#30 | No Motivation and Resistant

Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."

Get the Preview of the workbook, When Autism Grows Up by Lynn C Davison, Adulting Coach, Available in Fall 2022.

Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"

RESOURCES

• SEEING AUTISM by Barb Avila: https://www.lynncdavison.com/pl/2147533610
• Why We Self-Sabotage Phone Wallpaper
• THE PROCRASTINATION EQUATION by Piers Steel
• STEAR Map Phone Wallpaper
• Danica Patrick explains complexities of IndyCar steering wheel
• Recenter Ourselves Phone Wallpaper
• LivesInTheBalance.org by Dr. Ross Greene
• Collaborative & Proactive Problem Solving Process
• Watch my masterclass: 4-Part Roadmap to Systemize Self-Reliance with Your Autistic Young Adult

Hi, I'm Lynn, your adulting coach. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting together. Thank you for watching this video. Today's struggle is from Kathi Perkins in The Art of Adulting Facebook group. Her son has no motivation and is very resistant to suggestions and has become pretty withdrawn and isolated.

0:39
So, what's the best path forward in this situation? I'm going to rely again on Barb Avila, who wrote this marvelous book SEEING AUTISM. Her process suggests that we just go to understand, connect and practice.

Let me go backwards one more time. This withdrawal, this self isolation, no motivation and refusing medicine and doctor visits. These are some of the symptoms of what's going on. That's what t Kathy is observing.

So let's go to the understand step. What do we think is going on with our young adult?

1:20
Well, one of the first things that I had to learn after nearly 40 years of parenting, is that, you know, with differently wired kids with differently wired brains, traditional approaches and timelines just don't apply. They don't work. And yet we have to figure something out.

I mean, our question is always, "Will they ever be self sufficient?" They have to be at some point as our runways are going to run out and they're going to need to rely on themselves to become adults, to take responsibility for whatever they create in their lives.

So what's the best path forward between now and then?

It's really important for us to understand motivation, and why we do tend to self sabotage ourselves. That's kind of what it seems like our autistic adult is doing when they totally withdraw and isolate and refuse to do anything and refuse to accept any suggestions from us.

2:37
The motivational triad is that very faint little triangle in the middle and that's what our brains try to do to keep us alive.

Our brain is always looking for ways for us to avoid pain, conserve energy, and seek pleasure in the form of instant gratification. I mean, that's how we stay alive as a species over this long period of time.

And yet that motivation that's wired in our brains really isn't serving us today. Instead, what we have to do in order to make progress in our lives is:

• To invite discomfort and move out of our comfort zone.
• We need to expend a lot of energy trying things to see if they work or not.
• And we need to delay gratification and deny false pleasure in order to do the things that we conserve our denote and have the energy to do the things that we know work that that we know are going to move us forward.

That's a big ask for someone who's just out of high school with a differently wired brain who has had a lot of experiences in life that are different from what someone with an autistic brain has had.

So there's been this cascading effect of difficulties and, and missed opportunities to learn that again, Barbara Avila beautifully explains in her book SEEING AUTISM.

4:19
So, what is, you know, how do we motivate them? What do we do to make a difference in the level of motivation that they have?

And here's what we do. We we lean on science. The motivation equation came from Pierce Steele in his book, THE PROCRASTINATION EQUATION. And we kind of can imagine what's going on. What the elements are of a motivated individual are.

They have high confidence to do something that's very important to them. So let's just imagine their confidence level is at a 10 and they want to do something.

5:02
It's really important to them so it's a 10. So on the top line of this equation, we've got 100 points, and underneath, they are not distractible because they are highly focused and they know exactly what they need to do next, and they are guided on their schedule and they're gonna do it.

That's a person with one you know, one point in the distractible equation, then they know exactly what they have to do next. So it's not this long term,  "When am I going to become an adult question?"

It's this oh, this is the one thing I need to do next. So it's immediate and the gratification of getting that done is going to be immediate. That's a pretty tough that's an interesting way of looking at it. I have found this to be extremely helpful with me and with my own autistic young adults because I realized that confidence is a tough one. I see them hesitate doing things that, you know, a non autistic person might find.

6:05
You know, they just don't even have to learn about doing it. They just do it, do it, like call the doctor and order their medicine and make an appointment or whatever.

That there's a lot of, there's a lot of time that's been spent over the last 20 years. You know, where they haven't been confident that they can handle whatever needs to be done next, and the importance level. I mean, there's a long list of things that need to be done, how do I know how do they know how do we separate out what are important what are not important things to do next? And of course, we know how distractible they are. I mean, that's many of our young adults are taking medicine to help their prefrontal cortex stimulate their prefrontal cortex and keep their attention on what's important and, you know, isn't immediate.

Well, you know, as long as they're comfortable in their basic needs are taken care of. There's in many cases, there's not an immediacy, feeling about getting some things done. So it's, it's kind of it's kind of easy to understand why it is that our kids are having a hard time getting some things done to create their life and then when we multiply it by energy, I think this whole motivation equation also is motivated by the level of energy that we have available. And that energy management is a challenge. For my autistic young adults may require more time to get things done, they require more recovery time.

7:36
They're easily triggered. So they have to, you know, process all of that discomfort and that takes a longer time. So their energy levels are different. So I think it really helps us when we look at both the motivation, motivational triad, and the motivation equation why getting things done, has been difficult for our autistic young adults. Now we want to also look at okay, what's going on? With us? And I'm going to recommend that we look at our thoughts on a regular basis, and then put them in the steer map. Okay, so here's the situation. Here's my autistic adult. That's a fact. If my thought is I wonder if they're ever going to the self sufficient. My emotion is discouraged.

8:30
And then my actions are to look for all the evidence for the ways that they are not doing what needs to get done, which then produces the result of I can't find any evidence that they're ever going to become self motivated, self sufficient. An Adult.

8:50
That's tough, and we have to recognize the price. The energy zap that that is for us, and we have to take care of ourselves around our own energy levels first.

That's why I really recommend that you come into The Art of Adulting and learn the tools, the skills, the systems, the the concepts that I teach and mentor in each of the 10 domains of life, so that you can then teach your young adult how to take on adulthood.

So I'm not saying you don't know a lot of this stuff already. But what I'm trying to provide to you is a way to teach it, not only to yourself, but also to your young adult, that frankly can just be written on the back of a napkin.

I mean, it's not I'm trying to give you models and concepts that you can explain anytime you want. That when something comes up, you're prepared. You know what to do, to, to  help take your autistic and adult one step further.

I know that you already know a lot of this but what I've done is I've tried to distill it all in capsulize it so that it's easy for you to just whip out the back of your brain. It's there. It's not a problem. You know, just how to do it.

And you've got a place where you can put all the things that you're learning together. And that's the life GPS so you can go forward together.

And I really want you to learn it first. That's what I had to do. So that when I taught it to my young adult, I learned that the second time, and now that I'm teaching it to you of learning it the third time, which is how to package it.

So over the last 20 years as I've developed this system and then applied it to my autistic young adults. I really spent most of that time applying it to myself first and then realized, Oh, this is really going to be helpful to my autistic young adults. It really is. My phone is buzzing and you can turn that off.

So please, checking our own mindset. With this tool, the STEAR Map really helps us understand where we aren't Oh, no wonder and it makes perfect sense that we're. I'm not saying that any of the thoughts that you have are wrong or anything I'm just saying. Take a look at them and see what they're producing. And maybe like Danica Patrick, when we're steering our, our car through life, if we make just a tiny little switch just a tiny shift on that steering wheel, we can find that we're going to get the results that we want a little bit better and a little bit easier.

11:30
So then the next step is to connect with ourselves and with them.

The practice is that reflective listening. Whenever we have an opportunity. We want to make sure that we understand.

• It sounds like you're upset with me because I didn't fill in the blank.
• It sounds like you're upset with yourself because fill in the blank.
• It sounds like you're reluctant to even step out of your room because you just have no idea of what's coming next.
• It sounds like or I hear you saying that you're so discouraged. You know that you thought you could go to college and like all of your peers, and why can they do it? And I can't.

I mean there's a lot going on in our autistic young adults brains. There's a lot of thoughts circulating in there, and in many cases they're just spinning so fast that our kids can't really distinguish one thought from the other. That's where we can be the coach that they need to sort things out into the STEAR Map and figure out what's going on. And then what we can together collaborate on figuring out what to do next.

12:38
And of course, we have to keep ourselves centered during this entire process. And we need to teach this to them to the film gets triggered and  run off in the weeds so easily.

It means we need to breathe through our nose, exhaling through our nose, smiling slightly and focusing our eyes tell our brain that things really are okay, and we can do this and no one has to even know we're doing it. They can do this and no one needs to know.

It's a physical way of telling our brain that things are okay. When we keep trying to solve our problems with our thinking over and over again. We get caught up in there's just too much going on. First thing we need to do and we're net panic and that fear that you see in your kids eyes often and you feel your own body often that oh my god is this ever  going to work?

That fear then we feel that we know we have to breathe in.

13:41
Breathe out through our nose unfocus our eyes and slightly smile to tell our brain that it's okay. It can come back online again.

And that's because that's counter to that to the fight flight or freeze response that where we focus in on what the problem is. And we  get all tense and our breathing gets shallower and faster and we're frowning.

That tells our brain that there is something to panic about. So if we can recenter ourselves using our body. It really is an effective way to turn that prefrontal cortex, that problem solving part of our brain, back on again.

Because here's what's real. Our children do well if they can. And this is Ross, Dr. Ross Greene. He really gets the our kids there. They can do well.

But it was easier when you and the school provided structure. I mean, they knew what was expected of them. Even if they didn't like it. Even if they didn't like the teacher. They didn't like math. They didn't like gym. They didn't like all you know all the social stuff that went around school.

It was still a structure there was a there was a rhythm to their day, and now our autistic young adults have to decide themselves what the structure in their life is going to be. I mean, this is a difficult pivot period in their lives, going from being externally defined to being internally defined.

And you know, we struggled quite a bit with this. I remember my 20s and my 30s and now we've got a good structure and we kind of take it for granted. So it's really important that we recognize where they are.

15:32
The best thing for us to do is to keep that list of lagging skills and unsolved problems. Because unsolved problems show up when the skills aren't there to solve it.

If we can just keep a list of what we perceive in each of their 10 domains, what they need to work on, because autism affects us in every one of the 10 domains of life. It just, it affects the way we think so therefore it affects each of the 10 domains.

We need to get that list of lagging skills and unsolved problems on our notes app in our phone, and then find out from them. What do they think is the thing that needs they need to work on first?

Because that's where we're going to get the most leverage is when and when they can go about solving a problem. That is, you know, preventing them from getting what they want.

16:23
And so the practice is the proactive partnering with our child. We want to be proactively demonstrating to them the people skills that will help them find the help that they need. To recruit the team that they want. Recruit the people that are going to be there with exactly what they need when they need it.

And of course I'm going to go back to Ross Greene's proactive problem solving process, proactive and collaborative problem solving process.

1. We state the problem with no drama, just the facts, no drama.
2. Then we ask them what is their STEAR MAP. That's the empathy step.
3. We offer our experimental because we're prepared. We have three things we want to talk to them about.
4. And then we find out where we overlap and what can we agree on doing next.

This is the partnering proactive partnering process one of the proactive prop ordering processes that we teach inside The Art of Adulting.

Because if we don't, here's what happens, our kids get stuck in buffering.

17:34
Buffering is when we go and feed our brain things that provide immediate pleasure, immediate gratification, but are actually false pleasures, as opposed to the real pleasures, the authentic pleasures that we get from creation.

So we're buffering, we're consuming and when we're taking action, we're actually creating one is a false pleasure. The other is a real pleasure.

That's where our kids get stuck is in buffering. They watch video games they eat, they watch YouTube, they get entertained, they figure out what it is that gives them the most pleasure and they stay there for hours on end in every one of their days. And they get good at those things. They get good at finding the things on YouTube that makes them laugh. They get good at playing the video games, and they neglect the other parts of their lives.

And that's why they can't move forward because they are not authentically creating and giving themselves that authentic pleasure that will drive them forward to create lives that they love at work.

And so once we're centered, we know we need to do we've agreed on what the next steps are with our autistic young adults. We can start to move away from spending as much time buffering.

I mean we all buffer we all watch you know, mindless pleasures on TV and we all eat food that we probably shouldn't do like we like at most celebrations. We all you know in told in, I don't know, hot shower hot tubs. We all indulge in something?

It's just that we've learned how to limit it, you know, to to actually be renewing for us. And unfortunately our kids really do get stuck in that buffering zone.

So please watch my masterclass. It will outline exactly the process that I teach in The Art  of Adulting. There's a link to it right in right in the summary right in the the transcript that I'm going to provide for you it at my blog, LynnCDavison.com/blog.

I'd love to see you inside The Art of Adulting.

Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai