Hello, badass. Welcome to this special episode where we are going to deep dive into my brain a little bit and talk about what it looks like to run a multiple seven-figure business with badass careers and a multiple six-figure on track to hit seven-figure business with badass empires with this little thing called ADHD.
You may or may not have heard of it. If it's anything like my algorithm, you will see that ADHD is everywhere at the moment. This conversation about ADHD and a whole wave of people discovering that they have ADHD because it has been historically undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, especially in women. And I was one of those women who found out that they had ADHD quite late in life.
I was 33. And it's been quite revolutionary in terms of my workflow and figuring out how to best work for me. And it also explains a lot of things that I was historically struggling with, both in the corporate world and in entrepreneurship. And I actually posted on Instagram stories, asking people. What do you want to hear from me?
Do you have any requests for the podcast? And I had some amazing ideas come through, but quite a few people did ask about this. And at first I was a little hesitant because, I was thinking, is it really that relevant? And do I have anything to say really on this topic? Because, I'm not an expert either on neurodiversity and these kinds of things.
But then I, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this. Is such a great topic to tackle because it's linked to so many other things.
[00:02:22] Challenges and Strengths of ADHD in Entrepreneurship
It's linked to the fact that firstly, a lot of us become entrepreneurs because the standard way of living and the standard structure of doing work doesn't suit us.
And that can be for many reasons. It can be because of neurodiversity. It can be because of our life set up. Maybe you are a crazy person like I am, and you decided to marry someone from the other side of the world and makes life a little bit complicated. For whatever reason, it's really attractive, I think, to people who typically, want to live a little bit differently or think differently or go against the grain or work differently in some capacity, whether it's the structure of the work itself, the actual content of the work itself.
I have noticed that entrepreneurship tends to attract people who don't necessarily suit the quote unquote classic status quo. And so it's actually part of a bigger conversation, which is working on your terms. And it's also part of a bigger conversation because I find that it could be ADHD. It could be, anything else, but we're always going to be imperfect people showing up online and exposing ourselves.
And I've heard so many people say, can I do this? I'm so introverted. Can I do this? I have ADHD. Can I do this? I'm a mom of two. Can I do this? Whatever it is. And I think sometimes. It, it links back to that big concept in entrepreneurship where you've just got to figure it the fuck out.
And it doesn't mean that it's not challenging and it doesn't mean that it can't be a really hard sometimes, but there will always be things that come up that you don't know how to do, or it's a weakness for you right now, or it doesn't necessarily suit your natural state. So for example, when reels came out on Instagram.
I started on Instagram and there were only carousels and static posts and photos and when reels came out, there's always going to be like, Oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that. What? Like I have to do that now. There's always going to be something new to learn. There's always going to be something that's thrown at us.
And I think, when you learn to work with or reframe sometimes challenges or things that typically could make life more difficult in some way, it can be a really. Huge advantage and absolute superpower when you're the kind of person who can pivot and figure it out, even though the odds might be against them for whatever reason.
Now, of course, I'm all for strengths based businesses and strengths based, development and playing to your strengths in general. And so I'm not saying you should force yourself to do things that don't suit you. You don't want to do nothing like that. But sometimes, for example, When you have ADHD, like I do, and you work from home, like I do, and you are in charge of sitting your deadlines, you are in charge of doing your work.
You are in charge of staying focused. Sometimes you've got to figure it out and you've got to adapt and you've got to pivot and you've got to make it work no matter what gets thrown at you. So I think there are a lot of entrepreneurial competencies. Underneath this conversation around, how do we do the same when we, have challenges we have certain quote unquote weaknesses or things that are more difficult to work with, or we have context that are more challenging than others.
How can we make this work? And so in this episode, as I navigate this conversation about how I've adapted my work flows, my work schedules and figured out how to best run this thing in a way that suits my brain, there'll be a lot of nuggets in here pertaining to completely different situations. To my own that you can take away for yourself.
[00:06:04] Understanding ADHD: Symptoms and Impact
So I want to walk through a little bit, how does my ADHD affect me? Because ADHD is a term, a diagnosis, but it affects different people differently. So I'll share a little bit, what that looks like for me, my individual lived experience of ADHD and how I've put systems and rituals and adaptations in response to those things.
I'll also walk through at the end just some bonus examples of leveraging other weaknesses or other perceived weaknesses sometimes to your advantage when you get to work in a way that isn't the norm and you actually get to create the rules. You actually have quite a large scope of play. As I said, I am a late diagnosed ADHDer.
I was 33 years young when it happened, and surprise, what do they say, birds of a feather flock together, I had quite a few people in my circle and friends starting to get diagnosed with ADHD. And I always knew that I was different, I thought differently, I was a bit quirky at school I was never the person who felt like, mainstream, had heaps of friends and acquaintances, looked like, sounded acted like everyone else I always knew that I was a little bit different, for whatever reason, and when it came to my studies and when it came to work, I had huge challenges that other people around me had in doses, but it didn't seem to be crippling.
It didn't seem to be just at this level where I couldn't push through. I'm speaking about concepts, for example, like procrastination, like at university, it's this feeling with ADHD. I feel like you can feel so intelligent, so smart. You get it. It's not that you struggle to understand the concepts, but if it's a topic that doesn't interest you, I would literally tap out and not go to class.
For an entire semester for certain subjects, and I would cram the textbook and just learn the material and download old exams and reverse engineer the responses. I would do that over and over again in the week leading up to the exam, for example, and get really great grades, but I just couldn't do it.
I just couldn't show up consistently to subjects that didn't interest me and that I didn't have a stake in. And it was to the point where the procrastination, the avoidance of doing that work was so chronic because, I was in charge of my time. It wasn't structured like school that the stress of putting things off, asking for extensions, just, it was just so and the stress of it all would sometimes Leave me with stomach pain so bad from the anxiety that I would go to the hospital to make sure that I didn't have a stomach ulcer or something, to the, it's, I know everyone says, yeah, everyone procrastinates.
No, not like that's not to this level, or, everyone has topics that they're interested in and not interested in, of course, but when it's debilitating. When it can really affect you in so many different ways, when you're just beating yourself up saying, why can't you just get started? Why can't you just do it?
Why can't you just make it happen? And then to be diagnosed and have everything, looking back and be like, oh, okay, get it. Just a lot of lights went on. And I think this is the reason that a lot of people with ADHD do end up trying out entrepreneurship because you get to create a business around the things that interest you.
Now, I'm getting a little bit of a hit of myself here, but. Let's take a pit stop for a second. For those of you who don't exactly understand what ADHD even means, like the same to the degree of being a medical professional, but to give you a sense of it, here's this high level recap that I've pulled together.
So ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. It stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and it's poorly named because it talks about attention deficit. And interestingly, contrary to popular belief, it's not that people with ADHD can't pay attention to things. It's that there's actually an excess of attention and stimulation in the brain.
For me, I always felt like I had way too much attention. Eight radio channels playing in my brain non stop. One for the past, one for the future, one for today, one about bonbon, one about it could be anything, but it was like I constantly had different things to focus on and concentrate on in my brain.
There was too much going on. I'd be trying to work on something and ping, my brain would send me like a mission. So for example, I would be doing my emails and ping, incoming, I have a mission sent to my brain and it told me, Oh, you have to investigate to see what exactly Frenchie needs to do to be able to tick all the boxes to be able to get his New Zealand nationality and to be able to get his New Zealand passport and like it would give me a mission a random mission like that and I'm like okay and it's like I could tell myself like no that's not for right now but my brain Would almost be playing elevator music, like seriously, like the D like until I acted upon this mission, it's like the tab opened and I couldn't close it.
I had to go and do that before I could concentrate on anything else. It's definitely something to do with attention and focus. And in fact, what's happening is it's everything to do with executive function. So just behind your forehead you have the area of the brain called the frontal lobe.
And that is where all the part of the brain, the parts of the brain that are dedicated to executive functions, the last part of the brain to be formed. Okay. So it's the most sophisticated area of the brain speaking from an evolution standpoint. Okay. An executive function is. The collection of cognitive processes that organize things like tasks activities, goal setting, decision making, strategic thinking communication, time management, it's the structures, it's the strategies it's project management.
It's the collection of competencies and skills and tools to move forward on things. And so typically individuals with executive dysfunction often struggle to analyze, to plan, to organize, to schedule, to complete tasks either at all or to a deadline. They might misplace things, they might prioritize the wrong things, they may work on one part of the project for far too long and not have enough time for the other parts.
They can get very overwhelmed by big projects. That's an overview of how it can feel. And while of course a lot of people are like, I love my ADHD, it's my superpower and that kind of thing. There are obviously a lot of positives that come with ADHD and that you have super fast pattern recognition.
So you're very perceptive about people and you can pick up on patterns and themes very easily or you can be very creative or you can trigger this thing that's called hyper focus where you can become. Completely immersed in something that you're interested in and you're passionate about and the time can just pass your own flow.
It's just, and you can become excellent. Often world leading experts, a lot of them are coming out as ADHD because they found their thing and they became so obsessed with it that they really saw it through. So it does have positives. But at the end of the day. It does make life harder overall, and you do need to work differently to make it work.
So what's going on is that ADHD brains have lower than average levels of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that regulates the body's pleasure and reward systems. Okay. It's about reward and therefore it's about motivation. And as a result, dopamine increasing behaviors are even more gratifying to ADHD brains.
So that's why they can get lost more easily. Doom scrolling, binge eating, alcohol, addiction, those kinds of things, because you're looking for dopamine. And low dopamine, boring, non interesting activities can trigger severe chronic procrastination, your brain. It's like you just can't move forward.
You just can't do it. You just, you want to so badly. Like I had days sitting in front of my computer sometimes for work as well, like for an entrepreneurship. I'm not just talking about university now where I needed to do something very important. It was extremely important to me. And I was frozen.
So it's very much this interest based nervous system. And the nervous system with the relationship with dopamine is motivated by things like novelty, new things, new challenges, new gives you dopamine, urgency, deadlines, last minute go. That gives you dopamine. Challenge. Is it hard? Is it going to be satisfying to get into and conquer?
That gives you dopamine, things that you find interesting, that gives you dopamine, working on things that you're interested in, that you're passionate about, that gives you dopamine. Okay. And if you imagine that your brain is a Tesla and your executive functioning. It uses a lot of battery, right? It chews away at that battery.
It depletes the battery very quickly whenever you need to use your executive functioning. So you need to recharge more or often because your battery, your brain battery depletes faster, especially when you're experiencing stress and overwhelm. And I can tell you in the first few years of business, I experienced a lot of stress and overwhelm and I didn't know that I had ADHD and I had huge challenges with, as I said, chronic procrastination, feeling frozen, feeling like I could spend all day on something like luke of lukewarm importance where I really should have been doing something else.
And so on and so forth. Now, again, it's not all doom and gloom. People with ADHD are often very self aware, very emotionally intelligent, very creative, and you can have almost unlimited energy reserves when you're really big into something. Okay. But again, overall, it is a little bit life on hard mode.
Let's be honest. It's. It's something that, that you wouldn't necessarily wish on your best friend, Oh, I wish they had ADHD. That would just be so brilliant for them. No I would say that overall it's a challenge. It really is a challenge. And to take that away from people, I think, isn't very validating of people's experience.
Cause on social media, I feel like the conversation around ADHD is a little bit like, Oh, cute. Like me too. I lose my keys. Lol. Oh my gosh. Hyper focus. Yes. No. Can we not invalidate the fact that it is really hard showing up in life, organizing life, especially when you're playing big, you've got a lot on, you've got work, you've got a side hustle, you've got a business, you've got a baby, you've got, whatever it is hard.
It is hard juggling it all when. Your brain gets easily overwhelmed.
[00:16:58] Managing ADHD: Strategies and Systems
So how do I manage this? Just like anything it's about adapting and aligning the context to best suit you as much as possible. If you can align your work, your context, your business model, everything to suit you 80 percent of the time you're winning, right?
So for example let's break it down by symptoms. So one of the big things that can create a lot of drama for me. Our tasks where I have zero interest in them, they're very low dopamine tasks. And so I experienced severe lack of motivation. Now the systems that you need to put in place to work around this look like what I recommend.
I recommend everyone does this, ADHD people in particular, and what I recommend they do is they have a dopamine menu. They have a go to menu of things that give them dopamine that can be quick and easy Or, give them even more dopamine, be even more fulfilling, but take a little bit more effort or take more time or whatever it is, but have a menu categorized by quick wins all the way to something that gives them much deeper, fulfilling dopamine, but takes more time and energy.
And throughout the day, I will often pick rewards from my sort of quick and easy dopamine menu. So I will gamify it in a way. And that also obviously adds both rewards and urgency into the system. And I'll say, I'm going to do my emails for an hour and a half, and then that's it. I don't get to go over time.
So I've only got an hour and a half. And when I'm done, I'm going to give Bonbon a cuddle, or I'm going to have a snack, or I'm going to listen to three My Chemical Romance songs, or whatever it is. If it's something where I can listen to music, because that's huge for me for dopamine, while I'm working, because I don't need to necessarily thing can connect and really, yeah, it's something that I can do relatively easy with music playing in the background.
I will also put on a couple of my favorite albums and say, cool. So by the, I'm going to put on this trilogy and by the end of the third album, it's over. So gamifying it and then rewarding it is huge. And that really helps me do silly things like it could be, I'm not just talking about things like admin, like invoices and emails and things like that.
You could also have something that's really interesting to someone else, but for you, it's just not your thing. Okay. So it's not necessarily a hierarchy of tasks because actually, doing my emails, getting it to inbox zero, clearing them bam, tick done. That's actually really high dopamine.
Every time you tick something off your to do list bing, dopamine. Okay. So I'm not saying that there's a hierarchy of work. I'm not looking down on any kind of work, but you've just got to know what you're doing. Where your risks are in terms of the work that, that feels low dopamine to you.
And what I often do is I pair the task itself with the bigger motivator. And that's why I'm such a big fan of businesses around purpose, businesses around your why, because you can really. Connect to something larger than you. Something that doesn't rely on motivation or willpower alone. Something that relies on getting you out of bed to do the thing, even if sometimes you don't really feel like it.
So for example, did I want to film 365 reels last year? I post on Badass Careers every day, usually a reel a day. Did I want to film 365 reels last year? No, not really. But did I want my business to make a million dollars? Did I want to be able to live in France for a few months? Did I want to be able to take time off for my baby?
Did I want to be able to pay another quarter of a million dollars off, the beach house? Did I want? Yes. And that is incredibly rewarding for me. And so reframing everything, like when I go down to batch content and I'm like, cool, I'm going to batch three months of content in a couple of days.
Again, gamified, urgent deadlines. You see what I'm doing here, but when I go to do that. And I go hard and I make that happen in the morning. I can feel like the biggest sense of resistance. Oh, we're already here. Oh my gosh. Already today. Oh my gosh. I get myself in the zone while I'm getting ready. I listened to my music and I visualize, I think about the bigger reason.
No, I don't want to batch three months of content in two days. It's hectic, it's intense. Like I don't necessarily live for that. That's not my favorite thing in the world to do, but to know that I'm already going to get a quarter of the year's worth of content done in two days. And by showing up every day, my business can make me hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
Yeah, that's damn motivating. So connecting it to. The bigger picture and then breaking things down. Like I'm a big fan of to do list. I've always loved great stationary. I'm not, and of course, like typical ADHD, like I'll buy a beautiful planner and never touch it. But I have gotten better at that, at really having to do lists and we use ClickUp.
So our team is in ClickUp now, but it can be your personal to do list on a piece of paper. It can be. I also have a to do list on. On my iPad, I have a digital planner with my to do list, my weekly planners, my monthly planners. And on ClickUp as well, the team has all of their to dos in there and just making sure you physically tick things off, whether it's the little green tick and click up and it goes ding and you get the sense of I've done it or you strike things out on paper, you strike things out in your planner.
It's really important. You have to celebrate every little thing. So that your brain knows it's happening. It's happening. I'm doing well. Okay. I'm doing well. I'm moving forward. Baby steps are everything for someone who struggles to sometimes, move forward smoothly and seamlessly. I also organize my time so that I get the less interesting things done in my day cleared first.
So I get it cleared nice and early and therefore the consequence, if I don't, is that's weighing on my mind and I have to work on that all day.
[00:23:18] Clearing Tasks Early for a Better Day
What a shame when I could have been doing really fun stuff in the afternoon. And now I've mucked it up for myself if I don't do that. And so by getting it cleared early, I have something to look forward to.
It's almost like my day's only going to get better and better. And again, coming back to this conversation, most of these things take care of themselves when you build a business around your purpose and around your strengths, because that means you're building a business around dopamine, around interests, and also having a business model that works for you and your energy.
[00:23:50] Managing ADHD and Introversion in Business
So another thing that I've done in my business is, and this is a little bit ADHD, introversion, but for me having meetings throughout my day, Kills my day like even if I have two meetings, my days over because there's this thing in ADHD called waiting mode. And so if I have a meeting at 11 at 3 PM, like I'm doing nothing until 11 and I'm doing nothing between, it's almost like.
In my brain, it's okay, I can, I can't get into flow because it's going to get broken. My flow is going to get broken. So I have to do just bitsy tasks just administrative tasks in the morning till 11. Then we've got 11 to 12, then it's going to be lunchtime. And then I've got to prepare for the next meeting.
And then it's 4 PM and my day's gone. That makes me so overwhelmed, so anxious, the thought of that. So what I do when I'm planning out my weeks is that I have two big call days. Every two weeks. And I batch them. And so I'm able to churn through the call days. And as an introvert, that is really tiring because, coaching is very energetic and you give a lot of your energy to other people and you're guiding other people for sure.
But for me, when I'm on the calls, I absolutely love them and I love connecting with my clients and I love seeing them make moves. It's just that the speaking and the introversion part, that's difficult. So I know that it's going to be two big days, but then I get my silence, my introvert time, my, my flow time, my uninterrupted.
structure and schedule for the rest of the time. And that is so worth it for me.
[00:25:26] Time Blindness and Focus Strategies
Another symptom of ADHD is something called time blindness. And there's also, related to this is also the sense of focus. So there are two sides of the coin when it comes to ADHD. So when it comes to focus, you can either have this thing called hyper focus, which I mentioned earlier, where basically you're obsessively focused on it and you are in the zone and you just can't pull yourself away.
Or you can be completely frozen and paralyzed and focused on something that you need to do or that is coming up in it and it has the opposite effect. Because of these two things, time can disappear without you really noticing. You can be struggling to get started on something and suddenly you're like, wow, the sun's gone.
What time is it? You're like, oh, it's 6 p. m. Like, or you can be working on something and be like, oh, this should take me about an hour. Two hours and then suddenly I hear a knock at the door and Frenchie's home and I'm like, what? Is it lunchtime? He'd finished for the day. So time and the relationship with time is really interesting with ADHD.
And so again, the systems, the rituals, the things that I put in place, firstly, I don't even attempt to multitask. I don't ever pretend that I can multitask. All of the studies show that humans are not great at multitasking. We think we are, we're really not. I wouldn't even. I wouldn't even roll that dice.
That is not going to work for me. And as I was saying, my brain will give me missions and it will distract me. And if I let that happen all day long I'm never going to get what I need to get done. Already when I'm just trying to do my job and complete the task that I have in front of me, like I can go onto my Google Chrome and open a tab and go to type something in.
And I'm just like, wait, what? Like, why did I open this tab? What's going on? So trying to multitask, trying to have multiple tabs open, trying to have lots of things on the go, it's just never, ever going to work. So I will literally like, I'm going to get really granular with you here. So what I will do is I will.
Time block my day with buffer because you need buffer, but I will time block the top three things I have to get done that day and I will have them in the calendar. And then whenever I go to attack that one thing, if it's on the computer, for example, I will only allow the relevant tabs to be open. So if I don't need my email inbox, that tab is not open.
If I don't need. My podcast scripts up. I don't do scripts, but anyways, example, like it's not there. I will limit myself to having you say these three tabs open that facilitate my ability to get that thing done and everything else, every other application, WhatsApp, Slack, everything quit close.
It's down. It has to be down for me. And you can even put focus mode on your computer. And do not disturb on for certain time blocks as well.
[00:28:31] The Power of Batching Tasks
As I was saying, I also have themed days, so I can have my call day or my two call days, and I might have other days, which are content batching days. And I know that for those three days, that's my priority.
And so I've come up with my structure now where I have non negotiable things that must get done. In the morning, and then I have chunks of time that I block depending on what I have on. Pertaining to certain themes. It might be filming. It might be writing. It might be whatever. And then I close out my day with the unexpected, with the buffer as well.
In general, batching has saved me batching every, I patch everything. I batch my calls. I batch my content. I batch my strategy sessions. We usually go away for a whole week and nut it out for the year ahead. And then we just do mini tweaks all the way throughout the year. Like I like to batch everything.
Because it absolutely saved me because you do it once you go hard and you get it done and it allows the Unexpected to happen and it gives you buffer if I had to create content every week I would have never stayed consistent. It just isn't possible for me. Like I don't want to sound dramatic but My life, my energy, my location, my things change so rapidly and time flies so quickly for me, there's just no way, if I had to trust myself to come up with a whole new fleet of content ideas every seven days, it just doesn't the idea of that is so overwhelming.
The way I need to work is. I will research and write 90 content ideas in a day. I just prefer to do it that way. And then I will film them and then, editing is a little bit different, but I will get the thinking done and get it out of the way. It's also a nice big juicy challenge, which is important for the ADHD brain.
And so I do love being able to pull off and say, Hey, you've got three days. To create 90 days worth of content go right. And that's a nice big challenge as well. And this is what, I also did when I was running my YouTube channel on top of my full time job, I would do batching of content. I would do like a month worth of video in a weekend.
And it really did save me. By the time you go away, you travel, you get sick, this happens, that happens staying consistent in a big, interesting life, it's just really tough, I find, with my brain, personally. So that works really well for me as well.
[00:31:03] Impulsiveness and Novelty in ADHD
Now, another symptom of ADHD, definitely linked to reward and dopamine and that big surge of dopamine and adrenaline, is impulsiveness and novelty.
Okay, so a little bit of a hit of online shopping might be your thing, or just making impulsive decisions, rash decisions. At a personal level, for example, one year I decided to shout the Frenchie and I over to the Pacific islands and this really beautiful holiday together for his birthday. It's just something that he just didn't even ask for, didn't have on his radar.
It was just, and I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to fly us to the islands. That would be quite a a classic example of making an impulsive dopamine fuel decision. That's not necessarily logical and rational. It's much more emotional. And I've made many emotional decisions throughout my business.
And I'm not saying that's a bad thing either. Some point I had the most expensive private coaching engagement of my life. Sitting around 45, 000 for six months. And then at the time, my, who was like the person who was my absolute guru and marketing and business was Vanessa Lau and she dropped her mastermind and her mastermind I had just paid this coach in full.
And so I was, the cashflow wasn't huge, in terms of my personal business model, I take out a lot of money from my business because it is a lifestyle business and I pay off my mortgage and I do things like that I want to do with my money. And so having made this huge investment and having my team on the go, I didn't necessarily have a lot of liquid cash at that point.
To invest and Vanessa dropped her mastermind. It was going to be an investment that was I think close to 40, 000. And I signed up for that and I was quite stressed, to be honest, it meant that for three months, the business had to from zero every month, make the money it needed to pay all the bills, et cetera.
And it was over the holiday period over the Christmas period, which is typically a little bit slower for badass careers. So it was stressful, but it was like. I just had to, I just had to, and sometimes when things like that pop up, it can be, it can really pay off in this particular case, three months into the mastermind, Vanessa burnt her business to the ground and refunded us.
So it was just like a little bit of a plot twist anyway. But it can be tough when you are in charge and you're making emotional or impulsive decisions sometimes that feel a little bit risky. And we, we take risk all the time as entrepreneurs, but I do think I have an appetite for risk or whether it's risk or impulsiveness, that's that, that much bigger because of this.
The way that my brain works.
[00:34:02] Values-Based Decision Making
And so something that I have implemented is more of values based decision making flow chart based on key business goals and priorities. And there's a big difference between I could afford this Versus I want to do this for all of the right reasons. And something I've also implemented in terms of my decision making flow has been mentioning the opportunity cost as well, because it's one thing to have the money and to go for it, but that money could have gone where, for example.
So if you're going to invest, say 50, 000 into private coaching and six months,
A full time junior marketer on my team for a year, for example, not like it's not, I pay them more, but it could be right. If you were paying the classic, like graduate salary in New Zealand for someone who's just graduated from university. So you're like, okay, interesting. What would that. Give me in terms of my time, in terms of what would that give the team, what would that allow us to do?
And is that going to have more of an impact than then this unforeseen investment that has come up? I also make sure that I have Phases. And of course, like I get to make the rules and this can change at any moment, but I do typically try to have phases where I'm investing in learning and courses and coaching and all that kind of stuff, because I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on those things very happily most of the time.
But then I also have phases of implementation where I'm not learning something new and investing in something new right now. I am implementing, I am executing, and I'm taking action on what I've learned to prove to myself that the investment has been implemented. So I also make sure that I have not no investment phases, but phases where.
It's strategic for the business that I'm not looking around and shopping for those kinds of things because I can get quite impulsive.
[00:36:13] Embracing Personal Evolution in Business
Now, something that's also been quite interesting in my journey has been changing business, right? I changed from not even French to badass careers to badass empires. And I've struggled with that at times thinking, am I flaky?
Can I not stick to something? Is it the novelty? Is it the shiny object syndrome? Now I know that's not the case. It's a reflection of personal evolution and the evolution of my purpose as well. What felt most purposeful to me, but I know for sure, because I almost broke badass careers by not doing this.
I know for sure that simplicity and stability. Everything. That's where the profit is simple, stable businesses where you focus and get better and better and better at your scope of play. So what I've done in my business as I've made it very clear. Depending on the goals for the businesses in the year to come, where we are sticking to business and life feeling simple and streamlined.
And it's been about that mastery, not shiny objects syndrome, not new, but that mastery. So there's a core that I'm not touching strategically. So for example, if I'm going to develop a new offer. Maximum, that's one per year max. If that, if it's not just making the offer better, selling the offer better, marketing the offer better.
Okay. For example. But then I give myself, these whole passes that allow me to try new shit. So it's give yourself a whole pass to try new shit on one aspect of your content or a new masterclass when you go live or a new sales mechanism. Okay. So give yourself, when you're looking at your business for the year, there should be 90 percent stability, streamlining, simplification, focus on the core, getting better and better, doing it better than anyone else.
Okay. And then 10 percent of playtime. So making sure that mastery of that ratio is really important. Now, the good thing about entrepreneurship, which is why I think it attracts so many neurodiverse brains is that it is inherently challenging and novel in and of itself. I've never experienced such transformational personal growth in such a short period of time, not even moving to the other side of the world, like nothing compares to this.
And that helps as well for keeping things fresh, because you've got to make sure that if you do make decisions to pivot and change or add something new, it's not because you're bored. It's not because you want the hit of something new. It's because it's a really important decision for your business.
Now, there are other behavioral things that come with ADHD.
[00:39:06] Handling Rejection Sensitivity and Workaholism
For me, I suffer a lot with rejection sensitivity. You can have emotional overwhelm, like almost short circuits, emotionally, mood swings, and it can also make you a bit of a workaholic. So when it comes to rejection sensitivity, being in business has been rejected.
You will hear no rejection. More times than you hear. Yes, that's just how it works. That's just like the, that is just the simple nature of business in general. And this business model in particular, out of your entire audience, a small percentage will buy. That means you will have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of followers who never buy from you, who are saying no to buying from you.
If you look at it that way. So your mindset on this stuff is so important. Honestly, therapy has helped me a lot here, but mastery of that mindset piece, no more catastrophizing, no more making shit mean something, telling myself stories. They said no to me, therefore my offer sucks. No, they said no.
People say no. They're an adult making an empowered decision. Fun fact. If more than 50 percent of people on your sales calls are saying yes, your price is too low. You need to hear no. And really cutting the what ifs. And for me personally, it's helped me a lot to invest in mindset coaching, probably more often than business model or strategy coaching.
I found I'm often quite disappointed with business coaches from a strategic content marketing perspective, where I've really seen. Moves being made for myself and what I need, like I've always found, like I had more mastery on the strategic side than anyone I've hired, but the mindset piece was something that has been super helpful for me.
So knowing, what to invest in for you as well, like not everyone needs a marketing coach, not everyone needs a sales coach, like not everyone needs a mindset coach and I've had to practice. Deeply focusing on what is working and celebrating progress and celebrating. All the things that are going well, rather than focusing on the haters and a nose, the rejection, because otherwise you just can't keep going.
And regarding being a workaholic, business can be like a dopamine slot machine and it is impossible to compete with the fact that you put more hours in money out, more content out, more money in. It's almost like cha ching, when your business model is strong and thriving.
And so what I've had to really shift because it almost got me honestly, those first three years of business, like I was, I almost burnt out at least twice, I would say was because it became incredibly addictive in this way. And so instead of Constantly shifting the goalposts and playing for more, I've shifted my mindset to think, how can I make a million dollars a year working max 30 hours a week?
Or how can I hit my target of getting a massage every two weeks? And how can I put things in place where I just have to stop, right? And so I book in with poll and poll, my poll classes have a strong cancellation policy. And so Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I go to poll and I stop at six and things like that.
So putting structures in place so that you shift what it means to succeed, you shift those KPIs and you put hard stops in place. And then another big thing with ADHD, I found this my whole life is that I hate routine. I can't stick to routine. I can't stick to like little daily habits that, stretching five minutes a day.
I just, I've just never been able to. And so you know what I don't force it. I have blocks of my week. That I will plan out a week ahead, but I embrace now every day, not looking the same. I'm not a morning routine girly. I'm not robotic in my functioning. I'm not someone who likes or is good at running the same script every day.
It's not going to happen for me. And so sometimes it's also calling it and making it work for you. Now, James Clear has this beautiful quote, which is you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. And I think this discussion is a really nice example of that. You can have big goals.
You can go for it. You can figure it out. You can make it happen regardless of what your personal situation or challenges are, but you need to have your systems in place. You need to do it your way.
[00:43:27] Leveraging Personal Strengths in Business
Your quote unquote weaknesses or perceived weaknesses or challenges, they can be channeled Okay. And some other examples, like I grew up really broke.
I grew up on the poverty line. I, there were a lot of challenges in my upbringing and these things, nothing's so black and white. It's been a weakness, right? There's a strength and a shadow to everything. The strength to that is that I'm super resourceful. I'm really good at innovating frugally.
I don't need a lot of money to figure things out. And I get so scrappy. I used to be worried about my New Zealand accent. I'm not going to be able to attract a North American audience, or I'm not going to be able to do this because of my accent instead of looking at as a weakness. Why not say, Hey, how amazing to have this international perspective.
Why don't I focus on the fact that I am so global? I am so international. Why don't I make that my superpower? Or I've always beat myself up for not being able to communicate concisely, succinctly. My podcast episodes are long, maybe I should make it my thing. Maybe it's good to have deep chats.
Maybe that's my superpower. So leverage who you are and build a business around it. You don't have to be perfect to be a leader. You don't have to be perfect to be an entrepreneur, quite the opposite. Stop beating yourself up. Focus on your strengths and put the systems and rituals in place that work for you.
Don't copy paste some YouTuber's morning routine if that's not going to work for you. It never ever did for me.
[00:44:54] Final Thoughts and Encouragement
As always, I would love to continue the conversation in the DMs. If this has resonated with you in any way, please do message me. I absolutely live for it. And until next time, stay badass. A shit ton of income, crazy impact, a business that you love.
Just by listening to this episode, you are one step closer to your very own badass empire. Now I want to hear from you. Tag me in your stories or send me a DM over on Instagram so I can learn what resonated with you most. Oh, and if you're the kind of badass who is willing to help us out big time and take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast, Make sure you send us a screenshot of that review at helloatbadassempires.
com so I can send you a juicy freebie to say thank you. Until next time, keep showing up for your future and we'll keep smashing goals in the next episode.
