10 ways ADHD Worked in year 1 🎊
My company, ADHD Works 'officially' turns 1 today. Having ADHD myself means this is a huge deal - I've managed not to quit something for an entire year!
I used to want to run a theme park, which is pretty much what ADHD Works is like - there's never a boring day. Here's what we've been up to this year:
1) 1:1 ADHD Coaching
I decided to train as an ADHD Coach after discovering Stephanie Camilleri AAC ACC, who helped me to understand how to work with my brain instead of trying (and failing) to be normal. After training with ADDCA & coaching for Stephanie's amazing company, The ADHD Advocate, I set up ADHD Works.
At first, I was running around like a headless chicken - until I found coaching from Jacqueline McCullough & administrative support from Beth Lewis.
I took my learning of what worked for ADHD clients so far, and created a strategy to coach people to actually understand what it meant for them. Loveday Weller was the first person I nervously showed this to, who burst into (happy!) tears and became ADHD Works' very first client.
Since then, it's been non-stop. Endless enquiries, coaching, working on weekends, making clients' personalised worksheets in the evenings, saying yes, yes, yes to as many people as possible until I exploded and realised there had to be another way.
2) ADHD Group Coaching & Courses
I'd been meaning to make a course for ages but couldn't quite get around to it. Due to a growing waiting list for coaching, I found a coach, Kat Sorbello, to help me make it happen. Kat said we'd have an outline of a course finished by the end of our 2 months, but I finished this in true ADHD style, with 65 people signed up and ready to go. 👀
(As a disclaimer, I had literally no summer. I will remember that August as spent rather miserably re-filming about 1580300 videos for this ADHD course, blasting anybody who dared to ask me to hang out with them).
After running the first 5 minute a day ADHD course with 4 group coaching sessions, I was on my hyper-focus train. I made a Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria course for October, followed by an ADHD at work course, and an ADHD for entrepreneurs one. Then I realised it was quite unsustainable to have to keep selling a course every month - and everybody who did them still wanted 1:1 coaching. (I limited myself to ADHD Champions in the last few months!).
3) ADHD retreat
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria around sales meant that when I spontaneously agreed to run a retreat with my expert-retreat-runner friend Josephine McGrail, I had MASSIVE anxiety. I couldn't imagine asking people to pay money tocomeonanadhdretreatduringacostoflivingcrisisanddidthismakemetheworsthumanbbeingintheworld... which led me to Ari Scott.
Ari is a sales coach for ADHD-ers based in Australia, who I worked with at 7am every week. Once Ari helped me realise that I wasn't an evil person for running a business, we got onto systemising it, depersonalising the RSD-inducing-pain of sales to make it simple. Ari was worth every single one of those 7am wake ups, and we obviously completely sold out the retreat in a matter of weeks.
The ADHD retreat will always be one of the most memorable things I've ever done. Shouting 'ADHD CLUB!' on a dark beach, singing karaoke, doing ADHD themed life drawing and yoga, running workshops where people said they'd changed their entire perspective on life and felt seen for the first time, people saying how the retreat had enabled them to connect with other human beings and feel less alone in the world... it was incredible.
And also extremely overwhelming, as I returned completely burnt out from spending 4 days around people who thought exactly like me. Asking someone what they wanted for breakfast would result in a 10 minute tangent about their childhood best friend's dog - never boring, but a shock to the system!
We also ran a slightly easier energy wise day retreat with Emily Harding, doing mass group coaching via headphones and dancing it out to ADHD-themed music on a rooftop in Hackney!
4) ADHD Training
When Microsoft first asked me to do a remote talk after I published ADHD: an A to Z , my dad said it was a hoax (seriously). This is still how I often feel when companies get in touch for me to do training with them. In the last month alone I've done talks at the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, nervously hovering outside the intimidating buildings wondering what on earth I was doing there.
It reminded me of going for a job interview, when I paced the road so many times I wondered if I'd end up at home instead of even going in. Except now I was training these companies I couldn't have imagined working for 10 years ago... for the exact reasons behind this: ADHD.
I was absolutely terrified of doing in person training through ADHD Works, having traditionally burst into tears when having to talk in front of people. During the pandemic, I'd just about adjusted to doing them online, but kept my rates (what I thought) was too high for anybody to pay. This was until Jonathan Wakefield recommended me to La Fosse, who booked me for an in person talk.
I had no choice but to feel the fear and do it anyway, and it was great. A month later I was talking at Faculty, Paperchase, & Yahoo, before finding an email from DISNEY in my inbox. The conversation I had where I was asked to create a dedicated ADHD Champions training for 200 of their mental health first aiders & do an in person talk with AXA in their cinema will probably always be the best one of my entire life. (Possibly very sad, but I don't care.)
5) Publishing ADHD: an A to Z (again)
I'd self-published ADHD: an A to Z in 2022, but it was acquired by Hachette and JKP to be edited and republished. I spent 3 days of my life reading it out for an audiobook recording, realising that what I'd written actually wasn't too bad.
I just wrote this book for me to figure out my own ADHD - not anybody else. It's been an amazing experience to see people resonate with this all around the world. I even managed to throw a launch party last year, complete with an ADHD magician.
The book that I initially cried in bed for weeks over, having originally published the cover as 'AHD' (only realising after posting this online), was featured by outlets including BBC Worldwide, HR magazine, Forbes, & Metro this year. The irony (and talent of The Book Publicist).
6) ADHD Activism
As part of republishing ADHD: an A to Z, I needed to get testimonials. One charming charity CEO refused this on the basis of it not being academically verified enough, with concepts like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria not being academically proven.
I handled the rejection well, until I realised that the entire reason RSD isn't recognised is because the diagnostic criteria is outdated, which is possibly linked to the 5x higher suicide risk for ADHD-ers. So I took my RSD energy and wrote to the Director of the World Health Organization, ending up presenting to Directors of Health & Mental Health on why they should probably do something about this.
For good measure, I made an RSD course which had a healthy 50 people validating that Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria was most certainly real for them.
Having previously worked in law and policy, and receiving endless messages from people desperate for help and battling 7 year waiting lists, I also joined the campaign on ADHD & Autism assessment waiting times. I shared a template to make it easy for people to write to their MPs to attend, which was shared thousands of times and made it into Stylist Magazine. Then talked to Kate Moryoussef about how burned out I was from activism on her excellent podcast. 😅 (We also set up our own podcast here!!)
You can sign the latest petition calling for a Parliamentary enquiry here.
7) Training ADHD Works Coaches
By the end of last year, I was incredibly burnt out from trying to do everything by myself (and Beth). This was until I stumbled across Georgia Fitzgerald, who's coaching helped me to figure out a path towards becoming a human being instead of a human doing, leaving my house for the first time in weeks.
I was struggling with a waiting list of 250 people wanting ADHD coaching, and felt too passionate about providing ADHD-friendly coaching services to take a risk on people who had been trained with neurotypical standards. So, Georgia helped me to figure out how to train ADHD coaches in my style, with an assessed certification to ensure that people were able to access this support worldwide - and I could get some help!
I hoped that maybe 10 people would join, but we were having people somehow join even after taking it offline - with 25 total. I only planned 1 training, but ended up agreeing to another in September because of the demand. Which then became June. At the time of writing, we've trained over 55 ADHD coaches around the world, including in America, Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, Denmark, and more. It's pretty incredible!
We have our next course as planned in September, which you can join here. I have no idea what comes next!
8) Taking on ADHD Works coaches
The first course quickly taught me that it was administratively impossible to contract 25 people at once to work for ADHD Works as coaches (despite our the demand)... leaving us with 6.
Veronica F. Sommariva, Sarah Rhodes, Nicola (Nikki) Ironside-Skene, Jane Livesey, Charlotte Forbes & Suzy Jackson 📖🧠🏳️🌈 have helped us work through a waiting list of 500 people as in house coaches, and we're about to take on 5 more!
The work of Saskia Mardi has been absolutely vital to this, in setting us up with simple systems that bring clarity to chaos. Saskia is a brilliant quasi-coach-magician-consultant, who will take your brain dumps and turn them into organisation.
9) Becoming a 'real' business with a 'real' website
I think my ADHD makes me a good entrepreneur because I don't have the attention span to waste on things that are not directly relevant to what I want to do - like websites. Until February, ADHD Works' website was largely built by Beth Lewis with a very basic Squarespace model (after having paid a lot of money for one I couldn't even log into previously).
However, there came a point where it was obvious that we needed to get some kind of 'brand guidelines' or 'consistency', with the increased work we were doing. So I found Ellie Perkins, who is a literal copy writing wizard. Ellie picked up my endless ideas, overthinking, and ruminating dotted around the internet, and gave them a beautiful home. She ran our social media accounts, giving them the attention they deserved, and creating a community of ADHD-ers where ADHD works.
I also found a brilliant lawyer, Sam Walkley, who helped me to feel like a 'real business owner' who now gets their 15 page supplier contracts checked over and negotiated instead of assuming all will be fine. I couldn't recommend him more! Also, neurodiversity-friendly accountants with Diverso Accountants!
10) LinkedIn
None of the above would have been possible without LinkedIn. I never would have posted about ADHD on LinkedIn in a million years when I was working in law, but here I am, using it like a daily brain dump.
LinkedIn even invited me to be part of their Creator Accelerator Programme last year, where they sent me some orange socks and a t-shirt. Definitely not what I expected in running my own business, but a lot of fun. The community on LinkedIn makes me feel less alone, especially during tougher times of this year.
I have zero strategy or plans on LinkedIn - or anywhere else, really. I set up ADHD Works because I was determined to make a change and help other people, which is what drives it still today. Every single day is a rollercoaster of learning and figuring it out, but I feel extremely fortunate to be here.
To every single person who has come on this rollercoaster with me over the last year, thank you. Thank you for reading my brain dumps, for listening, for messaging, for caring. Thank you for joining my wild ideas and helping me to turn them into a reality. Thank you for helping me to make ADHD work.
I have no idea what lies ahead in year 2, except for training up 30 more ADHD coaches in April. If this year is anything to go by, it definitely won't be boring!