In this episode, Ash and Dusty explore the challenges and complexities of answering the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” for individuals with ADHD. They discuss two distinct types of clients: those who are successful yet struggle to manage their passions due to ADHD, and those who feel completely lost regarding their career aspirations. By sharing personal experiences and stories from their coaching practices, they highlight the importance of recognizing agency in one’s journey and the value of staying curious rather than fixated on specific outcomes.
The hosts emphasize that a lack of clarity in career direction is common, particularly for neurodivergent individuals. They encourage listeners to reflect on their past experiences, identify strengths, and consider opportunities without the pressure of having to choose the perfect path. The episode advocates for a journey-oriented mindset where pulling on various threads of interest can lead to unexpected and fulfilling career discoveries, demonstrating that growth often comes from embracing new experiences rather than adhering to predetermined goals.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I’m Ash, [00:00:02] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:00:04] Ash: and this is Translating ADHD. This week, we’re going to build on the strengths episode from last week. Hey Dusty, [00:00:13] Dusty: Yes, Ash. [00:00:14] Ash: Before you found ADHD coaching as a career, did you struggle with the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? [00:00:20] Dusty: Oh, it’s, that’s, I wish I could just give a simple answer. Yes and no. So, for a long time, no, because I had a thing that I was doing and then when that thing didn’t work out, absolutely yes. And before I settled on coaching, yeah, for like about the two years right before, I think I cycled through every possible career known to man that I was like, I could do this, no, I could do this, no.Yeah, I went through a period of just having absolutely no idea, because I had like one thing, I had one idea, and then it didn’t work out, and I was like, what now?
[00:00:52] Ash: Yeah. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today, by the way. How do I answer the question of “what do I want to be when I grow up” with ADHD on board? And by the way, this is not something that everyone with ADHD struggles with. [00:01:10] Dusty: I’ll be honest, I’m still struggling with that question now, because like, I’m an ADHD coach, I don’t plan to do anything else, but when I think about the future, and I’m like, what would I do? Like, do I want to do this forever? What would I do? I’m like, I have no idea. I’ve not thought about it, and when I try to think about it, I feel like there’s just this big wall there.I’m like, I have no idea.
[00:01:27] Ash: Yeah, the question of what do I want to be when I grow up is really tough with ADHD. And this isn’t something that everyone struggles with. I work with two very different types of clients. The first is what I like to call “the victim of their own success”. So somebody like you or me, Dusty, somebody who is working in their area of strength, they’re doing what they’re meant to be doing. They like what they’re doing. It’s interesting. It’s fun. It’s novel. It plays to their individual strengths, but the ADHD of it all is making it hard to manage day to day, making it hard to manage life, making it feel like that thing that they love doing is also crushing them. And this has been true both for clients who are traditionally employed in some specialty career field and for my clients who are business owners or self-employed.But the other type of client, and I’ve had clients from early twenties to late sixties bringing this type of question that I absolutely love to work with, are the ones who have no idea what they want to be when they grow up. When I asked the question in our first coaching session “what do you know about a life that fits” they didn’t have great answers.
And so today we’re going to talk about why that’s so tough with ADHD and some things that you can do to start to pull on that thread. If you yourself are in that boat of, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,
[00:03:00] Dusty: I’m excited to talk about this topic because I definitely have some clients going through this right now. And I feel like you are really good at this, Ash. So I’m excited to get into it because it’s hard, right? I think what can make it complicated is with ADHD we have a lot of surface level interests. We get hyper-fixated on something and it feels like we’re really into it. But then sometimes, like the craft project that you buy and never finish, sometimes you start it only to realize like, oh, I don’t really like this.And it could be hard to know, this goes back to the identity piece, what you genuinely like and don’t. And if you don’t know that, how can you make choices on what you want to do all the time, every day, constantly, right?
[00:03:39] Ash: So Dusty, with this type of client, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in my decade plus of doing ADHD coaching work. And by the way, this pattern actually applies to me and my own journey as well. The pattern is that whatever age they are, whatever stage they are at in life, if I am working with a client that feels like they don’t know anything about a life that fits, that they just don’t know how to begin to answer the question of what I want to be when I grow up, when they tell me about where they are now in their journey and how they got there, the way that they relay that story is as though their life happened to them more so than they happened to their life, if that makes sense, it very much sounds like, oh, I ended up here kind of accidentally.Oh, yeah, I’ve done this or that, but it was because I lucked into it or because I met so and so or because I didn’t know what else to do. There’s this real belief that there’s a complete absence of choice or agency, and that they’ve just kind of gone along with the flow and ended up where they’re at and they’re just satisfied where they’re at.
And so listeners, if that is resonating with you, one of the first things I like to do with a client when I hear a story told that way is ask them to retell the story by putting themselves in that picture. Where did you make choices? Where did your strengths shine? Even if that wasn’t ultimately where you landed, did you really luck into this circumstance or was it more than that? Was it that you’re good at networking and good at finding opportunities because you’re good at talking to people and good at networking and having a wide circle? So revisiting that story to see that you have been in that picture the whole time.
[00:05:33] Dusty: What I’m hearing is, we tell a story about how things happen to us, but those stories are always subjective. If it feels true for you to say oh yeah, I just lucked into that, somebody else could just as easily say oh yeah, I did that and claim effort for it, right?It just kind of depends where you’re sitting perspective-wise and the question isn’t what’s really true, what’s the objective truth? Did you luck into it or did you do that and make it happen?
What’s more important than that is what is the outcome of telling yourself that story if you tell yourself you lucked into it? It’s something that you can’t recreate. It’s something you have no control over. You don’t know how you got there and it doesn’t teach you anything moving forward. But, if you’re able to tell a story of how you walked through if the door was open, you still made the choice to walk through it, right? You were still standing in front of a door for some reason and if you can tell yourself that story and start to notice where you had agency, that’s something we can build on, right? Like, then we can start to break down how does one engineer a situation of success?
[00:06:38] Ash: Exactly Dusty. And this is something that I used to do, by the way, because I actually did luck into/fall into/sidestep into ADHD coaching. This is not a career path that was even on my radar. When I started coach training, I didn’t even have my own ADHD diagnosis yet. I did not know that I myself had ADHD.I was a working professional organizer and I won a coaching course. Somebody who runs a coaching program spoke at an event that I was at and gave away a free coaching course and I won it. And so for a long time I felt really bad about that. And like, I didn’t have anything to do with that, it was just happenstance.
What would I be doing if I was being at choice? But the perspective I have now is exactly what you just said. I walked through that door. I took, not only that first class, but several more classes. And then along the way, I got hip to the idea that, hey, maybe I myself have ADHD. So I pulled on that thread and I got a diagnosis.
And then I hired Cam as my ADHD coach and had this incredible transformative experience that really became the driving force for my own passion for coaching. Because up until then, I was doing both coaching and organizing and I wasn’t feeling strongly about either as a profession that I wanted to continue but after seeing what coaching can really do when it’s done so excellently, and Cam is just the most excellent coach I know, bar none, hands down.
And that’s not to say that there aren’t other equally excellent coaches, but as far as ones I know, and I’ve experienced.
[00:08:23] Dusty: I know, I’m team Cam. I feel like we should get, like, t-shirts with Cam’s face on it. [00:08:28] Ash: We should do that for a CHADD conference next year. Like spring, a little spring, a little cam fan club in Autumn. [00:08:37] Dusty: I’m in. [00:08:38] Ash: I love that. Anyway, the point here is not to discount those things that might be happenstance, but to see where you saw and recognized opportunity. And as you said, walked through the door, speaking of those unexpected things that you capitalize on, in that period of time where I was taking coach training, working with Cam and figuring out my own ADHD, I happened across this little book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective. This is a really interesting little book written by two computer scientists who were studying artificial intelligence and, by the way, studying it long before AI became as prevalent as it is now. And they were noticing a consistent pattern in their research, that when they tried to force an outcome, they actually got worse results.So if they tried to force a robot to learn to walk down a hallway and go through a door, the robot would do it better, less often and less well than if they just put it in the hallway and let it learn, which would eventually lead to it learning how to open and go through the door and this really got their attention. Got them curious.
So they started experimenting in that direction. What happens if we run some human involved experiments where we are not attached to the outcome? And they also looked at some major discoveries in history and made some pretty interesting compelling arguments for how attachment to a particular outcome would actually have impeded the ability for that achievement in history to be made.
And what I love about this book, I’m not a big self help person. I think a lot of self help books are people who mean well and write what worked for them and think that’s going to work for everyone else. It’s very prescriptive, whereas this book is like one half scientific argument and presentation of the thesis. And then the second half is about how you apply that in your own book of life. The whole argument that they’re making is that when you get too attached to an outcome, you lose possibilities along the way. You filter out novel things, potential opportunities.
In the case of my own journey, if I, for example, had been really attached to growing a professional organizing company at the time that I won a coaching course, I may not have taken that coaching course. I may have given it to somebody else. Or I may have taken the one course and then stopped because I was hyper fixated or hyper attached to this one particular outcome.
So listeners, who have been listening to this show for a long time, have heard the words journey thinking and detaching from outcome a million times, those ideas and the way they manifest in my coaching come from this book as does this metaphor. Imagine that you’re standing on a stepping stone in the middle of a very foggy pond. And there are stepping stones in all directions that could lead you to shore, but it is so foggy that you cannot see any given stepping stone in any direction, right? That is the place listeners, if you are standing in that place of, I don’t know what a life that fits looks like for me. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. That is the place that you are standing. And so as a coach, my job isn’t to get you to shore, right? If you get attached to a destination, what do you do? You hop in the water and you flail around and you hope that you’re moving in a direction that’s taking you towards shore, but it’s so foggy that you can’t be sure and you’re all wet. But if you stand on that stepping stone and look for what threads you might be able to pull on, where’s the novelty?
Asking yourself, what can I get curious about in the here and now might lift some fog and you might see an outcome or an opportunity or have a perspective shift that reveals things to you that you previously couldn’t have possibly seen.
[00:12:56] Dusty: It really resonates with me what you say about looking at the pattern of agency, and I think, too, like, the flip side of this, is that sometimes people can get stuck in perfectionism and decision paralysis, like they feel like they have to pick exactly the right thing.And if you have a lot of interests and you don’t necessarily know what these careers are going to be like, and you’re not 100% sure what’s going to be the best fit, but you feel like you have to pick the right thing. I think that’s also a way that people get stuck.
[00:13:25] Ash: That’s attaching to outcome, right? That’s “I need to get to shore”. I need or I need to know what direction I’m heading in, what that looks like, what are the plot points along the way? And this is a very ADHD thing, this all-or-nothing thinking just in a different form, right? I have to know the answer. I have to know where I’m headed or else I don’t possibly know what steps to take. [00:13:46] Dusty: I’m gonna say, and the hard part is when you’re thinking about what you want to do, whether you’re just out of high school or just out of college or in your 40’s and you’re making a career change, there are so many jobs and things that you could do as a career that you might not even, know about, right?If you’d asked me out of high school or even out of college, what do you want to be, I didn’t even know ADHD coaching was a thing. And before I was an ADHD coach, for a long time there, I worked as a fundraiser. I was really good at fundraising, and I had no idea that I would be good at that, and I had no idea that was even a job, or that when I first heard about this job, because someone, the guy who ran the fundraising agency that I worked for met me working at a cafe and he like immediately saw that I was like really good with people and very personable and he was like, do you want a job? And I was like, I already have a job. And he’s like, do you want a better job? And he told me about the job. And I’m like, that sounds awful, no, thank you. Eventually I did go to work for him, but, that’s the thing, when he told me about it, I was like, oh, no, that does not sound like something I would like.
So, it’s hard because how can you make a choice when you don’t even know what all the options are, and you’re trying to pick the perfect option? And I think it can be so hard for neurodivergent brains to get out of that attachment to outcome. I actually had a conversation a lot like this just yesterday with one of my clients because we were talking a bit about goals and what some of her long term goals should be. And I noticed that in the course of the conversation, she kept talking about the how and not the what. So for example, we were talking about family stuff and I said, what could make you feel better? Like a good goal or a good future thing for some of your relationships? What do you want for your relationships in the future? And she was like, well, if this person in my family apologized to me, then I guess I would feel better about the relationship. Or she just kind of said, if this person in my family would apologize to me, but they never will. And I said, okay, well, but you’re talking about the mechanism. If that person did apologize to you, what would that change about how you felt about the relationship. If you could have this and that at your job, what would that change about how you felt about yourself in your career, right?
Like, let’s start at the end. Let’s start at how you want to feel. Because obviously, we have no control over this person apologizing to you or not, right? We can’t control them. But if we can define how you think that might feel, and that’s the goal, there’s a million ways to get to that feeling, but she got really stuck on the process. So I saw it happen, and I was like, I think we’re putting things in reverse order.
And there’s this meme that I saw on Facebook at one point, Asher, and I always want to show it to my clients, but I can never find it. And sometimes they’ve found it by fishing the internet and found it for me because they’re all very good with computers and mostly younger than me. But it’s this picture of a cat in an airport and the cat’s in one of those cat carriers and somebody has removed the top of the cat carrier. Like you know those hard cases, right? So the top is missing but the metal grate door is still there and the cat is just sitting in the cat carrier looking at the metal grate door and he can’t get out.
And I feel like there’s no more perfect visual metaphor for being attached to outcome than that because there are so many ways this cat could literally get out of his box at any time, he could get out in any direction, but he’s so fixated on the idea that the way out is through this door and the door is closed so he can’t get out.
[00:17:01] Ash: Exactly, Dusty. And I’m going to illustrate that by talking about two clients. Each of these clients thought that the outcome they were looking for was something different than the outcome we eventually found. So coaches, by the way, this is for you too, because being able to powerfully detach from the outcome as a coach is one of the best things that you can bring to your clients.And it’s how you get to a place where you can do this type of powerful coaching with your clients. So client number one came to me, was working in nonprofits, was theoretically passionate about the work and was certainly passionate about the area of work in which it was happening. Working with underserved populations to connect them to healthcare resources.
But as he had grown in this career, he was no longer the person out in communities, right? And kind of couldn’t afford to be because of the pay difference. He’s married with small children and now he’s sitting at a desk and not getting to interact with people and doesn’t love it. And kind of in a crisis, but thinks he wants to find something similar and is kind of looking for what’s my next move? I see it as mostly a lateral move from this short term contract project that I’m on now. And I really just want to work on the ADHD of it all and how it shows up in the workplace. But the more we coached, the more his dissatisfaction with being behind a desk and being disconnected from his work showed up.
And there came a point in the coaching where I tossed out without attachment. I even sometimes will say that when I’m asking something really big or really heavy, I will remind my clients, and that’s exactly what I did here. I asked, I’m going to say this and just know that I’m unattached to what is about to come out of my mouth – but is a career change a possibility? And he said, I don’t know. And I said, okay, all right. That’s a fair answer. I couldn’t tell you where the coaching session went from there, but the next time we spoke, he was like, you know, I’ve always thought about being an occupational therapist. And since we last spoke, I just remembered that I’d forgotten about it for so long, but since we last spoke, I remembered. And I don’t even know if it’s feasible or if it’s something that I could do, but I’ve thought about it. And now that it’s back, now that I’m remembering, that is a career that has always interested me.
Based on what we knew about him, his love to work directly with people and see that direct impact and some of his other strengths. I reinforced for him that, yes, this makes a lot of sense based on what I know about you. And his practice that round was to do a feasibility check, talk to his spouse, look into programs, see if his family could afford for him to go back to school and to retrain for a different career. Just to see from a practical meeting, meeting basic needs perspective. Is this something that I can do and to talk to another client of mine who is an OT to get a feel for what does that career actually look like in practice? What does it look like to be a practitioner in this field, which is a really helpful context for people with ADHD.
If you want to know something about any given career, ADHD people, see if you can find somebody who does it because that will tell you a lot more than anything you’re going to read or any school program you’re going to go through. That will help you know what the day to day is. So in three coaching sessions, we went from career change, not even on the table to this is happening because when the feasibility check happened, it was a go.
This client is currently in school to be an OT and has made a career change! When we talked about a big agenda in that first conversation, a career change was nowhere in that, but because we remained detached from the outcome, we were able to lift the fog just a little bit.
My client was able to reconnect to that previous knowledge of he’s always been interested in that career and that was where we had the opportunity to find what my client was looking for, right? That’s journey thinking. Now let me tell you an opposite story.
[00:21:23] Dusty: Storytime with Ash. [00:21:24] Ash: Another client I was working with came to coaching with career change being the topic. She was a graphic designer. She was fed up with the work. She thought she might want to be an ADHD coach and was actually in part engaging in ADHD coaching so that she could see what that process looked like and what it would be like to be an ADHD coach.She started taking some coach training. Interestingly enough, in one of our coaching sessions, I noticed she was bringing a lot of energy and passion to a project that she was doing with a client, a graphic design project. And I just noticed that for her, right? Like, Ooh, what’s different about this client versus your other clients?
She went – that’s a great question. She thought about it for a minute and she said, you know what it is, I hate working with clients that assign me. And then that’s it, right? Make me this logo, make me this thing, make me this book cover, do it like this. I hate that kind of work, but I love clients who want to collaborate with me.
Clients that want to work together to use my skills to bring their vision to life. And I was like, ooh, that’s interesting. So, that coach training you’re doing has some value here because while you’re not doing whole person ADHD coaching like I do, when you’re working with a client like this, you’re helping them figure out and realize their vision along the way.
And she was like, oh yeah, that is what I’m doing. And so as far as I know, this particular client was a client from years ago, and I haven’t heard from her recently. Although if you’re still listening, feel free to check in and let me know how things are going. As of the last time I heard from that client, she’s still working as a graphic designer because for her, the change needed wasn’t a career change. That’s what she thought it was. But the change needed was really to put herself in the picture in her own business and to be a choice about what types of clients she hired. Because if it’s a collaborative project, it’s great and she loves it and is really good at helping clients realize their vision. If it’s a do this for me and we’re not going to talk any more about it, she’s not interested in it. And now because she knows that, she fell in love with her existing business all over again.
And so the moral of those two stories is – in both cases, we ended up somewhere completely different than where that client thought we were going to go or thought they might want to go in this coaching process because we stayed detached from the outcome, because we stayed curious and because we pulled on little threads along the way.
And so listeners, if you are in a place where you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, what is the thread you can pull on? Where is the opportunity on this stepping stone without getting attached to the outcome? What direction could you look in? What could you try or experiment with or look into or consider, right?
I wasn’t looking for the thread of coach training. It found me. But as you said, Dusty, I walked through that door and pulled on that thread, and then found something that was worthwhile to continue pulling on. And here’s the thing, even if that wouldn’t have been true, even if I would have taken that one class, and moved on, it was still a thread worth pulling on.
The reason I like the metaphor of pulling threads is, if you think about pulling a loose thread out of a sweater, sometimes you get a little tiny one, right? You yank it and it’s just a little tiny thread that doesn’t really go anywhere. Sometimes you get one that you’re like, oh, no, if I keep pulling on this, I am going to unravel this whole sweater. But while the thread is still in the sweater, you can’t tell which is which – until you pull it, right?
So the moral of the story here isn’t that I pulled on the right thread. It’s that I was consistently pulling on different threads and I eventually found the right thread. I found the thread that cleared some fog for me so that I could see and envision a path forward that would have been completely invisible to me prior to walking through that door.
That was some, wow. That was some cam level metaphor mixing right there. Like, Whoa.
[00:25:56] Dusty: Oh yeah, true. Best ending. But to think about everything that you’re saying, Ash, for me, we had been talking earlier about strengths, and you were telling me a little bit about how you do some of your coaching.You were talking a little bit about getting away from that outcome and looking at where we can go from here? And I think that’s really great, if I were to give any advice. It can be so hard with ADHD to know what you want to do or where you should go. And I do think that you don’t need to have that big vision, but you can start with what you do know, and you can start with your strengths.
If I look at my own career trajectory, right? I started in university for social work. I was going to be a social worker. And I got accepted to the social work program, and then I got cold feet, and I decided I didn’t want to do that. And then, I had to finish, but didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had taken a bunch of courses, briefly tried to get into a non performance based music major, didn’t get in. Then, I was like, screw it, I just need to finish, I’ll just do whatever’s easy and fun for me, so I did anthropology. And, so I have my degree in anthropology and my minor is in German. Because I, at that moment, I was really interested in German, and like, early ADHD hack, I was like, well, I’m having a really hard time teaching myself to speak German, so I’ll make it my minor so that I have to learn it.
And let me tell you, at one point, I gave an entire verbal presentation about 17th century German literature in German. But, at one point I was super fluent, so that worked. Although why? Why? I don’t know.
Anyway, my point is, I had this degree in anthropology, but I knew that I didn’t want to be an anthropologist, and I knew that I didn’t want to work in a university setting, so I was like, why did I get this degree?
Then I went into fundraising, and I was such a good fundraiser, that much like your client who kind of got promoted, I got promoted into being a manager. And I didn’t love it as much as being a fundraiser, but luckily I worked in an organization that had students and a strong philosophical belief in management training.
So I got a lot of management training. I really learned the ins and outs of good management. Then I took a big break from that to do my thing that I thought was going to be my career, which was, like, being a rock star. And while I was on the road playing music I had to do a lot of self promotion.
So all that fundraising training came into play. And my bass player, who was also my partner at the time, was really good at spotting trends in social media, so he was having me do all this social media and kind of teaching me about social media. So I learned a lot about social media while I was playing in a band, and self promotion.
Then, that crashed and burned and I was like, what am I going to do? And in the meantime, as I was waiting to figure it out, I started managing a liquor store and all that management training came back into play. And I had never worked a retail job in my life, but I was very quickly promoted to the manager of this liquor store.
And as the manager of a liquor store, I really learned about systems and processes, right? The first couple of months I was terrible at it because I’d tell someone to go clean the bathroom and then the bathroom wouldn’t be clean. I couldn’t remember who I told, if I told them, if they’d done it.
We had to order things. I didn’t know when I was ordering things. It was a mess. And so that job taught me how to structure my own day and how to implement systems and processes because there was a lot of counting merchandise, placing orders, very hands-on logistical stuff, right? But I was able to bring all my management training, as well as some of my social media training, to help promote sales in the liquor store and build a better sense of unity.
And then I found ADHD coaching and all my social media experience, all my fundraising experience, all my leadership and management experience (because really good leadership and management is about motivating people, right? It’s about figuring out how to motivate people). And all my experience, all that anthropology that I did came into play because anthropology is a very problematic discipline, I think, but at the heart of it, it’s really about looking at a group of people and their behaviors and just getting curious and being like, what is this behavior about?
And so all that school that I did years and years ago that I thought I would never use, I think is really central to what makes me a great coach because I’m always curious about understanding the mechanisms behind behavior and belief about that behavior. But it’s my social media skills that helped me to promote myself as a coach and I think it’s my fundraising ability to pitch and ask, basically sales that helps me to be really good at doing consultations with people and really good at like more or less sort of getting clients, right?
And it’s all that leadership and management training that also helps me empower clients. So all of that stuff came together, but I could not have planned that, right? I didn’t know. But what I did was I followed my interests, my passions, and I just looked for opportunities to learn and grow at every turn, and I just kept asking myself, what do I want to do?
And frankly, what I have wanted to do has changed. So I couldn’t have known 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and what I wanted to do 10 years ago or 20 years ago isn’t the same as what I want to do now. And I think that’s okay.
I had a client who was really struggling with this, and I’ll wrap after this, but she was really struggling with feeling like she had no skills, or she wasn’t really quite good at anything. And we talked about all the things that she had done, and she had done a lot of things, both personally and professionally, she had little bits of experience all over. And at the end of it, I could see what she was really good at – getting experiences.
She was really good at trying things. And so what if that was your job? Like what if your job somehow oriented you around like getting to have experiences and I don’t know exactly what that looks like but again instead of being focused on the process or the outcome like I want to be a banker or like I want to be a whatever. It’s like, what if we start with a job that allows you to dip in and out and have different experiences? And what are the possible careers that could match that? And I don’t know that she necessarily left that coaching session being like, oh, I figured it out. But I think just the reframe from I don’t have any skills, I don’t have any abilities, I don’t know anything to… well, there’s one thing I’m really good at. And this one thing, it’s more conceptual, was very empowering for her.
[00:32:10] Ash: Listeners, that thing I said at the beginning of this episode about the story you tell about your own past and rethinking that story, putting yourself in that picture. Dusty just did an amazing job of that, of telling her story, linking together these different experiences and you could very easily tell me that same story in the frame of I’m a loser who’s done a hundred things, but I don’t feel like I’ve done any of them well. And I’ve had clients do exactly that.So listeners, listen back to Dusty’s story. And start to think about your own experiences, even the ones that weren’t so amazing, even if you’ve had jobs that were definitely not a good fit. Guess what? There’s rich learning to be had there too. What wasn’t a fit? What didn’t work for you? How could that inform where you might go next?
Sitting at a desk for me for 40 hours a week was awful. That was the thing that sent me towards the path of self-employment. I was fortunate enough at the time that we could live off of my spouse’s income, so we had some opportunity to take some risk and that was the direction I went.
I could have ended up going a number of different directions because all I knew at that time was that I did not want to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week for the rest of my life. No matter how interesting the work, no matter how good the workplace, no matter how awesome the benefits, it was the sitting.
No matter the size of the company, I went from a big company to a small company thinking that might help. And it helped some because it removed the corporate stuff and it connected me closer to the impacts and the outcomes of my work. But, I was still sitting at a desk for 40+ hours a week. And I knew that whatever else I didn’t know, I knew that.
So. I think the opportunity for our listeners here is to reflect on those past experiences. What can you learn from them? What can you get curious about? And from there, what threads are there and now with all of your other context in the room. Remember, with that one client who’s married with two small children, we had to take the context into account.
Is going back to school feasible for your life and your family? That is a question we had to answer. So in your own context, in your own life, what opportunities are there for threads to pull on? And by the way, if the question is career oriented, you don’t necessarily have to pull on a career oriented thread.
I have learned so much and grown so much as a coach from experiences that I’ve had that are completely outside of the coaching industry and not necessarily career-oriented in any way. So what’s a new experience that you can have, without attaching to the outcome, just have the experience, get the learning, and eventually the fog will lift.
And really, I just described how I coach every single client. That’s always what we’re doing – what’s the new experience, and whether that new experience is amazing or terrible, what’s the learning. And now in this place where we know something that we didn’t know before, now what are we curious about? Now what has our attention? I think that’s a good place for us to wrap for today, Dusty. So listeners until next week, I am Ash.
[00:35:32] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:35:33] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
