October is ADHD Awareness Month
ADHD Awareness Month Isn’t Only for People With the Diagnosis
October is ADHD Awareness Month. You’ll see the posts, the infographics, the lists of symptoms and you’ll scroll right past them, because you don’t think that is you. You don’t have ADHD. You’re just tired, behind, and wondering why everything feels so much harder than it should.
I want to talk to you this month. Yes, you too if you have a diagnosis, or suspect you might. But especially you, the one who would never identify as having ADHD and is still dealing with the forgetting, the focus that slips away, the to do list that never seems to get shorter.
You don’t need a diagnosis to deserve support
People ask me all the time, “Do I need an ADHD diagnosis to work with you?” Absolutely not. That one’s easy.
There are a lot of misconceptions about ADHD, and plenty of women look at that word and think, “That’s not me.” Maybe it isn’t. Maybe life has handed you so much at once that your brain is doing exactly what an overloaded brain does. Either way, the memory struggles, the trouble with focus, the timelines that slide right past you are real, and they’re affecting your life right now. That’s what matters to me. I care far more about what you’re experiencing than what it’s called.
And just to be really clear: I’m a coach, not a clinician. I don’t diagnose anything. If you want answers about a diagnosis, a doctor or psychologist is your person. If you want someone to walk alongside you while you figure out what works for your life, that’s where I come in.
The sentence I’d love to retire this October
“Why can’t I just…”
Why can’t I just get to work on time. Why can’t I just answer that email. Why can’t I just keep the house picked up like everyone else seems to.
It’s the sentence I despise most, and it’s a harmful thing to say to yourself or to have anyone say to you. It assumes the problem is effort, or character. For most people I work with, effort was never the problem. They’ve been trying harder than anyone around them knows.
That’s what masking looks like. You show up, you look fine, nobody has a clue, and on the inside you’re a hot mess. You hold it together until you can’t, and then you blame yourself for the cracks.
What it looked like for me
I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t realize a lot of my own patterns were an ADHD thing until my late thirties. When I finally had a name for it, there was relief. It wasn’t that I was lazy or crazy. There was a reason.
And then there was a mountain of information to sort through and decisions to make. Medication or no medication, here are some articles, good luck. I was tired of feeling the way I was feeling, and it was so overwhelming. It would have been such a blessing to have somebody say, “Hey, let me walk beside you in this.” Instead I had to figure it out on my own, and it wasn’t very fun. That’s a big part of why I do this work now.
Here’s a small example of how it still shows up. I had a cooler sitting on my back porch with a few water bottles and soda cans in it. All I needed to do was put the drinks in the fridge, wipe it out, and get it off the porch. It sat there for over two weeks. It went on my to-do list and I passed it up again and again. No deadline, no priority.
Then my daughter-in-law called and asked to borrow it. I had it emptied, cleaned, and in the garage in under ten minutes. My husband pointed out he’d suggested it about a hundred times. Yep, I know.
That’s not laziness. That’s how an interest and urgency driven brain works. The moment someone else was counting on me, the task got done. Knowing that about yourself changes how you set things up, and it takes a lot of the shame out of it.
Why the new planner didn’t fix it
A lot of us, myself included, love planners. We love buying the new one. We love the color coding and the stickers and the due dates. And then we very rarely follow through with it consistently, and it becomes one more failed thing. The same goes for most of the apps on your phone right now.
Tools are neutral at best. At worst they add to your stress, because now you have a system to keep up with on top of everything else. Getting more organized is not the same as getting support. Coaching is about figuring out what’s actually happening in your life, what’s already working, and how we expand that while we shrink what gets in the way.
Try an experiment instead of a resolution
If you take one thing from this month, let it be this. Stop setting rules for yourself that you either pass or fail. When you tell yourself “I’m going to do this thing” and then you don’t, it lands as “I failed.” That feeds the shame, and the shame makes the next attempt even harder.
So we reframe it. We’re not attached to a particular outcome. We’re just going to experiment, and it either works or you learn something from it. There is no failure. You tweak it, you try it again, you tweak it again.
A few small experiments to try this October:
- Borrow someone else’s expectation. Remember the cooler. Tell a friend you’ll text them a photo when the task is done, or work alongside someone on a video call while you each tackle your own thing. People call this body doubling, and it helps a lot of brains, ADHD or not.
- Work in short sprints. Set a timer for 25 minutes, do one thing, then get up, stretch, and grab some water before the next round. (It’s called the Pomodoro method, after the creator who was inspired by a little tomato shaped kitchen timer.)
- Look for the micro shift. If you want to be on time to work every day and you were late every day last week, getting there on time Tuesday and Thursday is progress. Count it.
- Turn “I don’t want” into “I do want.” When you catch yourself listing what you don’t want, flip it. What do you want instead? Your brain can work toward a picture. It can’t do much with a complaint.
- Know when good enough is good enough. Perfectionism is often the thing stopping you from starting at all.
How you’ll know something is shifting
I look at two things. First, are your outcomes changing, even a little? Second, how are you feeling? Lighter? Happier? Less tangled up about it? It doesn’t always have to be both. Sometimes you leave a session and nothing has changed on paper yet, but you feel really good, and that matters. The outcomes often catch up.
And if you miss something along the way, a session, a goal, a week? You haven’t failed and you haven’t let me down. We pick right back up where you need to pick up. No judgment, no shame, no “you wasted my time.” That cycle of missing something, feeling terrible, and then disappearing because you can’t face the person is exactly what we’re working to break.
Are you ready for support?
From my own experience: you’re ready when the way things are right now just isn’t working for you anymore, and you’re sick of it. Maybe you’ve spent hours researching. Maybe you could talk for hours about how hard you are on yourself. You know something needs to shift, even if you can’t name what it is yet.
That’s a perfectly good place to start. You don’t need to have it figured out before we talk. That’s kind of the point.
Questions I hear a lot
Do I need an ADHD diagnosis to work with a coach?
No. I work with women who have a diagnosis, women who suspect they might, and women who’d never use the ADHD label on themselves but are still struggling with overwhelm, focus, and memory. What you’re experiencing is what we work on.
Is ADHD coaching the same as therapy?
No. Therapy is clinical and can only be practiced by a licensed (or supervised) provider. Coaching is present and forward focused: here’s the problem, let’s go after it and shift how you approach it. I’m not a licensed therapist or medical provider and I don’t diagnose, so coaching is self pay and not covered by insurance. Coaching and therapy can work well side by side.
Will my coach just tell me what to do?
That’s one of the biggest misconceptions. Coaching is a partnership. I walk alongside you with gentle accountability, and sometimes I’ll gently call you out, with compassion of course. But you’re the expert on your own life. We figure out together what actually works for you.
Can’t I just ask an AI chatbot for help?
AI can be a useful tool for some things, and I use it myself. But it can’t give you true human connection, and it isn’t looking at you as a whole person. It might hand you a tip that addresses a symptom. It won’t dig into what’s contributing to how or why you do something, or help identify the best type of support for you as a unique individual.
My partner has ADHD. Can you help me?
Yes. That’s one of my favorite questions. It usually starts with some education about what might be impacting your partner with ADHD (why they do the things that they do!), and then coaching on how you navigate it, including taking care of you. It’s not relationship or marriage therapy, but it can take a lot of the frustration out of the cupboard doors that never get closed.
This October, give yourself a little grace. If something in here sounded like your experience, let’s talk. Book a free discovery call and we’ll figure out together what kind of support fits you, one on one, in a small group, or a mix of both.