3 Essential Coping Skills in Your ADHD Toolkit

Does it ever seem like you’re missing a key part to supporting your ADHD brain? Maybe you read about a promising organizational approach or different time management strategies, but it’s so complicated that your overwhelmed brain can’t take the first step. If this sounds familiar, episode 260 of the I’m Busy Being Awesome podcast, discusses three foundational coping skills every ADHD brain needs to thrive and why they’re critical for our success.

The key skills we’re discussing today are:

• Identifying beliefs
• Managing emotions
• Practicing the pause

By locking in these important coping skills, you can identify and establish individualized support for your ADHD brain this season.

👉 Listen to the episode below, stream it on your favorite podcasting app here, or watch the YouTube video. Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for the full blog post.

https://youtu.be/zR_mG9ehUAw

In Episode 260: You Will Discover

• The top three foundational skills for an ADHD brain
• How to recognize if they’re missing
• How they’ll set you up for ongoing success in working with ADHD 

–

This post contains affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Disclosure info here.

Episode #260: 3 Essential Coping Skills In Your ADHD Toolkit (Transcript)

Today, we’re exploring the top three areas we tend to overlook when it comes to supporting our ADHD brains.

These three things are absolutely crucial for all of us. They lay the foundation for working with our ADHD brains. On top of this foundation, we each build our own scaffolding based on our unique situations, circumstances, and obstacles.

Everyone has different executive functioning challenges, which means our scaffolding might look different. But no matter what, we all need these three foundational elements.

I don’t think we talk about this enough. When you search for ways to get things done with an ADHD brain, these areas are rarely mentioned, if at all. And that’s why I want to dive into them today because they are incredibly important.

I think of these as the unknown challenges we can address versus the known challenges that most of us typically discuss. So, it’s the unknown versus the known obstacles we navigate. Today, we’ll focus on the unknown ones.

These are the three most important things we tend to overlook, but they provide a solid foundation. Once we have these in place and know how to support ourselves with them, we can build the scaffolding we need for our unique brains.

Story Time: The Crochet Analogy

To illustrate this concept, I want to start with a story that will make these ideas more tangible. Now, this story might seem unrelated—it’s about crochet—but stick with me.

Even if you’re not a crocheter or you’re not into crafts at all, I promise it will tie everything together and help us ground and understand the three non-negotiable foundational skills that all of us with ADHD brains need in our lives.

So, let me tell you about this seemingly unrelated yet related story all about crochet. If you’re watching on YouTube right now, I’m going to actually hold up where I am in the process.

I’m making this crocheted poncho. It’s very colorful, and I’m excited about it. It’s going to be fun.

Now, if you’ve done any type of crafting before and needed to follow a pattern or learn different skills, you know there’s a bit of a learning curve at first.

Like I said, I wanted to try creating this poncho. I’ve never made anything like this before. Usually, I make little animals and things. So, I had to start from scratch: find the pattern, learn how to read it, and gather the right materials.

For those of you who are more experienced in yarn crafts, maybe you can relate. It seems like there are so many different ways to write a pattern. There’s no standard way. Every blogger and creator has a slightly different approach.

First, you need to find the pattern. Then, you need to learn how to read and understand it.

Sometimes, it’s not clear for a novice like me. So, I had to find the pattern, learn how to read it, then find the right type of yarn and the right size hook for the project. From there, I had to learn several new stitches.

I turned to YouTube to learn these unique stitches that were new to me. I had to practice them and then put everything together to create this poncho from a piece of yarn. For those of you who haven’t done crochet or knitting before, it can seem like absurd directions: Crochet this thing for 173 stitches. Okay, do you know how many times I had to start and restart that because I lost count or got distracted? What? Come on.

So, I started the pattern, lost count, got distracted, Bruno came in, Ryan had a question—whatever the interruption, I had to tear it all out and start again.

Then there’s the process of learning: how tight do I need the tension of the yarn? Is it too tight so the poncho doesn’t fit over my head? Or is it too loose and doesn’t hold its shape?

There’s a lot of skill involved. First, finding the pattern, seeing what works, assessing your skill level, learning the different stitches, and then practicing them. You have to make sure the stitches are even so you don’t end up with a wonky poncho that’s super tight on one side and loose on the other.

These are the known challenges. I think this applies to any new skill or craft you’re learning. You have to learn about it, then learn how to do it and get the right materials, and then start practicing. You’re probably going to be really bad at it at first, and that’s okay. We kind of anticipate this.

Then you get into your groove, trucking along, doing your stitches or whatever task you’re working on, and suddenly you hit a snag. For me, it was a literal snag—I ran into a knot in the ball of yarn. I couldn’t keep crocheting because this knot appeared, and you can’t crochet through a knot.

So, I had to stop and slowly start pulling apart this knot. Sometimes they’re quite tight, other times not so bad. When I started this project, these little knots popped up pretty frequently. I guess the yarn wasn’t spun very well or something. There were all these kinds of knots and tangles within this thin yarn.

It’s a very thin yarn, so I had to untangle it. Then I’d pick up the hook again, try to remember which stitch number I was on, and keep going. I’d be going along, a little knot would come in, I’d pause, undo the knot, and keep going. About halfway or maybe a third of the way through the project, the entire center of the yarn ball plopped out.

If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see this yarn has lost its structural integrity. It used to be a solid ball, but after pulling out the center and working on the project, it starts to collapse and becomes really floppy. At this stage, you often get big knots coming out from the middle of the yarn.

That’s what happened to me. I had this giant knot, so I had to start slowly working through this huge tangle of thin yarn. For those of you who have worked with any type of yarn craft, you probably feel the cringe. It’s not a fun time. I’ve got to tell you, I spent hours, many multiple hours over about a week, working through this ball of knots.

The knot was so tightly wound that when you’d pull one side, another would get really tight. Then you’d pull another side, and maybe a little piece would loosen, giving a bit more slack. But then I’d go again, and it would tighten up somewhere else and loosen in another place. It was a mess that required so much patience, gradually pulling on one piece or another.

There were times when I got so frustrated I just wanted to cut it out and start over. Or even start a new project, throw this one away, and think, Ugh, this doesn’t work. I hate it. I’m just going to start a new project with a different ball of yarn.

Or, as I mentioned, I’d want to cut out the big tangle, tie the ends together, and start again. But if you look at the yarn, you can see the progressive color transformation. If I cut out the big knot, it would throw off the pattern and gradation.

My brain didn’t want to do that. So I stuck with it and kept untangling this knot over multiple hours. I think it was probably around seven hours of untangling this knot over several days, which is a bit silly. But it is what it is.

As I was untangling this knot for hours over the week…

I kept thinking about analogies that come up for me and my clients as we navigate this ADHD journey. We learn how to work with our brains in a supportive way that suits us. This helped me reflect on the areas where we all face the same challenges: the expected challenges and the unexpected ones, like when these random knots pop up along the journey.

Not very exciting, but I did finally get through the knot. I think there is a beautiful connection to our experience of working with our brains.

Connecting the Crochet Analogy to ADHD

We have our known challenges, right? We know that when it comes to working with our ADHD, we need to learn different tools to help us do the things we want to do.

We need tools to:

• Manage our time
• Know when time is passing
• Understand how long things take
• Help us prioritize the most important things, especially when setting up and designing a schedule that works for us

What are the important things to us this season? We need to learn how to navigate procrastination.

How do we kickstart task initiation?

How do we help our brains get into flow?

How do we build that on-ramp to help us move forward?

We need tools for decision-making, tools to help us with perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and tools to generate a commitment to follow through even when a new idea or project pops in, and we don’t want to do the old thing anymore.

We need tools to help us maintain that commitment to follow through. These are known challenges. We know these.

These are the things we search for on Google: How do I manage my time? How do I get organized? How do I follow through on this thing? How do I finally finish this project for work? How do I start saying no more often?

We know these challenges. They are no secret. They are on our radar. Then we have what I call the unknown obstacles. These are the knots that will come out of your yarn and trip you up.

We all have them. They’ll pop up at different times, and while they may have a little nuance, they all revolve around the same obstacles and the same skills we need to develop to help support ourselves through them.

3 Foundational Coping Skills To Help Our ADHD Brains Out

These three things are, first of all, learning to identify the beliefs we have about ourselves, our abilities, and our ADHD. This involves learning how to identify our thoughts and beliefs and separating the ones that serve us and help us do what we want to do from the ones that hold us back.

The 3 coping skills are:

1. Identifying beliefs
2. Managing emotions
3. Practicing the pause

We want to lay a strong foundation by creating supportive beliefs about ourselves and what we’re doing. This includes learning how to support ourselves through big emotions, and how to slow down and pause so we can identify our supportive beliefs and understand what these big emotions are telling us.

Learning how to pause, identifying our thoughts and beliefs, and moving through emotion—these are the three key things every ADHD brain needs to thrive. These are the core foundations of an ADHD toolkit. This is the toolbox.

These 3 things create a strong foundation when building our scaffolding for our particular situation, such as:

• Choosing the time management approach that works for you in this season
• Developing your approach to prioritization
• Decision-making
• Moving through procrastination
• Dealing with procrastinated working – you need to initiate tasks, get started, and follow through

All those tools we develop for you first need to have your groundwork, your toolbox, where we’re going to put all those tools.

We need the foundation of learning how to pause, identifying your thoughts and beliefs about whatever we’re working toward, and your ability to be with those emotions that come up throughout the process.

When we think about this story of my yarn and this poncho that I’m making, the unknown is that big knot that comes out. I think about this knot of yarn as all of our thoughts and different stories we’ve developed over the years about whatever new skill we’re developing to support ourselves and our ADHD.

Example: You’re Working on Creating a New Schedule

Let’s say you are working toward developing a schedule that really works for your brain. You know the typical approaches you read about in different productivity blogs don’t work for your brain. You need something more ADHD-friendly. That’s what you want to do.

So you start trying those things out. Then you encounter that big knot in the yarn ball, which represents all your stories about time, your ability to follow through, and how you never stick to a schedule anyway. And you think, what’s the point in even trying because it’s not like you know how long things take?

It’s all the emotions we come up against when we keep telling ourselves these stories over and over. It’s the ability to pause and intentionally decide: do I want to sort through this big knot of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions all tangled together? Or, if you’re like I was for years, do I just want to jump to a totally different time management strategy, planner, or app instead?

For a long time, I didn’t even recognize that these were stories. I thought they were facts of the universe—I just couldn’t manage my time, and the secret was in the new app or planner. So I would jump to the next one, not realizing the real work was in sorting through that giant knot.

What we want to learn how to do is gently pull on these different threads, pull on these thoughts that our brains are telling us repeatedly. You know what this is like. I know you do. You start a new routine or approach, and you’re really excited about it. It works well for a couple of days, maybe even a week, and then your brain says, “Well, fell off the wagon. That didn’t work. Now I need a new approach.”

What really happened is that you hit a knot. The project isn’t finished yet. The poncho’s not done. You hit a knot. What we want to learn is how to start pulling apart those stories. If you’re trying to implement a new time management strategy and your brain says, “This one didn’t work because I’m so bad at time. I’m so time-blind. I’m never going to learn how to do this,” we need to start loosening that knot.

Ask yourself, “Is that true? Are you always bad with time? When have you been quite good with time?” Okay, here are some examples. Maybe you’re not always bad with time. Maybe it’s just when you’re really stressed and overwhelmed and haven’t had time to slow down and break down the steps.

We can loosen that knot a little. It’s not that you’re terrible with time; you just need space to break down the steps, start estimating, and learn how much time you need. Good to know. So we’ve loosened some of that knot, but then the brain says, “Yeah, but once I have my time figured out, I won’t know what to do because I can’t prioritize. I’m never good at that. I always jump from one thing to the next. I always say yes to everybody else.”

Identifying Beliefs

We have beliefs about not being able to say no, beliefs about prioritization, beliefs about needing to do everything and what’s most important?

These knots, like the one I’d been working on for seven-plus hours, can be very tangled. There is so much wrapped up in those beliefs. We need time and space to start sorting through them intentionally.

Practice the Pause

We first need to learn how to pause.

Recognize, “Oh, hold on. I feel this pull to buy a different planner, try a different approach, or start a different project because I’m bored with this one. And I never stick with anything anyway. I’m noticing this pull.”

We’re learning to pause and check in with ourselves, recognizing, “Hold on. This is not what I originally planned to do. Can we pause here for a moment?”

Then comes the discomfort of sitting in that pause.

Hold on. Now I’m here, and I’m seeing all of these beliefs about my inability to prioritize and manage my time. I feel like I’m always behind, always dropping the ball, and I can never count on myself. These are the stories we tell ourselves without ever pausing to consider if they’re true, helpful, or if we even want to keep them.

Instead, we often jump to the next thing. But what I think is the most important thing we can do as ADHD brains is to pause, check-in, and actually question those beliefs. Allow ourselves to sit in the discomfort of, “Hold on, what if that’s not true?” Sitting with that discomfort is not fun.

We’re going to feel frustrated when we start pulling on one thought and realize, “But sometimes I am really good at finishing things. Look at all these areas in my life where I have followed through and gotten things done.”

We loosen that part of the knot, but then it tightens up somewhere else. We think, “Yeah, but that’s only because someone else expects me to do it, and I can never do it for myself.” That part gets really tight.

We have to sit with that. Right? We have to be in that discomfort and ask ourselves,
“Okay, I hear that, but is it true? What supports could I put in place? Am I willing to be in the discomfort of saying no to all these requests so I actually have time to do the things that are important to me?”

It’s this unwinding of the big tangled knot where the magic happens. When we are willing to sit with the discomfort, the frustration, the irritation, or whatever emotion it is in our own tangled knot, we can slowly sort through it.

We work through all our stories around scheduling, learn what we actually need, and challenge those beliefs like

“I’m so terrible with time. There’s never enough time. I never follow through. I always drop the ball. There’s too much, and I can’t decide what’s most important. Everyone else needs me all the time. I have to do it all myself, I can’t possibly say no. There’s just too much. I want to do it all.”

Managing & Supporting our Big Emotions

When we can pause and sort through these beliefs, recognizing the ones we want to keep, the ones we want to challenge, and the ones we want to release, we support ourselves through the big emotions that come up… the shame, the embarrassment, the frustration, the rejection, whatever it is.

When we can move through that by pausing and checking in, and then getting to the other side, that’s magic.

Then we can continue with the strategy we’re implementing.

We can continue with the time management approach with all the greater wisdom we’ve developed. We don’t feel the need to bounce to the next time management strategy, approach, or app.

Instead, we keep using the same one but at a deeper level because we’ve challenged all those stories about ourselves—that we’re terrible with time, never follow through, can’t stick to a schedule, and never know how long things take.

When we challenge all of that, we show our brains, “No, wait, hold on. Look at how you are following through.” We build our confidence, our sense of certainty, and our willingness to be in the discomfort of trying, failing, and learning.

This way, we continually get better at the same approach and can develop the skill and scaffolding that supports your unique brain to thrive in achieving your goals.

Like I said, the scaffolding, the type of schedule you want to follow, the way you prioritize, your approach to decision-making, and how you move through procrastination or imposter syndrome—these approaches will be unique to you. That scaffolding will be unique to you.

But underneath all of that, we need to set a strong foundation. A foundation that keeps us solid, where we learn how to pause.

When we feel the pull to switch the scaffolding, to completely change our idea of what we want to build, and think, “Oh, let’s just try something different,” we need to first pause and notice that urge.

We’re already building that foundation, so we check in and challenge the beliefs that might be holding us back. We move through those emotions that want us to switch our approach.

When we build a strong, solid foundation, we support ourselves by pausing, challenging what holds us back, and learning from the emotions that stay with us. This foundation allows you to build whatever scaffolding you want on top.

Conclusion

So, these are the top three things that every ADHD brain needs:

1. The ability to slow down and pause, to ensure we are moving in the direction of our values and goals.
2. We can then challenge the beliefs that are holding us back from those goals
3. Then move through the intense emotions that might otherwise make us switch to something else.

When we learn how to support ourselves through that, we have a solid foundation.

Want to build this foundation for yourself?

I would love to help you do that. In August, my small group coaching program, We’re Busy Being Awesome, will kick off its next cohort. If you’re looking for support to not only learn and establish this strong foundation but also build your unique scaffolding for all the other tools on top, I would love to have you join us in the August cohort.

When enrollment opens, you’ll be the first to know. You can read more about how we build your strong foundation and the different scaffolding you get to build on top of that.

If you are ready to take this work deeper, to truly learn how to work with your brain in a sustainable way that allows you to actually learn the tool and use it in your life, not bounce from one planner, app, or strategy to the next, but truly integrate it into your life and move through all of those knots, then We’re Busy Being Awesome has your name on it. I would love to have you join us.

Looking for one-on-one support?

If you are looking for one-on-one coaching support connect with me at imbusybeingawesome.com/private-coaching.

–

Whatever path you choose, I want to stress: don’t overlook this foundation. This foundation is everything. We don’t want to build scaffolding on top of sand.

Let’s pour some strong concrete, create a strong foundation on which to build your scaffolding, and learn how to slow down, pause, and check in with what aligns with your values and goals.

Then, let’s challenge the beliefs holding you back so you start stepping into the true beliefs that you can manage your time, that you know what’s most important, that you follow through, that you recognize what is a full-body yes for you to do, that you are reliable, and that you can say no.

Let’s start developing those beliefs and showing your brain that they are true. Then let’s learn how to move through any emotion holding you back so you can follow through on these big goals and dreams you have for yourself. Because we need you out there doing them.

That’s what will make everything in this world better.

Links From The Podcast

• Learn more about We’re Busy Being Awesome here
• Learn about 1:1 coaching here
• Get the top 10 tips to work with your ADHD brain (free ebook!)
• Discover my favorite ADHD resources here
• Get the I’m Busy Being Awesome Planning System here
• Get the Podcast Roadmap here
• Get the ADHD Routine Revamp here
• Tune into Episode 182: How to Slow Your Brain Down & Pause with ADHD

Leave IBBA A Rating & Review!

If you enjoy the podcast, would you be a rockstar and leave a review? Doing so helps others find the show and spreads these tools to even more people.

1. Go to Apple Podcasts
2. Click on the I’m Busy Being Awesome podcast
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you see the reviews.
4. Simply tap five stars; that’s it!
5. Bonus points if you’re willing to leave a few sentences sharing what you enjoy about the podcast or a key takeaway from the episode you just heard. Thanks, friend!