Welcome to the ADHD-ish podcast, where we explore what it truly takes to build a thriving business when your brain is wired differently. In this episode, host Diann Wingert is joined by Morra Aarons-Mele to introduce the ATAMM framework; focusing on attention, time, agency, and motivation.

Many business owners with ADHD faces intense burnout by relying on anxiety-driven habits instead of honoring personal needs. This conversation provides practical strategies for establishing radical self-acceptance, mapping your unique chronotype, and shaping a sustainable ADHD business strategy.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS & TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 – Entrepreneur anxiety and ADHD drivers

05:10 – Coaching strategies for resilience in business

11:25 – Smarter growth tactics and ADHD business strategy

17:40 – Small business owner challenges and solutions

23:55 – Leadership focus: guiding teams with clarity

30:20 – Accountability and delegation tips for founders

36:35 – Scaling strategies that play to your strengths

42:50 – Burnout prevention and sustainable success habits

Morra shares insights from her ATAM framework, grounded in over two decades of research and thousands of interviews, which distills the struggles and success factors of neurodivergent professionals into four actionable domains:

• Attention: Understanding your personal style, harnessing focus, and protecting against distractions.
• Time: Navigating time blindness, building healthy schedules, and pacing to maximize presence and energy.
• Agency: Having the power to structure your environment and processes in ways that support wellbeing.
• Motivation: Identifying intrinsic and extrinsic motivators that actually work for you.

One surprising truth: Gaining control of your calendar, environment, and workflows doesn’t guarantee balance or fulfillment if you don’t understand your own wiring. In fact, you're more vulnerable to burnout because you're paying the "passion tax" and your brain doesn't have an "enoughness" monitor.

Fun Fact From the Episode:

Did you know that delaying filling your gas tank (literally running on fumes) is an ADHD-ish trait? Not because of flakiness, but because life is more exciting when you turn everyday chores into a dopamine-driven game! Listen for this hilarious/ cringeworthy confession…

About today’s guest:

Morra Aarons-Mele helps leaders build strength by tuning into their inner lives. She teaches executive education at Harvard and advises global organizations on mentally healthy leadership.

Recognized as a LinkedIn Top 10 Voice in Mental Health and honored with the Mental Health America Media Award, Morra hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast and is the author of The Anxious Achiever (HBR) and Hiding in the Bathroom (HarperCollins).

Morra’s forthcoming HBR Press book, The Atypical Achiever: Leading and Thriving When Your Brain is Wired Differently, contains groundbreaking research on how neurodivergent professionals navigate leadership, and will be published in June of 2027.

Connect with Morra:

Linked In Website Podcast - The Anxious Achiever Books

Neurostrength study Fast Company Article on Morra's framework

Mentioned in this episode:

Ellen Galinsky - Families & Work Institute - The PassionTax - The Canary Code

Love Island - Dr Michael Gervais - Extra large wall size calendar (Amazon)

Your ADHD-ish™ host, Diann Wingert

Diann Wingert is a licensed psychotherapist turned business strategist and 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 neurodivergent business owners who are ready to create stand-out, sought-after, profitable businesses based on their unique brilliance.

Want to align your business with your ADHD-ish motivation, attention, agency and time? Book a free consultation with Diann and let’s talk about how I can help.

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

H: You have written about motivating yourself using anxiety as fuel and a lot of worst-case scenarios for focus, but you discovered that approach completely fell apart with your husband. How did you realize you were looking at a wiring issue rather than a communication problem and how did that end up leading you to develop the TAM framework?

Do any of you feel like that? Like they give me migraines, they make me feel like I'm being zapped by kryptonite. I had to like quit corporate America because I couldn't handle fluorescent lights, you know? So I knew the presenting problem, I didn't know the cause or have any of the language to make sense of it. And when I started learning about neurodivergence and motivation, I had this aha moment of like, what you use to motivate yourself. It's never gonna work on him. It is just making him resent you and it was the most liberating, freeing, beautiful mindset change I've ever had, I think.

H: And we already knew that your husband was, is ADHD by this time, right?

G: Yeah.

H: But you didn't realize what a huge difference that makes, especially when it comes to motivation.

G: Well, I'm gonna, this is the most stark and also sounds petty example of it. So I being anxious, and my mom used to run out of gas all the time, like in the '80s, you know, before cell phones. And so I am like very paranoid about always having a good amount of gas in my car and my husband would do this thing. since we were dating, where he would like run on empty and almost push himself, like play a little game to see how far he could get before like just about to run out of gas. Once he did it while we were in rural Costa Rica and I was pregnant.

H: Oh no.

G: I was seriously gonna murder him. I was in the backseat, like, 'cause there were friends in the car and I was like, I hate you, you know and I could never I was like, this is the dumbest, why would he do this? This is like stupid, it's reckless. It's not grown-up behavior like, meh, meh, meh and then I realized he hates driving, hates it. Gets so bored and this is his way of gamifying driving to keep some novelty.

H: I hope you don't lose respect for me, Morra, but I used to do the same shit.

G: You're joking.

H: I shit you not. I did the same thing. I didn't do it all the time because I was a grown-ass woman, married, kids, owned a business with my ex, had, you know, gainful employment but it was fun to see. You're kind of pushing the envelope. It's not fun is when you actually do have to run out of gas and you are in a remote area that's not terribly safe at night before cell phones.

G: Oh my God.

H: So probably once the cell phones came around, if I didn't already have so much responsibility by that time, I probably would've kept doing it cuz I'd be like, well, I could just call someone. But to explain this to someone who is not ADHD, they're like, you're outta your fucking mind.

G: Well, it's just dumb, you know? No offense.

H: It's, no, I'm not offended cuz otherwise I wouldn't be sharing this story. But it's truly indefensible once you're a grownup. But man, it really, really does help clarify very directly what the difference is between a person who's motivated by anxiety and a person who's motivated by winning.

G: Yep.

H: You're trying not to experience negative events. He's trying to get positive events in his brain through dopamine. Now, apart from the family, which is always such a great incubator, I think, and you've got a lot of neurodivergence in your family and I say I got nothing but neurodivergent fruit on my family tree. Beyond that, you've done a ton of research, thousands of interviews with professionals. And of course, because you're using the scientific mindset and honestly, I have to go back for a second, Morra, because you said you didn't have, you had the experience, you had the lived experience, and you could describe it really well because you're a good storyteller.

You didn't have the clinical or the technical language. I think the combination of the two is so incredibly powerful because, you know, we don't listen to the people who can only talk about something from a clinical perspective because without the storytelling, it's not interesting enough to learn from them. Especially if you have ADHD, you better make it interesting so you've done 1,300+ interviews with professionals. Now, sometimes an idea just kind of clicks in your mind, it's like a download that's fully formed. Did TAMM happen for you that way, or did it take a while to connect the dots and see how the struggle kept really collapsing into just 4 issues?

G: So quick note, I have renamed TAMM, which is an acronym that stands for Time, Attention, Agency, and Motivation, to ATAM, because it's catchier and I had gotten feedback. So it's now attention, time, agency, motivation, same stuff.

H: I'll make a note of that.

G: Just literally just happened. So I have been studying the workplace for 20 years. When I was in my late 20s, started blogging and at first I blogged about politics, which is my professional field, but I really soon shifted into workplace dynamics again because of my neurodivergence that I had no words for but I talked openly about my anxiety and my depression at work. And I was introduced to the field of work redesign, work design, and what we used to call work-life or workplace flexibility. And when I broke out on my own as a freelance consultant, after going to graduate school and studying this stuff, I worked for a woman named Ellen Galinsky who ran the Families and Work Institute, who is just a lioness of everything we know about how to make work work.

And I did her internet marketing and communications stuff and I said, can you mentor me and I'll help you. And she brought me into this incredible field with all these incredible people who were studying how to design work to meet real people's needs. And at the time it was a very mother-dominated dialogue because people were like, oh, only working mothers wanna work flexibly. Men can just show up every day and so that was the best education I got because I got to work at the feet of these people who were inventing best practices, doing the research. How do we make work work for everybody, not just the ideal worker. And so I had that framework, which was always about how, when, where we do our work. And then as I started, you know, getting into, again, into the literature around neurodivergence, and really obviously always when you're talking to people, the why is so important.

I thought, what are the characteristics that the very special people that I have interviewed use to stay sort of sustainably happy and engaged at work when they've got so much else, frankly, that they're pushing against that's running upstream? And it was these 4 factors, time, how they know their relationship with time, they know how to manage their time for them. They know how to pay attention, even when it's very hard. They understand their needs for agency and they understand what motivates them and they're very values-driven and they're very purpose-driven. And so the thing that I love about this framework is it works for everyone, not just neurodivergent people, because most of us are raised in a culture that tells us how we should be and it's not always how we actually are.

H: 1,000% and as a matter of fact, knowing these things about yourself until relatively recently, and man, you would be the first one to agree, we still have a long way to go.

G: Oh my God.

H: In the workplace, especially when you consider Gen Z is reporting identifying as neurodivergent in really high rates compared to previous generations. And the number of women in particular who have 2 decades of work experience under their belt before they find out or figure out increasingly that they have ADHD or they are autistic or both, they have been required to conform to the norm, to the neurotypical norm for decades without knowing these very important things about themselves because they had to make it work at great personal expense to their mental health and wellbeing.

G: It's so expensive, and that's the exciting thing when you get into the research on attention and time, is that you realize that this is a resource that is expensive and precious.

H: And limited.

G: And limited. And you can sort of, I always like to tell people, think of yourself as an elite athlete. You know, think of yourself as like LeBron, what does LeBron need to be the greatest? What do you need to be your like, take yourself seriously and I think it's really hard for a lot of us to take ourselves seriously.

H: I love your point, Morra, about this isn't just for the specials among us, this is for everybody. I'm sure you're familiar with the term canaries in the coal mine. I first learned I heard it way back in the '90s when I was at UCLA for my MSW. And one of my favorite professors used that term, which I had not yet heard at the time. But ultimately my version of it now, to paraphrase, is what's good for us is good for them.

G: And there's a great book, The Canary Code. I don't know if you've met Lyudmila Preslova, which I love.

H: 100%. And so I think it's this understanding that while we may be the more neurologically and sometimes temperamentally sensitive to our environment. Everyone is affected by these 4 things and the workplace benefits from all of us being optimized and really understanding what we need. And of course, anyone listening, anyone who identifies with ADHD or ADHD traits understands the importance of, you know, all of these traits. But the one that really stuck out to me from the model is agency.

And the reason why is my people by and large are self-employed. They're entrepreneurs, they're small business owners, they're creatives, they're independent professionals. So they already own their calendar, allegedly. They own their calendar, they own their environment, they own their processes, but many of them are still completely cooked. They're on the verge of burnout and I've got a lot of theories about why that is. But what does your research tell you about what actually happens once someone has control, more or less, over these 4 things?

G: Yeah. I'm not sure I know the answer to that and I would love to hear your theories. Because honestly, a lot of the people that I work with are feel like their agency needs aren't being met. So they're kind of in a different place. But, you know, I mean, I think that one of the things that is really hard is what's called the passion tax. And John Yachimowicz at Harvard Business School is sort of the leading researcher on the price of passion at work. And his research would tell us that the more passion we have for our work, the more vulnerable we are to burnout.

H: Wow.

G: Because we just love it so much and we're so driven. And especially I've been self-employed for 20 years, there's nobody telling you, good job, you're done for the day, go home. So if you have anxiety, if you are that type who just wants to push, push, push, push, push, there's no off button ever and it's really hard to turn off. And it's a discipline that you have to learn so too much flexibility is no flexibility at all. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs get themselves in that mess before they're like, you know what, maybe those 9-to-5ers did know something after all.

H: Well, the 9-to-5ers or any employee at any level, unless you're in the C-suite, in which case you're not punching anybody's time card, there's some safety there. There's structure, there's support, there's supervision. There are systems and processes, and there's the culture of the people around you that kind of tell you when it's time to show up and when it's time to leave, even if you don't have official work hours, like in a law firm, you know, the competition about the earliest in and the last to leave and that means you're the most committed so you're the most promotable, yada, yada, yada. So I think, you know, starting with the Industrial Revolution and this idea of the 8-hour day, I'm sure you're familiar with the research. You know, nobody actually works 8 hours out of an 8-hour day.

G: It's the stupidest thing in the world.

H: Of course. But once we have allegedly complete control over our time, our energy, our motivation, our effort, and our attention, does that mean we work less? Well, you know the answer to that, most of us work a great deal more. And for I agree 100% with what you said about there's no one telling you, good job, you've done enough. I refer to it as our enoughness meter. We do not have any way of gauging what enough actually is because of imposter syndrome, because of perfectionism, because of time blindness, because of hyperfocus, because there's nobody there telling us enough already unless it's our spouse who's like, it's 7:30, we're starving here, make some dinner. So, and also you're right, it's the passion tax.

If you really enjoy what you do, a lot of us would do it for a whole lot less than we're getting paid. But when you're self-employed, don't you let that secret out or you could go broke as a joke.

And we went to lunch and she said, well, I can always have lunch on Fridays. And I was working at a large company at this time and she I said, why? She said, well, Fridays are for my dad and me. And I thought, and she was like 29 years old, she didn't have kids. She was single, but she had figured that out and I thought, I want that. So I think what it takes is discipline, it takes the self, sort of self-actualization to say, I'm not going to listen to all the voices around me. I'm going to do what's good for me and it takes practice. But if you can get there, when you truly have agency, it's the best feeling in the world.

H: That awareness led me to something I encourage most of my coaching clients to do when we first start working together, is to buy a wall-sized calendar.

G: Yes! Oh my God. Obsessed.

H: You're gonna put this ginormous thing up on the wall and you're first going to block out how much time do you wanna take off during the holidays if you observe them? How much time do you wanna take off during the summer if you have kids or grandkids that are gonna be available to you or you're gonna have more responsibility for? How many days do you wanna work each week? Are there blocks of time that you wanna take off for writing, for relaxation, for you know, whatever.

Block that off first, that is protected time. And now we're gonna create your business, your offerings, all of that around what's left because most of us do that ass backwards. We try to create those things in the leftovers when we're not working. You're gonna get crumbs, you're never gonna get a full meal doing it that way.

G: Yeah. I think it's so important, you know, and I think, again, speaking in my 20th year of this stuff, I mean, I was really excited because I had planned to take all of August off. I really hate to work in the summer, but for many years in my previous business, the summer was our busiest time, so we didn't get to stop. But in my new life, I decided, I don't like working in the summer so I had really worked a plan to take all of August off. And then yesterday I get an inbound from a client that I have been trying to land to do leadership training for probably a year and a half. And she said, I need someone August 11th to fly out and do my leadership retreat.

And so what am I gonna say? Now there's a world where I could be like, no, Morra, this is your boundary. You've worked hard, you really need some time off, no, or there's a yes. Now, in the old days, the yes would've been an immediate yes 'cause of my anxiety. No one's ever gonna hire you again, don't a bird in the hand beats two in the bush, yada, yada. But what I was able to do this time was say, this is a choice. I decided to say yes, but it felt good 'cause it wasn't an autopilot decision made out of anxiety.

H: Yes and it’s one of the true privilege of self-employment, is that when you work for others, you have to bend the knee to their rules. When you work for yourself, you make your own rules. And I do believe, especially people that are neurodivergent, need more rules and fewer exceptions.

G: Interesting. Even though we don't want them, probably.

H: Well, true that. But the thing is, is that most of us make so many exceptions and so many accommodations for other people, whether it's because of anxiety, imposter syndrome, people pleasing, all of the above. But I think that the privilege is I make the rules, I get to make the exceptions, I get to decide. So it depends and this falls into an, it depends, is it a hard rule? No August for no amount of money and no opportunity will be good enough? No, it's like, I will say yes, and it's not the default yes. It's the intentional yes and it's a yes you feel good about so, but anyone listening who thinks, yeah, good for you. That sounds nice, I'm still in my first couple of years of business. I have to say yes to everything, whether it's convenient or not. Duly noted.

G: Oh, I did that for years.

H: That's what I'm saying. This is not only discipline and experience, it is laying down the tracks for however many years it takes of saying yes to things you don't really want because you need to.

G: You kinda have to earn it. Like the older I get, and I don't ever wanna sound like those, someone who says the older I get, but you know, I meet a lot of younger people who are, you know, they're entrepreneurs at 23, 24, and, and I'm like, girl, you kind of need to earn it and so I do think that that's really important. Now, if you're an older entrepreneur and you're like, I've already put in my time for 25 years in corporate, like, I'm not doing this, fine, you've earned that too.

H: But as you know, putting in your time in the corporate world or in academia or in nonprofits or politics, wherever you put your time in the military, does not translate over to, I don't have to do any of that now that I'm self-employed. As a matter of fact, that's part of the humility of going into business for yourself at any age, because your expectations may have to be renegotiated.

G: Oh God, it's humiliating to be an entrepreneur. I mean, for every chance where a big client comes and says, we need you in a week, I've had a million instances that I've been very public about where I'm like, I don't have any money. You know, it is so much of either pole.

H: Thank you for being honest about this, Morra, because you have an excellent track record. You've got a wonderful platform. You appear in all the right places and yet, and I want people to really hear this, is like, nobody has it better than you. Nobody has it easier than you. Nobody has everything just falling at their feet and no one dares to say no to them because they're such a big fucking deal at this point. We all have to endure the humility and I actually like the humility because I think it keeps us more honest with ourselves.

Okay, let's talk about time, right? You talk, 'cause I'm paying attention to the time and I wanna make sure I don't blather on and run out of our time. You talk about time as chronotype and pacing rather than time, which I think is a really important distinction. And you've talked about designing a day around your presence of mind instead of an idealized version of it, 'cause that's where most people with ADHD in particular fall away from the standard productivity advice. Most of the business owners I work with and the people who listen to this podcast built their calendar around client expectations or needs.

G: Yeah, for sure.

H: Whether they check them out or not and they never once considered, do I have the energy for this? Do I have the capacity for this? Does this fit with my other obligations? So they're always at risk for burnout and are often consumed with resentment because they're doing things they'd rather not do and they never check.

G: Correct.

H: What do you tell someone, who's starting out? Are those 2 things competing with each other or is there a better way?

G: So I believe everything starts with self-understanding and that you, before you start anything, or whether you work for someone else, whether you work for yourself, you are never going to be happy and sustained and successful unless you know who you are and what you need.

H: Preach.

G: Right? It's like, that's it so what does that mean when it comes to time? Well, what is my chronotype, it's just a fancy word, what is my chronotype? Like, when am I at my most focused, most energetic? When am I tired? What are my sleep patterns like? On my ideal day, what time would I get up and what time would I go to bed? There are many people who you and I have worked with who simply this sounds entitled, but they just can't do 8:00 AM meetings.

And I work with people who are depressed, who have mental illness, and the world is just not built for someone who doesn't do 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM meetings, unfortunately, it sucks. So then your question is, do I try to change myself and fit myself into, you know, a round hole for, or do I try to find work, an employer, a role that lets me work when I need to? That's a big question but first you need to know when am I spent? When am I fried? When am I on? What gives me energy? What zaps it? Everyone is different. I have ADHD family who like literally cannot work without listening to music. Oh my God, I need silence.

H: I must have silence.

G: When I leave, I know that they just jack up the stereo and they're all happy and right, so great, that's you. So you have to know who you are and what you need, and you have to accept it and then you can make the choice, oh, you know, I really love this job. I'm gonna force myself to make 8:00 AM meetings and I'm just gonna figure this out or no, I really can't do this.

H: I used to, in my the way I work, I used to start with the foundation. The work with clients, I used to start with the foundation of self-awareness, and then we would move into self-acceptance. Over time, Morra, I realized I have to put self-acceptance first, I'll tell you why. Because a lot of people don't even know who they are and what they need because they never felt the agency or the permission or even how important these things are. They just did their best to try to do what was expected of them and couldn't understand why they struggled.

So what I realized is that when we're pushing on the self-awareness first without first laying down the foundation of self-acceptance, that increased self-awareness can feel dangerous because now they're learning about needs they didn't know they have that they're not sure they're safe asking for. So now I say radical self-acceptance is where we start because that makes it safe to find out, who am I? What do I need? Allegedly, our workplace and our clients, if we're self-employed, they want us to be at our best, or they should.

So us figuring out the ideal conditions for us to work in a healthy, sustainable way, everybody should want that. What's good for us is good for them. What's good for them is good for us. We have a little bit of a ways to go in making that the norm in the workplace, but I'm so grateful for voices like yours that are really making sure leadership hears this. Motivation is the tricky one, I think. Time, a lot of people talk about time, time blindness. I prefer time optimism, but time blindness, motivation. You know why because I always think I have more time than I actually have. So I'm really optimistic about my time until all of a sudden I'm like, oh shit, fuck, I'm at the last possible second. Motivation is the one we tend to fumble our time a lot.

G: Yeah. ADHD.

H: Motivation, that's the one we feel a lot of shame about, we've been called lazy, flaky. Most of us have been told from childhood, you're not living up to your potential, that whole list. What did your research reveal about motivational profiles that pushes back on this tired-ass story about willpower?

G: You know, willpower is great, but your chemistry kind of has to support it. I mean, we are animals, and motivation is really interesting if you just think about it like an animal. We all animals are motivated to survive, to procreate, to not die, right? To eat and that's what their brain is telling them to do, they feel no shame about that. And I think that we're not dissimilar you know, there are many of us whose dopamine just is like set off, you know, and motivation is really, as far as I understand it, I'm not a scientist, you know, dopamine and motivation have a very, you know, what's the word? One does not exist without the other and dopamine is the seeking of something. We think that it's the reward, but it's not. It's actually what causes us to seek, and that's motivation, right?

H: Yes.

G: And so we have a lot of shame around what we should be motivated by versus what we are. We actually have a lot of shame around time as well. What I came to realize in my research is time is a deeply moral and judgmental concept. All of this we have judgment around, but motivation is hard because we're supposed to be motivated by what? What are we supposed to be motivated by in our culture?

H: Money.

G: Money. Power.

H: Prestige.

G: A nice family, a good life, blah, blah, blah.

H: Stuff that looks impressive to others, mainly.

G: Yeah or to our parents or whatever. And if you have interest-based motivation, if you are motivated by, oh God, I just that is a really hard problem and I just want like 10 hours to sit here and figure out this problem, you have incredible potential in the world. But that message is probably going to be interrupted by, why don't you make more money? Or, why don't you want to interview for this position? It's time to move on now. And so when you really understand what motivates you, to me, motivation is as fundamental as values like, we yap on in leadership about understanding your values. Motivation is equally powerful.

H: That motivation gives life to your values. If you just have values without motivation, they're just going to sit there on your website or on some board in an office.

G: Motivation gives life to your values and so, know that and again, you're right. I guess self-acceptance comes first. I think there's something though, for a lot of us in trying to fake it before we make it.

H: 1,000%, Mprra.

G: You know, it's like, I don't accept myself. I've done so much work, but I understand myself. And so motivation is really, really important, there's lots of different kinds of motivation. It's different for everybody. And I wanna say one more thing that I learned in my research, which is, I think, really powerful. You know, we are told that we should be intrinsically motivated. We're told that we shouldn't care about money, power, prestige. It's so interesting, we live in a world that only cares about money, power, prestige, but we're told that we shouldn't. It's really messed up. And we're told that we should be, right? We teach our kids like, do what you love and the money will find you. Well, that's actually, that's not that true and Dr. Michael Gervais is someone whose work I really love. And what he has found in working with like the highest achievers in the world is that they are intrinsically motivated, but they are also extrinsically motivated. It's okay, but know what motivates you. I love money. I'm very motivated by money, I accept that. I'm not ashamed of it anymore.

H: But it's a tool, right? It's like the love of money is the root of all evil. You know what? Whatever floats your boat. I had a client a couple years ago who had a very nice position at a prestigious law firm in intellectual property. Girl, if I had gone to law school instead of social work, I would've loved to do intellectual property law, protecting the smarts of really smart people. Yes, queen, all day long. But this particular client was really struggling to be the rainmaker that she was hired to be, but she wasn't finding the motivation in it.

What we eventually tapped into, Morra, was that she really, and this was in alignment with her values, this is what gave her values life. She wanted to be able to practice what she called outrageous generosity. Beyond, you know, supporting the family, creating generational wealth, the typical things, she wanted to be able to practice outrageous generosity, which meant she wanted to give in a lavish, anonymous way to causes that she supported. So I'm like, okay, once we tapped into that, everything changed. Because now she knew that running the numbers, bringing in the big new clients, being the rainmaker in order to make rain, she had to tap into what she wanted to do with the raindrops.

G: That's right.

H: And it's like, that's such a great example of it and it's essential. You're right, it's like maybe the ignition switch. You might have a full tank of fuel, but you gotta be able to turn over the ignition switch. You talk a lot about anxiety. Your first book and your podcasts are about being an ambitious person with anxiety, and a lot of folks with ADHD have a great deal of anxiety, many listening to this podcast do. So many of my clients have told me that anxiety is what keeps them focused. Anxiety is literally the glue that holds their executive functioning together and keeps them moving. I have thoughts about that, I'm sure you do too. You know this pattern intimately as well. What have you learned about discerning useful fuel. We can call it useful fuel from the stuff that's literally just grinding your gears and depleting you.

G: Anxiety is often a great motivator. Fear is a great motivator. But, you know, it's interesting when you come back to sort of your motivations power your values, your values power your motivations. For most of us, anxiety is just a default reaction. It's a habit, it's not values-based really at all, except when it is. And this is why I love anxiety and this is a little abstruse, but bear with me. You know, anxiety as a motivator is, as a habit, is just, I get this new assignment, I'm super stressed about it. I know I'm gonna fail at it, I better stay at the office till 12. I better worry about it, I'm gonna just like lose sleep and just have like tunnel vision and blah, blah, blah. That's a pattern probably that you've always done and you're just acting on autopilot really, right? It's like, well, this behavior got me here, so I better keep repeating it.

H: It's a neural pathway that's devoted to maintaining the same.

G: Values-based anxiety, anxiety as a choice, as something I accept and welcome, and stress too, is I really care about this thing, whatever it is. It could be a swimming meet, it could be a presentation, it could be a dinner you're cooking. I don't care. I really care about this. The outcome matters to me, and I'm anxious about it 'cause like, I feel like there's a lot on the line and that's okay. And so what I encourage anxious achievers to do is to interrupt the pattern and make the choice. We are always gonna be anxious, about big things that we care about. No one was ever anxious about like watching the next episode of Love Island, I mean, maybe, I don't know. But no one was ever not anxious about their first day on a new job.

H: Or a first date.

G: Or a first date, or, you know, when you bring your baby home from the hospital or your book, your book coming out so I think that that's the key. And I think we shouldn't dismiss anxiety as a motivator out of hand and we should ask anxiety, what are you trying to tell me? Like, why are you here? And that is a hard thing to learn and bring into practice but once you do, you are free.

H: I just felt my shoulders just relax.

G: Oh my gosh.

H: That felt so good. Morra, this has been an absolute delightful conversation, as I knew it would be. I will be linking to your website, your first book, your podcast in the show notes. Is there anything that you wanna leave people with about maybe a little anticipation for something coming up in the near future with you?