Hi, everyone. Welcome to the first audio session of this course that we've titled purpose, priorities and plans. My name is Erica Fortescue, I'm an ADHD coach and educator. And I'll be leading you through a series of conversations and musings and sharings about this topic. I wanted to do a class about priorities and purpose and plans. Because, from my perspective, as a coach, this is a really central issue for people with ADHD. You know, I think in many ways, at the essence, ADHD can be described as knowing what you need to do, knowing what you want to do, but you just don't seem to be able to do it. And I really believe that a lot of ADHDers are living lives of incredible stress. And despite hard work and persistence, they're having to manage a lot of cognitive overwhelm, and to do list overwhelm. And sometimes a feeling of decision paralysis around where to focus time. And I created this class really is a very practical class. So my goal here is to give you a lot of strategies that have worked for some of my clients, a little bit of science, and just enough stories to keep you entertained and keep you listening.We'll be talking through these next couple weeks about how you might identify what really matters most to you. And, and using purpose and intrinsic motivation as a way to propel yourself through the challenging moments of having an ADHD brain, we'll be talking about how to manage over commitment to other people, and even to yourself, so that you have a way of tackling this to do list overwhelm, that I know happens to so many people who have this kind of brain. And then we're going to talk about practical ways that you can plan out your week and plan out your day that are a bit more ADHD friendly than a lot of the typical advice you might hear. And then last, we're going to close with some chatting about habits, just the science of how to set up habits and some strategies to create regular habits that will help you to stick to your plans and stick to your priorities over time.So I think one of the fundamental questions here is why is prioritising and planning and sticking to the plan, so very hard for people with an ADHD brain. And I'll share a few, a few brain based reasons. The first is time blindness, or what people like to also call time nearsightedness. For a lot of people with an ADHD brain, it's difficult to see into the future, there's a different kind of sensation of the passing of time. And often people will describe the way that some ADHD or is perceived time as just in two categories now, or not now. Now, this isn't true for anyone, because there's quite a lot of variety. But for those people who do perceive of time as now or not now, it makes it very difficult to do some future planning, because these are such big categories. And now is often so much more interesting than whatever is not now, the other factor is so many people with an ADHD brain are big picture thinkers. I mean, the advantage of this is seeing so much complexity in detail all at once, which can lead to brilliant problem solving. But it also can lead to a pretty frequent experience of decision paralysis. There are so many possible projects, there are so many things I'd like to do, and which one is the more important one to do. And then to compound that there's this love of novelty, the love of anything that is shiny and new, and suddenly more interesting than what has become boring because we're used to it. And so you've got the shiny new phenomenon, which often leads to adding more and more and more things to the to do list. So these are some of the core of why I see prioritising and planning and really getting clear on your purpose as very essential things to help anyone with ADHD live a life of greater success by doing less, and enjoy the ease of being able to stay focused on what matters most. Exactly how to do that can be very different for different people. But I'll be sharing some of the most common life hacks and strategies that I've seen work for people that I know, on the thought that you might want to try some of them you might want to tweak one of them, and there just might be something there that you'd like to make your own.I definitely believe that how ADHDers make things work is to figure out what works for them. It's rarely these conventional strategies, but my hope is that by hearing a lot of different thoughts a lot of different life hacks you might get some new ones for yourself that apply to your life right now. And I'll give you a few teasers just to pique your curiosity. Couple things you're going to find out about, you're going to discover what an IGNOU is, you're going to learn about the diplomatic takeback. You're going to hear about bullet journals, and you're going to learn the 333 strategy for setting priorities. And hopefully a lot more, and also some embarrassing stories about me and the many ways in which my ADHD brain has gotten me into trouble. So, hope you enjoy the rest of the class. Looking forward to the next segment, signing off