Unlocking the ADHD Entrepreneur Full Potential
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 23rd, 2023
In today’s episode, I want to dive into the intriguing connection between ADHD and entrepreneurship. If you’ve ever wondered how they relate, this episode is for you.
Here are seven essential strategies for ADHD entrepreneurs:
- Nutrition: Your diet matters. Avoid potential triggers like gluten to improve focus.
- Exercise: Channel your energy through physical activity for mental clarity.
- Sleep: Prioritize quality sleep for mental health and focus.
- State Management: Control your emotions with techniques like breathing.
- Biological Priming: Influence your biology positively during stressful moments.
- Environment Design: Set up your workspace to minimize distractions.
- Gamification: Turn tasks into engaging challenges to boost focus.
By mastering these strategies, you can harness your ADHD superpowers for entrepreneurial success without medication.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The key to performing at your best is to operate from a state of calm and directed focus. It’s very important that you show this calm, collected poise throughout the engagement to give them nothing to latch on, to give them no hope.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
One of the things I’ve noticed now that I’ve been in business for many, many years and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out around other entrepreneurs and founders, is that ADHD is very prevalent within entrepreneurship. And I think the reason for that is the skills that come from being a person with ADHD lend itself very well to thriving in the chaotic environment that is business like. Creativity, curiosity, the ability to get hyper focused and obsessed on things, the ability to pattern, recognize, to be able to process things very quickly, to be able to pivot and adapt. These are all things that people with ADHD tend to do very, very well. And so it’s not surprising then it seems to be like this self selecting bias for ADHD entrepreneurs to succeed in business. I’ve seen this over and over. But with that said, there are also other aspects of business that the ADHD mind is not well suited for at all. And it’s a real struggle.
Anthony Vicino:
Like the organization, the attention to detail these things can be really problematic. The meetings, the schedule, the routines, all those things. And so the other day, somebody DM’d me and they asked me like, hey, what resources do you have that have helped you overcome ADHD? And I wanted to talk about seven things in particular that I think every ADHD CEO or founder or business person, entrepreneur, whatever you want to call yourself, these are seven things that if you can figure these out, you can manage your ADHD without medication and you can tap into your superpower more consistently, rather than finding yourself on the other side of the ADHD spectrum where you’re just frustrated because you can’t self motivate, you can’t stay on task, you are constantly getting distracted and you’re feeling overwhelmed. So these are seven things. Get these nailed down. I think you’re going to be doing all right. Number one is nutrition. It’s got to start.
Anthony Vicino:
This is super surprising to me because I have never been a nutrition freak. I just eat garbage. I have always eaten garbage. I’m like a pig. But what I realized last year when I started working with my personal trainer, Phil Daru, he put me on a nutrition plan with a very particular macro split. And in there, we cut out a lot of things. We cut out dairy, we cut out gluten, we cut out pretty much everything that could cause inflammation. And what I came to realize was that so many of my ADHD symptoms were exacerbated by certain elements of my nutrition, in particular gluten.
Anthony Vicino:
And there’s a lot of research to suggest that gluten does exacerbate the symptoms of ADHD. And so reducing that one thing in my life had a massive effect in giving me more energy and giving me more clarity of mind consistently throughout the day, more discipline as well, like more willpower to be able to execute towards my goals. I found that very, very interesting because I had always been kind of the guy who laughed at the people who are like, oh, I’m gluten intolerant. And it turns out I might be gluten intolerant. So number one, get your nutrition figured out. I think that’s a super easy hack. Number two is exercise. You need to tame your body, get that energy focus in a particular direction.
Anthony Vicino:
The best way that I know how to do that is through steady state cardio, through getting your heart rate up and then doing strength exercises. Getting those three things figured out and moving your body consistently throughout the day is the best way that I know to maintain mental health, mental clarity, and high energy levels throughout the day, bar none. Nutrition, exercise, those are the two easiest wins. Not to say that they’re easy, but the easiest of all the things that we’re going to talk about, the third on the list is sleeping. And if you combine these things, nutrition, exercise, and sleep, these are what I call my three levers of energy. These are the three things that are really going to dictate the quality of your focus throughout the day, your energy levels. And so getting good sleep, it’s becoming very almost cliche. Now.
Anthony Vicino:
The hustle culture conversation has really swung the other direction on that pendulum where people used to be like, oh, you have time to sleep when you’re dead, and you should wake up early, and all this stuff. Now people are starting to understand, like, no, sleep is super important, and if you want to be at your best, you need to get enough sleep. And I think that’s particularly important for people with ADHD who can really struggle to sleep sometimes because your mind is so active, your body’s so energized, it can be really hard to get in bed, stay in bed, and so figure out what is that routine and those things that you can implement into your life that help you sleep more. That’s the key. Get better sleep. I did some podcasts on this before just breaking down my sleep routine, because last year, Jamie and I, we spent a lot of money getting this dialed, a lot of time, money and resources getting this aspect dialed in. And I’m finally at a point where I think my sleep is okay for a period. It was great.
Anthony Vicino:
Now it’s come back down. So I need to get rededicated to it. But go listen to that podcast episode. All right. Number four is state management. And what I mean by state management is a lot of times the manifestations of your ADHD are born from the emotions, the energy that you have in any particular moment. So anything that you can do to help prime your state and put you back into a better place is going to help. Now, what I mean in this instance of state management, though, is to recognize that your body, your ability to focus, your ability to execute and do things is a result of the chemical reactions that are happening inside your body at any given moment.
Anthony Vicino:
And very often our emotions and our focus follow from our physiology. So there’s things that we can do to manage our state that help put us into that place. And one thing in particular I’ll put in front of you that’s been very helpful for me is what I call poise management. Now, poise is an interesting concept where I used to teach this a lot in rock climbing when I was working with rock climbers who were competing at nationals or in the Olympics. Is that the key to performing at your best is to operate from a state of calm and directed focus. When you’re competing in a sport where there’s an opponent directly across from you, like in martial arts, maybe boxing or some kind of mixed martial art, it’s very important that you don’t show the other person that you’re suffering, right? If you show them that and you show that weakness, then they might take that as the extra boost of energy that they need to find that next gear and kind of like get it over the top. So it’s very, very important that you show this calm, collected poise throughout the engagement to give them nothing to latch on, to give them no hope. But when you’re in an individual sport, it’s kind of like, well, what’s the point? Like, okay, put your try hard, face on and grunt and give it all.
Anthony Vicino:
But what I find is that your biology will follow through from that mindset that you have. If you come into it and say, this is not a big deal, I’m fine, I’m cool, calm and collected, your body is going to respond in kind. And so state management for me is putting yourself in situations that intentionally stress your system, stress your biology, so you have the opportunity to deploy poise and the ways that you can do this. There’s many different ways. The cold showers, cold exposure is one of those. One that I’ve been doing recently is breath holding. I think this is a really interesting one because holding your breath for an extended period of time is going to put your body into a state where at some juncture it says you need to breathe now or you are literally going to die. And it will feel for a period of time like you are going to die.
Anthony Vicino:
And yet that is just your body rebelling and your mind is in control. And you start to realize when you do breath work long enough that you can actually go much longer past that point of I’m going to die than you think. And it’s by staying calm and poised during that period of time that you’re able to tap into your full potential. And so I think giving yourself these hard tasks, hard engage, like physical state management tasks that stress your system, that force you to be calm. I think that’s the way that you get enough exposure to it that you start to develop the type of poise that presents itself regardless of scenario. And that’s really what you want, right? Like, you want to expose yourself enough to these traumatic events and whatnot so that when they occur in the future, you’ve been there, you’ve done that so many times before. You can just execute calmly. And so that’s what I mean by state management.
Anthony Vicino:
Super important. It’s been very valuable to me. I think about this as like a daily discipline practice. But what I want you to think about if you implement this into your life, is like, how am I developing my poise today? How am I staying cool, calm, and collected in the face of stress? Put yourself in that stressful event and then work hard to stay calm in that moment. So get into the cold shower, take the cold plunge. Don’t let yourself hyperventilate, don’t let yourself go, and don’t make a big deal about it. Just stay calm and collected as you go through it, and that will prime you to go through life with poise, which and a lot of times when you have ADHD, you’re battling these extreme fluctuations of emotional roller coaster. It’s like just being able to stay calm and collected and focused forward.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s the key sometimes. All right, number five is biological priming. Again, this is different than state management. State management is more of like an ongoing practice, whereas biological priming is, what can I do in the moment to influence my biology when I’m stressed out? Breathing is a great example of this. When your heart is racing and you’re getting out of breath, you can go through very intentional breathing routines. That kind of reset box breathing is one of these examples where the Navy Seals do this. You take a deep breath in, you hold it for 4 seconds, and then you take a deep breath in for 4 seconds. You hold it for 4 seconds, you exhale for 4 seconds, and then you hold that for 4 seconds.
Anthony Vicino:
You just keep doing that routine. Four, four, four, over and over and over until you get your heart rate slowing down. That’s an example of biological priming. Another one is through olfactory manipulation. I use something called boom boom. I’m holding it right now. If you guys are watching on YouTube, you can go to Amplified Impact. You can see it’s just a little tube, little scent stick.
Anthony Vicino:
This has cinnamon in it, which helps bring down my heart rate. So if I’m feeling overstimulated, I need to take a breath, I need to calm down. I need to bring it all down. This is what I use when I’m feeling low energy and I need to escalate like I’m about to go on stage and give a speech. I’ll pull out some boom boom that has some peppermint in it, and that gets me excited in the same way. You could have candles, you could have those going. I always like to have cedarwood and tobacco going when I’m working. It just puts me in a state that primes my biology.
Anthony Vicino:
But there’s all sorts of different ways that you can do this, right? Like you can do physical exercise, you could do air squats, push ups, you could do your breathing. There’s so many different ways that we can prime our biology, but understanding that those are levers you can intentionally pull gives you the power over your ADHD to be able to get into the zone that you need to. And the way I think about this is like your pregame ritual. When I need to get focused and ready to do the hard work, I light my candle, I take my boom boom, I put my headphones on and I go, Right. Well, there’s some other aspects of it too, which I’ve broken down in other podcasts. But it’s important to have that pre focus ritual. I find personally, for ADHD at least, to be able to set the intention and say, now I’m focusing. This is what I’m doing and how long I’m doing.
Anthony Vicino:
It not just kind of backwards flopping into it and then hoping it all kind of works out. Number six is environment design. So much of focus is just the ability to resist distraction, right? And you can improve your ability to resist distractions by getting into the mental weightlifting gym every day. You can do focus exercises, you can meditate. That’s important. Improving your capacity to focus is important. However, you can make it way easier on yourself by just making it so that distractions don’t appear in the first place. And you can do that through intentional environment design.
Anthony Vicino:
And what I mean by this is, how do you design your computer, your desktop, your phone, your screen? How do you design your office? All these things go into helping you get into the zone and stay in the zone. I’ve done really extensive episodes on this and a deep dive video on the YouTube channel. Go to Anthony Vasino. You can check it out. It’s called how to unlock hyper. Focus on command. That video breaks it down much more deeply. In addition to the 7th step here, which is gamification, the more that you can keep score when doing mundane activities, the more it’s going to engage that kind of like, competitive side of your ADHD brain.
Anthony Vicino:
And you could pretty much gamify anything if you’re creative enough, right? You could set a timer for ten minutes and see how many emails you could get through. You could do the reverse of that and just see if you could get all emails done in five minutes, right? There’s so many different ways that you can gamify a thing, whether that’s laundry, it’s cleaning the apartment, it’s doing the work, making the phone call. See if I can get 100 sales calls in today, right? There’s so many different ways that you can gamify it. And what you see is that when you observe kids playing games on the playground, the energy and the focus that they bring to the activity fundamentally changes the moment they all start keeping score. The energy elevates. The importance of the thing elevates, despite the fact that there’s really no award being handed out at the end of it’s still just a game, right? But this is one of the ways that you can kind of tap in and kind of trick your system into thinking this is more important than it is or more fun than it is. Games can be fun, and I think that’s going to be a really interesting way that I found to just make the mundane, unenjoyable things a little bit more enjoyable. And sometimes that’s the key to getting the thing done.
Anthony Vicino:
Because a lot of times, I don’t know about you, but my ADHD brain can easily hyper focus on stupid games, like really stupid children’s games. And so it’s not too much to ask that all I need to do is set a timer sometimes and be like, I’m going to see how many if I can go for the high score today on whatever activity is. So those are seven things, seven triggers, seven ideas, seven concepts to think about for unlocking your full potential as an entrepreneur with ADHD. So hopefully these bring you a little bit of value. If they did, let me know. Shoot me a review. Give me a review. Shoot me a DM.
Anthony Vicino:
Come find me on Twitter. I’m at Anthony Vasino. Come find me on Instagram. That’s the Anthony Vasino I try to respond to as many DMs that I get. So if you guys have questions or things that I can help with or things that you’re enjoying you want more of, let me know. And as always, I appreciate you all being here. I’ll catch you around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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