What was the main challenge you had before starting coaching?
Before coaching, I was at a crunch point with my consultancy work. I had moved my office out of my home to help me be more focused, but I was feeling overwhelmed with the pressure to achieve.
My mornings are chaotic, I struggle with time blindness, and procrastination. I have a constant sense that I have forgotten something and worry that the whole day will unravel.
Admin is horrendous; it feels like this huge “big sticky, dark lump” is always in the background, which makes everything else feel heavier, too.
I had thought that having my own space would help, but it just added more problems.
What has been the biggest benefit you have gained from the coaching?
Small strategies have made a huge difference:
I have a playlist to accompany my morning routine. I have begun to recognise specific songs are associated (timewise) with where I need to be if I am going to leave the house on time.
Writing a single, specific sentence at the end of each day about the exact first task for the next morning has a transformative effect to get me going in the morning.
Dedicating Friday afternoons to do admin has stopped it from feeling like constant pressure. I know I will get to it on Friday when I am already in wind-down mode. This has meant I have plenty of time to tackle the big tasks during the week when I am at my best. We talked about chunking – a way of carving out specific periods of time to help me get into a lovely, focused state where I can really do my best work.
Coaching also helped me reframe distractions and impulsivity. Instead of just berating myself for eBay spirals or late nights, I started thinking about reward structures, protecting my sleep and how to reset after my creative hyperfocus.
Perhaps most importantly for my peace of mind, I now feel I have a direction for the next few months in my new office, and this has reduced a lot of the background anxiety I was feeling.
What did you like most about the coaching relationship?
Leigh understands ADHD; she understands what it is like to feel guilt and shame over the things I ‘get wrong’. She questions the purpose of such thoughts, and when I say things like “it sounds so stupid, but…”, she challenges this and brings it back to what it really is – issues with executive function and mental load – phrases that I had heard but not really understood before working with Leigh.
I think we had more of a mentor relationship; everything felt very practical and collaborative. She told me about things she had tried, what had worked and what hadn’t. We tested ideas out together. It all felt like building a toolkit together. Some things didn’t work, and that felt ok; it felt like lots of interesting experiments.
If you were to recommend Leigh to a friend, what would you say?
Leigh felt like a partner in crime. Someone I could share the ideas and the frustrations with. If you want her to, she will tell you what she has tried, what things were her ‘game-changers’. I found this incredibly helpful, as sometimes I felt like I had already tried everything I could think of and didn’t know where else to start looking.
She understands executive function challenges in a practical way. She encourages you to think about strategies in terms of experimentation. I confess I thought there would be quick fixes, and some things are, (the morning playlist is still working months later), other things didn’t, and she prepared me for that.