Take 5 seconds and reflect with Marshall Lichty

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Come join me May 1st through the 6th, so that you can rest, rediscover your strengths, reconnect yourself and those physicians like you who are ready to leave, work at work and re-energize. This is the invitation for you. 2023 your year. Join me in Costa Rica in this really amazing, non-judgmental, intimate decision community.

I am gonna show you how to rest and how to recharge. Let's transform your brain up so that you can start to dream the life that you always wanted this year in 2020. I can't wait to learn all about what kind of year you're gonna have after this conference. Take care. Hello. Welcome to Beyond ADHD, a Physician's Perspective.

I am Dr. Diana Mecado Marmarosh . I'm a family medicine physician practicing in rural Texas. I used to be hindered by my adhd, but I now. See it as a gift that helps me show up as a person. I was always meant to be both in my work and in my personal life. In the past two years, I've come to realize that unlearning some of my beliefs.

And some of my habits were just as important as learning the new set of skills. Oh my goodness. I am so excited today. I have an amazing treat. New Year, new goals, right? So I have a really good friend of mine here. It's really so important to have him here. He's one of been one of my guest coaches and.

Been treat and the, it went wild. My group went wild when we had him. He is actually an a lawyer and his name is Dr. Oh, sorry. I'm so used to saying doctor. But he is an honorary doctor in our group. Okay. So Marshall Litchy and I might have mis spelled or Miss said that, but he's here and he will tell us all about himself.

And he actually has a D H D and he coaches lawyers with a D H D. What an amazing service that is. And he has his podcast and he's just changing the world on his end. And so I'm so happy to have him here today. Marshall, would you tell us a little bit about us about.

Marshall Lichty: Yeah, you bet. I'm Marshall Litchy and yeah, I'm a lawyer, a Juris doctor, which the JD doesn't quite have the same ring that the MD does.

And yeah, I practiced law. I do no real lawyering these days, but I practiced law for about 15 years. And I was 43 when I was diagnosed with a D H D. For a lot of folks it will resonate with them that I had a kiddo who was having some STR struggles in school and we got curious about it and brought 'em to a specialist doctor, diagnosed him.

And as we were sitting in that meeting room, the doctor says, kinda looks at my wife and says, Now is there anybody else in the family that you know that has any of these characteristics? And all the heads snap over to me. And and then I got, I did some assessment and I did a full on assessment. I did the whole nine yards and kind of diagnosis.

And my life has been very different ever since then in almost all good ways. At the end of.

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Tell me, when you look back and they were asking you those questions, could you see all those characteristics in yourself as a kid, as a as a, high school and college? Could you see any of those things?

What stood out? To you.

Marshall Lichty: I think I, I was talking about this with a client of mine yesterday. If you're the mango juice and you're trying to read the label, you have a hard time doing it because you can't see the label, you're inside the bottle. And I think there were some elements of it that I saw plain as day, but some of them I just didn't. Really see them or I didn't know what I didn't know. And it was the, as diagnosticians, yes. Any, anybody who has a clinical practice knows that there's a gaping difference between somebody who really has thought about what they might have and they've been on the internet and they might be, Self-diagnosing a bunch of stuff, but they've been in the symptoms, they've been in the differential diagnosis, and they know what to play with so that it makes your job easier.

Sure, you gotta talk 'em down from having cancer, but at least they have talked about, I have this and I have this and I have this and I have this. And they can talk about it in a way that shows that there's been some self-reflection. And for me, that was the most interesting part was watching my son go through.

It led to this process of self-reflection, talking to my spouse about it and. Doing all of the research and looking for resources, and that's when I realized that there were no meaningful resources for lawyers with A D H D. And as I started thinking about what all of the implications of executive function challenges would be for a lawyer, I was.

Gobsmacked. I was like this is a huge challenge for lawyers because our jobs in many ways are just dripping with executive function. And I found very quickly that that there was a big need for what I was. Going through myself, great fortune of writing a book with some friends about how to run a small law firm and the book did well and we believed it.

It's a good book. I believe this stuff in there, but I owned a small law firm. I had a really hard time implementing some of the things, some of the things that we had written in the book and finally it started to make sense to me where those struggles were. It wasn't that I was lazy or crazy or stupid or any of those things.

The places where I struggled. Were reflected in some patterns that I was then able to see. Medication made a difference. Tools and tips and hacks and tricks made a big difference. And so starting to view my life as a search for healthy dopamine and healthy neurotransmitter processing has become a real joy for me.

Sometimes augmented by, not sometimes every day augmented by controlled substances, but also augmented by. Exercise and meditation and planning and sleep and a whole bunch of other things. And with those things, I feel like I've honestly never been in a better spot professionally. So it's, it has been a huge blessing for me.

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Yeah. And probably personally too, right? Because now, like you said, now you're choosing meditation. Now you're choosing, I don't know if you're exercising or not, but now you're at least more conscious that there. Like you said, a dopamine menu you can tap into whenever you need it versus before, maybe we didn't even have that awareness and we were going to go get that sugar or that.

Drink after work or whatever because we didn't realize that was gonna motivate us or keep us, push us through the deadline that we needed to commit to. And he and unaware of that, sometimes we could have been self judging, right? Or we could have been like, oh my God, I'm trying to lose weight, but I keep going to go get the cookie at 3:00 PM Like, who am I?

And like all this shame that can Keep us from growing or becoming or reaching all those damn goals that we keep making and like we don't really follow through because we didn't know, we didn't have the tools to be able to follow through or we keep trying to do things the way, like you said, it works for everybody else.

This is great. That's right. Checklist for A, B, and C. And if you don't have a D H D to do and it works beautiful but. We forget that with a D H D, what really drives us, our passion really trumps sometimes, although we do need that somebody to help us be organized and help us with some of the checklists that we ourselves on purpose, things are needed, right?

Because there's some things you can't ignore that are needed to, in order to be able to do. If you have a, you had a client and you knew that their. Case was, on Monday at 3:00 PM like you couldn't show up on Monday at 4:00 PM because then you missed that window. There was no window of oh, I had it on the wrong time and Maybe at 2:00 PM had somebody told you, okay, Marshall, are you in your car?

Are you driving towards whatever? And it sounds silly, right? But our brain wouldn't have given us the opportunity. We would've literally wanna be driving out of our thing at two 50 thinking we're gonna get there by three and have plenty of time and have the, the parking space and everything, right?

And aware that, oh God, we wanna keep doing things until the last minute because our. is just wired that

Marshall Lichty: way. , that's right. Yeah. The the classic time optimism. I love the phrase time optimism, cuz it puts a little spin on that predicament that we get ourselves into. One of the things that I've really been thinking a lot about lately in the context of A D H D for adults who are diagnosed later Is and I haven't seen medical research on it, certainly not peer reviewed.

And so this is anecdotal, it's observational. But I am fascinated by what I believe to be really significant parallels between people who are late diagnosed with A D H D, usually smart people with HighQ who are late diagnosed. Yeah. And the C PTs d literature. I'm fascinated by a complex PTs d as a. I don't know what it is, whether it's A L.

There is a lens through which you can look at either one of these and see a ton of parallels. And while I know that they are separate what I have begun to wonder about is whether there are elements of A D H D that increase perhaps dramatically the likelihood of a young person having an experience with parents during attachment.

That leads to C P T S D fascinating. Thing for me to play with and think about. And so I want to say it to this group because it's just something that I've been chewing on and I know that there are legitimate doctors in this group who are capable of thinking about this at a higher level. For me it's a curiosity.

It's something that I've been playing with, I've been trying read and research, but I think there are so many interesting elements of having D H D and beginning to work on that chain cycle that you mentioned. That is as much of the work as. Yeah. And in a lot of ways that people work through C P T S D, they are very similar to what we talk about, at least the emotional aspects of working through A D H D.

So anyway, I don't know what thoughts you have about it, if any, but that's something I've thought a lot about, as you mentioned,

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: shame. Yeah. And so I think that's such an important. Topic that you point pointed it out to, I just interviewed a physician. She's wonderful, and she has 10,000 certificates.

Like she's family medicine, she's like psychiatrist in functional medicine, Reiki. And she actually, interestingly enough, her area of interest is. Addiction medicine and she talks about this correlation of trauma and and so I think you're onto something because me and her had a discussion and of course we had the discussion after I stopped recording.

I was like, God damn it, we should have recorded that. But that brings it up to the fact that I was talking to her, re realizing. That, most of our experiences up to the age of seven like really shape us into how we react with the rest of the world going forward. And so I was sh telling her that, I grew up in Mexico till I was 10, and then not until I came over here Sure.

All of a sudden, like I was meant to do certain things in a certain way, and them calling my parents was not enough. It meant that. My mom had to come and sit there physically for me to behave. And again, it was not because I wasn't doing my work because they would give me work and then they would give me more work and I would do all that work.

And you could see that my mom sitting there did not keep me from not asking questions or being disruptive, right? And so then they had to bring my dad in to do that. And so how she was talking about how that must have been traumatic for me to. Be myself, right? Because my dad would've probably spanked me because, my dad you're pulling him out of work.

This means money. This means like livelihood, right? And how like .

Marshall Lichty: . Now if y'all are listening right now, you're hearing a catch. Sons voice over there. Yes. We're talking about

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: so the well meaning, right? Like well-meaning, well-intentioned. This is how teachers were taught they needed to do that.

And we were talking a conversation earlier, you and me about how I'm in a place in my life where really rethinking how can we. Help a society like, meaning like how can we make laws to where everybody is so inclusion. So instead of making it obvious that your kid has a D h D, how can we bring in tools and be like, Hey, in the front of the class, here's all these gadgets that can help you like to concentrate.

If you can use them like quietly under your desk and it's not distracting you, but they're using you to get you to still pay attention. But it's of like a side thing in the back and then. in the class can go and grab it. Now is you're not self-identifying you as a D H adhd. Only the people with A D H D can have this gadget to help them concentrate.

But anybody in the classroom can use this tool as if it's a tool and if it's no longer a tool, then you take it away because now it is distracting. That's right. Teaching. Teaching people tools. Right? And or how can I have those timers that are visual timers so that when you just say five minutes are up, people don't know what five minutes are.

But if they have a clock that says, oh, five minutes, and it, you can see the little red and then you're like, oh, okay, closer and then because of five minutes you implement it where then you turn around and you tell, Hey, okay, this is a time. Your friend next to you can tell you, did you catch the assignment?

Can we share each other? Can you group, instead of, again, making it seem like, oh, you're the only one that didn't catch it because you were so distracted in your dreams, like now you're working as a team, everybody works together. You're not making it mean a thing that you're asking questions, right? So why is that stemming from that now?

Now I can go back and see it was traumatic to have my dad sitting right next to me and. I'm praying for my life. Obviously that's not my life, but in my mind, I'm freeing for my life to be embarrassed. That's to be spanked out here in front of everybody. So used

Marshall Lichty: to disappoint, right? Realistically, that's what we're talking about at the end of the day.

And you ta, I I think you touched on some really interesting stuff there. The first one that I'll mention just on the side is that timer that you're talking about. The product is called a time timer. Yeah. And you can get it on Amazon. They have it in different colors. It's a whole, it's a whole thing.

And they're great. It works. For my kids. I had a client last week hold one up. He's I got a new time timer for Christmas for my in-laws and I've been using it and it actually helps with Poros or with other, tactics to stand tasks. So yes, time timer. But the other thing that I wanna mention, this is one of the reasons that you and I connected and immediately felt like kindred spirits was because your vision aligns with mine, which is to see that two things are true.

First, your parents were doing their best Exactly. And their. Probably led to some really tough experiences for you that you're probably still scarred. Working through. Yeah. The same is true for your teachers. They were doing their best. The opportunity that we have is to talk about D H D in a different way, to empower people, to educate folks, parents and teachers and coworkers and partners in our medical practices and things of that sort, which is why.

I think it brings us around to something that you and I talked about before we started recording, which was I think that A D H D accommodations or accommodations that in general are great for everyone. So yeah. For example, in your personal practice, you now have scribes available to all of the physicians in your group.

Yes. That began as a need that you. Yes, for executive function, for order for capturing notes, and you are out and about. Anybody who's listening to your podcast knows that you are out with being a D H D and talking about, and you've got a podcast and group coaching available. A great value, by the way, for anybody's like you are doing the thing.

So it would be bizarre to not be. Coming out at work about your adhd, but there are a lot of people who are not fortunate or not so bold or not confident that they're not gonna see ramifications at work. And for them if they have h adhd, but it's on the down low, you've made the world better.

But guess what, even better. And this goes back to your point about being a student in a classroom with a teacher who is aware of the benefit of fidgets and distractions. Now we get to have scribes in your. And all 10 physicians benefit dramatically, which means your patients benefit dramatically. And it's all because we made the world a little bit better for one person who had a D H D, and I think that is beautiful.

Now you, like I said, You volunteered to say, I have D H D. Yeah. But in a practice where people want to be accommodating, where we want to have our diversity and inclusion efforts front and center, we need to be thinking about what it looks like to do d e I for folks with Neurodiverse brains and feels like there's resistance to it.

The fact of the matter is, most interventions and accommodations for people with ADHD help every. I love that. I love that you did it. I love that your work is now, at least in part, built around coaching people to understand that in the medical profession because that has, that is just an absolute force multiplier Yeah.

To have physicians on the frontline, of course, working on their own d h adhd or the h ADHD that their kids have. They're sitting in clinic and they can talk to people about what this looks like. They can be advocating for accom. In their practices, not because they think anybody else has a D H D, but for their benefit.

I

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: love that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it it was, like I said, it was such an empowering thing that you were, you said yes to this complete stranger to be like, Hey, do you want a conversation with me about A D H D? Do you wanna come and coach my group? Like it was such a benefit for the physicians to be able to hear your side and to be able to hear, you know that if you don't feel like you want to say you have adhd, like you don't have to and that's okay, but you can still show up and tell them, I work best when blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

When like I have my own nurse, when I am not moved from like this room to that room, like you just keep me in these two rooms when I am next to a window, when I have the ability to use. Phones and nobody's talking to me like it sounds. That's right. Silly. But we sometimes when we are employed with somebody else, we feel like, oh, I just have to follow all the rules.

This is the way it's always been. I don't want my job a jeopardy. I'm on the, I'm on the fine line because I keep getting those damn emails that I haven't closed my notes. And I can't ask for how dare can I ask for something for me to help me to do what they want me to do and so I thought it was so good that you.

Piece of advice from it, and I know you weren't doing it for everybody, and everybody's own case is their case. Just like when we say from, we're not giving medical advice, we're not giving legal advice here, but it's good to at least have a general understanding of how you can still empower yourself.

To ask for things. And look, it took three years of me asking for scribes. It's not like it happened overnight, right? And it's not like it's gonna happen, but it, at the end of the day, you had to realize how much does it takes us to replace us and to replace, a physician can take anywhere from a hundred to a million dollars a year just to replace you depending on what you do.

And so if you could say, I work best. When I have learners and I love to teach medical students, that's what I want. Or I work best when I don't have learners and I don't wanna teach medical students, I just want to do surgeries and this is my area, or I work. Like, how wonderful would it be that every time you show up and you do, what are your strengths and you feel so aligned?

Everybody benefits, like it's just a ripple effect instead of being like, yeah, no, that's not possible. And ours on virtual scribes, they don't, they're not even in the room. Like how amazing is that? Right?

Marshall Lichty: Listen, one of the things that I think is absolutely critical about this part of the discussion, first of all, let me back up cause I want a little bit of credibility in the room. When I was a lawyer in my first job, the first seven-ish years of my legal career were, was representing doctors in medical malpractice lawsuits. I then spent three years suing doctors in medical malpractice lawsuits.

So I have. A lot of experience with what it looks like for doctors to do well, for them to chart well, for them to follow on patients well, for them to do the things that not only provide great patient care, but keep them out of trouble. That has me thinking very often, weirdly, often. About the struggles that doctors have when they have a d h D and the point that I think is critical, listen the medical profession is not one where you go blasting from the rooftops that you've got, d h D, that you've got depression, that you've got anxiety, that you've got a substance abuse problem, that you made a mistake that you think you possibly might have potentially made a mistake.

It is no place for that. We're trying to change that and I think there's interesting movement around that, but we all know the stigma around not being perfect. In medicine, the idea that we would be suggesting that you're gonna march into your clinic or march into the hospital or march into your patients and say, Hey, guess who's got a D H D over here?

Nobody knows what it means. There are a ton of misconceptions about what that is. You will lose your practice, you will lose your patient. I don't think that's exactly true, but there is certainly that perception and there's certainly that here. And so the point that the doctor's making is how do. Try to have a different relationship with our lives and our practice in a way that doesn't threaten our livelihood.

And so that point about having a strengths based approach to navigating your practice is, I think the quintessential one. We wanna talk about takeaways. We wanna talk about tips and acts and trick, tricks and all that shit to navigate ADHD as a doctor in practice, I think this is it. You cannot lead a strengths-based.

Life if you don't reflect on your strengths. This is the time of year when I spend time with clients. Obscene amounts of time with clients trying to plan, planning our years, planning our quarters, planning our months, planning our weeks, planning our days, learning new habits, using new software, using new tools and templates and new workbooks and all kinds of, everybody's out there buying their brand new planners and all this shit.

There is a belief that we can change by just looking forward at what we want. If you are in a position where you are struggl, The single best thing that I can believe that I believe that you can do is start working on giving yourself permission to every day, if possible, reflecting on what it is like to be you.

That didn't go very well. That went great. I loved that. I hated that. That was a great piece of music I listened to on my commute while I was late. That was a great piece of art I saw, man, did I hate that patient? Boy, I never want to talk about doubt again. That is the worst thing in the on the planet.

These are things that benefit us because as we reflect and we give ourselves permission to not be doing something, to not be putting out a. Stop. Be feeling guilty that we didn't close our note. Be like, I don't have time to reflect. I have to go close the note. I don't have time to plan. I have to go see the next patient.

I don't have time to plan. I have to throw my scrubs in the laundry. The point is, we don't give ourselves permission to do things that we know will benefit us. And if you can start today carving out just a little bit of time to reflect on yesterday, on last week, on last month, on last quarter, on last year, that gives you a relat.

With what you like, what you don't like, what you're good at, what you're not good at, and that. Is what allows you to then go use a strengths-based approach when you're asking for accommodations. It is not my expectation that you're gonna march into one of your partner's offices and say, gee, I need scribes in the office because I work better with scribes.

If you can look back at the last year and say, every single time that I get in trouble here. When I get behind, when I get anxious, when I miss things, when my patients are upset, when we get fiery emails from, other providers, it is because of things that ascribe could fix. I don't want that anymore.

I want this practice to be better. I am at my best when I can have those things taken care of, so I can put my big, huge ass, powerful brain to work on solving real health problems. That message, Is gonna resonate every single time, but it's only through reflection and retrospective that you're able to talk about that in any meaningful way.

And so really as we enter 2023, if I can encourage you to give yourself one gift. One gift this year. It is find time, hopefully every day, even if it is just a little teeny, tiny bit of time. This is not a Woowoo gratitude journal. It's not Brene Brown. God bless her soul. I love her. It's not Glennon Doyle.

It's not. This is, think about how it went. Observe what you liked and didn't like. What would be better? What would be less good and hold. And then do it again tomorrow. And by the end of the year, you're gonna know a lot more about yourself. And I guarantee you that will lead

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: to good change. Yeah. That's such an amazing, powerful thing.

Like you said, it's seems like we keep telling ourselves we don't have enough time, but if on purpose. Like growth is optional, like growth is intentional. Like you on purpose have to reflect so that you can see, yes, this work, this does not work. And it's seems so simple and it seems like why would I wanna pay anybody to tell me that?

Because again, it's so simple, but it's in the accountability and in the implementation and in seeing. What it's doing for everybody else around you who this is now the community that you're on purpose signing yourself up to be in. So like I'm sure that's why your clients are kicking ass now because they're coming and you're having that one-on-one or that group coaching with you to be able to do that and it's simple.

So simple that we're like, go do it tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow, and then tomorrow never comes. And then you wonder why you're still in the same damn horse race that has, nothing's changed. Although you have the best intention at the beginning of the year or the beginning of the month, or you name it every Monday you start to say you're gonna work out right.

But someday is not. A day in the calendar, like you really have to give yourself five minutes. And it sounds silly that I'm asking you to do five minutes, but oh my God, the five magical minutes make a difference. If you wake up with the intention of what am I doing today for five minutes, like on purpose, what is my fun, what is my priority?

Is my priority to go pick up my kids so I can see him at the soccer practice is my priority to close my notes, my priority to not miss my doctor's appointment. Like it, it sounds silly, but if your priority is. To do that. Then at the end of the day, if you just spend another five minutes, did I do my priority?

Why or why? love

Marshall Lichty: that. Yep. I think that is a beautiful loop that is virtuous in that if you can, and you do your five minutes, I'm sure that you've mentioned that on the podcast in Televis before. Sure. For me, when we talk about habit formation, when we talk about, putting things into our subconscious, I don't care if it's five, honestly, you get credit for starting if you even exactly.

Think about doing it today, right? . Yes. If you can do five minutes, that's great. And if you can do five minutes in the morning planning and setting intentions, and if you can do five minutes in the evening doing retrospectives and reflecting, great. That seems like a wonderful virtuous cycle. But if you can spend five seconds.

In the morning with one priority, and if you can spend five seconds in the evening with one reflection, that is a win. We are busy. There is not enough time, and the only way that we change that is by setting different priorities. And that is a message that I hear loud and clear from you. It doesn't mean that you need to put all of the other priorities that are crowding in on you to the side, right?

What it means is you can carve out, this is like the please. Whatever it is, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation or whatever, say, for the price and a cup of coffee, you can. And that's what we're talking about for the, yeah. For the amount of time that it takes you to open Insta and scroll through the first four posts, you can also do a little bit of reflection or a little bit of intention setting.

And if you give yourself permission to do that, not to stop looking at Insta or TikTok, but instead to say, I'm gonna. Spend five seconds beforehand just doing a quick reflection. Now we're talking. So anyway, we got a little bit down a rabbit hole there, but I think it's No,

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: But it's an a, a useful tool or that obviously you can do today.

Marshall Lichty: This, you don't have to plan your year. You don't have to talk about 2023. You don't have to talk about your five year life plan. You can do that fucking today. You can do it right now. In fact, I have an idea, doctor, with your permission, I'm not trying to hijack your podcast, but what if we, yeah, what if we shut the hell up for a minute, you and.

Yeah. You give a little direction to your people about what they might do and maybe we have them set their intention. Cause it's, for you and I, it's the morning. Yeah. People listen to it. But what if we have them take a little bit, five seconds, 10 seconds to reflect on yesterday and a little bit of time to set an intention for today, and then we just make 'em, do it.

Not make

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: them whatever We encourage them to. We offer them the space too. That's

Marshall Lichty: right. The margin. Yes. Yeah, I don't know your.

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Listen, listening to us, they're already listening to us, so you know, why not now Give yourself the gift of those five seconds. So we'll both be quiet for five seconds to let you think of what your priority is for today.

All

Marshall Lichty: So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do one five second. Intentional priority setting. Pick one priority and say it to yourself out loud. If you're in the car, if you're in the subway, if you're listening to this in a group and there are a thousand people in the waiting room waiting for you, say it out loud what your intention is.

Then we're gonna interrupt you to tell you that it's five seconds, and then we're gonna tell you to do another five seconds, and this one will be to reflect on. Some period of time when there was earlier today or yesterday or last week, and find one thing that you can observe that you liked, that you hated, that you were good at, that you weren't good at all.

Okay, doctor, you're up.

All right. I got one. I'm gonna put my groceries away

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: before my next call. My five seconds was, I'm gonna be on time for my appointment for my massage. That was my priority for today.

Marshall Lichty: Self-care and being unsound. Damn, that's next level. All right. Should we do five more seconds and do a little reflection?

All right. Here we go.

All right. What do you

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: got, doctor? I am I'm smiling because yesterday, I finally had a, an amazing time with my kiddos painting. I didn't have my phone on me. I went and I left it to charge, and I, it was beautiful because I was not on call and I did not have my phone on me, I've been working on being present when I am present and not just texting while I'm doing an activity.

Marshall Lichty: I love that. Mine was I've been talking a lot about goals with people and I have a really tortured relationship with goals and so I did some kind of frame shifting for people and instead of goals, I was calling them very specific plans. . And so I have this hashtag V S P that I've just been like scratching out on stuff like V S P V S P.

If I wanna get anything done, I need a V S P. And so this morning I didn't sleep well at all last night. So this morning I got up and I did a V S P. For a project that I wanna accomplish this year, I wanna build a cedar strip canoe before the ice comes in next October. And I got a pretty good start on A V S P for my canoe building plan.

And that was great. And so the reflection really is vs p's feel good. And normally I wouldn't give myself time to think about that project and plan it out. But I did and that's what I thought. And the five confession was probably a little bit longer than five seconds. Neither one of us actually had a clock on, but yes, that's what

I

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: did with my time.

Yeah. And that's the thing, right? Even though it seemed, we are not sure exactly what five seconds mean to either of us, because we don't have the time awareness and we don't have a clock. And this was a totally spontaneous thing, but you quickly saw how it was not a whole minute and how it was plenty of time for you to give yourself that gift of just thinking through.

The top of the mind without overthinking, without da, what came up? And it didn't take that long for you to realize what came up. And if we just give gift ourselves, that gift of awareness again goes back to awareness. What a difference it would be. I've been I was just telling Marshall before we start I'm so excited about my upcoming February schedule I've been toying with the idea of having more time to play and it took me a year to say, okay, I'm gonna have Thursdays off.

And so for a whole year I had Thursdays off and then it, and I kept thinking, no, I want more. I wanna play more. I wanna play more. And so finally on Thursday, this past Thursday, I was like, you know what? I got it. I'm gonna have Monday and Tuesday. I'm gonna find me a daycare where I can drop my kid off a little bit earlier and they have flexibility where my hub can pick up in the afternoon and then I don't have to feel like I have to rush outta clinic.

I'm gonna stretch my days Monday and Tuesdays off Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is clinic. And then instead of being here and there on call, I'm just gonna be on call Monday through Monday. But then that. The rest of the three weeks, I don't have to worry about having the phone attached to me so that I could actually be present with my family and not feel like I'm gonna miss something important.

And so it seemed like it was an instant thing. and then I talked to my manager on Friday and she's yeah, let's implement gifts. It took years. Years and me getting to the realization that, oh, I can have all the things. Oh, I can make containers so that I'm fully present wherever I'm at, wherever I'm at.

But again it took a community, it took self reading books, it took reflection. It took asking me, what do I want? Despite, and me working through oh, what are people gonna think? You're just working three days a week. I'm like, who gives a shit what I think I care what I think. I care what I want.

And if I'm happy, I it's so important. So anyways, I love it. I know that we, I just

Marshall Lichty: love it. That's, that is such an incredible thing to share with. We are not talking about doing something over. We're not talking about waving a magic wand and all of a sudden being a different person. This is toil and pain and joy and suffering and glory and grit and all of it, and it doesn't happen overnight.

But the message that I believe is real and true, and this is what I tell my lawyer clients all the time, a D H D Brain. In white collar professions will change the way that we work. We are creative. We see systems differently. We are entrepreneurs. We see change. We don't always know how to do it, but.

That's what other kinds of brains are for. Yeah. And that's okay. We will change the profession, but we need to give ourselves space and time to do that. And hopefully the gift that you can give yourself today is the opportunity to set some intentions and the opportunity to reflect a little bit and.

And be

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: brave to to believe in what you need. Four out of the six physicians jumped on to this new way of doing it. They're all gonna do it exactly the same. Some of them might be off, Thursday, Friday. Some of them might be to do Thursday. Who, but they're gonna have three days a week.

But you just don't know. I'm not doing it for them. But like you said, everybody benefits when you decide to show up for you and for yourself. And we're changing the culture of medicine where you can have all the things where you can be who you want to be. Remember that you need to be around the community that's gonna support you to do that.

So of course, I know I could talk to you for tens of hours and it's gonna be amazing. Me too. It would be magnificent. And so I would definitely have to have you come back. That's what I was gonna say this, but tell us how, when people, yeah. Where can people find you? Because I know they have friends or lo who, have lawyers who would benefit your service.

Or they have a spouse who have, has ADHD and is a lawyer. Where can they.

Marshall Lichty: Like a true A D H D. I have a pretty good website that isn't, all the way done and perfect, but I would like it to be, it's at the J D H D. Dot com, the jd H D all one word.com. And I have a podcast called JD h d. It. I haven't released an episode in Forever and ever, and I have a bunch of shame about it, but there's some good stuff in there.

Interviews with Ned Hollowell, who's a world famous A D H D physician. Gary Johnson, my personal psychologist who is. Frigging genius when it comes to A D H D. So go listen to some podcast episodes if you're interested in it,

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: and I could totally share today's podcast and you can put it on there and we can relive it.

And while we're double right.

Marshall Lichty: Why not? Doctor, as always, thank you. Please invite me back to the group and if anybody's listening to the podcast and you want to chat join the group and then I'll see you

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: in the group. One last question. I know you have to jump off. What do you hope to see yourself in the next three years?

For fun, one thing. Oh, I'm gonna build this

Marshall Lichty: canoe and then I'm gonna paddle it around and I'm gonna build a house on a river and I'm gonna catch trout out of it and it's gonna be fucking amazing.

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Awesome. Thank you for coming. It was a blast. Audios. Thanks, doctor. Thank you for spending your time with me.

I really believe that time is your most valuable asset. Please subscribe to the podcast, share with your colleagues, and don't forget to check out my website@hdlivecoach.com where you can find out about my upcoming coaching group classes, as well as free masterclass and other exciting events that are happening.