Ep 68: Managing the ADHD Mind - Gaming, Tech & Focus with Joshua Archer

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🎮 Managing Multiple Passions and Technology with ADHD: Featuring Joshua Archer

In this engaging episode, we are joined by Joshua Archer, a multi-passionate entrepreneur and educator who shares his journey of late ADHD diagnosis and navigating life in our digital age. Together, we explore how to manage multiple interests, find focus in a tech-saturated world, and create sustainable systems that work for the ADHD brain.

📌 What You'll Learn:
- How to manage the constant flow of "idea popcorn" in your mind
- Strategies for building trust with yourself through effective planning
- The impact of technology on the ADHD brain and how to find balance
- Ways to embrace multiple interests without burning out
- The role of role-playing games in developing social skills
- Tips for finding peace in our increasingly digital world
- How to determine "what's enough" in your life

🗣️ Featured Quote:
"You have to take your life in terms of what you can accomplish and not in terms of what you're not accomplishing." – Joshua Archer

👤 About Our Guest:
Joshua Archer is the founder of The Game Academy, a nonprofit organization using tabletop role-playing games for education and personal development. With a background in software engineering and web design, Joshua brings a unique perspective on managing ADHD in our technology-driven world. After receiving his own late ADHD diagnosis, he has become passionate about helping others understand and embrace their neurodivergent traits.

🔗 Useful Resources Mentioned:
- The Game Academy: thegameacademy.org
- Joshua's Substack: Among Monday Publishers
- Planning strategies for the ADHD brain
- Tools for managing digital distractions

Connect with Mande: 

Learn more about private coaching: https://learntothrivewithadhd.com/services/

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Website: https://www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/ 

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/learntothrivewithadhd/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/learntothrivewithadhd/

💡 Remember:
Managing ADHD in our modern world isn't about eliminating technology or limiting your interests—it's about finding sustainable ways to embrace both while maintaining your peace of mind.

#ADHDcoach #ADHDcoaching #AdultADHD #ADHDhelp #Technology #DigitalWellness #LateADHDdiagnosis #MultipleInterests #PersonalGrowth


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CLICK HERE for more resources. We're on this journey together!

Transcript

All right. Welcome back, guys. I have Joshua Archer with us today. Can you introduce yourself? You've you've had quite an interesting run. So of all the things that you've done, so can you tell the audience who you are? Sure. I mean, I think it's probably pretty common for us in the ADHD crowd to have any interest in many careers.

And my pathways no different from that. The most recent thing that I've done professionally was to create a nonprofit using role playing games, tabletop role playing games with kids for education, and a whole person education as well. They called the Game Academy. But before that, I ran a web company, web design company, and before that I was a software engineer for years and years and dot coms.

And I before that, I think as a kid, I wanted to be a game creator. So I kind of came full circle to the games. But, you know, that's just the professional arm of things. You know, I've have a million different hobbies as well, you know? Yeah. Yeah, you did. One of the very interesting things you do is you do the dickens fair every year, and you're doing that.

Is that over now, or are you still in a bid to have more weekends of that sort of weekends? Early December. Now it will be running till right before the the Christmas break. So. Yeah. And I've never attended, but I assume it's like some other things that I do have context for where you're in full, like roleplaying mode.

Right. It's, it's based on Charles Dickens version of Victorian London and it's been running for I think this year is the 40th anniversary for the fair and it runs in San Francisco at the Cow Palace. And a bunch of us get dressed up. Some of us play characters from actual books. Some of us create just individuals that would fit into that setting, and people will run different vignettes like there's, you know, down the street from where we're at.

I'm part of the Patti West School of Seamanship, which actually tracks an individual from history, Patty West, who would train unwitting people wanting to become sailors and really didn't give them very good training and then sent them off to to be on the ships and and took their money. But, you know, down the street we have Fagin and an Oliver Twist.

And throughout the fare is Scrooge, you know, being accompanied by one of the three ghosts. And by the end of the day, he has this epiphany. So it's you sort of just walk right into the world and we're all doing our best to sort of bring life to that world and deep context. Yeah, so fun. And I was checking in preparation for our meeting.

I looked back at our notes and Josh is actually a client of mine, and we've worked together for a couple of years now, and I saw your ADHD story in those notes that I took, which was that one of your sons got diagnosed and then you realized you also had ADHD. Right. I was an adult. I didn't get diagnosed until, I guess 20, 22 or 2021 or one of the very recently.

And it wasn't because I had any experience. It made me think of that. But my son, who had been, you know, is looking at memes online, is like, this looks a lot like me, you know, And he comes to me and say, Dad, I think I have ADHD. I was like, Why? Why would you think that? And it's like, well, you know, this of this and this.

And he showed it to me like, yeah, that sounds pretty familiar. So we had him tested and he came back with a, with a diagnosis. And then I also got tested because as we know, it runs in the family. And I was pretty solidly, you know, in that camp as well. But we, you know, depending on what kind of struggle you have and what your particular circumstance, I just masked really well without knowing it and became hyper fixated on grades.

So that was my thing. And so society rewards you for that. But what they don't tell you is all of the anxiety and sort of cortisol, you know, fueled last minute papers and, you know, just all of the things that you're suffering in the background, trying to meet the requirements of of the circumstance, and that when you have a job and you have a boss, they can set that level for you.

But then when you become an entrepreneur and you start your own business, you are your own boss and then you're hit with a new problem of, well, what do I do? What's more important? And you try to do it all and then you burn out. So that's where I've gone through and now I've actually taken a step back from running the Game Academy.

My partner is running it. I still teach classes, but I'm now just really trying to figure out how do I take on my interests in my life in a way that's sustainable. And that's what has been a lot of our work together, has been organizing your interests and managing your time. But so Josh is now writing for Substack, and it's one of his commitments that he's been keeping.

And I want to read you an excerpt from one of the Substack because I think those of you with ADHD are going to very much relate to this and says, So my pattern is to engage with people, interests and hobbies and obligations

as if they were the only thing I had to do until I found myself spending 37 plates in the air on the end of sticks while juggling 48 bowling pins and riding the unicycle through the obstacle course of flaming hoops.

And I just thought I pulled that out because I thought it was just so perfectly ADHD. And there is that note of like not only the chaos but also the hyper fixation on whatever is right in front of us at the moment. And so that's been interesting to manage. But where I was suggesting that we had a podcast together, Josh reminded me right before the call because I couldn't remember exactly what I got so excited about.

But it's a process that I work with a lot of clients. On that Josh has adapted from not only other areas, but also in our work together of basically Empty in your mind. And so can you explain to people the process that you've pulled together for yourself? Right. So and let me say it's process that I've pulled together.

It's in the process of being a process. Like all things, it's thinking right? And I think that the hyper fixation and impulsivity of like being in really interested in things and taking them on and pouring yourself into it is can be a superpower and can be really amazing when you can really just immerse yourself in that. But you often have a life and a context and all these other things.

Maybe you have 12 other things just like that, and then you have your bills and you have your home life and you have your relationship with your wife, you have a relationship with your kids, and you have your commitments that you've made to other people and and all of those things get stored in the back lot of your mind and you don't get to choose when they show up.

Sometimes they'll show up at the most inner and or inopportune moments. Right. And that becomes this sort of anxiety chatter. And if that anxiety chatter is too loud, you can't focus you can't focus even on the stuff you're really interested in because you're worried you're not doing the thing you should be doing. And how do you figure out what that is anyways, right?

And the the real key to focus is the ability to get rid of the distractions, especially for folks like us, because distractions, whether they be good or bad, are going to interrupt our flow, they're going to interrupt our flow, and then getting back into flow is incredibly difficult. So how do you quiet your mind? How do you get rid of the chatter?

Well, the best thing that I've discovered is to create a place in my schedule where I can deal with planning my important things, where I can figure out my priorities, but not long term. Long term, really, we're talking about incremental. We're talking about the next day, you know, and having those those maybe you've got a half an hour, maybe you got an hour, depending on how much time you need.

In general, you set aside your planning time and you know that it's there. And when you're doing whatever you're doing and the voices start chattering, saying, hey, that thing you got to do, you did you do it? Did you do need to do it? You're like, Hey, I had my planning period. And in that planning period, I made choices.

And those are the choices I'm going to stick with. And this thing that I'm worried about is not unreal. It's not it's not incorrect, but I'm going to just park it. I'm going to park it till the next planning period. Because if it's not that I made the right choices last time, I'm definitely going to make the right choices next time, or at least I'm going to make the ones that are that are formed about in that moment so you can divert those noisy interruptions in your head.

Then you can clear the deck for actually going deep in what you're doing. And it's about trusting yourself and it's about really giving yourself a break from the worries, you know, that you're not getting rid of the worries, you know, gaslighting yourself. You know, saying you don't have to be worried about. You're just saying that's not now time.

Right now I'm chopping wood. I'm carrying water. That's what I'm doing. And I'll worry about worrying when it's time to worry. And but the other side is you have to keep that day. You can't let that slide. You can't get to the planning period and say, I'm so jazzed about what I'm doing right now. I'm going to just stay in that.

I'm not going to plan because you made yourself that commitment and that's what allows you to have your focus. Time is that you're going to give yourself the planned time. Yeah. And once you really get this down, it's it's funny that you're like, I don't have to worry about that right now because I have a tool that I've developed from working with clients called the Now Not Now List.

And the way I offload this kind of information is all of this goes everything that doesn't matter in the next day or two goes on the not now list. But I'm really happy that you mentioned trust because it is building trust with yourself and it calms your brain just to go. I can trust that that's on that list and I can look at that list later.

And I even like to hide my not now list for myself because I don't. I already got it out and now I don't need to worry about it. It doesn't matter today or tomorrow. And also one thing that we talk about is deciding what's enough in your life. How has that been for you as far as like kind of paring down and because you're a man of many interests.

Right. So talk about that. Yeah, it's that's that's been tough because, you know, when your mind is always popping and especially if you're trying to build a business, you, you know, have the superpower of being able to see across categories. And you can see all the things that need to be done, but you pay the price in the ability to figure out what needs to be done first, what can be done realistically alongside other things.

And so it's just there's a lot of unknown. Your anxiety is built. My anxiety by my own anxiety comes from not being able to figure out what I should be doing right now. Right. And so if I stack my deck with too many things, then I'm always in a state of fight or flight. I'm always in a state of like jumping from one thing to the next, because that's the only way I could even conceive of getting it done.

And honestly, I can't do it all. I'm tricking myself, I'm fooling myself. The thing I've been trying to do is just roll it all back and just say, All right, what's the one thing I can do? Instead of trying to make the question about how do I get all this stuff done, you whip it, You know, you don't try to worry about fixing all of the world's problems.

You just figure out what's the next thing I'm going to work on. Because the truth is, you'll never do it all. You'll never do it all. And you have to accept that. But it's also a blessing because when you flip it on its head, you do get to choose what you're going to do. And somebody I can't remember who it was was talking about it was a friend or something I read about like perspective on like things like charity or, you know, work with, you know, towards good.

If you measure yourself against all the tax tasks that don't get done, all the people that you don't help, all the lives that you don't save, you're never, ever going to be happy. But if you look at, Hey, I changed one person's life today, or I fed one person or I clothes one person, like that's positive and you got to take your life that way.

You've got to take your life in terms of what you can accomplish and not in terms of what you're not accomplishing. And that's prevalent. And every every one of my clients that I work with are highly intelligent people. And the problem with that is the not intelligent people don't notice all the things that are happening. They're not worried about it.

But but we are. And there was another thing that you wrote about in your substack about popcorn. And like I think you called it idea Popcorn or something like that, but you described this experience in your childhood. Tell us about that. Right. So when I was in kindergarten, I had a kindergarten teacher who was really creative. And one of the things that she would do as a reward would for, I don't know, good behavior for the class is that she would put a big blanket out in the classroom.

It might be like eight foot by eight foot. And in the center of the blanket, she would put an electric walk and then have all the kids sit around the outside of the blanket with you can't get under the blanket. But she would put oil and popcorn into that walk and it would sit and it would heat up and you would listen and the sound would change and you would hear like sizzling and popping and and all of these sort of really loud sounds.

And all of a sudden, you know, you'd get these pieces of paper and start flying out in different directions. And if it flew towards you and you could reach it without getting on the like it, you got to take it. And it was one of those things that are both really loved. And I also really hated because you never get to choose where that popcorn goes, you know, and you might sit there on that blanket and never get a single kernel and it just goes elsewhere.

Right? So sometimes when I'm in my life, the ideas that I'm getting are like this, like they're popping and they're going and they're landing different places, but I can't reach all of them. And sometimes it's almost like you combine that picture with having a little Jack Russell terrier in the room who goes around and eats all the popcorn and so, like, you're just watching all these ideas go away.

You know, they just pop up and they go away. And that's can be incredibly frustrating. And that's that sort of idea popcorn idea of like, how do you capture those kernels, you know, or how do you just let it be background noise, you know, because maybe you don't need all that. Maybe you don't need all that popcorn, right?

Yeah, I will tell you. Like that's kind of back to the tool of the Now Not Now list. That's where all my idea of popcorn goes is on the Not Now list. And some of those things have been there for a year. And so when I thought that they were so important that I had to capture them, I now realize, well, maybe it just wasn't that important anyway.

But then I look at the list and I'm like, Do I want to take these things off? Well, no, I still would someday like to do these things. I was just experiencing this with my coaching business, actually. I guess with the economy, I don't know. But my consultations had gone like really, really down and now they have just sped up so, so much from like one a month to what you would normally used to be to a week.

And then it got to one a month for about four months. And now my consultations are like three or four a week. And I am always thinking like my idea of popcorn in this example is always what else should I be doing in order? Should I be advertising? Should I be doing this? Should you be doing that? And there's always a million things we should do.

I just interviewed an author. I believe her book, her the podcast will come out this Thursday, but I believe her book is called From Chaos to Order, and her name is Jacqueline. First name Jacqueline. I'm not recalling her last name at the moment, but there are several books under that name. But I think it was her book that talked about our brains are just not meant for the modern world.

You know, we're not meant to have come to carry a computer in our pockets. And I'm hearing I love this. I think I've talked about it on here several times, but there's this podcast I love called My First million, and it's these two guys that are I come from the tech industry and have done all kinds of different businesses.

And I love their show because a lot of times they don't they don't agree with each other. But but one thing that that they're talking about on the show is just as technology that's coming is like that's already here, actually. But is having basically computer screens on your eyeballs which is would be these glasses that the name of them has left me at the moment.

But I can see once that technology starts to take off, then it's going to be contact lenses and then we're never going to be able to get away from technology. And so I can see that there would be this backlash in the future of just shutting down all kinds of technology. Like on my phone, I have shut down all notifications whatsoever, but I see your ideas percolating there.

What's what's going on? Well, I totally I agree with the sentiment. And I'm of an age where, I mean, I was Gen Xer. I grew up in the seventies, in the eighties, and, you know, I was incredibly curious kid and I followed all of my rabbit holes. But what that meant was that I went to the library once a week, you know, and it wasn't I wasn't able to be distracted to the level that I am now.

Now, if I have a question or a wonder of, you know, who invented that or how do you pronounce that word or what does that phrase mean? I like is with my phone out and I use that a lot of the time and that adds up. You know, the distractions, the pull towards the interest, the thing that's and I shudder to think that if I don't even have to pull the phone out of my pocket, if all I've got to do is think and gesture like we're not really human anymore, you know, like we'll be something else.

I don't know what it's going to look like. Maybe it'll be okay, but that will definitely be dependent at that point and a level that we're not right now. And will we know peace? Will we know how to calm ourselves? Will we be able to have silence? That is what I think is most at threat and who knows what negative effects that will have on our health, our wellbeing, our ability to communicate.

Humans are meant to have solitary time. We don't have a chatterbox on the top of our head that says everything we're thinking, and that's a really good thing. If we have more and more interfacing with machinery, that makes it easier for us to not shut up and not to stop, I worry. I do worry. Yeah, I very much relate to the library because that is like where I got all my information and I remember being, you know, probably about five years old too.

It's kind of my five year old story, but my grandparents had this like encyclopedia of, like animals. And so there was a book on horses and a book on cats. And and I would sit there cross-legged, just going through all that information or like Highlights magazine or, you know, just reading prolifically. And I was discussing with my husband yesterday because my my kids are educated a little.

First, I homeschooled for like 12 years, and now they're in a education program that's called the Socratic Experience, which some colleges have adopted, which is just a very different learning style. So they're not being educated the way I was being educated and the discussion I was having with my husband was, is that even going to matter? Do they even need to do we need to know multiplication?

Do you know the last podcast I mentioned my son when he did go to school, he chose to go to middle school. He came home and he's like, Mom, they can't read analog clocks. They they don't know how to tell time. And so, like, do these things matter anymore? And does it matter how kids get an education or will they constantly have a second brain somehow?

You know, I mean, I have a master's degree in education. It's one of the things that I did in order to be better at my my work than I did with the Game Academy. And there's this thing that's called hidden curriculum. It's the stuff that you don't teach, and it's just as important as the stuff that you do teach.

And if you are learning that you don't need to know anything, but you just need to know how to use the tools and you become a conduit. Like this is happening in software engineering right now with A.I., right where we're looking at a future where it is very possible that we won't have as many coders, as many people that are working directly with machines.

And instead we're going to have much more people who are just good at asking the questions of the machine to get the machine to program itself. Right. So, I mean, in one sense, you mean you're just pushing the envelope, maybe you just develop new skills. But on the other hand, the way we have creativity is that we call upon the disparate things in our mind that we know how to do, and we see how those things can be combined together to make something new.

And if we don't know these fundamentals, they don't get to be a part of that conversation, you know, and they're just the black box. And so I do think it matters to, at least to some degree, maybe it doesn't matter to always do long division, but you should learn how at least once you should at least have the skill.

Right? That's interesting, because my 15 year old is very interested in being a coder and both the 15 year old and the 17 year old are very against this world of AI that's coming. And one is an artist and one wants to be a coder. And what I've told them that, you know, it's just my opinion, we'll see what they do with it, but they're, you know, very A.I..

I said, you're going to get left behind. You really need to embrace this to some degree. But who knows if that's true. Like, part of our conversation has reminded me where both Gen X and what were our parents worried about watching too much TV? The TV is terrible. Don't don't watch so much TV. And I lived in a town where before we got a satellite dish, which sounds ancient, we had like three channels in our town.

One was PBS, one was like ABC, maybe the other was NBC. I don't know. And there really wasn't a lot of TV to watch where my husband, as soon as there were satellite dishes available, his parents had that and they had all kinds of channels. But that was also in in the book or the podcast that I was listening to that same day, which was like, there's always this fear of the next technology.

What's what's your opinion about that? Well, I'm not afraid of technology, and I don't think that anything in itself is dangerous, but it is very much how we adopt and guide the use of those things and what gets lost in the process. Calculators haven't stopped people from being able to do arithmetic, but maybe it has caused people to be slower at it or not be able to do it on their head.

Does it matter? Well, in some context, it really doesn't matter. But, you know, say you get lost in the wilderness and you have to calculate, you know, an orienteering path back to civilization. You've got a map, you've got a compass. But how do you figure out how to get there? How do you figure out, you know, like you might need these skills, you know, or you've got your cell phone and it's got a GPS on it, but it runs out of battery.

Do you know how to use a compass? You know, do you have one even? Right. So, I mean, we as humans evolved with technology. It is a part of who we are. I think that we just have to be careful. Like I would say to your your children, like you should be part of the conversation so that you can guide where it goes.

You know, that's the biggest deal is like if you sit and try to opt out of something that is not going away, you lose your ability to determine where it goes. And so you've got to you've got to learn how it's being done and maybe, you know, put your foot in the ring and say like, this is a useful way to do it.

And this is not so good. Like, algorithms are really good at helping us for stuff that, you know, we don't need to be spending our time on. But, you know, it should it be creating, you know, art, painting, things like that? Well, if it does, then you're losing the entire realm of how artists get trained, right? It's you know, if you if you if you give over a task to a technology, it's going to be very hard to take it back.

So just stay in the conversation. Really don't fear it, but don't don't ignore it. Yeah, I love that. And also with these these new each generation, you know, has it's it's new thing. There was some biography that I was reading or was talking about how they were fearing electricity at one point and then they feared cars. And you know, like I mentioned, our generation veering, veering in TVs and for a long time I really couldn't and was concerned and still am about how much time my kids spend on the computer.

It's it's an obscene amount of time. And some of that I can place blame on myself for not requiring that there are doing other things. But we've had discussions about, okay, let's make sure we're getting our exercise, let's make sure we're, you know, keeping good posture while on the computer, that kind of thing. But I had an experience yesterday where I was traveling back from Tucson, Arizona, and we stopped at a convenience store to get something to drink and the kid behind the counter, he was doing such a good job at getting people and it was very busy.

And he was, you know, getting people checked out. He was all by himself behind the counter. But when it came to our interaction, he was extremely rude. And my husband immediately got upset and I held back for a second. I did say there's no need to be rude, but then I kind of held myself back and I pondered on it as I was getting back on the freeway and I thought, my gosh, this kid has probably been behind a computer screen his whole life.

This is his experience interacting with the real world where he's not a keyboard warrior saying anything he wants to say. And that is where like, okay, are we losing human interaction a little bit? And is that that's why I didn't get angry with the kid because I'm like, it's just not his fault. This is this is just a byproduct of this thing that's coming.

And so and, you know, there's the way that they spend their lives and then there's, you know, are they given any opportunities in their lives to practice these skills or even be told that these skills are important, Right. Yeah. The technology that we use distance distances us from one another physically and and it can cause an alienation it but it's you know, it's akin to like driving in your car and getting road rage.

You know, like if you don't see the other cars on the road as having drivers who are people and those people having lives and issues and problems and, this guy just cut me off. Well, maybe he was distracted by something that happened in the car. You know, maybe he was just thinking of that thing that popcorn into his head and he didn't notice your turn signal.

Like, how many times have I done that? You know, And I've felt really bad about it, you know, But you can't, you know, knock on the window of the car next and say, I'm really sorry, you know, So we have to just allow for that being part of the experience right. And it makes us feel better. Like, you know, I had an experience where somebody cut me off on the freeway and my first, you know, impulse was like because it was obvious.

It wasn't like the person was, I accidentally came over there. They sped up and got in front of me and slowed down like I had somehow become their, you know, problem. And yeah, I was like, you know what? I'm going to back off from this. And now what I'm going to do is everybody who wants in in front of me, I'm just going to let them I'm going to give them the space and give them that opportunity.

And I instantly felt better like each it changed the perspective, you know, So we do need to interact with another one, another to to learn these skills. But we also have to remember, you know, we don't know all the story, especially if we have a limited exposure to people. Right? So I think when it comes to the use of technology and that distancing part, like we have to mitigate mitigate it, we have to we have to culturally decide where it's appropriate and where it's not appropriate if we want to preserve the things we value today, if we don't want to preserve those things, if we don't care about those things, well, then, you know, we'll

find out where we end up. But I don't like to sit in the backseat, you know, I want to be part of the conversation. So, yeah, I'm going to continue to try to promote what I think is right and but do it in a way with compassion and not blame, because nobody likes to be yelled at. Nobody likes to be told they're doing it wrong, you know?

Yeah. That's so interesting you said that because, you know, my husband, his immediate reaction, even though he's a very chill guy, but his the kid was very rude and his immediate reaction was to get really upset. But, you know, me thinking about it afterwards, I'm like, I'm sure it didn't make that kid feel good for me to tell him he was being rude.

Did he need to know? Yes. But I'm sure it didn't make him feel good because he did not apologize. He just kind of tried to sweep it under the rug and move on to the next customer. And so, yeah, those interactions are going to happen maybe less and less. Whereas, you know, self-checkout and things like that, right? We may just have eyes that are programed to treat us fairly nicely.

You know, you never even notice it anymore. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But to kind of take this full circle, a lot of the work that I do with especially my male clients, I don't think we've really dealt a lot with this, actually. But I've had several clients that the phone it has been the problem. The phone has been the distraction, the phone has been the disconnect from the family.

And that's that's been something that we have to work on. And so with what's your experience with that? I he dealt with that before we started working together. It is because as I was saying before, like every impulse or whim of what I want to know is right there. Plus I might be engaged in multiple conversations and social media and I've got to have like, you know, have they answered yet?

Are they here yet? Are they answer yet? But really, more than anything, it's about a tolerance for unfocused interaction. It's a tolerance for boredom. Like we since we have the ability to give ourselves dopamine in any moment of the day, any, any second, like those uncomfortable pauses or those silences or those things where you're trying to get your head together and figure out what you're going to say to somebody.

You know, they disappear, you know, and therefore we don't learn how to navigate them, you know, And it you know, it was the case where I would find myself on my phone instead of sitting down at the dinner table and talking, you know, And it's never I mean, it's not always even stuff that's that's interesting or useful. It might just be phone games, you know.

And so I had to make myself a rule that, like, I get one phone game on my phone at any given time. I do the exact same thing. You're you're just one. That's a challenge enough, you know. But if I have, you know, words with friends and black widow, coo and all these other things, you know, they have a social aspect to them.

There's a competitive aspect to them. And I can spend all my time wasting my time on that. And I'll even try to leave my phone at home at times, like if I know that I don't need it, if I don't need to be connected, you know, And then I go to Burning Man in a up until recently, like you didn't have Internet out there.

So it was an enforced seclusion from all of this. Right. So I do think it's important for us to disconnect to, you know, put the phones in the box, you know, and close the box when you're having family interactions, just like it's it's a great tool that can be so easily overused and it takes so much time incrementally away from the things that really matter more.

Yeah, And that's one thing that Josh is really good at is your your human interactions. You have your camping trips and Burning Man and the Dickens fair and you've put a really an importance on your human interactions. And is that part of the work that you did with getting away from the phone, or has it always been because I just come naturally to you?

I think that growing up I was since I was undiagnosed ADHD, there was an awkwardness that I possessed, maybe an over enthusiasm or maybe, you know, I always knew the answer to things and I was always, you know, impulsively raising my hands or answering questions or interjecting or so I had to learn how to interact in a way that other people found comfortable.

Maybe that could be considered masking. Maybe that's just learning skills. But one of the things that I discovered early on in my life was roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons, things like that, where I was able to practice interactions in a social arena. But it wasn't about me. It was about my character and it wasn't about the other players, it was about their characters.

So you could make social faux pas, you could do the wrong thing and it didn't reflect, reflect badly on you. And interesting, it's one of the things that, you know, I've carried into the work that I do. The kids in the Game Academy is that same sort of giving a performance space to learn how to be a person and to make it not be so high stakes.

Yeah, to be able to be messy. And I love that you said awkward. That's how I've always described myself as awkward. And I actually got some coaching on it. And they they said, well, what makes it awkward? And I realized that it was my thinking that I was going to be awkward in this interaction that actually made me more awkward and still does to this day, especially with people that I don't know well, I can get so worried and so in my head about being awkward that I will come off very awkward, right?

Tripping over yourself. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That hasn't gone away for me. You know, I just. You give yourself a little moment to slow down before you have, like, if you know, it's a high stress situation and you're worried about it, you know, you just you take a moment, you focus in, you say, okay, this is going to be as easy as it's going to be.

You know, I can't make it any better than that. Yeah, Yeah. Very good. I love that. All right. Well, I think we've had a great conversation. We've hit on a lot of things. What do you think ADHD professionals and entrepreneurs need to know? Well, I mean, many people who are professionals are also people who have the same, you know, divergence in their neurology.

So we have a sense of what the experience is like. But if you don't, I mean, I think the biggest thing, especially for, you know, adults that have late diagnosis, late life diagnosis, is that there's always feeling of like, am I doing this right? I am, I am I, am I fitting the mold? Am I? You know, why does it feel so hard?

Why does it feel so awkward? And that self-talk can really turn into hindrances And really this the therapeutics around the situation and allowing people to really fully accept who they are and what they're, you know, what they're really good at and whether the challenges are. And that just because you have those challenges doesn't mean that you'll never do those things, that it's not, you know, a victim mentality.

It's not like, well, I can't plan, so I'm not going to plan. It's like, no, it's just a it's just a challenge, just like anything else in your life. You know, some people are really good runners. Other people have to practice at it. Some people, you know, can do math well to be also have to practice at it.

You know, some of us have poor short term memory and we have to either practice at it or have tools that help us, you know, like have your notebook. It's the only way you can survive. So, you know, letting your clients know, look, there's so many tools to help you meet the difficulties. Don't beat yourself up about that.

And really also just celebrate what you can do better than other people and use that forward. Yeah. And just building on what you were saying there, I thought, I like to offer clients a lot when they're, you know, learning to manage their time or they're, you know, trying to learn some skill or build up one of their executive function skills.

As I'm becoming a person who, you know, fill in the blank, I'm learning the skill of fill in the blank instead of, I can't do this. As soon as we're saying I can't, what happens? That's exactly what it's become. It's true. It's like when we're driving, you're going to go where you're looking. husband's a farmer and he will check fields, sometimes not even his own.

As we're driving around. I live in an agriculture town. He will, you know, look out onto the fields and see like if there's weeds or bugs or, you know, bug damage or what's going on with that field. And sure enough, the truck goes towards the field. And that's the same with our thoughts like is wouldn't when we're learning these skills, we need to make sure that we're thinking in such a way that we're going in the direction that we want to go.

So yeah, that being said, I definitely want to direct people to your substack Is there any where else you would like people to connect with you? Well, I mean the Game Academy is still an organization that I put a lot of energy into and we the really good work. We do really good work so the game academy dot org is a place to find out about the work we do.

And if you have kids in your life, you know, that are looking for ways to sort of fully express themselves and learn how to be people, we do both in-person work and remote work online games, etc. So anywhere around the country or the world, as long as we can fit a time zone, we can help. And the SUBSTACK is going to be among Monday publishers.

So come and check it out. You know, as my writing chops grow, there may be more, but it's really all of those things through my life that I've always like, I should write about this or I should write about that. I just finally said, okay, this is my commitment. I'm going to do at least one essay a week.

So come and see my journey and I'm all caught up and it is very much ADHD friendly. You're definitely like seeing a brain just like your own as you're reading Josh's work. So it's it's going well. And I'm proud of you for not that you need me to be proud of you, but for making the commitment and following through.

That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you very much. All right. Well, thanks so much for being on today. I appreciate it. All right. We'll see you guys next week.