Having ADD or ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Hear from people all around the globe, from every walk of life, in every profession, from Rock Stars to CEOs, from Teachers to Politicians, who have learned how to unlock the gifts of their ADD and ADHD diagnosis, and use it to their personal and professional advantage, to build businesses, become millionaires, or simply better their lives.  Our Guest today in their own words:  As a visionary team leader from Delaware, Zachary has leveraged the power of social media to build his own successful brokerage, Loft Realty. With a robust following of 1.6M on TikTok, coupled with a significant presence on Facebook and Instagram, he has elevated Loft Realty to the pinnacle of Google reviews in the state.  Now, Zachary channels his passion for mentorship, regularly sharing his blueprint for success. From gracing stages as a distinguished speaker, coaching budding agents, to hosting inspiring masterminds, his mission is to empower others to make their own mark in the industry. Enjoy!

[You are now safely here]

00:40 – Thank you again so much for listening and for subscribing!

00:41 – Introducing and welcome Zachary Foust!!

01:42 – So what’s your backstory?

03:35 – “Where there’s consistency, there’s redundancy” -Zachary Foust

 5:55 – Talk to me about some of the lessons that you pulled out of those dark times?

06:15 – On meditation and the change is made in Zach’s life.

07:32 – How on Frozen pond do you Meditate@!?? On ADHD!? Ref: MindValley.com Ref: Wim Hof Method

09:00 – On wanting to resume disciplines and hobbies. 

12:32 –  How do our subscribers find out more about you if they are at the lake? 

Web:  https://www.loftteamde.com   https://zacharyfoust.liftoffalpha.com

Socials: @zacharyloft on TikTok  @Zachary.Loft on INSTA and Loft RealtyDE on FB

00:00 – 00OhHello hello? Hello there! YEs, yoU.  We are so happy that you are doing good, here & listening with us!! I’ll say it till I die.. 

ADHD and all forms of Neurodiversity are gifts, not curses. -Peter Shankman. And ooh-ooh now.. and just by the way, if you haven’t picked up The Boy with the Faster Brain yet, it is on Amazon and it is a number #1 One bestseller in all categories. Click HERE or via https://amzn.to/3FcAKkI My link tree is here if you’re looking for something specific. https://linktr.ee/petershankman

13:15 – Faster Than Normal Podcast info & credits. Guys, as always thanks so much for subscribing! Faster Than Normal is for YOU! We want to know what you’d like to hear! Do you have a cool friend with a great story? We’d love to learn about, and from them. I’m www.petershankman.com and you can reach out anytime via email at [email protected] or @petershankman on all of the socials. You can also find us at @FasterNormal on all of the socials. It really helps when you drop us a review on iTunes and of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already! As you know, the more reviews we get, the more people we can reach. Help us to show the world that ADHD is a gift, not a curse!  All right, guys, as always, than you for listening. Love that you’re here. Any news, shoot us a note. Petershankman.com go to fastennormal.com everywhere but Twitter. We are on Blue Sky now at Peter Shankman on Blue Sky. 

[Ed: I will siphon -in BlueSky and learn about that next week!! If not, in October when Twitter stops eating itself and we figure out hash^tag threads or whatever it all the Newnew is, cooL??  -Ed]

[Also Ed: This is still a relatively brand new experiment in editing show notes, transcriptions sort of; so if you notice any important, or significant goofs we’ve missed here or along, please do let us know @FasterNormal  Thanks! -sb] 

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TRANSCRIPT via Castmagic.io and then corrected.. somewhat. 

You’re listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast, where we know that having Add or ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Each week we interview people from all around the globe, from every walk of life in every profession. From rock stars to CEOs, from teachers to politicians who have learned how to unlock the gifts of their add and ADHD diagnosis and used it to their personal and professional advance edge to build businesses, to become millionaires, or to simply better their lives. And now, here’s the host of the Faster Than Normal podcast, the man who doesn’t understand how anyone could have leftover Pizza 

Peter Shankman [00:00:40]:

Hey, guys. Peter Shankman. Welcome to another episode of Faster Than Normal. Thrilled to have you here. Every once in a while I’m browsing Instagram or a lot. And not just once in a while, but like constantly. And every once in a while I do come across someone who is worth following. And I found someone named Zach Faust who does a billion things. I’ll tell you, he sent me a bio and he managed to put a billion things into two paragraphs. He’s a team leader from Delaware. He’s levered the power of social media to build his own successful real estate brokerage called Loft Realty. With a robust following of 1.6 million on TikTok. Coupled with his significant presence on Facebook and Instagram, he has elevated Loft Realty, the pinnacle of Google reviews in the state. Now, Zachary channels his passion for mentorship, regularly sharing his blueprint for success, gracing stage as a speaker, coaching agents, hosting Masterminds. He likes to empower other people. He’s also massively ADHD. At 29 years old. Zach. Welcome to past the normal man.

Zachary [00:01:35]:

Thank you, Peter. Man, I did not write that. My lovely assistant Adrian did. And yeah, he did manage to somehow sum it all up.

Peter Shankman [00:01:42]:

Well, it’s pretty much everything you need. It turned out pretty well. It turned out pretty well. So tell us your story. You tried to tell me offline. You were diagnosed when you were a kid. Tell us what happened.

Zachary [00:01:51]:

Yeah, I think probably the typical history book for a lot of ADHD was, hey, if only he applied himself. Right? If only he would apply himself. If only he could pay attention, being a distraction. And so it eventually just led to teacher after teacher saying the same thing. Doctor appointment schedule came out at around eleven or twelve years old, was given the Adderall medication for several years, body just wouldn’t take it. Nothing was really helping in that regard. And it led me toward pushing toward the inevitable difficulty of US. Structure and consistency and had been for so many years.

Peter Shankman [00:02:30]: Right.

Zachary [00:02:30]: And it took me a good twelve years of adulthood to finally accept that and just accept than that’s how it’s going to be Add. We’re all just kids that grew up. We just happen to be kids that wanted to fidget every time.

Peter Shankman [00:02:42]: What was it? Because a lot of entrepreneurs. A lot of ADHD people are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur people, ADHD. What was it that sort of woke you up and said, okay, I don’t play well with others in that regard?

Zachary [00:02:55]: So I was six years military. I joined the army at 17 years old. My parents, dual military, they didn’t force me to get in, but obviously just the influence and from their perspective and from mine, the consistency and the discipline required just to be a part of it seemed like it could help, and it did, and I learned so much. But one thing I definitely learned was that where there’s consistency, there’s redundancy. And that redundancy for me especially, I just couldn’t do it.

Peter Shankman [00:03:25]: That’s a great line where there’s consistency, there’s redundancy.

Zachary [00:03:29]: Yeah. And it’s tough to not bleed those lines together. And we have to be consistent, especially in the entrepreneurial world, but that also leads to that. Oh, it’s the same thing, chicken and rice. So I eventually bled into accidentally becoming an entrepreneur by when I not back from my first deployment or actually my only deployment to Afghanistan, I wanted to play soccer again. There were no adult soccer leagues that weren’t like either 40 year olds or 40 year old or older or for kids 18 younger, Add. So I was like, let’s just start an open gym. And then we had 10, 20, 30 before we knew it was uncontrollable. So we’re like, let’s turn this into a league. And before I knew it, I was profiting off of something we created. And I discovered entrepreneurship, and I quickly found out that even though I was making no money off the venture, it was like 40K in, 40K out. I was like, this is what I need to do. Meeting with different people every day is different. New problems to solve, something different, some new fire to put out. I fell in love with it. And that’s what led us into led me to finding real estate, which is just every single day is definitely different. And now running a team here in Delaware of 17 fold problems, fires to put out, and loving every day of it.

Peter Shankman [00:04:38]: What is it about the constant? Not, say the constant fires, but the constant you never know what you’re going to get when you wake up in the morning that excites you?

Zachary [00:04:45]: That exact thing. The never knowing what’s going to happen. I’ll put our podcast, for example, I put your book in the morning when I went into the gym by noon or 01:00 p.m., I’d finished it. DMG said I liked it. And here we are in a podcast together. I love that about life. I love that about the universe. I love that about just the life I get to live with my beautiful daughter and wife, that every day is different. And I love that because I’ve seen the redundancy just lead to a dark time for me where my brain is just not being stimulated and part of that for me was immaturity and not knowing my brain. Add not knowing that just like a muscle in my body being worked at the gym, so too did my brain need to be stimulated. Even more so for us to continue to grow and not grow stagnant and frankly, dark and went through a lot of dark spots before I really started learning about what I was and how my brain operates.

Peter Shankman [00:05:43]: Talk to me about.. so that’s an interesting point. So you went through dark times. Talk to me about some of the lessons that you pulled out of those dark times, because if you’re talking about the now in the past, you obviously learn from them.

Zachary [00:05:55]: Well, I would say the fall of 2021 was my darkest time. I’ve had, I had fallen into it on so many different levels. But what got me out is what’s really important and what got me out was understanding what my brain was doing add how it was operating. And that every time I went into a consistent pattern of good, I felt like I was met with water on the other end time period of doing bad. Like I could go two weeks, no alcohol, no sugar, no caffeine, and then boom, four weeks laying on the couch, getting to work late, not taking care of myself, things like that. And that wave was just compounding, it seemed, every single time. Add it was like a drug. Higher the high, lower the lows. And so finally I met meditation and I sat and I finally learned and I sucked for a while. I sucked for a while. Add I finally started to learn how to actually be in a moment. I never knew what that meant. And then from there, it was a little easier to start the little tiny self care things back again, just doing what I need to do, the routines of making my bed. I started getting back into the gym for the first time in years and then a fitness journey took off and real estate grew from being just myself and as part of our team to now it’s the top brokerage in the state. And all that was based off the little consistencies that really just started with getting my brain involved and giving it a moment to breathe. Man, it’s like our engines are on hyperdrive all the time.

Peter Shankman [00:07:32]:  Yeah, talking about than brings up an interesting point though. You said you learned to meditate. People with ADHD usually equate meditation with something else. Whether it’s for me, I meditate, my bike is my meditation, right? I look at people who sit there and sort of become one with their brain and one with the universe and can do 30, 40, 50 minutes of, of just, just Zen. Add I just don’t understand those people, right? And God bless them, it’s amazing what they can do. But it has never come easy to me and I just assumed it’s because of my ADHD, you seem to have cracked the code there. And I guarantee you a lot of my listeners, a lot of my listeners are like, sitting there going, how the fuck did you do that?

Zachary [00:08:24]: I can’t sit here and say there’s one secret. I will say getting my own brain is very on the logical end of things. Emotion doesn’t get mixed in a ton. And so for me, I need to know why I started ice bathing because I learned why it was helping my I i started going to the gym more because I started learning more about it wasn’t just about my body. It’s what my liver is getting from it. It’s what my bones are getting from know. It’s what I’m going to be as a grandfather type deal. And so with the meditation side of things, a man by the name of Joe Dispenzia, dr. Joe Dispenzia and a company named Mindvalley both were really good at breaking down why we’re doing it, why being in the moment matters, what are the studies? What’s the reality behind the science? And from then, I discovered that what I thought was keeping me from being able to meditate, I was actually given a little bit of a superpower behind it. It’s just like your book, being able to operate on hyperdrive, being able to go in super fast mode, it seems like the worst thing in the world for when you’re told, hey, shut your eyes and think about nothing, right? But the way that, like Dr. Joe Dispenzio puts it, is meditation is focus. And we have this innate superpower that we can unlock sometime called that hyper focus, where we can just lock in, where you’re on a plane writing a book for 8 hours, right? And so meditation has become my plane in a way where I can now focus my energy instead of focusing my thoughts, because we’re really good at focusing on something, add just going into it. But what if we could transition that insane amount of hyper focus into, say, hey, just focus on the top of your head. Just focus really hard on the top of your head and just on repeat or focus on the tip of your nose. How does the air feel going in and out? Is it warm? Is it cold? What do you smell? How are your nostrils moving? How do your eyes feel? Because doing that body scan type stuff where it’s like feeling your toes and your fingers, I feel we have such a superpower with that because we can lock in now. When I’m locked out, don’t expect me to be able to knock out more than seven to ten minutes, right? But like any form of exercising, I’m continuing to get better. And that was definitely the start because I wasn’t listening to me. And especially when we have 19 different voices and messages and emotions and stressors and, oh, by the way, I forgot to say Happy birthday to Gabrielle six weeks ago. Got to get to that all going on at the same time. Giving the opportunity to breathe was just something I had to learn how to do.

Peter Shankman [00:11:15]: I understand. It makes sense. It’s one of the simplest things in the world, and yet the hardest thing in the world to master.

Zachary [00:11:20]: There’s no question about it. Yeah. And this thing that named itself between our ears, we don’t even take the time.

Peter Shankman [00:11:29]: I love the fact that you’re an ice bath guy. I fell in love with ice bathing about probably ten years ago. It’s so funny because I go for me, everyone’s like, oh, how do you survive the cold? I’m like, It’s not about the cold. It’s about breathing.

Zachary [00:11:43]: Yeah.

Peter Shankman [00:11:44]: It’s not about the about I know that if I get dumped into Coney Island on New Year’s Day for the polar bear plungers, I do almost every year that I’m not going to drown because I understand how to control my breathing. The fight or flight scenario of hitting that water, I don’t say I control it, but I don’t say I own it, but I definitely can control it.

Zachary [00:12:09]:You’re aware of it.

Peter Shankman [00:12:10]: Yeah, and I understand that it’s going to take five to 10 seconds. Push through it, and you’ll be breathing again.

Zachary [00:12:18]: Exactly.

Peter Shankman [00:12:18]:

It is literally a metaphor for life. I’ve yet to meet a problem that might take some time. Bu. You just push through it, and then you’re onto the next thing.

Zachary [00:12:30]:

Onto the next side. Yeah.

Peter Shankman [00:12:32]: Really true. Zach, how can people find you? I know that you have a ridiculous Instagram following or Twitter following all that. No TikTok followers. How can people find you?

Zachary [00:12:40]: Yeah, it’s at Zachary Loft. On most platforms. Just Loft Realty is the company. Zachary is the name. So just combined it and ended up sticking. So it’s at Zachary loft. Instagram is the best place for DMs. That’s in my opinion. I’m not a big Twitter guy. I know. It’s good over there, too.

Peter Shankman [00:12:54]: No. Canceled myself off Twitter about three months ago. I just don’t see the point anymore, but awesome. Zach, thank you so much for taking time. I definitely want to have you back in a few months. I’m going to make a note to reach out to you, and we’ll do this again in the fall, but I have a feeling you have a lot more stories to share and a lot of value to give, so we’re definitely going to have you back. I really appreciate the time, man.

Zachary [00:13:13]: Of course. An open book for you, my man. I appreciate you.

Peter Shankman [00:13:15]: All right, guys, as always, fast and almost for you. We want to know what you want to hear. Shoot us an email. Know it’s the beginning of summer now, and my kid is at summer camp. She’s at sleepaway camp. So I got a shit ton of time in my hands. Let me know what we’re talking about. Find me a guest. Bring the on. We’ll have them on just like Zach. Stay safe, stay healthy. ADHD add all forms of neurodiversity are gifts, not curses. We’ll see you guys soon. You’ve been listening to the faster than normal podcast. We’re available on itunes, Stitcher and Google Play, and of course, at www.fasterthnormal.com. I’m your host, Peter Shankman, and you can find [email protected] and at petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you’ve heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review? The more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast is shown and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were performed by Steven Byrom, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagonblast. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next week!

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Credits: You’ve been listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast. We’re available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google play and of course at www.FasterThanNormal.com I’m your host, Peter Shankman and you can find me at shankman.com and @petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you’ve heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review, come more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast has shown, and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were composed and produced by Steven Byrom who also produces this podcast, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagenblast. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next week!