We’re kicking off 2024 with the incredible Jessica McCabe - creator, writer, and host of the award-winning YouTube channel How to ADHD. I’m sure a lot of you are already familiar with Jessica’s work as her YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers, but for those of you who haven’t, her channel contains a wealth of knowledge about ADHD and is one of the things that kicked me in the pants to start taking my ADHD more seriously.
And now she’s coming out with a book: How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It) - which is coming out on January 2nd - so tomorrow if you’re listening to this when this episode comes out.
In our conversation today, Jessica and I discussed how we want to go from surviving our ADHD to thriving with it, to get past some of our issues with executive function and universal design. We also get into a lot of stuff about her book and how she was able to use a lot of the strategies that she wrote about in the book to also help her write that same book.
Honestly, this episode was a blast to record and I hope you enjoy as much as I did putting it together.
William: I'm here with the well-known Jessica McCabe. You've heard of How to ADHD. I keep wanting to say Hacking Your ADHD and I'm like, that's the wrong one. That's me.
And I'm so glad to have you on here. I know your channel has been super influential to a lot of people and I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the book you're releasing, which is also titled How to ADHD, correct?
Jessica McCabe: Yeah. It's How to ADHD: An Insiders Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It).
William: Awesome. So how long have you been doing your YouTube channel?
Jessica McCabe: When I finished the book, I'd been doing it seven years, at this point, eight years now. Wow.
William: That's impressive to stay on one topic for anything with ADHD.
Jessica McCabe: It is. And I expected to get bored and be done a million times. And it's not that I didn't ever get bored, but one of the nice things about ADHD is it's not one topic. There are so many topics. Every week when I started out, I set out to learn one aspect of ADHD or one challenge that I was struggling with, and a strategy that could help, and I expected that to take, you know, a few months, maybe; seven, eight years later, there's still stuff that I'm learning. So that's one of the really nice things is yeah, it's one topic, but it's also way more than one topic. There's so much to talk about, which is how I ended up with a lot of chapters in my book.
There's how to motivate your brain, how to sleep, how to feel, how to people, because social stuff is a struggle for us. Rejection sensitivity is a struggle for us. So I think that's what helped, was I could focus on whatever I was personally struggling with. And there was always something new, something different to talk about.
William: Yeah, that's actually a very similar way I approach my channel with the podcast is just being: what do I need help with? And then researching, diving in and being like, okay, how can I apply this to an episode? And usually it comes out fairly naturally. Cause I'm like, oh, this is what I'm struggling with and how I'm going to be addressing it.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, I think it works great because if you're struggling with it, as somebody with ADHD, chances are other people with ADHD are struggling with it too. And it's nice to know that we're not alone. It's nice to open up that conversation and let people know like, yeah, this is the struggle. The struggle is real. There's a reason for it. Here's what it is. There are strategies that can help. Also, you know, you're not always going to be able to use the strategy, and that's fine, too.
William: That is one of the funniest things where you're like, “Oh, I figured this out. No, I haven't. There's more to learn.”
Jessica McCabe: Or, I figured this out, and now my brain just decided that it doesn't work anymore, or just refuses to do it; I have so many strategies that I know work really well for me, and my brain's like, “Nah, I'm bored now, I don't want to do that.” But we know it works! “Nah, I don't want to.”
William: And I think that's one of the funny things that I always come back to when I'm doing episodes is the acceptance of that. I have ADHD and it's going to make things difficult. It's just there's no solution that cures or fixes my ADHD.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, my operations director had a great quote. “There is no magical rainbow unicorn tool that will solve all your ADHD woes.” Transcribed I think that might actually be the quote. I'm surprised that I remembered it correctly, but it's so accurate.
And our brains tell us that there is, right. Society sometimes tells us there that there is, just use this planner, do this one thing. And that'll solve everything. And we're like, okay. And then we pour ourselves into it. And no, it does not. It definitely does not.
William: Yeah, I've had many of the times I'm like, okay, I'm going to buckle down. I'm going to build a system and then ADHD will be fixed, and I can just be really productive and there'll be no more stress in my life.
Jessica McCabe: That's exactly what it was. I started my channel trying to get to that point. I was like, okay, well, it's fine. My brain works differently, so I have to do things differently, but I'll just learn all the things I have to do differently, and then I won't struggle anymore. And this is a lie. If anybody is still at the point in their own ADHD journey, that they believe that that's the way that this ends. Um, no, it's kind of like how in romantic comedies they lived happily ever after. Yeah, that's not how it works, though.
I talk about this at the end of my book and in the final chapter of how to change the world. No matter how many tools you have, you still have to use those tools. You have to pay for those tools. You have to fight for your ability to use them in the workplace or wherever you need to use them. And not everywhere is that tool accessible, right? I got to speak at the NSA and that was a really cool opportunity. But one of the things they were saying is, a lot of the strategies and solutions are phone based, and they can't bring their phones to work. So, there are times that we can't even use our tools or that, people expect us to “overcome our ADHD” and not struggle, but also they're upset if we do use the tools that we use. So that's another barrier.
I forget where I was going with that, but long story short, I think it's so important and so empowering to have these tools and have these strategies and have the understanding of how and when to use them, but it's also not enough. We need to live in a world that makes the world a little bit more ADHD-friendly, a little bit more accessible for us in general.
And thankfully, that's also something that can make it easier for everybody else too, because we are not the only ones who struggle as society likes to remind us, we don't have a monopoly on forgetting things or getting overwhelmed, or struggling with executive function or even having limited working memory. There are a lot of other people that struggle with it, and everybody's working memory is limited to some point. Everybody's got too much on their plate, right? It feels like right now. And so if we make the world more accessible to those with ADHD, we also make it easier for everybody else as well.
William: Absolutely. I love the idea that creating accessibility helps everyone because oftentimes, people are like, “Oh, should we just accommodate everyone?” And it's like, if we can, yes, absolutely.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah. There's a word for it, which is universal design. I first learned about this from an example of: consider curb cutouts in sidewalks. They make the sidewalk more accessible, or accessible at all to somebody in a wheelchair, because they can go up and down the curb cutouts, but it also helps people who are trying to move, or wheel luggage, or riding those dope little electric scooters. So there are a lot of things like that that can make the world accessible to somebody with ADHD, but also benefit everyone.
William: I've seen stuff with teachers talking about how they modified their homework policies for allowing late assignments. And it was such a stress relief for the other students as well. They're like, “Oh, this is just something I'm going to always do because it's good for everyone in my class.”
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, exactly. So that's the world I'm pushing toward now. I love having this toolbox. I love understanding how to use it. And it's really nice having options, because when I started my journey, I knew very little about my ADHD and I had exactly one tool. I had medication, and if I couldn't get my medication because I forgot to schedule another appointment for my doctor, or I didn't bring my prescription to the pharmacy, or I forgot to pick my meds up, or I didn't have insurance because I forgot to sign up for it, or whatever it was. I was, kind of just screwed, like that was my one tool and it was a really good tool, but it was my one tool.
So now I have all of these tools, all of which I include in the book, but it's really nice to now think, okay, great. Now I have these tools. I can do pretty much anything I want to do at this point. There are some things that I realized are not worth it for the amount of extra stress or extra accommodating I'm going to need to do for myself to do, but I can.
I, for the first time in my life, I feel like anything I want to do, anything I want to achieve, I have the tools to be able to do it. And one of the big things that I want to use my toolbox for now is making the world a more ADHD-friendly place so that we don't have to spend seven, eight years collecting all these tools and trying to figure out how to use them and how to pay for them and all of that. And the world can just be better for everybody.
William: That sounds like a great push forward from where your channel has been leading, because I know what people have learned from your channel, myself included. I remember very early on in my ADHD journey, seeing videos of yours and being like, “Oh, I need to share this with my wife so that she can understand what my brain is doing”, but it being this thing that, like, yeah, there's all these tools that we can use, and then what's our next step, so that we can really thrive with our ADHD.
Jessica McCabe: And that's it, right? Everything that I learned in this book, everything I've learned over the last seven years have helped me survive because I was drowning. And a lot of people with ADHD are drowning. We are really struggling to just survive. And we don't even get to think about thrive. You think about how it starts young, right?
Even elementary school kids are like, I don't get to go play with my friends because I'm just still sitting here trying to finish my homework. So I don't get to do the fun things. I don't get to do the things that will help me feel fulfilled and thrive because I'm just trying to meet basic expectations here.
And so everything that I put in the book was really about like, how do I just survive and meet basic expectations? You know, “basic”. Because they're not basic if you have ADHD, they're very neurotypical and often very challenging expectations. But how do I meet these expectations? And now I want to talk about how we can thrive.
I want to talk about how do we not just keep up, but how do we get a little bit ahead maybe, and get to relax and enjoy our life. And then maybe if we are behind on something, how do we still have maybe a little bit of time carved aside to just enjoy ourselves and our lives, right? And there's so many things that I'm dreaming big about right now.
I'm not exactly sure what direction I'll take the channel in the future, but I know that these are some big questions on my mind. Not just how do we do things, but what's worth doing and how do we make time for the things that are really important and valuable to us in this struggle to just get by, and how do we thrive?
William: Yeah, because it is a big deal for us to make time for the things that matter, because we have such a poor ability to prioritize a lot of the time, everything feels important, and then we're like, I'm going to keep getting to the things I have to do, or the important but not urgent things.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, we often don't get to these things, and part of it is because we feel so guilty for not meeting expectations. Because of our difficulties with time management, we can overpromise and then get ourselves into a situation where we're not delivering on what we said we would do.
And so then we kind of just throw everything else that's important to us out the window, so that we can deliver on these promises. And it's tough. I even found myself doing that at the beginning of the book. I thought I planned well. I'd given myself a couple weeks to write the first chapter, because it was like, a week to write the chapters after that, and then I had time to edit. I had breaks, I thought I planned really well, but when I went to write the first chapter, I realized, like, oh, it's not just that I need extra time to write the first chapter because it's the first chapter, I also need to plan the book, I need to know what structure the book is even going to be, so I had to do all this work, I was immediately behind schedule, like, immediately, and my first thought was, I'll just work nights and weekends.
I will catch up, right? I will just sacrifice my own well-being and everything so that I don't let somebody else down. I just remember thinking, that's not a good thought. That's not a healthy thought. So I had to talk to my therapist about it. We set some boundaries, and I think that's a lot of it, is setting some boundaries and saying, okay, look, I will work some extra nights and maybe one weekend day to try and catch up and make up for the fact that I did not plan well, but I can't sacrifice everything; that's not realistic and that's not fair to me.
William: It's one of the things that I know I deal with a lot, giving advice on how to talk and deal with your ADHD and then being like, but my ADHD is special and I can just push through and I don't need to do these things. Even though if someone came to me with this, I'd be like, here's what you should do, really step back and like, figure out what's important here. I'm like, well, what's important is that I don't disappoint anyone.
Jessica McCabe: It's so true. It's so true. How much do we just go through life trying not to disappoint people and then feeling terrible when we do? God, it's so accurate. I hope if anybody's listening to this, and resonating with it, you hear how ridiculous this is, but it's something that we still, as ADHD experts, get sucked into, especially because when you do have the tools and you do have the know how, it can be really tempting to be like, well, I should know better, I should be able to do this. You gotta watch out for those shoulds, man. I did put this in the book, it's not weird. If somebody with ADHD is struggling with ADHD-related challenges, it would be weird if they didn't, it would be weird if we didn't struggle to be places on time, it would be weird if we didn't get distracted during conversations, like that would be strange. Brendan Mahan of ADHD Essentials said something really beautiful to me the other day, which is that he gives himself permission to be neurodivergent, he gives himself permission to have ADHD, and as long as nobody's getting hurt, it's nothing he needs to apologize for. And I thought that was really cool.
William: Yeah, that's a really good thing. The number of times I need to remind myself, I have ADHD, that's why I'm struggling with this particular thing.
Jessica McCabe: It's not a personal or moral failing. It's not about, I'm not trying hard enough, or anything like that. It's just, it's tough. It's a tough condition to manage, and we're also trying to manage it with the same brain that struggles with executive function in general, right? So we're trying to accommodate our own executive function challenges with a brain that struggles with executive function.
And in many cases, we're trying to do that for our kids too, right? So you're trying to executive function for yourself and your kids with a brain that struggles with executive function. And so I know a lot of parents have a lot of shame to around, well, if I had just done this for my kid, or helped him set up the system and maintain the system, then they wouldn't be struggling as hard. But with what brain are you trying to do that?
William: Yeah. One of the things I've also realized is, I have to model struggling for my kids so that they know it's okay to struggle. That one's real hard. Cause you want to be the perfect parent, but that's also not realistic to do, or healthy developmentally for them to not see you as being like, I make mistakes.
I have to apologize to my kids. My daughter didn't get to go to an event she really wanted to last night. And I'm like, we're really sorry. We have people that are sick at home. We can't go to this thing, and we should have planned ahead to let you know that this might not happen.
Jessica McCabe: Oh, that's really nice. Yeah. Cause otherwise, what are you teaching them, that it's not okay to make mistakes and that you have to be perfect. And that's the only answer. Nobody's going to be perfect. Everybody's going to let somebody down. Everybody's going to struggle sometimes.
And so learning how to cope with it when it happens, I think is such a more valuable thing than to just not have it happen ever.
William: It'd be like giving myself the grace to be like, yeah, you're gonna make mistakes, and you don't need to hide them either.
Jessica McCabe: I saw a really good Instagram the other day, where somebody was talking about how we try to stay perfectly emotionally regulated, especially parents for their kids, try to stay perfectly emotionally regulated, and that's a losing goal, like you're not going to be able to. So instead it's like, okay, when you are emotionally dysregulated, noticing that and then figuring out how to get back to baseline, figuring out how to cope. Where do I go from there is a much more valuable skill than just trying to never get emotionally dysregulated. I'm trying to learn all these things because I am currently six months pregnant.
I'm about to have my own kid and I'm nervous about it. I'm, I have learned how to manage my own ADHD quite well. I do feel like I can accomplish anything that I want to accomplish at this point. But I know that kids are going to throw a whole, whole new wrench into the mix.
William: The most unexpected things where I'm just like, this was not something I foresaw or at all.
You know, when I tell my daughter, you need to clean your room. And she's like, “Well, why is your room so messy? And why don't you have to do that?” And I'm like, you're right. But also, clean your room.
Jessica McCabe: I have wondered about that. How do I hold my kids to expectations that I can't meet?
William: Yeah. Once they realize to question it, it's hard.
Jessica McCabe: I actually, I think I have an answer and I'm curious, cause you are a parent, if you think it would work. Saying, “I was not taught how to do this as a child and that's why I struggle so much as an adult. So I am here to ensure that you do learn these skills so that when you are an adult, you don't struggle as hard as I do.”
William: Yeah. When they get a little bit older and can rationally have the discussion, then sure. And, it's amazing just what they pick up on, and this is something that's important for them to understand. And I'm just so glad I can give my kids the tools to deal with these things.
So we were talking a little bit earlier about the difficulty with following through with your plans on that first chapter. And I was wondering about some of the other skills you were using to keep yourself on track while writing, because writing a book is a big project. And so it's very commendable that you got all the way through. I know a lot of people that, they do have those intentions, but it's just like, that's too much.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, I knew it was going to be a challenge, and this is actually the first long term project I have ever completed in my life, ever. Like I dropped out of community college. I didn't quite finish massage school. I've been married and divorced twice. Neither of those marriages made it more than a year and a half, and the process of writing a book was 15 months to write it. And then, I still had to do some copy editing and promoting and all of that, in the end, it's a two year project, right?
And I've never completed a two year project before. So I knew this was going to be a challenge and I understood my brain really well going into it. So that was helpful. I put a lot of supports in place, and I used many tools that I talk about in the book to push myself over the finish line of actually finishing it.
There were a few that I thought were really important. One of my favorites, which is when you plan a project, especially a long-term project that your brain's like, “Oh, I've got time”, work backward. So I knew what I wanted the finished product to be. And then I went, okay, in order for that to happen, what has to happen before it, right?
So in order to have a published book that I was proud of, well, I needed time to edit it, right? Okay, so I needed to build in that time. Well, in order to edit it, I had to have finished it, right? So I had to build in time to finish each chapter. But also I knew that I sometimes needed time to rewrite.
So I built in time, like weeks to write, weeks to rewrite, weeks to edit. And I also knew that I tend to hyper-focus, right? I have ADHD. And so I might get sucked in and work really hard, work long hours, and I needed to not die. So I plugged in four weeks off over the course of a year. I had a quarter and then a few months of working on the book and my channel and everything.
And then a week off, and then a few months, and then another week off. And I built those breaks in ahead of time and working backwards, I got to. Then, I got to, oh, shoot. If I don't start on this right now, then I'm going to end up in crunch. And I don't want that, right? At least, any more than I need to be.
By working backward, planning backward, I was able to kind of connect the dots and see how what I did or didn't do now impacted my ability to deliver a finished book, without dying, a year from now, right? And it was still tough because there were places where I still underestimated how long it was going to take me.
That's very common with ADHD. But I did get the book finished and I did accomplish everything that I wanted to do with the book. I turned it in a couple months late and then I took an extra month editing that my editor wasn't expecting, because there was a lot that I wanted to rewrite once I went back to look at it again, but I was able to get it done because I was able to see the path toward done. It wasn't just this nebulous thing that I needed to start on at some point. I very intentionally planned it out all out, but the other part of it was I had to add accountability because the farther away we are from a deadline, the less our brains are going to be like, “Yeah, I totally need to get started in this right now.”
So even though I had planned it out and I saw I need to finish this chapter this week. My brain was still like, “But do we? We could do something else and just make up for it. We've got like 11 months to catch up.” Right. I set up meetings with my editor and I told her, look, this is my process. I'm gonna learn a bunch of stuff for this chapter, I'm gonna brain dump everything out, it's gonna be garbage, it's not gonna make any sense, but I need to turn something into you every week that I'm supposed to be writing, or I won't do it. And so there are times where like, Monday, Tuesday, I wasn't writing a ton, Wednesday I wrote a lot because my deadline was Wednesday night.
Wednesday night I had to turn it over to the editor to review so that she could look at it Thursday morning before our meeting. So because of that accountability, I definitely stayed more on track with the plan that I made than I would have otherwise. So it was the planning, it was the accountability, and then keeping it interesting and exciting for myself.
So one of the big things that I did was I planned a couple of different writers retreats. I kicked it off with a cabin in the woods thing. I always thought it was a really romantic idea to go stay in a cabin in the woods and like lock yourself away and not talk to anybody and just like write.
So I invited my research consultant who is helping with the book to a cabin-in-the-woods-type retreat, and we just sat there for a week and brainstormed, like what is the most important information about ADHD that needs to make it into this book, and let's make sure that we have a chapter to capture all of those.
And so we just went chapter by chapter. I want a chapter on time management. Great. What do people with ADHD need to know about time? And we did some really cool stuff to hopefully make sure that it reached as many people as possible, where I would sit down, my research consultant is also a psychologist. I was like, let's say I come in and I'm a college student struggling and, you know, X, Y, Z. I only have one hour with you. I can't afford any more sessions. Teach me everything that you think I need to know about ADHD in an hour. And we would have little play sessions like that. It was super fun, right?
But having that variety of, sometimes I was at my desk at home working, but sometimes I got to go to a cabin in the woods, or we rented an Airbnb by the ocean at one point, to do these writer retreats, kind of mixed it up and kept me from getting bored. Gave me something to look forward to, and also made it so that there were these writing sprints too.
So if I hadn't written that much that week, I could get a lot done.
William: Awesome. And I think that sounds like such a great way to get through all of that because there is so much there that is, it's hard to follow through on those intentions, even for those things that we really want to do.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, this was really important to me, but if I hadn't put a lot of that stuff in place, I still wouldn't have done it. Because that's what it's like to have ADHD, right? You can care very deeply about something and it might look to other people like we don't care because if you cared so much, why didn't you get started on it?
But it's how our brains work. So we need these hacks. We need these strategies, and we need to put these extra tools in place that other people might not need, because that's what our brains need.
William: I think that's so key is that even things that we really want to do can be hard to get started on and follow through on, because I’m like, “Do I really want to do this? Yeah, I do.” Okay, let's figure out ways to make this happen. I can't rely on motivation and getting inspired to do it all the time. I sometimes I have to go through the hard process.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, and even still there were there were times where I was really discouraged, and I would have to go back and read an anecdote from one of the chapters that I'd already written, and that would give me the inspiration to keep going.
It was kind of nice. I did have the benefit of the book that I was writing helping me finish the book that I was writing. The further along I got with it, the more support I had in getting across the finish line, but it wasn't easy. And I didn't do it on my own. I think that's really important to know, too.
When I first started, I was really stubborn. Like, I want to write a book and I want to write it all by myself and yeah, I can talk to my research consultant and he can pull research for me, but I'm going to write it. I'm going to show myself that I can do this by myself.
And a couple of weeks in, I woke up one day and I went, I need Teresa. I need the person who helps me with some of my talks and stuff like that. I am being ridiculous. I wanted to do it on my own. Why? Like, what am I trying to prove? That people with ADHD shouldn't ever need help or ask for help?
And like, the accomplishment only matters if you did it completely on your own? No, we know that the best way to live as somebody with ADHD or any condition or even just being a human is to be effectively interdependent with other people. And for the areas where I was struggling, like with structure or pulling community quotes and keeping track of of those and reaching out to people, I needed support.
And so I ended up hiring a writing buddy who was amazing. I had my research consultant and a writing buddy. I had a lot of ADHD experts that I reached out to and would read parts of chapters, or ask them for their insights or input, or even an entire little section in the chapter. I'm like, I don't know anything about eating disorders. Let's reach out to Dr. Carolyn Lynch Parcells and see if she'll contribute something. And in the end, this was not an accomplishment of, I did it all by myself, but also it's done and it's good. And I don't think it would have been both of those things if I had tried to do it all by myself.
William: I think one of the most important things I've learned about ADHD is that not doing things by myself, asking for help, not only when I need it, but when it would make things better overall.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think about it that way in terms of accommodations too, or I think about accommodations that way as well, where it's like, can I do this without it? Like, sure. But there's a difference between “can” and “should” put the supports in place. And if it turns out you don't need them, then you don't have to use them. But I'm short. I use a stepstool. Could I climb up onto the counter without a stepstool and get things off the top shelf? Sure. But why, what's the benefit there?
William: Yeah, I didn't use the tool, but I did it. Okay. But use the tool and then have a superior result and don't get hurt.
Jessica McCabe: Right. Yeah, exactly. And those are really the two outcomes, right? And those are both worthwhile. One is you have a better outcome. Or two is you don't hurt yourself. Or at least, hurt yourself as much. I came out of this exhausted. But I'm okay. My brain's okay. I'm not burned out. I'm tired. I need a break. I would like to nap for a very long time, but I'm okay. I didn't kill myself to get this done or do any permanent damage to my brain or body in the process. And I think that the book also turned out better than it would have if I had tried to do it by myself.
William: Awesome. Well, I'm excited to get a chance to read it when I pre-ordered it the other night because, that's important for those, initial sales and stuff.
Jessica McCabe: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it really is. This is my dream. It's been my dream since I was, like, 12 years. I wanted to be a published author by the age of 15. I'm a little late to that party, but I am a published author. But now I really want this to be a bestseller, and pre-orders really help with that. I would be just super thrilled. I used to love to read. I still like to read, but it's a little harder for me now than it used to be when I was a kid. Um, and I think part of that is because books are not as accessible. There's a lot of long blocks of text that my brain kind of nopes out at in a way that younger books didn't have. But I remember reading all these best-selling books and it would be super cool to be a bestseller.
I'm proud of my book regardless, that would be amazing. And that's what I wanted from the beginning. I was like, I want this to be a bestseller. I want it to have all this information and help all these people. And I want it to be a bestseller. And it's very pie in the sky, I don't have complete control over it, but pre-orders do help make that happen. And it is possible. I'm getting to see the numbers come in, and it looks like it's going to be possible. So now I'm just like, let's hope. It's very exciting.
William: So do you have any favorite parts of the book or parts that you just think that are really going to resonate with people?
Jessica McCabe: There's some parts that I'm really proud of. There's a really cool story that I talk about in the book that came from my research consultant. His name is Patrick, Dr. Patrick LeCount. And he tells all of his clients a story about Coach A versus Coach B. Have you heard this?
William: Uh, no.
Jessica McCabe: Okay. I love it. He says, imagine an eight-year-old little girl and she's playing soccer and she's the goalie. And it's the end of the game. It's coming down to the final seconds and the other team takes a kick and she looks at it and guesses which way the ball is going to go. And she dives in that direction to block the ball and she got it wrong.
The ball goes the complete other direction, sails right past her right into the net and her team loses the game and she's kicking herself, right? She's super disappointed. Oh, man. And Coach A calls her over and goes, “What are you doing? Like, what's wrong with you? We went over this in practice. You knew what to do.” And he starts berating her. Well, the next time there's a game, maybe this little girl, she's gone home dejected, she feels terrible, the next time there's a game, maybe she says she has a stomachache, or doesn't want to go, because she felt so bad about how that went.
And then he goes, well, now imagine the same thing happens, it comes down to the final seconds of the game, the team takes a kick, she guesses the wrong way, and dives the wrong way, and the ball sails right past her, but now Coach B is coaching instead.
And he brings her over and he says, “Hey, come here.” And she comes over all dejected, feeling bad that she let the team down. And he says, “Hey, so if you want to know which way the ball is going, remember, look at their eyes. Look at where their eyes are looking and look at the direction of their foot. That will help you know which way they're going to kick the ball. You got that? You got this? Yeah, you got this.” And that's it, right. And she goes home and she still feels bad, but now she's got something different to try. And, you know, she might've been beating herself up, but nobody else was beating her up.
And so the next time there's a game, she shows up and she has something that she can try different. And so what he says to his clients is, if you wanted your kid to just have fun, which coach would you want them to have, Coach A or Coach B? And everybody's like, he seems more fun. And he says, okay, but what if you wanted her to go pro?
And still everyone chooses Coach B and he says, okay, but we often talk to ourselves as Coach A, like, what's wrong with you? You should have started sooner. We start beating ourselves up. And so when we do that, he says, ask yourself. What would Coach B say? And it's such a simple thing. It's such a cool brain hack.
And it was something that I personally used to get through the book because there were times where I was behind schedule or hated what I wrote. And that coach, a voice crept in like, what's wrong with you? Who let you do this? What do you, who, like, you've never written a book before. How could you think that, that you could pull this off?
I would go, what would Coach B say? “Oh, you've never written a book before, like you did your best to plan, but how? How could you have known how long it was gonna take you when you've never done this before? What can you do differently? Let's adjust the expectations with your editor, based on how fast you're actually writing versus how fast you thought you'd be able to write. Let's get out there. Let's do this.” You know, here, here are some things I could try differently. And you know what? The next time I needed to write, I showed up.
William: And we just want people showing up.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah. That's so much of it. So much of what we do when we berate ourselves makes it harder for us to show up the next time. And it's such a cool, simple switch. That's a cool, simple brain hack. Not that you're not going to beat yourself up. Not that you're not going to have that Coach A voice creep in because It's so common for us, right? Like, we've been criticized and corrected so, so many more times a day than our neurotypical peers, like that voice is going to creep in. “What's wrong with you. You're being lazy. You're stupid. You're careless.” Like you don't care. All of these voices creep in, you should have known better. You should have started sooner. It's going to happen. But when it does, just go, “Cool. What would Coach B say?”
William: Get reminded there's nothing wrong with us. We're sometimes going to need to do things a little differently. And sometimes we. Just need some reminders along the way to get where we're going.
Jessica McCabe: Yeah, but we need coaching, not criticism.
William: All right. Well, we're kind of coming up on time here. It's been a pleasure talking with you. And I’m just curious, any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with?
Jessica McCabe: Trying harder? Doesn't work. We know that, right? Like effort for us is not the problem. So trying harder is not the answer. I have found that it's much more helpful to try different. And I'm hoping that my book helps you do that.
William: Awesome. Well, people can find you on the web at How to ADHD pretty much everywhere. I imagine at this point, um, especially on YouTube.
Jessica McCabe: And you can find the book at HowtoADHDbook.com.
William: Awesome. And I'm going to encourage everyone to pre-order it because we do want this to be a bestseller. And I think it's going to be regardless, but I'm really excited to read it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jessica McCabe: Thank you so much for having me. This is a pleasure.