Being Brilliant At Your Job Shouldn’t Cost You Everything
There’s a really uncomfortable problem with talking about neurodivergence when it comes to our work.
Because a lot of the focus is around the things we find difficult: the overwhelm, the executive dysfunction, the sensory stuff, the exhaustion, the communication differences, the fact an unexpected call can make us want to chuck our phone into the sea.
And all of those things matter, so we definitely shouldn’t stop talking about them.
In my last blog, The Performance Never Ends, I wrote about how much energy I can spend monitoring myself during meetings, phone calls, networking and all the other interactions that come with running a business. Understanding that has been massively important for me. But there’s another side to this conversation that I don’t want to lose, because I’m also really bloody good at what I do.
I can read a room. I notice things other people miss. I’m brilliant at joining dots, spotting problems and seeing opportunities. I can become deeply invested in understanding somebody’s business and will happily disappear down whatever rabbit hole is required to find out why something isn’t working. Give me a problem that interests me and I am basically a Labrador who’s just been shown a tennis ball.
None of that disappears because some parts of running a business take more out of me than they might take out of somebody else. And that’s where things get interesting, because what if the question isn’t whether neurodivergent people can thrive in business? Loads of us already are.
What if the better question is: how do we keep all the brilliant bits without sacrificing ourselves in the process?
Being exhausted doesn’t mean you’re bad at this
This is something I wish I’d understood much earlier. For years, I assumed that if something left me exhausted, I must somehow not be very good at it. Surely if I was naturally good with people, meetings wouldn’t tire me out? If I was confident, I wouldn’t need to prepare so much. If I was genuinely capable, work shouldn’t require this much effort.
Except that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.
I’m very good with clients. I’ve spent most of my working life in roles involving people, communication, sales, strategy and relationships. I’ve presented, pitched, negotiated, managed teams and walked into rooms full of people I’d never met before and somehow managed to convince them I knew what I was doing. Most of the time, I did know what I was doing!
But some of the things that made me good at those jobs were also costing me energy. I prepared thoroughly. I watched people closely. I noticed changes in tone and body language. I thought about what somebody might need before they asked for it. I could adapt my communication depending on who was sitting in front of me.
Those are skills, and the fact that they sometimes come with an enormous energy bill doesn’t make them less valuable. That’s been quite a shift for me, because it means I’ve stopped using exhaustion as evidence that I’m somehow failing. Sometimes I’m tired because something was difficult. Sometimes I’m tired because I’ve been doing something incredibly well and my brain has been working its little socks off behind the scenes.
The outcome might look effortless. That doesn’t mean the process was.
When coping becomes your business strategy
The awkward part is that some of the habits that helped me succeed were probably never particularly sustainable.
Over-preparing is a great example. If you’re worried about getting something wrong, one fairly effective solution is to prepare for absolutely every possible eventuality. Research everything. Think through every question. Make notes. Make notes about the notes. Mentally rehearse the conversation several times and, as we’ve already established, prepare the other person’s lines for them too.
Does it work? Often, yes. You walk into the meeting incredibly prepared and do a fantastic job. Everyone is impressed. Lovely. Unfortunately, you’ve already used half a day’s energy preparing for a one-hour conversation.
The same can happen with over-delivering, being incredibly responsive, saying yes because you don’t want to disappoint somebody, working late because you lost several hours earlier trying to get your brain into gear, or taking on more than you really have capacity for and then somehow pulling it off anyway. From the outside, all anyone sees is the result, and when the result is good, it’s remarkably easy to keep doing the thing that produced it.
I think I’ve spent chunks of my career running on a highly sophisticated business system consisting largely of anxiety, adrenaline and sugary snacks. To be fair, it got quite a lot done. But there’s a difference between something being effective and something being sustainable, and I don’t think I understood that distinction for a very long time.
Nobody gives you extra points for making it harder
I think many of us have inherited some fairly peculiar ideas about what being professional is supposed to look like. Professional people are always available. They respond quickly. They don’t need much downtime. They can go from meeting to meeting without needing to stare at a wall for twenty minutes in between. They answer the phone when it rings rather than looking at it suspiciously until it stops. They also apparently enjoy networking breakfasts, although I remain unconvinced by this.
The trouble is that when you’ve spent years trying to fit that model, making things easier for yourself can feel like cheating. If I choose email instead of a phone call, am I avoiding something? If I don’t put meetings back-to-back, am I being less productive? If I decide that a huge networking event isn’t the best way for me to build relationships, am I missing opportunities? If I need time to think before answering a question, does that make me look less competent?
Increasingly, my answer to all of those questions is: who cares, if the end result is good?
My clients don’t benefit from me having three meetings back-to-back if I’m running on fumes by the third one. They don’t get a better strategy because I answered their email within seven minutes. Nobody receives bonus points because I made the process unnecessarily difficult for myself. Professionalism, to me, looks much simpler these days: do good work, communicate clearly, do what you say you’re going to do, and treat people well. Everything else is negotiable.
Keep the brilliance. Lose some of the cost
This is the bit I’ve become much more interested in since understanding my neurodivergence. I don’t want to make myself less ambitious. I don’t want to stop getting ridiculously excited about ideas, caring deeply about my clients or disappearing into a problem until I’ve worked out what’s going on. Those are some of my favourite things about the way my brain works.
I just don’t want to keep borrowing energy from myself to do them.
So I’ve started looking at the bits around the work. I never book days full of meetings anymore. I leave gaps because I know my brain needs them. I work from different rooms when I need a change of environment. I choose written communication when it makes more sense. If somebody asks me something and I need time to think, I’m comfortable saying exactly that rather than producing an answer on the spot because Professional Hannah apparently has all the answers immediately.
I’ve also become much more protective of the conditions in which I do my best work. I know that there are times when my brain is brilliant and times when asking it to produce anything useful is like repeatedly pressing the button on a remote control when you know perfectly well the batteries are dead. Past me would probably have kept pressing the button harder. Current me is much more likely to change the batteries. Or, depending on the day, abandon the television entirely and go and have a cup of tea.
None of these things makes me less serious about my business. If anything, the opposite is true. I’m finally treating my capacity as something the business depends upon rather than an inconvenient obstacle I need to overcome.
What did it cost you?
For years, I think I measured whether work was going well almost entirely by the external result. Was the client happy? Did I deliver what I promised? Did the meeting go well? Did we win the work? Did the business grow? If the answer was yes, then whatever I’d done to get there was obviously working.
Except I was leaving one fairly important question off the list: what did it cost me?
Not financially. Personally.
Did that piece of work require me to push through exhaustion for three days? Did I spend the whole weekend recovering from a week I’d apparently “managed” perfectly well? Was I constantly anxious? Had I agreed to something I knew I didn’t really have capacity for? Was the business succeeding because I’d become the resource it was consuming?
That’s a much less comfortable measure of success, but I think it’s an important one. Because a business can look successful from the outside whilst being completely unsustainable for the person running it. You can have happy clients, money coming in and a diary full of work and still have built yourself a job that requires more of you than you can keep giving. That’s not success I particularly want anymore.
Sustainable doesn’t mean less successful
For me, this is where the conversation about neurodivergent business owners sometimes goes wrong. We talk about adjustments, boundaries, energy management and doing things differently, and somewhere along the way it can start to sound as though we’re designing smaller lives because we can’t cope with the big ones.
That’s not how I see it at all.
I don’t protect my energy because I have less to offer. I protect it because I know how much I can do with it when it’s available, and there’s a huge difference between those two things.
Building a business around the way my brain works doesn’t mean lowering my expectations. It means creating the conditions in which I’m much more likely to meet them without flattening myself in the process. And yes, sometimes that means doing less. It might mean saying no to something, moving a deadline, leaving space between commitments or accepting that there are only so many people I can deal with in one day before my brain puts up the CLOSED sign.
But it also means that when I am working, I have far more of myself available for the things I’m genuinely brilliant at. That feels like a pretty sensible business strategy to me.
Maybe the cost was never the point
I spent a lot of years assuming that being good at something meant being able to keep doing it regardless of what it cost me. I don’t believe that anymore.
I’m still ambitious. I’m still fascinated by business. I still get overexcited about ideas, care far too much about solving problems and occasionally find myself doing considerably more research than any reasonable person could argue was necessary. I’m not trying to remove any of that.
What I’m removing is the belief that exhaustion somehow proves I’ve worked hard enough, that pushing through is evidence of commitment, or that if I make something easier for myself it somehow makes the result less impressive.
Because my business doesn’t need the version of me who can keep going until there’s absolutely nothing left. It needs the version of me who can still be here doing work I love in five, ten or twenty years.
The goal isn’t to become less brilliant at what we do. It’s to stop sacrificing ourselves in order to prove how brilliant we are.