This episode is sponsored by CURE Hydration. All right, I’m going to be real with you. Drinking water is boring. My ADHD brain is like, wait, we have to do this again? Like every day, multiple times. What in the world? And because I’m running from meetings to coaching calls to kid chaos, staying hydrated is not something I’m naturally good at. It’s not something I naturally think about. That’s why I’ve been obsessed with Cure hydration packs lately. CURE is a plant based hydrating electrolyte mix with no added sugar, only 25 calories, and it actually tastes good. The watermelon and berry pomegranate have been on repeat for me. I’m actually like really running low on those flavors, which is so sad. They’re refreshing without being too sweet or artificial. It feels like my water finally has a little bit of personality, which I enjoy. I really do. What I love most is that CURE uses a science backed formula that hydrates as effectively as an IV drip. So when I’m scrambling through my day forgetting my water again, CURE helps me to catch up fast. I throw a few packs in my bag and it makes drinking enough water simple, which for my ADHD brain is basically a miracle. So staying hydrated isn’t just about water. You also need electrolytes. And that’s why I love Cure. It’s clean, tastes great, and it actually works. And bonus, CURE is FSA HSA approved. So you can use those funds to stay hydrated. The smart way for I have ADHD podcast listeners, you can get 20% off your first order@curehydration.com I have ADHD with the code I have ADHD. And if you get a post purchase survey, make sure to tell them that you heard about CURE right here on the podcast. It really does help to support the show. Don’t just drink more water, upgrade it with cure. Welcome to the I have ADHD podcast where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults with adhd. I’m your host Kristin Carter and I have adhd. Let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder disorder. I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B. Hey, what’s up? This is Kristen Carter and you are listening to The I have ADHD podcast, episode number 136. I am medicated, I am caffeinated and I am ready to roll. Happy December everybody. How in the world is it December, I’m not sure. November was a blur for me. It went by so quickly. But make no mistake, it is a freezing, dreary December day here in Pennsylvania. And so it’s here. Winter is here. I hope all is well in your world. I can’t believe 2021 is coming to an end. I’ve been thinking about how the next couple of podcast episodes are the last ones for the whole year, which is a crazy thought to me. Crazy, crazy. Now, last week’s episode was a doozy, and if you haven’t caught it yet, I highly recommend that you go back and listen. It’s a good one, and it seemed to resonate with a lot of people. It’s called ADHD is not your superpower. How does that make you feel? I expected a lot of negative response, but honestly, for the most part, everybody’s been really kind and felt so validated by my thoughts on, you know, calling ADHD a superpower or a gift or awesome. Many of you expressed that the shift that I presented was actually really empowering for you. So I’m really, really glad to hear that, because who you are and what you have to offer the world, that is what is amazing. That is what is a gift, that is what is its superpower. And so today, I thought it would be really fun to talk about how to discover your magic, how to discover your superpower. Like, if ADHD is not your superpower, which it’s not, then what is, right? And so I want to have a conversation about your gifts, your. Your talents, your magic, your secret sauce. One of the points that I made in last week’s episode was that a lot of people are delegating their amazingness to adhd. So they’ll say things like, yeah, I’m super creative because I have adhd, but no, it’s not because you have adhd. Lots of people without ADHD are creative, and lots of people with ADHD are not creative, right? If you’re super creative, it’s because of you, because of who you are, because of how you were designed. You are incredible. So, as we wrap up 2021 and we look toward 2022, I think it’s really appropriate for me to help you identify or get more clear on what makes you amazing so that you can spend more time leaning into that and waste less time, effort, and energy on your weaknesses. But first, it’s ad time, baby. I have a question for you. For those of you who celibate, there’s always one word that I can’t say, folks. And that’s what it was Celebrate for those of you who celebrate Christmas or any kind of holiday gift giving experience in December, what did you get last year? Like, take a second and remember. And if you bought a gift for yourself, what did you buy? Can you recall? Did it change your life? Are you a happier or more peaceful version of yourself this year because of it? I want you to consider what an investment of $1.99 a month into the focused ADHD Group coaching program might make for you as you enter 2022. What might it be like for you to be surrounded by hundreds of other functional adults with ADHD who are setting goals and persistently failing their way to reaching them? What might it be like for you if you had the support of a team of coaches who are available to help you through tough times and keep you from self sabotaging during good times? What might it be like for you to immediately access my trainings on time management, self confidence and how to plan out a vision for your life and you can use that to plan out 2022. Give yourself the gift of focused this Christmas and make 2022 your most ADHD friendly year yet. I feel like we probably should have had jingle bells playing lightly in the background and like snow falling on you wherever you are in the world. Like, what if while you were listening to that, like snow just started falling and jingle bells just started playing and maybe like reindeer came up and sniffed? I don’t know, I took it too far, but I think that would be really fun. Okay, let’s get to the juicy part of the episode where we talk about your true awesomeness. Now I want to read for you an email that I sent out that went along with last week’s episode on ADHD is not your superpower. And I think it’s going to make a really good intro into what we’re talking about today. So I’m going to read it. If it sounds like I’m reading, it’s because I’m reading. Okay? Okay, so here it is. It starts like this. You have a superpower, but it’s not adhd. You have gifts, but ADHD isn’t one of them. You are awesome, but ADHD is not awesome at all. According to the science, ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with very poor outcomes. When left untreated, it can ruin relationships, lead to substance abuse, cause accidents, and lower life expectancy. Fact check. True. I understand why some people want to reframe ADHD as a superpower or as a gift or awesome Trait, but I don’t think it’s helpful to anyone to do so. In my opinion, this reframe is actually doing more harm than good. See also toxic positivity, gaslighting, and victim shaming. Your superpower is your ability to overcome the challenges that ADHD sends your way. Your gift that you bring to the world is your personality, your compassion, your flaws, your sense of humor, your ingenuity, your creativity, your curiosity, and everything else that makes you you. There is so much awesomeness about you. Embrace all of it. Take credit for it, and stop giving ADHD the credit for your badassery. Okay, so if we’re going to stop giving ADHD credit for our badassery or our awesomeness or our superhero ness, then we need to figure out what we can give credit to, right? So we’re shifting the credit from adhd and we need to put that credit on something else. So this episode is designed to help you identify your strengths, your magic, your secret sauce. And as you’re listening to me walk you through this process, I want to encourage you that finding your superpower might not happen overnight. I mean, for most of us, it really doesn’t. So this is the kind of episode that you might want to tuck away and, you know, reference every so often so that you can realign, check in with yourself and continue to move yourself closer and closer to that place of knowing exactly what you are amazing at. Don’t be discouraged. If you’re like, ah, I have no idea what I’m good at, that’s totally fine. And another thing I want to say here is that you might be very resistant to the idea that there’s anything good about you, that you have any superpowers. Maybe you’ve been raised by or surrounded by people who belittle you or demean you and don’t honor you for the amazing human that you are. And if this is the case, you likely have habitual negative self talk and can’t really imagine a world in which you are awesome. Some of you were taught that speaking about your strengths is arrogant or selfish or unchristian or unkind, et cetera, et cetera. So you’re just not used to looking for what’s good about yourself. In my opinion, this is a huge problem. And if we’re going to do like a sidebar or like parentheses here, like, it’s a big problem with the kind of puritanical way of being raised where we believe that all people are inherently bad and wretched, and we feel the need to remind ourselves and everyone Else all the dang time. And so if I had the brain energy to get into that, I sure would. But I’m not gonna. So suffice it to say that if you’re listening to this and you feel really resistant about the idea that there’s anything good about you, I would really highly encourage you to go find a therapist today and work that out. Like, don’t walk, run, run. If you can’t identify anything good about you, if you can’t point out some of your strengths, working with a good therapist will really be helpful, because if you don’t believe that there’s anything good about you, you will constantly prove that belief true. And that’s just how the brain works. And that’s not what we want. We want to prove true that you are amazing because you are. We want to prove true that you are incredible because you are. That you have gifts, that you have purpose. Okay? That’s what we want you to continually prove true in your life. And let me pause here to say there is a lot of good in you. You are inherently lovable and valuable and worthy of kindness. You are here on this planet for a reason. You are listening to this podcast at this very moment in your life for a reason. And I believe one of the reasons you’re hearing me speak right now in this moment is so that you can discover the good in you, so that you can identify your gifts and your strengths and ultimately your superpower, your magic, the value that you can offer the world. So I’m going to take you through a series of questions to help you identify your secret sauce. Okay. Or sauces, maybe you’re very saucy, and you’ve got, like, multiple sauces, and that’s amazing. And if you want to listen and kind of, like, answer in real time, great. If you want to write these questions down and reflect on them, great. If you want to save this episode, come back to it later. Great. All right. You do you. So here we go. Okay, so it’s just four simple questions that are actually not simple at all. Four pretty easy questions that might not be easy to answer at all, but here we go. The first one is, what do you care about when you’re looking for your secret sauce? For your magic, for your superpower, for the thing that makes you amazing. And you. You want to look at what do I really care about? Secondly, what do you enjoy? You need to care about it. You need to enjoy it. What do you enjoy doing? What do you do better than most people? And what do people come to you for, right? What do you care about? What do you enjoy doing? What do you do better than most people, and what do people come to you for? So I want you to think of, like, a Venn diagram with each of these questions in a circle, and the center of that circle is your superpower. Okay? You have to care about it. You have to enjoy it. You have to do it as good or better than most people, and people need to, like, come to you for it. Now, that might not be happening. Like, if you have something that you care about that you enjoy doing that you do better than most people, but nobody’s coming to you for it, it might be because you have kind of kept it hidden, kept it secret, and haven’t put yourself out there yet. So don’t let that last one be a disqualifier for you. Okay? Little side note here. What do you care about? What do you enjoy doing? What do you do better than most people, and what do people come to you for? Now, my guess is that none of your responses included paying bills, administrative work, grocery shopping, keeping my garage organized, right? And yet so many of us spend most of our mental and emotional energy trying to get ourselves to do the things that we’re not actually good at. Hear me, hear me. When we prioritize being really good at the things that we think we’re supposed to be good at, like organization, tidiness, dishes, etc. It steals energy that we could be spending on doing what we’re amazing at. In my experience, the clearer that we can get about our specific strengths, then it allows us to also, in the process, identify our weaknesses. And here’s the thing. I know that ADHDers spend most of their lives trying to make up for their deficits and weaknesses. And a lot of you are trying to hide or mask your weaknesses and pretend that they don’t exist because you were shamed so much for them in the past. But I’ve come to believe that this really is doing it wrong. Like, what if we just start owning our weaknesses, accepting them, delegating them to someone else so that we can focus on our strengths. Whatever organizational or logistical task that gets in your way, you know, tapping into your superpower, figure out how to delegate it, overcome it, outsource it, get it off your plate somehow? I know that this is, like, coming from a place of privilege. I know it will be a lot easier for those of you with money than for those of you without money. And if you’re listening to this and you’re so frustrated because maybe you’re a single parent, and maybe you are having to deal with all of the things on yourself, and you’re like, I literally have no one to delegate to. I want you to know that I am sending you so much love, and I want to somehow empower you no matter what the status of your life is right now, just to know that maybe it’s not right now that you can delegate and hand things off, but eventually, like, this is the goal, to be able to delegate the tasks that you suck at and focus on your magic, focus on your superpower. Live as much of your life in the place of your superpower and as little of your life in the place of your weaknesses. Now, some of you are in a place where you’re, like, amazing, I’ll go hire someone today to help me. Or I know exactly who I can hand these tasks off to. Right? So I know that you’re all in different places, but at least having the perspective that, like, every amount of energy that I spend on the tasks that I feel like I should be good at, but I’m not good at is energy that I’m not able to give to my creativity, to my superpowers, to my secret sauce. And so if we circle back around and we say, what are your strengths? What is your superpower? Remember, you want to find the intersection of what you care about, what you enjoy doing, what you’re better at than most people. Like, you’re pretty good at it, and maybe people come to you for it, right? So I mentioned a long time ago on this podcast that, like, as I reflect on my life, people have been coming to me for coaching my whole life, since I was a child. I never identified that. It took a lot of introspection and reflection to realize, like, oh, my gosh, I’ve been a coach since I was, like, a little kid, right? So when I say, what do people come to you for? You might not immediately recognize it. And that’s okay. I didn’t recognize that people came to me for coaching. But it’s so fun to look back and see that identifying your gifts and your superpowers, it’s going to take time, right? So I want to encourage you, like, use this as an inspiration, not as, like, a discouragement. It’s totally 100% fine. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, I just don’t know, that’s totally fine. My advice is try a bunch of stuff, right? When you try something, you’ll know right away if it’s wrong. And here’s an Example, in college, I needed a job, obviously, and so I did what my friends were doing. I filled out an application at a local restaurant and I became a waitress. Now, a word here in American society, we often kind of look at waitressing jobs as being like lower level positions. And I think this is complete bs, Complete bs. Because you have to be freaking smart and fast and efficient and friendly to be a good waitress. You have to be those things all at the same time. You have to have a good memory. You have to be detail oriented and be able to work in a fast paced environment with a lot of loud, crazy stimulation going on. Waitressing is not a low level job in my opinion. It’s a very high level job. And let me tell you, I sucked at it. I sucked so badly at it. All of the instructions were given to me verbally, which I of course did not absorb. I was given a menu to memorize, which of course I did not memorize. I showed up like I own the place because that is one of my gifts. But my ego was quickly smashed down because I, I could not keep up. I couldn’t get orders right. I couldn’t remember which meal was which. Like when it was coming off the little belt from the thing, I would always have to be like, what’s this? What’s this? Like, I had no idea. I spilled drinks. I dropped guacamole on an old guy’s coat. I could not waitress and I felt so much shame. I felt like waitressing was something that everyone should be able to do. I felt like I was supposed to do it. I was supposed to be good at it. I actually got really depressed during this whole period. And it’s actually one of the things that led me to my ADHD diagnosis, which is pretty cool. I don’t remember quitting. I just know that I quit. I think I just never went back, which is not great. But let’s be real, it was a terrible experience. And then I found out, like just in that same time period, I found out from a friend about a tutoring position. And even though I had completely failed at waitressing, I needed money and I was willing to do something different. Hear me, I didn’t try to become a better waitress. I wasn’t like, oh, I’ll go to another restaurant and I’ll try something that demanded the same skill sets. I tried something completely different that required a completely different set of skills. Okay. And I spent the next two years tutoring students one on one, taking them through a step by step curriculum that my boss, who was an educational psychologist had created. So there was a clear plan and strategy. It was my first job where I was able to help people get from point A to point B. And I was so good at it. I caught the bug. I caught the bug at that job, the bug of working with people one on one. I discovered that I was really magical. And after college, I then taught music lessons one on one and loved it. And I was good at it. And I did cognitive skills training one on one and loved it. And then coaching finally found me. Finally. So it took completely trying a bunch of different things, but knowing like, okay, the skill set that I used for waitressing, not a good skill set. Like, not. That is not my top of the line. And so trying different things until I finally found the thing. So listen, if we call ADHD our superpower, we’re never actually going to go looking for our superpower. Do you see that? If we call ADHD a gift, then we don’t spend much time digging deep to figure out what our true gifts are. Stop giving ADHD the credit for your badassery. You are amazing. You are completely unique. And there is no one else on the planet that is exactly like you. What is it that you bring to this world that no one else can? What do you bring to your family or your friend group or to your community that no one else does? Identify and admit your weaknesses and delegate them if you can instead of focusing on them and spending your time and energy trying to cover them up and improve them. Focus on your strengths. Figure out how to spend 90% of your time operating out of your strengths. I know this is high level work, but I think you’re ready for it. So remember, we’re looking for the intersection of what do you care about? What do you enjoy doing? What are you better at than most people, and what do people come to you for? I can’t wait to hear what you discover are your gifts and your awesome qualities and your superpowers. Would you head to my Instagram? I have ADHD podcast. I think that’s what it is. And tell me, like, tell me what gifts you’re discovering about yourself because of the work that you’ve done through this podcast. I can’t wait to hear from you and I can’t wait to talk to you again next week. I’ll see you then. Bye. Bye. Hey, adhder. I see you. I know exactly what it’s like to feel lost, confused, frustrated, and like, no one out there really understands the way that your brain works. That’s why I created Focused Focused is my monthly coaching program where I lead you through a step by step process of understanding yourself, feeling better, and creating the life that you know you’re meant for. You’ll study, be coached, grow, and make amazing changes alongside of other educated professional adults with ADHD from all over the world. Visit ihaveadhd.com focused to learn more.
