Don't forget to celebrate your non-shiny achievements of 2023
This year has been an objectively 'successful' one for me, with fancy metrics and 'achievements' like:
ADHD Works being awarded the 'most diverse & inclusive brand' from Soho Works Soho House & Co
80+ ADHD Works coaches trained around the world (& 14 working with our clients in house, coaching hundreds of people)
Publishing the best-selling ADHD Works at Work book (& audiobook!), with a foreword by Google's Lisette Schipper (before training them on it!)
Creating & launching an ADHD Champions programme for Disney (with 7 training sessions!)
Talking non-stop in the media about ADHD - such as for Metro, the FT, Reader's Digest, HuffPost & BBC World News
41k followers on LinkedIn & 26k on this newsletter (hello and thank you for reading my inner chaos all year)
However, the things I am most proud of this year can't be measured, and they aren't the kinds of things you typically get awards for.
They are fighting the inner battles and demons that nobody sees, but everyone can relate to. These happen behind the shiny achievements and leave us wondering why these things don't feel as good as they look, keeping us trapped behind an invisible prison of 'success'.
Here's some of mine:
1) Finally breaking out of toxic relationships
ADHD Works emerged out of a terrible break up. Two years ago on my birthday, I found out that the person I was living with had cheated on me, partly because they didn’t agree with me quitting my law job to become an ADHD coach.
It took me a very long time to leave - many times over the next few months, I’d pull my clothes out of the wardrobe to leave and they’d simply hang them back up. It was only thanks to ADHD coaching that I could finally put together a plan and execute it, which is one of the many reasons I am so passionate about this work.
Most women will return to an abusive relationship on average 7 times, and I must have returned many more than that. This on-and-off-again dynamic continued into this year, where I became completely dissociated and had given up on myself, believing that I was simply broken, and that there was no hope. It was making me feel dead inside.
It was randomly going to an event on domestic abuse that helped me to realise this this was not my fault, and to finally get out of it. To hear strangers describe what had happened to me so vividly suddenly made me realise how much of this was associated with my vulnerability of having ADHD.
This vulnerability had closed me off to several other relationships, and I had become very lonely and isolated. Ironically my work had never been busier, but my ‘real life’ had never felt emptier. I stopped trusting myself, which meant I stopped trusting anybody else.
Eventually I realised that to trust myself, I needed to start setting and upholding boundaries that put myself first, instead of everybody else. Once I eventually respected myself enough to believe I was worthy of healthy relationships, things started to change elsewhere, and I ended several of these toxic dynamics.
You can have all of the ‘success’ in the world, but if you have no one to share it with, or worse, share your life with people who make you feel even more alone than being by yourself, then it feels pretty pointless.
I have felt happier in the last 2 months of allowing myself to connect and trust people again, building healthy relationships, than I have been for much of this year - everything in life ultimately comes down to human connection.
2) Quitting vaping
Having ADHD means I have an increased tendency to seek ‘risky’ sources of dopamine, like alcohol and cigarettes (as in chapter ‘V is for Vices’ of ADHD: an A to Z), but I have honestly never been as addicted to anything in my life as vaping.
I bought one for a festival in 2022, and simply could not stop. It was deeply embarrassing for a 30 year old woman to go to the corner shop every day and ask for a candy floss flavoured vape, but felt so good as soon as I smoked it. Very quickly, the vape that initially lasted me 3 days lasted me 3 hours, and became the first thing I thought about each morning.
I hated myself for it. I had quit smoking cigarettes after 10 years, but quitting vaping seemed to be impossible. It hit all of my ADHD weak spots: novelty, with brightly colours and sugary flavours, and adrenaline, with an instant boost to my brain that seemed to trick me into believing I was then more ‘productive’. I smoked constantly, without even realising until it ran out.
It was seeing how this was also impacting my clients that eventually helped me to stop, because I realised I wasn’t alone. One of my clients told me how ashamed they felt about telling me they were addicted to vaping, and I showed them mine. I started writing a book on how to quit vaping with ADHD, and ironically started hyper-focusing on the subject, reading Alan Carr’s excellent book, and quit myself within a matter of weeks. (The book never made it past chapter 1, sadly.)
It helped to learn that the nicotine actually leaves your body within a very short period of time, and the addiction is mainly mental. I kept a tally on the app ‘Threads’ (which was basically my only use of it) of how many days free I was, and eventually a week passed, then a month, then I stopped thinking about it all together.
I can’t describe the happiness of waking up each morning and realising my first thought isn’t about vaping. It used to make me start my day feeling as though I’d already failed, weak for being unable to resist something that was clearly having such an impact on my physical health, as I regularly experienced chest and breathing pain.
If you are in this boat, please know that it is possible - and life without spending £7 a day on a vape is really, really worth it.
3) Changing my mind and making a LOT of mistakes
I have done a lot this year, but I’ve also changed my mind just as much. From attempting to take on 25 in house coaches at the same time, to offering a job to a manager before realising it was a mistake, to launching and selling an ADHD retreat that I put impossible timeframes around and had to cancel - it has been a rollercoaster of a year.
This is something I used to beat myself up about a lot, because it felt like I couldn’t trust myself. I was so frustrated at myself for acting so impulsively, but now, it’s one of my favourite parts of my ADHD. I’ve come to realise that I can trust my gut, and all of those moments I changed my mind were definitely for the best.
Having a brain that acts before thinking things through fully means doing a lot. For all the decisions I changed my mind about, I did 10x as many things instead. Taking responsibility for this forced me to create systems and boundaries, including an exceptional team to help me, setting expectations for myself to meet to be able to do this for others.
Having ADHD enables you to act fast, fail fast, and learn fast. I’ve learned more than I ever thought possible in this year, from managing people and a business, to managing myself, and my own racing car ADHD brain. I don’t regret a single one of these mistakes, because each one has taught me a valuable lesson that I’ve been able to take into the next adventure.
4) Doing less work
I started 2023 a severe workaholic, trapped in my flat working 12 hours a day - minimum. I was frustrated at myself, because being self-employed meant I could work from anywhere, and I didn’t need to put so much pressure on myself, but I could not stop.
For much of this year, it felt like I kept attempting to tidy a mess up, whilst making it messier each time. I came up with endless solutions of how to make things more organised as the business scaled impossibly quickly. It was like every idea made more things more complicated - from our back end system to hiring a team, training coaches to organising group coaching - it never ended.
Somewhere along the way, I realised that the only way to do less, was to literally do less. I was still the one coming up with all of the solutions and attempting to do everything myself, as a typical ADHD-er who struggles with delegating to others. I had to start actually accepting help, and letting people get on with it.
I found an incredible team of humans and helped to create working environments that aligned with their strengths, setting goals to align us all. Saskia Mardi made us a back-end system that completely transformed our lives. I took on coaches and stopped taking on so many clients myself. I realised when I was working for the sake of working, or people pleasing, and allowed myself to say no.
I’d initially booked a month long trip to Australia for December as a way to force myself to take a break, but in all honesty, it would have been yet another ‘solution’. Staying still for a while and allowing myself to simply exist, without needing to fill up every moment of every day making courses or writing books or coaching people, was one of the greatest gifts I could give to myself. Instead of working from a new location for a month, I’ve now taken the first genuine holiday I’ve had in months - a real break, instead of an escape from reality.
This year has been incredible, but these are some of the things I am most proud of. If they resonate with you, I hope they can serve as reminders that you don’t have to have a TED Talk or a billion followers or quit your job or a new marriage or house or baby to be ‘successful’.
As long as you are here, you are learning and growing, and that is something to be proud of.
I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, New Year, and most importantly, a rest. You deserve to be able to switch off, get off the treadmill of constantly being 'on', and experience everything that life has to offer.
You deserve to experience joy in the little moments, to simply exist as a human being, instead of a human doing. If there's one thing I've learned from this year, it's that happiness isn't something you can achieve: there's simply self-compassion to be found along the way, if you remember to look for it.
Thank you very much for coming along on this journey with me, and for being so wonderfully supportive along the way. I have had some very dark days this year, but having a community on LinkedIn including yourselves has genuinely gotten me through it, and reminded me that I am not alone - and neither are you.