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Are you ready to supercharge your goal-setting and achieve remarkable results in just 12 weeks?
In this transformative episode, Mande shares her experience and insights from implementing the 12 Week Year challenge with her group. Discover how this powerful approach, adapted for ADHD brains, can help you set clear goals, create a compelling vision, and take consistent action towards your dreams.
What you'll learn:
The key components of the 12 Week Year approach and how it can be tailored to your unique needs
The importance of crafting a vivid vision of your future self to stay motivated and focused
How to break down your goals into manageable daily, weekly, and monthly tasks
The power of accountability and weekly check-ins for maintaining momentum and overcoming obstacles
Strategies for tracking your progress, celebrating wins, and making data-driven decisions
How to reframe setbacks as valuable learning opportunities and continue moving forward
"You can't do this wrong. You are always learning what is working and what isn't and reiterating." - Mande
Throughout this episode, Mande shares personal stories and practical advice from her own 12 Week Year journey, highlighting the transformative effects of setting clear intentions, taking action, and embracing a growth mindset. By implementing the strategies discussed, you'll develop the skills and confidence to tackle any goal, no matter how ambitious.
Useful Links Mentioned:
Join the 12 Week Year Challenge: https://www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/12weekyearchallenge
Whether you're looking to boost your productivity, launch a new project, or make significant life changes, this episode provides a roadmap for accelerating your progress and achieving your goals in record time. Subscribe for more inspiring stories and practical strategies to thrive with ADHD.
Share your 12 Week Year experiences and victories with us in the comments or on our social media channels. We're here to support you on your journey to personal and professional growth!
Remember: Setting goals and creating a sense of urgency can be incredibly powerful for those with ADHD. By committing to a focused 12-week period, you can build consistency, accountability, and momentum, ultimately achieving significant growth and progress in both your personal and professional life.
#12WeekYear #GoalSetting #Accountability #ConsistentAction #ADHDFriendly #VisionCasting #HabitTracking #ProgressTracking #ThrivingWithADHD
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Click here to read the transcript:
All right. Welcome to episode 41. This is going to be an update on the 12 week year challenge that is just finishing up this week. And I wanted to let you know what our progress was. We had just about 100 people sign up for this round and it was so fun watching people grow and make progress.
I know. I felt like I did. If you're new to the 12 week year, I'm going to tell you about it. I also have some ADHD adaptations I make to the 12 week year that might be helpful to you
If you feel kind of weird about goals, when I want to remind you, I just heard this from somebody else's week. Goals are simply a problem to be solved. Do you have problems that need solved? And then this is what goals are, right? A lot of people say, I don't like to set goals and a lot of times the reasons people don't want to set goals is because they don't like that feeling.
If they don't follow through on the goal or if the goal doesn't go as expected, I will say with this round of the 12 week year, my goal did not go as expected. I didn't make the goal that I set out to make. But what I did do and I'm sure I'll talk about this a little bit later, I have some notes here in front of me, but what I did do is I set into place habits that are going to help me for the rest of my life.
And I really hope that that was the case for everybody that was going through this process where, like, what if you could concentrate on something for three months? Would that make progress in you solving that problem? I know for me it sure did. So if you're listening far in the future, then you can go to WW w Learn to thrive with ADHD.
Tor.com Backslash 12 The number week year challenge. So that's the number 12 week year challenge and you can jump in there and there will be replays that come to you through email. One will be an initial meeting that you can go through as if you're there and then a wrap up meeting to just answer questions for people and help them work on their vision and things like that.
And then from there, whatever will week your challenge we're on because I don't foresee this ending. It could possibly end in the future depending on my time availability or something like that. But I know I always have goals I'm working on problems to solve. But if you are seeing this sometime in the future or hearing this on the podcast or on YouTube, then you can just jump in the process.
You'll get those, those first replays and then you will jump in to whatever week we're on and you just start your 12 weeks from there.
So I really had fun with this. Everyone that showed up for the weekly accountability meetings were just lovely people to talk to and hear from. For me, and I hope for them it really planted, like I said, those seats of good habits.
But it wasn't just that. It was also knowing that every Thursday I had to check in with these people. And so when I would make the decision, am I going to follow through on the tasks that moved me towards my goal or not knowing that I was going to have to come back and report a score? That's how the weekly accountability meetings work.
You come back, you report a score and you say, What went well and what didn't go well, and you can even ask advice from the other people. A lot of times the people in your group will chime in things that they think were helpful to them and that might be helpful to you. And so it's just a really good environment.
I jump in with coaching wherever it's needed. So that's that's how that all went.
But as adults with ADHD, we are always striving to build consistency, right? That's the biggest challenge, building that consistency. And like I said, what I teach you to do is have your tasks where you cannot miss them, have them, you know, on paper and have them digital.
So they're always with you. Put the ones on paper somewhere where you will for sure see them. I actually put them on a mirror where I get ready in the morning and I have to walk by this mirror all the time. So I can't forget that I had these things to do. And having that there for 12 weeks, even if I have a bad week and I know all of us in the group at some point were like our week did not go as expected this week.
But doing that scoring is so helpful because it's just data. At that point there was one week that I came with like a 63 or 66, something like that, something in the sixties, and I didn't love that score and it made me look at that and go, okay, which of the tasks are not getting done? And it was clear to me because I was tracking them on I what I do is I send you guys a habit tracker, but I was tracking them on this habit tracker that I created and I could see, okay, consistently, this one's not getting done.
That's contributing to the low score. And what's beautiful about that is then you don't make it mean something terrible about yourself, that your score is low. You just look at it as a problem to be solved, right? If I want a higher score, I have to check more of these boxes. Therefore, I'm not just failing at this goal or I'm not doing a bad job or I'm not.
It's not that I'm not doing it right. I know what I need to do in order to increase that number. And so it just takes all the emotion out of it. So what is the Tool Week here? If you are new to the 12 week year? I've just gone on a lot about something that you may not know about.
It's a book by Brian P Moran and Michael, I think you say his name learning Lennington. I think that's correct. I never get it right on the first try. But what I will do here is just really condense my understanding of the book. I have gone through 12 week year challenges several times now. I did a video on on this book and why I thought it was perfect for the ADHD brain.
Maybe, gosh, maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit more. I do think it's perfect for the ADHD brain. What it does is creates urgency by condensing the problem or solving or your goal down into 12 weeks instead of 12 months. What do we do? We have New Year's resolutions. We have goals. We said at the beginning of the year and you have all year long to make this happen.
With the 12 weeks you do not have all year long. You got to get moving. Every week matters. And in coming back to those WAM meetings, those weekly accountability meetings where you're going to show up to real people. And what's kind of funny is you'll start seeing kind of the same people every week.
that accountability is really built in. You, you know, once you it's like showing up to your friends and saying, Hey, I did this or I didn't do this. And so that is a big piece of the 12 week year too, is accountability. I know when I first started, when I first read the book and and did my first 12 week year, I had a really hard time finding weekly accountability meetings.
And so I created my own. I did eventually find some on Facebook and things like that, but I just didn't love the way they were so impersonal or I would even take it off Facebook and turn it into like maybe a WhatsApp check in with someone. And it was only like one person or two people. So it just made it a little more difficult.
Like I said, last round, we had 100 people. Who knows what, we'll have this next round. But having the bigger community, more people, you're actually seeing faces, you're hearing their challenges, you're hearing their successes. It just makes all the difference.
So I take you through how to create a vision that is the most important thing. Don't skip this.
When I did this in this particular process, this 12 week year session that I am updating you on, I found as I went through the vision that there was a whole piece where I was deciding that I didn't deserve a certain thing until I got this goal and I was able to like really dive down into my vision and let that idea go, let go of the idea that I didn't deserve that thing until I got my goal.
I deserved it right now just because I do. So that was super helpful. You're going to find all kinds of things, and I'm really I really teach you how to, like, get deep into your vision and particular ways to set up your vision so that it's something that fuels your emotions each day and
keeps it top of mind why you're doing this.
And so I have some some things that I walk you through how to do that.
there was somebody in our group that when I went through and coached her on her vision, we realized that the goal that she showed up was wasn't actually the goal at all.
Once we got deeper on why she wanted what she wanted and who she would become at the end of this process, she discovered she was in a whole different place. And so the vision is very, very important. And like I said, I help you with that. No stress. I also help you not take it too seriously at first so you don't get stuck.
So you're also going to break down what actions is it going to take to get to this goal?
For some people the actions might look the similar or the same every week for other people, there might be completely different actions you need to take from one week to another.
So an example might be this is a big one, right? But if you were going to sell your house, for example, there would be different things you need to do each week in order to make that happen. There would be, you know, contacting a realtor, there would be preparing your house, there might be packing up certain things to show the house.
I don't know the process of selling a house. I'm just guessing here. But you can see how throughout the 12 weeks things would be different each week. And so some of your goals are going to be the same. Some of them are going to be different. I also help you around making them very simple steps for you to take so that you don't overcomplicate the process.
We also had people discover that they, as they were going through the 12 weeks, discovered that they needed to be in a completely different goal. One example was we had one member that was job searching and she was job searching and a tech field, and she discovered by last week on R&R Week 11 that more likely she probably wants to be in the health care field.
And she had all these reasons. But had she not gone through the process and went in a direction, that's what people get so stuck on, like making decisions and don't get stuck with your goals or your problem solving on making decisions. So she made a decision to move forward in this job search for the tech field and learned that she wanted to be somewhere else.
Nothing's gone wrong. You can't do this wrong. Everybody that switched gears and there was there was a few that I know of ended up in a better place than they were. And that is all we want. All we want is for you to improve in some sort of way.
So I made some notes here and I kind of went deep into explaining each little step of the 12 week year.
I'm going to give that all to you when you sign up for the challenge or when you show up to that first meeting. If you're able to show up live. So I'm not going to take the extra time now to do that. I just want to talk about a few important things. One is I want you to make the commitment.
That is the biggest thing with this commitment has got me where I am today as a coach. What I did is I committed to a completely separate thing. I committed to attending these meetings that were 2 hours. It was a two hour, two and a half hour drive out of town. And they were weekly for, I believe, two years.
I don't recall exactly Now. It wasn't a huge amount of time ago, but it was it was a while ago. But I committed to doing this and it my end result was going to be that I could attend a school at a university, at a community college prices or something like that. And so basically it was like this You're re learning what you need to know for college, because I thought that I wanted to finish my degree,
What is most important here is to make a commitment. And the making commitments is how I am sitting here talking to you as an ADHD coach, which is what I love to do.
I basically found my purpose because I made a commitment to a completely separate thing. And I notice that every time I make a commitment and fulfill on it, it leads me to the next thing and the next thing and next basically iteration or piece of growth or the next exciting thing. So that's the most important thing. Whatever your goal is, make it large or small, but make a commitment.
So when I say a completely unrelated thing, I started out with my commitments by committing to attend a class for two years. Once a week out of town, and it was like a five hour drive round trip, two and a half hours there, two and a half hours home. And this was every Thursday and it was kind of late at night once the time changed because it was in Arizona.
I'm in California, and once the time changed, I would get home at like 11:00 at night. And so this was a sacrifice. I had kids at home and every Thursday I had to, you know, get in the car, make that drive, attend the class for a couple hours. Some of the time I was teaching the class, each of us took turns teaching, and so I had to prepare for that.
There was homework to be done, but I made a commitment to it all. And I remember just making this commitment to do it no matter what. And I felt like I had never made a commitment that seriously before. Besides, like getting married, having children, things like that. I felt like my commitments are always kind of soft or it was like more of a I'll try, but this was a no matter what.
And sometimes I would rather have done anything but get in that car. I remember telling my husband one week I'm like, I would rather just poke myself in the eye than attend this class tonight. I don't want to be there, but I made the commitment and I was there. There was only two times out of the whole time that I didn't make it, and one time my daughter was in the hospital and the other time we had camped in Arizona.
And we were actually, as we were driving through the city that I was going to have to drive back to. Once we got home, I realized I was so exhausted that I couldn't drive safely. And so I really liked my reasons for those two times. I didn't make the commitment back, commit to attending the weekly accountability meetings if you can.
If you can't commit to watching the replays, commit fully to doing the tasks that you know are going to get you to your goal, just commit, just decide you're going to do it no matter what. All right. So commitment is huge and this commitment will lead you to the next thing. I did not end up doing anything with that class that I attended.
I met some great people. I learned some fun things. I didn't do what was intended to do with it. I was able to attend a university at a community college prices. As a person with ADHD, I have attended so many colleges. It's just and you know, you're always thinking like it's the next thing, it's the next thing. And I discovered there was a delay in me getting into the university part of it, and they couldn't they couldn't pull together all my transcripts of all the schools that I had been to in order to decide what credits they were going to take and what they weren't in them delaying that, I found coaching certification and I
was able to fully commit to coaching certification the way I committed to that. So I want this to be your stepping stone. Those were kind of big things, right? Doesn't have to be big. Just commit completely. And what I guarantee you is and then you're going to find the next thing. And so it's just going to be a step upward in your growth.
So again, come in balance, huge.
So as I told you, I've adopted this. Let me just quickly explain. If you join the challenge, what's going to happen so you'll end up on my landing page? You there's going to be a little short video there just explaining to you the next steps in, just a little less depth.
But then I'm going to explain them. Now, I'm not sure exactly what that video will look like. I have I haven't created it yet, so we'll see.
All right. If you're right at the beginning of a starting, this particular one is going to start on June 20th. Then you'll get an invitation to that meeting.
If you sign up beforehand. If you sign up afterwards, you will get a replay of the initial meeting. And that's where I teach you all the things and answer any questions for the people that are in attendance. And I will also give you the tools. I have a Trello board that helps you score yourself and keep track of your tasks if you'd like to use that.
I have an app that I really like as far as keeping track of your daily streaks, You can also share it with friends, you could share it with people in the group. And so I'm going to utilize that a little bit more in this 12 week year session. I also have the habit tracker that I created, especially for this, and I will share that with you in that initial email as well.
And by the time I get that going, there might be some other things, but that's what's going to happen.
Then we'll have the wrap up meeting and then we will start our Thursday meetings. And currently I'm doing them Thursday 12 p.m. Pacific and I'm just going to stick with that.
That seemed to work well for some people. If you're unable to attend, it's okay. The replays come out after the meetings and I invite you to the next meeting. You can just put these on your calendar. They will have the same link every time. So it's super simple. What I will say is just show up. Just show up in for yourself.
Just show up in some way. It's kind of back to that commit piece, but by saying just show up. That's what I promised myself when I made that commitment to do those classes as I just took all the pressure off by saying, all I have to do is show up, all I have to do is show up to doing my homework.
All I have to do is show up to the meetings. Literally, Like I said, if you can't attend, that's okay. Just show up by watching the replay. Just show up by doing your tasks. All right, Ted, I'd say that to just take the pressure off, it doesn't need to be that serious. Take it seriously, but not so seriously that it's going to hold you back.
All right.
I'm going to teach you how to find your top four priorities. I'm going to teach you how to break down your goals. I'm going to teach you how to have your daily, weekly and monthly tasks that you need to have together. I'm going to put coaching pieces in there all along the way.
I'm going to show you my adaptations for the ADHD brain.
I'm going to help you work on your belief system. That's huge with this. If you don't believe you can do it fully, you're not going to do it. So I would coach you on your belief system and then I just help you all along the way as we show up each week.
Okay. I think that's all I have to say on this. It's been a really fun experiment, offering this 12 week here to you guys for you to kind of join me on my journey for the 12 week year. I still have a ways to go with that goal that I set for the first 12 weeks. But like I said, I feel like I have set into place tasks that I know work and that I can carry with me for the rest of my life.
And it was so fun to see each week, okay, this is working well. This is not working well and making those adaptations and getting down, honing down to like this really great list of tasks that I know make sense, that I know will work and that I'm going to continue on. I'm actually going to do a completely different 12 week all this next time, but I'm going to continue working on that what we had last time and I just want the same growth for you guys.
Come along with me. It doesn't matter when you hear or see this, you can still sign up again. It's www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/12weekyearchallenge
All right. That's what I have for you this week. I have some really fun subjects coming up. So if you're not already subscribed, if you aren't, whatever you do on the podcast, I don't know. Do you subscribe? Do you follow? I don't. I don't know. But make sure you stay tuned because I have some really great things I'm working on and I hope you join me on the challenge and I'll see you guys next week.
Thank you.