October marks ADHD Awareness Month in the UK.
Like many adult women who have always thought themselves to just be a bit weird, I discovered that I had ADHD a few years ago and as a business owner that comes with both its own challenges and strengths.
My strengths
Let’s start with the good stuff – I am incredibly creative and can come up with many different ideas or solutions at any one time. You want blog titles to promote your business then I can probably give you twenty in about five minutes! My brain works fast and sees things from many different angles all at once.
Alongside this, I can work very quickly and get a lot of things done. For example, this blog is easy for me to write and so it will only take me about twenty minutes to do. See below though for what happens when I am not so interested in a task.
I feel passionately about things, want to help people and will give 100% of my energy to ensuring success. Erm, on that subject you should probably also see below when I talk about burnout!
I am great at multi-tasking and can get completely focussed on one task very quickly and then move to another.
I make decisions very quickly and I trust my gut instinct. When I was running my last business, I made the decision to sell and had prepared everything, advertised, found prospective buyers, interviewed them, got multiple offers and completed the sale all in about two weeks. I knew it was right so there was no point thinking about it any longer.
The tough bits
This is actually the easier part for me to write as I struggle with my ADHD on a daily basis. While understanding more about my neurodivergence has been enlightening, it also means that the mask that you have put on forever drops slightly and, in my experience, this then means that new challenges become apparent all the time.
While I am creative, I struggle to complete a task right to the end once the initial buzz of excitement at the beginning has gone. I combat this by breaking jobs down into tiny milestones so they always feel achievable and I regularly have a sense of accomplishment rather than feeling like the dopamine buzz of completion is so far away.
Although I can hyperfocus and get things done quickly, the pay-off from doing that too often is burnout and ADHD burnout is brutal. At the time, hyperfocus mode is really fun and is, in fact, referred to as God mode, when you feel all conquering and like nothing can stop you. But it’s too much and eventually your body and your brain force you to stop. I’m learning to try to balance this by having strict working hours and allowing myself some time off in the evenings rather than constantly working.
I can get overwhelmed if I feel like there is so much to do and this leads to procrastination or I simply stop and cannot start anything. I tackle this by setting myself reasonable deadlines and trying to be strict in not expecting myself to do too much in one day. If I am really struggling to get started then I do what’s called ‘swallow the ice cream’ which means to choose the easiest, most appealing task first and get that done. Most of the time this then starts me on a momentum and I’m able to keep going and get the rest of the work done.
I am very introverted and that’s a challenge when I am trying to build a business. I can get out and interact with people but it takes a lot out of me and I need to build in the rest and recovery time afterwards.
I can be easily distracted and find working from home to be difficult sometimes. While a lot of people like to work in a quiet environment, I actually find that if a task is difficult or requires a lot of concentration then I am better working from a noisy coffee shop instead. The downside to this is that I have far too many trips to Starbucks each week!
Finally, I also have an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ brain so I can forget things really easily. For example, I try to post on our social media channels every day but sometimes I simply forget that Instagram even exists! I combat this by having notes everywhere on my desk and using my to-do lists to manage daily tasks as well as project-based ones.
This is just a tiny look at my own personal experiences as a small business owner with ADHD. What I do know is really helping me is having the support of Kelly as my business partner running COG as I can speak up when I am finding things tough and she can help me to find a solution. I didn’t have that in my previous businesses and I can see now how much I suffered as a result.
As an ADHD-er I would love to help other neurodivergent business owners by lightening the load and taking some tasks off your hands – trust me, I really love the mundane jobs you might hate! Our services page can show you some of the ways we could assist you.