252. Running A Business with ADHD with ADHD Coach Skye Waterson

Happy New Year beautiful souls! Wishing you a year filled with happiness, prosperity, and good health! May this Lunar New Year bring you joy, success, and endless opportunities! May the Year of the Snake bring you strength, wisdom, and great fortune!

In the beginning of every year we always set goals, but unfortunately for many, almost immediately after, we start to give excuses. Oh I can’t because of xyz. You fill in the blank with plenty of excuses. So I’m here to remind you that if it is really what you want, it is possible. Even if you come up with a reason why you cannot accomplish something, there are people out there who’ve done it. This episode serves as a dose of inspiration for you to know that even if you have ADHD you can be focused and consistent and run a successful business. This also goes with any other conditions or difficult circumstances that you might be going through. There is always a way and believe that more blessings are coming your way! 

My guest today is Skye Waterson who is a former academic PhD turned ADHD Coach For High-Value Entrepreneurs. She is the host of the ADHD Skills Lab and the Founder of Unconventional Organization, an international ADHD support service that provides research-backed coaching programs for late-diagnosed ADHD professionals looking to go to the next level in their career without burnout and breaking ADHD stigma one successful CEO at a time. Not only does she run a successful business having ADHD, her entire work team has been diagnosed with ADHD and everyone is thriving.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

You are so amazing. You run a business and you had ADHD.

So what are the symptoms of ADHD?

Yeah. ADHD symptoms, they include hyperactiveness, impulsivity. If you have primarily the attention deficit, it can also be a distraction.

Yeah. So lots of different kinds of symptoms related to executive functioning.

So what causes ADHD then?

Genetics is kind of what we know at the moment. There’s still looking into whether there are any sort of other lifestyle factors that could be affecting it. But at the moment, we just know it’s a genetic genetic causes.

And from what I understand, there are different types of ADHD, right?

Yes. Yes. You can have primarily hyperactive, primarily inattentive, or you can have combined type like myself, where you’ve got a little bit of both.

Can you talk about a little more about the different types?

Yeah, definitely. So primarily hyperactive is one of the biggest things for that is, you know, you feel driven by a motor, you know, so you’re very on the go, maybe more of the impulsiveness, more of the sort of out, outward demonstrations of ADHD, you know, talking, fidgeting, all of those kinds of things, whereas primarily inattentive is more of the struggling with focus and attention. And so it might not be as obvious to other people that you have it, but it is as much of a struggle.

And then combined type kind of brings those two things together.

So do you have to get tested in order to know for sure that you have ADHD?

Yeah. So you can, you know, do a lot of testing, you know, on the internet, there’s lots of resources out there. That’s the one way a lot of people find out they might have it, but to actually know you have ADHD, you need to get a diagnosis.

Yeah.

And how does that work?

You can go to a psychiatrist and that’s often through a private channel. You can go to a psychiatrist and they will give you a variety of testing. So with our clients, we hear all kinds of different ways, but eventually, you know, they go through a survey.

They might talk to your family. They might do some, you know, brain scans depending on who they are and what kind of support they need to make that decision. And then, yeah, they’ll find out if you have ADHD or if you have some other, you know, neurodiversity or maybe something else entirely.

Does ADHD ever go away?

So that’s an interesting question that that’s been sort of argued a lot in different spaces, but basically what we find is that ADHD, to get diagnosed with ADHD, you need to struggle with executive functioning and other things. Obviously I’m not giving the full diagnosis here. And for some people that they may find that their struggles can reduce.

And so therefore they wouldn’t meet the criteria for ADHD, but ADHD itself is like a neurobehavioral condition. It doesn’t, it doesn’t go away, but it might shift in terms of what it looks like. And in fact, we want it to shift because one of the things that we do in coaching is we help you with those executive functioning challenges that you can have.

So what was your own journey with ADHD?

So for myself, I was diagnosed with ADHD at the start of my doctorate, which was quite a good, interesting time. I went in thinking I might have dyslexia or something like that. And I came out realizing that, yeah, I had, I had ADHD.

And so I was really interested in it. I learned a lot and I learned a lot about how I was already, and then other strategies for supporting it. Because it’s not just about the negatives, although we do talk about that, there is research that people with ADHD are more likely to be entrepreneurs, are very, you know, have original thinking, all of those kinds of different things.

So being able to support the struggles while spotlighting those strengths is kind of what we’ve been doing as part of our organization.

So what would you say would be the strength of being an ADHD and running a business?

I think it’s probably problem solving and original thinking. So there’s research to show that people with ADHD tend to have this strength when they did studies with neurotypicals and people who had ADHD. And I definitely find that for myself, when I was in the workplace, people would often say, Oh, I never thought about it like that.

Or I never thought that way when I was kind of problem solving. And now in my own organization, it’s really helpful to be able to kind of think outside the box a bit more when it comes to problem solving in business, because we definitely have a lot of problems to solve in business.

And that’s the core of running a business is to have a problem to solve, right?

Exactly.

Would you say there are any cons of running a business with ADHD?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest is it can, it can be very overwhelming. I mean, obviously it can be overwhelming in general, but there’s a lot of administrative work, especially when you’re starting out that goes into running a business that can really bog you down with ADHD and can make it very hard for you to progress. And so being able to find strategies to support that, finding an assistant, for example, figuring out how to get them to help you.

I have an assistant who kind of taps me on the shoulder, you know, Hey, when you do this, when you do that, and that makes everything so much easier when it comes to working with ADHD.

So you actually have a neurodiverse team running your business, right? What’s that like?

It’s great. It’s great. We all talk very fast, well, depending on who it is, but yeah, most of our most of my organization is neurodiverse.

All of our coaches are diagnosed with ADHD. It’s very, I imagine it’s very unique, but for us it feels very normal, but it is about sort of figuring out where everybody fits in the same way as you would in any organization. But particularly in this case, understanding, you know, people have what they call a spiky profile where they’d very good at some things and not very good at others.

So really understanding, you know, where somebody’s strength is and putting them in that part of the organization, giving them freedom in that area. And then maybe saying, Oh, you actually love to write. Why don’t we do that?

Or you love to do research. We could add that and kind of keeping people engaged as is a really big part of what we do.

So you work with a lot of clients that are in the same situation. So what are some other examples that you’ve seen with entrepreneurs? What other strength or struggles can you talk about to inspire our audience who have possibly think they have ADHD themselves, but still run a successful business?

Yeah. Yeah. I think often it can feel overwhelming things like hiring, for example, or turning on sales funnels, the, the executive functioning tasks that, you know, bog us down in the day to day reports processes, you know, having to build those processes can be a real struggle.

And, and I think it’s important to know that, you know, a lot of people with ADHD end up in the, in the entrepreneurial space. It’s something that we have a lot of strengths for. So if you have it, you know, this is an area that you are, you know, designed to do in many ways, but there are those struggles and it’s important to know how to solve them in order to then just keep doing what you’re doing and keep, keep growing because it is possible.

I guess is what I would say. Don’t feel disheartened. If you think, Oh, I have ADHD and I run a business.

That’s awesome. But it’s just, you know, there’s just a little bit of tweaking that sometimes needs to be done.

I love that mindset shift and in your days running your business, when it gets tough, what is your favorite quote that you go by to lift yourself up?

The quote that we have in the organization that we use for everything is we rise by lifting others. It’s just a reminder, particularly in what we do, that our goal is to help the other people, both people in the organization, talking to each other, our clients, everyone to kind of help them improve, and then we will improve as well. And so it’s sensing that we’re going to, all support each other.

I love that. That’s beautiful. Let’s rise together.

Thank you. Skye, where can we find you at?

You can find us at www.unconventionalorganization.com or at Unconventional Organization on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We have a lot of free resources there, articles about ADHD, articles about ADHD and entrepreneurship. So feel free to check those out.

Beautiful. Thank you.