Made With Heroes and Dragonslayers In Mind

ADHDers often carry a staunch resistance to accepting recent, well-researched findings — namely, that they are brilliant, essential to the workplace, and strategically invaluable to their teams. In these pages, you’ll learn to dislodge the stake of that resistance — however big or small — and discover the full bloom of your ADHD talents.

This book respects your multidimensional learning style. You’ll find spacious spreads I call “Pause Pages” for the moments when your journey asks for something more profound than words. Simple illustrations are scattered throughout for quieter visual processing. And you’ll be invited to see, live, and sense your powerful qualities in what I call “the lab” — where you get to experiment with developing your unique gifts, not just read about them.

Does seeing yourself as brilliant, essential, and strategically invaluable conflict with other messages you’ve received in the past? Are those messages wedged into the mosaic of your self-concept? I’ll bet you could even “prove me wrong” with personal anecdotes.

Trying to stay on top of your professional game, you may already have been through a slew of resources that didn’t help — further reinforcing the false story of being less-than. Not just books. What about all those podcasts, influencers, articles, workshops, and blog posts? Oh — and that ten-page, over-hyphenated, habit-building strategy you had ChatGPT generate?

Before we go any further: take a minute to appreciate everything you’ve done to succeed in a society that doesn’t yet appreciate your gifts.

You’ve put so much into your development — the time, the frustrations, the stress, the falls, and the rewards. All that effort. Invisible, double-time effort. Just to be on par with your colleagues.

Take a deep breath. A little deeper. Feel the air fill the bottom of your lungs.

You’ve probably worked much harder than you give yourself credit for. After all, didn’t you just do what anyone must do to make it in this world? No. You didn’t. You did much more.

You’re a working professional with ADHD. I don’t care where you are on the ladder — you’re on it. How the heck did you do that? Unless you had an abundance of teachers who could really connect with your learning style, or you were passionately in love with your career path (often the case with actors, artists, and athletes), you fought tooth and nail simply not to drown.

The modus operandi of an ADHD brain doesn’t lend itself well to sequential or tedious tasks. Medication, stress (both self-imposed and external), all-nighters, maladaptive habits, and brute force have been the go-to methods for getting things done.

Your bilateral-thinking brain (more on that later) may also have found brilliant adaptations and ingenious workarounds. Sometimes you aced your exams, or a whole semester — often followed by burnout and months of needed recovery.

Does any of this sound familiar? You may discredit your efforts, just as many of your care providers, friends, and mentors often did. They saw the last-minute all-nighters, the need to be comatose for days after a grueling exam, or the avoidance of certain tasks as, well, laziness.

Why wouldn’t they? For them, those avoidant habits can usually be turned around with some time management, hard work, and a pep-talk about values and goals. I can practically hear you shaming yourself right now: “Right — I should be able to do that too. The only reason I can’t is because I’m lazy.”

I hate to tell you. Actually — I love telling you this. The evidence doesn’t support that belief. You are not lazy. You are extremely motivated. The work you’ve put in just to get by proves it.

You haven’t been operating on a fair playing field. All the hard work and motivation — the kind that lasts until burnout — won’t help. Not until you learn to change the playing field altogether.

Hearing that you’re not lazy might frighten you. If it goes against the messages you’ve grown accustomed to, you’re in exactly the right place.

As hard as this might be to hear, I’m going to hit you with another message — and this one is foundational. Ready?

Give that a second to sink in. Let it settle a little more. You don’t have to believe it fully. Is there a tiny part of you that can accept it? Try to tap into one remaining shard of hope — the part that was spared even though it endured some 20,000 corrective comments by the time you were ten (in school alone).

Let that part be seen. Shower it with a new awareness.

Whether or not all of this makes sense yet, you’ve just begun a very different kind of journey — one customized to your greatness. Your productivity is about to flourish. And, more importantly, your true self is going to shine.