In this episode of ADHD-ish, host Diann Wingert is joined by client, Kathryn Bird, a successful travel content creator and entrepreneur, as she opens up about the reality behind her seemingly enviable career.

Despite speaking at major shows and building an impressive business, Kat wrestled with overwhelm, time blindness, guilt, and the relentless expectations she placed on herself—classic hallmarks of living and working with ADHD.

Join us for an honest conversation about unraveling the tangled threads of passion, drive, and self-worth, and how doing "less but better" can transform both business and well-being.

Here are my top 3 takeaways for anyone feeling stuck in their own “success”:

• You don’t have a million problems—just a few powerful patterns. Identifying and naming them makes change possible.
• Your worth is not tied to your to-do list. Planning for realistic work hours, protected downtime, and recovery is the key to sanity and sustainability.
• You get to define your boundaries. Say no, let go of what drains you, and protect your energy—even when it means “hiding” some of your projects from yourself if deleting them feels too scary.

If you find yourself working nonstop, feeling guilty about taking a break, or recreating old corporate patterns in your “dream job,” remember: nothing on your list is more important than your well-being.

About today’s guest, Kathryn Bird

Kat (she/her) is a former Royal Navy helicopter observer and London airspace air traffic controller turned travel blogger and entrepreneur. After leaving her high-pressure career to travel the world, Kat turned her passion into a thriving business, teaching and inspiring fellow adventurers through her content and memberships.

Her journey has been marked by remarkable achievements—and the hidden struggle of managing ADHD, perfectionism, and the pressures of self-employment.

Connect with Kat:

Website: https://www.wandering-bird.com/

Instagram: @wanderingbird.adventures.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WanderingBird

Your ADHD-ish™ host, Diann Wingert

Diann Wingert is a former therapist turned coach, speaker, and consultant who blends her expertise in entrepreneurship and neurodiversity to help others thrive.

Host of the top-rated ADHD-ish™ podcast and creator of The ADHD-ish™ Method, Diann works with ADHD-ish™ business owners who are ready to create stand-out, sought-after, profitable businesses based on their unique brilliance, while eliminating the extremes of boredom and burnout.

Inspired by Kat’s results & want to chat about what success can look like for YOUR business? Book a free consultation and let’s talk!

Want to listen to other Client Success Story episodes before booking that consultation appointment? I’ve got you. Here is the playlist.

Practical Takeaways

• Be honest about what’s really on your plate. Track your time and get real with your expectations
• “Nothing on this list cannot wait.” Borrow Kat’s mantra - perfect for ADHD overachievers
• Rest is productive. Building in recovery weeks and being intentional about your workload makes all the difference
• Let go (just a little). Not every idea, offering, or piece of content needs to be perfect or even used

Not ready for my six-month, one to one coaching program, but want an ADHD-informed, business savvy coach on demand? My digital clone, Di AI is free in beta.Just click the link and start chatting now!

© 2026 ADHD-ish™ Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops/ Outro music by Vladimir / Bobi Music / All rights reserved.

H: From the outside, you were the picture of success, enviable success, one of the biggest names in your industry spirit, speaking at major shows, even getting recognized out and about like a freaking celebrity. But that wasn't a match for what was happening behind the curtain. So what was actually going on?

G: I felt a little bit like a swan and sort of all beautiful and calm and whatever on the outside on Monday, I'm like, oh, this is insane and it just felt like I was drowning. I think that's probably the best way of explaining it. I was constantly trying to bail the boat or dig out the quicksand or whatever analogy you want to use. And it just kept piling on and piling on and I felt that if I could just dig a little bit harder or bail a bit faster, I'd get to the end of this never ending to do list.

And I was constantly delaying everything personal. I felt like I had to earn a day off. I felt like I had to, I couldn't, like, take a weekend off work. I was constantly trying to keep up with everything. I felt like I dug myself into this rut of I have to do these things every day or every week or people will judge me or I'll judge me and it was just impossible. It just felt like I didn't know how to get myself out of this situation without throwing the entire thing away, which I obviously didn't want to do so I felt stuck.

H: I don't know if you relate to this, Kat, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs with adhd, especially the women, are in a similar situation and on top of it, they feel guilt and shame because they know that they are successful. Like, a lot of people work their ass off, but they're not even making it. You were making it and probably a lot of people would love to have the business that you have and the lifestyle you have. Did you ever feel, like, guilty or ashamed that you couldn't even appreciate it because it wasn't all that. both all the time.

G: Both all the time and I think in a lot of ways it made it worse because I quit my job to go traveling, which is so many people's dreams, and it was supposed to be. And don't get me wrong, it was this incredible experience. I felt so incredibly privileged because I know a lot of people can't do that. And yet it was then became a hobby like talking about my traveling and talking about what I was doing and helping other people, you know, with their own travels or whatever and it grew.

And as it grew, my hobby became a business which I had no clue that it could do at the start. And so I loved it and I was passionate about it and then it sort of on the flip side of that became this burden almost, which is an awful word. But every time I went anywhere, I had to film it, I had to write about it, I had to share on social media. You couldn't even, you know, plan anything without, oh, this would be a nice Photoshop. And it became like the dark side of travel content creation creator which was really difficult to get away from because I still love to travel, I still love to talk about it and I couldn't find that balance between life and business. My life was my business.

H: That is so incredibly relatable for so many people Kat on a couple levels. One, the number of people who kind of accidentally fall into a business because they're following their passion. And then all of a sudden people say, hey, I really love what you're doing. That's really cool, can you teach me how to do it? And all of a sudden you're like, okay. And in true ADHD fashion, because you're high energy, you're curious and you're open minded, you just started learning more things and collecting more things and then you're recording more things. And I think at one point, very early on when we started working together, you and we'll get into this a little bit later in the conversation where it wasn't the feelings, it wasn't the thinking, it was the data that finally convinced you.

But I think close to the beginning you said you went through your to do list and did your estimation of how much time each of the tasks would take and realize that you were obligating yourself to attempt to do 33 hours of work in a single day. And even though you knew it was ridiculous, it was like, yeah, but what am I going to cut? So I think it's really, really important to realize there are people who accidentally end up in a business and it becomes successful and when they're struggling, they don't even feel worthy of asking for help because it's like, bitch, you made your bed, now lie in it kind of thing.

And you tried everything, you literally tried everything that we find on the Internet. You tried to get this under control. The planning systems, strategy sessions with ChatGPT the upwards of 30 courses that you bought to help you figure it out and never had time to open them. What finally made you decide, okay, this has got to change because you have been at this for a while and you have been overworking, over delivering and over complicating. I would guess probably from the beginning.

G: I think it was probably a collection of small things rather than one big pivotal. Oh, my goodness, this is as much I can do. There were a couple of things that were quite key. One was I paid quite a lot of money to go to a blogging Mastermind weekend, which was amazing. And the people on it were lovely and the lady who was running it was lovely and we were all sitting around them.

There's about 30 bloggers in there, mostly female, but a couple of men. And everyone was going around, like, talking about what their next steps were and their next things to do. And she kind of got to me, and I was like, I genuinely don't know. And she was like, okay and so we had a little conversation, me and her. Would you mind if I bring you up to the front and we could do, like, a workshop with you and so everybody could learn from my experience. And I went up there and she like, right, give me your things on your to do list and I had about 40.

And she just looked at me with this face like, oh, my God, you're insane. And I look around the room and everyone's looking at me like, everyone had that look and I was like, does everyone not, is this not normal? Like, I honestly felt that that was just like being part of a small business owner. And I didn't realize that it was a complete lack of being able to prioritize and been able to understand, like, or knowing how my brain worked.

And that was a moment where I was like, okay, this ADHD thing, because I've never been officially diagnosed, this probably is a lot more prevalent in a small business world than it has been in any part of my previous jobs or anything like that, because they were a lot more regimented. And that was, I think, when I started looking more into adhd, which is how I found you, and how I found a podcast and everything. And that really clicked for me because I was listening to you talking about ADHD and business. I was like, oh, my God, that makes so much sense. So I was already kind of going down that path of, okay, I have adhd, let's just assume that I do.

How do I build up systems and processes to try and deal with this insanity? And I tried to do it all on my own and like you said, bought more courses and bought more things. I just genuinely thought if I just worked a little bit harder, I should be able to figure this out. I'm an intelligent person, I should be able to do this. And then I think the biggest kick over the edge to know I need help was the year before I started working with you. I had some really nasty health issues. I had a couple of skin cancer scares. And then I had a couple well, I was told I had a degenerative spinal condition, I'd be in a wheelchair in five years.

So that was like, okay, great. Luckily, she says, I had to go in for a scan for that to find out how bad it was. And the good news was that I don't have this degenerative spinal condition. But do you know you have a tumor the size of a grapefruit on your ovary and we have to operate immediately because it might pop and I'm going, what? I haven't got time for this, this is not on my schedule.

And I think that was such a wake up call for me because it sounds awful and I feel really quite bad about it. But one of my overriding thoughts as I was going into surgery was, thank goodness I'm gonna have an excuse to stop for a couple of weeks and that is insane. Like, major surgery was a good thing in my brain because it gave me a reason to justify not working so hard. And when I came out of that, I was like, oh, no, I have to figure this out.

H: You need some serious help. And this is sort of like the flip side of adhd, because a lot of women with ADHD have the inattentive, distractible type, so they have a lot of problems with making decisions. They're doing a lot of, you know, overthinking and over planning and over organizing and a lot of analysis, paralysis and perfectionism. And they really, desperately don't want to make a mistake, which makes it really hard to take any kind of action at all.

You and I have the subtype of adhd, where, yes, we have those things, but we also have this constant need to be taking action, to be doing something, to be learning, to be moving the needle. And what happens when that's kind of your flavor is that learning that you might have a life changing diagnosis doesn't affect you the way it does most people. Most people would think, oh, my God, I'm going to be disabled, I might die and they would come to a screeching halt. You and I think, oh, my fucking God, I do not have time for this. How inconvenient could this be?

So and it seems perverse when you say it to someone else, but when you're wired this way, where you're always going, going, going, going, going, thinking, well, I might actually have to go to hospital, I might actually have to go to rehabilitation, I might have to have surgery. I don't have time for this. It sounds crazy, but that's exactly where we go. And yet and maybe this is because of the course thing, you know, buying all the courses and then not only not finishing them, how about not opening them? When you did make the decision, you'd been listening to podcasts for a while. We had a consultation, we got along really well. You thought, okay, I think this can work.

The next step is the intake form and you wrote, because I asked, do you have any concerns about coaching in general or about coaching with me in particular? And you said, Kat, my biggest fear is that I'm not going to change or maybe I can't change, and that you would start strong and then start to regress. I've never asked you this before during our engagement, but do you think it was helpful to you to name that fear up front, even before we started digging into anything?

G: Yes. And I went into coaching with you slightly dubiously and slightly nervously, but also with the mindset of I need to be completely upfront with you because I'm very good and I think most people with adhd, or maybe it's a female thing, I don't know, but putting up the front and certainly people pleasing, that's a huge thing for me. So I wanted you to be proud of me and I wanted to make you happy and I wanted to be your star student and all the rest of the rubbish. And obviously I achieved all of those things, but…

H: Definitely, or you wouldn't be on this client success story.

G: Thank you. But I also knew that behind that facade that there was a lot that needed fixing, and I wanted to hand you my messy brain in its raw form, because otherwise, what's the point? And I've never done coaching like that before. I've done coaching for the business, like with the mastermind and whatever, but never done coaching for my brain and how I work. So I was like, there was no point not being open and honest with you because it won't achieve anything.

So, yeah, I wanted to write from the outset to be that it's funny because I had had to go back through our transcripts and things to do this podcast, because I don't remember what happened three months ago don't be insane, I've lived a life since then. And that came up and I was like, oh, yeah, no. And I think just in general, the amount of raw honesty that I gave you, and I think because you are quite raw and you're very honest and you are very open about everything, and the way that you talk on the podcast portrays that it was a lot easier to be that way with you, which I think helped massively.

H: I think this is speaking to why goodness of fit when you are hiring a coach is so important, whether it's me or someone else feeling like I don't have to perform for this person. I can own my wins, I can celebrate my successes, but I can also have the courage to be vulnerable about what I affectionately call my messy back end. Because most businesses have a messy back end. And I think most of us have been, you know, culturally conditioned to only show the polished parts, to only show how you look from the outside. But that was exactly why you were struggling and couldn't see a way out because there was this disconnect between how the business looked from the outside and how you were feeling on the inside.

One of the things that you told me that I think surprised you the most was realizing, I don't have 20 different problems. I think you thought you were probably like, I want to be. It was like you were caught between wanting to be my star client and also thinking, I'm probably the worst example full of ADHD she's ever experienced. And you were thinking, I have all these different problems. But there was a moment that we were in a coaching call and you started recognizing, no, actually, it's not a bunch of different problems, it's a handful of patterns. Things that I refer to as time optimism instead of time blindness.

The unholy trinity of procrastination, perfectionism, and people pleasing and the default yes. Which for you was, I say yes to every request. I say yes to every impulse I have to create something. Yes, yes, all day long YES. Which is how you end up with the 33 hours of work on a single day's schedule. Do you think you can remember? I know this was several months ago. How it felt for you to go, no this isn't like a whole long list of problems. It's a small handful of patterns. It's all connected.

G: I think that was probably one of the biggest things that surprised me about coaching was I kind of expected. And I know this sounds ridiculous now in hindsight, but I kind of expected you to, in effect, wave a magic wand and be like, hey, you do this, this, and this, and then you're all magically fixed. And then I was like, okay, right no, and then it was this weird. It was almost like unwrapping, like a parcel or one of those Russian dolls where things like stacked and stacked.

H: Yeah, I used that analogy. Yep.

G: Yeah. And maybe I've stolen it from you sorry but, yeah, I felt like we kind of got down enough dolls to get to the real core of it, and that made me feel a lot better. I remember the relief after that call. Like, okay, if I can just fix three or four things rather than fixing 25, it's not that bad. And I also somewhere around that same time, I started realizing I had to disconnect my worth from the business and the business revenue and the time spent on the business and trying to sort of separate out those things all happened around the same sort of time. And I think it was because we were another analogy pulling apart the bit of string, and we slowly started to unravel it all. And that was a really good session, I enjoyed that one.

H: Yeah. And I think when you say you enjoy it, I think because you were ready for it. And also I think the pattern of thinking I have a million problems and my business is just one of them, but realizing, no, it's kind of like sometimes I'll jokingly say, oh, people with ADHD think they have so many problems, so many problems. We just have three problems, getting started, stopping and switching gears. That's overly simplified, but it's also true and I think for you realizing, no, I have patterns.

I don't have a million problems, and I can pay attention to those patterns and over time, you learn to recognize them sooner. Maybe you can't always prevent them, we can't always prevent ourselves from going down the old roads, but we'll see what we're doing sooner. We'll recognize the pattern that it's part of, and then we can pivot before we've lost hours or days. You also talked about, I think you call it a slap in the face, which is a bit rough, but sometimes we need that to wake up. I had a hard time convincing you to do this, but I think we're both very grateful that I asked you to actually track your time because you were. You knew objectively that you had what I call grossly unrealistic expectations. But you didn't really know right.

Like I say that to be a little bit provocative, but also to really. Because I want people to say, no, I don't and then, okay, prove it. And then they go, oh, shit, which is exactly what happened to you. So you're like, no, no, I'm not that far off okay, well, why don't we just track it for a week right. Just or just five days right and what you realized was I have been planning my business, my tasks, my productivity, my work product, my standards, where I can even allow myself to let go of the working day or even feel good about what I did. You were planning on seven to eight hours a day, but you actually only had about five truly productive hours that you described as a slap in the face. But once you got over the sting, what changed as a result of waking up to that?

G: Yeah, I think and it was because in my brain I was still mid-20s, highly sort of flying, working eight nine hour days, and I hadn't quite caught up to the fact that I'm now mid-40s, my brain has slowed down quite a lot. And also I left the corporate world to have a bit more freedom and to be able to work at different times or, you know, stay up and work or get up late or do whatever. And I haven't quite equated that into my working day and tracking it and realizing I only actually had about five productive hours was in some way quite difficult because when you say you only work 25 hours a week, it sounds a lot less than when you work 40 or 45 hours a week.

But also then it made me try to be a lot more, what's the word I want, like, be a lot more selective about the work that I chose to do intentional. Absolutely, that's a really good word for it. The top three things that I pick for each day are the things I have to get done and I don't always want to do them. And for that I sometimes use like the body doubling and stuff that we've done. But I pick three things that have got to be done and I've also not perfectly, but I also very much try to let go of the fact that future Kath is going to have 10 hours a day and she will be able to work magic and actually cram in 14 hours a day.

And I've just got to work harder till she arrives and just be a lot more realistic about no, five hours a day is enough. And I can be very intentional and I can be a lot more focused. And then when those are done, I can stop and I can relax and I can read a book, God forbid, or watch a movie or, you know, any of these other things that are not business related, which I just wasn't doing before at all. So in a lot of ways it's been really freeing to acknowledge that. Even though, as you said, I fought it a little bit at the time.

H: Oh, and you know what? I think given you are, you know, as I mentioned, you are the combined type adhd. You have an inner restlessness that the folks that don't have that hyperactive trait don't. So it's first realizing my expectations are totally unrealistic, then figuring out what is realistic, then adjusting your tasks and your output and your daily routine around that. But I think the hardest part, and I'm sure you would fully agree, is actually shifting your mindset. So when you are done, like, okay, now instead of having a zillion things, I have the three most important things.

And if I knock those three most important things off, everything else is gravy and if I'm feeling a little tired at 3 o', clock, I can stop then. Or if I'm noticing it's a beautiful day and I'd actually like to go for a walk or a bike ride or just lie on the grass and stare into space, I can do that and I don't have to feel guilty or stressed out or shame.

I think something we should probably refer to is that your former career was one where you were as a person with adhd, extremely well suited because we tend to perform well under pressure. Do you mind sharing with our listeners what you did before you started your own business?

G: Well, I've had two careers actually. First I was a helicopter observer in the Royal Navy so I did that for a few years and then I left and became an air traffic controller for, for London Airspace, which is I believe the busiest bit of airspace certainly in Europe might be in the world. So yes, lots of throwing planes around skies and working on the limit and yes, my brain going, it's how the whole business started because I quit that. Yeah, to go travel and I got bored two months in. I need to do more than this and now I've created a mini empire so yeah.

H: Oh my goodness, the number of people who leave a very stressful job. And I'm sure you were an excellent air traffic controller because the ADHD brain is extremely well suited to that. But that does not take anything away from the fact that it's probably also exhausting, and you're at a high risk of burnout, so you well suited to it and you needed to leave it. But it's really fascinating to me how many of us recreate some of the same conditions that we were desperate to flee from because, honestly, we don't. First of all, we don't have other context, that's the only way we know how to work. Because of the kind of work we gravitate towards and because of how we are.

G: I think that was one of the hardest things for me, because my entire life I have been told, oh, you can't join the Navy. You're a girl, you can't do this because of whatever reason, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't. And I did, you know, you can't leave work and go traveling. So it was very, very hard for me but that was the point. So when someone says, oh, that's impossible, or that's unrealistic, my brain goes, hello watch me and you're going, but that's unrealistic and I'm going, no, it's not. I can do that. Normal people might not be able to do that, but I can do this. Sounds awful, doesn't it?

How arrogant but my brain really struggled between no, that's something that you if you work really hard, you can achieve. And no, 33 hours in one day's work is just impossible, Kathryn and you need to get your head around that. That actually is a no, rather than just a work harder. And I think that's one of the reasons that I struggled so much, because up until that point, there have been very few limits that I couldn't hit. And then suddenly I'm making all these issues for myself, and they were literally impossible and it wasn't just time optimism. It was time ridiculousness. So, yeah, that, I think, took me a while to kind of catch up with that.

H: I think that is the hardest part. And I think it's not just because we're conditioned to have a very strong work ethic and to set really high standards for ourselves. But what you pointed out, when somebody says, you can't do this, a lot of people who are neurotypical would hear that and say well that's probably good advice. That was probably a bit, you know, unrealistic and they just let it go but you double down. And I think one of the reasons for that is that's also, you know, we agree on this is wanting to bust gender norms. And you wouldn't say that to a man, so why the fuck are you saying it to me? But also because of the four ADHD drivers, interest, challenge, novelty and urgency that pushed your challenge lever all the way down. And it's like well you say I can't do you know me like watch, you know, watch and learn.

So and then you get sort of your identity gets wrapped up around that. It becomes woven into your ego, into your self worth, into how we sometimes feel we need to prove ourselves to ourself and to others. And I think that's why working with someone in a one on one capacity where there's a high level of trust and safety, that's how you get down to that level. Because otherwise we just kind of gloss over that and frankly it was such a big part of your identity. We needed some time to get down to the level where you were willing to loosen your grip on that. And I think of it as like you're gripping the wheel so tightly, you start with loosening just the pinky fingers and you gradually work your way to the ring finger and then the middle finger because it's truly, it was a point of pride. It's like that's who I am, you want me to give that up? Fuck you.

G: I think that came very much so when I left air traffic that I'd gone from a job that was very well paid, very well thought of and you kind of went into any social situation, people ask what you did and I thought and then it, it became a thing. So when you leave that and they're like what do you do? Like meh, I travel for a bit and then I sort of had a little travel blog and I was like oh, they're there and then it became a thing. But I think I very much exactly what you said fed my identity and my ego and my self worth, my value into this business.

And then I separated from my ex husband and we later got divorced and it became everything because it was my only source of income. I no longer had a safety net of somebody else's income or anything. So the, the urgency and the fear that if I stopped, took my foot off the pedal to use the car analogy, what would happen? What, you know, it might all disappear and then what would I do? And yeah, it just became, go, go, go, don't stop, because it might all fall apart and that is not healthy.

H: Yes. And honestly, I appreciate you bringing up the traumatic and disruptive things that went on too, because when you leave a highly paid, highly respected job with security and benefits and all that, and you don't have something equally impressive to replace it with, it's a real genuine loss that needs to be grieved. And sometimes it's hard to feel okay to get support for that because they're like, you did this to yourself. So, you know, understanding what someone goes through to make that kind of change and it takes time to build up the new business. But going through a divorce, which I certainly been part of my life experience, you absolutely feel like all the things I'm doing are 100% necessary and if I stop a single one of them, I could lose it all. So I think given that context, probably the very scariest part of our work together was you realizing that I have like 17 different offers and she's asking me to cut them in half.

Now usually I would ask for a lot bigger cut than that, but I didn't want you to totally freak out. We ended up cutting your offers, I think from 17 down to nine and at the same time narrowing the focus of your business to travel in Europe and your membership. And you told me at the time, I'm absolutely terrified that my income will completely collapse and I will never recover. But what actually happened to your revenue when you right sized the business and stop trying to do everything for everyone and focus on where most of your money came from and what was actually sustainable.

G: So you made it easy for me, which I appreciate because I didn't have to delete things and like just completely turn them off. What I did is they're still there, the funnels for everything else are still there. But what I don't do anymore is actively promote them, which made it a lot easier on my poor little heart because these are my babies and I could just sort of leave them there and they're fine.

But yeah, thing like the brain space that came from like what content to create, what to talk about on emails or whatever, what I was going to plan for the next three months or whatever was so much easier when it came to just focusing on two different things. And it made it again the mental weight of stuff. We have our to do list, but behind the to do list if you've got, you know, right email for the week or whatever, you've still got to think, well, what topic am I going to write? How long is it going to be? I'm putting me images in, Am I doing a video?

Like, and there's all this other stuff that comes behind that to do list. And just being able to reduce that massively has helped a load in terms of just having space to think about other things that hide, don't delete tactic was something you prompted me to come up with. I hadn't actually done that with a previous client, but as I got to know you better, I'm like, there's no way I'm going to get her to just like you say, murder your babies. And I was like, okay and I, trust me, you know, I get it. So I'm like, okay, well, what if we don't actually kill them? What if we just let them take a long nap in a room where you don't see them all the time? Like, what if that's what we're doing?

H: Yeah, and I remember specifically, one of the ways that we talked about doing this is you had, oh my God, thousands of videos and photos that you had collected on all your various adventures, which traditionally you want to repurpose them and use them in your email, with your membership, in your marketing, in ads, all the things. But they had accumulated because, you know, as you were saying earlier when you go on travels and you see, oh, look at this, and ooh, look at this and oh, this would be a good photo and oh, I've got to videotape this. You've got so much content and it just piles and piles and piles and piles.

And at one point it was like, is it succumb to Jesus? Is it possible that there's just so much in that repository that you're actually never going to go in there and use any of it? And you were like, yeah, I'm like, so and yet there's so much guilt because all this stuff has value and my clients and members would love its but it's just so much. And it's like, well, okay, what about from this point forward? And you've had several adventures since this conversation. What if you be a little bit more discriminating and a little bit more intentional about what you actually capture what photos, what videos.

You delete some of them while you're still on that trip so you're not coming back with a whole boatload. And then you think about only accumulating enough for what you can actually have the capacity to use and let's just put away the archives. Let's just put them away and so they're not constantly reminding you and making you feel guilty, let's just set them aside. So they're literally out of sight, out of mind, which ADHD is very good at. And at some point you're like, I can see the day where I can just completely let these go. Today is not that day but I no longer feel terrorized by their existence. That was a huge turning point.

G: Yeah, it was. You hit the nail on the head massively because you said, are you ever actually gonna go back through all of these files and find the three that you want? And the answer was no. I mean, I have thousands of photos and videos from the past eight years of basically full time travel. And no, I'm not and I've already got the clips on my phone and on a hard drive that I use when I'm editing my videos and stuff and I've sort of developed a bit of a routine. I tried it once a month, but whenever.

Where I can either sit and watch a movie or sit and listen to an audiobook, which I like to, and go through my phone and it becomes a bit of a treat because I get three hours of work time, but it's not really work time to an audiobook of something or other and it's great. So I basically am rewarding myself and that has really helped as well. Just keep everything manageable and keep everything. I'm not 100% on top of it, but I'm so much better than I was, which is a win. Definitely, I'm much nicer to myself about that sort of thing as well.

H: Oh, my goodness, that makes me so happy. Because where we started at the beginning, when you filled out the intake questionnaire and said, I cannot take a Sunday off without guilt. Six months later, you took a full, intentional, deliberate, protected week of recovery before you went into travel season, including daily naps, if I recall where you used to just work, work, work, work, work, literally right up to the very second. And then you'd leave on the adventure feeling stressed out, tired, unprepared.

This time you're like, okay, I'm going to transition in. Because we talked a lot about transitions and where so much of our exhaustion comes from, because we don't plan for them and we don't do them. We don't give ourselves any breaks whatsoever. We just have the enormous thing right next to the next enormous thing with nothing in between. Did the guilt go away or did you just learn to do it anyway? Even though the guilt was kind of present or in the background?

G: Bit of both. The guilt is much less, it's still there. I am way better at having weekends off and unless there's something like really urgent on and I still publish my YouTube videos on a Sunday and I probably shouldn't, but unless something really urgent has happened, then I try not to check my emails at all weekend. And if I do have to work because I just physically can't not I try and do something that's fun, maybe opening one of those 30 courses that I have never opened before, you know, something that I enjoy doing. But the other thing that I'm really much better at is planning in these recovery weeks. So that was the week before I went and did six weeks of non stop group travel trips in Ireland.

And then the week after I came back from that, instead of jumping straight back into normal work, I had a recovery week. Now that doesn't mean I don't work at all, but I am intentionally planning in and the things that I know drain me like editing YouTube videos and creating social media content and all this kind of stuff I just didn't do that week and I kept it to the things that basically is just sitting in front of my laptop and doing admin and all that kind of stuff, which is a massive change, massive change because I'm actually having karma weeks and recovery weeks and then having some weekends off most weekends.

H: Oh my goodness, this is so good. And I honest, God, Kath, I would not have predicted it from the beginning, but I have to hand it to you, you are very coachable because little by little you're like, even when it's hard, I know I need to do this. And you are also willing to explore not just the habit, but like we talked about, the ego and the identity that's wrapped up around all this. But recognizing that what's the point of being self employed? What's the point of doing all the hard work of starting your own business if you have essentially recreated the conditions that caused you to be so stressed out in your corporate life that you wanted to leave and so many of us do. But something close to the end of our work happened that was like, oh shit. We had just kind of got, I feel like we had gotten everything kind of dialed in and really moving forward.

And you had right sized the business and you had hidden the extra offers. You were not dealing with the thousands of videos and all that and then you got kind of a pile on, for lack of a better term, on social media, where and I don't want to traumatize you or the audience by reliving every detail, but you really, you really got your ass handed to you in the worst possible way. And at the time you said, I need a playbook for dealing with these things, I don't want to have talks. How did you handle that experience? And you can tell as much or as little as you want about it, but how did you handle it differently now that you had a way of thinking about your business and your brain that made you feel more in charge?

G: Yeah, it was one of those things, I think anyone who posts on social media or YouTube, it was a news article that came out, I shared it, which was basically my job. And oh, the backlash and the nasty comments and the things and people telling me I was making things up because I enjoyed drama and all. It was just a really horrible thought. And I think our call fell in the middle of it. So you got me in full on like, oh, this is rubbish, I don't like this and I think there were a couple of things. One was I realized how much I was holding myself to the standard of, well, if I don't put out a YouTube video every week, if I don't post on Instagram every day and Facebook and tick tock and LinkedIn and all everything, and if I don't send out an email every week, and if I.

Then people will judge me because people are looking at me so intimately that they will notice everything I do. People don't care, they didn't notice I've not posted on YouTube for weeks and they nobody cares. So I've got a lot better at probably again being kinder to myself, but also being realistic about the fact that nobody is telling me I don't have a boss. No one is saying you have to put out a YouTube. I am making that pressure, I'm putting that on myself. So when that was all kicking off, I just said to myself, just stop for two days, just, just stop. Do something else, do something fun, just stop. Get off the Instagram and social media and everything else so that really helped. And actually weirdly doing that made me realize that I can have a little bit of a break for a couple of days and nothing happens, nothing goes wrong.

I'm also a lot better at just not reading the comments on social media or on YouTube or whatever. So, yeah, I do go back and I read, like, my Instagram messages and stuff, but I am a lot more selective about when I do that and also what headspace I'm in. And I think that in itself, overall, rather than now having a to do list every day, one of the things that I do that works with my health issues because I have quite bad energy fluctuations now with all the various things that have gone on. And there are some days where I just don't have the energy to do anything other than maybe answer a couple of emails and I don't know. But there are days like this morning, I got up, I walked the dog, I filmed not one, not two, but three YouTube videos. I am on fire today, it's great.

So I have a list of things to do every week, and I arrange that as and when I feel the energy to do. So if something like that does happen again, where I'm having a bad day or there's a bad because why is it and I think this is an ADHD trait. But one bad comment, you can get 50 lovely comments about how helpful you are. One bad one and you're in floods of tears. You're like, what is going on, this is ridiculous. So I'm better at dealing with that and just generally, I think I've got a bit more perspective on the fact that this is a business. It's not my entire life and my entire identity.

H: And I want to land the plane with this, you started creating some mantras for yourself, Kath. So because you know, we have plenty of real estate in our brain, plenty of those old neural pathways devoted to keeping us in the same patterns that brought you to my door. And one of the mantras that you created for yourself, I'm going to cue you up and then have you finish it. Nothing on this list…

G: Cannot wait. I say that to myself every day. As well as success is not supposed to feel like survival, those are my two. I say that every day. Every day. They're on my board up here.

H: Yeah, I remember you had them on your board. And honestly, I think that this is one of the most powerful stories and the reasons why I wanted to share your story and story of our work together with the ADHD-ish audience. Because you mentioned earlier, it's like, oh, I'm just gonna buy this course or learn this trick or go to this mastermind or hire this coach and everything will be better. You're gonna have ADHD the rest of your life. You are going to be running this business for as long as you choose to. So being a work in progress, improved but not resolved, it's so much more honest than this magic pill fairy tale ending. And it sounds to me like you're just as successful and actually enjoying it a whole lot more.

G: I am. I am. Yeah, thanks.

H: Love it.