Recently, I lost my decorating gloves and sandpaper in the middle of doing up our annexe.
Hilariously, I had a little cry.
Now, anyone looking in on that scene would wonder what the fuck was going on. There are more appropriate things to cry about that don’t affect me at all, such as the cost of living crisis, and COVID when it happened, but I cry when I feel my brain won’t work, and that happens when I get overloaded.
It doesn’t happen very often - just a few times a year now I understand more about ADHD, because now I recognise the symptom as an alarm bell that something needs to change in my life.
Of course, it wasn’t just the gloves and sandpaper that upset me. I’d had a day doing things that were not part of my skill set, namely arranging dates, venues and times for meetings.
Tasks like that require huge amounts of my brain power, and I quite often fuck them up.
It’s not because I’m stupid or lazy. They are simply areas of difficulty for me that get worse the busier my brain is.
This year, Kev and I have made a change to our business model, meaning we’re working with groups on our 90 Day Breakthrough course.
It’s great, however it takes more processing power in my brain because there are more clients to deal with, and whilst I’m much better than I used to be at putting things in my diary, setting reminders etc, I’ve noticed I’m really dropping the ball on various things, and yesterday I made a couple of communication errors with clients and I experienced the frustration of not being able to function like many people can.
Before I understood ADHD, I used to get really upset with myself. I’m pretty sure it contributed to my mental health problems.
I couldn't understand how I could be an intelligent person and yet get simple things like writing down dates wrong.
I now realise that it’s all to do with processing power in my head.
Although it’s called Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder, it doesn’t mean you can’t pay attention. It means that you are selective about what you pay attention to, and hyperfocus on what interests you at the expense of other things.
Luckily for my clients, my hyperfocus is on them.
You might think my job is just chatting to people, like a hairdresser would ask someone about their next holiday, but it’s much more than that for me.
When I’m coaching, I’m totally transported to their worlds, and I’ll quite often be thinking about them between calls.
If I’m reading a book or listening to a podcast, I’ll be bouncing ideas around in my head about who would benefit from what I’m learning.
Having more clients to think about (which I love), and different things to plan (Yuk) has taken me to the brink of my processing capacity.
Last night, when I was decorating our annexe and couldn’t find my gloves and sandpaper (after 10 minutes of looking I found they had dropped behind the hoover), I felt a wave of Fuck My Life crash over me, triggered by the brain strain of admin work earlier that day.
Luckily, Kev is totally supportive and understands how I feel (probably because we are 99% sure he’s affected by ADHD, too, even though he hasn’t been diagnosed), and he came up with a solution.
He’s great at systems, and he’s always advising clients to grow theirs as they grow their businesses, and he identified that our current system is under strain and needs adjusting.
When I didn’t have so much admin and organising to do things ticked along nicely, but right now things are creaking.
So, we’re currently in the process of looking for an extra brain in the form of an Executive Assistant to help with the things that are causing issues that only a UK based bod can sort (we can’t expect our team in the Philippines to sort meeting venues etc for us - that would fry their brains!).
When we designed our 90 Day Breakthrough journal, we included a daily question “What do you need to stop doing/delegate/postpone today?” for exactly this reason.
Life is constantly changing, and sometimes your systems need to change to accommodate the new things.
So, if you ever find yourself crying about gloves and sandpaper (unlikely, I know, but it can happen to anyone!) then it’s time to look for what you need to let go of.