I’ve often thought to myself how nice it would be to able to skip the hard parts of some things - to just arrive at my goals. But unfortunately, there are some problems with this idea - let’s imagine that I went away for the weekend and I had someone come to my house and clean everything and get it all organized. This would be fantastic. I’m already on board for this idea. But I do wonder... how long would this state of immaculate cleanliness last. And I want to be clear here that I understand that a lived-in-house develops mess, you never escape cleaning indefinitely. But what I’m thinking about is how long until my built-in habits reduce the organized house into a clutter catastrophe again.
Because while the end result is an important piece here, it’s also important how I get there. If I want to have a more organized house in the long run I have to work on developing the habits that are going to naturally lead to that outcome.
On the other hand I don’t want to write off the easy path as only a bad thing. Remember, we can do hard things, but, and this is a big butt, we don’t have to do them in the hardest way possible. While just having an already cleaned house would be great it could also be paired with working on those habits that would help me keep it clean.
What’s important to grasp from this is that either way I still have to do the hard work of developing those habits.
Another easy example here is something like dieting - the reason that a shocking amount of dieting does not work is because many people view it as a short-term intervention and not a changing of habits. Sure I could do the Whole30 (and I have) but unless I am adopting that as my new lifestyle then you are quickly going to end back up where you were when you pick back up your old habits.
Part of the reward is the hard work itself. I know that doesn’t sound like the best incentive but of course, it gets easier the more you do it and there is also a certain satisfaction with completing something hard. One place this comes up for me is doing a workout, especially when I’m doing a hard one. It may not feel great the entire time I'm doing it, but when I’m done I usually feel pretty good.
And workouts also illustrate this idea of having to work to where you want to be extremely well. Imagine you wanted to be able to bench press 200 lbs and then I magic wand your muscles and voila you can bench press 200 lbs. But I’m not the best wizard so your muscles aren’t going to stay that way unless you maintain them. And since I’m not at a place where I was already maintaining those habits I’m going to have to suddenly start making them happen.
Because the truth is, the goal isn’t the hard part, it’s the habits and routines you have to develop to get there that’s the hard part.
Building off this idea as well I’ve also been thinking a lot about goal setting with the new year upon us. I’m going to borrow some ideas I got from the Lorax as I wander through these thoughts - many of our goals often revolve around how we can bigger and bigger ourselves. But the question I ask myself far too infrequently is “how can I make this more sustainable for myself?”
And I am shocked that I don’t. This feels like it should be an obvious goal-setting question, but too often we’re more focused on the biggering and biggering. And I think this is a key piece of our burnout because we’re not asking about that sustainability. It’s incredibly easy for me to look at 2022 and ask how I want to grow the podcast, but it’s an entirely different idea to ask how I can make making the podcast easier and more sustainable to do. Not how can make more episodes or even how can I make better episodes, but how can I make the same number of episodes but with less effort on my part? How can I follow through on my commitments even when I’m at low capacity? What can I do to refine my habits?
These aren’t the easiest questions to answer and I’m certainly still working on them, but they are absolutely worth asking. With ADHD we’re often more interested in the novelty of the new instead of how to make something sustainable. With ADHD we tend to gravitate towards routines once we find something that works, but we also tire of routine when it doesn’t offer enough novelty.
It’s also funny because I’ll often give myself stress when starting something new because I don’t know how I’m going to maintain it for literally the rest of my life... and yet I don’t think I have any routines or habits that have last more than a few months without heavy tweaking or completely changing.
But here’s a fun idea - we can keep novelty in our routines by keeping a core routine where we can switch parts out of. Think of it kind of like seasonality of routine - with planned changes. I wear clothes year-round, as I expect many of you do as well, but I wear different clothes depending on the season. We can think of some of habits and routines in a similar way where once the weather starts changing so does my daily routine.
Okay, this series has been entitled, "How to do hard things" so there really should be more how-to in here. We’ve covered what hard things are and that they aren’t always what we always expect them to be.
We know that we can theoretically do hard things - although, of course, we do love to argue that point sometimes - but history has shown us that we have in fact done at least a few hard things in the past - don't argue with me on this one, go back and listen to part 2 again if you need to.
But what about the nitty-gritty how do we get ourselves to do those hard things?
First, let's reframe that idea. As I mentioned early in this series, there is an inherent reward in doing hard things and so we can reframe having to make ourselves do these hard things as we get to do these hard things.
Of course, things that suck are still going to suck.
I'm not going to tell you that that parking ticket you have to pay is something that you need to be grateful for. Yes, we could go through the process of being grateful that you have a car or that you can think about what you learned from the situation. It's okay to be pissed off that you have to pay for that ticket. It's okay that you don't want to do it. What we can do though is still embrace that I get to do this thing and when I do it I get to go on to the next thing that I do want to do.
And then we have those hard things that we really can look to through the lens of gratitude - and this is even for those things that we don't necessarily want to do but are still pushing us towards our goals. I get to write that essay, it's just a stepping stone on my way to graduation. I get to wash the dishes because that's part of the process of having a clean house. I get to...
So why bother with this? Is it just semantics... well yes, but semantics matter, especially when our self-talk is involved.
One of the frustrating hilarious parts of ADHD is how we can really resent when people tell us what to do - perhaps I was getting up to do the dishes but then my wife asks me if I can do the dishes while I walking to the sink... well now I don't want to do them.
What? Brain, not okay.
But wait, it gets better.
We can also feel this way when we feel like we "have to" do something. Because it's not the words, it's the sense of obligation. It's our disconnection from our autonomy. So if I say I have to clean the garage, well that doesn't feel good. But if I get to clean the garage, that feel better... and if I can take it a little further, I get to clean the garage and I bet I'm going to find some cool stuff that I've forgotten about, well that's even better. And I bet I am going to find some cool stuff... I actually kind of want to go clean the garage right now. That's way more of a dopamine driver than I expected.
Again, I want to be clear, we don't have to do this for everything - I like looking for silver linings, but the implication of a silver lining is that something bad had to happen first.
There
And while we can do these hard things its important to realize that we don't have to do them in the hardest ways possible. Part of what makes certain things hard is that I'm trying to do them as if I were neurotypical - this is not a winning strategy and yet for so many things I have trouble breaking away from those patterns. Part of this comes from me just not realizing that "hey, maybe there's a better way for my brain to do this," but sometimes it also comes from me trying to prove that I can do things just like NTs. Writing that feels foolish, but I know that there is part of me that believes that if I just try harder that I can make myself do whatever I want.
Trying harder is a bad strategy. It's that same idea that we "just" need to focus. Whenever we're saying "just" it means that we're conveniently just ignoring a bunch of steps. There are things I can do to help get me focused, but saying "just focus" means that I'm not taking all those steps into account.
The same is true for trying harder, except perhaps more insidious because it implies that what we're doing already is working - and sure there are some situations where a little more force in a situation will make a difference, say I'm trying to get a zipper unstuck and need to apply just a little more pressure... although if I apply too much pressure I might just break things. Perhaps it would be better to backtrack and figure out where the snag is and try and fix things there.
Same is true of most of our other situations where we might think we just need to try harder. Yes, a little more pressure could theoretically fix some of them, but more often than not it's better for us to figure out where the snag happened and fix the issue there.
And this is where consistency comes up. Many of the hard things we want to do in life require us to be consistent, however, with ADHD we're often consistently inconsistent. If my solution is that I need to try hard to just do the thing then I am just setting myself up to fail over the long term because I'm not going to be able to keep trying harder forever.
When we're doing hard things the most important aspect is figuring out where our sticking points are and specifically where those sticking points consistently are. If I want to exercise more what's keeping me from doing so? Is it not knowing what to do? Do I not have the energy? Time? I just don't feel like it when it's on my schedule? Maybe you think it's going to be boring or you were going to go for a run and it's raining and you don't really want to get wet.
It's okay to have days where you miss things - the issue is when those days happen over and over again. Usually, there are some predictable patterns that show up and it's those patterns that we can address. But remember, it's not about trying harder or forcing yourself to do things.
And this mindset is incredibly important for us to develop because while we can know that doing hard things can be rewarding we often don’t see those rewards right away.
Increasing how much we exercise is a great way to help increase our energy levels throughout the day, but we’re not going to see that results after our first trip to the gym. Perhaps we want to start running and that first run, well, it’s hard. It doesn’t feel good. And the second one isn’t all that much better, but at least you’ve got an idea of what it’s going to feel like.
I did my first hard workout in a while in the beginning of the year and I had delayed onset muscle soreness for three days - that’s not a recipe for encouraging myself to get back into the gym right away... although I do kind of enjoy the aspect of being sore from a sensory seeking kind of way, but three days was a bit much.
This changing of mindset has been entirely what this series has been about so far because it really is that important. Our attitude towards doing hard things is the biggest indicator of whether or not we’re even going to attempt them. When we think a task is simply beyond us we often don’t bother starting, because why would we? So shifting our mindset becomes one of the most important aspects of doing hard things.
With that in mind we can get to a task or project with the right mindset and still find it hard to approach and this is where we can get into the nitty-gritty of doing hard things.
The first thing to do for any hard project is to start by breaking it down into its component steps. The smaller the steps we can break it down into the better, although eventually there are diminishing returns here. I could theoretically break down writing this episode to one letter at a time - not that useful - but perhaps starting with just the first sentence or idea could be helpful.
From these component parts we can then find where we think the hardest part is going to be. And it’s important to think about what makes it hard. Is that it is going to be the longest part? Or maybe it’s the most technical? Perhaps it’s the part that you have the least experience with or the part that you have the biggest emotional attachment to.
By identifying where you think you are going to have problems - for me one place I often have the hardest problems is when I don’t know how to do something. Fortunately, that’s often a very easy problem for us to solve, we just need to do a little research. There are plenty of resources out there to help us learn how to do things - from books to youtube to friends and family to just googling the thing.
But what can be more paralyzing here than not knowing what to do is not knowing how it’s going to turn out. Perfectionism is a common problem for people with ADHD - I even did an entire episode on it, episode 48 Give Yourself Some Slack: Perfectly Imperfect - go listen to that episode or maybe you noticed it was a recent rebroadcast - fancy that hun? but if you haven’t heard it yet, the basic gist is that when we engage in perfectionism we’re setting unrealistic standards on ourself. Standards that no one could ever meet. And I understand this isn’t something where we hear this and say, “oh well, in that case, I just won’t do it” - perfectionism is a coping mechanism that we develop to try and protect ourselves from criticism, so it is going to take a lot of work to overcome, but it is definitely something worth overcoming.
But getting started isn’t the only place that we can have trouble in doing something hard. Often hard things are more than just doing something once. While running a marathon is a hard thing, I’d argue that the training for that marathon is going to be the harder part. It’s the getting up and doing it again and again and again, that’s going to be hard. With ADHD it can be especially hard to stick with something as allure of our initial goal dampens and we start thinking about shiny new things.
Two keys here are making sure you know the why behind the goal and having some kind of accountability.
When we’re not connected to any reason for doing something it’s easy for us to give it up so it’s important when you’re starting out to figure out why you really want to do it. There could be countless reasons that you want to run a marathon from improving your fitness to bragging to your friends - the point is that it’s important to know why you want to do it before you start your training and to write down your reasons in a place that you can see it regularly. While it might feel like you’d never forget the reason when you’re starting... just remember you have ADHD and all the other important things we have forgotten.
Additionally having someone to support you through this process is important as well. For something like running a marathon having a running buddy will absolutely keep you on track, but you could also just have someone your checking in with. Accountability is a great way to keep yourself on track and is an essential part of my process when I’m taking on hard things.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Part of the reward of doing hard things is actually doing the hard things - this may seem glib, but when we’re building up our habits and routines the only way we actually build them is by doing the hard parts. We can’t skip to the end and expect to have picked up habits needed to maintain that goal.
We can reshape our mindset around the things that we “have to do” - we often rebel against the have to’s and so changing our mindset into things that we get to do can have a profound impact on how we approach doing those tasks.
Two of the best ways to get through doing hard things is to know your why behind what you’re doing and then having some accountability to help you follow through.
