#24 The PM Interview and Attention and Focus (Part 2 Strategy)

How to allow yourself to experience feelings to improve attention and focus.

Welcome to Tech Atypically👋. I’m an ADHD Coach, product manager, and former neuroscience researcher. I write a weekly blog about ADHD, product management, and a neurodiverse life. Each issue includes science, stories, and strategies for regulating ADHD and the general chaos of being a PM.

Part 14 of the Product Manager Interview and Executive Function (EF) Series.

🌋Takeaways

• Improving your emotional regulation increases the chances of success of the focus or attention strategy you choose.

• Exercise - Ground, Conduct, and Give to process your feelings.

• ADHD isn’t an attentional disorder. It’s an emotional regulation disorder that’s been mislabeled because people only get to see your surfaces. Don’t give into their beliefs and let the world see who you truly are.

😄Welcome

A big welcome to the 185 new subscribers from r/ProductManagement this week. Before reading, I recommend reading part 1 of this attention and focus post. It’ll give you a primer on the science of attention and focus and introduce you to my hypothesis on the subject: Regulated focus and attention are byproducts of regulated emotions.

⭐Introduction

My strategy for being more attentive and focused does not involve an app, supplement, medication, or task manager. I think all those things are great but the effectiveness and experience are going to vary widely from person to person. Instead, my strategy is centered on addressing the core challenge of ADHD that most people overlook, emotional regulation.

By allowing yourself to experience and be self-aware of your emotions you can better understand what you need, instead of what you think you should or want. Improving your emotional regulation increases the chances of success of the focus or attention strategy you choose.

Should leads to shame, shame leads to procrastination, and procrastination leads to inattention.

🔥Questions to help you be more self-aware of your emotions

If you’re having trouble concentrating or working on a particle task or goal, take some time to think about why. Use your supercharged ADHD brain to think through some possible scenarios to find out what you feel and need.

• Why? Why? Why? Ask yourself why you want to do the task or accomplish the goal three times. Get to the question behind the question. The three whys are a known framework and are commonly used in Amazon operations. It’ll help you to identify if the task itself is the issue, or something larger.

  • Example: Why am I not applying for more jobs? Because I’m scared I won’t be able to pass an interview.

    • Why? Because I’ve been unemployed for 6 months and don’t know if I can still be a PM.

    • Why? Because I’ve spent my time building 3 new products instead of full-time applying. 2/3 are launched and generate a little revenue though.

    • Why? Because I really like building products.

    • Conclusion: I’m a PM whether I want to admit it or not. I can get get a job.

• Does this goal/task give or take energy away from you? If you can pinpoint what part takes away energy, you can find or reframe the task into something that has greater give energy.

  • Example: It takes energy to write a bug ticket because it’ll only get put into a black hole of a backlog. However, it gives me energy to write the ticket because it helps my engineering partner have more evidence on why they need more people on their team.

• Organize your emotions and actions by asking yourself if this should, want, or need?

  • Shoulds are often externally driven, self-imposed expectations. Failure to accomplish should often drives shame.

    • I should be a doctor because my mom said so. (It’s hard to let this one go)

  • Wants are desires to be balanced with the feasibility of the cost of acquisition (hey, I used PM jargon).

    • I want to be a self-employed ADHD coach that also runs a whiskey company.

  • Needs drive your overall direction but, help you prioritize the order of doing the shoulds and wants. How can needs support wants? Are there shoulds that should be needs?

    • I need to provide income to support my family so I need a job now. I can work on my coaching and whiskey company want on the side. I need to continue to practice letting go of ever being a doctor. (sorry Mom)

Looking inward is hard. Telling my mom I wanted to be a professional musician and not a doctor was harder. An image of a monk in Laos I took.

🦄Strategies - Ground, Conduct, Give

With these questions and answers in mind, you can start the physical practice of experiencing and processing the emotions that come with them. This exercise can be done at any time you feel big emotions, need to let go of a feeling, need a minute to breathe, or need a little dopamine to perk up your brain.

• Ground - Close your eyes and place your hands on your heart. Breathe in and out and check in with your sensations. Allow yourself to feel yourself without judgment. Breathe in and out and let your feelings go out through your feet. Ground yourself at the moment and breathe.

  • What feelings and thoughts come to mind?

• Conduct - Now that you know your feelings, think about where to send them. This isn't about repressing your feelings. This is about experiencing them, negative or positive, and giving yourself the space to decide how to respond. It could be letting them go, crying, laughing, making art, or creating tasks to allow you to experience them.

  • It's picking the path you need to best experience the emotions. Emotional avoidance will only exhaust you further.

• Give - Take action on the tasks or actions you've decided. Give to yourself or others in order to process the emotions. It could be giving yourself kindness in dealing with a mistake to let it go. Or it could be giving kindness to a teammate for a dopamine hit after a long day.

  • When you give, you empower yourself with shame-free, self-aware actions. Use your clear emotional state to decide on your tasks and decision-making.

Ground yourself to find yourself.

✨Conclusion

So much of your energy is spent trying to keep your ADHD impulses and feelings suppressed that you can lose touch with what you’re feeling. It’s this weakened state of internal connection that impacts our attention, focus, and energy levels the most. It often leaves you with feelings of fatigue, exhaustion, or avoidance. Allowing yourself to experience emotions enables you to decide on actions that empower you, instead of draining you.

In my opinion, ADHD isn’t an attentional disorder. It’s an emotional regulation disorder that’s been mislabeled because people only get to see your surfaces. Don’t give into their beliefs and let the world see who you truly are.

🐼Talk to me about your challenges

⏭️Next Week

The executive function interview toolkit. A consolidated cheat sheet of strategies to help you prepare and interview as your best self. That will also wrap up this series and a new one will start the following week.

A wheel with 10 domains of executive function: organization, attention and focus, impulse control, time-keeping, planning and prioritization, self-monitoring, working memory, flexible thinking, emotional control, task initiation.