Pick Up the Pieces

INCUP describes your nervous system. It doesn’t define you. Cameron opens with a check-in on last week’s actions about nurturing meaningful moments amidst the onslaught of tasks. How hard was it to hold the boundary and plant some 'seagrass' against the tide of tasks? And did you stare at a blank sheet of paper and wonder which seed to plant? Then he turns to a sacred cow: INCUP, William Dodson’s acronym for a nervous system wired for interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. It’s spot on, and Cameron says so. His concern is what happens when a description hardens into a commandment and a behavior becomes an identity. That’s a little cognitive rigidity, and the same goes for time blindness. INCUP is great for the 'here and now'. It’s less help with the 'there and later', which is where long-term goals live. So Cameron introduces four clients who use INCUP and then go beyond it. One sets a date, brings in a team, and keeps the bar low. One finds his motivation: “I like the feeling of outdoing myself.” One approaches the work at a right angle instead of head-on. One stops guarding a thimbleful of future energy and builds a habit with a reward that’s real. The tools are curiosity, creativity, and context. Cameron argues that interest isn’t binary and it isn't a set value. It can be nurtured and grown. This week: pick one thing you want more of, where INCUP isn’t enough on its own, and bring curiosity and creativity to it.

The tide is relentless. It comes in twice a day, and it floods everything. Cam relays a story from a client who got caught in a frenetic scramble to prepare for houseguests and stopped to ask why she was doing it. The answer was meaningful connection. That led her to a bigger realization: the tasks will never run out, and the meaningful things won’t shout “pick me!” You have to go hunting for them. This is particularly challenging with ADHD in the mix. Cameron brings it home with a seagrass metaphor. Seedlings can’t take root if the water pours over them twice a day. So you need a small plot, protected on purpose, for something creative that matters only to you, with no guarantee of payoff. There will be hesitation in the doorway. Ask for help, start small, lower your expectations, and let go of whether it’s “worth your time.” He also takes a moment to question how much of our creative process we’re handing off to AI. This week’s challenge: plant something. Thirty minutes, three times. The tide isn’t going anywhere, but the seagrass can still grow.

A friend listened to last week’s Over/Under ADHD model and said it reminded him of Foursquare, with him as the ball bouncing between squares. Overthinking, overdoing, underthinking, underdoing: that movement is the ADHD experience, and masking is how we try to freeze it. The trouble is that meaning lives on the other side of authenticity, and it’s hard to find when all your energy goes into holding back your truer self. Cameron names two kinds of masking. One is bracing: armor on, drawbridge up, waiting for the siege. The other is constant motion, staying so busy that nobody can call you lazy, and, as one student put it, never slowing down “or my feelings will catch up with me.” He is also clear that sometimes masking is a safety decision, and that stepping into a role at work isn’t the same as hiding. The difference is whether you can step out again. The invitation this week is to let the ball move and take one step toward your authentic self. Find the outlet, whether that’s a paddleboard, a paintbrush, or a go-kart track with your kid. Your values and practices don’t disappear. They’re just poured into a bucket with a colander bottom. Keep pouring.

Your brain isn’t stuck in one gear. It’s constantly moving. Cameron sketches a plus sign on a piece of paper (or in the sand, if you’re on a beach) and introduces a new tool: thinking and doing across the top, over and under down the side. Four quadrants. Most of us are sure we live in one of them. We don’t. With ADHD, we’re making rounds through all four: overthinking, over-feeling, overdoing, and then underthinking, under-considering, and underdoing. Avoidance counts as doing, too. The exercise this week is to notice your language. Cameron shares a client who “over rotates” on unfairness, another who’s late for some things but never for others (it comes down to under-considering light cycles), and a mom who overdid it the moment her son left for college. The words we choose show us which quadrant we’re in, in real time. It’s a tool for orienting to the ADHD dilemma and quieting the inner critic with better data. And if you’re wondering, mindfulness isn’t stillness. It starts with noticing the busy brain. The metronome has a fourth dimension. Let’s go find it.

You can’t hunt meaning down. It arrives when you’re present enough to receive it, and presence is exactly what ADHD makes hard. Cameron starts on the paddleboard, where seventeen geese flew straight at him at eye level and split at the last second, close enough that he could hear the rustling of their feathers. Then he asks the question: why do so many of us miss moments like that? The present can feel like a bead curtain between two rooms, with the past in one and the future in the other. The meaning maker follows us through both. Add a “three-dimensional metronome” of swinging between past and future, thoughts and actions, too much engagement and too little, and it’s no wonder holding still is hard. That isn’t a deficit. It’s a dynamic system constantly overcorrecting. Cameron offers three moves for the week. Turn annoyance into something you care about before it hardens into grievance and an emotional sinkhole. Question the preloaded content running your decisions (“look competent,” “do more”). Check whether you need to replenish, build, or stretch. And if your inner critic says you have nothing to pick back up from last week, it’s lying.

Season 2 begins. Ten weeks after the Season 1 finale, Cam is back in the seat and picking up where he left off. This episode looks at why people with ADHD keep setting down what already works while chasing the next thing they think they're missing, and how that search trades aliveness for a quick dopamine bump. Cam shares what meaningful impact felt like at a recent conference for coaches, why reflection and movement matter, and what's changing in Season 2: shorter episodes and one action step each week.

Season One's finale, and it's a milestone: week 10 of the Ten-Week Integration Reset, episode 46, and the close of an entire arc. Cam turns his attention to a concept that's been quietly present the whole season — completion — and the specific way ADHD makes it hard to put things down. Using the image of carrying a picnic potato from one activity to the next until it goes cold, he explores why release, more than achievement, is often the real skill: setting something down not as failure or loss, but as a way to create distance, reflect, and pull the learning forward. Cam gets personal about the podcast itself as an exercise in this practice — 46 weeks of learning to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, a real stretch for a mind wired to diverge rather than converge. He shares what's shifted (46 episodes down from 10 hours of prep a week to 2), what hasn't (still not "great" at it, and that's fine), and a hard-won lesson in letting good enough be good enough. He closes with a reflection on purpose — riffing on a Norman Lear/Aristotle line about happiness as the exercise of your vital abilities — and an invitation: take the next 10 weeks, before Season Two begins October 9th, to notice what you're picking up, what you're ready to set down, and what that says about what actually matters to you. Season Two returns October 9th.

Week 9, and the Ten-Week Integration Reset is coming in for a landing. Before looking ahead to the finish, Cam turns the lens backward — because for people with ADHD, looking back can go sideways fast: unkind, distorted, inaccurate. This episode is about developing a kinder, more accurate view of the last nine weeks. Cam names the usual suspects who show up uninvited when we review our own history — the judge, the big-signal hunter, the meaning-maker, and a new addition: the scribe, who quietly reinforces the same tired story ("here we are again, off the rails"). Rather than banishing these characters, Cam suggests giving them a seat at the kids' table, or a spot in the sidecar — acknowledged, but not driving. In their place: discernment instead of judgment, curiosity instead of a verdict, learning more than results. The episode moves through real reflection — patterns of committing and releasing commitment, the saboteurs that resurface in new disguises, the whispers of a calling that ADHD often obscures. And it closes with an unusually direct question worth sitting with: what's the progress you're not seeing or appreciating, simply because it doesn't look like a big, dramatic win?

Week 8 of the Ten-Week Integration Reset, and Cam is living the material in real time. Facing a full day — training prep, a class to teach, a "command performance," and client sessions — he catches himself reaching for his usual move: clear the deck, focus on one thing, prepare like it's everything. Instead, he tries something different, and names it: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Using his kids' waffle recipe as a guide — specifically the art of folding in egg whites, not too little, not too much — Cam explores what it looks like to integrate our best qualities into a moment rather than compartmentalizing them or leaving them out entirely. He revisits the podcast's original starting point (three intentions, two friends, one hour) and reflects on how much has shifted since week one, even as the core intention holds. There's a meditation here on identity, too: the pull to believe we have to fully transform into someone else — a "Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln" level of preparation — to show up well, when often what's needed is simply presence, listening, and trust in skills already built over decades. It's an episode about noticing the parts we tend to hold at arm's length, and choosing, instead, to fold them back in.

When ADHD kicks us into stress mode, our focus narrows and we default to the same habitual response — the go-to move that's comfortable, automatic, and usually about 80% effective. But what happens the other 20% of the time, when that single move isn't serving us? In this episode, Cam explores what it means to develop a "second choice" — not replacing our default response, but building a complementary option alongside it. Using the recurring metaphor of jumping ahead a few comic strip panels and wondering how we got there, he unpacks why it's so hard to trace our own decision-making in the moment, and why outside perspectives (well-meaning as they are) don't always capture what's really happening. Drawing on a story about his son's car-tuning process — sending data back and forth with a specialist to make small, precise adjustments — Cam reframes the work of integration as an iterative practice: noticing one specific habitual response, and asking, simply, "what's another way?" He closes with an invitation to remember there's a more aware, more resourced version of yourself already available to you — and that recognizing you have a choice at all is the first step toward using it.