if you are not yet a patron, you can visit the website www.translatingadhd.com and click on the Patreon tab. For simply $5/month you get access to the podcast, the Discord server and we’ll give you access to this conversation with Dusty in October and a new event with one of us every month following. [01:06:09] Dusty: So, Ash, what are we going to talk about today? [01:09:09] Asher: Dusty I thought it would be a good idea, as I was going through concepts for us to revisit, which is what we’re starting off with this season, to revisit the very concept that this show was built on, which is the idea of understand, own and translate. This is a model that Cam and I came up with when we first launched the show, and one that, interestingly enough, to revisit, I think still really works, still really speaks to what we do as ADHD coaches and why ADHD coaching is so effective for folks with ADHD.So are you ready to break this down with me?
[01:48:10] Dusty: Yes I am. [01:49:12] Asher: So let’s start with Understand. ADHD itself makes it really hard to understand the impact that ADHD is having on us. We acutely understand the symptoms, the forgetfulness, the lateness, the procrastination, the inability to activate tasks, the inability to do what we know we ought to do or what we want to do but what we don’t understand is causation and that’s where your context matters.Who you are matters. What’s going on in your life matters. The way that your brain is otherwise wired matters. What stories you are carrying around matter. So much of the sort of traditional, basic ADHD advice focuses on symptoms. Hey, get a planner. Set a timer. Do this, do that. If you just did this or if you just did that.
And yet that advice doesn’t work. If it did, Dusty, you and I wouldn’t have jobs. This field that we work in, ADHD coaching, wouldn’t need to be a thing. What’s challenging is getting to individual causation. What is actually going on for me? I’ve given this example before on this podcast, but I love to give it because it’s the one that I give to brand new clients when they’re coming in and they’re trying to understand what it means to get to causation with ADHD.
I like to talk about a client who is struggling with email, which every single listener who has an email inbox can probably relate to. Email is a huge challenge for those of us with ADHD, and her particular challenge at the time was that she was spending too much time in and on unimportant emails. She was getting up in the morning, and the first thing she was doing was opening her two inboxes because she was running two businesses at the time and just blowing the best part of her day, where her brain is at its best, on these relatively unimportant emails.
And we spent two sessions talking about why this was happening, strategizing around what she might try to do differently after the first session and her practice did not go well. There was no change after her second session. She was so frustrated that even knowing that this wasn’t a good solution, she bought a timed lock box to put her phone in to try and break the habit that way.
And in the third session, this brand new language comes up about hard emails sitting at the bottom of her inbox. And I was like, ooh, what’s a hard email? Well, for her, she was a photographer, a hard email was after she’d already sent final photos to her clients, she did family photography so these are photos that people are going to buy prints of and put up in their house and give to grandma, etc., and clients would email her back and ask, what are your favorite photos?
Because from her perspective, she had already chosen her favorites by virtue of the ones that she’s selected to edit and present to the client. So she didn’t know how to answer these emails so they would just sit at the bottom of her inbox creating this sense of guilt and shame. It took us three coaching sessions to figure out that that is why she was compulsively in her email.
It had nothing to do with feeling like it was so very important to attend to new emails. It had everything to do with the guilt and shame of not dealing with the “hard emails” that had gotten old enough that she felt guilty and shameful that she hadn’t done something about them. And so in that session, we solved for “hard emails” and how to respond to those in a way that felt good to her, and that was what was needed to solve the dilemma.
So even something as universal as email, something we all struggle with as people with ADHD, your individual reasons for struggling with email may look very different from someone else’s. And that’s the stuff that’s really hard to get to with ADHD, particularly because we tend to live in now or not now. So it is really hard for us to reflect on and learn from past experiences.
That client over three sessions was not really aware of the impact of these hard emails until that language of hard email came out and I said, “ooh, hard email, what’s that?” Before that, she had no idea that that in particular is what was causing her dilemma with email. And so trying all the other strategies like lock boxes or locking herself out of email or trying to force herself to do something different in the morning had no effect because we weren’t actually addressing the cause until we were.
[06:44:22] Dusty: It’s so interesting because she probably didn’t even really notice that until she said it. And it’s interesting because, you know, clients are always asking me the difference between therapy and coaching, and certainly we’re not therapists. We don’t try to play therapists. But I think the commonality is there is that need for people to just process through talking, like they need to verbally process and either they hear themselves say it, which happens to me so often, like a lot of my clients will say something and then they’ll be like, ooh, they don’t often need me to even be the one that’s like, oh, what’s that – they’ll do it for themselves.But sometimes, we catch an angle that they don’t really hear or notice. And it’s just so useful to be in process with another person talking that through. And I say this all the time – what’s so persnickety about ADHD is that one of our executive functions is self-monitoring. I don’t think enough people feel sorry for us, honestly, because you can’t effectively change a behavior if you don’t really notice that that behavior is happening or you’re not able to see it from that 30,000ft view that we need to change it. And so it makes it so hard to enact meaningful and effective behavioral change at the point of performance.
Think of your executive functioning like a gas tank. When you’re running your car, the windshield wipers are going and you’re driving and you have the air or heat on and you’re using all these different aspects of your car. It’s going to drain your car’s gas tank faster, but you don’t have a little gas tank just for this part of the car and for that part of the car.
It all comes from the same, single gas tank, right? Hopefully nobody in the comments is going to be like, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of mechanics anyway. Just gloss over that part instead.
So it’s the same for our brains. If we’ve gone off to work and we’ve been using impulse control to regulate ourselves and we’ve been using attention regulation to stay focused on our work, and we’ve been using our time management skills and our organizational skills and our decision making skills, which personally, I find it is so true for my clients that nothing is harder than decisions.
So when you talk about your client who had hard emails, what I hear is how hard decision making was for that person, right? And so when you’ve used all of that and you’ve drained your tank, it’s not like you have a separate little tank over here for self monitoring that’s still full of gas.
So when you are at your most executive dysfunction, you also have the least self-awareness, right? And it’s really tough. It’s a tough cycle to get out of. And I think that verbally processing it can be so helpful.
[09:32:05] Asher: And even when you do have awareness, often it’s in the wrong place. It’s again awareness about the behavior, but no awareness about what’s going on behind that behavior.Dusty, I agree with you. One of the reasons that ADHD coaching is so powerful is it puts language to our lived experiences as ADHD people that can help us slow down and examine and find the hard email and find what the real roadblock actually is for us in that moment. Rather than going to what we so often do, which is to try anything, just throw solutions at the dartboard until something sticks.
And this client in particular, was so frustrated at herself by this behavior that that’s where she was – I will try anything or do anything because I see how insane this is, how backwards my priorities are right now. I don’t understand why I can’t change here.
I also kind of want to talk about the other side of this though, when the solution is something that is pretty “obvious”. I have a newer client that I’m working with whose first real topic for coaching was that she’s actually got a job interview coming up, and she wanted to have a different experience with this interview.
The experience that she would normally have is to have the mindset that if I’ve got something big, then it takes up my whole week or that whole span of time, but not in a useful way, in a way where I feel like I can’t do anything else. But I’m also not really taking meaningful action on that thing and that thing is ending up in the land of urgency right before it happens. I’m actually doing the action part from an urgent place.
So she has these twofold goals of wanting to have a normal week, even though she also needs to prepare for this interview, and wanting to prepare for it in a more measured and consistent way, rather than waiting until the last minute and doing all of the preparation at once.
Her actions were nothing earth shattering. It was, first of all, scheduling time for her. Putting time on her calendar is an end all be all. She’s been a freelancer for a long time, so if it’s on her calendar, she is pretty liable to actually make time for it.
The next bit was helping with the ADHD struggle of transition, so laying out the things that she needs in advance, which did include like old paper files and things that she did need to dig out, taking a break before starting, putting on a certain playlist to get her kind of in a “working groove” and accessing some support from other people.
And as we’re laying this out, and this happens a lot in my coaching practice, she kind of started to admonish herself. These steps are so simple. I should have been able to come up with this on my own. And so I really like to distinguish simple from easy when it comes to ADHD.
Like, yes, these steps that we have come up with are simple. There’s nothing earth shattering or even unique to this client in these steps, but that doesn’t mean that knowing that this is what she needed was an easy thing to get to with ADHD. Having the ability to have reflective practice, to get curious about our experience in a different way is not something we’re great at because everything for us is now or not now.
And so the other thing that coaching is really effective at is teaching our clients how to do that. I’m sure Dusty, you notice as well as I do, in your coaching practice, that the longer you’ve been with a client, the more they kind of self coach through things that would have previously been a coaching topic. You ask them how their week is, and you get a story about something that previously might have been a pretty sticky coaching topic for them, that they were able to use what they’ve learned in terms of how to get curious, how to reflect instead of going down into the limbic system and letting that take over, being able to get up above it and pick it apart with curiosity, combined with what they’ve learned along the way about their ADHD and what language they’ve been able to put to that, to come to some solution for themselves, some effective practice.
[14:02:12] Dusty: Oh yeah. Absolutely. That’s what I’m saying about how I don’t even often have to be like, “oh, that’s interesting”. It’s such a fun moment when a client hears themselves say the thing and then they go, “oooooooh, it is”. It’s kind of like a muscle that you build up. You know, it’d be interesting to know if this ever really becomes better internally.I think it just becomes a thing that you realize you can do through talking so then you do it more often through talking. That’s my opinion to clarify. I mean, like having those moments, I don’t know if that ever becomes more of a thing that people internally do in their own heads when just thinking through things.
But once you start having those moments, like with a coach, you realize, oh, this really helps me. I think what the habit becomes is seeking out more opportunities to talk through issues so that you can have more of those moments. Maybe it becomes something that people just do more in their own heads.
I’m not sure I feel like I still have to do it, but now I know it’s the thing that helps me. So I do it more often, and by it I mean having conversations where I can go, oh, I just heard myself say that.
[15:05:05] Asher: Dusty, I’m not sure that talking is the only way to get there. I do think that I’ve had some clients that have had success with journaling, or even communicating with me in writing or communicating with others and writing, but I do think there is something valuable about externalizing. And certainly for me, the easiest way to externalize is talking.And so much so I have some language for that. I call it “talking at”. It’s a strategy that helps a lot of my clients at work by being able to grab a coworker and hey, I’m stuck in this, I’m not sure where to go with this project or how to look at this dilemma or how to think about this from here. Can I talk at you about something?
And when I use the language talking at, I distinguish that from talking to or brainstorming because I’m not necessarily looking for the other person to solve the problem for me or solve the problem with me, although I’m open to their input and I’m going to them because I think they might have some input to offer in their subject area.
But the primary goal is just to kind of hear myself talk about it, to hear myself say the words enough that I can start to make sense of whatever it is and parse it out in some way.
[16:16:02] Dusty: Yeah, that makes sense. So we’re talking about understand, what about own? How does that come into this? [16:23:09] Asher: So ownership is a few things. The first of which is accepting that ADHD is always going to be a part of the picture. I’ve been doing this show now for six years. I’ve been ADHD coaching for over a decade, and I still have ADHD struggles. You all hear me talk about my current ADHD struggles on this show.Frequently my ADHD is better managed than it used to be. I understand it a lot better than I used to. I know what support looks like in ways that I didn’t before, but those ADHD moments where I just plain mess up because ADHD is in the room. And when life gets hard, when support kind of crumbles because of your individual context, ADHD is going to become harder to manage.
Old supports may not work as well as they used to, so it is always kind of this game of staying on top of revisiting retooling. And that can be a frustrating and scary thought for a brand new client who is typically coming to us with the idea of can we fix it?
[17:38:09] Dusty: I mean, I don’t know that I have anything radically different or opposed to what you’re saying. I just agree with you. I think the sort of acceptance phase and the grieving phase, which I know that you’ve talked about, right, is the middle part. And it’s kind of the hardest part because it’s what comes before you start to see progress.I think sometimes you go back and forth between these phases or stages or whatever you want to call them. And this can be hard for clients, too. They often ask me what’s the difference between an excuse and a reason or how do I know that this is ADHD and I’m not just being lazy?
And I think that’s the subtle nuance in the difference between ownership, like you’re talking about versus just being disempowered with ADHD. I have an example. So this past weekend I had a busy Saturday with my family. I have talked about it before, but I have a very diverse family. I have a boyfriend who doesn’t live with me. I have one roommate who I co-parent with and who’s pregnant. And, you know, we have foster kids. We have my kid, they have an upcoming kid. We have another roommate who lives with us too who helps out. So we’ve got sort of all these different players, like different adults and different kids in the mix and different obligations.
And last Saturday, I had an event that I had to go to, and I was planning on bringing the kids, but then we talked about another event earlier in the day that we knew that the kids would really like to do, and my two roommates would really like to do. It was paddle boarding and I’m not big on that kind of thing. I don’t like being wet and cold, but my boyfriend was staying over at the time, so when we made this sort of plan for the day, he thought he knew what was going on on Saturday. I thought I knew what was going on on Saturday and then we sort of added another thing and it was very dynamic.
There were a lot of people all trying to negotiate what we were going to do with our day and who had to be involved. So what ended up happening was my poor boyfriend had no idea what was going on. He thought, you know, he’s waking up for a leisurely Saturday and I’m like, okay, get up, we got to go. We got to be there at a certain time. And he’s like, wait, what’s going on? And then he knew about the thing later but basically our plan kept changing and evolving as the day went on, and my roommates and I had been in contact about who was going to drive what car because we had three vehicles between us, three children, different deadlines.
So there were a lot of moving parts and my partner was a bit annoyed and frustrated because it was a Saturday morning and he’s getting dragged hither and thither. And he kept asking me questions, recapping “well, what’s going on with this? And why are we doing this this way?” And then I would say, “okay, well, we’re going here now and we’re doing this.”
And he’d say “well, that, you know, it doesn’t seem like he thought this out very well”, and then I would feel defensive, like I had to explain, “well, actually, you know, so and such and I made this plan. But as I was trying to handle all the moving parts and update the schedule…” It was really exhausting for me to keep updating him and verbally explaining why we were doing things the way that we were doing them, which to his credit he had no idea because I hadn’t really shared all of the details because they were all happening so fast. I felt like I couldn’t write, so I understand why he kept being like, why is this happening like this? And what are we doing? Why? Why don’t we just do this? And what? Are you sure? Can’t we just go do things this way?
But I hit a point where it was so mentally exhausting for me to keep explaining things to him because to me, I had to keep switching tasks, right? I was focused on doing the mental math of the schedule and getting from this place to that place and remembering this and that, and to keep stopping what I was doing to switch tasks to explain to him just for him to then ask another question.
For me, when I’m already doing something in my brain, and somebody asks me a question, it’s like I just sat down on the couch and they’ve asked me to go get something, and I don’t even know where that thing is but I have to go get up and look for it.
Now. It’s not even like I just have to get up and walk to the next room and grab them a plate of french fries. It’s like they’re asking me, do we have any french fries? And now I gotta go to the freezer, that’s in the garage and dig through the freezer. And I just sat down. That’s what it feels like in my brain.
So after a number of times of this happening, I just lost it. I had a meltdown and I was in the middle of paying for some parking and he asked me a question and he was kind of a bit grumpy at this point, and I was kind of snapping at him, and I didn’t end up finishing paying for the parking. And then I got a ticket, and that was like the last thing. That’s when I had the meltdown. I was like, oh my God. I was really upset. But I was able to kind of get it under control and take ownership of it.
I said to him, listen, it’s really mentally tiring for me to have to answer questions. I know you don’t mean anything by it. I understand you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. But sometimes when my brain is really busy, like I’m not able to tell you a lot of details about the things that aren’t super important. I can answer the basic questions, but I’m going to need a way to let you know that I’m at my max communication capacity.
So on the one hand, I could have just been like, you’re so annoying. Why are you always bothering me? Quit asking me questions, right? And in the past, I think I would have been like that. But I was able to understand this isn’t my issue. But at the same time, I can advocate for what I need.
And I think that’s maybe the translate part – understanding. It’s not going to work for me when we have a day like that, which we try to avoid. But sometimes it happens. I’m going to need a way to communicate to him that I’m not able to keep answering questions about things that aren’t really important at that moment. He’s going to have to understand this isn’t because I don’t want to answer them.
But I also can’t just be like, he’s so frustrating. Why is he always asking me questions? That’s the ownership part of it – getting out of that story. And I think where I see a lot of clients in that story is the “it’s not my fault” story.
For example, I got this parking ticket and I could’ve been like, oh, it’s not my fault. I was trying to pay the parking, right? Or when I’m running late, it was not my fault, I couldn’t find my wallet or there was construction, it’s not my fault. And while that’s true, things happen, but there’s also that nuance where it’s okay, but I also didn’t plan things very well, or I didn’t leave myself enough time or I knew I should have done this thing and I did that other thing. And there’s a space there between it’s all my fault and it’s not my fault. And I think that it’s really hard to get out of that in between because you oscillate wildly when you don’t understand your ADHD very well.
You go right from it’s not my fault to it’s all my fault. I’m terrible. And it’s about finding that middle space where this situation sucks but I can take ownership for my part of it, and I can understand why I got myself in this situation. I can understand how ADHD made this harder for me than it is for other people.
[23:59:16] Asher: Really lovely example Dusty. And you’re right, you could have gone either way. You could have gone exploding at your boyfriend. It’s not my fault. It’s his fault. You could have completely gone the other way. This is all my fault. Why do I always do this? That catastrophizing that we get into and that point right there kind of brings me into one more thing I wanted to say on the topic of own.Something that I find that comes up with nearly every client that I work with is not just moving out of that all or nothing thinking relative to that present moment as you did, but also in a bigger way, learning how to distinguish from past and present. Those of us that are doing our own work on our ADHD and having better experiences still have moments where things go awry, as you just told.
However, we can also, as people with ADHD, be really bad about dragging in the past, right? So that one moment becomes “I always do this. I always let everyone down. I’m always running late. I’m always doing it wrong. I’m always getting tickets I shouldn’t be getting” or whatever. So we tend to not recognize where we’re being successful.
I hate that one moment of failure. This happens all the time in coaching, and I’m sure you’ve had this happen too. We were just talking about long term clients and how they start to self coach as they’re having better experiences. But the flip side of that is when things do go horribly awry. A client has a day like the day that you just described, and typically they’ll come to coaching and they’ll be wondering, is this all for nothing? Am I really doing better or managing better or having better experiences than I was before, or am I right back where I started?
Learning to separate the past from the present, distinguishing between the now and the mistake in the moment, and not piling on every mistake that you’ve ever made on top of that, to tell yourself this story of failure, especially if you are otherwise having better experiences. You are always going to have those moments. But those moments can become less and as you just described, can have better outcomes than they used to, rather than it being you exploding on another person and blaming it on them, or you internalizing and blaming it on yourself, it became an opportunity to recognize how you need communication to look different between you and your partner in moments like these and and to work through that with him.
So seeing the opportunity there unto itself is a success and a different experience than one you might have had years ago when you had less awareness about your own ADHD.
[26:41:12] Dusty: Yeah, you nailed it. [26:43:03] Asher: So finally, let’s talk about Translate. To me, translate goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The externalizing, the getting it out or translating first is for self understanding. When we are able to put meaningful language to our experiences that help us better describe what’s going on for us, or when powerful language comes out as we’re trying to, or grappling with putting language to an experience that can help us better understand what’s going on for us.I have a client that’s been grappling with the language of overcomplicating. It’s a criticism that she’s received throughout her life that she over complicates things, and it’s something that she’s now attuning to differently, because part of translation is about curiosity, right? Looking at this through a curious lens, what’s really going on here? And it’s really interesting that in her case, two things are actually true.
There is a phenomenon where she gets into that one down place where someone externally criticizes her for overcomplicating or more so often than not these days, she starts to criticize herself for that. And that is actually the point in which she starts to over complicate. She gets into her limbic brain and she’s like, oh, I got to figure out how to do it faster. I got to figure out how to do it right.
And so what feels like trying to do it in a less complicated way at the moment is actually sort of going down all these different rabbit holes. She doesn’t even need to be going down, and is actually the thing that becomes the point in which she is overcomplicating in a way that is serving no one.
However, the point that she often receives criticism at work about overcomplicating just has to do with how her brain works. Sometimes she needs to be able to map things out for herself in her language. A list means nothing to me. If you present something to me as a list of words that doesn’t do anything for me, it doesn’t make sense to me.
And so there is some amount of effort that she needs to put in at times in order to build her own understanding of what’s going on, in order to then be able to do what she needs to do with that thing. And so distinguishing out, overcomplicating into these two different buckets has been this really interesting story arc in our coaching, because it’s taken her from a place where overcomplicating is almost a trigger word.
One that leads to that place where, okay, now I’m going down rabbit holes to try and not do the thing that everyone criticizes me for doing to a being able to recognize that and start to have that a pause, disrupt, pivot moment with that behavior. But alongside that, to also recognize that when other people are using the language of over complicating, that can sometimes just be a misunderstanding of how her brain works and what she necessarily needs in order to be able to come to her own useful understanding.
[29:45:20] Dusty: Yeah, I think that’s a really good client example. And I think that the translate part yet again comes with its own challenges for clients. I don’t know if this is exactly controversial to say, but sometimes we have been coming from the one down perspective so long that we’ve surrounded ourselves with people who might reinforce that.So sometimes starting to push back on that narrative and finding a narrative that’s neither “it’s all my fault” or “it’s not my fault” can be met with resistance from outside. And so that’s where I think the role of a coach is so important. To validate that person’s experience and just help them to know that they are not alone in seeing things the way that they see it.
And they’re not wrong – there’s no right or wrong here. There’s just sort of better communication for better outcomes. And sometimes that looks like helping people understand you and they’re on board. And sometimes it looks kind of like standing up for yourself and saying, okay, no.
To give you an example, I once had a client who really struggled with mess and forgetting. This was one of my most forgetful clients yet. And I had talked to them about the idea of putting some reminders up on some walls, like a checklist or a spreadsheet or a schedule or just a note. And they kept coming back and saying, well, my partner really doesn’t like visual clutter.
They won’t let me put anything up on the walls. Yet my partner really doesn’t like this and they won’t let me do it. Yeah, their partner was also giving them a really hard time about all the forgetting that was happening. I’m like, okay, you can’t have it both ways. So then this person went and visited some other friends who were also neurodivergent, and I remember that the client then said to me like, wow, you know, I had this experience at my friend’s house where they had everything labeled, everything had a home, but everything had a label where it went, you know, there was stuff all over the wall, but not in a totally messy way, in a way where there were visual notifications, reminders and guides.
It blew this client’s mind and they saw how helpful it was. I think that gave them a big moment of realizing how unhelpful it was to be in a situation where they weren’t able to do what they needed, but they were being asked to just overcome their brain dysfunction, basically. And so, you know, I think those people ended up parting ways in the end. But often there comes a point at which we do need to kind of stand up for ourselves and be like, okay, I’ve had that with my partner, myself, right where yet, you know, I’ve had to say, like, this is how it is, right?
You don’t have to like it. But there’s not really a lot I can do to change this. This is what I can do and this is what I’m willing and able to do. But this other thing that you’re asking, that’s not that’s not something I can change. And yeah, I understand you don’t love that but that’s the way the things are. But I’m not going to make you promises I can’t keep.
[32:28:16] Asher: Dusty, I see this with my clients at work, too. My client that I was just speaking about included, where a superior or a coworker will have the mistaken assumption that because they think a certain way that everyone thinks that way, or because most people are able to process something this way, that this should work for everyone, and particularly in corporate environments where things are so standardized, it can really throw up roadblocks when somebody is genuinely unable to conform, because that’s just not the way that my brain works.I need to be able to think through it differently, do it differently, spend more time on parts that would take other people less time. Not because I’m not capable, but because this is how my brain works and this is what I need here. And so we’ve kind of already touched on the second part of translation to do it.
First, it’s about cultivating your own understanding, getting language that makes sense for you. That’s always been what this podcast is about. And when I hear from listeners and clients about what’s resonating on this show, it’s always bits of powerful language that have helped them better understand their own lived experience, and have given them new ways to articulate that lived experience to others.
But the second piece is self-advocacy: being able to stand up for yourself, being able to articulate what you need, being able to do that not from a place of one down or apologizing. Just as you described with your partner, being able to kind of draw that line in the sand of this is what I can do, but this is what I cannot do. This is where it is, what it is. And if that’s not okay with you, I can’t make you promises to make it different. Nor do I want to do that to myself. And from a one down place, that’s exactly where we would go as ADHD people as, oh, I’m going to fix it. I’m going to make it better.
Let me promise you better outcomes from here. And then we’d get stuck in this failure loop because we’re not actually able to do that and we would blame ourselves for that.
[34:53:09] Dusty: That’s exactly what I was going to say, it’s not possible to set those boundaries and to take that stance when you’re coming from the one down perspective. Because if your greatest fear is just losing the people around you through your own ineptitude, then you’ll never take a stand and say “okay, actually I can’t”, because it’ll never feel okay to not be able to do something or to feel what you’re doing is enough.And so there’s an interesting sort of through line here with self-worth and self-esteem. The road to self-esteem with ADHD is such a very crooked and cyclical one, because I think we keep going through this. But more like an upward cycle where every time you go through it, you kind of go up a level in terms of your awareness of your self-worth and your self-esteem and recognizing that maybe these are not horrible moral failings that mean that you’re unlovable and maybe you’re allowed to have respect, even if you make mistakes, and maybe you’re allowed to ask for what you need.
And maybe it’s okay if you can’t do everything and, you know, maybe it’s even okay if that’s not okay for other people, right? I think that really the next level is when you get to a level where you’re like, people can choose me or not choose me. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that I’m the problem. It just means that people are different.
And what’s okay for one person might not be okay for me. The way that I’m not able to do these things or the way that I live my life might not be okay for someone else, and I have to accept that. That doesn’t mean that I have to change what I’m doing. It just means it’s not the right choice for that person.
And if that person, if that’s not the right choice for that person, then that means that that person is not the right choice for me. You know, I don’t know if you’ve seen that little meme where there’s a guy and then in each picture he’s getting more dramatic and then by the last one he’s got lasers shooting out of his eyes.
That’s me with the lasers shooting out of my eyes. Someone who knows means we’ll get this.
[36:37:01] Asher: I actually know that one. Which tells you how ubiquitous that one is. Because I am not on social media. I am not immersed in meme culture. But yes. Really well said, Dusty. And I think it’s actually a nice place for us to take a pause for this week. So, listeners, until next week, I’m Ash. [36:55:22] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[36:56:23] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
