H: I have so been looking forward to this conversation. I don't have nearly enough opportunities to speak with my genuine colleagues so Phil, let's jump right in. You spent quite a few years, decades in fact, running a company before you ever called yourself a coach. What did having a quote unquote real business teach you that coach training simply couldn't?
G: Yeah. And it's great to be here, by the way, I really appreciate it. It's very interesting because obviously I did things to some extent the other way around to what a lot of other people might do. I came from I was a computer games programmer and then I launched business and then I became a coach. Running a company is quite different, I think, to running a coaching company. Scaling a business, growing a business, changing with the business, allowing the business to grow, all of the challenges and things that you actually get day-to-day, that even as a business coach, people don't really say to me. So there's a lot of things that happen day to day, week to week, month to month that I don't think even during my coaching conversations, unless I asked those questions, they would necessarily come up.
And the reality is, as a coach and a business owner, we have very kind of many similar things. Issues with cash flow and challenges of trying to sell, and all of those things are kind of the same. But unless you have a particularly large coaching business, the form of running a company that's or the actions of running a company that's, say, 20-something people, which is where my business got to, is very different. And you have to think about scaling quite differently compared to thinking, how do I get more customers in, for example, and how do I work on my LinkedIn strategy and those kind of things? You have to think at a different scale, that's probably one of the really key things that I would say was a major difference.
H: Probably a little bit less of a change for me going from having a psychotherapy practice to going into coaching, but what most people didn't know was over the many years that I was in my former career, I owned and ran several businesses with my current and previous husband. I didn't talk about it because I was a psychotherapist, but I was also a co-owner of a business. And you're right, there's a big difference between a coaching practice and a coaching business and so you brought all those skills in with you. One of the other things that you and I know that we have in common is that we were both late to the ADHD party, diagnosed well into adult life. And most of the people I know have somewhat of a similar version of the story. Years of different professions, seeing different professionals, maybe going to different therapists, maybe even seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety, depression, but nobody ever brought up those 4 little letters. So what's your backstory about how you came to the diagnosis and who finally helped you figure that out?
G: Oh, the books. I always think that, so I trained as a psychotherapist years ago, although I didn't go into actual practice for various reasons I had my other business, but I was always interested in the mind. And so back then, I think I realized that I was somehow different I was different. I could tell that something was a little bit off compared to everyone else and obviously that led to lots of masking. I actually remember, so I'm autistic as well as ADHD. I remember buying a book that was primarily, I think, about eye contact, what's normal. Maybe that was a section in the book or something this is going back 30 years now. And I remember thinking, I don't understand this eye contact thing.
So you're right, over the years I spoke to lots of therapists. No one ever mentioned ADHD until I had a therapist when I was, well, it was probably about 5 and a half years ago now. And she was the first one to say, oh, hang on a second, I think this might be neurodiversity. And the thing that I'd brought up for her was, the term highly sensitive person. I'd gone through the list and said, this seems spookily similar to who I am and I thought, I've got a new label. It's not this thing over here or this thing over here. It seems to be this highly sensitive person and she said, it just seems like a neurodiversity to me and my mind just literally exploded, and I thought is that possible?
And then I remember I started, as I will tend to, I went down lots of rabbit holes and I joined a community and I said in the community, oh, do I just need to drink more coffee? I mean, 5 years ago I knew nothing, nothing about stimulation, dopamine. And they said very kindly, it's a different kind of stimulation that you need yeah, so I was utterly grateful to that therapist for mentioning. And I mean, I know now that she was or is also neurodiverse and presumably had been, because she's a fair amount younger than me, presumably had been diagnosed. We've never actually discussed it much, but a few years earlier than me or a number of years earlier than me. And it was obviously it was pretty obvious to her and yeah, I'm utterly, utterly grateful to her for, I guess, trusting me with that. It must be a little difficult for a therapist to be willing to say that, but I'm utterly grateful for it.
H: One of the things that I know about you, Phil, that I think is really quite brilliant and I can clearly see how it is a super ability as a result of being ADHD and autistic is that you think in frameworks. I've experienced it and I would love to experience it with you right now. With your clients, you build frameworks live during coaching sessions with them, customized to whoever's in front of you. You've built one with me, let's build one now. So on the horizontal axis, let's have the hyperactive impulsive at one end and inattentive distractible at the other, with the combined type in the middle, just like it is in the DSM. ADHD, 3 different subtypes: hyperactive impulsive, inattentive distractible, and combined. Why do you think that the combined type produces most entrepreneurs, or the most successful entrepreneurs who have ADHD tend to be combined type?
G: Yeah. I mean, there's always the opportunity to be at either end and be a successful entrepreneur. I think it can be a little bit more challenging to be very much at one end or very much at the other. I think it requires a little bit of work but the combined type gives enough of each without having too much of either. So enough risk-taking, without moving forwards with something completely different every week. People who are very kind of at the hyperactive end are probably more likely to be serial entrepreneurs. If they're going to go ahead and do something like that, they'll go and do something for a couple of years and my suggestion for them is always like, just deal with that. Start the business, grow the business, put people in to run the business, move on to the next one. It's fine, you don't have to fight that constantly.
But yeah, combined type gives enough of all of the things that entrepreneurs can still move forwards. Because I think that if you're, let's say, if you're very, very hyperactive, it's difficult to get anything done. And at the other end, it's also difficult to get anything done, but for completely different reasons and that's where the challenges lie. So I think in the middle, you have enough of the, oh, I'm going to, I might struggle a little bit to get things done, but I'm thinking a lot about these things and enough of the restlessness to take the risks and move forwards. So yeah, that bit in the middle seems to fit entrepreneurship very, very well.
H: Yeah, I totally agree with you, Phil. As a matter of fact, when I first got my diagnosis, which is combined type, and I started working with folks like us, I realized, oh, they, all of them, as you say, can be successful in entrepreneurship. The challenges, the greater challenges that interfere with success and hold people back and where they need more support, they need more structures, they need more accountability is at the opposite ends. But how I'm looking at it is impulsivity is the engine and we may not even call it impulsivity, we may call it a creative urge. We may call it an instinct, we may call it, you know, intuition or just drive, but you have to take action to move forward. If you're terrified to make a mistake, which is more common with the inattentive type, you're not going to take enough action to move forward.
If you're doing nothing but taking action, you might be scattering your energy in a million different directions. But, I like to think that nobody really wants failure, but if you take lots of actions, you're going to fail and if it doesn't stop you, you will develop resilience as well. So I think that also tends to cluster around the combined type. So let's think about the inattentive group in particular, which tends, as you know, to skew female. We're not claiming that inattentive founders can't be successful or that they've got the hardest time being that way. But sometimes people will say, well, I don't think these women should start businesses because they're really going to struggle a lot harder. What's a different way of saying that that's more hopeful and more accurate?
G: Yeah. So the reality for me is anyone can be successful in business, that's my general position. A question that I love to ask, or a shift that I love to suggest, is moving people from, can I, just adding the word how on the front. How can I, and it's actually a surprisingly profound shift because can I is the fear, is the maybe even slightly victim mentality that people can fall into, whereas how can I is an agency statement. So how can I go and do this? Now, if someone's more inattentive and struggling more with generally taking action, focusing, maybe not having the confidence, et cetera, et cetera, from a business perspective, my question is always the same. It's this, how can I? So, what can you install into your business that will handle or help to handle the challenges that you have. I tend to mirror board a lot in my sessions.
So I'll draw something and I'll say, look, you've got this bit covered over here and you don't have all of these bits covered. You don't have to have the whole thing covered. Your job is just to make sure that the whole thing is covered, that's your entire job. You can go and do some of the work if you want to, but you don't have to. So for someone who's more at the kind of inattentive end, the question is really still the same. It's how do I make up for the challenges that I have? That requires people to be honest about what they are and have awareness about what they are. And that's one of the things that I think coaching can be particularly useful for is helping people zoom out of themselves and spot the patterns that keep coming along.
And once people spot the patterns, the how can I question or the solution to that becomes often a lot easier because the question is, or the solution is, can I put AI in to go and do this? Can I remove the task entirely, it doesn't need to be there. Are there psychological reasons that I'm not letting go of this? Some kind of piece of ego or something that's from decades ago, or is it just something that I can't focus on. Well, fine, go and do some body doubling or whatever it is. There's a solution to absolutely anything that you might want. And it's just to shift from that idea that you have to be the person that does everything to be the you have to be the person that gets everything done. That's your only job as a founder. Everything else can be done by someone else.
In fact, in the scaling community, there's this concept very much of firing yourself, but you don't need to fire the entirety of yourself. You just need to fire some bits of yourself. As businesses scale, you should start with the things that you don't like and aren't good at and move yourself upwards from there. And so it's the same concept really, if you are spending all of your time worrying about the things that you don't like and aren't good at for whatever reason, personality, brain wiring, whatever it is, that's the bit you should start with because that's the bit that you'll procrastinate on. That's the bit that won't get done, it'll be the reason you don't continue. So there's nothing about being any type that means that you can't start and be successful with a business. You just got to make sure that all of the important things are done, not that you have to be the person that does them all.
H: That is brilliant and I agree with you 1,000%. It, that adding that one word, Phil, one word, deceptively simple, but it changes everything. It reminds me of an intervention that I did. I learned it in coach training a decade ago and the first person I tried it out on was my daughter. She had just had a bicycle accident and broke her arm. At that time she was in graduate school and she was working as a server in a restaurant. She clearly needed her arms, she was also managing, you know, as well. So immediately she calls me up and she's in tears and she tells me, Mommy, I just broke my arm and she starts, she went into, she's also ADHD. She goes into this whole download about, I'm going to lose my job and if I lose my job, then the economy, then I can't get another job and then I won't be able to afford my apartment.
She lives in San Francisco, which is ridiculously expensive to live. She literally, within about a minute and a half on the phone, Phil, tells me this is going to happen and this is going to happen. I'm going to lose my job and lose my apartment. I'm going to lose my and then I'm going to have to move back home and I said, Marissa, what's perfect about this? And we know the power of unexpected questions in coaching. That one at the time felt really dangerous because it was completely unexpected. She stopped and it got so quiet for so long, I thought she'd hung up on me. Honestly, I don't think I would've blamed her.
But it was such a dramatic pattern interrupt, she was running on herself that she said, well, and then immediately her brain went into problem-solving mode. And she literally figured out exactly what opportunity to change her life in the ways that she had been wanting to. That broken arm gave her another example of that is, I'm sure you oftentimes have clients say things like, well, I don't know. You know, I wanna do this, I wanna do that, but I just, I just don't know. Or, you know, it's either I don't know how to do something or I can't make a decision whether I wanna do something or not. And I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And I learned to ask, okay, that may be so, but what if you did know and then they just…
G: Reeled off all of this.
H: Yeah. It's like, then they know exactly what to do. So I think the power of like changing the, can I, to how can I, or, okay, maybe you don't know that. You may be entirely right, but what if you did? It's so interesting to watch how that pattern interrupt can completely change the conversation and open up people's awareness to the fact that truly, everything is figureoutable.
G: It is. It's interesting when you mentioned that, have you ever seen the Alan Watts Chinese Farmer video? If you've not, and anyone that's listening who hasn't, go and watch it. It's so good. The concept of it is that you can't ever know what's good news and what's bad news. Bad things happen and then that leads to good things. Good things happen, that leads to bad things and it's just this story as we see that. And the concept is you can't ever know the impact of good or bad news. There's no point in really labeling it good or bad because some of the worst things that have ever happened to me have ended up being the best. And yeah, I can't ever see bad news as bad news anymore in that sense, because sometimes that's the shift that we need to go and make some change that's actually essential for us or becomes essential for us over the years and decades.
H: I think you and I must be 2 people sharing the same brain and the same point of view because I have been accused of being ridiculously silver lining oriented. Some of it may come from my studying of Buddhism for many years and non-attachment to things, non-attachment to ideas, outcomes. But truly what we think of as a positive or a negative, it's all perspective. And it's a fascinating exercise to challenge yourself to think of something you perceive as negative in a positive way. It's such a great way to develop increasing neuroplasticity in your brain so that we're not just so reductive. I wanna push you on something, and I know you're gonna be game for it.
Something you and I have talked about in a previous conversation is the impact of shame on functioning with ADHD. And I'm gonna bring you into another one of your frameworks kind of thinking. If we have a high degree well, let me think, inattentiveness and hyperactivity on one axis, high shame, low shame on the other, what am I missing about this? Because oftentimes it feels like when we're inattentive, we tend not to take action and we don't take action, we feel ashamed. Or if we're hyperactive, impulsive, we take the wrong action, we have negative consequences, and then we feel shame. Help me come up with a new framework for shame and these traits.
G: Yeah. So, I mean, some of these things that we've talked about are at the level of hypothesis, should we say? But they're anecdotal based on lots of conversations. The reality is that shame is probably quite high on both particularly high on both ends of the scale. Might dip a little bit in the middle. The question that I often ask is, what does someone do with the shame? Do they direct it inwards or do they direct it outwards? Are they taking it to heart or are they protecting themselves from it? And that's something that I've spotted quite a lot with different types. There might be some kind of correlation between which end someone's on and which way that they tend to see the shame.
The reality is that those of us who are late diagnosed, shame is almost part of our lives. I don't know many people who I've spoken to with neurodiversity that don't have some element of there's something wrong with me, which is what shame is. And so the question, as I say, is like, well, what do we really do with that shame? Do we push it inwards and does that lead more to an inattentive angle, or do we push it more outwards and does it lead more outwards towards the you know, more kind of hyperactive side. And I've often wondered whether that might be the case.
H: You also have some interesting ideas about attachment that we've talked about. And it's almost, it's something, and I haven't really heard anyone else in our shared space, ADHD coaching, business coaching for ADHD business owners and founders. It does require someone who has that psychotherapy background that you and I both have. And I think it's another one of those aspects about living, loving, working with ADHD that's kind of hiding in plain sight. Because when we're talking about running a business with ADHD, we tend to be talking about, you know, making the right decisions, being better organized, delegating more work and not, you know, overwhelming and burning ourselves out. We're not talking about our attachment style, what are your thoughts?
G: Well, I started to realize that so I probably started to learn about attachment stuff about 7 or 8 years ago related to myself. And I realized that I was able to detect people's, feel people's attachment styles. When I started coaching, I was realizing that attachment styles actually significantly impact how people act day to day. One of my customers years ago who was obviously on the anxious preoccupied side, he had written his copy such that he would attract people who were probably a little bit narcissistic. He's very much like, we are the best, all of that kind of stuff. Or certainly people who are very, very results-driven. And he was nervous all the time and we actually ended up changing his copy. That was the result of our conversations. And it went a little bit more towards, oh hey, we're really good at what we do, but actually we're really nice to work with.
That was the angle that he started to move on. And within 6 months he was happy in his business again because he was working with people that he liked. But the interesting thing again, when we look at the shame angle, so lots of shame stuff in attachment, particularly for disorganized attachment, very high shame. And again, I wondered a little bit about where's this shame directed towards? Is it internal or is it external or am I saying, look, you are not doing the right stuff, or am I thinking I'm not doing the right stuff? And that possibly could lead to people who are more on the anxious-preoccupied side being a little bit more internal, inattentive, and people on the opposite side being a bit more avoidant. And I can't say that I have any clear evidence for this, but it seems anecdotally to maybe be true and yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts, do you see this?
H: Well, yeah, I do. And I think it was so fascinating when we started talking about this, because the shame tends to be more obvious. But what's driving the shame? Well, the shame can be like a lifetime of being told you're lazy, you don't try hard enough, you're this, you're bad, you're, you know, crazy, you're stupid, you're all the things and of course we internalize that and we say those things to ourself. And if we don't get a handle on that, we tend to attract friends and partners who maintain that. So we literally come to think of ourselves as a seriously damaged person without ever knowing why we are the way we are.
So shame, as you say, can be internalized or externalized. If it's more externalized, we may do things that actually increase our shame, right? Because if we've got this idea about ourselves, I'm a bad person, then I'm I might as well just embrace it. The internalized, we're probably going to do everything we can to avoid making mistakes, which will make us feel even more ashamed. The attachment style is something that I'm still trying to you got me thinking about this and I hope it doesn't become a complete rabbit hole, but I really do think you're onto something because instead of like the framework where there's 2-dimensional, this is like a 3-dimensional thing, Phil, isn't it?
G: Where it could be, yeah.
H: And how they are expressed and how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about them having anchors and origins in the way we're attached. Because attachment starts with early childhood, it starts with parenting and given the fact that ADHD is largely genetic, a child with ADHD may very well be born of one or two parents who have ADHD.
G: Yes. Yeah. And then you get into the thoughts of, well, the parents may be doing their best, but not meeting the needs of the child, which leads to challenges around attachment. And 30 years later, you have a manager who's, or an executive or someone who's burned out at work, constantly taking things on, seems to live up to this term high performance. And high performance to me just means I mask a lot. I don't know what everyone else thinks of it, but that's all. When I hear that term, I'm just thinking, well, actually high performance? I don't know, you're just pushing too much.
But anyway, I'm sure some people don't mean that with it, but in the ADHD world, when I meet people like that, it's always this thing of like, well, I've got to take it all on myself. I've got to deal with all of this stuff. And that feels like this internalized version of shame and a lot of those people do very, very well. They climb up the career ladder for 20 years very, very quickly often. And then they get to an area where it's starts to be a struggle and then they're thinking, I can't handle things then eventually they're burned out. So I think we have to look a little bit deeper than just label ADHD. We have to look at, without being therapy sessions, because that's not what we're doing here. I think we have to look a little bit deeper and think, well, why is this really happening at all? What's the real why here? And so I have a tendency to and my brain models things. It just is how I navigate the world. I don't ask it to it just does it.
H: It came with the package.
G: It did. It is the entire package. So yeah, I just sometimes try to see these things connected together in certain ways. And yeah, when I see certain types of customers, I'll often be thinking, oh, so you've got this type of attachment and this type of ADHD issue and maybe a little bit of autism and those kind of things. And we pull together this, in my mind, this idea of what they're likely challenging or having challenging, or more specifically, why they are and that's really the interesting thing for me. The understanding of the why is more than just, oh, you are this type of ADHD and you have this trouble and so on. It's much deeper than that for me and I like to try and see the person as a whole and think if you've got a lot of internalized shame, Firstly, I have to be cautious with that, I have to be very cautious with that. If you have a lot of externalized shame, I actually have to be very cautious with that, but in a different way. So from a coaching perspective and a coaching lens, it's actually incredibly useful to think about these kind of broader multidimensional spaces and problems.
H: Well, like you said, you really can't help yourself. This is how your brain works and also, I was trained as a clinical social worker which was person in environment. And that perspective, different than psychology or marriage family therapy or clinical counseling, the social work perspective comes from the understanding that everything about the person's environment affects them and everything about their internal environment affects their external environment. So while I imagine your brain to be like a Rubik's Cube with all the different colors lining up, mine is more like, I think like a spider web. The more I learn about the person, the web just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and I can see all the connections between it. It's very easy to overcomplicate it because then you have to figure, okay, I know all these things about how this person functions and how they got here and what their challenges are and how to help them move beyond here. But then I have to make it a little bit more linear. So we can actually take action and move forward.
G: I agree.
H: We've been talking a lot about attachment and how it affects us as business owners, as business founders, obviously the ideal is a secure attachment. That's also probably a distinct minority of human beings, much less folks with ADHD who are running a company. Of all the people who have hired you, Phil, what percentage would you guess? And of course, this is very anecdotal, you're not a researcher. What percentage of them would you guess are probably securely attached based on their challenges and their thinking and behavior?
G: Great question. It might be almost none, if I'm being really honest, because the thing with attachment is it's not a, we draw it as 4, but in actual fact, we're never always in one attachment. It's always related to a specific situation and how you relate to your partner and how you relate to a particular colleague and things can be a little different. Does pure secure attachment exist? I'm not sure that it really does. It's always relative to other people. But do I find people who have you know, significant issues with people pleasing, which would be, you know, more that kind of disorganized and anxious-preoccupied side. Pretty much everyone that I speak to is tends to be at that end. And a lot of I end up doing a lot of assertiveness work with people in that area, particularly again if they're executives and things.
But founders as well can put find themselves getting pushed around or push themselves around, you know, it's like, I should go and do this. One of my founders was doing a he had an Open Door Tuesday, which sounds great. Great founder, fantastic, care about the company. He landed himself an extra 10 spinning plates a week. And so he couldn't move the business forward because he was just dealing with all of those and he was people pleasing himself into that. For people who are maybe more on the avoidant scale, they different sets of challenges, I don't know. I mean, secure attachment in the neurodiverse community, I've not come across many people at all within my practice or more generally, do you find the same?
H: That sounds about right. As a matter of fact, because, you know, we see the anxious preoccupied, we see the avoidant. One is more the people pleaser, the other is more, has trust issues, can't delegate and so forth. I think it how it's not whether I'm gonna go back to something you said earlier. It's not whether we have shame or not. Shame is part of the human condition, whether you're neurodivergent or not, it's what we do with it. Same thing with our attachment. You help your founders become aware that this is part of their internal framework and functioning that affects their business. It affects their relationships with their team, with their clients, with their vendors, and with themselves. That's useful information. Do we have to be securely attached to be successful? No. Just like we don't have to be one particular subtype of ADHD or the other. This is all food for thought and a conversation about, not that knowledge is power, but applied knowledge is power. And the most powerful knowledge we can have is knowledge about ourself. One of the things you've also shared with me is that you're pretty big on getting decisions made before the work starts.
G: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
H: Let's talk about that.
G: Yeah, so I often, when I'm in sessions with people, I'll let them do a big conscious stream of thought, and I'm mirrorboarding the key elements of that. And what we'll discover is that there's decisions here, there's decisions here, there's decisions up here, there's decisions down here, they're all over the place. And some of them might literally be behind some actual task that it needs to be behind there. But a lot of these things actually, can be decided fairly soon, almost immediately. And the thing that I notice is that people don't have a tendency to take action when there's significant decisions still on their plate. Because, well, I suspect it might be because people are quite perfectionist and also don't like to waste work. And if they're going to go through something they don't like doing, like accounts or something like that, it's I'm only going to do it once and you don't want to do it twice.
H: That's me.
G: Yeah. So we're always trying to optimize things. So if you get all the decisions clumped up, so we take all the decisions from further down, pull them all to the start, starting becomes significantly easier. I think people use the word procrastination without really thinking that there's so many reasons for procrastination. Some might be your attachment style, some might be decisions that you haven't made, some might be it's a boring task that you can't follow through with, but that's not the only one. And that's too much of the ADHD world talks just about that, oh, I can't get started with this task. Procrastination is multi-layered really.
So yeah, I'd really like to get people to pull all the decisions from to the front because it becomes a lot easier then just to, you know, to take action. That doesn't mean every single micro decision. If you're building a website and you don't know whether you're gonna go with green or blue, fine. As long as it's not getting in the way, you can make the decision at the time. But, you know, these major things of, you know, well, am I gonna have a website or am I just gonna rely on LinkedIn? Pull that forwards, make that decision, examine that, understand the outcomes, you know, and all that kind of stuff, lean into a very specific decision and I find action becomes a lot easier in those environments.
H: I couldn't agree with you more on this, Phil. I think so many of our colleagues and peers in ADHD coaching and ADHD business coaching really believe their job is primarily accountability. So they help their clients take action. And in fact, I agree with you. It's the decisions that precede the action that we think, well, I just want to, like you said, I hate doing something and having to redo it. I don't care what it is.
G: Same.
H: I just hate it so of course it has to be right. Well, what would make it right? It seems simple on the surface, but there's the prerequisites to making the decision. There's the whether I actually am ready to make the decision and want to make the decision and know what the options are and which one is more aligned with my goals and all. I mean, next thing you know, it's just blown up into this huge thing. Is it any wonder we say, I'm just going to procrastinate on this? But I think your psychological savvy and my psychological, you know, training is really, really helpful because we understand that procrastination is not this one-dimensional thing. It is many dimensions and we have to get the right dimension for that particular client or we're gonna end up giving them feedback or advice that we think is wildly practical and will be completely useless to them and frustrating at the same time. So it's, I know some people do things visually like when you are mapping out the things, are you doing that right in front of the client so they can see all that?
G: Yeah, yeah, we can. 'Cause I was just gonna bring up the working memory challenge in all of this, 'cause obviously we don't have great working memory. If you, let's say you have 5 decisions to make, and they're only a yes or no, and virtually no decisions are just a yes or no. After the first decision, that's 2 options, after the second that's 4 options. After the next, that's 8 options after the next, it's 16, then it's 32. What ADHD working memory can hold 32 things in mind?
H: Not this girl.
G: I'm not even close. Get me to 5 things in my mind and I'm about done. So if we pull those out, make the decisions in isolation, it collapses the 32 options down to the one that you're going to choose. No requirement to try and evaluate every single option and also the perfect path of all of the options and things. So yeah, to me, it's a hugely different challenge. And good, just going on the kind of mirror boarding that I do. It's actually something that I started quite a few years ago. And as much as anything, it helps me because what we'll normally do is we'll go through all of the stuff and then we'll go back to where we started because they realize how far they've come in just 3/4 of an hour or an hour or whatever the session length is.
And they recognize suddenly, here they started from this perspective of, can I even do this or, what options should we be doing? What should we be going down? We go down the path and they get to the end. We go back to the start and they can see how far they've actually moved and shifted. And that's actually surprisingly powerful for people, particularly if they've not really felt beforehand that they were able to do this kind of thing. So yeah, I find mirrorboarding surprisingly good fun and useful.
H: I just think visualizing things, is incredibly helpful because we have different learning styles, which is another component with the ADHD. Some people are auditory processors, some people are visual learners, some people are kinesthetic. But I've definitely found that even folks who really like listening and talking and verbally processing things, you show them a visual of what the options are, it's like we've entered into a different dimension entirely.
G: Yeah, I agree.
H: One of the things that you and I have talked about is that an increasing number of people who have realized that they have ADHD well into adult life, with all the consequences and benefits we've discussed, are also eventually uncovering their autism. You are one of several of my friends who have come to their understanding of their autism after ADHD. But when I think about the unique challenges and gifts of each of these different types of neurodivergences, I'm thinking 2 brains, one body. The ADHD half wants stimulation all the time, the autistic half may want things a little bit more quiet and a little bit more organized. So how do you build a work week for yourself that accounts for both of those needs without being overly fatiguing and stressful.
G: Yeah. And so it's interesting when I had my business, I don't think this got too involved. You know, my days were a lot easier. I had a lot less contact with people unless I particularly wanted it. I didn't get involved in things like the sales in the business or any of those kinds of things. So autism, I don't think showed up quite so much in its more challenging areas in my business. From a coaching perspective though, in the early days, I absolutely did have to set some boundaries. So I was originally thinking, I can do 5 days of coaching, and quickly learned I couldn't. So it switched out to 4, and then I quickly learned I still couldn't and it switched out to 3. So I do a Monday, Wednesday, Friday for coaching, that's my routine. It gives me a chance to have the kind of harder coaching days, the more mentally challenging coaching days, and then to do the bits in between that my brain probably finds very easy that maybe other people's brains find a lot harder. So I also have a sleep mask and headphones, noise-canceling headphones, and I'll use those fairly regularly, often between coaching calls. It doesn't matter whether the coaching call's been easy or hard, it's just sometimes the attention that it requires means that 10 or 15 minutes of decompressing makes things a lot easier. But ADHD and autism, they can be a bit mutually exclusive.
So my ADHD side wants to talk to lots of people, my autistic side wants to be away from people. One-to-one coaching is easier in that regard, or group coaching. But if I was required to lead an actual group in a room, I think that would probably be too much for me. I don't think I would get on very well with that at all, even though I like being around people and I'm a very social person. I think that would be a bit too much for me, actually seeing all of these strangers' faces and looking over them, and I'm very hypervigilant. I can see if someone swallows at a particular moment, I'm like, oh, I know what that swallow means. So I can't stop it, I can't turn it off. So watching all of these people and their expressions and things, I'm going to be taking so much information in, it's just going to be exhausting.
So I think the key thing for me is it comes down to boundaries, doesn't it? Boundaries and designing things. I always say from an ADHD perspective, and this is really the center of my practice really, once we've closed off the things that can't or won't happen, the solution is in the remainder. So if I can't do hours of group coaching with people in a room, we just close that off. If I can do one-to-one coaching, but only 4 hours a day, then we close off 6 hours a day. And the solution has to sit within the things that can and will happen, not within the I hope or I wish or any of those kinds of things. So yeah, I guess my overall approach to all of this is I design a life that that suits my brain, both the personality side and also my neurotype. Personality, you can shave some edges off, but you can't do too much about it. You can become easier at certain things and stuff, but you can't completely shift that even either. So yeah, and neurotype, you've got no chance, it's kind of set.
H: Non-negotiable.
G: It's non-negotiable, exactly. And you can work around little bits, but again, the best solution is where you've closed off all of the things that aren't going to happen and say, right, the solution has to be in this area here. And that sometimes requires other people, delegation sometimes it requires tools like AI, using Claude Cowork to go and do something that I frankly can't do. These are genuine things that we can use these days so yeah, I'm just all about designing what's actually going to work for someone's brain. And I come across people who are things like twice exceptional and stuff. I might have an element of that, we don't really know as well. But the point with all of that stuff is that again, it comes with its positives and its challenge areas, and we just need to make sure that we've got the person at the center of the conversations. And that's the same for me, no different for me.
H: This is exactly how it looks, how it sounds, and how you design the business and life that actually suits your brain is instead of thinking, oh, I have these challenges to overcome, your approach is very, very practical. It's like, these are the things I have to close off because they're either not aligned, they're exhausting. It's just, it takes too much of me to do them, or it's simply not worth it, or it's impossible. Close 'em off, take 'em off the table. Don't expend another moment of this precious human life trying to get better at something that you have the option to just shut down and then make the best you can of what you've got left. Because one of the best things about being self-employed is that you have the privilege of doing that.
G: You do. You get to choose, you totally do get to choose. It's interesting actually, one of the founders that I worked with, I think it was last year actually, he had quite a perfectionist streak. It's really common for ADHD and particularly ADHD autistic. He was both, and I said to him, you know, there's, there's elements where your perfectionism is absolutely the right thing you know, this is helping your business. It probably got it here, now there might be areas where, you know, it's causing business challenges and we need to go and deal with those, but I don't want you to not be perfectionist because, you know, what that does for your business if used correctly, is incredibly helpful. So a useful question sometimes is to think, this particular trait, where is it helpful and where is it unhelpful?
Not, it's unhelpful. And then we start to say, well, the unhelpful bit, you're probably never going to not be perfectionist, so we need to close you off from the bits where it's unhelpful and pass that to someone else. I notice, we go into attachment very quickly, a lot of salespeople, good salespeople are more avoidantly attached. So if a founder is anxious, preoccupied, struggling with sales, one of the things that I might suggest is to find someone with a different neurotype and attachment style that suits more of a sales role. And we go and design the ad and the hiring process around finding that person and making sure that the right person joins the company. Not always the exact thing that we do, but these are the kind of things that when you think about all of these things and put them together, they significantly speed up the progress of business growth.
H: You remind me, Phil, of my favorite professor when I was in graduate school, who all of these, and I went to grad school in my 30s and most of the other students were in their 20s so I had a significant maturity advantage. And most of them, they just wanted the right answer to whatever the clinical problem is. I'm in a room with a client and this happens, or I've got a new family I'm working with and that happens. And they wanted the cookie cutter cookbook, do the if this, then that, and he knew that that was impossible and every question he got started with, well, it depends. And everybody was like, ah, you know, I don't wanna hear that, I just want you to just give me the fricking answer. But you are reminding me that the way I go about coaching people and the way you go about coaching people, it's very much from the it depends mindset. Because there's so many things that are taken into account beyond the fact that you're a business owner with ADHD. Thank you for absolutely a delightful conversation and I hate to end it, but we have to.
G: I know we had plenty to talk about.
H: And I'm sure we will again. Thank you, friend.
G: Speak to you soon.
