The Octopus Approach for ADHD Entrepreneurs with Avy Schondorf
This week we’re joined by Avy Schondorf, a mom, entrepreneur and host of the AvyHD podcast, who shares her journey of self-discovery, entrepreneurship and building systems that work for neurodivergent minds.
Highlights:
The concept of "invisible admin"
The importance of shame-free support
Practical strategies for managing life and business with ADHD
Mentioned in This Episode
adhdonline.com/adultingwithadhd (promo code: adultingadhd40)
Avy on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook: @avhd
Summary
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with AV Shandor, a mom, entrepreneur, and host of the AV A DHD podcast. AV shared her journey of discovering her own neurodivergence through parenting, and how that experience led her to build both a business and a community focused on supporting neurodivergent entrepreneurs. She described the challenges of "invisible admin"—the mental load and behind-the-scenes tasks that can drain energy, especially for those with ADHD—and how recognizing these hidden barriers was a turning point in her personal and professional life.
AV introduced her unique "octopus system" approach, which emphasizes building support structures around the individual, rather than forcing people to fit into rigid systems. She explained that for neurodivergent thinkers, traditional advice and productivity tools often fall short, and that success comes from identifying personal strengths, delegating effectively, and creating compassionate, shame-free environments. Her team, affectionately called "bees in a hive," works together to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life, allowing them to focus on their creative vision while the team handles the operational details.
One of the most powerful takeaways from our conversation was AV's advice on practical strategies for managing daily life with ADHD. She recommends identifying all the "tentacles" of responsibility, delegating with clear instructions, and using flexible scheduling methods like "anchors and floaters" to reduce overwhelm. Most importantly, AV encourages listeners to embrace their unique brains, stop feeling bad about not fitting the mold, and build systems that work for them. You can find more of AV's insights on her podcast, AV A DHD, and connect with her on social media or LinkedIn.
Transcript
This is the adulting with adhd. Are you hearing an echo? I'm not. Okay. Okay. This is.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Sarah.
Yeah, so thank you so much. Everything really happened by accident and I think that's so familiar in a lot of a D'S journeys. For me, I had these kids and my whole life changed. And whereas I had felt kinda lost and all over the place before, once I had my kids I was like, there's clearly something I'm really bad at this.
And by this I meant everything. Like I am really bad at this life thing. I don't know what it is about me. And then I started getting to know my kids and observing them and comparing them to other children and realizing, wow, these are really. Unique humans, and they're also very polarly opposite from each other.
So you have one extremely structured, very sensory, very particular justice seeking human, and then her younger sister is passionate and excitable and all over the place and makes a lot of noises. And somehow I found myself relating. To both of these people. I'm like, wow, you're like one half of my brain and you're like one half of my brain.
And seeing it externalized like that, I realized there's something really special going on inside my own head. And that's what led me ultimately to pursuing an A DHD diagnosis and an autism self diagnosis as well. I mean, I was like, this is not, this can't be the way everyone lives their life.
There's no way that everyone is out here doing fine. And I am, and I'm a whole mess. And the entrepreneurship happened by accident too. I moved to the United States and um, quickly looked around and realized that a nine to five was not gonna cut it. So I needed to build a business. And if I was going to build a business, well now I'm in trouble 'cause.
I actually can't do anything. Like I can do a lot of stuff, but I can't do it from beginning to end. That's crazy. I am really great at the middle piece or the beginning piece or the final piece, but not A to Z, and that led me to build a Listo, which is the. Administrative backend, it's our implementation arm for entrepreneurs with A DHD.
'cause I said, if I'm ever gonna build a business, I can't. I can't do it on my own, so who's gonna help me? And we built a Listo. And once we had a Listo, I said, well, this is really cool, but who am I talking to? I only wanna be talking to other neurodivergent entrepreneurs. And that's where A VHD came about.
So we can kind of connect to the people who are doing the actual work. And if ever they need, we have the backend support to support them as well.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Yeah, invisible admin. Well, we call it, I think we call it a lot of things. We call it mental load. It's all of the stuff that goes into making everything happen without actually practically doing the task. So, for example, when you're going grocery shopping, that doesn't start at the grocery store. It starts with looking in the fridge at home, seeing what you have, checking the pantry, making a list.
And considering what everyone wants to eat, is there someone who's picky right now? Is there someone who's having a particular allergy? Is there something that's going on at school and we need extra ingredients for this or that? And then it, you have to transition and get in the car and go to the grocery store and carve out that time.
So all of those pieces before I walked into the grocery store is invisible admin. And that would be an example of invisible admin in our home life. But it's everywhere all the time, all at once, even. Canceling the gym. You can't just say, I wanna cancel the gym and call and cancel the gym or email and cancel the gym.
You have to go online and find out how to cancel, and then you have to go to the particular portal or follow the specific set of instructions to maybe send an email and then follow up with a phone call. These things are intentionally difficult to make it difficult for the average person to cancel or get things done, but that in turn makes it almost impossible for somebody with a DHD to get any of these things done.
It's anything that sucks your energy without giving you a tangible result at the end. It's the rewriting of the email, not sending an email, right? I have to send an email. Great. It takes you two minutes. Type it out, send it. Not if you have rejection, sensitivity to dysphoria or challenges like you feel like you need to rephrase yourself a hundred times because.
You're concerned about not being understood properly. If that's an experience that you've had in your life with it, you're, if you're neurodivergent, that's an experience that you've had all throughout your life is being misunderstood. So now I'm sitting and I'm writing an email, and it takes me between 18 and 32 minutes to write two and a half sentences.
The challenge is that at the end of that, you still don't feel as if you've accomplished anything. How you supposed to pat your, oh, good job. You only took 30 minutes to send an email today. It doesn't sound genuine no matter how many times you try and reframe. Yeah,
it's everything. It's. First of all, it's a mindset and the mindset behind it is that you are allowed to show up exactly as you are and the system that is built has to be built around you. You are the container. You don't need to fit into someone else's external container of something that works for them.
And I, I came across this 'cause I kept seeing people on the internet being like, this is the solution to blah, blah blah. Which of course we all know is a little bit silly, but. It's even more silly than we realize because if I'm somebody neurotypical, giving neurotypical advice to 80% of the population, that means that there are 20%, there's 20% of the population that this does not apply to at all.
And I call us complex thinkers, whether you have autism, A DHD or your brain, you have a, a spatial brain, so maybe you're dysgraphic or dyslexic. You have a complex thinking brain. So somebody's gonna try and give you some sort of simple system, simple advice, simple something, and then turn it around as your fault.
When it doesn't work for you, when the premise is actually what's flawed, you know what you know. Great. Once we identify what your strengths are, we can then identify what's missing, and then you build the system of the weaknesses. The challenge is that it's really expensive to build a business like that, and it's very difficult to sustain because it means that I need a strong team working together all the time, whether I have clients or not, right?
Like whether we're helping anyone or not. These people need to know how to work together and they need to know how to work together in a very compassionate and shame-free environment. And also. Work very quickly. So along the way we learn some tips and tricks. For example, the most successful way to start with us is if you have a product idea or a launch, something in your mind and you're like, I'm gonna do my course, or I'm gonna build an app, or I'm gonna do a something.
And then you get into it and you realize, oh shit. Building a course means the course material, the graphics, the presentations, recording everything, editing it, auto like, audio syncing, and making sure that the, that the, the video and the audio sync together. And then I need a funnel to put it online and I need to publicize this and I need to reach out to people and maybe I need to promote it.
So I need to get myself on podcasts, and now I need to be a guest places. And I don't know how to do anything except talk about the thing I wanted to talk about in my course. So if we can all jump in together and take three months to launch your product, by the end of those three months, we have options.
Now. We have so many options in front of us. Do you wanna go back and take your product that is fully built out and go do whatever you intended on doing with it? Do you wanna move on to your next idea and continue building out? Or do you wanna sustain some sort of status quo with this team that you're now familiar with working with?
And what we found that worked really, really well about that is people with A DHD want to jump in all do everything all together, all at once, and a lot of systems and a lot of of services will intentionally slow you down and tell you that you kind of have to start with phase one. Like why do we have to start with phase one?
Can't we start with phase two and a half and then come back to phase one because that works too. And if that's what works for you, then let's do it. So to answer your question, it's a service, but the service is comprised of people. We call ourselves bees in a hive. Bees is beyond essential executive support in a hive, which is simply humans interacting very efficiently.
And any tools, systems, anything we use or build out within that just serves the purpose. So if you have stuff you love to work with, we will work with that. If you don't care, we are gonna find the simplest common denominator and put it to that level. And if that's a Google doc, amazing. Love Google Docs.
My favorite systems exist in Google Docs. 'cause not everything has to be complicated, it just has to be streamlined and it has to make sense to you. Yeah.
Yeah.
Bless you.
Yeah, there's, well, for me, what I was seeing is there's so much shame involved in being a human with A DHD and trying to build a business as a human with A DHD as any entrepreneur will tell you. There is a lot of challenge and the challenge is very uncomfortable and it feels very bad, and it feels a lot like failure, um, a lot of the time.
So if you are a person who's already have, having internalized shame surrounding the way that you do things, and now you're an entrepreneur and you have a wild idea. Those two things together mean that your environment is not gonna be kind to you. Probably they're gonna tell you you're nuts. They're gonna tell you to go get a nine to five job.
They're gonna tell you to stop being so flaky or flighty or all over the place or whatever. Choice word is the word that people tell you about yourself when you have a DHD, and that you have to focus and that you have to streamline, and that is not correct. That is. A disservice done to people with A DHD in a capitalist system that wants you to be an automaton.
You don't have to do just one thing. You can be amazing at a lot of different things. It's just that you only have one brain and two hands. Now, one brain and two hands works just fine for a neurotypical person. 'cause if you're using 10% of your brain capacity, then two hands is sufficient. What if you're using 50% of your brain capacity in a very complex brain?
Neurological system. All you need is more hands. So let's add hands. Now we just need to make sure that those hands are smart. So we call it the octopus system. I love an octopus 'cause an octopus has a brain in its main body and a brain in each tentacle, as well as three hearts. And the hearts there are always two hearts that are working and one heart that is resting at any given time.
So you as the business owner, and this is our philosophy, you are the head of the octopus. You are the brain, you are the vision, you are the heart, you are the core of what we are doing. And every tentacle, which is an implementation of one element of your idea, has to be smart. So it has to have its own internal brain.
And those are our systems. You're in control of the system. Someone is gonna set them up for you and you're gonna say, oh yeah, this works well, or this doesn't really work for me. Let's tweak this. Let's change that. Or this doesn't work for me, I don't know why, but go fix it. That's fine too. 'cause sometimes we don't know what's not working.
We just know that that's not it. And what that practically looks like is. For example, if you were like, our course example from before, so you wanna launch a course called Adulting with a DHD, you know how to talk to people about adulting with A DHD, and you have the content. What I need is a graphic designer, a video editor, an audio editor, a social media manager a researcher, an executive assistant, maybe someone doing SEO, maybe someone doing some GHL or other funneling things.
That's what we give you. And all of those people will do exactly what they need to do within their area of expertise to execute your vision. So you don't need to know the subject matter expert. You don't need to know the subject matter expertise at all. And they don't need to know the content, per se, 'cause they're never gonna try and change your core idea and you don't have to now learn extra skills.
Yeah, so that, I mean it's amazing for people with A DHD for a lot of reasons, but yes, it tackles time blindness 'cause you always have somebody who is checking up and making sure that things are happening. You always have an executive assistant. It tackles rejection, sensitivity to dysphoria because we are here exclusively to serve you.
And. We will come up with proactive ideas of how to serve you better. My assistant reminds me to take my meds every single day. Was I embarrassed the first time I asked her to remind me to take my meds like a little. But her job is to make sure that I'm okay and whatever that means, that's what she's going to do.
It works really well because we don't make you focus. What's really cool is that you have your adulting with a DHD course. You give us all the information. We are now building out your course. You can go and build the next idea while we're building this thing out in real time. So it doesn't keep you a slave to.
Like the clock, there is no such thing as time. If you're allowed to create at any pace you want to. Once you create, you hand it over to operations, and they're the ones who will make sure that the idea becomes a reality. But that doesn't have to remain under your management, so you get to really bring out the best of your ideas, and most importantly, your ideas don't get lost.
We have so many good ideas and so many of them get lost just because they're, we didn't grab them quickly enough. We didn't have the container to put them in. So I have an idea parking lot, but I don't park the ideas in the idea parking lot. Somebody goes through the transcripts of my meetings and pulls out my good ideas and puts them in an idea parking lot for me.
So that one Tuesday when I wake up and I'm like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do today. I can go to my idea parking lot. And see what's there. And it's a fun surprise for me 'cause I don't remember what good ideas I've had in the past and then I get to just pick something and build it, which is great.
So fun.
Yeah.
Yeah. Thank.
So for the octopus approach, the first thing that you really wanna do is you need to understand your tentacles for women. I, I, if a lot of your listeners are women, where this is a great place to start is at home 'cause you are a multi. Armed, CEO of your household, and there's a lot of stuff that's going on.
So really identifying kind of all of the areas of what you're doing on paper is best. But we have a D, H, D, so whatevs. And then picking one thing to delegate. Delegating just means asking for help in a specific way, right? Not just saying, can you help me, but can you please do x? If there is like a par like parameters that they need to follow, you need to give those specific instructions at the same time.
Hey, do you mind doing grocery shopping on, or do you mind taking out the trash on Tuesdays before 5:00 PM so that when I come home, the house, the kitchen is clear and ready for me to start cooking for the weekend? Whatever it's, that's going on in your mind. But when I'm delegating a responsibility, I'm asking for help specifically with as much detail and parameters as I want the person to follow.
If I didn't give you the details that's on me. If I said, can you please take out the trash, and I gave absolutely no specifications as to when, why, how, or what. Then you'll do it. When you do it, it'll, you'll get to it when you get to it. So we need to take, as a DH, ADHD or some responsibility for the way that we're asking for help.
Don't give up on asking for help. Just get more specific with it. And the second thing that I would say is for scheduling. Scheduling is so important. And I don't mean scheduling a strict day. I don't mean time blocking, I don't mean any of that. The way that we schedule is with what we call anchors and floaters.
So there's hard anchors and soft anchors, and then floaters fit in everywhere else. A hard anchor is something that can't change. The kids drop off at the bus is at seven 15. If I'm not there at seven 15, the bus leaves and I have to drive my kids to school. It is a hard anchor. It's not dependent on me.
It's external and it happens at that exact time. There's nothing I can do to move it. Those are the things that go into your schedule. If you see my schedule and back, those are in red. Hard anchors are in red. They cannot move. Those are the things that will delineate your day. Soft anchors are things that I really, I wanna get done.
These are important to me, but I'm gonna give myself multiple opportunities of when I wanna do that. So, for example, I wanna go to the gym today. I have an option of going to the gym at 7:00 AM at 3:00 PM or at 6:00 PM Those are the blocks I have in my schedule in which gym time would make sense. So what I do is I give myself an option of gym.
So it says gym question mark. Or even better, if there's like a specific class or a something that I might want to do, I'll put it in there with a question mark. Now I'm giving myself a binary option gym. Yes. No. So I've taken out the mental load for myself, or rather for me, my assistant does it for me. So it pops up in my schedule and I get to say, I get to kind of check in and decide do I wanna do this now or not?
By making it a binary yes, no decision. I'm removing the shame. Do you feel like it or not? Like there's nothing, no value judgment attached to this whatsoever. And if you say no, there's another block that's gonna come up that will offer you the same opportunity. And then floaters just move around. They fit in everything in between.
Those are like little tasks or things that can move to the next day or whatever it may be. Those are floaters. And if they're what I call kind of bonus. If you got all your hard anchors done for the day and one soft anchor, you're in great shape. If you've got all your hard anchors, a soft anchor and a couple floaters, you're like fricking killing the game.
You're doing amazing. There's nothing more that you should ever expect for yourself, and those parameters are going to change depending on your point of life. So when I had newborn babies, my soft anchor was, did you wear pants today? Not, did you wear clean pants? Don't get crazy with me. Not. Did you take a fresh pair of pants outta the cupboard?
Are you wearing anything on the bottom half of your body? If you are, you are killing it. You're doing amazing. The hard anchor. Keep baby alive, soft anchor, put on a pair of pants. If you're doing those things, you're doing great. So now it's changed a little bit. I have to wear pants every day. It's no longer a pat on the back when I get dressed.
But by changing your systems to fit you. You get to be in control of how you feel in those systems.
Absolutely. So the best place is my podcast, A VHD. It's A-V-Y-H-D. And you can find us@avhd.com on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere at avd or my name, Vy Shon Dorf on LinkedIn. I would love to chat with any of your listeners. I would love for you to listen to the podcast and just, this is what we talk about all the time, just how to be who you are.
Stop feeling bad about it. Like it's, it's time, it's enough. We're, we're wasting too much time on feeling bad. And, um, when really we're being judged by, and according to the standards of people who are simply not as good as you are, it's silly to judge yourself by somebody's lesser than standards when you're doing so awesome and you're, you're.
Brain is such a complex and fascinating organism. We can, um, get the best out of it without letting all that other yucky stuff get in the way.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
This is the adulting with A DHD. Are you hearing an echo? Okay. Okay. This is the adulting with A DHD podcast. Self-empowerment for people with A DHD. Today I'm excited to have with me AV Shandor, a mom, an entrepreneur, and host of the AV A DHD podcast. On her podcast, AV speaks with entrepreneurs, leaders, and creatives who are building lives that do not follow the usual script.
They talk about identity, business, burnout, neurodivergence, and what it really means to build something sustainable. Welcome to the show, Avi. Absolutely. I wanna hear a little more about your background as your mom, as a mom, entrepreneur, A DHD or, and, and how all this led to you, um, creating your show.
I.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Excuse me.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's incredible. It makes me think, back when I was first diagnosed and doing entrepreneurial things, I would've loved to have had something like that. Uh, so you talk about this invisible admin that eats away, um, at our time. Um, can you give us some examples of what that looks like? These hidden drains.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um, back to this is it a service or a tool that, that you created? Tell me a little bit more. I wanna hear more about this.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
Right.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I love this and I think you answered this, but I'm gonna ask anyway. Now that you've broken this down, what, why is this especially helpful for A DHD brains? Why are they especially vulnerable to losing time? Excuse me. Um, we had talked a little about this, the jumping in part and so, um, the rest of it, how does the system help with the rest of it?
And what are those pitfalls that we're falling into that we need this, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
Yeah.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Wow.
Nice. Yeah.
I,
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, I like that. It sounds very freeing. So my next question, th this whole octopus approach I love, by the way, sounds amazing. What's one or two little take home things our listeners can do today to start thinking like that in their own day to day?
10 to gold. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Nice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I like that.
Right.
Mm.
Yeah. Yep. Yep.
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us. My, for the last question, I want you to tell our listeners where they can keep up with you and keep up with the work you're doing. I love it. Thanks again. Okay, so I'm gonna hang here and stop the recording.
This is the adulting with A DHD. Are you hearing an echo?
I'm not.
Okay. Okay. This is the adulting with A DHD podcast. Self-empowerment for people with A DHD. Today I'm excited to have with me AV Shandor, a mom, an entrepreneur, and host of the AV A DHD podcast. On her podcast, AV speaks with entrepreneurs, leaders, and creatives who are building lives that do not follow the usual script.
They talk about identity, business, burnout, neurodivergence, and what it really means to build something sustainable. Welcome to the show, Avi.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Sarah.
Absolutely. I wanna hear a little more about your background as your mom, as a mom, entrepreneur, A DHD or and how all this led to you creating your show.
Yeah, so thank you so much. Everything really happened by accident and I think that's so familiar in a lot of a journeys. Me, I had these kids
I.
and my whole life changed. And whereas I had felt kinda lost and all over the place before, once I had my kids I was like, there's clearly something I'm really bad at this. And by this I meant everything. Like I am really bad at this life thing. I don't know what it is about me. And then I started getting to know my kids and observing them and comparing them to other children and realizing, wow, these are really. Unique humans, and they're also very polarly opposite from each other.
So you have one extremely structured, very sensory, very particular justice seeking human,
Yeah.
and then her younger sister is and excitable and all over the place and makes a lot of noises. And somehow I found myself relating. To both of these people. I'm like, wow, you're like one half of my brain and you're like one half of my brain. seeing it externalized like that, I realized there's something really special going on inside my own head.
Yeah.
that's what led me ultimately to pursuing an A DHD diagnosis and an autism self diagnosis as well. I was like, this is not, this can't be the way everyone lives their life.
There's no way that everyone is out here doing fine. And I am, and I'm a whole mess.
Right.
And the entrepreneurship happened by accident too. I moved to the United States
Quickly looked around and realized that a nine to five was not gonna cut it. So I needed to build a business. And if I was going to build a business, now I'm in trouble 'cause. I actually can't do anything.
Excuse me.
do a lot of stuff, but I can't do it from beginning to end.
I am really great at the middle piece or the beginning piece or the final piece, but not A to Z,
right.
led me to build a Listo, which is the. Administrative backend, it's our implementation arm for entrepreneurs with A DHD.
'cause I said, if I'm ever gonna build a business, I can't. I can't do it on my own, so who's gonna help me?
Right.
a Listo. And once we had a Listo, I said this is really cool, but who am I talking to? I only wanna be talking to other neurodivergent entrepreneurs.
Yeah.
where A VHD came about.
So we can
yeah.
to the people who are doing the actual work. if ever they need, we have the backend support to support them as well.
That's incredible. It makes me think, back when I was first diagnosed and doing entrepreneurial things, I would've loved to have had something like that. So you talk about this invisible admin that eats away at our time. Can you give us some examples of what that looks like? These hidden drains.
Yeah, invisible admin. we call it, I think we call it a lot of things. We call it mental load. It's all of the stuff that goes into making everything happen actually practically doing the task. For example, when you're going grocery shopping, that doesn't start the grocery store.
Right.
It starts with looking in the fridge at home, seeing what you have, checking the pantry, making a list.
And considering what everyone wants to eat, is there someone who's picky right now? Is there someone who's having a particular allergy? Is there something that's going on at school and we need extra ingredients for this or that? And then it, you have to transition and get in the car and go to the grocery store and
Yeah.
that time. So all of those pieces before I walked into the grocery store is invisible admin.
Right.
be an example of invisible admin in our home life. it's everywhere all the time, all at once, even. Canceling the gym. You
Yeah.
I wanna cancel the gym and call and cancel the gym or email and cancel the gym. You have to go online and find out how to cancel, and then you have to go to the particular portal or follow the specific set of instructions to maybe send an email and then follow up with a phone call. These things are intentionally difficult to
Yes.
difficult for the average person to cancel or get things done,
Yeah.
in turn makes it almost impossible for somebody with a DHD to get any of these things done. It's anything that sucks your energy
Giving you a tangible result at the end. It's the rewriting of the email, not sending an email, I have to
Great. It takes you two minutes. Type it out, send it. Not if you have rejection, sensitivity to dysphoria
Yeah.
challenges like you feel like you need to rephrase yourself a hundred times because. You're concerned about not being understood properly. that's an experience that you've had in your life with it, you're, if you're neurodivergent, that's an experience that you've had
Right.
all throughout your life is being misunderstood. So now I'm sitting and I'm writing an email, and it takes me between 18 and 32 minutes to write two and a half sentences. The challenge is that at the end of that, you still don't feel as if you've accomplished anything.
Yeah.
How you supposed to pat your, oh, good job. You only took 30 minutes to send an email today. It doesn't sound genuine no matter how many times you try and reframe.
Yeah.
Yeah
back to this is it a service or a tool that, that you created? Tell me a little bit more.
everything.
I wanna hear more about this.
First of all, it's a mindset and
Okay.
behind it is that you are allowed to show up exactly as you are
Yeah.
system that is built has to be built around you.
Are the container.
Yeah.
don't need to fit into someone else's external container of something that works for them. And I came across this 'cause I kept seeing people on the internet being like, this is the solution to blah, blah blah.
Right.
course we all know is a little bit silly, It's even more silly than we realize if I'm somebody neurotypical, giving neurotypical advice to 80% of the population, that means that there are 20%, there's 20% of the population that this does not apply to at all. And I call us complex thinkers, whether you have autism, A DHD or your brain, you have a spatial brain, so maybe you're dysgraphic or dyslexic. You have a complex thinking brain. So somebody's gonna try and give you some sort of simple system, simple advice, simple something,
Yeah.
and then turn it around as your fault.
When it doesn't work for you, when the premise is actually what's flawed, know what you know. Great. Once we identify what your strengths are, we can then identify what's missing, and then you build the system of the weaknesses.
The challenge is that it's really expensive to build a business like that,
Yeah.
and it's very difficult to sustain because it means that I need a strong team working together all the time, whether I have clients or not,
Yep.
whether we're helping anyone or not. These people need to know how to work together and they need to know how to work together in a very compassionate and shame-free environment.
Right.
And also. Work very quickly. So
Yeah.
the way we learn some tips and tricks. For example, the most successful way to start with us is if you have a product idea or a launch, something in your mind and you're like, I'm gonna do my course, or I'm gonna build an app, or I'm gonna do a something.
And then you get into it and you realize, oh shit. Building a course means the course material, the graphics, the presentations, recording everything, editing it, auto like, audio syncing, and making sure that the video and the audio sync together. And then I need a funnel to put it online and I need to publicize this and I need to reach out to people and maybe I need to promote it.
So I need to get myself on podcasts, and now I need to be a guest places. And I don't know how to do anything except talk about the thing I wanted to talk about in my course.
Absolutely.
if we can all jump in together and take three months to launch your product, by the end of those three months, we have options. Now. We have so many options in front of us. Do you wanna go back and take your product that is fully built out and go do whatever you intended on doing with it? you wanna move on to your next idea and continue building out? Or do you wanna sustain some sort of status quo with this team that you're now familiar with working with? And what we found that worked really well about that is people with A DHD want to jump in
Yeah.
all do everything all together, all at once, and a lot of systems and a lot of services will intentionally slow you down and tell you that you have to start with phase one.
Yeah.
Like why do we have to start with phase one? Can't we start with phase two and a half and then come back to phase one because that works too.
Right.
what works for you, then let's do it. So to answer your question, it's a
Yeah.
but the service is comprised of people. We call ourselves bees in a hive. is beyond essential executive support in a hive, which is simply humans interacting very efficiently. And any tools, systems, anything we use or build out within that just serves the purpose. if you have stuff you love to work with, we will work with that. If you don't care, we are gonna find the simplest common denominator and put it to that level. And if that's a Google doc, amazing.
Yeah.
Google Docs.
My favorite systems exist in Google Docs. 'cause not everything has to be complicated,
Yeah.
to be streamlined and it has to make sense to you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love this and I think you answered this, but I'm gonna ask anyway.
Yeah.
Now that you've broken this down, what, why is this especially helpful for A DHD brains? Why are they especially vulnerable to losing time? Excuse me.
Bless you.
We had talked a little about this, the jumping in part and the rest of it, how does the system help with the rest of it?
And what are those pitfalls that we're falling into that we need this,
there's,
For me, what I was seeing is there's so much shame
Yeah.
in being a human with A DHD and trying to build a business as a human with A DHD as any entrepreneur will tell you. There is a lot of challenge and the challenge is very uncomfortable and it feels very bad, and it feels a lot like failure a lot of the time. So if you are a person who's already have, having internalized shame surrounding the way that you do things, and now you're an entrepreneur and you have a wild idea. Those two things together mean that your environment is not gonna be kind to you. Probably
Gonna tell you're nuts.
Gonna tell you to go get a nine to five job.
They're gonna tell you to stop being so flaky or flighty or all over the place or whatever. Choice word is the word that people tell you about yourself when you have a DHD, that you have to focus and that you have to streamline, and that is not correct. That is. A disservice done to people with A DHD in a capitalist system that wants you to be an automaton. You don't have to do just one thing. You can be amazing at a lot of different things. just that you only have one brain and two hands.
Yeah.
one brain and two hands works just fine for a neurotypical person. 'cause if you're using 10% of your brain capacity, then two hands is sufficient. What if you're using 50% of your brain capacity in a very complex brain? Neurological system. All you need is more hands. So let's add hands.
Yeah, I like that.
Now we just need to make sure that those hands are smart. So we call it the octopus system. I love an octopus 'cause an octopus has a brain in its main body and a brain in each tentacle, as well as three hearts. And the hearts there are always two hearts that are working and one
Yeah.
is resting at any given time. So you as the business owner, and this is our philosophy, you are the head of the octopus. You are the brain, you are the vision, you are the heart, you are the core of what we are doing. And every tentacle, which is an implementation of one element of your idea,
Smart.
Yeah.
to have its own internal brain.
Those are our systems. You're in control of the system. Someone is gonna set them up for you and you're gonna say, oh yeah, this works well, or this doesn't really work for me. Let's tweak this. Let's change that. Or this doesn't work for me, I don't know why, but go fix it.
Right.
too. 'cause sometimes we don't know what's not working.
We just know that's not it.
And what that practically looks is. For example, if you were like, our course example from before, so you wanna launch a course called Adulting with a DHD, you know how to talk to people about adulting with A DHD, and you have the content. What I need is a graphic designer, a video editor, an audio editor, a social media manager a researcher, an executive assistant, maybe someone doing SEO, maybe someone doing some GHL or other funneling things. That's what we give you.
Yeah.
all of
Wow.
will do exactly what they need to do within their area of expertise to execute your vision. So you don't need to know the subject matter expert. You don't need to know the subject matter expertise at all. they don't need to know the content, per se, 'cause they're never gonna try and change your core idea and you don't have to now learn extra skills.
Nice. Yeah.
so that, I mean it's amazing for people with A DHD for a lot of reasons, but yes, it tackles time blindness 'cause you always have somebody who is checking up and making sure that things are happening. You always have an executive assistant. It tackles rejection, sensitivity to dysphoria because we are here exclusively to serve you. And. We will come up with proactive ideas of how to serve you better. My assistant reminds me to take my meds every single day. Was
I,
the first time I asked her to remind me to take my meds a little.
But her job is to make sure that I'm okay and whatever that means, that's what she's going to do. Works really well because we don't make you focus. What's really cool is that you have your adulting with a DHD course. You give us all the information. We are now building out your course. You can go and build the next idea while we're building this thing out in real time. So it doesn't keep you a slave to. Like the clock,
Yeah.
is no such thing as time. If you're allowed to create at any pace you want to. Once you create, you hand it over to operations, and they're the ones who will make sure that the idea becomes a reality. But that doesn't have to remain under your management,
Right.
you get to really bring out the best of your ideas, and most importantly, your ideas don't get lost.
Yeah.
We have so many good ideas and so many of them get lost just because they're, we didn't grab them quickly enough. We didn't have the container to put them in. so I have an idea parking lot, but I don't park the ideas in the idea parking lot. Somebody goes through the transcripts of my meetings and pulls out my good ideas and puts them in an idea parking lot for me.
So that one Tuesday when I wake up and I'm like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do today. I can go to my idea parking lot. And see what's there. And it's a fun surprise for me 'cause remember what good ideas I've had in the past
Right.
and then I get to just pick something and build it,
Yeah, I like that.
So fun.
It sounds very freeing. So my next question, th this whole octopus approach I love, by the way, sounds amazing. What's one or two little take home things our listeners can do today to start thinking like that in their own day to day?
So for the octopus approach, the first thing that you really wanna do is you need to understand your tentacles, for women. I, if a lot of your listeners are women, where this is a great place to start is at home 'cause you are a multi.
10
Armed,
gold.
Of your household, and there's a lot of stuff that's going on. So really identifying all of the areas of what you're doing on paper is best. But we have a D, H, D, so
Yeah.
And then picking one thing delegate. Delegating just means asking for help in a specific way, right?
Right.
can you help me, but can you please do x? If there is like a par like parameters that they need to follow, you need to give those specific instructions at the same time. Hey, do you mind doing grocery shopping on, or do you mind taking out the trash on Tuesdays before 5:00 PM so that when I come home, the house, the kitchen is clear and ready for me to start cooking for the weekend?
Yeah.
It's, that's going on in your mind. But when I'm delegating a responsibility, I'm asking for help specifically with as much detail and parameters as I want the person to follow.
If I didn't give you the details that's on me.
Yeah.
said, can you please take out the trash, and I gave absolutely no specifications as to when, why, how, or what. Then you'll do it. When you do it, it'll, you'll get to it when you get to it. we need to take, as a DH, ADHD or some responsibility for the way that we're asking for help.
Don't give up on asking for help. Just get more specific with it. And the second thing that I would say is for scheduling. Scheduling is so important. And I don't mean scheduling a strict day. I don't mean time blocking, I don't mean any of that. The way that we schedule is with what we call anchors and floaters. So there's hard anchors and soft anchors, and then floaters fit in everywhere else. A hard anchor is something that can't change. The kids drop off at the bus is at seven 15. If I'm not there at seven 15, the bus leaves and I have to drive my kids to school. It is a hard anchor. It's not dependent on me.
It's external and it happens at that exact time. There's nothing I can do to move it. Those are the things that go into your schedule. If you see my schedule and back, those are
Yeah. Nice.
Hard anchors are in red. They cannot move. Those are the things that will delineate your day. Soft anchors are things that I really, I wanna get done.
These are important to me, but I'm gonna give myself multiple opportunities of when I wanna do that. For example, I wanna go to the gym today. I have an option of going to the gym at 7:00 AM at 3:00 PM or at 6:00 PM Those are the blocks I have in my schedule in which gym time would make sense. So what I do is I give myself an option of gym. So it says gym question mark. Or even better, if there's like a specific class or a something that I might want to do, I'll put it in there with a question mark. I'm giving myself a binary option
Yeah.
Yes. No. So I've taken out the mental load for myself, or rather for me, my assistant does it for me. So it pops up in my schedule and I get to say, I get to check in and decide do I wanna do this now or not? By making it a binary yes, no decision. I'm removing the shame.
Yeah.
Do you feel like it or not? There's nothing, no value judgment attached to this whatsoever. And if you say no, there's another block that's gonna come up
Yeah, I like that.
offer you the same opportunity. And then floaters just move around. They fit in everything in between. Those are like little tasks or things that can move to the next day or whatever it may be. Those are floaters. And if they're what I call kind of bonus. you got all your hard anchors done for the day and one soft anchor, you're in great shape. you've got all your hard anchors, a soft anchor and a couple floaters, you're like fricking killing the game.
You're doing amazing. There's nothing more that you should ever expect for yourself, and those parameters are going to change depending on your point of life. So when I had newborn babies, my soft anchor was, did you wear pants today?
Right.
Not, did you wear clean pants? Don't get crazy with me. Not.
You take a fresh pair of pants outta the cupboard?
Are you wearing anything on the bottom half of your body? If you are killing it. doing amazing. The
Yeah.
Keep baby alive,
Yep.
put on a pair of pants.
Yep.
If you're doing those things, you're doing great. So now it's changed a little bit. I have to wear pants every day. It's no longer a pat on the back when I get dressed.
But by changing your systems to fit you. You get to be in control of how you feel those systems.
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us. My, for the last question, I want you to tell our listeners where they can keep up with you and keep up with the work you're doing.
Absolutely.
Place
A VHD. It's A-V-Y-H-D. And you can find us@avhd.com on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere at avd or my name, Vy Shon Dorf on LinkedIn. I would love to chat with any of your listeners. I would love for you to listen to the podcast and just, this is what we talk about all the time, just how to be you are. Stop feeling bad about it. Like it's time, it's enough. We're wasting too much time on feeling bad. And when really we're being judged and according to the standards of people who are simply not as good as you are, it's silly to judge yourself by somebody's lesser than standards you're doing so awesome and you're. Brain is such a complex and fascinating organism. We can get the best out of it without letting all that other yucky stuff get in the way.
I love it. Thanks again.
Thank you so much.
Okay, so I'm gonna hang here and stop the recording.
