ADHD & Change: 3 Things You Must Know Before You Can Change Your Life (Season 2, Ep. 15)

Lacy Estelle [00:00:00]:

Hi, guys. Welcome to an ADD woman podcast with Lacy Estelle. This is a podcast where we talk all about being a Christian woman living with ADHD. ADHD. Full disclosure, guys, just so you know, which you probably can already hear some random weird background sounds, I am recording this. You've been listening to my podcast for any length of time. You know that I'm a mother of 5, and I am recording this with the smallest human In the background, he's, of course, in a play saucer. He's got about a 1000000 toys surrounding him, but he will drop them, press buttons on them, or whatever.

Lacy Estelle [00:00:33]:

But, hopefully, you can just kind of listen through it. I know if you are listening and you have ADHD, you might be thinking, that's gonna be really distracting, and I apologize ahead of time. Just one of those things where I've not been able to get time completely to myself to record lately. So We're just gonna do this, and we're gonna do it with, an entourage. So this episode, I want to talk about it it's gonna kinda talk a little bit about my mentorship, what it is, what I'm doing. But the primary thing with the mentorship, I want, anybody to take away because the The main thing I try to focus on with the mentorship. I'm not trying to sell you on a new business method. I'm I'm not trying to sell you a book or tell you how to live your life.

Lacy Estelle [00:01:22]:

I'm not doing that. What I have found as a woman with ADHD in adulthood that I can make the most progress in whatever my goals may be. That could be losing weight. That could be starting a business, flourishing a business. That could be just changing my mindset, going back to school, keeping my house clean, getting on a budget. Any of those simple things, right, that seem simple to the rest of the world, but for whatever reason for us, they seem really, really difficult. The Best way I have found to be able to do that is to just have somebody come alongside me and remind me why I'm doing what I'm doing. And that doesn't always look like a coach or a therapist or anything like that.

Lacy Estelle [00:02:08]:

Honestly, it looks like a friend. But If I were to tell you guys that I want you guys to sign up to be my friend, I think that you would all think I was a little weird, and that's okay because some friendships, okay, some more than others, have a push pull dynamic to them to where, you know, One person is kind of always pushing along the other person and helping them in ways that maybe they can't help themselves. But, also, It's a matter of when you start with friendship, you really start with love and acceptance and understanding. And I find that that's one thing that I find is lacking in a lot of the coaching settings or even in a therapist point of view because The person who's talking to you is not a two sided relationship. It's a one-sided relationship. The person who is being coached is usually explaining to the coach what they're dealing with, and the coach is saying, okay. Do this, this, this, and this. Or in a therapy setting, it's, Okay.

Lacy Estelle [00:03:07]:

These are my goals, and they're like, okay. We're gonna talk about this first, then we're gonna talk about this, and I wanna know more about this. And as you work through those things, I'll help you move towards your goals. But you don't actually get to sit down and relate to the person because therapists, at least most of therapists that I know, They're not gonna sit down and say, oh, you know what? This one time, I was dealing with this and this happened and that's how now some really awesome therapists, They're really good at that, and they are able to kind of bring in this component of empathy with the therapy that they're trying to do with their clients, but it's pretty rare. Now I'm not a therapist, and I'm not a coach. I mean, maybe I could be a coach someday, but I don't really want to be a coach. And the reason for that is is because I find that, especially people with ADHD, is is we don't stay motivated by somebody just telling us what to do. We don't.

Lacy Estelle [00:04:03]:

We only stay motivated to do things if we understand why we are either choosing not to do them or why we should choose to do that. So let me give you an example. Way back when I was still in my 1st marriage, I got I gained a lot of weight, And I was really unhappy with the way my body looked, and I was really unhappy with how I felt every day. This is also before I even knew I had ADHD. When I realized what I was doing to my body and what I was putting in my body, first off, the first thing that had to happen for me to make a change was I had to get tired. I had to get tired of being tired beyond being tired. I also had to get to a point to where I was tired of looking in the mirror every day and, you know, doing my hair and doing my makeup and still not liking the way that I look or how heavy my face had gotten or full my face had gotten. I just I didn't I didn't like it, and I felt tired all the time.

Lacy Estelle [00:05:07]:

I didn't have energy. I I just thought I don't know what to do. And I remembered that way back when I was in high school, coming from a perspective of I wasn't trying to lose in high school, but I wanted to eat better. I wanted to have more energy. And I remembered that in high school, a friend of mine lost a bunch of weight, And it was really, really exciting for a lot of people because, you know, as students, you see these people all the time. And so when somebody loses a lot of weight, most everybody notices. And, I asked her, I said, what are you doing? And she said, oh, I I read this book. So, of course, I was like, well, I don't necessarily wanna lose weight, but I really wanna I got this book because it totally changed her life.

Lacy Estelle [00:05:48]:

So that's what I did. I went and read that book, and I remembered that after reading that book, it became almost easy to me to change my habits because I knew information that I didn't have before. So when I decided to lose weight and I During my 1st marriage, I told myself the same thing. I thought, you know what? The last time that I was really good about how I ate, I read a book about food, about nutrition, and it enabled me to have the tools to be able to grow that part of my self discipline, to choose something better. And so I went to I went to Meijer. I live in the Midwest. If you are listening anywhere else in the US and you're not in the Midwest, you probably have never heard of Meijer. But it's just it's just like a Walmart, but it's only up in, like, I think, Ohio, Kentucky, whatever.

Lacy Estelle [00:06:41]:

Of course, this is a tangent. Anyway, I went to Meijer. They have a book section. I looked in, like, their nutrition and dieting section, and I picked up the book, The Virgin Diet, and it's written by a woman named JJ Virgin. That's why it's called The Virgin Diet. It's It's not to do anything to do with purity. In her book, the basics of her book, she talks about high inflammation eating, and high inflammation food. And the response that your body has when you're eating these these foods that are not very good, her Her mantra was drop 7 foods and drop 7 pounds in 7 days.

Lacy Estelle [00:07:17]:

And at first, I didn't believe her. Right? But I kept reading. And as I read, I gained more knowledge, and I gained more knowledge. And then all of a sudden, I couldn't look at the foods she was telling me were so bad for me. I couldn't look at them the same. It was really, really difficult for me because I would see them, and all I could think of was all the terrible things that, that they do to my body. Now there's a trick to this and it it doesn't work for everybody in that aspect and I can tell you why. Because there are 3 components that you have to have to be able to make a real change in your life.

Lacy Estelle [00:07:51]:

You have to have the knowledge as to why you want to make the change. Okay? So for me, in this instance, it was I knew I did not wanna feel the way that I was feeling anymore. So I had a why I wanted to make the change, but then I also had to have a why to make the change. So every time I reached her food, I had to know why I was choosing having a cucumber tomato salad over having a doughnut or why I was choosing to eliminate things like gluten, dairy, and soy instead of just eating peanut butter and jellies, you know, 4 times a day and trying to cut calories. I had to understand why Every choice I was making about my food, why I was doing it that way. Now I have found that this part tends to be key for a lot of ADHD people, and it's because the last portion of making change as an ADHD person is accountability. Now Here's the problem. We, as ADHD people, we don't like accountability.

Lacy Estelle [00:08:56]:

We want to avoid it at all costs. We don't like it when people point out to us that, you know, we said we're gonna do something and we're struggling to do it. We hate it. And the reason for that is is because we get this perfectionist mindset that if we're not doing everything exactly the way that we're supposed to do things, we're not doing it at all, which is really not true. And if you really wanna dive into that, you'll have to go back a couple episodes. I can't remember exactly which episode. I know I talked about it. I think there might be an episode about perfectionism, and I talked about, you know, things are not as black and white as our brains try to tell us.

Lacy Estelle [00:09:30]:

But, anyways, so when you are understanding why You are reaching for everything. The accountability aspect only helps if you are willing to embrace that accountability. Now for me, change came when I was willing to embrace the accountability. My husband at the time, was not somebody I could use as an accountability partner because we were already struggling just to get along as it was. Because of that. I had to go to somebody else for the accountability, and at the time, I had a really good friend and we were really close. And I basically told her what I was trying to do. I didn't read to her the book, but I explained to her, like, what the book was talking about.

Lacy Estelle [00:10:12]:

And so even though she was not necessarily on the same and pages me as far as, like, wanting to cut out all these foods. Right? She knew deep down that this is something that was really important to me, And she could see that maybe if I could get on the other side of my lack of self esteem, but maybe it would just kind of open a lot more doors for me. Right? So when it comes to making change in your life And the reason why I chose to do a mentorship instead of, you know, to offer coaching to people is because what I find is lacking in coaching is the why, the understanding why you are doing everything that you're doing from both a past point of view and also from a future point of view. So you come to me and you say, hey. You know, I just really struggle with regulating. I really struggle with, you know, being able to regulate, like, my mood. Some days, I feel like my You know, feel like I have a bunch of energy and I'm happy and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and there's other days where it just feels like it's cloudy and gloomy and I don't wanna do anything. So with a mentorship, you come to me and you say, you know, I really I really have this bad habit of not being able to regulate myself, and I don't really know why.

Lacy Estelle [00:11:26]:

I don't know what the reason is why I can't seem to manage, you know, my mood every day. And I'm gonna sit down with you, and I'm gonna I'm going to talk to you like a friend. I'm not gonna talk to you like somebody who knows everything or somebody who knows exactly how to fix your problem or somebody who right away knows what is best for you because that's not what this is. As a mentor, my goal is to get to know you first, to understand kinda how you tick, you know, why it is that you have gotten to the place that you have, and then to really get a better understanding as to what your goal is with having the accountability aspect that you're willing to take on through the mentorship. I think it's really important to do that. I think that so many ADHD coaches, they miss that mark. They miss it by a mile. And when you miss getting to know the person on their level and understanding their perception of themselves, their perception of me, their perception of what they're capable of.

Lacy Estelle [00:12:35]:

Only then can you really help somebody implement change. So my mentorship is not cut and dry. Now I am going to I'm actually adding right now some mini courses to it, some quick 10 minute, video tutorials that you can listen to via audio or not. And in those tutorials, I just kind of walk you through some 10 minute mindset questions so that you can get to know yourself better. One thing that I find most ADHD people or most ADHD women specifically are struggling with is being honest with themselves. If you can't be honest with yourself, you can't embrace change. Because if you're not honest with yourself, you don't actually recognize what you need to change, and you also aren't recognizing how people actually perceive you. So when you sit down with me and we do all of this And, yes, there's courses and things like that that are gonna be part of the membership that you'll be able to go through at your own pace whenever you want, Hit the 10 minute listen button when you're in the car, whatever, and you can just take it as you want, and then we'll work through the things that you're working through in each of your sessions.

Lacy Estelle [00:13:43]:

I'm not telling you about this because this is something that I I want everybody who listens to my podcast to buy. I'm telling you because even if you don't come to me to help you through the changes you wanna make, whether that's next year, whether that is at the end of this year or in 3 years. I don't care. I want you to understand the components that you need to look for when it comes to being able to really make change in your life. One of the biggest components is going to be understanding yourself, understanding why you make the choices you do. Now there's so many gurus out there, so many self help gurus out there that are that will say, oh, you have to know your why. You have to know your well, you know what? That is way too generic to understand what they're really saying and how to actually apply it to your specific circumstances. Chances.

Lacy Estelle [00:14:35]:

If you're struggling, maybe you're struggling with your relationship, or maybe you're struggling with the relationship with your kid. I am currently struggling with my relationship with my kids, and different aspects with each of them. And when I look at the problems that we have, my struggle to be consistent with my requests of them in the evening, my struggle to be available to them as much as I possibly can be while also still finding ways to provide for them and also having children that are, you know, 7 months all the way up to 14 years. When I look at all that and I have to get really honest with myself, I can see the flaws. I can see the problems that need to be fixed in what I'm doing in the mentorship or what I'm working through with some of the clients that I already have in the mentorship and then ones that, you know, will listen to this podcast and say, yeah. I think I want I think I want that. That's the kind of house that I could actually use. What I'm doing is I'm finding a way to look at the big picture, and then I'm filling in the holes where I feel it's necessary to fill in the holes because it's not all one size fits all.

Lacy Estelle [00:15:37]:

When it comes to my parenting, One thing that I worked through years ago was yelling. Oh my gosh. I would lose my mind in the morning because it felt like if I did not create this sense of urgency in my children by yelling at them, they did not move at all. There have been countless years where my oldest has had several tardies, and I really can't tell whether it is, you know, the chicken or the egg, which came first, whether it's his fault entirely or my fault entirely or both of our faults combined overall. Okay? Him being late in the past was such a source of stress for me that I used to just freak out in the mornings. And guess what? It did not make a difference. It didn't make a difference, but I would lose it. And then the other problem that would happen is all of a sudden, I realize at some point, me and my poor kids, they have to go off to school every day knowing their mom is mad at them.

Lacy Estelle [00:16:38]:

You know? Now the good thing about having somebody there for you that you can be accountable to, that you can talk to is they can give you perspective, and they can give you perspective in a way that helps you actually realize Some of the things that really seem like not a big deal, for instance, for me, yelling at my kids in the morning. I didn't really think about it as a big deal until my mother pointed out to me, and she's like, you know, it really sucks for the kids to have to start their day with somebody yelling. Now my ADHD wanted to go, why do you gotta make me feel bad about it? Well, you know what? Sometimes, like I've said in a previous episode, sometimes feeling guilt is good. Shame is a different spiral, and you have to move away from that. And that's what I was feeling like. I was feeling ashamed. Like, she would say that to me, and I feel like, you just Punch me in the gut. Clearly, I'm just not a good enough mom.

Lacy Estelle [00:17:29]:

Okay? That's not true. What she's telling me is she's saying The kids are never gonna say this to you, so I'm pointing it out to you. It sucks for them to have to go to school every day with their mom yelling down their throats. Who wants to start their day that way. And because of the type of person that I am, and not everybody is this type of person, k, but the Type of person that I am is somebody that is always wanting to improve. I'm always wanting to grow. I'm always trying to get On the other side, how can I do it better? How can I do it better? And parenting specifically is definitely something that I've applied that to. And because of that, I was able to say, okay.

Lacy Estelle [00:18:06]:

I feel really bad. I feel really bad about this. What can I do about it? The only thing I could do about it was to cease yelling altogether. What would that look like for my kids? How would that look if I did that? And then in those moments, when I want to yell, what can I do differently? Because it's not like those moments are just gonna go away. You're gonna change your behavior or your perspective about your circumstances or any of those things. In all of the things that stress you out and all of the things that you were dealing with a different way. They're not going away. When you reframe your mindset and you can get like I said, you can actually step back, Take a look at the bigger picture and then fill in the holes 1 by 1, 1 problem at a time.

Lacy Estelle [00:18:49]:

Deal with 1 stress at a time, 1 trigger at a time, 1 thing at a time, one goal at a time. That is when you start to make huge strides to doing the things that you want. And the other great thing is is this mentorship, I don't want you in it forever. Lee, I want you out of it. I want you to come on board, talk to me, do a couple 1 on ones with me, tell me your goals, tell me what you're wanting, and then let me help you sort through the messy stuff and not because you're paying me. Do I have to require payment for this? Yeah. Because it takes up my time, and it takes up your And quite frankly, what I have found is you're not gonna commit to something that you're not paying for. No offense, but I do it too.

Lacy Estelle [00:19:30]:

Right? There there's a sense of urgency because I have committed something, and I've also put my money down on it and said, I'm going to do this. I don't want you to do any of that because I want you to. I want you to do it because you want to. I started this podcast actually, I started my blog and my content and all that fun stuff ADH years years ago because I told myself I was gonna be, like, the next Rachel Hollis. Right? These days, I don't even listen to Rachel Hollis anymore because, Well, I don't really agree with her on everything. Right? And the more I think about it, the more it's funny to me how I have been resistant to a lot of the things that God's called me to. I'm not gonna be resistant to this anymore because if you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking to yourself, I really do. I I want I wanna change something, but I have no idea what I need.

Lacy Estelle [00:20:13]:

And if you've read every single self help book out there, you've read you maybe you've read Rachel Hollis, maybe you've read Girl Wash Your Face, or you've read, you know, driven to distraction, or you've read, oh, I don't know, all of the ones that are in Barnes and Noble. I mean, I used to have a whole stack, and it doesn't seem to matter how hard Heard you try. How persistent you are with your approach and with trying to implement the things in there. You just you get to the end of it, and you're just like, screw it. I'm not gonna try anymore. I don't know why this doesn't work for me, but it doesn't work. And I can tell you why. Because you have ADHD, and you're sitting where I used to sit.

Lacy Estelle [00:20:50]:

And I used to sit there, and I used to tell myself the same things. I'm never gonna get this. I'm never gonna figure this out. And guess what? I have. But the great thing is is I'm not perfect, and I'm never gonna expect you to be perfect. All I wanna do is hold your hand and remind you how absolutely capable you are of doing the things you want to do even with the brain that you have. So That's where I'm gonna end this episode. I hope that it resonated with you.

Lacy Estelle [00:21:17]:

I hope if nothing else, I just hope that you took away from this episode that you now know what it is maybe that you need to really ask yourself so that if you want to make change in your life, you can. ADHD. Now there are lots of practical ways to deal with ADHD, and that can range from medication to therapy to occupational therapy, to sensory input, to all sorts of different things, and that's fine. All I want you to think about is who do you want to be? Who do you wanna be next year, tomorrow? Who do you wanna be to your kids? Who is it that you want to be? And then if you're not that person yet, Or if deep down inside of you, you're like, I am that person, but for whatever reason, my actions do not match up with who I wanna be, then You're not asking yourself the right questions, so start asking yourself the right question. Okay? I'll talk to you guys really soon. Have an awesome week. Bye for now.