Consistency and Interviews

Written by Christopher Pentecost on January 21, 2024

One of the things I’ve always struggled with is the part of being consistent with relatively anything, whether that’s going to the gym, coding, taking time for myself – you know, very rarely have I been able to keep consistently consistent. What I have found is that if I write things down, I’m about 90% consistent with anything that I do. Too bad I found this out after all the years of being inconsistent. Even if I was inconsistent, I could always bet that I would be consistently early to anything – except writing this. To be fair, this post was supposed to be one delving into ADHD and the symptoms, and how each of those symptoms reflects in my life. The reason it isn’t, well, because I have children, and both of them have been sick this week, which, taking care of children when they’re sick, really cuts down on that prized time where researching stuff could be done. So my consistency was left up to taking care of them. Now, I have to be consistent with keeping up with these posts, especially since I am thinking, in the next month or so, I’m going to start having to do double the amount of work. So, I reinvested in writing things down. Now, I don’t want to make this platform a ‘this is what I use, go out and buy this’ – because it’s not that platform. But if I do use something and I do believe that it helps me and it’s proven to help me, I’m more than willing to share with a wider audience. Clever Fox planners are the best planners that I have found that work for me. I have two different ones working on the go. I have one for my health and fitness journey, and I have one for my daily activities. The nice thing with Clever Fox is that it gets you to focus on things that are important to you – something that really I’ve never done. I’ve never been able to sit down and create goals for myself, which led to a lot of like, do I go left, do I go right, or sometimes I just want to go both ways. These really focus me and challenge me to create focus, whether it’s in health and fitness, business and career, finance, spiritual or personal development, romance and relationships. But there are sections to create long-term goals, short-term goals, and also affirmations to sort of remind you why you’re doing something, which sometimes we need to be reminded why we do things. Currently, my daily one is the Clever Fox Weekly Planner Pro with time slots so I can better plan out my day. What I found was I could plan my day, but then I was never planning it down to the hour, which then I would have five things I needed to do and I could only get through two of them because I failed to take into account I may have to travel. This at least allows me to be a little more invested in the hours of my day. The gym one for health and fitness helps me track my workouts, my goals, and my food tracking – which, as my doctor keeps telling me, I should be doing a lot more. So, I will leave a link at the bottom just in case you’re curious and you want to check it out.

The other thing that threw a wrench into consistency for me this week was I finally got an interview after 8 months of no prospects in my career since being unemployed. I finally got an interview. The job is not in my career field or at my previous pay grade, but it is something. And since being unemployed, you tend to find ways of making your life easier on one income. I saw a post recently on social media that a wage increase doesn’t need to be huge – if you’re living within your means, an increase is a benefit. And that’s true here. When I first lost my job, the first thing I went and did was cancel all of my investment transfers because I knew I wasn’t going to have the money for it. I went to all of the monthly bills and went through each one, finding ways to save money. Now, maybe I didn’t save a lot of money, or maybe I didn’t save any money at all, but in those cases, I did end up getting larger amounts of service for the same amount of money. So, that kind of balances out a little bit.

Back to the interview. One thing I have always had an issue with is interviewing because my ADHD likes to make my mind wander. So, before the interview, I went to YouTube, I found a 10-minute meditation on focus, did that, and then I proceeded to the interview. That small amount of time just to refocus myself was a major benefit. Did it stop my mind from wandering around when the interviewer says, ‘Explain to me a situation’? My mind has the ability to focus but never really when I want it to. The other thing is being able to be present in an interview while also trying to make sense. I find a lot of the times, even when doing these posts, that as my mind is writing the next line, my brain is continuously throwing at least 12 more lines at me, and I can’t keep up with the productivity that my brain is trying to achieve. A lot of times, subjects, stories, experiences all get melted into one massive stream of consciousness that really has no end. And so, every time I’m sitting in an interview, I always have to be finding a way to edit myself to make sure that I’m not sounding like James Joyce. I know, like a lot of people, you get out of an interview and sometimes you have that feeling where, ‘I nailed that.’ I’ve always left an interview, every single interview I’ve had, second-guessing, ‘Should I have led with that, or should I have told him the story about the guy in the room?’ I don’t know. I also know that a lot of people, their jobs are to sit and not give reactions to anything you’re saying, and they’re just to take notes – which, for me, is like being a stand-up comedian with a dead audience. The silence is deadly, and you don’t know where you stand. I understand that’s the idea, that you’re supposed to not know where you stand, but with a person with anxiety as well as ADHD, the aftermath of that is “INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT TO DEAL WITH!” I remember applying for a job within a company, and I knew the boss, and I knew the person from HR doing the thing, and they would ask the questions of, ‘Tell us the situation when,’ and I would inject humor. And it was always funny that the HR person never laughed. It’s almost as if she didn’t like me, but then I got tons of laughs from the boss – that would be the person I would have to, you know, report to – and they were always nice enough to at least give me a chuckle every once in a while.

I’m not sure what’s going to come of the interview, and that’s fine. I put my best foot forward, and I’m fine with that. This job is not what I want to do in my career, but it is a job that would allow me sort of the freedom to continue doing this and add to this, and maybe be able to bring forth whatever we’re doing here into other contexts. This isn’t my first bout into ranting and recording my thoughts. I’ve done a few of these things before, and actually, after having a chat with one of my best friends, he reminded me that this is something that him and I used to do. I like where this is going so far, and I want to continue doing it. That means I do something outside of what my career was and where my career trajectory was going. Then maybe this hobby has become my career, and a job is just what allows me the funds to do so, and to be honest, I kind of don’t mind that. One of the Instagram accounts I follow is Derric Chew. I will link his account below, but one of his posts talked about you only need five hobbies – one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, one to stay creative, one to build knowledge, and one to grow your mindset. This resonates with this project of mine because if this project could be one hobby to cover four of those five, that would be well worth it. And for those paying attention, the one that this doesn’t help would be to keep me in shape. I still have to take my Fox planner and go to the gym, but this project, as I continue on with it, can grow my mindset, build my knowledge, even if it’s only knowledge of myself and how to better myself in this world. It’ll keep me creative, and then I just have to find a way to monetize it. And no, I’m not going to add Google AdSense to this yet. I’m not that popular, nor am I that pretentious. But after reading this and coming up with things in my head – because my head likes to do these types of things – there are possibilities of expanding this to, again, doubling up the amount of content, also creating different types of content. Let’s not just leave it to my ramblings and writings. Maybe adding video, maybe adding audio, maybe a podcast. I don’t know, haven’t really thought it fully through. At this moment, I just knew starting out slow and steady, let’s get some thoughts on paper or, in this case, virtual paper on the web.

And to hold myself accountable and to be consistent going forward, next week’s post will be about symptoms of ADHD and me going into a couple of the symptoms and how I have dealt with it in my life. I appreciate you going on this tangent with me. Sometimes it’s nice to get off the well-worn paths and get muddy. But that’s life, and if you’re not getting muddy, are you really having any fun?

[https://www.instagram.com/p/C0lOj5RpXYr/]

[https://cleverfoxplanner.com/]

[Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash]