My brain and my business: What setting up a psychology private practice taught me about my brain

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast, the show that helps you to reach more people, help more people and build the life you want to live by doing more than therapy. 

Hello. And before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to give you a little update on what's going to happen with this podcast over my maternity leave, because if you've been listening for a while, then you'll know that from October 14 I'm going to be on maternity leave, probably coming back at some point in January, but no specified date yet. 

But fear not! This podcast is one of my favourite things to do, and I really value you guys as listeners, I don't think I tell you enough. I'm often told by people in my life that I'm not very good at giving compliments, and I think that has translated into my podcasting. And I don't tell you guys how much I appreciate you as much as other podcasters do, and I really do though. And as I said, I love recording this podcast, I love writing the content for the podcast, and I love doing the interviews. So the podcast shall continue. We've already recorded, in fact, most of the episodes that are going to go out across my maternity leave. However, there will be some breaks. So in order to make sure we're giving you content consistently, we've planned to take a few breaks of just a week or two weeks here and there, where we're going to have a little pause in the content, just so that we can keep up with ourselves and make sure it keeps going through the whole maternity leave period. So the best thing you can do to make sure that that doesn't disrupt you and that you don't miss any of the episodes we put out there is to make sure that you subscribe to this podcast. So whatever podcast app you use, whether it's Apple, Spotify, Google podcasts, or we're on Amazon now as well, you can click the subscribe button, and this podcast will be delivered to you every week, every week that we put one out. So please do make sure that you're subscribed so that you don't miss any of the episodes that we do put out there. 

Another thing that I'd like to encourage you to do, if you haven't done it already, is please, please, please leave us a review. So you might have seen the podcast is starting to do quite well in some of the charts, and we're picking up a bit of traction, which is amazing, but the way that Apple decides how many people get to see this podcast is by how many reviews it's got. So please, if you haven't done so yet, leaving us a review on Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts, it really makes a big difference to how many people can find us. So I'd really appreciate it if you could put the word out there for me just by leaving us a quick review. All right on with the episode.

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Hello, and welcome to a slightly different episode of the Business of Psychology podcast.

So this episode is a bit different, it's a little bit more personal. And that is because I'm recording this in September, but it's going to be going out at the beginning of October, and October is ADHD Awareness Month. 

Now a lot of you won't know this about me, but a couple of years ago, I realised that I'm probably not the most neurotypical person. And although I don't really relate to the label ADHD, mostly because I don't consider myself to have deficit and I don't consider myself to be disordered, and I don't like giving other people that label either, I have found it really, really helpful to think about the ways in which I might be neurodiverse. And maybe some strategies that I've been taught that should work for me, in business particularly, don't work for me, and that that's okay. And letting go of some of the shame I've always felt around certain things that I'm not very good at has been very, very powerful for me. 

So, I've been approached recently by quite a few psychologists and therapists setting up their own business, who shared with me that they also think that they're not neurotypical. And you know, maybe they're feeling like they can't do it because they feel like they're not good enough at admin or they struggle too much with a particular kind of task. I just thought I shouldn't really sit here silently when I've kind of been on that journey and learnt how to come through the other side of it feeling a lot stronger. And I actually feel like being in private practice and having my own business has finally allowed me to create a job where I can maximise my strengths and avoid some of the quite painful overwhelm that I used to experience when I worked for an employer, having to do things which are really not good for my brain, not something that my brain is good at. So I think we've got an amazing opportunity in business. But there are also kind of unique challenges that go along with it. Because in business, of any kind, but particularly in private practice, that's what we all know, is when you start out, you have to do everything. So you learn what you're bad at really quickly, which, you know, is a bit painful. I think we will all discover that there are things about running a business that we find very difficult, but it's an amazing opportunity to get to know your brain, and how you work. It's a great exercise in self reflection, setting up a business. And then secondly, once you've learned that, you can then build a business around those strengths. And like I was saying, I felt in my practice that has really given me the freedom to lean into the stuff that my brain does really uniquely well, and move away from the stuff which has caused me agony through my academic and professional career. 

So I hope it's gonna be helpful today for me to share a little bit with you about that journey, how I came to realise that I probably wasn't that neurotypical, what that was like, but also the strategies that I've put in place in my business to work with my brain. I'm hoping that that will inspire those of you who maybe also suspect that you're not quite neurotypical to think about how you could structure your working life around that and make the most of it. But I also hope that even if you're like 'yeah, I'm pretty neurotypical', it will encourage you to look at your strengths and your weaknesses and make sure that your business plays to those strengths, because it's something we should all be thinking about, I think.

Okay, so firstly, I'll just say a little bit about how I came to realise that I probably wasn't neurotypical. And it wasn't when I worked in services, supporting people who were not neurotypical. So I did have, I had placements, a paediatric placement particularly where we talked a lot about ADHD. But it was all kind of badly behaved little boys, if I'm honest, and I couldn't relate to that. So I never saw myself reflected then. And this was some time ago, there wasn't much literature at the time that I was aware of anyway, about girls, and how things might look different for girls. And we just saw lots and lots of similar presentations that didn't look anything like me. So it really didn't occur to me when I was doing that paediatric placement. And then I came across it again, as I was working in learning disability services, often there'd be people with sort of mixed diagnoses. But again, those... I didn't see myself, I never saw myself in, in those people. And possibly it's something to do with being younger as well. I wasn't perhaps as reflective as I am now. And I was still caught up in a lot of scripts really, that I'd been given, a lot of stories about myself that I'd been given through a not so easy time at school. And messages that we have about what it means to be female, what it means to be a woman in our society as well. So I had stories about myself, like, I'm useless at, you know, names and dates. Lots of very... I was very, very hard on myself about the things that I wasn't good at. So I thought I was stupid, because I'm not very good at admin, and I would make admin mistakes. And anybody who's worked their way up through the pathway to becoming a clinical psychologist, or I think probably any type of psychologist knows that you actually spend years doing jobs that are essentially admin jobs. And I'm kind of embarrassed to say, but even when I was qualified, I was still asked to do quite a lot of admin for other people, as well as obviously having to do my own admin in the NHS. And I often felt like I was, you know, not very bright because I would make stupid mistakes. And people would extrapolate that, people would think, oh well, she can't even photocopy correctly, she's obviously not clever enough to go and do a cognitive assessment with somebody. And, and those are the kind of messages that you hear growing up a lot when you're a bit wonky like I am, and it was like that all through my schooling really. So there were subjects that I would really struggle with, like maths and physics and geography. My brain just didn't take, just, it was just like the information it would never go in. I think, I suspect, I was probably bored. But I wouldn't allow myself to acknowledge that because being bored was seen as such a bad thing. Good girls are not bored. So I never admit to being bored, but I suspect I was, and that's why I wasn't concentrating very hard. But anyway, for whatever reason, I couldn't get myself to concentrate on those subjects. So I would do really badly and then I would try and compensate by learning in my own time. Because I knew I couldn't concentrate in class, thinking about actually knowing what I know now, it was possibly also because classroom discipline wasn't very good at my school in those subjects, and what I know about myself now, and we'll talk more about this, is that I either have to focus or not focus, there is no middle ground for me. So if somebody is tapping me on the shoulder, if there's a loud conversation going on right next to me, then I haven't really got much chance of getting into that focus state. So that might actually be, that might actually be quite a contributing factor to my schooling as well. But anyway, that kind of wonkiness was, you know, perceived with a lot of suspicion, when I was growing up. People would think it was laziness, people would think it was stupidity, and people make a lot of assumptions about me that I just sort of took on board. And I was carrying all of those with me through my career, so I think that's probably why rather than thinking I wonder if I might be non neurotypical, or if I might share some qualities with some of these people that I'm assessing, in my head I was like, no I'm just a pretty rubbish person. Which is sad when I look back at it, but I think there'll probably be some people listening to this that can relate to feeling a bit like that. 

So that narrative started to change for me when my mentor, and she was my coach at the time, Janet Murray, got diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 45. And Janet put out a podcast about her journey with that. And I was seeing Janet really regularly at the time, we had weekly sessions and we were talking about it. And what it took for it to hit home to me that this was probably a journey that I was on too, was her podcast was playing in my kitchen. And my husband was sort of pottering around behind me while I was cooking, and he overheard some of Janet's podcast. But he didn't hear that she was talking about ADHD. He just heard her talking about herself and some of her qualities, some of the things that had been challenging in business, but also what made her really good. And what he said to me was, oh I'm not surprised that you hired Janet as your coach, she's exactly like you. Everything she's saying, it could be about you. And I was like, oh, yes, yes, it could. And actually, that probably is one of the reasons that I was attracted to working with Janet, is that our brains do work in similar ways, in a lot of ways. And, but it took, I think it's interesting that it took that moment of somebody else reflecting it back to me, for me to go, oh actually, maybe there is another way of seeing some of the more difficult experiences that I've had in my education and in my career. And perhaps I could investigate what it would be like to apply a different narrative, rather than all of the shame and beating myself up about the stuff that I'm not brilliant at.

Because at the time, I was really beating myself up about the fact that I kind of struggle with things like baby groups or groups for parents with toddlers, and I struggle for two reasons with those. Firstly, there is so much competing background noise, and I have to divide my attention between my children and other people trying to have a conversation with me. And that is just overwhelmingly stressful for me, I really can't do that. Like if we meet up for a playdate at a soft play cafe and it's loud and my kids need me to be watching them, I can't also talk to you. So I find that really, really difficult to start with. And then I also really struggle to remember details and, particularly in the community that I was in time, there was a lot of value placed on remembering kids' birthdays and things like that. And actually, I really struggle to remember birthdays of people that I'm very, very close to. I've developed compensation strategies for it, because we all know it's not acceptable to be a woman that doesn't remember birthdays very well. So I've got calendar reminders, physical reminders, I make sure that I don't miss the birthdays of people I'm very close to, but I'm very unlikely to remember a friend's child's birthday, unless it's made it onto that list, which a few do. And that would put me in lots of awkward positions and difficult conversations in this particular community that I was in. And I'd always just thought, oh that's because I'm rubbish, that's because I'm bad at being a mum. But actually, having this different frame to put around it, a different way of seeing it, made me realise that, you know, I wouldn't judge somebody else for struggling in those situations. And there might be things I could do to make them easier on myself, and to make those relationships run a bit smoother. So it was a big revelation for me both personally and professionally, because it made me start questioning what I was doing in my business, and how I could do that differently, because my relationship with Janet was a business relationship. But it also really made me think about my personal life and you know, how possibly had not been the most compassionate person to myself over the years. So it was a big discovery for me. 

But what were the key qualities that I noticed that I realised I needed to kind of work with in my business? I thought it might be helpful for me to talk a bit about that, and the practical stuff that I put in place to work around them. In case any of you listening have similar experiences. But even if you don't, it might help you to think through some of your own strengths and weaknesses. 

So the first thing that we've already touched on, that I realised I needed to work with in my business was my hyperfocus. So if you haven't heard that term before, it's this kind of cool ability, actually, to completely zone everything out and just work in a total flow state on something that you're very interested in for very long periods of time. And for me, as a child, this was very exaggerated. So if I pick up a pen, and I start writing, I automatically go into hyperfocus. And that must have started for me when I was in infant school, I think. Because I've, my mum had these exercise books of mine, where I, I'd literally filled up whole exercise books in one sitting of just writing stories, just writing basically. And I would be in this total flow state doing it. And the upside of that is you can in a short space of time, because you've got nothing else going on in your head, I can only describe it as total clarity in, in what you're doing. There's nothing distracting you. So you can achieve an awful lot in that time. And that's why when people ask me oh, how can you put out so many podcast episodes, write so many blogs, do so much that is effectively writing? I'm like actually it's not very difficult for me to do an awful lot of writing in a fairly short space of time because my brain will go into this hyperfocus state and just allow me to block the entire world out. Now the downside of hyperfocus is that, well for me anyway, I'm sure it's not the same for everybody, but for me, I don't even notice that I need the toilet. I don't notice that I need food, I don't notice that I need drinks. I don't notice that I've been in the same position for hours. It is literally total. And I'm very irritable if I'm pulled out of it. So even things like, my husband's working from home today, which we've not done a lot of because as you'll know if you listen to this podcast a lot, he's away a lot. And when he's not away, his job is not office based, he's in the armed forces. So it's really unlikely that he's going to be working from home, but he is this week and he is neurotypical I think, certainly doesn't, doesn't have this hyperfocus quality. And so he will come and interrupt me, usually for perfectly legitimate reasons, just to you know, ask me an opinion on something or ask me what I'd like for lunch or yeah, I mean I feel like a mean person complaining about it because he's being reasonable, he's really not being annoying, but it annoys me. Because when I'm in that hyperfocus state, all I care about really is the task at hand. The one exception to that is when my children are around, I can't go into hyper focus when my children are around. Not at all. Sometimes I will do when I'm playing with them, which is really fun, and I wish I knew how to make that happen more often. But most of the time, I can't, I can't go into hyperfocus when they're around, because I'm always giving them a little bit of my attention. So this can only really happen when I know that they're safe, well and cared for by somebody else. And we'll talk more about what that has meant for my business, and how I do things. But basically, that's hyperfocus. And what I've had to make sure that I do is make time to allow myself to hyperfocus. So I'll allocate, say this morning, I knew I have two hours, where I'm not going to be interrupted at all, and I was just going to focus on getting this podcast written and getting this podcast recorded. And that allows my brain to do its thing. Ideally, it needs a bit longer. Ideally, I'd have whole days where I could hyperfocus on one subject. And I'm trying to move towards that in my business, but it is hard to make that happen, but that's definitely what I'm going to try and work towards, as I'm kind of designing my business going forward. Because I know that works best for my brain. Give in to the hyperfocus, make the most of it. But set alarms for drinking and looking after personal care. A tip for anyone else that has that quality! 

So the second thing that I need to work with, with my brain, is the fact that I can't do half focus. So we already touched on that I either hyperfocus, or I'm not focused at all. If there's loads of background noise, if it's a busy office, I can block out a busy office, but what I can't do is be polite, and block out a busy office. So anybody who knew me from my NHS days might remember this, that I can be very chatty, if I'm taking a break at lunchtime, but I can't do chat at the desk. Or if I am doing chat at the desk, there's no chance I'm doing any work. I can't, I really can't divide my attention in that way, there is no such thing as half focus for me. So for me either working somewhere completely