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    • Sep 5

ep 53: Reframing Failure: Insights from ADHD Coach Ksenia Barton


i know what to do so why can't i do it

Are you struggling to navigate midlife challenges with an ADHD brain? In this enlightening episode, Ksenia Barton, a coach specializing in supporting Gen-Xers with ADHD, shares her insights on reframing failure, embracing neurodiversity, and developing strategies that work with your unique mind.


Discover how understanding your brain's wiring, leveraging your experiential intelligence, and adopting an essentialist approach can lead to increased self-trust and success in various areas of life.


What you'll learn:

  • The role of the habenula in motivation and ADHD

  • Techniques for reframing failure and adopting an iterative mindset

  • Strategies for developing self-trust and tapping into experiential intelligence

  • The importance of essentialism for overwhelmed adults with ADHD

  • Understanding and addressing common ADHD coping mechanisms

  • Practical approaches to self-validation and accepting your neuro-sparkly brain


"Figure out who you are and do it on purpose." - Dolly Parton (shared by Ksenia Barton)

Throughout this episode, Ksenia offers practical advice and personal insights to help you harness your ADHD traits for success in midlife. By implementing the strategies discussed, you'll gain the tools needed to thrive while managing the challenges that come with ADHD.


Useful Links Mentioned:

No matter how overwhelming midlife challenges may seem with ADHD, this episode is a powerful reminder that embracing your neurodiversity and creating effective strategies can lead to profound personal growth. Start aligning your life with your authentic self today, and watch as your perceived challenges become your greatest assets.


Share your biggest takeaways and "aha" moments from this episode with us in the comments or on our social media channels. We're here to support and celebrate your progress!


Remember: By understanding your unique ADHD strengths, developing personalized productivity techniques, and embracing your neuro-sparkly brain, you can turn perceived obstacles into powerful advantages. Your present situation is not a permanent predicament. Armed with the right perspective and strategies, you possess the ability to flourish in a life tailored perfectly to your authentic self.




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Click here to read the transcript:

All right. Welcome back, guys. Today, I have brought you another coach. And will you go ahead and introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Ksenia Barton. I'm from Vancouver and I'm a 1 to 1 coach for Gen-Xers, especially the sensitive neuro sparkly ADHD, gifted people who are in midlife. And they're dealing with a lot of they have a lot on their plates, a lot of responsibilities work parenting often aging parents, health concerns.


I help with everything, but I specialize in relationships. Okay. And we were talking just a little bit before the call and actually about 5 minutes. And I decided, well, let's just start recording because we're going to easily have a good conversation here. But we were talking about failure and a certain part of the brain, and I just go ahead and run with that and tell people about that because it was very interesting.


Yes. So I have been loving a book by Dr. Cairo, Bob Barnett called The Unstoppable Brain, and she is sharing the neuroscience inside of the habanera, which is this tiny pea port size portion of the brain that is have been discovered to be very involved with regulating dopamine and serotonin, which we, as we know is so important to mental health and happiness, has been tied to depression and anxiety, OCD, all sorts of mental health challenges.


So Dr. Bob Barnett is working in the weight loss area and she was trying to understand the know do gap like why we don't do what we know, why we don't do what we say we're going to do. And she has a lot of compelling evidence that it's actually the habanera that's involved in that. And the the thing that the Daniela does is when there's an expectation and reality mismatch, like when you make that craft on Pinterest and it looks nothing like the picture, that is when your habanera activates.


And what it does is it stops you from taking action, it kills your motivation and and obviously that has a survival function, right? We don't want to keep doing what doesn't work. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, but the problem is, in midlife, we've tried a lot of things. We've had all sorts of outcomes and if we're interpreting those outcomes as failures, our habaneros can be perpetually activated and we can just experience a real slump in motivation.


And my question was, as as you were explaining this, my question was, well, what do we do about it? And I love your answer. So what do we do about this? Hi, Ben Mula And and we've had failures and how to how do we fix this problem? So the first the first thing to recognize is anything you're seeing as a failure or a shortcoming or a goal not achieved that you're feeling bad about, like often disappointment.


Our emotions are a flag, right? You're feeling bummed out. You're feeling disappointed. That's a red flag that you're probably interpreting something as a failure and you may not be using those words, but that disappointment, bummed, kind of depressive feeling, that's that can be an indication that you have a failure story about something that's happened and realize that failure is just a story.


No one can say that the things that happened in my life are a failure. That's really for me to interpret. And so recognizing that we have stories about failures in our lives. And then second is adopting an error of iterative mindset. We reject strict ways of measuring our success. Maybe we don't need these smart goals where I'm going to lose £20 by such and such a date and then feel crappy about myself if I don't or however I'm measuring my progress.


These can backfire. Instead, we can develop an iterative mindset where we're constantly learning, we're constantly experimenting, we're constantly looking to the next step. If we hit a roadblock, we're going to detour. We don't know the path that's going to get us there. We only need to know the next step. Now what I like to talk about with failure is like, We're just not done yet.


I run a 12 week challenge with with people and we're on round two. But on round one it was a weight loss goal and within this 12 weeks it was my goal to lose £15. Well, to your point, a lot like smart goals where, you know, they have to be specific and measurable and all. I've never loved smartphones, by the way.


And but to that point, like I didn't lose the £15 in that round. I lost the £15 and more in the next round when I wasn't even working on that goal. And so it wasn't it wasn't something I could really measure in time and I was doing all the right things. It just it just didn't happen in the timeline that I expected it to.


And it also makes me think of like you talk about telling a different story. I have a lot of people now that have listened to my podcast or watch the YouTube channel know that I have rabbits and I heard you talking about that. Isn't that so cool? And this rabbit project basically started with my sister bringing me rabbits, and two of them had had this sad thing that happened and and passed away.


And there was, I believe there's three or four rabbits at that time. So during this project there was three or four rabbits and I was talking to a friend on the phone and she said, And we're not very close friends anymore, and this might explain why, but she's like, How is your failed rabbit rabbit project going? And I was like, I'm sorry, what?


And I was doing the dishes at the time, I remember. And she repeated herself and she's like, How is your failed rabbit project going? And to your point about telling different stories, in my mind there was no failure at all. And I explained to her and I said, first of all, this is not how we speak to each other.


Number one second. It's not failed until I quit. And that was my idea of failure. If I had like given up and, you know, rehomed the rabbits or whatever, then that would be failed to me. But she was just telling a different story. I don't think she was trying to be a bad friend. She just was had a different idea of what failure was.


And so I love this idea that we can just tell a different story about it and our mentor because we're both. Yeah, life coach, school certified coaches. But our mentor talks about just moving the timeline on your goals, not changing the and even celebrating your fails. You know, that's something that I really one of her teachings that I love is like, celebrating your fails because that means you're out there, you're taking risks, you're experimenting, you're taking action and fail.


Failure, you know, fails are really indicators of progress and learning and growth. Yeah. So what made you decide to work with gifted Gen-Xers? So, you know, I don't really market it that way. It's the people who have come to me and I think it's because I've often been in communities that are full of gifted people, not necessarily on purpose.


The homeschooling community is full of gifted people, and I've all often been participated in online support communities. I've I've done years, decades of peer coaching in online support communities. And the coach community, of course, is full of gifted people. I worked, did 1 to 1 mindset coaching in a in a mastermind and I had the opportunity to coach hundreds of coaches there.


And so I got to see how how common it is for people to have that kind of background, even though often Gen-Xers, you know, they, they just a lot of times that was a thing that they knew about themselves in the past, but most of them aren't really aware of that being a factor in their normal midlife experience that a lot of them don't recognize that they have strengths that they maybe aren't using as much.


The other thing is a lot of people who talk about and celebrate ADHD, a lot of them are gifted people and some of them don't realize that they have a lot of gifted privilege when they talk about ADHD and how how is it a factor in adulthood? So a lot of times it does come back to that failure story, how you feel about yourself.


Sometimes people got some support at a certain time in their childhood in development. They got encouragement from teachers or maybe validation for success, or maybe they realized that certain things were easier for them than for others. And I it can actually backfire and create low self-esteem in adulthood. When you feel like you've fallen short of your potential. And a lot of times people struggle with just the innate sensitivity that gifted and ADHD people have, which tends to make us a little more neurotic, a little more emotionally reactive, a little more a little more introverted.


These are hardwired characteristics that sensitive people have, and most gifted people have that sensitivity. Most ADHD people have that sensitivity. It's interesting when you talk about homeschooling, as I homeschool, we talked a little bit like I think you had about this, but I homeschooled for 12 years and it wasn't like a matter of a difference in values or anything like that.


It was simply like my child was bored at school and he would come home with these elaborate pictures and I'm like, When are you when are you coloring all these pictures? And he said, when I get done with my work, my teacher tells me to turn my paper over and draw a picture. And it was just picture after picture after picture.


And I just finally I was like, What are you doing at school? And he had an excellent what a beautiful reason to homeschool. I love it. But say to your point, like, that's I think that's where you you kind of get a lot of the gifted people that end up coming home because the school simply just doesn't have the resources to support them.


And and so yeah that's that's how we ended up in that situation was that I think I had a gifted student that was just really bored and needed needed more. So absolutely, absolutely. And our gifted children, I love the work of Arthur Aaron. He talks about dandelions, tulips and orchids. So 29% of of humans are dandelions. They're people who are very resilient.


It's like the dandelion will grow and crack of the parking lot at Walmart. They'll be fine. Then tulips are like, you know, they're not going to grow in extreme conditions. They're going to they need to be planted, but they're not super hard to grow. Like that's 40% of people, but 29% of us are orchids. We are more naturally sensitive.


We actually do. We have we're more at risk for struggling in many areas, but we also have incredible potential when we have the right support and nurturing. And I always say that coaches like find themselves. And so what what made you go into this niche? Exactly. You know, I've had it's it's funny I, I for decades before I was coaching I was a field botanist and you would think that has nothing to do with coaching.


I love it though, but I realized it actually does. It's it's about you know, you've probably heard the quote there. The cure for boredom is curiosity, and there is no cure for curiosity. And I think that kind of describes all of the work that I've done in my life. And and being a field botanist is about your powers of observation.


It's about observing patterns. It's about understanding why a plant will grow in one location and not in another. It's about understanding the interactions between growing, growing, living things and their environment. And that also underpins my lifelong interest in and human potential and development. I was going through my bookshelf yesterday and I came across this picture book that I made for my little brother when I was 12 years old.


And it was it was hilarious. It's like a picture book and it was a motivational book. It was like the last pages. The magic is in me so cheesy, but it was like it was also a sensory book, so it had like sandpaper in it and it had a little mirror and it had fabric and fuzzy stuff and it was like, This is what was on my brain when I was 20 years old, is how can I help my little brother who struggles so much so brutally with ADHD?


He was constantly getting in trouble at school and at home. How can I help him? How can I support him? So I had this lifelong interest in this idea that always, you know, in my family and then, you know, going through unwinding a lot of my own, a lot of, you know, adverse childhood experiences growing up, dealing with that in therapy and then joining online support communities where I could have deep conversations about what people were really dealing with the attachment parent community, the homeschool school community.


When I went through divorce, I was a leader in communities around supporting people, picking up the pieces and moving on with their lives. So it's just it's been a thread throughout my whole life. Yeah. What are the so any anytime you're looking up information about ADHD, they always talk about like getting some sort of community. What would you say are like your favorite resources as far as community for people with ADHD and you know, I, I'm not sure I have like at this very moment.


I do think there are a lot of people in the ADHD or in the associates in the life coach school community. We have such a vibrant alumni community and a lot of coaches do have ADHD. So I do feel a lot of community with my fellow coaches. There's so many of us who just get it in terms of something that's accessible to many people.


I've really been loving for women who have ADHD in midlife, I've really been loving ADHD. Woman subreddit. And the nice thing about that, yeah, it's it's anonymous, it's really supportive community and there's some really smart people in there. And I love that people are really opening up about their experience. There's especially areas where they're feeling shame around the struggles that they're having.


A lot of them are smart and accomplished people who struggle with some of the basic stuff, which is the reality of having ADHD. Yeah, I think that's so helpful to see like struggles that other people are having and to really normalize that and and realize like, there are other people that struggle to wash their face or things that you think are like really simple.


And it's so interesting. Like as I was, I wash my face in the morning before I put my makeup on. And as the water's running down my arms, I like I think of one of my clients where that drives her absolutely insane. And I don't like it either, but I don't have the sensitivity to the point that, like, then I can't do it.


But like, those kinds of things, like there's so many things. I have literally read people talking about that very thing in that subreddit. Funny. Yeah, I and I've also coached a lot of people to get off of Reddit because they're spending time in the wrong ways. And so there's a great way to spend time in Reddit, but I like that there are really good support communities around stopping buffering behaviors like drinking and surfing the Internet and just dealing with, you know, the everyday realities of having ADHD.


And that if you're on Reddit and curcumin entities with caution very carefully, very carefully. Okay, So my audience is mostly professionals and entrepreneurs with ADHD. What's what would you say that you do in your field that would be helpful information to them? Well, I think, you know, if your in you know, if you're a Gen Xer or if you're 24 to 59, you may be underestimating the value of your experiential intelligence.


If you haven't had people supporting you and trusting your own perceptions about what's happening in the world, you may be wasting a lot of energy on self doubt and a lot of of people with ADHD, especially my gifted people. They really need to be increasing their self trust and trusting their own guesses and more than they have been.


Gen Xers were raised by many, were raised by emotionally immature parents, and because of that, they didn't always get as much mirroring as from their parents as we would like. I'm guessing you're your homeschooling mom. I'm guessing your child felt seen and heard and understood by you and my child. And they still do. If you don't grow up in a home where you're not, where you're seen and heard and understood you, it can be hard to develop self trust in your own opinions, your own perceptions of what's happening, and that lack of self trust can can hold you back in terms of taking action, expressing your point of view, acting on your hunches, doing experiments.


If you're outsourcing your ideas about what's supposed to be happening, what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing, you're going to miss out on your self and you are your own best source of information, especially if you're neuro sparkly. Okay, so this is probably an obvious question, but how do you develop your self trust? It's it's really looking.


I mean, any time I hear my clients saying I should, I shouldn't other people say, I've been told you probably have noticed that too. It's like a flag that this is a person who is accessing their they're outsourcing their opinion about what's happening rather than checking in with themselves and using their experiment experiential intelligence. So when you realize that you're not accessing your internal intelligence, it's like, okay, what's my best theory about this is like a really good sentence.


Then it doesn't matter, you know, whether it's a situation at work, it doesn't matter if it's a parenting situation, it doesn't matter if it's a health situation. What's my best theory about how to solve this problem or how to move forward or how to make progress? What is what is my guess about the next step here? And that can be tricky because the best next step or the best theory for a person is neuro sparkly.


They may not get a lot of positive feedback from their ideas. Doesn't mean it's the wrong step. If I my life would be completely different if I. I mean, I have I'm a very stubborn person, so sometimes I have trusted myself when, you know, people really thought I was crazy and I have never regretted those things. So I really do.


I have a lot of experience with having trusted myself and have haven't gone against the grain and done things and made choices that other people didn't agree with. I help my clients move more into that energy because it's something that that other people won't have the answers. For us, it's so personal. That's why I do 1 to 1 work.


Yeah, I was just talking to a client this morning about a book that I very much enjoyed, and it's it's by Jamie in Lima, and I'm forgetting the name of the book at the moment. my goodness. It is not coming to me. Anyway, it's by Jamie Lima, the person that created it, cosmetics. And she got a whole lot of rejection when she was creating cosmetics and she was, you know, trying to bring it out to like a whole bunch of skin types and things like that.


But her whole life, she felt like she was the weird one. And as you were talking about that right there, it's like, you know, you're talking about like doing things that people thought you were crazy for doing. And she actually went to a therapist and told the therapist about these things that were happening in these situations in her family.


And and she's like, am I crazy? And excuse me. The therapist is like, No, you're not crazy, but I'm glad you're here because you're just first. And especially it's it's funny that homeschool has come up because that was my experience with homeschool there. I live in a very small town. There's not a whole lot of people that homeschool.


There was like this one little tiny community of home schoolers, but they were very exclusive. You had to like, sign the statement out, like be a part of this community. And it was a statement that when I read it, I wasn't willing to sign it. So it wasn't something that I wanted to be a part of, But people would question me, Well, what about socialization and well, what about this and what about that?


And and I took it as they were questioning my motives. They were questioning things like that. And these same people that were asking me the questions now homeschool their kids or have homeschooled their kids in the past. Amazing. And so, so many. So you went first, right? So many times. We're just going first and that's okay. But it does look like crazy.


Like they often can can look like that. And so it's funny that you even use that word. But but oftentimes we're just going first. And especially as ADHD, there's a lot of ideas that we have that aren't the normal ideas that everyone else is having. And so we kind of have to go first with these crazy ideas, like being a coach.


Absolutely. One of my favorite crazy ideas. Exactly. So helpful. Right. And it's it's not only so much improved my life, but then all the people that we get to help. All right. Absolutely. Yeah. That book is still not coming to me, whatever the name of it is, but it's a book. We noticed that it's. But okay, so what else?


What else do you often talk about in your practice? In my practice, I talk a lot about how everyone makes sense all the time. Tell me more. And this is a really core belief, and it's the foundation of self validation. When you are different than others, it's really important to discover how you make sense and understand. Even if we can't understand all of why we make sense, the foundational assumption that we make sense, that other make people make sense is actually the foundation for moving forward in life.


So when the client says, I don't know why I do this or don't do that or can't do this or can't do that, let's just assume there's really good reasons. We can be curious about those reasons and discover why if you're if you are snacking late at night at two in the morning, let's assume you have really good reasons for doing that.


Let's be really curious about why you're doing that. Yeah, the more we understand why we're doing what we're doing, the more we understand why we are the way we are, the more we can work with our natural strengths and deficits. That's very interesting because I have noticed that sometimes with clients the why will keep them stop if they if they kind of don't answer the question of why and they just stay stuck in kind of the loop of, I don't understand why I do this, then they just keep not understanding why they do this and they kind of stay stuck in that loop.


But it sounds like what you're saying is, let's answer the question and then what? Yeah, exactly. And you know, everyone makes sense all the time. The turtle was my teacher in that area. He has an amazing website out Turtle dot com, and he describes it as like an iceberg, like how I make sense. There's parts that I can see above the surface of the ocean.


There's the tip I can see and I can understand that part. I'm not going to understand everything that's under the ocean. I'm not going to see how I make why I make sense. Let's just assume that I do stop feeling shame or sense of failure or have lack of of self trust based on not understanding why we only get to know part of the why.


We only get to figure out part of the why. Interesting. Okay. So that kind of aligns with what I do with my clients, which is like, it doesn't really matter why. That's kind of the part that's under the water, right? But what can we do to take action? And in your piece that I love is is understanding the part that we can see and getting curious about that.


And then like, how can we take action to change those, maybe the smacking at night or whatever is not working for them. Right. Yeah. Or first figure out how it is working for them. Yeah, because all of our bad habits are happening for some good reason. Absolutely. Yeah. And even, and that's something that doesn't get talked about a lot with ADHD, but there are a lot of, there's a lot of buffering, there's a lot of like substance issues and all of those could be very much like, why am I doing this?


Absolutely. Have you found that in your in your practice? for sure. You know, most people who have ADHD, I think, do struggle with all sorts of buffering and, you know, overeating over drinking over over shopping, over cluttering over surfing, using the devices and the phones and all of that. These are all really, really common. I know when I was a kid, I was a bookworm.


And I never knew the word buffering at the time. But I know that that was part of my coping strategy for all all of the things that were not working in my app in my childhood home. You know, my book was my escape. That was my safe place, my happy place, or sorry, I remember reading it was Stephen King's.


gosh. It's a very, very popular book and movie. But in the book I was way too young to be reading this book, but I would escape into books. And I remember reading the part where like the child breaks his arm and just his descriptive ness and just feeling ill. But just to your point, like, books were very much an escape for me too.


And, and we don't even think of that as buffering. And I do talk to clients oftentimes about like even learning can be buffering if you're doing it to avoid your feelings or to avoid something that you would rather not necessarily would rather be doing, but feel you should be doing them. That even good thing. Yeah. Buffering. And and it's important to realize that comes from our hardwired sensitivity, that comes from our emotional reactivity.


It's like, we're, we're, we're experiencing an emotion and we're reacting to it. And that is, you know, that ability to be with our emotions and allow them allow ourselves to process them and allow ourselves to to experience our emotions rather than buffering. That is such a useful skill set. And it's so amazing that you're working on that with your clients because we don't have to eat the bag of chips.


We don't have to be scrolling endlessly on Reddit. We don't have to have that second drink. It's it's those are coping strategies for a lack of capacity, for holding and experiencing our emotions. And your emotional regulation, which is one of the executive functions skills could be low and if that's low you can be very reactive. And then if you're having impulsivity problems, then you could make bad choices.


And we've just oftentimes got a lot stacked against us. But luckily we're very smart people and we can learn methods and get help with these things. So absolutely. What else what else would you say is is one of the top things that you teach your people? Essentialism So my people are in midlife. They have so much going on and, you know, I love how Dolly Parton says, Figure out who you are and do it on purpose.


And I've never heard that. Okay. To me, that's the that is expresses what essentialism is. So here we are in midlife. You know, most of my clients have so much going on. They have so much responsibility at work. If they're running a business, that's obviously a huge amount of responsibility. Most of them are dealing with teens or launching adults, attempting to launch adults.


They've got aging parents. With all of that health, the creeping health concerns, sometimes major ones, transitions in relationship with kind of looming empty nest issues, all of those things. It's like a it's a very intense time of life circumstantially. Combine that with lack of feeling misunderstood or misunderstanding yourself as a nearest sparkly person. It's a lot to handle.


So essentialism is really the key. It's figuring out what really matters and letting go of everything that doesn't. And that can be hard because I don't know if you've ever seen that movie. Everything everywhere, all at once. Yes. One of my clients recommended that to me. it's so amazing. And the main character in this in this movie she's living in and she feels like a failure in her normal life, but she's living these alternate realities in her brain, like she's she's that's all she's living in, these incredible alternate realities.


All that stuff is really wild movie for those of you is it's just wild. But I'm like, yes, that's. And how does the Gnarls Barkley experience have? I loved it. And you can almost involve a grief process to just prune our lives, to release things, all the things that we're not going to do, all of the realities that we're not going to experience and and have respect for our capacity.


What what capacity do we have to live our lives? What are we going to take on treating ourselves with kindness and self trust and not following other people's self-care advice? Just asking ourselves really simple questions of like, how do I take care of me ten years from now? I'm 56 now my job is to take care of 66 year old me.


What does she need? And in order to do that, that that is a really incisive question to figure out what's essential for me right now. And that character in that movie, the more like you mentioned, like pruning away, the more she pruned things away and she was more accepting of herself, the more she was like more loving and kind and accepting the people in her life.


And that is so true. And that is that I think as coaches especially, we find that the more the more it's like, okay, it's not black, it's not white, maybe it's gray and maybe all the feelings are okay and everything everybody has to say is okay and we can be accepting of that, all of those things, and then we're more accepting of ourselves.


And so I love that example. That's funny. I I've never heard anybody else like that. My client talked about that movie. My name is It's got Jamie Lee Curtis in it, surprisingly. But it is amazing. And I was introduced to it by a life coach school neuro sparkly coached named Tyler, says Nelson. He's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And you can just tell from the you're like, this lady has ADHD and no one has ever dealt with it, including herself.


All right. So, well that that I think that's a good closing. But what I want you to do is let people know, like, how can they find you? How can they work with you? Anything you want to share with people? Well, I'm you can find my website at senior Barton Econ. That's KSC and I a, b, rt0 and and you can also connect with me on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook and yeah I'm and show up on Instagram pretty often and you can always become 1 to 1 insight session with me where we just talk about what's going on with you and there's no big sales pitch.


It's just talking about what's happening in your life and I'll give you my hot take on it and you can see if feels like a fit. All right, Sonia, also, thank you so much for coming on and talking to my audience. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation and the work you do is so important.


I just think it's the most amazing thing that you're supporting people with their ADHD experience. Thank you. Thank you so much.


 


















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