Podcast Title: You've Read Everything. Nothing's Sticking.
Host: Sharon Collon
How many tabs about ADHD do you have open right now? Let's be honest. It's confessional. On your phone, on your laptop, the ones you meant to come back to, the article about dopamine, the one about demand avoidance, the routine chart. Somebody swore by the podcast episode you saved at 11 p.m. I want you to know something. You are not a person who lacks information about ADHD. You are one of the
Best informed parents I know. And you could probably explain executive function better than a GP can. And your Tuesday morning still sucks. That gap between everything you know and what actually happens in your house at 7:40 a.m. is what today's episode is about. Because the gap is not a knowledge problem. And once you can actually see what it is.
You can do something about it and we can do something about it together. I'm Sharon Collon, a credentialed ADHD coach, parenting expert, and mom of three of the most spectacular humans with ADHD, which means I have tested most of this the hard way in my own kitchen, crying silently to myself, wondering why is everything with family life so hard?
Before we start, two bits of housekeeping. So nothing comes to surprise later. The first one, I've got 25 minutes with you today. I know what the drop-off rate is when I go for too long and I get too carried away with topics. So I try and keep our episodes nice and short. So I can't give you every tool your family needs. And I know that you know that.
What I can do is give you one genuine shift on how you see the problem and a clear next step if that is right for you. The second one is if you are listening to this podcast in the first week of September, you have come in at a great time. It is when I am holding my spotlight bonus week launch for the ADHD Families Quest. And we throw in some extra incredible bonuses for those who would like to work with me.
It is open all year round. There is no pressure on my end. We just have some really cool bonuses happening this week. Right, let's get to it. Now I've supported more than 40,000 families, and I can tell you there are two places almost every single family gets stuck. See if you recognize yourself here. I can certainly recognize myself. That is why I've given them a name. The first one, I call it Knowledge Farming. This is where you collect.
Info about ADHD. You read the books, you follow the accounts, you listen to the podcasts, including this one. You screenshot all of the things. You know about rejection sensitivity, you know about time awareness challenges, and you know that your child's brain needs that reward closer to the task. but you can't implement a single bit of it consistently. We have all been there. Now
A lot of my clients describe this to me as a discipline problem, which always makes me a little bit sad because it definitely is not. It's that it's not a system. Knowing that your child needs an external cue does not tell you which cue, where it lives in your house, who maintains it, what happens when it gets moved, and what you do on the third day where everyone's bloody over it. Information gives you the what. It almost never
Gives you the how. And the how is the entire job. That's why I have a job, right? The second trap I call is systems farming. Oh my gosh, I'm a systems farmer from way back. This is the next stage. You realize that information about ADHD isn't enough. So you go and buy the
thing, the visual schedule, the magnetic chore chart, the Etsy printable with all the beautiful fonts, the planner, the token board, the color-coded whiteboard that you spent the whole Sunday afternoon setting up and you felt genuinely hopeful. And then, well, that stops working too, usually within a fortnight.
Now here is what I need you to hear because my gosh, I've spent so much money on ADHD crap that doesn't work for the ADHD brain. And please just stop it, stop it. And I that's a message to myself as well. Stop it. often these things just do not have legs.
this is the part that actually really makes me sad. When the chart stops working, you do not conclude that the chart was a poor fit for your household. Usually parents conclude something about themselves. They think, I can't even stick at this. If I was only more consistent, everyone else can do this. Everyone else is doing it somehow better than I can. That is not what happened here.
And before I tell you what did, I want you to answer something for yourself because my answer is worth a lot less than yours. You know your family better than anyone. Think of the last thing that you tried when it stopped working. Not why you think it failed. Why do you think that particular thing became a point of friction in your particular house?
I'm gonna stop talking for a second because I really want you to think about that and have that in your mind.
Now, whatever came up, hold on to it. We're gonna come back to that at the end. Let me tell you a story about two families who came over to my house for a barbecue. Both of them have kids with ADHD. In fact, pretty much all of my friends have kids with ADHD. It's called neurokin. It's a phenomenon. both of them are lovely, capable, switched-on parents. And at some point in the evening, both of them ended up in my laundry somehow, and they were looking at my laundry chart that my boys use.
And both of them got their phones out and asked if they could take a photo of it. And I was like, yeah, of course, take a photo. But as I was thinking about it and they were taking a photo full of so much hope, genuine hope that they could get their kids to do their own washing. But I already knew standing there that it wasn't going to work in their houses. Now I knew from the way that they were talking about it, the way that they were looking at the end result, and they wanted to install the end result in their house.
They were going to go home and they were going to print something similar, stick it to the laundry wall, and expect their kids to use it. Now, the chart on my wall was only the last 5% of the work that I did to get that system up and running. it was a visible bit. It was quite glamorous, that little bit. But underneath it, there are months of decisions that nobody photographed. Like, you know, all the decisions that we put in place when we are putting a laundry schedule out for our kids.
Who can carry a basket up the hallway? What opportunities do they have for that system for them to get distracted halfway up the hallway? What happens when someone flatly refuses to do it that week? Who is allowed to remind them and in what tone? Because if in our house one of the brothers reminds a brother it's going to turn into an instant fight club, not a reminder. What happens when I'm not home? What happens when I'm home, but I'm too tired to enforce the system?
Now that photo that they were taking captures none of that. They just captured the beautiful poster. Now this is the thing about a system that you buy or you copy. It arrives with no household attached to it. And every household has its own physics. Somebody moves the shoes.
Somebody tidied the launch pad in a different way, and now we can't find anything. One kid does it perfectly and the other one melts down about the unfairness behind it all that you asked them to do it. Your partner has a different threshold for mess than you do. You get sick for four days. There's a birthday party, a late night, a growth spurt, and by Thursday the whole thing has quietly died, and you're back to asking six times for everything.
Now a template can't hold any of that. It was never built to. So it falls back on the only person who is capable of holding it, which is you. Such a shame. It's me. Such a shame. Such a shame. Which means that the system isn't running the house. You're running the house, and the system is decoration on the wall, which reminds you of a daily of a plan that you couldn't sustain.
ADHD follows us around the internet. It's in your feed, it's in your inbox, it's every second real. And I know that you're not silly. I know that you've got the information over and over again, and you're still sitting here going, I need help. That is not a gap in you. That is a gap in what has been available to you. So let's do something useful. I want to give you one shift that can change how you build.
Anything in your home from here. Here it is. Build any system as if it's your worst day, a low capacity day where you're not feeling great. Not on your best one. I am so optimistic all the time. I'm such an optimist. I build systems like I am gonna have the highest capacity. I don't know who I think I am, quite frankly. I am a mum with three extra needs kids that has a full-time, crazy seven-day-a-week job and
I have a really, really debilitating chronic illness and chronic pain. It is outrageous who I think I am when I'm planning these things. I'm planning things like I'm Superman. Like I have endless amounts of time, energy, money, all of the things, right? It's outrageous. I need a reality check. So I have to check myself before I wreck myself with every single system. Plan it as if it is a low capacity day.
Almost everything you have tried has been designed as if it is on a good day. You sat down on a Sunday afternoon with a coffee and some optimism, and you designed something for a version of your family that had slept well, eaten properly, and had nowhere to be. Then Wednesday arrived and someone woke up at 5 a.m. screaming, He's got scissors. That's actually a true story. you had a deadline. One child was dysregulated before their
Feet even hit the floor. You can't find the stupid garage remote to open to get your car out. And this is oddly specific examples. And the system had no answer for Wednesday because Wednesday wasn't in the room when you designed it. Remember, you did on Sunday where you had time and optimism. So here is the test. I want you to run this week. Take one thing you've been trying to make stick, not all of them, just one. And then ask three questions around it.
Question one, does this work if I'm not in the room? Now I am not expecting you to be able to remove yourself from your system straight away. But that is the end goal. You can't do it too prematurely, but in the end need our kids to be doing things independently if we're going to take some of the pressure off you. There is a structure that we need to get them there. So does this system work?
If you're not in the room. Because if it doesn't and it's not going to get there eventually, what you have isn't a system, it's a performance that requires you as the lead actor. And your child hasn't learned anything from it because the thing that was doing the work is you. Question two: Does this still work on a bad day? If it needs everyone calm, regulated, and cooperative to function, well.
I don't know if there's ever been a state in my house where every single person was calm, regulated, and cooperative, never seen it. So I'm not gonna plan for that, right? we need to make sure that our systems work on those tricky days. question three? What skill is actually missing for my child here? What skills are we helping them develop?
Because everything that we do here at the Functional Family is about giving our kids the skills, the skills that they need to be able to go out into the world and be a functional adult. now a lot of the time when there are skills missing for our kids, it looks like defiance, it looks like laziness, it looks like a child who doesn't care, it looks like paralysis.
But a skill actually needs support. It hasn't developed yet, and the brain is developing on its own different timeline. So getting started is a skill. Stopping something enjoyable is a skill. Holding a three step instruction while in your head while you're walking down the hallway is a skill and it's a big one. When you can name the missing skill, two things change immediately. You stop taking it personally because it stops being about you or about your relationship.
And you stop building systems that punish your child for something that they cannot do yet, and start building ones that carry the load while that skill grows. That's the shift. The system isn't there to make a child comply. It's there to do the job your child's brain can't do yet. so that they can practice the rest of it without failing every single day while they learn.
I would love for you to sit with that one this week. I want you to sit with that little bit of information because it is going to change what we do together going forward.
Now I would love to tell you about one of my gorgeous families in the quest. Of course, I am sharing with permission and I have changed names. Now I want to be careful here because before and after stories, to be honest, I feel like they're a bit slippery. So I'm going to tell you where the family was, where they are now. but I'm not going to hand you their exact system we built. Now the reason is if I was, it isn't.
going to work in your house because it is built specifically for their house and probably wouldn't survive yours because every family is slightly different. That is the whole point about today's episode. So this lady, I'm gonna call her Kate. Kate's day was Sunday.
Sunday she ran like a full-scale military deployment. It was her admin catch up day where she got ready for the week in front. She was doing all of the things, uniforms sorted out, lunch stuff bought. It was like a whole thing. While everyone else and family had a nice day, she was running it like a full-scale military operation. It was exhausting. And the whole thing was sitting on her one person while everyone else did their thing.
It was she was often over it by lunchtime. And the bit that she said that I keep thinking about is she said, by lunchtime Sunday, I already knew that the week had beaten me. And there was still all of those days to go. There was that much that she had to do. And underneath all those logistics,
she had this feeling because she had woken up and she braced. Her shoulders were up around her ears before her feet even hit the floor. And there was all this resentment about all the tasks that she had to do on Sunday. and her kids were not helping with. Now,
She was not being careless. She had done the work. She had run the Sunday reset. She had built the chart and it was a pretty good one. it was color-coded, and at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, she felt genuinely hopeful. She'd meal prepped. She'd had four half-finished courses on a laptop and a podcast history that was a lot longer than mine. And she could have sat in my seat and explained executive function to you.
But she was knowledge farming and she was system farming. Exactly like most of you listening, exactly like me as well. She had a library of things that work. She just didn't have one thing in her house that held. So on our first call as a part of the quest, we always start off with a one-on-one, a private one-on-one.
We didn't talk about Sunday. I didn't ask her how to make her Sundays karma because karma wasn't available and chasing it, well, it was costing her. I asked a different question. We asked about skills and which ones were missing there. And it turned out that Sunday wasn't a motivation problem in her house. It wasn't an attitude problem. And it certainly wasn't a kids not pulling their weight kind of problem. It was a starting problem.
No one could see where the job began. It didn't have a definite end. and we know how important that is for ADHD. Not the children, and honestly, not Kate either. Because get ready for the week is not a job. It's a category. So everyone went into paralysis and the waiting from the outside looked like avoidance. And that's why it felt personal, but it really never was. Once we knew that, we built one thing, one, built around the start.
Built to help run without her standing in the room. We stress tested it on her worst Sunday, not the best one, because a system that only survives a good Sunday isn't a system. It's a good mood. it's good luck. Where are they now? Her words, not mine. It's the same three steps every time, and everyone, including her, knows what happens next. Sunday's done before lunch.
her Sunday schedule and reset used to run the whole day and she was exhausted. Now the kids run their part of it. Her husband runs that part of it and she runs her part of it. one of them needs to switch out for a social engagement or whatever, they can take over the other one's part. Which matters because that's the real proof is that the Sunday can run without being propped up by her.
And Monday morning stopped becoming a fresh emergency because Monday morning is now just the outcome of something that's already happened on Sunday. So I am not going to tell you it's all fairy tale and roses from here. It is not perfect because there are still bad Sundays in Kate's house. Someone's sick, someone's sport ran late, it's the last week of term, and no one's got capacity there. That still happens.
And it still is a little bit distressing. But the difference is that it's just a bad Sunday now. It doesn't take Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday down with it. It used to be the first domino that made the whole week extra sucky. Now it's just one hard day in a whole week that keeps functioning around it. She doesn't spend the whole week trying to catch up. She's not living her life in constant catch up mode.
I'll be happier when I can do this when I you know, I'm if I could just it'll get easier when that's the biggest lie we'll tell ourselves.
That's the magic. It's a system built for that actual family's physics on their worst day around their skills that needed support. And it only took Kate four weeks. Now I wanted to tell you why I called this business the functional family, because I don't think I've ever said this in the podcast.
to be honest, I don't care about my family being a picture perfect family. I don't even care about if we're the happiest family. Those aren't my targets. They come and they go in every house on this street. I care that my kids have the skills that they need to learn so that they can be functioning adults when they leave this house. That's it. That's the whole thing.
The functional family is about giving our kids the skills so that they can go into the world and participate.
And yes, problems are going to come up for my beautiful kids, but I also want them to go, huh, and be curious about it and know deep down that they have the skills that they need to be able to navigate this spiky, spiky world.
See, the washing chart on my laundry wall was never about the washing. It was about the three boys learning that the job exists. It's not magic, that washing just gets magically done. It has steps. The steps are known to them, and that they can run those steps, whether their mother is standing in the doorway prompting them or up the road getting a coffee. That is what we are building.
Not a tidier house, although our house is definitely tidier these days. It's a set of skills that outlive my supervision. and I'd rather you got there sooner than I did.
Remember the thing I asked you at the start of the podcast to hold on to back at the start. The reason you gave for why the last thing that you tried to implement became a point of friction in your house. Why did it fall over?
Here is the simplest way I can describe what the quest is. You have been standing between two things for years knowledge you cannot implement and systems that will not hold. That is the gap your answer came out of. The quest is the bridge across it. It is the unglamorous middle bit that nobody sells you, and it's the only bit that actually changes how your house runs.
it's four weeks of guided implementation for parents of primary school aged kids, although we do have some older kids in there as well with ADHD. And today is the first day of our spotlight bonus launch.
Now I mentioned three questions earlier in this podcast, and I'm gonna be really specific about where each one gets answered. A feature list doesn't answer what I just discussed with you.
Question three what skill is my child actually missing? That's a 30-minute one-on-one onboarding call with me. Not a group call, not a chat bot, me. so you don't spend week one of the quest guessing which friction point to work on or naming the skill yourself and hoping you got it right. We work it out together based on your actual house.
And you start in the right place. This is the bit most people tell me afterwards they didn't expect and would never want to give up.
Question one was Does this system work when I am not in the room? That remember, that is where we want all our systems to get to. That is checkpoint five with playbooks and templates ready to go in the quest. Every one of them is designed to hand the job to your child, to the house, but not relying on you to run it. We need to give them the steps to get them there, just like my laundry system.
But we can't just dump them in it. We need to help support them to get them there with the right skills first. So that you're not designing something from scratch all the time. There's nothing when you've got nothing. So you so that you're not designing something from scratch all the time, when you've got nothing left in the tank, so that you what you build doesn't need you standing in the doorway to run it. Question two was: Does this work on a bad day? That's the
Question two was does this work on our bad days? That's what we have our three monthly group session coaching. that's what we do in our three monthly group coaching sessions with me. Because the bad days is where everything starts to wobble, usually by about week three. And a system with nowhere to take that wobble is a system that quietly dies. So when it happens and it will, there is someone, me, there is some.
There is somewhere to bring it and is also the on and this is the this is also the honest answer to I'm worried I won't finish because I will be there with you. You won't be doing it on your own.
then two things that just make it possible to do it all. videos in the quest are under five minutes, each one with a very targeted action step. So you can actually watch them on your phone, on your computer, you can listen while you're driving your car. I know what your evenings look like.
If I hand you a 90-minute masterclass, you'll save it with every intention and you won't get around to it. And then you'll be carrying that too. So five minutes, one thing to do, done. Super, super easy. And then you get access to the quest, including the app and all the resources for three months. So the system lives in your pocket instead of the folder you can't find.
And don't forget, you get access to everything in the quest for three months. So you can access it via the app, you can access it via the computer, you've got that live coaching with me so that you've got that there to reference instead of being tucked away in a folder that you can't find. And for the September spotlight, if you enroll in the quest this week, you will also be getting a live bonus group coaching session with me where we actually map.
out and decide what we're going to do with your friction points that your family is experiencing. And that's going to be on Thursday, the 10th of September. And that's a session where we actually sit down together and map out what is going on for your household, what is losing you time and energy and what we're going to do with it. So this special bonus spotlight period closes at 10 p.m. on the 8th of September and it isn't part of the standard quest.
The investment of the quest is $997, including GST, or we have a payment plan available. and let me break it down for you. you've got three months access. So that's about $77 a week. call it $11 a day. So it's about two coffees a day.
if you add up a couple of your specialist appointments where you haven't been able to get the how that you so much need, and a few of the printables and charts that you've purchased on
Etsy that haven't been ADHD specific enough.
Or have come in without the skill building that needs to happen to make those charts work, I suspect that we're not far off that price. That is why the quest is absolutely invaluable for your family. Now, one thing I hear every launch is every family says that they need one-on-one coaching. they don't think that the structured program is right for them.
I hear you and I understand why you feel that way. Here's what I've found after working with tens of thousands of families. Almost everyone thinks they need one-to-one coaching. and what most of them actually need is structure that doesn't depend on their and my availability. One-to-one can sometimes become reactive. You bring me whatever happened that week, and we deal with it what happened that week.
but the quest is actually engineered to be super layered intentionally. It builds in order on purpose, and it keeps building whether or not there's a session in the diary.
And you still get me on top of it. We have our one-on-one and we have our group coaching sessions. that's what's really missing, and that's what's already in there. We have a very structured process to get your family from A to B.
So I want you to picture December this year. Picture the last week of school. The holidays starting. The routines are starting to fall away. All of it. Now picture walking into that with all your systems already in place. They're already tested. and they're already running. Four weeks from today is the first week of October. That's the whole quest process done.
four weeks from today, which is how long the quest takes, is going to take us to the first week of October. Plus, you've got two more months of private coaching to make sure we're cementing in that change. That's the whole thing done with time to spare. So here's what I want you to do: I want you to go to the functionalfamily.com.
Forward slash quest.
And if it feels like the right fit for your family, come and join us as we go through this amazing process. It closes at 10 p.m. on the 8th. And it's not that the quest closes. You can buy that anytime. It's just that beautiful friction map coaching session that we're going to do, which is super, super high value. So you're going to get that free. That expires at 10 p.m. on the eighth.
And if the quest is not the right fit for you, that is completely fine. Go back to part three of this episode and run those three questions on one system in your house. does it work without me in the room? Does it work on a bad day? What skill is actually missing here? That will move you and it costs you nothing. You've read everything. I know you have. This week, build one thing instead.
I'll see you in the next episode.
