Ep #1: Who's Driving Your ADHD Brain (and why it matters)

Bonnie Mincu interviews Tracy Brown (Segment 3 of 4). Although Tracy had reached an extraordinarily high success in sales and leadership at Mary Kay Cosmetics by age 26, she had no idea that she was ADHD. It was only after reporting feeling mentally foggy after having her second child that her doctor told her she'd always been that way -- and was probably ADD. 

Tracy was prescribed Adderall, and saw an immediate difference in her ability to focus on getting work done. Instead of working on several projects at once, she was able to start a project and finish it before moving on to another. Within six months of diagnosis (and treatment), she went from managing a team of 60 salespeople to 300. And that success earned her a pink Cadillac from the company -- a famous prize awarded to only the top 1% of performers worldwide.  

Tracy then expanded her career into a new direction: fund-raising. Her "Pink in the Park" event to raise money for breast and uterine cancer became the most successful in the country.

As Tracy tells her story, it's clear how her mindset, life philosophy and approach to leadership was critical to the kind of success she achieved, and how she used her ADHD to her advantage. 

Bonnie Mincu interviews Tracy Brown (Segment 2 of 4). Tracy describes her approach to doing well in her first job at Mary Kay Cosmetics as being "very coachable."  She made a point of learning what the best salespeople and leaders did, and especially how they handled when things went wrong.

Tracy was highly attuned to what she was naturally good at, and thought about how to become the best that she possibly could through intentional learning and practice.  We discussed the importance of that kind of growth mindset, especially with ADHD. Tracy also said that rather than waste mental energy on areas where she'd likely NOT be good at, she made a point of surrounding herself with people who excelled where she did not. 

As someone who usually found her best approach was different from those around her, Tracy believes in making a life that works for YOU, rather than trying to fit into someone else's idea of how you should be.

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Bonnie Mincu interviews Tracy Brown, an extraordinarily effective leader with ADHD whose approach to life has taken her far. In this first of four short segments, Tracy shares how her father taught her poker along with his philosophy on life: "Play the Hand You're Dealt." 

Tracy didn't dwell on why she wasn't able to sit still and read a book... or even a paragraph -- without her mind wandering to many other things. Instead, determined to do well with the skills she had, she applied her mind to figuring out how to ace tests without reading class assignments. And after leaving college to go into sales at Mary Kay Cosmetics, by age 26 she was managing a team of 300 people. 

Tracy attributes much of her success to her eagerness to learn and seek advice from the most successful people in the company, being very intentional about following their coaching and reflecting on what worked and tweaking what didn't.

Ambiguity is when something is unknown, uncertain or vague. With ADHD, we can easily get mentally paralyzed by all kinds of ambiguous situations, from not knowing where to find something to being unclear of what's expected of us. When you can't get started on something, if the words "I don't know..." come to mind, it's likely that ambiguity is the culprit.

Unfortunately, instead of identifying that there are unanswered questions or uncertainty getting in the way, many people with ADHD fall back on simply thinking they're overwhelmed.  A state of overwhelm arises from feeling there's too much to handle -- which is an entirely different problem.

Why does it matter? Because the only way to break through the paralysis of ambiguity is to get the answers, clarity or direction you need.  Strategies to overcome overwhelm won't help at all.  When you can correctly identify what it is that you need to know, need to find or need to learn, you've taken a step towards getting the right kind of solution.

With ADHD, sometimes we create overwhelm for ourselves by erroneous assumptions that we hold to be true. In this episode we'll look at 3 common beliefs that may be unconscious assumptions on your part. If you try to act upon them, it they'll contribute to your feeling perpetually overwhelmed by self-expectations you can't fulfill.

Assumptions like these aren't only damaging because they overwhelm you. They can lead you to feel shame at what you believe is your own inadequacy. Ditch the self-blame, and challenge these assumptions instead.

When you feel overwhelmed, your brain is telling you things are "too much."  But what if your brain is tricking you?  With ADHD, that can easily happen if you try to process information or learn in a modality that you're not strong in.

 Modalities for learning and taking in information are the senses of visual (seeing), auditory (hearing) and kinesthetic (touching or movement). When you learn best with visual information, but you're expected to learn and remember just by listening alone, your brain will struggle. If hearing is a weak modality for you, your brain could feel overwhelmed and shut down. There may not really be too much information for you to process, but unless you can see it, it would feel that way.  

 Find out how the way you process information best affects how well you learn, remember and respond. Using your strongest modality or the right combination of modalities could greatly reduce your sense of overwhelm.

With ADHD, "overwhelm" may seem to be such a constant state that it feels normal.  Sometimes overwhelm is the natural response when there's just too much going on in your life, or too many obligations.  Think about how many of those commitments or to-dos are ones you're required to perform versus some you may have brought on yourself.

 Do you volunteer your time to neighbors when you have unfulfilled obligations at home?  Are you afraid to say no when someone asks you to take on yet another project?  Dive into the first of several episodes where we'll break down the concept of Overwhelm, and learn why it has more impact on people with ADHD. You'll want to determine the right solution for the reason you're overwhelmed before it breaks you.

Many different traits of ADD or ADHD make it hard to get started. Most of the time, people say they're procrastinating or 'overwhelmed" when they 're really mentally paralyzed for other reasons. Plain old procrastination applies when you just don't feel like starting something out of boredom or lack of interest. When you can't focus on a dull task, it's as if there were a two-year-old inside your brain stamping her foot and saying "NO!"

For basic tasks of life, you can't wait for motivation to strike. Learn strategies to entice your inner toddler with stimulation or timer games that allow you to get started, get it done and move on.

As an adult with traits of ADD or ADHD, you may struggle with getting started, or doing what you intended to each day. Solutions for productivity or disorganization often don't work for you. To achieve self-mastery with ADHD, you need to  develop customized strategies that address both the root cause and the trigger for your roadblocks. 

ADHD Coach Bonnie Mincu introduces the concept of your brain as a private bus, with eight different characters aboard. At any moment, any one of those characters could grab the steering wheel and drive your bus... perhaps wandering off-route, plowing into a ditch, or stalling the engine altogether. In this episode, you'll learn about a few of those characters, and why -- if you want to keep "Disorganized Derek" from grabbing the wheel, you'll need to identify which of the other characters goaded him into driving!