Lindsay Guentzel: On ADHD, rejection sensitivity and burnout

Hi, we are the ADHD Skills Lab podcast. My name is Skye. And my name is Sarah. And we will be your hosts, chatting to you about practical ADHD strategies you can use, the research behind some of these strategies, as well as interviewing other professionals with ADHD about how they've developed skills and working through struggles in their lives. You might know us from Unconventional Organization, where we talk about this kind of stuff all day long. So we're super excited to have you along and we're going to chat through it together. 

So today I'm here with Lindsay Gensel. Lindsay is the host and producer of ReFocused, a podcast inspired by her own later in life ADHD diagnosis. She is also an award-winning journalist with more than 15 years of experience working for news organizations like CBS Radio and Minnesota Public Radio. She'd been navigating the new normal of ADHD. She discovered her ADHD in 2021, just a few months before she turned 35. like a lot of people during the pandemic. Today, Lindsay lives in a house filled with all the evidence of her many hobbies. I want to know what some of those are, which she shares with her boyfriend, John, her cat, Pippi, and her dog, Ada. So welcome, Lindsay. It's really great to have you on the podcast. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Skye. I'm really excited to see where we go today. Yeah, for sure. So let's start with where are you based? I'm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So. heart of the Midwest, we get really brutal winters and really good summers. And I've been here for, gosh, my entire adult life. I was born and raised in a small town south of the cities about an hour. And then besides a brief stint in New York City, I've called this home. Awesome. That's great. That's wonderful. And so how, what was your diagnosis like? You know, you mentioned it was in 2021. So during the pandemic times. How did you sort of realize that you had ADHD and work through that? It was a tweet. It was a tweet that said something along the lines of, oh, tying back gifted and talented kids to kids who had undiagnosed ADHD now as adults. And thank heavens for impulsivity because I was sitting at home, I was unemployed. I had been working in a restaurant and during COVID, everything was shut down. And I got on my computer and I called my primary care provider and I just asked the woman on the phone. I said, I'd like to speak to somebody about ADHD. And she said, okay, can you come in this afternoon? And so I made it in before the rush. Yeah, before the rush of people. And so I had like two appointments with my primary care provider who both times were nurse practitioners. And then I had an appointment with a psychologist. Then like a week later, I was given my diagnosis of combined type, which makes total sense. Yep. Then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out everything I could about ADHD. Yeah. And then you're like, well, this is what I'm doing for the next year. I'm rethinking my entire life. Yes. Yes, very much so. Yeah. Wow. So for you, I guess, your diagnosis came quite quickly. from sort of a standing start of, okay, maybe I have this too, oh, I do have this. What was that like? That must've been quite a lot to process. It was a lot to process. It still is a lot to process. Those of us who even have been able to pack away some of the sadness and the grief and the frustration we have over our later in life ADHD diagnoses, it's still there. It's never fully gone. The what ifs are always there. And I think that's really hard. I feel a lot of frustration about the ways that it has affected my career, the ways it's affected my relationships with friends, with partners, with my current partner, with my family. And you see how destructive it can be. And then the flip side of it, you see how flippant people can be about it and how dismissive they can be about it. And once you've lived it, you know that that's not the case. And so... you get almost defensive. And so it's all of these emotions happening because, unbeknownst to some people, you can feel multiple emotions at once. You can be overjoyed that you have this ADHD diagnosis and you can still be mad as hell that it took that long to get it. And those things can live inside you at the same time. Yeah. So it's, you know, it is. Oh, it's so fun. It's very fun. Yeah. No, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And in terms of your experience, So you were and still are a reporter in various spaces. How did that affect, looking back now, being a reporter with undiagnosed ADHD, what was that experience like? I was always chasing the biggest story, the biggest guest, the dopamine rush, but I struggled with the day-to-day tasks. I struggled remembering what my tasks were, even though they were always the same. I thrived there because of the deadlines. The deadlines weren't a month out. The deadlines were, oh, you're in at 8 a.m., we have a show at noon. We need this guest or we need this story. And so you thrive off of that. And you start to forget that that's not real life. That's not how life happens. And it can be really hard to balance it all. Yeah. And there's things I wish I could go back and do over. I was definitely very sensitive. It can be a hard industry for people who are sensitive because it's cutthroat. And you're always looking for your next job or your next story. And I found it really hard to connect with women I was working with. And so I never really found a mentor. Now I look back and I see ADHD just like woven through all of that. And it's good that I know now, I don't have to repeat those same experiences, but it's still hard. Definitely, I think looking back, that can be a really tough space to be in. And I am curious, you know, with the reporting job, there is a very freelance feeling element to it. You know, you are given a responsibility, you have a timeline to deliver on that responsibility. I sort of have a two-part equation. One is, is that the case? And two, is the short time frame, you know, we want this guest by X date. Was there a sense of kind of, well, if you get them, then that's great. And if you don't get them, well, it's hard to imagine that you would have gotten them in that period of time anywhere. Was there sort of that kind of feeling behind it as opposed to like, you have three months to book and prepare for this thing and you would have to achieve at that level? Where was that in reporting? So your first question, the freelance style of things. There are definitely jobs that have that. You can work on a team where you've got three weeks to be working on a show, and you are in charge of setting up your work plan, your structure. For me, most of the jobs that I was in, I was working for daily shows or daily news shows. I produced a Monday through Friday show where we had three hours of content, and that was some days eight to 12 guests, depending on. what the news story was for that day. Yeah. So not that many. No, not that many. Yeah. And you would get in at eight and you would know what your biggest stories were or your host sends you, I want this guest. And you start rolling. There is this mentality in journalism, especially when those big stories are hitting, everyone's going after the same guests. So. you are just getting in a queue to speak to someone's publicist. You're trying to find the most direct contact. And so there is that rush that trying to put together a puzzle you've never seen before and you don't know where all the pieces are. But it's exciting. And Again, the dopamine of if you get the guest and then your host is happy and then you get a good interview to go on air and you can add that to your resume. So all of those things are massive dopamine rushes. On the flip side, I can think of one moment in particular where the guest that we wanted was not available nor were like the next 15 guests. Oh no. And I booked someone. who I should never have put on air. It was comically bad. I thought we were getting punked it was that bad. And in the moment, my host was not very happy. As the interview developed and he kind of just realized like, this is what we have and I'm just gonna have fun with it. But in that moment, I was so afraid of disappointing my host and my team by saying, I don't have someone on the story. Instead I. put someone in who was ill prepared because I was more afraid of disappointing them because we didn't have someone. But then I was disappointing them because we had someone bad. So I just was losing all over the place. Yeah, that's interesting and really interesting insight to what that job is because I think a lot of times people say, oh, you have ADHD, you should go into journalism. It's one of those jobs that you hear people go, oh, right, you should do this. This has got a lot of dopamine into it. You know, so like you should be a firefighter. You're like, I don't want to, but okay. It's a great job. It looks amazing. But in terms of, I guess, you now, knowing what you know now about ADHD, if you were to speak to other people who are listening because they heard, oh, this is a person and they had a reporter job, and you're learning about that kind of role, what kind of strategies would you put in place now to support having that role with ADHD? I would have. all of my tasks, every single thing written out, even the most mundane, and I would have it in front of me at all times. When I was producing, and I produced for this show for about a year and a half, I don't think there was ever a point where I knew exactly what I needed to do every day, even though I was expected to do it every single day. You start to get into a routine, you're filing a story, where does the photo go, who does it go to, how are you writing the captions? So I was spending so much time going back. and looking up all of that information, when if I had just kind of set myself up with the cheat codes right in front of me, it would have made things flow so much better. Yeah. I mean, I was producing noon to three. I would get to my desk and I would sit there at 3.30 and I was so exhausted. The dopamine rush of coming off air, you do a live hit or you file a story or you... see lots of comments on a story you've posted and they're positive and people are excited about it. Yeah. Once that wears off, you're exhausted because you have expelled so much energy to get to that point. And so I would sit there and I couldn't even focus on the task at hand. I couldn't even look ahead. And so I was constantly living day to day because by the end of the day, I was just like, I'm beat. I am so tired and I am just. Crossing my fingers and my toes that no major stories break overnight and we can just have an easy show tomorrow. Yeah, no, that's so true. It's funny how, because a lot of what you're describing is not knowing that you had executive functioning difficulties, not knowing that you had working memory struggles or time blindness struggles. And it is one of those things. And I think when we look back with ADHD. We don't necessarily, it can be very frustrating. We've talked about this at the top of the podcast a little bit to go like, I didn't know. I, no one knew that I didn't have a working memory that was really on point with everyone else's and I didn't know either because it's very hard when you, when you don't live in everyone else's head to even sense that difference, even in an environment where you're all doing a very similar thing. Absolutely. And I also view myself as someone who, if I told you I was going to get it done, I was going to get it done. And people were not seeing the lengths that I was going to, to get it done. They were not seeing the stress I was putting myself under. And most of it was stuff that was easily taken out of the equation had there been a little planning involved. But as you mentioned, I did not know I was struggling with executive functioning issues. I thought I was just procrastinating because that's what I did and there was no way to change it. You were just a bit stressed because that's who you are. Exactly, yeah. Coming through in the clutch was like my claim to fame, but the majority of people didn't see the lead up to that. And I think had I been more forthright or more open about it. But again, you know, going back the emotional side. I think we sometimes lose sight of how much our emotions are tied to a lot of the things that we do in life. And I was so afraid of letting people down that I would do everything humanly possible to make it happen. And the only person who I was hurting in that equation was myself. It was just getting worse and worse. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Those boundaries can be such a huge, huge factor. And that kind of leads me to another. question because often when we talk about lack of boundaries, we're talking about burnout. Did you experience burning out in your job as a reporter? Yes. I worked through a lot of the Trump presidency and we were booking guests a lot of the time that we were talking about national topics and it was just really emotionally draining. It was typically topics that were not fun to be talking about. So one thing I will say is I love breaking news. I love the energy of getting a story and keeping the public up to date and the great community service aspect of that, but it is really taxing on a human being. And the people who are good at it are the ones who can put it in a box and go home at the end of the day and they don't bring it with them. And I am not one of those people. I am the person who... stops their work day to take the injured bird to the rehab center. I can't leave it on the side of the road. That's just not happening. I'm the person who gets really uncomfortable when I have to call the mother of a child who was kidnapped even 20 years later, even though she is an advocate and is someone who is used to the press reaching out. I'm so aware of how serious that is. And it can be a lot to just make yourself open and exposed to that all the time? Yeah, definitely. And I guess in terms of that, what advice would you give to people now who are, who might be younger, they might understand that they have ADHD and they're considering a career in the journalism space? What advice would you give to those people? One of the great things about journalism is you can find an area, a pocket, a focus to become really well-versed in. And you don't have to go into news. There's a ton of different areas to explore. I got started in journalism because I loved sports and I wanted to be a sideline reporter. And that's really what got me into radio to begin with. It's definitely a line of work where you take new opportunities as they come up, especially if they're exciting and they're a jump ahead. So you just kind of are always looking and I found myself in news and there's parts of it that I really liked. But I would say go in knowing that if you're someone who is really sensitive to things that you have safeguards in place, that you are talking to a therapist, that you are open about your feelings in the office. That was one of the things I never did. I never just said, I know we're working on this story but I just need everyone to know it makes me really sad. or I'm having a really hard time dealing with this part of the story. There were times where because I was working here locally, I had to take myself off of stories because I knew people involved. And especially in jobs where it's very competitive, you never want to slow down. You never wanna give someone an opportunity to take your spot. But being open and honest, I actually think is so refreshing. and I think it actually is like a step in the right direction. Those are kind of my moments of advice. Like, if you're really concerned, find a specialty. You can pick a totally niche thing and just go into it. Food. Food seems like one that, you know. Food's great. We love food. Everyone loves food. Yes, yeah. Maybe you are into business. So there's just different things that you can think about. That's a really good point. find your hyper focus and then kind of go into that. Definitely. And it is interesting. Like you said, you know, there's that sense of wanting to please people and those competitive industries. And I definitely, you know, I haven't done reporting, but academia can be very similar. And there is a sense of masking that goes along with that, especially when you have maybe experienced masking, even before you knew what it was as a young person going, well, this isn't. how I would do it, but this is how other people are asking me to do it. So I'm just gonna play along until the bell rings and kind of do that. And that sort of feeling can show up in your adult work life as well and contribute to a lot of that overwhelm and a lot of that burnout for sure. And I will say another big one for me was not knowing about my rejection sensitive dysphoria and how big of a. it's been in my life. I mean, it has just been a monster. And it really was hard because I just always assumed I was not welcome. I was always coming home, complaining to my girlfriends, telling my mom, I just, no one likes me, no one wants me around. And I look back and I really missed out on a lot of opportunities for growth and developing friendships with people who would have probably made it. better place to work. It's not just that sometimes the job is hard. It's sometimes it's hard because we can't fit ourselves into this box we've created in our heads. Yeah, definitely that neurotypical idea like this is what neurotypicals must be like. So I'm going to try and fit into that box. We talked about this a little bit on your podcast and it kind of, it kind of comes up here as well. Definitely. One point I wanted to make too is I realize I'm someone who is not having casual conversations. I'm not like, hey, how are you? How's the weather? I need to know someone so that when I walk in the room, I'm like, how are you? How is your family? How is that thing you're working on? And because a lot of my time with my colleagues is always in passing, you're moving into the studio as they're moving out, or you have people who are on the morning show who are there at 4 AM, and then there's people working at night. You see them at the end of their shift and their beginning of their shift. So your timeframe with them is so limited that I look back and I wish I had been more, I don't wanna say forceful, but more confident in being like, hey, let's go get lunch. Or, you know, I've got a free afternoon, can we get a cup of coffee or whatever it is because those moments of developing those friendships is crucial in feeling like you belong. And I, oh gosh, I... despise nothing more than casual small talk. There's a reason we both have podcasts. Like you have to have serious conversation. Yes, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. It is very funny. It's, it is funny how much I love the podcast and conversation and how rough the like, how was your weekend conversation? It's always something. What did I do? And what did I do that I can say I did? Yes. And if I'm not in the high of the dopamine from that moment to tell you still, I don't want to tell you. Something cool else has happened since then. I don't know what I did this weekend. Yes. This morning, that was a thing. Like, let me tell you about that. Yeah, no, 100%, 100%. 

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So we've talked a little bit about the idea of, you know, what life was like being a reporter pre ADHD and those experiences. What have your experiences been post ADHD? You mentioned that you were unemployed at the time. Now you have a podcast. Where did your life take you after that? Yeah, so I was diagnosed in January of 2021, and I still had a few months of unemployment ahead of me. And then in April, I took a role at Minnesota Public Radio, and it was supposed to be two months. I was coming on as an on-call temporary associate producer. And like I said, two months. Second week on the job, I was directing the show and I was working there full time for almost a year and a half. It was great. It was a great little deep dive into getting back into an office. It was still strange because it was still happening during the pandemic and I was learning new things about myself. I will say I recently started working with an occupational therapist who is also an ADHD coach. some of my executive functioning skills, and I should say the lack thereof. And I think what was hard for me going back into this role at the radio station was I was being bounced around from job to job. And when I was finally getting into a rhythm, which normally for a person with ADHD would be exciting, but I think for me, I was like, oh, I'm starting to... get into a groove and I'm starting to realize like these are the things I do here and these are the things I do here and then I would get moved or I would be balancing life between two different shows. So I would have some responsibilities on one show and some responsibilities on the other. And where I would find myself getting into predicaments was when the timeline for the one show was like a very tight deadline. In at 7 a.m., editing an episode or editing an interview for 8 a.m. like very, very tight. Whereas my roles on the other show were more loose. We need a guest for three weeks from now. Yeah, I can see how that would be difficult because one of them is giving a lot of dopamine and the other one is less. So it requires more executive functioning. Yes, but I loved what we were working on. I got to be creative. I worked on an hour long magazine show where we... got to do stories that really mattered to us and were really exciting and got to try out things, which was really neat. And you kind of got to put your heart into it because it wasn't breaking news. It wasn't really hard news. It was looking at the new stories that were happening, that people were dealing with and taking a different angle to them. So one of my favorite stories that I did, and I thought this was so creative and actually won us a couple of awards was, Two parents that I knew who had two children under the age of like three at the time, everyone in the house had COVID. And this was, I think, fall of 2021. And they just documented their life for me on voice memos. So I sent them prompts and I was like, set up the phone at dinnertime and record what happens, or set up the phone at bath time and record what happens. And it turned it into this really beautiful glimpse into the life of this family that was dealing with something that we had all dealt with. We were all dealing with. With cute kids talking in the background. I mean, what's better? Yeah, no, definitely. But it was one of those things where no one had thought of that. Yeah. Make a reporter out of these just regular people. Yeah. Well, it's funny because that's one of the benefits. We've been talking about some of the struggles of ADHD, but one of the benefits of ADHD is that... We know from the research that we tend to have a lot of creative thinking and creative problem solving. And when we are in a space where we feel like we can bring that to the space, where we're not burning out and overwhelmed and that kind of thing, it can be really, really great and really amazing. Did you find yourself using any particular kind of strategies post, you worked with a coach, at that point you would have, I imagine, been learning some strategies. What did you take to work with you? What were the strategies that you took to work and maybe still do take to work? I don't know that I was taking any strategies to work, honestly. I look back and I wish I had some really awesome answer of what has worked for me. What's working for me now is having a planner where things are written out and then also putting it in my phone and. on Sundays or Monday morning, I go through and I match everything up. And then every day I have a sheet where I write down my schedule and I write down my tasks and I write down what's most important. And it is so redundant and it has to be redundant because I'll go to bed and I'll know in my head, this is what I'm going to do tomorrow. When I wake up in the morning, I could be 10 miles away from that original plan. But having all of those places to go to pull me back in. has been crucial. And I think what it's helped is, it's helped me avoid the temptations to dive into something that might be a little sexier in the moment. If I look at my sheet for the day and I go, these are the three most important things you need to accomplish, and once they are done, the rest of that time is yours. And you can go into the later list, and you can go into your triage list, and you can do the project you want to that is so exciting. but only after you get those three things done. And being the producer of the podcast, it's allowed me to work on handing stuff off and work on identifying where my time is best spent and where I can bring someone in. And I'm learning to trust people. I'm learning to let go. Delegation. Oh man, it is hard. There's a reason why I was always the group lead. Yeah, it's so interesting and it's so important. And I guess my other question is how did you end up starting the podcast and being open about your ADHD? Because coming from a space where, you know, you were in the public eye, but you weren't necessarily expressing that. What was the decision making around, first of all, disclosing your ADHD, because that is part of the podcast, and then doing the podcast itself? It's so funny people ask about disclosing the ADHD because there was never even a moment of hesitation. Once I knew I had it, I was talking about it. And I know that that's not the case for everyone. I've always been at what people will say is an overshare. I don't view it as oversharing. I view it as like, this is what's happening in my life. And if you are interested in learning about it, you're gonna hear about it. Because I think so many of us for so long in so many different arenas in life, have tried to be what we think we're supposed to be. And there's something really, really cathartic and healthy and strong about being exactly who you want to be. Now, I by no means am all the way there. There are still things that I get hung up on. There are still things I'm insecure about. That's just life. I would imagine even the most confident people have something that holds them back a little bit. But putting it out there was always just felt right, felt natural. And so the podcast actually came about, I was lucky enough to connect with this amazing team of people behind ADHD Online, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So not too far from where I am in Minnesota, another Midwest city. And we were having conversations about creating some stuff together. I was newly diagnosed, I had been sharing some stuff online. They got connected with some articles I had written on my website. And in like the second conversation, Keith Boswell, their VP of marketing asked me, what do you want? What are your career goals? And I said, I've always wanted to host a podcast about mental health, but it has felt so daunting because there's just so many ways to go with it. And I was like, oh, okay. And I could like see the wheels turning a little bit. No one's looking at each other because we're all in zooms, you know, but if they were all in the room across from me, it'd be like the side eye like, oh, yeah, yeah. And then the next meeting was, well, we had been thinking about starting a podcast as a resource for our patients, and it would be available to everyone. Yeah, we don't know what to do. And so I was like, oh, okay. And if I had people on my team, I would have been looking around like, well, maybe. Yeah. Just looking at yourself like, yeah. All right, let's do this, you know? And then I remember it came time to pitch. They were like, well, put together a proposal. And I was like, I don't know how to do this. Like, I've always told stories I was told to tell. I've never built anything. And I'll say this even, you know, we're approaching a hundred episodes. We launched in May of 2022. I still am figuring it out. I'm still figuring out what we're building. And we put out an episode every week and every week it looks a little different, but we're fine doing it now. Yeah, no, definitely. And it's good. It's been a good lesson. I was listening to the one on anxiety recently. And I was like, that was useful. That was really helpful. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. So really great. Thanks, yeah. No, definitely. Awesome. So I have a few questions that we ask everybody at the end of the show. The first one is tell us about one professional achievement that you are the most proud of. I will say launching this podcast, every time someone sends an email that they feel seen or that's something I said connected with them and allowed them to maybe look at themselves in a better light or pursue a path maybe they wouldn't. We got to do this last year. So we told 30. well, 32 stories in 31 days because I'm an overachiever and that's just how I did it. But for ADHD Awareness Month in October, and so we got to talk to people ranging in age from 14 to 16. And it really kind of solidified that my place in life is helping other people tell their stories. And that was really powerful. And to have all of those people trust you. There's something so incredibly powerful about sitting down in front of someone and then having them just completely open up and bear their soul to you. And I think that is more powerful and more important to me than the awards. The awards are great. The awards mean that you keep working. The awards mean that you can pitch somebody for funding. But at the end of the day, the podcast was always meant as a community builder and. That's without a doubt what I'm the most proud of is, the friendships that I've made from talking about something that is so important to so many of us, but that was really pushed aside for a really long time. Yeah, 100%. It's so great to be able to do that. And I definitely understand what you mean. On the other side, I feel a bit bad transitioning into this question, but it is the next question. Oh no, this is the one I know what it is. Is there a professional failure that embarrasses you and how did you deal with that? You know, it still is kind of embarrassing because it happened pretty recently. So when I was launching the podcast in spring of 2022, doing the math in my brain, yes, 2022, I was also working with a team of people I really respected on a very small project and I dropped the ball in such a I was doing interviews and putting these interviews onto some, I mean, they're somewhere here. They haven't been used because I never got around to using them. And it was really hard for me in the moment where I had to say, I'm not delivering on this. I can't deliver on this. And I look back and I see a few things. I see the fact that at the beginning, we did not set any defined deadlines. There were no defined deadlines. There were no defined. requirements or standards. And as we talked about the entire time, I kept moving the goalposts for myself. So as I'm launching this podcast, which is going to be my career, you know, it's something that now I've left my job for. It was what was most important to me. It was my hyper fixation. There was this other project on the side that even though when it came up and I look back now and I look at the interviews I've done, I'm like, God, there's so much great stuff sitting there. It was an annoyance. It was a frustration. And it ultimately led to ruining some great work relationships with people I really respected. And I had to very quickly own the fact that I had completely dropped the ball. And it's hard. It is so hard. And it happens. It happens to so many people. But here's the thing that I remind myself is no one is airing their dirty laundry. No one's going on Instagram and going, look at this client I lost. It's so gross, let me ask you. Yeah, no, and it actually is something, if the opportunity ever came up, I would never name who it is, but if they were listening, they'd be like, oh, that's me, that was the project. It was a terrible reminder of Lindsay's of years past and when that would happen. And I didn't deliver. And I don't know that I'll ever work with those people again. And that is a... ramification of my actions that I have to live with and you have to work through that shame. Otherwise it sucks you in and it's just gross. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you sharing that because like you said, the reason this question is on the podcast is it's one of those questions I was always afraid someone would ask me when I was doing podcasts, guessing before I started. And it's a tough question. It's always the question everyone goes to and they go, whoo, okay. It was one question at the end there that I really had to think about. But it also shares, you know, when we're putting ourselves out there to say, Hey, this is what I'm doing and this is what I've done. It's important to have those conversations as well to remind people listening that there isn't this perfect, it's not like it was perfect. And then it was just, it kind of, you know, there are these things that continue to happen and they are okay. They're not great. They're not fun, but. They're part of experiencing ADHD and they're part of life and we can move through them, pass them, whatever we decide to do. I couldn't agree with you more. And I think it's a good reminder for everyone that we all have them. We all have one of those moments. Whether we are open about them in public spaces is a different thing. So just because that- person you follow on social media or that person's career that you want to emulate, just because they aren't talking about those moments doesn't mean that they didn't happen. It's because we've been trained to hide the bad stuff. Like, exactly. We all have that junk drawer. Like life has a junk drawer. You throw stuff in it and you put it away and you're like, please don't get brought up. Please don't get brought up. You're like, this might come up in therapy otherwise. It's only pertinent because it just happened. I was with my family over the weekend, and I got put in charge of taking the group photo. And I assumed everyone was where they needed to be. So when I rushed to get the phone, because there were like 20 some people in this group photo, and I didn't want people to be annoyed with me, all I did was look to make sure it wasn't blurry, that it was clear. I didn't look to make sure that everyone's head could be seen. And one of my aunts got cut out. And the shame and embarrassment I felt over that, it was to the point where I was like, I didn't wanna say it out loud. And then I said it to my mom the next morning. I was like, I'm really upset with myself. I didn't look at each person to make sure they could be seen. And so and so is cut out. And she goes, oh, she's probably happy with that. She probably didn't wanna be in the photo anyway. And I was like, I couldn't sleep over this last night. Yeah. But my point being is that when you get those fears and... that trepidation and that uncomfortableness out of you. And you say it, the more you say it, the less it starts to be something that holds you back. I'm a firm believer in that, that we internalize way too much that is meant to be carried by a team of people. And it might be something as small as your aunt's head getting cut out of the family photo and you feeling terrible. Or it might be something like completely dropping the ball on a work project. Going into hiding with that is just too dangerous. Yeah, it can be really, really tough. And that's one of the things I think, especially with ADHD and masking and burnout and all those conversations, you know, being able to share with people who understand and who've been there and who are like, oh, yep, that you dropped a project, I dropped a project, you know, it happens and kind of be able to work through the shame that sometimes we can feel. is such a huge, huge important thing. And one of the reasons I think why it's great when you can get that ADHD diagnosis and you can understand yourself and have that conversation with people. So last question, if you had an ADHD life motto, what would it be? Have Post-It notes everywhere. You know, like a Post-it note pad and a pen in every room, in your car. So I learned this one from my mother is your to-do list should always be right on your dash because you get in your car. And even if your backseat is full of the returns you need to do, if you don't see like, it's in the backseat. Yeah. If you don't see it, it's not going to happen. Post-it notes and kindness will get you through. Self-kindness. I love that. Yeah. We'll roll with that. Yeah. Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to share your story and your ADHD skills with us today. Where can people find out more about you and what you do? Well, thank you first for having me. This was so much fun. It's so much fun to be on the other side of things. They can go to lindsayguentzel.com. That's my personal website, or they can search for refocused on any of the major streaming platforms. And that's where the podcast lives. Wonderful. Well, really wonderful to have you. Thanks, Lindsay. Thanks so much, Skye. 

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