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Hi, friend! I'll keep this short and sweet, because ADHD!
Whether you're newly diagnosed or have known for a century, Overachievers Anonymous: ADHD Edition is the podcast for you. Join me and my guests as we explore the latest research, share personal stories, and provide actionable advice to help you live your best life with ADHD.
Welcome to Overachievers Anonymous, A DHD edition. I'm Jamie Catino, a board certified occupational therapist, two times TEDx speaker and a DHD coach. Now let's talk about A DHD.
Hello, beautiful humans, and how the heck are you doing today? I am really excited about this episode. And the funny thing is, although we're gonna talk about how ridiculously high standards are making you burnt out in your job and all that, that entails, I this week was really thinking, oh my God, what have I not.
Talked about yet that I haven't talked about yet in 66 episodes, and I was putting this ridiculously high amount of pressure on myself to give you the most perfect episode where you have never heard any of this information before, even though you have a DHD, which means. Working memory can be hard, which means that you're gonna need to hear the same thing a few times before it really sinks in.
Even with all of that, I was thinking to myself, what the fuck am I gonna say this week that is actually going to add value to your life to where it makes sense that you are going to tune into this on your commute to work, or while you're doing the dishes, or whenever you listen to podcasts. And I think that's really fucking funny with what this episode is about this week.
So this is an episode for you. If you are a high achiever, a career driven person feeling burnt the fuck out. If that's you, stay tuned because this is gonna make a whole lot of sense to you and it's gonna add some value to your life. Okay, so this week we are talking about how your ridiculously high standards for yourself are burning yourself out in your job.
Here's the thing. You have been taught that you need the be the best. You can't just be adequate because just being adequate means that you're mediocre. Many of us have been taught in childhood that being average isn't good enough. Maybe you've been taught this by a caregiver, by teachers. For myself, I think where this comes in is not even necessarily.
From my parents because my mom was someone, she would tell me, you know, your best is good enough, but somewhere along the way I learned that my best is only my best if I am giving 100% of my mental health to it. My best is only my best if I have absolutely nothing to give after my best is only my best if I put 100% of my energy into that thing.
Okay. Taking away any energy that I need to take care of myself. Somewhere along the way I learned that that is my best, and I'm gonna take a wild guess that you, somewhere along the way, also learned that that is your best as well. We weren't taught that your best is the best that you can do without
sacrificing mental health. We weren't taught that if you'll have only have 30% to give and you give that 30% that you gave a hundred percent. So let's dive into this a little bit more, a little bit more into the origin, a little bit more into what happens when you have this mindset and what the fuck to do, and at least what the fuck to think about it and where to start to recalibrate.
So.
You were taught that the more that you produce the better. And what I see sometimes is not always, but sometimes, or me, for example, very much fell into this category. The underachieving kid that became the overachieving adult pipeline as a kid. Up until probably about eighth grade, I got mostly A's, um, I'd have a B here and there.
I remember getting my first C when I was in like fourth grade and freaked the fuck out. But for the most part, I was an A student with a couple B's thrown in there. But. Behavior wise, I was also the kid that spent a lot of time out in the hallway because I was being too disruptive. I was talking to too many people.
I needed to get up and sharpen my pencil sharp or sharpen my pencil, dating myself. I don't even know if there are pencil sharpeners in classrooms anymore. Probably not. But I was the person that. Teachers treated me like I was a bad student because of my behavior, because of having undiagnosed A DHD, not having accommodations, not having medications, not having the things that I need to be a human to be able to pay attention.
So growing up I thought, you know, I am, I'm bad at school. I'm not good at school. I can't focus. I can't X, y, z. I'm sure my thoughts were different as a kid. As a kid, I just thought, you know, I'm a big old failure fuckup. But what happened later on, especially in my career, I found out that I'm pretty good at what I do.
I found out that as a personal trainer early in my career, but even before I was done with my bachelor's degree, I found out, you know, you're good at sales. Um, you're good at. Connecting with people.
Later on, I got another sales position working at a university. I found out even more that I'm able to connect. I'm able to set appointments and make people feel comfortable. And I,
later on when I was hired to run an entire gym, I was not originally hired for that. I'll probably use that as, as an example in this episode later on when I talk about taking on more responsibilities than I was hired for. But what I learned is that in the workforce, I can actually do a pretty damn good job.
I can be someone that people rely on. I'm a really good problem solver. I am a loyal person. I will follow your rules as long as they make sense to me. Hello, autism. But I found out somewhere along the way and as a coach and as an occupational therapist too, that I'm really good at what I do, and because of that I took a sense of pride in it.
And it was a pride that I didn't feel as a kid, because as a kid, I never even felt what it was to be adequate. So therefore went all the way on the other side of it, found something that I am good at. Or a lot, quite a few skills that I'm good at and then ran with them. Why? Because when you grow up feeling like you are never adequate, it sets you up for an adulthood of figuring out a way to be a whole lot more than adequate because for the entirety of your life, or until you do a lot of this deep work, you are searching for, when am I going to fucking be good enough?
So. Before getting into the tactical, what do you do if you find yourself in this situation? I just wanna iterate that being in that position isn't something that you consented to. Because here's the thing, you didn't consent to being born with A DHD, you didn't consent to having a disability. You didn't consent to the way that your caregivers or your teachers treated you.
And you might be listening to this with a little bit of resistance thinking. Yeah. But they did their best. And maybe they did, and maybe they did. But we're talking about you. We're not talking about them. And how this is internalized will affect your adulthood until you recognize it, until you deconstruct it, and until you do differently.
So what happens when you become the overachieving adult after being the what felt like less than adequate child? Well, in the workforce, you.
End up saying yes to responsibilities that are not yours. Why? Because you find what you are good at and fill the holes in anywhere you can. For me, for a long time it was to be seen as good enough. It was to be recognized by somebody else. Hey, you are doing a good job, and how do you get recognition? By going above and beyond that is something that has be been beaten into us for a long time, hasn't it?
Go above and beyond. Be the best. Do the best. You can't be average, you can't be mediocre. So what do you do? You get hired for a job and for the first three months or so, while you are getting acclimated to that job, you maybe stay within your job description because everything is new. You are learning the entirety of those first few months.
And then what happens? You start saying yes to things outside of your job responsibilities,
and you keep setting the bar higher and higher and higher and higher for yourself. Now I believe that this is in part because of how the A DHD brain is wired. You are a dopamine seeking human because your brain does not have a do enough dopamine in it as it is. So what's one way to get that? Well, by seeking out new challenges that work that might not be yours to figure out.
By getting in at a girl or at a boy or at a person when you do something Well, so what happens is that you keep setting the bar higher for yourself
to the point where it is not human. For anybody to get that amount of work done within an eight hour period, let alone somebody that has a disability that affects attention. Which affects so many parts of your life.
And the next part is what's heartbreaking because then you tell yourself that you're not capable of maintaining a nine to five job with without burnout. And I know that this feels true. I was in this position before where I felt like, you know what? No matter what I do, I can't maintain a nine to five job.
There's no way for me to have any semblance of my mental health and have a nine to five job or a successful business. I,
but in actuality, you have set yourself up. You have standards that you have set for yourself that nobody would be able to live up to that is humanly impossible. And because boundaries are hard, you continue to take on more work, becoming everyone else's solution to their problems. Does this resonate? I'm gonna take a wild guess that if you are still tuned in that this probably still resonates with you as a high achieving A DHD human.
So if you're in this position where you're feeling incredibly burnt out, it's time to be very honest with yourself. I want you to take some inventory and I want you to look, when you're making these observations, I want you to go into it as objectively as possible. Depersonalize yourself. Take yourself out of the situation and imagine that the person that you are.
Analyzing is, I don't know, Jennifer, Christine, I don't care. Pick a fricking name. You're analyzing that person. Now you're looking at what their job description is and what they are doing on a daily basis. You're looking at the people that they're managing versus the people that they should be managing.
You're looking at the people who are coming to them for solutions versus who they're actually appointed to be in a leadership position for. So you're gonna take a really good look at their job description and if they are taking on everybody else's responsibilities, again, I'm saying they, because we're looking at your job, but we're taking you out of it.
Sometimes it can be really helpful to look at yourself as an outsider, to be able to analyze.
The next thing you're gonna look at is these standards that you are setting for yourself. Are they realistic? Are they realistic? And are you outperforming others in the same job or the same career? This might be a little bit more challenging to do if you are the only person in that position. Let's say that you're a director of something and maybe you're the only director of something.
But then again, go back to what your job description actually is. Who are you supposed to be leading? What is your busy bee work and what are you doing outside of all of that? We oftentimes find ourselves as a high achieving a ADHDers. We'll find ourselves filling in the holes for other people when it's not ours to fill.
So be honest with yourself. Are you doing that now? If you are doing that, it's time to refocus on what your job tasks actually are. And if you're having a really hard time prioritizing, what the heck should I even do to start my day? Because there's also a lot of people who set these unrealistic expectations for themselves, have a whole backlog of work.
Oftentimes these are people that I are hiring me because they have a lot to do in a small amount of time because it was hard to get those job, those tasks done. But also, they're the same people who set incredibly unrealistic expectations for themselves. So. You've heard this before, you're gonna hear it again.
This is a time to refocus on what actually is in your job description. Start with the most pressing matter that needs to be done as soon as possible, and then give yourself permission to do a shitty job to get that thing done. Because 99% of the time, when you do a shitty job as an overachieving human, you are doing an adequate job.
And after you do an adequate job for long enough and find out that nobody. It's going to die and nobody's job is on the line. It allows your nervous system to exhale and know that you can do just an adequate job the next time as well. Now, the fourth thing I want you to think about and an action step that I challenge you to do is to start setting boundaries at work when something isn't your job and they're asking you a question or to solve a problem.
Acceptable answers are, I don't know, that's not in my wheelhouse, or refer them to the person whose job it actually is. I don't care that that person is not adequate. If it is not your job, it is not your freaking job. Now you're in a little bit of a different position if the person that you're managing or leading is.
Your responsibility to get up to speed and they're not doing their job, but that's an episode for another day of knowing when someone isn't right for the job. And you might have to take some action on it, but I'm talking about someone coming to you to solve issues that are not yours. It's okay to say, yeah, I don't know.
That's not in my wheelhouse. That's not for me to figure out. I wish I could help you. Getting comfortable with those words is going to save you so much in the long run. It can save you your job because burnout will steal your time. It will steal your energy, it will steal your motivation, and it can cause burnout.
And if you let that go on long enough, eventually it's going to feel damn near impossible to continue working a full-time job, which is why it is imperative to make progress. Deconstruct these inner beliefs so that you are able to make these changes in your career so that you can enjoy your career without it's stealing all of your time and energy.
Because what the fuck is a career if you don't have the time or the energy or the capacity to even feel like a human after working all day? All right, my friends, I hope that this was helpful to you. If you have a moment. Rate and review this podcast. When you rate and review this podcast, it helps to push it out to other people who may not be able to find this information otherwise.
All right, my friends. Talk to you next time. Bye now.
I'm an occupational therapist. Turned a DHD coach for overachieving. Perfectionistic. Brilliant, but burnt out. A DHD humans. Are you curious about my one-on-one coaching schedule a free consult link is in the show notes, or go to out smart A DH d.co. I'll see you next time.