In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Ash and Dusty dive into the diverse ways ADHD manifests in individuals, including their own experiences. Both diagnosed with combined type ADHD, Dusty leans more hyperactive while Ash leans inattentive, leading to strikingly different challenges and coping mechanisms. Dusty shares her “ready, fire, aim” approach, embracing complexity and constant activity, whereas Ash describes his struggle with inaction and getting stuck in neutral. They discuss how these differences influence their daily lives, time management, decision-making, and social engagement, emphasizing that ADHD is not a one-size-fits-all condition.
The hosts highlight the importance of personalized coaching and self-experimentation in managing ADHD effectively. They caution against generic advice found on social platforms and stress the value of curiosity and adaptability in discovering individual solutions. By sharing their contrasting experiences and strategies, Ash and Dusty illustrate how coaching encourages people with ADHD to understand their unique profiles and engineer approaches that fit their lifestyles, ultimately fostering empowerment rather than frustration.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:01:16] Asher: I’m Ash. [00:03:25] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:05:09] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. [00:08:15] Dusty: I have a coaching demo coming up April 16th at 8:30 p.m. EST. So if you are not a subscriber to our Patreon, it’s a good time to become one because you might be the person being coached, or you can just listen to me doing some coaching. You can come hang out. You can check out our Discord, which is very cool.Lots of good discussions there. So come on over. Also, it is that time of year for me to announce my very late spring ADHD Boot Camp. I’m running the ADHD Boot Camp again starting June 7th. It’s going to run six dates: June 7th, 14th, 20th, 21st and July 4th and 5th. This is a mega body doubling session where we are going to get your whole house organized.
We’re going to bust clutter. We’re going to help set up your spaces to be ADHD friendly. It’s going to be guided by me. There’s going to be a bunch of other people there doing the same thing. So if you are drowning in clutter, which also I am right now, I’ll be right there with you. We’re going to do it together and it’s going to be amazing and exhausting. So come on over.
[01:14:22] Asher: Dusty, I feel like I need this right now too. I am also drowning in clutter at the moment. It must just be that time of year. Who knows. So you want to tell our listeners what it is we are going to talk about today? [01:29:00] Dusty: We’re going to talk about different ADHD flavors, specifically yours, mine and ours. [01:35:23] Asher: Ha! Dusty and I have had so many interesting conversations off mic about the differences in our ADHD, and we’ve alluded to some of them on the show as well, I think, but we thought it would be interesting to dedicate an episode to this to really demonstrate how ADHD is not the same for every person with ADHD. That’s what makes coaching such a powerful modality for people with ADHD, because coaching helps you learn about your ADHD. [02:06:00] Dusty: Yeah. And it’s definitely interesting for me getting into coaching early in my career to see how other people’s ADHD was different than mine. That was definitely a really interesting experience. So a good example of that – I always thought that I didn’t struggle with making decisions. I would have described myself as a person who very much goes with their gut, very much knows what they want.And when I first started working with clients who really struggled with analysis paralysis and decision fatigue, it was interesting to me because I’m like, oh wow, this is a part of my ADHD that I don’t really experience. And so sometimes as a coach, we are more coaching people from the outside. We can understand something intellectually, even if we ourselves have not dealt with it.
But what was so interesting to me is I realized later, it’s not that I don’t struggle with indecision, it’s that knee jerk decisions with my gut are my coping mechanism. If I stopped for a split second, then I would get into analysis paralysis. And I don’t know if I actually knew that about myself, because for as long as I could remember, I would just go, yep, that one.
And I would actually get flack from people in my life about not taking more time to weigh things properly. The thing is that on the other side of that experience, I rarely had buyer’s remorse or I regretted not making a decision more thoughtfully, but it was actually pretty rare.
So most of the time I would make the decision and then I would just roll with the punches. If there were some consequences that went along with that, I never thought to myself oh, I wouldn’t have had this consequence if only I had thought through this more or done more research. It was kind of just like, yeah, this is the choice I made and this is the outcome.
But I realized along the way that that was kind of my way of never getting stuck in decision fatigue and coping with it, which isn’t necessarily to say that that is a great coping mechanism, because certainly, along my life, I’ve made a lot of knee jerk decisions. And when I look back on them, I probably could have thought through some of those a little bit more – like getting married. So yeah, it’s interesting to see.
[04:07:04] Asher: I want to back it up a little bit and sort of talk about broadly how you and I experience ADHD differently. So we both consider ourselves combined types. That’s our diagnosis for both of us. But you absolutely lean hyperactive and I lean inattentive. So that ready, fire, aim method of decision making, apparently even in the case of getting married, oops, is very classically hyperactive, and I have the opposite experience.I love the metaphor here of a manual car’s gearbox. You struggle with getting stuck in fifth gear, right? Just go go go go go. Ready? Fire! Aim. I more so struggle with getting stuck in action. Stuck in neutral. I can’t even get into gear to get going. And this isn’t universal, by the way. Sometimes you do find yourself stuck in neutral and I find myself stuck in fifth gear.
It’s not always one way or the other, but more often than not, your struggle is related to doing too much, being impulsive. My struggle is related to doing too little, not being able to engage with what I know that I want to or ought to do.
[05:24:04] Dusty: But I mean, that’s something I learned from this podcast, right? Like big brain versus fast brain in these kinds of different ways. I’ve also heard it called front end perfectionism and back end perfectionism. Having clients who struggle to get into action, yeah, it’s really interesting how it manifests so differently. And something that’s also really interesting to me is people who compensate for their ADHD in really different ways than I would. For example, the people who are chronically early because they’re so anxious about being late, whereas I really struggle to be on time. [05:55:19] Asher: I had this client that I was really challenged by that was completely hyperactive. It was such a new experience for me. I tend to mostly have inattentive clients or combine type clients that have struggles in both directions. And when this client came to me, his challenge was not action. Like action was never the problem. He could always do something.His challenge was his relationship with time, because there is this belief that if he could just organize the to-do list in a particular way, then all of his problems would be solved. And so it was really interesting to help him work through that and just sort of see that very, very different presentation of ADHD because again, action never the issue, always doing something.
And the guy that’s like, oh, something in my house needs fixed. I don’t need to hire somebody for that. And not because he couldn’t afford to or didn’t have the resources to, but because the way that his hyperactive ADHD manifests, he’s like, I can learn how to do this and I can do it myself. And so his to-do list was just so massively overloaded.
This is the client I talked about in a metaphor with junk cars in another episode. I’ve got all of these junk cars in, and he didn’t actually have junk cars, but I’ve got all of these junk cars in the front yard, in the backyard, in the side yard. And I know that they all need some amount of work to become functional again, but I can’t see the forest through the trees. I can’t see so I have no concept of what needs what. I have no concept of how to prioritize. And also coming with this belief that if I just prioritize in the right way, I can attend to all of the junk cars and so the story arc of that coaching relationship was very much getting this client to see that time is also a resource.
That was a huge perspective shift for him. And interestingly, for me, I’m very aware of time as a resource. I don’t struggle with time. I am the person that tends to be chronically a little bit early. I do the red light planning. I tend to show up 10-15 minutes early. I do not like to be late. I don’t like how it creates anxiety in my body. So that is a positive coping mechanism for me.
I don’t struggle the way that this client struggled to be aware of time as a resource. If anything, I come from the exact opposite place where I can often live in a time scarcity mindset. That waiting mode thing that we talked about last week is that time scarcity thing where I don’t like to have to sit around and wait because it feels like that’s just sunk time when realistically, I could do something else in that time.
But for some reason, me waiting for an unknown start time makes it really difficult for me to shift my attention into anything else. Whereas this client, if he had unknown time, would probably have the very opposite experience of engaging with something else and maybe getting hyper fixated into it and missing the thing that he was supposed to do in the first place.
[09:08:11] Dusty: When it’s so interesting to hear you say that, because the other thing that I think is really salient here is how all the different ADHD symptoms and presentation of those symptoms interplay with one another.I heard you say, okay, I don’t like to be late. I don’t like the anxiety it introduces into my body. Okay, I don’t like to be late, I hate it, and yet I have not been able to become the kind of person who is chronically on time. And it’s not because I’m not aware of time passing or I’m not aware of the fact that I struggle with lateness or the fact that I need to be early. It’s actually related to how I manage space and objects and being mindful, because what tends to happen is I’ll leave myself enough time. I got to be early, I know I need to leave at this time, and then I’ll be missing something. I’ll go to the car, I’ll come back. I’ll come back into the house 3-5 times because I’ve forgotten to remember something that I need. Or I get in the car and there’s no gas.
This actually happened to me so much last year, Ash. There was construction along the street that I usually take my daughter down to get to school, and every morning over and over, I would turn that same direction, get stuck in the construction, and then be late to school. And then I’d say to myself, tomorrow I’m going to take a different route. But of course, by the time I got home from dropping her off, that thought was gone from my brain.
So I never made a note or flagged it anywhere in any way that the version of Dusty who gets in the car in the morning, would remember. And it went on like this for months, and it got to the point where I would get in the car and as I was driving, I’d be like, oh yeah, don’t go that way, Dusty, got to go a different way. And by the time I got to that part of the drive, I was on autopilot and I would just drive the same way, hit the construction and go, well, I wasn’t going to go this way. And so for me, the interplay of the way that my ADHD shows up and how that has had its ripple effect on the kind of life that I live, I guess has made it really difficult to solve things like time management in the same way as you, where I’m managing things and being early.
And so how I’ve compensated for it differently. I’ve basically set up only flexible structures for myself. It’s very rare that I have to be on time somewhere or I’m going to miss a thing, right? And I do that by managing expectations. I do that by, you know, setting up my life in a way where I’m going to minimize disappointment and minimize stress.
So I still get that anxiety in my body, in that stressful feeling. And it’s very nerve wracking for me when I do have to be somewhere in a timely fashion, because these days I mostly don’t. But it’s because time after time, after time after time, I’m trying to become that kind of person, I just wasn’t able to. But because it wasn’t about managing time better, it was about managing my space.
Managing space was related to remembering things in the moment. And there were just so many layers, I’m not saying that I couldn’t be that person. Yes, I could, but it would require such a fundamental restructure of so many different interlocking things in my life that the better way for me to manage it was through a different back door.
[12:11:11] Asher: That last thing you said that you could do it the other way, but it would be painful for you. It wouldn’t. It wouldn’t work for you as well as what you’ve set up for yourself. That gets at the heart of what we’re aiming for at coaching, right? Coaching is about finding a life that fits you.So you said you do not like to have to be at a place at a certain time. I hate the opposite situation. I hate a situation where we don’t know, where there’s not a plan, or there’s not a study plan, where there’s a window, where there’s a let’s keep it loose. I really struggle with that. I want to know what the plan is, because my way of managing my ADHD is if I know what the plan is, then I can prepare to be prepared to be on time at the correct time.
But if the time is loosey goosey, that’s when I can get into trouble with feeling like I can’t prepare adequately, that I can’t know what the expectation is, that I can’t know when I need to leave, that I can’t know whatever. Like your life in the way that you’ve structured it, and I’ve said this to you so many times, it would be so uncomfortable for me.
And I think the same would be true. My life would be very uncomfortable for you. Which brings me to – let’s dig into that a little bit more. You have this very jam packed life that’s scheduled flexibly. But there’s a lot going on at all times for you. So much so that when I realized how much you had going on, I’m honestly amazed that we do this every week, that there’s space for that.
But you’re able to make the space for the things that matter to you. There’s a lot, it’s so much. It’s so many things, it’s multiple bands, it’s so many children and foster children and multiple relationships and just talking about having my life work that way makes my skin crawl. Because for me, simplicity is a huge aid to my ADHD.
And as a coach, by the way, a big learning for me was that that’s not true for every one of my clients. That minimalism, simplicity, really, hyper organized way of living, which, when I’m doing well, I’m pretty hyper organized because it’s a comfortable coat for me. But that’s not necessarily what’s going to work for all of my clients.
Simplicity is a strategy, but it’s certainly not the strategy. And I think a simple life like mine would make your skin crawl in the same way that your chaotic life makes mine.
[14:54:09] Dusty: Yeah, well, and it’s kind of the same thing as not getting stuck in decision fatigue by going with your gut or how you can’t do two things at once, but I have to do two things at once. For me, if I’m going to do what I need to do, I need to add stimulation, I need to add complexity.I often used to joke that I can’t just do something the easiest way. People would always make fun of me because I would do the same task that they were doing, but I had 6-7 extra steps. I had this really convoluted way of doing it. But I always really resisted the simpler way because it didn’t get engagement.
My brain just wouldn’t do it. And in some ways, I am a minimalist. There’s certain things, like clothing and possessions, I love not owning too many things because I struggle with mass. But, I know a lot of clients who really love to own a lot of things. It’s not just that they own a lot of things because they don’t manage how many things they buy. That’s just the right amount of things for them to own. Whereas, I would struggle too much with indecision if I had so many clothes to choose from. And if I liked all of them, I would have such a hard time getting dressed because I would want to wear too many things.
So by keeping it very simple and only having a few things that I really like to wear, I don’t get stuck right? But certainly there’s consequences that come along with having this kind of lifestyle. Recently I felt validated when I read and listened to Henry Rollins. He’s the previous singer of Black Flag.
He’s a really well known personality. He does radio shows. He’s a total, renaissance man. He does speaking and writing. I read this interview with him recently about creativity, and he said that he sleeps five hours a night pretty much every night, and he power naps through the day, and he’s like, my day is divided into two shifts, the day shift and the night shift.
The day shift is for admin and the night shift is for creativity. And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s me. I don’t think that sleeping only five hours a night is good. It’s something that I’m actively working on, but if I don’t actively work on it, I will be just like that.
And Henry Rollins goes to the gym like three hours a day. I swear! He’s talked about having ADHD, but I’ve been reading a book of his lately where he talks about how he just wants to work, everything for him is work. He doesn’t see people unless they’re involved in the work he wants to socialize through, like doing a project with someone.
And he talks about how he’s like a workaholic and everything is work and he just wants to be achieving. He was really sick at one point and he didn’t even notice it and he thought that was so cool. I love it because I think the way that I live, the way that I live my life, people are always trying to talk me out of it.
They’re like, oh, you’re doing too much, slow down, blah blah, blah, blah blah. And certainly there are times where it gets out of balance. I can feel when it gets out of balance, when I’m frustrated, when I want to sit down and I can’t, when I’m dropping balls. That’s how I know that I’ve put too much on the plate.
It happens, for sure. But much like Henry Rollins, I always want to be working. And my favorite way to connect with people is if we’re doing a project together. Everything to me is work, but it’s work that I love. And if I wasn’t doing it, if I had more free time, I would just fill it up with more work.
I’m a bumble bee. That’s what I do. And it’s just really validating to read his writing, because so often I feel there’s something wrong with doing it that way. But the longer I do this work, I think it’s true. The more I lean into my way of being isn’t wrong, it’s just not right for everyone, but it is right for me. And the more I lean into it, the more I accept it, the more I’m able to find that nuanced balance.
I always joke, I like to sit down for about half an hour a day. I like to sit down and rest. I like to have a minute of quiet and peace and maybe read a book for about half an hour, and then I’m going crazy. Like, then I’m crawling out of my skin, right? I need to be doing something all the time, or I’ll find something to do.
[18:50:22] Asher: Dusty, this is so interesting to me because out of balance for me looks exactly the opposite of out of balance for you. Out of balance for you is too much on the plate and out of balance for me is often this frozen place where I’m not doing enough, and that can be a toxic place for me as well.Socially, I consider myself an am never, I am neither, I am neither fully extroverted or fully introverted. I am both and if I swing too far in either direction, that is really, really bad for me. And with my inattentive type that often looks like me swinging towards too introverted like, I don’t want to. I don’t want to go out and do the social thing.
I don’t want to make the effort to make plans with people and that’s not healthy for me. It’s not healthy for me when I’m not engaging enough. But that’s the place where I tend to end up out of balance – in a lack of engagement. So again, listeners, two very different ADHD coaches who share very similar philosophies about ADHD itself, about coaching people with ADHD, two very different presentations, two very different ways of working through building a life that fits for us.
And Dusty, I will say, when we first started working together, I had this little quiet concern that you were biting off more than you can chew by committing to this podcast, which, by the way, has never been something I’ve actually experienced in your behavior or how you show up. It was me reacting to our very different lives and not yet having this fuller context of how this works for you.
[20:43:21] Dusty: Yeah, my bag is always full, so if I want to put something in it, then I’ll just take something else out. So this is the thing, right? I think this is what makes coaching so powerful. There’s all these books about ADHD management. There’s the tocks. And I have to say, as somebody who makes TikToks, ADHD, TikTok really bothers me because there’s a lot of people on there who are not coaches, who are just influencers, and they’ve figured out something about their ADHD, and they’re telling the whole world, this is what you got to do as if it is doctrine.And I hate that because it’s so disempowering if you try it and then it doesn’t work for you. The one thing I know to be true as a coach is the only thing that’s going to work for a particular person with ADHD, for a particular problem they’re having with their ADHD is for them to engineer their own solution and figure it out.
Because even if it’s 95% the same solution that somebody else uses, it’s ever so slightly different and it has to be geared towards them. So when I make TikToks giving advisor hacks, I try to always qualify it by being like, okay, this might not work for you or this is just something that works for some of my clients because it’s so disempowering to be like, oh, I have ADHD, let me go learn about it, let me learn how to manage it. And then the standard advice out there doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just going to make you feel like you’re continuing to fail.
That’s one of the things I love about coaching. And I think how we’re able to talk about this as coaches is we recognize within ourselves that we have to engineer our own unique solutions.
Certainly for me, those are also always changing. What works for me now is certainly not what worked for me years ago and we’ve talked about that a lot. So I think the powerful thing here about ADHD coaching or if you don’t have a coach, but you’re kind of trying to figure out your own ADHD, is remembering that there’s no one right way to do it.
Everybody with ADHD experiences similar clusters of symptoms. But kind of like a recipe or something, all the spices are in there in different proportions. You might have a lot of one spice and not another. And so you’re going to get a completely different flavor palette or color palette or whatever than somebody else, even though you’re working with the same base ingredients.
And so that is why it’s so important to have solutions that are right for you and to not feel badly if something that works for someone else doesn’t work for you.
[23:00:02] Asher: Precisely, Dusty. We talk about cause and effect a lot on this podcast and the symptoms of ADHD, which you and I share. If we just sat down and listed the symptoms of our ADHD, they would look very similar. We struggle with similar things. That fact causation. What’s behind the unwanted behavior? What’s behind how we’re showing up in ways we don’t want to?That’s where things get very, very different and where we’ve come to this place of very different solutions, very different lives that fit for each one of us. So my clients do find it helpful if I toss ideas into the mix, like particularly if they’re discussing something that sounds really familiar from another client experience, I’ll say, oh, I have another client that talks about it this way or that, and they tried this kind of method.
But when I’m doing that, I’m offering that as context. ADHD brains love context. I’m not attached to that language being exactly right for that client or that solution being exactly right for that client. It’s more adding something into the mix so that we can then get curious about what will work for that client.
So if you do see a TikTok that seems like it will work well for you and it doesn’t – rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the opportunity there is to get curious about why didn’t it work? What about it didn’t work? How could I tweak or adjust this to help it work better for me?
I have an example of that from my recent coaching work. I have two clients that are ADHD, one that has identified that way for a long time, and has a very strong understanding of. He talks about his artistic side versus his ADHD side. I’ve actually learned a lot about ADHD just by virtue of coaching this client, because he has such strong awareness about those two sides of himself and the interplay there.
And another client who came to me with an ADHD diagnosis that is now on a discovery journey of ADHD. In our last coaching session, because ADHD and this is a totally different topic. So I’m going to keep it to a sentence today. But at some point we will talk about ADHD.
ADHD folks have a unique relationship with structure that the rest of us without ADHD do not have. There is some different need there, and it’s this competing need between the need for structure and the ADHD rebelling against structure. And that’s something I’ve worked on with both of these clients and in my session with the client, who is still discovering what her ADHD means to her, I told her about a color coding system to categorize different types of tasks.
That was really helpful for my clients, and the conversation from there became about taking that concept. It wasn’t, let’s copy paste this because that would not have worked for my client, but it opened up a new thread for us to pull on in terms of I conceptually like that. We’re kind of using the word themes at the moment, so I like the idea of themes.
I think that that could help me with the dilemma that I’m having right now. We don’t yet know where we’re going with that, other than the little bit of practice we named a theme design. Some practice around that theme for this client that week, and we’re going to see where that takes us. So the concept was helpful for my client, but the way in which my other client put that concept into practice isn’t what’s going to work for her.
[26:57:11] Dusty: Yeah. It really comes down to figuring out what is going to work for you. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you can build off what has come before you, but that personalization is so important because of exactly what we’re talking about.And like I said, I think it does also relate back to the way that your ADHD symptoms interlock with one another, just trying to be earlier to a place wouldn’t work for me if I really wanted to dedicate myself to, showing up everywhere early, it would require me to restructure where I keep things in my home and how I set up my space, and probably also what I do when I’m getting ready to leave. Not when I’m getting ready to leave, but before I’m getting ready to leave. It would also relate back to what I do when I first come in the house. I would have to change a lot of things because the outcome of struggling to get out of the house isn’t just related to one aspect of my ADHD, it actually has a basis in 3-4 different areas that are unique to me and my lifestyle and my struggles and all of that stuff. Right. So that’s why we have to personalize it.
[28:14:27] Asher: And that’s where, again, coaching is one way to get there because coaching is rooted in curiosity. But even if you do not have a coach, the opportunity here is to access curiosity. Can you approach the dilemma instead of guilt and shame about the thing not working, shift into a curious mindset of why did it not work? What can I learn from this?What can I try next? The concept of experimenting. My ADHD client actually introduced the language of experiments in our coaching relationship, and it’s something I’m finding that I’m using more and more with my clients. We don’t call actions homework. It’s not pass/fail. It’s experimenting. It’s trying something on, seeing what we can learn from that, and then going back and tweaking, adjusting, pivoting if needed.
So often with ADHD, that’s where the breakdown happens, right? As the thing doesn’t work we have powerful negative emotion around that and then it loses our attention. We just don’t think about it this way. But the flip side of that is at least brains are naturally pretty curious. So that can be a superpower of ours if we put some intention behind going back and doing the curious work. And so thinking about it as experimenting has been a really, really helpful concept across the board from my coaching clients.
[29:49:20] Dusty: Oh yeah, I use that language all the time, actually. Not to brag, but I always tell people in consultations that you and I are basically like scientists of you. We’re postulating hypotheses, we’re running experiments and just like in science, even no result is a result. [30:07:04] Asher: Really well said, Dusty. It does crack me up how we so often find this place where we have arrived at the same conclusions by very different means in our coaching. I love that. I also think this is a good place for us to wrap for today. So listeners, until next week, I’m Ash. [30:23:11] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[30:24:16] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
