In this conversation, Rick MacIvor and Gabby Nistico explore the complexities of change, discussing how people often resist it and the mental hurdles that come with transitions. We share personal experiences of navigating significant life changes, such as shifting careers and overcoming feelings of being stuck. The discussion emphasizes the importance of finding momentum, embracing individuality, and innovating personal systems to enhance productivity and happiness. Ultimately, we encourage listeners to empower themselves through change and to break free from societal norms.
Takeaways
People generally dislike change, especially when it feels uncontrollable.
Change can be overwhelming and lead to mental paralysis.
Thoughts and fears about change often aren't based on facts.
Personal transitions can create a sense of being stuck or frozen.
Finding small ways to start can help overcome inertia.
Putting oneself first is crucial during transitions.
Innovating personal systems can lead to greater efficiency and happiness.
It's important to challenge societal norms and expectations.
Empowerment comes from embracing individuality and personal choices.
ADHD can be harnessed as a strength in navigating change.
Chapters
00:00 Embracing Change: The Struggle and the Journey
04:37 Navigating Personal Transitions: From Voice Acting to Therapy
08:53 Finding Momentum: Overcoming the Freeze
15:15 Innovating Life: Breaking Free from Norms
20:13 Empowerment Through Change: Making It Work for You
Transcript:
Gabby Nistico (01:00.566)
boy. People, I mean people hate change no matter what. Like nobody likes change. Very few people like change. They might think they like change, but I mean ultimately I think the change that they enjoy is change that they have very strong control over and they're like ooh, cause they're excited about it. But change with variables. Yes. Debilitating. Good.
Rick MacIvor (01:02.2)
Things are changing.
Rick MacIvor (01:21.677)
Right. Or the idea of change. I like the idea of change. That sounds fun. But when it comes down to it, it's rough. It can be very rough. And I know just on the micro level, my little things about don't like, don't move my stuff. That's change. Right. Or if we have something planned and then plans change that micro thing that really
Gabby Nistico (01:30.306)
God.
Gabby Nistico (01:38.523)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (01:49.753)
you know, is the cheese grater of my brain. I hate it. So I get it. Now I'm looking at a big change.
Gabby Nistico (02:00.024)
Well, we've talked and it's funny you said, cause we have, we've talked so much about the macro, but this, this really is, or the micro, this is, this is the macro. This is the big boy and.
Rick MacIvor (02:04.805)
Hmm.
Gabby Nistico (02:13.646)
Poof. It's even hard to quantify, you know? Like, I mean, because it brings up so many things. I know for me, it's utter hijacking of the normal thought processes. And everything becomes this slurry of what-ifs and what-abouts and trying to predict.
outcomes in a way that is so obnoxiously time consuming that no change actually takes place.
Rick MacIvor (02:50.423)
That is, that is a real thing. Yeah.
Gabby Nistico (02:52.532)
Mm-hmm. Just it's a lot of thinking about the change but not in a productive way. Yeah Yeah, for sure Mm-hmm
Rick MacIvor (02:59.362)
God, it's more like ruminating on that kind of thing. Where, what if this and gosh, and how about and what if I get there and my God. And then seize the engine seizes. Pistons freeze up.
Gabby Nistico (03:15.288)
Yeah, it's a lot of time spent dealing with theoretical cause and effect that might not even manifest. Which is... yeesh.
Rick MacIvor (03:23.492)
Oh yeah, for 100%. It could probably everything, everything that I'm spinning on in my brain, there is a extremely low probability. However, sometimes thoughts aren't facts. Most of the times thoughts aren't facts.
Gabby Nistico (03:29.429)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (03:35.566)
And yet we do it anyway.
Gabby Nistico (03:44.936)
Most of the, yeah, I mean, they're really not. They're just ideas. They're just possibilities. But we get obsessed with them. And it halts any kind of natural, logical movement towards the change. And for a lot of people, it actually backpedals them out of the change, right?
because those variables become so intense that they're like, you know what, nevermind. I don't think I want to go down that road. I don't think I want to do that now because, right, it's terrifying. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (04:20.067)
Yeah, you talk yourself out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So I was telling you right before we started, I've locked, I've been in freeze the last couple of days and today was the first day I got out of it. And I got, I was in freeze because now that I've been accepted into this program and I'm really shifting gears, life gears, right? Career gears, from being a voice actor. Well, I'm still going to do that, but
Gabby Nistico (04:29.742)
Okay.
Rick MacIvor (04:49.067)
running a video editing business and a voiceover business to being a student with the goal of being a therapist. That's, that's a big change. And so I've spent the last week ish telling my handful of clients, I am getting out of the business.
Gabby Nistico (04:50.574)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (05:01.624)
Holy crap is that. Yeah.
Gabby Nistico (05:09.294)
Mmm.
Rick MacIvor (05:17.707)
And so I have one client. I have you. You're my last client. I will always edit for you. No matter what. But and the reasoning was I probably could have like tried to because it's night classes, right? I even put my schedule together already. It's Monday, Wednesday, Thursday classes and they go and for three to ten. Right.
Gabby Nistico (05:20.75)
Woo!
Aww thanks.
Gabby Nistico (05:31.662)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (05:40.716)
and it doesn't start for how many months?
Rick MacIvor (05:46.549)
I've not been ruminating at all.
Gabby Nistico (05:46.572)
All right. I mean, good job. mean, good progress, like that's okay. Continue.
Rick MacIvor (05:50.563)
Good point. Yeah, you don't start till January and now you've been sitting here putting all the bits in your calendar when you have to. Yep. Yep. I did. did that. Rabbit hole. So I've kind of shifted gears out of that. And so I let my clients go. so the last two days, I finished all the work for them. And now I'm kind of
Gabby Nistico (06:00.792)
home.
Rick MacIvor (06:19.944)
sat around staring out the window going, wait, what now? What am I, what are we? And today I said, okay, there are things that I wanna do for me. Like we do this podcast, I have episodes to edit and I wanna put video together to put out. I said, I'm gonna work on that. Because I got into that freeze mode of total lockup.
Gabby Nistico (06:27.054)
Mmm.
Gabby Nistico (06:38.03)
Okay.
Gabby Nistico (06:41.324)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (06:46.669)
Yeah.
Rick MacIvor (06:48.886)
Even though I had some things to do, just it was weird and like the change kind of froze me.
Gabby Nistico (06:54.222)
Now, do you think that if, mean, again, hypothetically speaking, if there was someone who was able to say to you, okay, the next thing you need to do is this, would, do you think that that would have unstuck you from the freeze or? No. Wow.
Rick MacIvor (07:13.024)
No. I, cause I had a list. have a list. I have a list on a piece of paper and I have a digital list and I have a list on my whiteboard back there. have lists all over my damn house. So it's not that I didn't logically know that I need to do stuff. It's that I have to get started, but everything has is different and all the things I'm used to my routine again, it's the change. It just, I just went.
Gabby Nistico (07:17.329)
Mm. Mm.
Gabby Nistico (07:24.386)
The list has a list, Yeah, okay.
Gabby Nistico (07:40.846)
Hmm.
Rick MacIvor (07:43.552)
and just kind of deer in headlight kind of situation. So then I sat down this morning and I'm like, I'm just going to edit one video for me because I hadn't put that as, you know, it's one of those also those things like you don't put yourself at the top of the list for things to do for yourself because I have, I used to have all these other clients and they are much more important than I am. So I'm going to edit all their stuff first. And now that's different. And so you,
Gabby Nistico (07:46.851)
Wow.
Gabby Nistico (07:53.443)
Yeah.
Gabby Nistico (08:11.618)
And that's a huge part of it because that's exactly what you've done. You've put yourself at the top of the list and you've made these changes for you, but that means that you don't have anybody else to be accountable to right now. And whoa, yipes.
Rick MacIvor (08:29.96)
Right. And so I sat down this morning and I've started editing some videos from the podcast and wanting to put stuff out and I'm like, yeah, I like this. This is fun. And I had up to the two minutes before we started recording. I, I have been editing. I'm like, okay, this, I remember, yeah, I like this. I know why I did this now. Right. So it's just, it's a, like I was saying, it's a mindset shift because
Gabby Nistico (08:47.896)
Wow.
Gabby Nistico (08:52.11)
Hmm.
Gabby Nistico (08:57.528)
Yeah, for sure.
Rick MacIvor (08:58.943)
I'm putting myself and my stuff that I think is important for me in the front of the line. Because there's no more line. Yeah.
Gabby Nistico (09:05.4)
That's a lot.
Gabby Nistico (09:09.582)
That's such a, it's such an oddly, it should be a liberating feeling, but I find that it's not for many of us. It doesn't have that effect. It's not liberating the way we think it'll be. It actually creates so much more distress, just a distress of a different kind. Yeah.
Rick MacIvor (09:16.021)
Mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (09:22.666)
What do mean?
Rick MacIvor (09:40.289)
Yeah.
Gabby Nistico (09:40.438)
Wow. So in that process of unsticking yourself, okay, you said you just decided to sit down with one video, right?
Rick MacIvor (09:49.025)
Yeah, yeah, that's how I got there. That's how I got started. Because I know that's kind of worked for me in the past with something if I'm stuck, just 5%. Just I'm gonna edit for 15 minutes or I'll do this thing for one minute, right?
Gabby Nistico (09:51.66)
Yeah, yeah.
Gabby Nistico (10:02.049)
Right.
Right, one task, one, yeah.
Rick MacIvor (10:07.538)
Yeah, it's that momentum that gets created and that with, cause without it you think, I have to sit down for two hours and do something. at the five minutes that doesn't seem so daunting.
Gabby Nistico (10:09.996)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (10:24.202)
No, no, and often when we get a thing accomplished that way, then we go, God, don't know why I was making such a big deal about it for it. It only took a little bit of time. wasn't, that's me with laundry. Like I'm, you know, cause I'm just like, ugh, why, why? There's a great, there's a great, Tom Segura, the comedian, he has, he has this great bit and I, and I really remember.
Rick MacIvor (10:40.768)
Ha
Gabby Nistico (10:53.602)
This is so, I think pertinent to neurodivergent people because it really does speak to the thought process. He was talking about how people spend, right, mean, years of their lives, right, laundering, cleaning clothes, folding clothes, putting the clothes away, put like, right, this whole ritual, this process. And he even went so far as to say, you know, it's so funny when
Rick MacIvor (11:06.207)
you
Gabby Nistico (11:23.022)
people know you have company coming over and my God, you've gotta grab up all the, like hide the laundry. And he's like, right, cause God forbid people knew we wear clothes. Like, come on. And he said that the way his laundry process now works is that there's simply two piles. There's a pile of clothing that is clean and there's a pile of clothing that is dirty.
Rick MacIvor (11:33.82)
You
Yep.
Gabby Nistico (11:53.312)
And he's like, I don't put away laundry at all ever two piles. That's it. He goes, I go to the clean pile. I pick out what I want. I wear it. And then it goes to the dirty pile. And he goes, and I just want all of you to know that while you are fretting and doing and laundering and folding, and he goes, I have gained years of my life back by not being
a slave to this process. And I'm like, but there it is. That is so much how we often think. And we're ostracized for it much the same way. I'm sure people, know, there's there's judgment being passed for him by this method. it but you go, God, it makes sense. Like, who made these rules? Who told us that this is the way it had to be? And we were like, OK, well, we'll just get in line and fold the laundry and put the laundry in the dressers and have the furniture.
Rick MacIvor (12:36.487)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (12:50.09)
specifically for the level. other thing he talked about, he's like, I don't know to dress her anymore. It's great. He's like, what do I need this big giant piece of furniture to hold clothing for if the clothes are in a pile? I'm like, this is brilliant. Yeah.
Rick MacIvor (12:54.79)
Yeah.
Rick MacIvor (13:03.485)
Yes, it's awesome. There is, okay, there's a creator I follow, who I'm hoping we can get on our podcast. And she does systems like that for ADHD people. And one of them is very similar, but she breaks it down into, these are my tops. This is the clean pile of tops. This is the dirty pile. And she has a little shelf basket. When the clean is empty, she pulls the dirty one out. She throws it in the
Gabby Nistico (13:12.461)
Mmm.
Gabby Nistico (13:26.698)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (13:32.912)
wash and then she puts it back and so it's all there but it's still just piles that's not right there's no need to make it harder.
Gabby Nistico (13:36.5)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah. It's also, you know, it's similar to Zuckerberg who talks about like literally his entire wardrobe consists of one type of t-shirt, one type of, that's it. It's all uniform basically, because then every day he doesn't waste precious resource brain, right? Figuring out what am I gonna wear? Because it's all identical.
Rick MacIvor (14:07.004)
Right. Yeah.
Gabby Nistico (14:09.12)
It's exactly the same. I think about that in a weird way. And I think about my dad who wore a uniform most of his life. And I'm like, huh. But now we've created this modern version of it. And I'm like, OK, this actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Rick MacIvor (14:18.599)
Mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (14:28.974)
It really does. It gets you over that hump because what are the other options? So if you're ADHD and laundry is a thing that's hard to get done, The choice is to, you have three things. You can just do it, figure out how to get it done. To not do it and just let it sit there or do it like in piles like this but then feel guilty about it.
Gabby Nistico (14:55.854)
Mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (14:58.042)
Right? That you can either have it in piles and not feel guilty or have it in piles and feel guilty. Which which am I going to choose?
Gabby Nistico (15:05.355)
And that's, and there's, you when you break it down like that, it's like, that's, I gotta take the easy one. That sounds nice. I like the piles without the guilt, please. That sounds great. Put that on my tray. And you know, it seems, but we don't, we fret and we stress and we, and so what it comes down to is for many of us, it's making a choice to say.
I'm either going to conform or I'm going to innovate this. But innovation for me might look completely different than it does for somebody else. And well, yes. And that's it, full stop. Yeah. And there's so many things that that can apply to. And I think that that's a lot of the problem. There's so much time spent trying to comply to systems that
Rick MacIvor (15:33.853)
Hmm.
Rick MacIvor (15:43.356)
And OL. Mm-hmm. That's all.
Gabby Nistico (16:01.326)
I mean, I know for me, this was one of my problems in the corporate world. If you forced me to use a system that I was like... I would never get over it. Right? It wasn't just like one day I would just accept my fate and go, okay, this is what I have to do. No. No. Every day, every single time, I had to use it. It was a mental battle.
Rick MacIvor (16:14.302)
Hmm?
Mm-mm.
Rick MacIvor (16:30.799)
Especially things that potentially don't make sense. I know, I worked in the corporate jungle, you know, the cubicle swamp, and there were things that I had to do with extra steps that were so unnecessary. And I asked, and then, but I...
Gabby Nistico (16:32.206)
Gabby Nistico (16:36.747)
Yeah!
Gabby Nistico (16:41.326)
Mmm!
Gabby Nistico (16:48.456)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rick MacIvor (16:52.146)
did my diligent, I asked for explanations. And the one that just drove me crazy was because, well, that's because that's the way we've always done it.
Gabby Nistico (17:01.624)
That's an answer. That's a cop out. Yeah. that's the thing. Things like that will never not irk us. So yeah, it's figuring out a way to... And mean, again, this is where we have to take control where and when we can. And certainly in our own lives, it's just going, you know, I mean, it can be anything. It can be the simplicity of like, listen, I know...
Rick MacIvor (17:02.877)
It's not it's
Rick MacIvor (17:11.229)
Mm-hmm.
Gabby Nistico (17:31.214)
that people would normally put their cutlery in that drawer. But I'm not doing that, right? I'm going to put spices in that drawer. And I know it's a strange place. And I know that most people would walk into the kitchen and be like, cutlery? Nope. Okay. Tarragon. And, you know, but it's your freaking kitchen. Yeah. And it's, I think.
Rick MacIvor (17:46.85)
but
Yep, yeah. I've even heard we go so far as to have when you build your own house, build it with two dishwashers. You have a dirty dishwasher and you have a clean dishwasher and when they move, you run one and then you move it back. There's no need for putting anything away.
Gabby Nistico (18:15.288)
Can I go reorganize my entire kitchen right now? Holy shit. That's amazing. It's funny because I have a kitchen project that's in the works right now. And now I'm like, wait, another dishwasher.
Rick MacIvor (18:16.632)
You
Rick MacIvor (18:27.516)
Cut.
Gabby Nistico (18:28.076)
Right, right. Like why? It's so true. It's so true. It's also, and we think about it in some terms and we go, wait, we've already embraced some of these things. Like, okay, I have multiple ovens in my house. This is not actually by design. This was kind of accidental, you know? So I have smaller ovens. have a convection.
Rick MacIvor (18:47.242)
Rick MacIvor (18:51.356)
Okay.
Gabby Nistico (18:57.696)
microwave that is also an oven. And then like most people now, I have an air fryer that's pretty sizable. And it dawned on me a number of years ago. I don't use the big oven anymore. The big oven is this mat. I use the stovetop, right? But the oven itself, I'm like, unless it's a Thanksgiving turkey, you know, which doesn't fit anywhere else, it
Rick MacIvor (19:09.756)
You
Yeah, sure, yeah.
Rick MacIvor (19:23.7)
Sure.
Gabby Nistico (19:26.708)
I'm not using this. So I just started storing pots and pans in it. It's a big metal cabinet now. And right. And I mean, but that's something that people have sort of embraced. Like they've gotten used to, they've accepted. It's not that unusual. Right. But I do think it's taking those same ideas and applying them to your own life and just going, yeah, why not?
Rick MacIvor (19:29.36)
Wow. Yeah.
Rick MacIvor (19:36.909)
It's your fault.
Rick MacIvor (19:56.303)
Right. Look around. What else could you change to make things easier? For you. Right.
Gabby Nistico (20:00.824)
For you, for you, yeah, not for anybody else, like, them. It really does. And I think for a lot of people with, especially ADHD, that's empowering. People don't realize that. It's very empowering to let go of these preconceived ideas or these boxes we're supposed to check or things we're supposed to do and just go, no.
Rick MacIvor (20:06.158)
Right.
Gabby Nistico (20:30.242)
This is how I do it.
Rick MacIvor (20:32.709)
Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Gabby Nistico (20:34.878)
No, no, there really, really isn't. And it's, we're giving, we're giving people permission. Yay. Happy dance. Yeah. But sometimes I know for me, this has been true in the past. Sometimes that's what it takes. It takes somebody giving you permission and then you go, my God, I can do that. Yeah. So go, go, go forth and find that thing that works.
Rick MacIvor (20:40.623)
Yeah. Go do it!
Rick MacIvor (20:53.082)
Right.
Gabby Nistico (21:04.595)
so that you're implementing change in a way that makes you happy and hopefully, you know, it makes your life better and improves on it instead of trying to, I don't know, keep up with the normies. They're annoying anyway.
Rick MacIvor (21:17.368)
It's true.
Rick MacIvor (21:26.05)
Use your, yes, use your ADHD for, for powers of good for yourself. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Why not?
