Executive Function Deep Dive: Goal-Directed Persistence

Goal-Directed Persistence: How to Return to Yourself When Urgency Disappears

Why can you move mountains for other people but lose traction the moment the only person depending on your persistence is you?

Why do your goals feel solid one day and dissolve into fog the next?

And why does trying harder keep making it worse?

In this episode of Running in Heels, we dismantle the myths about ADHD and “inconsistency” and trace the real story: how persistence fractures when external urgency goes quiet, and how to rebuild functional return pathways that don’t rely on panic, pressure, or other people’s expectations.

You’ll learn:

• How early socialization trains ADHDers to anchor persistence to external expectations, not internal goals.
• What Goal-Directed Persistence actually is and how it differs from motivation, grit, or self-control.
• The neurological fault lines where ADHD persistence snaps: temporal flattening, dopamine depletion, urgency binary, emotional weight accumulation, phase fragmentation, and post-success shutdown. T
• he hidden social cost of “inconsistency” and why shame becomes the real derailment engine.
• Why trying to brute force your way back into a goal just drives the fracture deeper.
• The scaffolds that make return possible: frictionless re-entry, visible anchors, value visibility, soft accountability, effort calibration, interruption mapping, emotional threat calibration, structured recovery, and quiet proof points.
• How to build persistence that belongs to you - not your deadlines, your boss, or the crisis.

This isn’t about becoming more disciplined. It’s about lowering the emotional cost of return so your goals don’t die in the silence between bursts of urgency. Listen if your goals keep slipping out of reach the second no one’s watching.

Ready to get more specific about your particular flavour of ADHD?

Check out the Executive Function Inventory. - Where are you right now on each of the 12 executive functions. An inventory that identifies which EFs are challenges (that need to be bolstered), adaptive (you've built accommodations for yourself), and strengths (to leverage to support your challenges. If you know, you can be intentional. https://www.mineelachand.com/adhd-adults-efi

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