PRIMER

Intro

I want you to think of yourself and your work in terms of expansion and integration.

As a little baby, when you finally let go of the couch and took your first few independent steps, that was expansion. Then you fell down on your butt. In between that moment and the next moment when you stood back up to try again, something else happened: integration. You internalized the experience — you incorporated it.

Expansion is an action that you take — purposefully and with intention. Integration is a passive process that the subconscious mind does on your behalf. Integration converts that which was unknown into something that is known. The mental boundary that divides the known from the unknown has shifted outward. You are now more. You know more. You are more capable than you were just a moment ago.

For this reason, when you make your next attempt to walk, it will be better than the first attempt.

As you continue to make new attempts, the task goes from 'not-you' to 'you'. From 'unnatural' to 'natural'. It will occupy progressively less of your attention as you continue. Eventually it becomes automatic. And then soon you begin developing new skill-sets on top of this one: running, jumping, and skipping.

Expansion

There is a natural tension that builds up into a crescendo right up to the very moment when you take a new, novel action. This tension is the result of two conflicting forces in you — the aspect of you that desires to expand, and the aspect of you that would prefer not to. These are two aspects of your own psyche.

The part of you that would prefer not to expand desires to stay inside the realm of the known. It has good, evolutionary reasons for this: any expedition into the unknown could be your last. After all — you don't know what's out there! The fear of the unknown is not sourced from the rational, adult aspect of you, it is sourced deep from millions of generations of evolution over billions of years. The entire game was to live long enough to reproduce — nothing else mattered. We all carry that legacy in us.

And that legacy is active even when we consider trying a new brand of yogurt! When you look at the other, unknown, container of yogurt — you may not necessarily say that you're afraid, but if you're honest you'll note just enough reluctance to succumb to the muscle-memory of sticking with your tried-and-true yogurt brand.

Fear of the unknown is a strong sensation when it comes to things like asking someone out on a date, or bungee jumping, but will also be proportionately minor with minor deviations from the known. Thus instead of fear it will feel like reluctance; unwillingness. We just talk ourselves out of doing it — even if we have every reason to think that this new yogurt could be even better than our usual one.

Thus the fear of the unknown can vary in intensity. But it will always discourage us from expanding.

The part of you that would prefer to expand comes from a different area of your psyche. This part of you is not rooted in fear, survival, or evolution. It comes from the aspect of you that is visionary. It speaks quietly. You become aware of it just before you fall asleep at night. It is the sense of something that you could do, that you'd like to do. It's creative, generative, interested, enthusiastic.

After all — why did you learn to walk? What was that in you that wanted to do it? Viewed from the perspective of survival, it makes no sense — crawling is much safer than walking or running. Why not just crawl?

The answer is simply that you got the sense that you could, and that you wanted to. It looked like fun. It looked like it would open up new opportunity. This was the drive to expansion.

Integration

Integration is a natural but delicate stage of the growth process.

The biggest mistake that we make about it is when we treat it like a manual process, when it is in fact an automatic one. Any attempt to 'do' this part will only interfere with it, retarding or even stopping the process in its tracks. When it is permitted to happen unimpeded, the experience is converted into muscle memory.

Some road construction has begun recently along the route that I usually take to visit my parents' home. Our homes are positioned somewhat awkwardly across large stretches of farmland and there are no direct highway routes to take — just a lattice of small rural roads. Google Maps had settled on a route that I ended up taking a few times, when I soon began to notice that despite going this way several times, I didn't actually know the way on my own. So I started to pay attention to the landmarks as I went. And then I started turning off Google Maps at certain points. And then eventually it stayed off. And then eventually I came to know the route intimately, intuitively.

That's integration.

Along this process if I chastised myself for making mistakes, if I criticized myself for not learning it faster, if I made claims about how easy this is supposed to be, if I told myself about how I'm not good at this kind of thing, if I stayed tense in my body, if I constantly doubted myself along the way, then this process would have been obstructed. Friction would have been coded into it.

Self-punishment, self-abuse, self-doubt, and self-ridicule all slow down the process of integration into a brutal grind. Ceasing these mental activities allows integration to go at maximum speed.

Expansion and Integration

If you don't expand, then you stagnate. The visionary aspect of you is going unacknowledged.

If you don't integrate, then you get caught in endless loops of the same failure. There's no progress.

However if you master the process of expansion and integration, then life takes on motion. There's movement. Things truly begin to shift and change for you. And only now can you truly begin the work that you came into this life to do.

From Powerlessness into Empowerment

Power refers simply to your ability to make something happen.

If you are in a situation that you don't like, and you wish to change it, then power refers to your ability to put yourself into a new one.

The amount of power that you wield corresponds to the amount of responsibility that you take on for your situation. The less responsible you are, the less powerful you are. The more responsible you are, the more powerful you become.

For the moment let's forget about why you are in the situation that you're in — with everything about it that's problematic. Let's forget about how you got here, what you've done wrong, the mistakes that you made. Or the ways in which you've been victimized. Let's instead find you in your situation right here, right now. And let us ask: What now?

It may not be clear how to change the entire situation around — but it is the case that you can think of something that you can do to improve it. Something that you could do that you haven't been doing. We're interested in that now. This is what we mean by taking responsibility.

The crux of the movement from powerlessness to empowerment lies in choosing where the locus of power actually is. What is causing your situation to be as it is? Your bad habits? Your bad upbringing? Your unresolved emotional wounding? The economy? The job market? Your clients? Your health? The weather?

The moment you shift your locus of power outside of you and into any one of these, then you are disempowered — subject to the conditions of life. And yet the moment we shift the locus of power back to you — you become the causal agent. You become the decider, the determiner, the author of your situation.

Making this crucial shift may not necessarily cause your problems and obstacles to dissolve immediately, but something nevertheless important is happening — you are becoming empowered. You are returning to yourself, your original knowing of who you are and what you're capable of.

Stay with it. Never abandon this knowing.

The next crucial step then is to take fresh action based on this knowing. What can you do now to make your situation better? The answer will almost certainly involve doing something that will cause you to expand.

Thus you return to the cycle of expansion and integration.

From Friction to Flow

Friction refers to whatever counteracts your efforts to start a worthwhile task. Or to complete one once you've started. Internal friction is what results when the aspect of you that wishes to expand and the aspect of you that wishes to stay safe are at cross purposes. The result is that unpleasant, grinding feeling behind true, productive, creative work.

Friction is what causes us to want to procrastinate, delay getting around to our work, run the clock, and distract ourselves with other things.

The absence of friction is called flow. The flow state is a joyful, fulfilling state when the work that you're doing seems to take on a momentum of its own. A hallmark of the ADHD experience is for the flow state to be experienced when doing anything other than our work.

The key to dissolving friction is to inquire into it. To ask: why do I believe that I benefit from NOT doing this task?

Most of us are so frustrated with our survival aspect, and are so deep in our attempts to rid ourselves of it, that we're unwilling to stop and listen to it, and even less willing to validate what it has to say.

The aspect of us that is afraid feels that its survival is threatened by accomplishing this activity. We can respect this fear while also knowing that there's nothing to be afraid of. For example you might be afraid of going through all the effort of doing the task, only to find out that you did it the wrong way and that it now has to be redone. All of that time and effort that you put into it — wasted. Better off not doing it in the first place, thinks the survival self, as it applies the brakes on your endeavour.

What do we do then?

Don't debate, don't argue. Just acknowledge that you feel that way.

Next, figure out what the truth is despite what your fear is telling you. The truth is something like: even if you had to redo it, your effort would not have been wasted because you would have expanded from the attempt. And anyway, it won't get done unless you do it, so either way you need to do it. Doing it wrong still brings you closer to doing it right. Ultimately, this is the only way forward.

The part of you that is reluctant to work deserves your respect, even though what it is saying is wrong. Therefore don't argue with it and tell it that it's wrong — just respect it and then move forward with what you know. And what you know is: even though you may end up doing this task wrong, doing it would still be preferable to NOT doing it.

In this way you now move consciously beyond the boundary of your fear. You expand, and then you integrate, and then the task becomes natural.

From Chaos to Control

Is your situation chaotic, out of control?

For many self-employed people with ADHD, there's a sense of constantly hanging on for dear life — everything has been left to the last minute, everything is urgent, and it becomes impossible to choose a single priority out of the bunch.

Furthermore, there's no centralized database of things to do so that you know what needs to be done first — everything is held loosely up in the mind and comes at you haphazardly and without overall organization.

We need to get out of chaos and into control.

How is this done? The first step, a profound step, is to decide that this is true beyond any doubt whatsoever: 'It is necessary to get out of chaos and into control.' It may not be clear how to do it, and we may have already failed multiple times at doing it, but we must nevertheless assume that we can and decide that we shall. With this established, we are now automatically placed on this difficult-but-essential journey of converting all of the chaos in our lives into control — getting on top of everything.

What is required now? Systems.

A system is when A causes B. What systems currently work for you? Do you brush your teeth daily? Good. How do you get yourself to be so consistent about it? 'When it's time to go to bed, that's when I brush my teeth.' A triggers B. Do you brush your teeth because it's fun? No. You brush your teeth because you've decided it's necessary, that you're unwilling to allow your teeth to rot.

Do you make your bed in the morning? No? Is it necessary to make your bed in the morning or not? ... Not necessary, you say? Great, then drop it and forget about it.

Or, wait a minute, you actually don't like having your bed be messy all day long. Okay then we decided that it is necessary to make your bed every day. The system now is: when I get out of bed, I make my bed.

"But I don't want to!" Good — then don't.

"But I don't want to look at a messy bed." Well then establish your new system and stick with it.

"But I can't, I'll get distracted and forget." Then support your system with a reminder of some kind.

"But that won't work." Then forget about the whole thing.

"But I don't want to!"

… This is how the mind manipulates you. This is its trick for preventing you from further cycles of expansion and integration. Do you see the powerlessness in it?

The movement from chaos into control is simple:

1. Assume that you can.
2. Decide that it's necessary.
3. Create systems and support them.

Courage

You'll always experience reluctance prior to the moment of fresh expansion. But once you convert that particular unknown into the known, it's done. It's yours.

Soon enough though, you'll find yourself expanding against that new boundary, and once again you will encounter reluctance.

Like balancing on a bicycle, you stay upright by pedalling.

Therefore the expanding, self-actualizing individual will always be engaging — lovingly — with its survival fear. There is no true expansion that does not require overcoming fear.

But the presence of fear doesn't mean that there's anything to be afraid of. Our purpose here isn't to fight with, argue with, ignore, or succumb to the part of us that is afraid:

Our purpose is to listen to and support the fearful self
while taking a bold new step in the direction of our expansion.

This is courage.