Procrastination, Flow State and HYPERFOCUS
So… blog on procrastination, flow state and hyperfocus… AND GO!
Just start Stuart…
Yep, it’s not that simple though is it brain?
No but you gotta do it, the deadline and all… Hannah will be disappointed.
Yeah, I know, exactly, so why won’t you just get started then, BRAIN?
Brain will not be told what to do, brain is brain, brain decides what brain does. You shut up ego. Brain in charge.
Arghhh. Just get on with it, I have consumed enough caffeine to power a 90s rave, just get the frig on with wording and typing.
::silence::
::silence continues::
::more silence::
::except it’s not ‘silence’ though is it?::
::It’s the bin lorry reversing, it’s the birds outside the door, it’s the couple screeching their true love vows at ear piercing volume, it’s the twat of a dog that just will not stop asking where the owner is because object permanence is not a thing for it, BARK BARK BARK… BLEEP FUCKING BLEEP. YEELL YELL YELL.::
And breathe….
When your brain decides that leaves rustling in the breeze is reason enough to stop focusing and forget what it was thinking about one minute and then three hours later we arise from our miasma and realise that hyperfocus got us again.
We’re gonna take a look at procrastination, flow and hyperfocus, maybe. If this brain cooperates and gets going. It’s been a hard three weeks recently and the heat has not played well with my productivity.
It’s not an unreasonable ask, one might think, to say to another functional grown adult, “Hey, could you take this task and do it?”
And, that other functional grown adult says “Yeah. I can do it. I will do it tomorrow.”
24hrs later…
“That thing you wanted me to do. I did it. Here.”
“Thank you functional grown adult, I truly appreciate you doing what you said you would do when you said you would do it.”
“That’s OK. Would you like to get coffee sometime? Just two professionals interested in the thing we did…”
“No.”
::awkward silence::
End scene.
Just because you have a deep wellspring of ideas, ready to give you all the good stuff, doesn’t mean it turns up when YOU want it to. We’ve documented this throughout the Oddcast, energy is patchy and can be unreliable, which translates to a lot of panic when deadlines loom. Like this blog!
But what does any of that actually mean Stuart?
Good question, thanks brain!
Well it makes for focusing on a topic quite challenging; when you’re an intellectual omnivore you feast on all the trivia, nommity nom. You want, no sorry, you NEED all of the details and have questions. And this is for EVERYTHING!
Not only is your brain coming up with all its own stuff, it also has millions of questions at any time, it is truly exhausting. So getting started is more like whack-a-mole, where you hope that one of the moles turns out to be the blog you wanted to write.
So you have all that just to get going and then you have to shut all the noise out, quieten it all down, and focus like a “LAY-ZERRR” (10 points if you did the Dr. Evil voice in your head 100 points if you did the little finger too).
Getting started might be a whole load of circling the landing strip before you tentatively try to touch down and get the work started. Procrastination can look like many things, but for ND brains it can be procrastination against your will. Your brain just refuses to settle down and get on with it, a myriad of competing actions, thoughts and demands all crashing in and demanding attention.
If you’re lucky you have a series of cues and triggers which help you forget the world at large and get into the work you want to start.
Ideally, as all the “one size fits all” self-help and business literature holds up the ideal productivity goal is to get into “flow state”, or “flow”, which the dictionary describes as:
A mental condition of complete absorption in an activity, marked by focused attention, diminished self-consciousness, and an altered sense of time,
Flow is often held up as the perfect state for achieving productivity, where you are “in the zone” or “locked in” and you are attuned to the work. First coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, in his 1975 book ‘Beyond Boredom and Anxiety’
The concept has been widely adopted across a variety of fields and denotes absorption in one’s work. Named because, during Csíkszentmihályi’s interviews with chess players, dancers, artists, and athletes, the metaphor of a water current carrying them along, or flow of thoughts was used by several people to describe a state of function with moderate levels of psychological arousal, where you are unlikely to be overwhelmed by the work, but also not understimulated and bored.
But do not confuse flow with hyperfocus, they are not the same.
To use the water metaphor, flow is like being in a rubber ring, floating down a lazy river, maybe with a cool beverage in one hand and chilled vibes floating on the breeze.
And if that were possible in your ND brain then life would be all cake and candles, kumbiyah at sunset and a never ending hugathon (unlikely!). But here’s the inside skinny…
It’s a raging chaos, fire hydrant of ideas, with thoughts and actions cascading over each other. If flow is a day out to “Float Town”, hyperfocus is a ride down a white water rapids of ideas propelling you towards the waterfall of desperation and deadlines. A mind full of synaptic murmurations, diving and veering off, tangents meeting side quests, which in a Newton’s Cradle of ideas thwacks the next shiny ball into view for you to chase in a dopamine, sensory rush that never wants to end.
All of this is pointed at the object of your obsession, your hobby, or current special interest, a deep dive that seems to be endless, and the deeper you go the more you need to know, do or see. It can span multiple sessions too, where you snap out. Maybe you finally listen to your bladder, or your hunger. You peel your eyes off the object of your desire at that time but the itch is not scratched.
And that’s where flow state stops being flow state and starts to develop into something a little more hard-core-you-know-the-score. Where your flow state focus alights on a sweet spot, something you are really feeling, and then brain bends time and warps space and you are in a hyper-bubble.
You may even sleep, awake and find yourself unable to think about anything other than what it is you are focusing on. Eventually it ends, or diminishes enough for real-life to crash in and the light that burns twice as bright, lasts half as long.
And the neurodivergent brain burns so very, very brightly at times, which comes at a cognitive cost, well, at least for me. And that’s an issue, if your available cognitive bandwidth is an all or nothing full-fibre firehose at the all-you-can-eat data buffet then it can be overwhelming. It can take days to recover from a 2 or 3 day hyperfocus, where you have smashed out 30+ hours of work, often to a very high quality. But with every high, comes the lows…
You also have to live with your focus being fungible, it can be with you and then slip away just when you need it because you notice some small detail on a business card on your desk and your brain decIdes that’s the off ramp and away it is gone. If you’re lucky, it’s a pretty easy detour to navigate and you can get back on the freeway to hyperfocus town.
Literally time stops and others cease to be, you cease to be, you are nothing but the task in hand and the moment you are in, this is what buddhists train for their whole lives, it’s less about achieving and more about sustaining this beautiful feeling of freedom.
Your focus is narrowed to a sharp and very clear point, you’re aware of everything but nothing matters as your hearing, and eyes, brain and self melds into this one creature just doing their thing.
It’s a beautiful thing, right up until it’s not, and then you start to realise that things might be not right in the “body” department, and you snap out of the hyperfocus, like you de-warp and suddenly realise the control bridge is on fire and all the red shirts are dead. Plus if you do not pee like NOW… then… ooops…
Plus, call the Dr. and ask him why is my ankle in a weird position. Also, why are you pressing your foot into the floor so hard? Ouch it hurts, that’s gonna take days to stop aching.
All this because your body decides to ignore the Geneva Convention rules on interrogations and puts you into tortuous stress position for hours whilst your brain folds in on itself over and over like so much dough in an orgiastic release of dopamine and need for more. Forget you body… Brain be braining…. Nawwmmm, nawwnnnn… ahhhh it tastes really dopaminey.
Think of it like itching a particularly compelling scratch over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over until both the patch is red raw and so is your finger from all the scratching.
It’s a FIREHOSE. Absolute ruddy non-stop and you have to wrestle it to point in the right direction and hold it there for however long it is needed. It can be exhausting.
The hyperfocus is not something that can be summoned, it’s a flighty creature, some might call it by the familiar, “muse”, or the more prosaic “inspiration”. But it is attracted by certain rituals and spaces, provokers of state, and suggestors of the possible. Also the hyperfocus may literally have zero to do with the work you HAVE to do. Your brain bolts and you’re on a wild ride until it stops. Destination unknown.
There are definitely factors that will prevent a hyperfocus, tiredness, hunger, illness, cold, distractions, both physical and emotional, but it’s not guaranteed. All of this can mean that simply being hungry and a bit tired, maybe even a bit dehydrated, can prevent you hitting the big red hyper-warp access button. But may also contribute to the after effects, if you go in unrested, out of sorts or mentally already a bit spent, the end result can be very exhausting.
Hyperfocus is a superpower, like King Midas’ golden touch, sounds great until you realise the implications of such abilities, gives a whole new meaning to “polishing your (k)nob”. Two major hyperfocus sessions back to back is brutal, and I want to just lie down all the time.
Do not read this and think you can summon focus at will, you can’t, but you might plant some seeds and see early signs, and then get going and hope it all falls into place. The getting going is the hard bit, like the start of this entire piece. You might find a few sparks and fan them into a roaring flame. Your hope is the flame doesn’t turn into a forest fire that wipes out large swathes of your cognitive landscape.
It is a balancing act, can be dictated by circumstances beyond your control and when it hits you can be all consuming, but it is certainly not delivered at will. You have no control over it, or at least I have no control over it, when it lands, like an unwelcome visitor you have no idea when that will be or what time, including the 3am waking and need to write down the ideas.
However, there’s been lots of thinky on this piece, which means I have to go eaty/drinky and brain has to go rest.
If any of this has felt familiar then why not listen to an episode?
Or take our NeuroInclusive Workplace audit, to see how neuroinclusive your workplace is. You can then see how to make your environment more productive whether you are a solo-preneur or multi person team.
If you have any questions get in touch!
Following The Dopamine
Have you ever sat down to answer one specific email, only to discover, forty-five minutes later, that you’ve somehow learnt the mating habits of octopuses, reorganised your desktop, found a podcast you’d forgotten to listen to and become absolutely convinced that now might be the perfect time to start a completely unrelated business?
For me, it always starts with the best of intentions. I’ll realise I need to check one tiny detail before I reply. That tiny detail raises another question, which obviously requires a quick Google search. The Google search throws up an article that looks genuinely fascinating, which reminds me of something else I’ve been meaning to look into, and before I know it I’ve got so many browser tabs open that my laptop looks less like an archaeological dig through every interest I’ve had over the past month. Past Hannah was clearly very optimistic. Every single tab was apparently too important to close because I might need it later. Present-day Hannah has absolutely no idea why seventeen of them are still open, but I’m sure there was a perfectly good reason at the time.
From the outside, it probably looks like distraction. A complete inability to stop chasing the shiny thing and just crack on with the job in hand. It certainly used to look that way to me. I’d sit back at the end of the morning wondering how on earth I’d been so busy without actually doing the thing I’d originally sat down to do, and conclude that I simply wasn’t disciplined enough. Other people seemed perfectly capable of deciding what they were going to work on and then… just working on it. Meanwhile, I’d somehow wandered into a wilderness of possibilities with absolutely no idea where I was heading.
I’ve started thinking about this as following the dopamine. I know dopamine has become one of those words that’s casually thrown into almost every conversation about ADHD these days, and I’m not about to pretend everything we do can be explained by one brain chemical. Brains are wonderfully complicated, and anyone claiming otherwise is usually trying to sell you something.
But as a description of what this feels like, it comes surprisingly close. It’s more like my brain finds a loose thread and simply can’t resist pulling it to see what happens. Before I know it, I’m blinking into the sunlight wondering how I ended up reading about something completely different from where I started. My brain, meanwhile, is full and happy, rubbing its belly as though this had been the plan all along. In reality, I never consciously decided to abandon that first task. My attention just wandered off for a moment… and that moment pulled up a chair.
For years, I assumed I was just a bit ditzy. God knows there were enough school reports suggesting that was the case. But when I look back now, I know that’s not what was happening. Not even close. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had, the projects I’m proudest of and the biggest pivots in my career all started because I wandered off and followed the shiny thing.
Everything interesting feels like a breadcrumb
My brain seems to experience curiosity very differently from some people. For them, it appears to be a passing thought. They wonder about something, perhaps make a mental note to look it up later, and then carry on with whatever they were doing. A tiny pause before getting back to the task in hand. Yay them!
Mine, on the other hand, treats every fascinating idea like a breadcrumb that absolutely has to be followed because… well… what if the next breadcrumb is even better? Sometimes that works out brilliantly. Sometimes it ends with me knowing far more than any reasonable person should about something that wasn’t remotely connected to what I was supposed to be doing.
I’ve long since accepted that, like Alice, there are certain rabbit holes I’m powerless to resist. Mention an unusual business model, an obscure historical event or a piece of technology I’ve never come across before, and there’s a very good chance I’ll disappear for an hour and emerge with an entirely unnecessary amount of knowledge. My brain seems convinced it’ll all come in useful one day and, after all these years, I’ve learnt it’s usually not worth arguing.
The funny thing is, it never feels like I’m deliberately avoiding work because avoidance has a very different feeling to it. This feels more like my brain has found an itch it simply has to scratch before it can settle again. I suspect that’s one of the reasons so many neurodivergent people become accidental experts in the most wonderfully random subjects. We don’t always choose our interests. Quite often they choose us, and once they’ve got our attention they won’t let go until we’ve reached Mastermind specialist subject levels of knowledge.
For years I saw that as a weakness because we’re taught that focus and consistency are the holy grail. But I’m no longer convinced that’s true. Looking back, I think this relentless curiosity has quietly become one of my greatest strengths.
This is where my best ideas are born
The older I get, the less convinced I am that my brain is actually as random as I’d always assumed.
At the time, it certainly feels random. One interest appears from nowhere, quickly followed by another, and before long I’ve disappeared off on yet another project that nobody saw coming. If you looked at my CV over the years, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether I simply couldn’t make my mind up. Novelty cakes. Bar work. Marketing. Business strategy. Podcasting. On paper, it looks less like a career path and more like somebody repeatedly throwing darts at a noticeboard.
For a long time, that’s exactly how I saw it too. I admired people who seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do from the age of twelve and then spent the next thirty years becoming brilliant at it. Meanwhile, I was enthusiastically wandering through life picking up new interests like I was collecting Pokémon.
But when I look back now, those interests don’t feel disconnected at all. They all have the same thread running through them. I’ve always been fascinated by understanding people, solving problems and making complicated things easier to understand. The subject matter has changed over the years, but the thing driving it really hasn’t.
I don’t think The Business Oddcast exists despite the fact that I followed lots of different interests. I think it exists because I did. My business strategy work didn’t appear because I suddenly woke up one morning with a perfectly formed business idea. It grew out of years of following conversations, asking questions, noticing patterns and joining dots that didn’t seem connected until they eventually were.
That’s the awkward thing about following something that grabs your attention. It rarely gives you the full picture at the beginning. It simply nudges you to take one more step. Sometimes that leads absolutely nowhere. Sometimes it leads to another abandoned notebook, three unopened browser tabs and an Amazon basket full of things that felt essential at the time.
And every now and then…it changes the direction of your life.
The Problem Isn’t Curiosity. It’s Timing.
Much as I’d love to tell you that following every fascinating idea has been the secret to my success, I’d also like to remain on speaking terms with reality.
The truth is, my brain has absolutely dreadful timing. It doesn’t patiently wait until I’ve finished writing the proposal, sent the invoice or replied to the customer who’s now wondering whether I’ve accidentally disappeared. It turns up halfway through all of those things, taps me on the shoulder and whispers, “This probably isn’t important… but what if we just had a really quick look?”
The really clever part is that it always feels completely logical. Future Hannah will apparently never understand this idea as well as Present Hannah, so naturally everything else has to wait. Looking back, it’s remarkable how many “urgent” ideas have turned out not to be urgent at all. Future Hannah usually copes just fine.
I’ve lost count of the number of notebooks – both digital and physical – containing brilliant business ideas that never became businesses. Half-finished online courses abandoned around week two. Browser tabs I’ve kept open for months because I was absolutely certain I’d come back to them. My Notes app is full of cryptic sentences and random numbers that made perfect sense at the time, and a significant proportion of my camera roll is screenshots that now look like they belong to somebody else’s life.
For years, I assumed the answer was to fight it. Ignore the distraction. Stay focused. Be more disciplined. Unsurprisingly, that worked about as well as telling a Labrador to ignore the interesting smell in the hedge. I could manage it for a few minutes, but I’d spend far more energy wrestling with my own brain than I ever saved by resisting it.
The breakthrough wasn’t learning to ignore those thoughts. It was realising they didn’t all need dealing with immediately.
These days, I ask myself a different question. Not “Should I follow this?” but “Does this need following today?” Surprisingly often, the answer is no. The article will still be there after I’ve sent the email. The business idea can survive until tomorrow. If it’s genuinely a good idea, it’ll almost certainly still be a good idea once I’ve finished what I originally sat down to do.
So I leave myself a trail back. A quick voice note. A sentence in my Notes app that I’ll hopefully still be able to decipher later. A reminder in my calendar. It isn’t a productivity system worthy of a bestselling business book, but it works for me because it tells my brain something incredibly important:
“You don’t have to remember this. We’ve already caught it.”
For years, I worried that if I didn’t act on an idea immediately, I’d lose it forever. Every thought seemed to arrive with an expiry date. The irony is that trying to hold onto all of those ideas at once made it almost impossible to concentrate on the one thing I actually wanted to finish. Now I trust myself to come back.
Not every idea deserves my attention today. Some do. Others simply deserve somewhere safe to wait until I have the time and headspace to give them the attention they deserve. That one shift has probably saved me more mental energy than any productivity technique I’ve ever tried. Because I’ve realised the goal was never to silence that part of my brain. Quite the opposite. It’s responsible for some of the best things I’ve ever created.
Maybe following the dopamine was never the problem
I’m still the person who can disappear down an internet rabbit hole because one question led to another. I still start researching one thing and somehow end up learning something completely unrelated. There are still days when I look at my browser and wonder whether anyone else has ever managed to open quite so many tabs whilst technically doing one job.
The difference is that I no longer see those moments as evidence that my brain is broken or that I’m somehow incapable of focusing. They’re simply part of how I explore the world. Some of those detours lead absolutely nowhere. Others have led to conversations, businesses, friendships and opportunities that I’d never have found if I’d forced myself to stay on the straight and narrow.
Looking back, so much of what I value in my life began with a question I couldn’t quite let go of. The Business Oddcast exists because Stuart and I kept following questions that fascinated us. My business strategy work grew because I couldn’t stop asking why some businesses thrive whilst others, often with equally good products or services, quietly struggle. None of it came from sitting down with a perfectly mapped-out plan. It came from paying attention to the things my brain kept coming back to.
So these days, when I find myself halfway through writing an email and suddenly wondering how something completely unrelated works, I don’t immediately assume I’ve failed. I make a note, finish the email and then decide later whether it’s worth following. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. But I’ve stopped seeing every distraction as evidence that I’m doing life wrong.
Because after all…some of the most important things in my life started with a distraction.
Handbook for the Recently Diagnosed
We’re currently writing a “Handbook for the Recently Diagnosed” – a sort of primer, provided day one, that explains the practical, lived realities of neurodivergence.
A lot of commentary, narrative thrust and general focus in neurodivergence and particularly autism circles, is to define, delineate and describe what‘s going on, we do like definitives after all. But, and I must admit my research is probably flawed, but, there’s little I have read, seen or gleaned online that looks at the practical realities of living, learning, earning and, well, life in general getting by with a brain that is a wild stallion at a petting zoo on good days. On bad ones, that beast has broken out the paddock and is doing doughnuts in an Asda car park at 2am… Story for another time perhaps.
There’s various testimonies and lived experiences but mostly it’s a lot of frustrations, venting, self-therapising, and lived experience, but not a comprehensive “if this, try this” a kinda Sam Costa’s top tips for living day-to-day with a recalcitrant and magnificent brain.
The thing is, that however you arrive at “Destination Diagnosis”, either self-realisation or formal assessment, the lived reality of what your brain and nervous system IS, allows you to start building a better life. HOW you arrive is of no importance, THAT you realise who and what you are, that’s massive.
And yet…
Once you’re dropped off at “Destination Diagnosis” that’s it, there’s no one to meet you at the pick up point, yer on yer own, make us proud kid! There’s no courtesy bus, no welcome wagon, no taxi. There’s not even a signal, wifi or vandalised phone box to sob in.
The support post diagnosis is, at best, woeful. You may get some links and a leaflet, I share exactly what I got later in this post. Whatever your thoughts on support, just think about the lived experience of the person living for 30+ years and then getting told; yeah, all those “things”, yeah, you’re Autistic. That part in the movie where the plot twist gets revealed and just like that, ::insert wind blowing noise:: Keyser Söze has left the building, and you no longer know who you are.
Is Anything Real?
Once passed the initial head trip “If I am not who I thought I am, then is anything real?”
You then turn to “What’s me? What’s the autism?” Erm… So if you are not who you thought you are why continue doing all the things you do? Are those things things YOU really like, or were they performative and for show, just to “fit in”? You do this high wire act alone, thankfully I had a very supportive partner and family, mostly because I HAD built a life the way that worked for “me”, and in fact “US”!
So, you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile thinking, this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife. HOW DID I GET HERE? And suddenly those lyrics take on a whole new dimension. Hat-Tip to awesome autist David Byrne and further extended hat tip to Tina Weymouth bass boss, and the rest of Talking Heads for that matter.
As Hughie Green might say, “and I mean that most sincerely folks!”
Who’s Hughie Green? Then you have clearly never seen the magnificent TV series Opportunity Knocks, a proto BGT where Hughie held court and I thrilled at the chance to one day be on the tellybox with my impersonations.
It Was There – Day One
The child who would mimic everyone, spend hours walking round the garden having conversations, making up all the voices from the faces on the telly. A rich inner world that span on an axis that I controlled, much better than the world I saw outside my head.
That world proved to me over and over, from school, clubs, training and workplaces that if you do not fit the model of human they expect, you’re instantly the issue, the weirdo, the “difficult one”. Or the medical establishment tries to “fix” you, or at the very least ensure you’re not a problem for the rest of gen. pop.
This is why, now more than ever, we need to build a neuroinclusive workplace, in fact we need a neuroinclusive society. The benefits would be to EVERYONE not just the NDs suffering daily to be heard, seen and taken seriously. Ease of communication, understanding of different styles and approaches would help all of us, whatever our neurotype.
::Stuart steps off ADHD Tangent Soapbox::
Back to the plot…
When we last check in our hero was raging at the lack of support post-diagnosis…
Let me share with you the full extent of the support that you get once you have a formal diagnosis.
At the point of formal diagnosis, a process which, for many people is both frustratingly long, offering you a lengthy wait or a big bill as your choice, before sitting in front of assessors and finally getting granted a certificate to put on your wall. (Spoiler Alert: there’s no certificate!)
Before you get that “prize” there’s a tortuous and exhausting process to go through, with questionnaires, appointment chasing and interviews all whilst hoping your executive function does all the right things at the right time – I nearly blew it because I missed a crucial step in one email and failed to fill one part of a form.
This process comes after many months/years of research into every aspect of neurodivergence as you wait, the doubt gnawing at you. The entire process is not built with ND brains in mind. The energy required, the executive functioning required, the focus and the FORMS! DAMN YOU FORMS!!! ::runs outside, shakes fist at sky::
The endless, frustrating questions, where you mostly want to answer “IT FRICKIN’ DEPENDS!”… Can I wear socks, well, yes, I CAN wear them. Do I want to wear them? IT DEPENDS? Also, what sort of socks are we talking about? My socks, socks that I have been handed that are warm/wet/white? A lengthy woollen hose or a short sports sock? C’MON PEOPLE, I NEED DETAILS!
Whilst you wait for this process to reach destination diagnosis, you deep dive into the entire back history of, and any topic associated or tangentially related to, neurodiversity and consider possibly doing a PHD in it. (deep breath)
Finally…
after doubting yourself and thinking you will be charged with wasting the NHS’s time, you get formally diagnosed. Apparently no, it is not normal for people who are not “on the spectrum” to spend 2 years and countless hours and money on trying to disprove that you are indeed “a bit special”. But at age 56 I was running out of things that it might be!
I once even considered the notion I was a psychopath – just because it might then offer me some respite to this one question “WHY AM I SO DIFFERENT?”
But whatever your pathway to finding out the reality of the situation, as a late diagnosed adult I want to share everything you get given and all of the facilities, funding and general underlying support you get at the point of diagnosis.
So… Are you Ready? Are you Steady? Is your name Eddie? (My Mum said this all the time… Hello if you ARE indeed an Eddie, welcome!)
Here’s the full package of support that you get…
DRUM ROLL…. brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr
You get an email with your full written report, which contains an assessment of every dimension in which your brain is broken, different and generally odd, all couched in medical terms that make you sound unhinged.
BUT WAIT… YOU ALSO GET…
A link to a page of resources!
AND THE CROWD GOES WILD…
“I’d like to thank my wife, my children, my good friend Hannah Logan…”
That’s it. You get a list of all the ways you are broken, deficient, and different, and some “Post-assessment resources“. The biggest of big woops.
“We’ve prepared some helpful guides to support you following your assessment.” enthuses the email…
NOTE - Hi - Editor Stu here it's 10 July 2026, just checked the diagnosis notification email received Sept 2025, 312 days and the link to those resources is broken, not even a full year. No post-diagnosis follow up, no counselling, or trauma support, pushed in the deep end, good luck. Well, I guess up to now I’ve survived, oh well keep treading water Stu.
The point is
…there’s absolutely no support directly after diagnosis. You’re just left to figure it out, and as someone very late diagnosed, I kinda been doing that since I was born, so, well I guess I just push on with the “cope and hope” strategy, seems to have worked (mostly) thus far.
“WHAT ABOUT ACCESS TO WORK THEN?”
You are right Sandra*, there is Access to Work – https://www.gov.uk/access-to-work – this is what the Gov. says about eligibility, “You must have a disability, illness or health condition that means you need support to do your job.” – Which is helpful, and genuinely could be of use if you need it, but I was not told about this and found out whilst doing some additional research for an Oddcast. But that’s the point, no one told me about it, I stumbled on it when looking for something else entirely!
*humble apologies to anyone with that moniker, including the lovely people I actually know, but it made me laff, I always hear it in a Birmingham, Midland, Black Country accent…
“WHAT ABOUT PIP?”
Yes, thank you Sandra, (you heard it in that accent then too, right?) you could also apply for a “Personal Independence Payment” (PIP) https://www.gov.uk/pip – but after two years waiting for diagnosis and having every part of your life poked and reviewed to see if, yes, he’s an “odd ‘un“, last thing you want is to dive into a whole other world of form filling and further means tested scrutiny.
And the horror stories I have heard first hand from friends who’ve applied and have been through, and still enduring, the process. It doesn’t sound like a fun time. I am not good with this type of bureaucracy, so best for them I do not go anywhere near it.
But that got me thinking… and one thing my brain does do well is solve problems, often at 3am, but timing is not my strong suit.
I’ve always loved Beetlejuice,
The movie with Michael Keaton, a young Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davies, Catherine O’Hara – loved it since I saw it back in the eighties. My kids introduced me to the musical, which has recently landed in London and a family trip is planned. My daughter’s already seen it 4 times, it’s only been open for about a month! SPECIAL INTEREST much?
If you have yet to witness this marvellous film/musical, there’s a guide given to the newly-dead titled “Handbook for the Recently Deceased“, and so we arrive at the “Handbook for the Recently Diagnosed“, a not altogether original title as a quick Google will reveal, and it’s just the working title – more a sub-header, title page kinda thing.
Because, quite frankly, there needs to be something more concrete than “here’s a few links and some government support, that we won’t tell you about”, because quite frankly it’s disorientating to be told you’re not who you think you are. I spent so much time at odds with the world, out of step, misunderstood and struggling and now you tell me why!
It’s all a bit of a confusing time, and you have to start to reconsider so, so much about every aspect of your life. Having lived my own life since my mid twenties, and just got on with ploughing my own furrow, I had fewer barriers to employment than most, but it is still a disorientating time.
Waaaay before diagnosis
Aged 25 suffering a major burnout/breakdown/life flatline I just decided that I was going to stop listening to everyone else, they just seemed to not get, understand or otherwise process that my experience of the world was not the same as theirs. Their advice and guidance, may have been well meaning, and with a genuine interest in my best interest and good outcomes, but that didn’t make it any less wrong.
I’d spent 2.5 decades on the planet without knowing the reason, or having a “label” to help shape my perception and give me language to help me gain a full understanding of why I seemed to be out of step with everyone around me.
So I just opted out and started to forgive myself for being “odd” and not really being able to explain it. Various Dr’s attempted, psychotherapist, sleep experts, cognitive assessments and diagnosis from bipolar, and hypermania, via insomnia, and OCD and a whole cast and crew of ideas, symptoms and pharmacology all with added migraines! Which keeps you eternally hopeful that at some point you might find some semblance of “nOrMaL“. Whatever that might look like, but like most things in life you’d know what works for you when you see it.
Three decades-plus later
and I have realised that the decision I made aged 25 was the start of it all. The self-acceptance that I was not broken, just different, magnificently fanatabulously awesome. I often thought I was an alien on a mission to gather as much knowledge as I could about humans, and studied them intently, fascinating creatures.
Hence my childhood mimicry mentioned at the start, which led to a career in stand-up and lookalike/impersonations because I followed my own intuition and backed myself. Everyone else’s feedback was along the lines of “REALLY? An Ali G lookalike? Nah.“, but I just knew I could do it, it wasn’t something scary to run away from, but something big and shiny to run towards.
I remember one specific gig, where I was a surprise guest, to give my wife a toast for her birthday, as Ali. The host/main act was sceptical, and openly so, when I told him what I was going to do. Anyway, afterwards he stated “you were amazing” and enthused that I was so much better than he’d thought I might be. And that’s the whole point, that you get underestimated, second-guessed and otherwise diminished. Yet, here we are 32 yrs later and I am still pursuing my shiny, sparkly, rainbow interests, dancing like everyone’s looking and knowing I make a positive difference to my community.
The one decision that changed everything
Deciding that rather than going to beg, like Oliver for a second bowl of gruel to fill me up, that I’d just start building a life that required nothing from anyone and I could make all the accommodations myself.
Why wait for permission to be magnificent?
Remarkable and extraordinary doesn’t look at the clock and wait until 9am on Monday to turn up in a suit. If my energy and passion arrive in a shipping container at 3am, then you betcha bippy I am going to be working, living and loving the project whenever my energy arrives.
In some regards it was a selfish decision (Insert Hannah – “a Necessary one!“), but I decided to put on my own oxygen mask first, you cannot do your best if you do not give yourself the best.
Nothing from anyone
As a policy it only gets you so far, but I needed to withdraw from the toxic people around me to gain some perspective. I saw that actually, you need a community around you, you need others to help you see things you can’t and help you with the things you need help with. A family (whoever you call family!) is the first layer, then good friends who really understand you and have your best interests at heart also adds further protection. Expect false starts, and family members it’s best not to mingle with. Then you find your “community” or “tribe”, which adds strength in numbers, and validation.
This gives you space to figure out who you are and be accepted, and that’s all any of us are trying to do, get through a day, be understood, accepted for who we are and be valued for our whole self, not just the convenient bits, or the socially acceptable bits, but the whole of you.
It’ll share a lot of what we’re delivering with the Neuroinclusive Workplace giving practical steps you can take at work, home and everywhere you go, once you know what is actually going on in that amazing brain and nervous system of yours, an Owners Manual. It’s some thoughts, ideas and suggestions, allowing you to kind to yourself. Not a proscriptive list of tasks or must-dos, frankly that kind of book gives me the right itch.
This is more a pick it up and flick to the section that you most need to read at that time. Bit like a car maintenance manual, it’s the engineer in me, I do like a manual, the oilier the better!
There’s a long way to go, and we have yet to complete the first draft, or collate the research, but the plan is in place and like any worthwhile journey it’s going to take some time to get it completed.
But once it is ready – we’ll share it!
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
If you have any specific topic or other question that arose once you found out or were diagnosed as being neurodivergent, get in touch.
We would love to hear any insights or thoughts you had, or areas that you still are not sure about. We would love to hear from you and include your questions, or suggestions in the book.
Get in touch hosts@businessoddcast.com and keep your eye out for Neuroinclusive Workplace resources being added to the site. Sign up using the form below and join the mailing list for notification of everything Oddcast!
PDA in Business: A User’s Guide to Autonomy
There is a very specific way to make me not want to do something.
Tell me I have to. That’s it. That’s the kryptonite!
It doesn’t matter whether it was already on my to-do list. It doesn’t matter if it was my idea. It doesn’t even matter if it’s something I genuinely want to do. The moment it starts feeling compulsory, some deeply stubborn part of my brain folds its arms, narrows its eyes and mutters “NOPE”.
I’ve had entire conversations with myself that go something like this:
“Right, today we’re finally going to finish that blog.”
“No, we’re not.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“We just aren’t.”
“But it was literally our idea.”
“Still no.”
At this point, I’m essentially arguing with myself like both parts of me are not, in fact, on the same team! If this sounds familiar, then welcome. Pull up a chair. This one’s for you.
Instead, I found myself in a bizarre stand-off with perfectly reasonable activities. The strange thing is that the task itself often wasn’t the problem. In fact, I was frequently interested in the task. I’d chosen it. Planned it. Sometimes I’d even been excited about it. Then I’d write it on a list. And suddenly it felt completely different.
The day my to-do list became my enemy
For years, I thought there was something wrong with me. Surely if I wanted to do something, I should just be able to do it? It seemed logical enough. If I needed to send an email, send the email. If I wanted to write a blog, write the blog. If there was a task on my to-do list, complete the task and move on with my life like a sensible adult. (although, I have always felt that ‘sensible’ was overrated. But I digress)
The blog that had seemed exciting now felt oppressive. The email that would take three minutes somehow became a major life event. The phone call I’d intended to make all week was a weighted chain around my neck. It’s a weird experience trying to explain to people, particularly when the person creating the pressure is also you.
I once spent three hours avoiding a task that would have taken ten minutes. During those three hours, I managed to reorganise my desktop, research something completely unrelated, make two cups of tea, and stare out of the window. The original task remained exactly where I’d left it. Waiting patiently…mocking me with its judgy face.
The problem with “should”
I’ve come to realise that one of the most dangerous words in my vocabulary is “should”. I should post more consistently. I should be further ahead. I should have finished this by now. I should really sort that out.
The funny thing is that “should” sounds incredibly responsible. Like the sort of word used by people who always know where their car keys are and have a bottle of water on them at all times.
But for me, “should” always comes with some creepy companions. Like guilt, pressure, unrealistic expectations and a small suitcase full of shame. Before I know it, a perfectly manageable task has transformed into a judgement on my entire character.
And then the resistance arrives. The more pressure I apply, the more resistance I create. The more resistance I create, the more guilty I feel. Which makes me apply more pressure. It’s an impressively terrible system.
Why self-employment felt like freedom
One of the reasons self-employment suited me so well was the autonomy. No manager. No clocking in. No annual appraisal where someone asks where I see myself in five years’ time. (Surviving. Ideally in stretchy trousers.)
For many neurodivergent people, self-employment can be genuinely life-changing. It gives us the freedom to work around our energy, our focus and our lives, rather than trying to squeeze ourselves into systems that were never really designed for us in the first place.
The autonomy is glorious. There is, however, one slight complication.
Whilst we’ve escaped other people telling us what to do, we’re now responsible for setting our own deadlines, creating our own structure and deciding what happens next. And if your brain is demand-sensitive, it turns out it doesn’t particularly care who created the demand.
The number of productivity systems I’ve lovingly created and then immediately rebelled against is frankly embarrassing. I’ve colour-coded calendars. Built project plans. Created beautifully organised task lists. Then looked at them the next day and thought, “Hell no.”
It’s a very strange experience setting your own rules and then immediately looking for loopholes.
Negotiating with yourself
At some point I realised that I spend a surprising amount of time negotiating with myself. Not motivating myself. Not inspiring myself. Negotiating.
“What if we just do ten minutes?”
“You don’t have to finish it.”
“Let’s just open the document.”
“Would a biscuit help?” (FYI – they ALWAYS help)
The thing is, choice changes everything. There is a huge difference between telling myself “You have to finish this today” and “It would be useful to make some progress on this today.” The task hasn’t changed. The outcome hasn’t changed. But the emotional response is completely different. One feels like being backed into a corner. The other feels like an invitation.
Over time, I’ve realised that my nervous system cares far less about the task than it does about how trapped it feels. The more choice I have, the easier things become. Which is deeply inconvenient for all the productivity gurus trying to convince me that discipline is the answer to everything.
Why motivation was never the answer
For years I bought into the lie that I needed more motivation. More discipline. More grit. What even is grit!?! The internet certainly seemed convinced that was the solution. If you couldn’t do the thing, you simply needed to try harder. Push harder. Want it more. Whatever the latest advice happened to be.
The trouble is that pressure can absolutely produce results. For a while. Many of us become experts in last-minute heroics. We pull things together at the final hour. We work ridiculous hours. We create miracles under pressure and then wonder why we’re exhausted afterwards.
For years I thought this meant I worked well under pressure. I don’t. I work well under urgency. There’s a difference. One feels energising. The other feels like being chased by an angry badger. Or rather, what I imagine that would feel like. I’ve not actually lived that badger experience, thank god.
Eventually, constantly relying on urgency becomes exhausting. It’s like powering your business with emergency generators. It works, but it’s noisy, stressful and not particularly sustainable.
Curiosity works better than self-bullying
One of the biggest shifts for me has been replacing judgement with curiosity. Instead of asking, “Why can’t I just do the thing?” I’ve started asking, “What is making this feel difficult?” The answers are often surprisingly useful. Sometimes the task is too big. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed. Sometimes I’m exhausted. Sometimes I’ve accidentally convinced myself that a perfectly ordinary piece of work will determine the entire course of my future.
Sometimes the resistance is trying to tell me that I’ve taken on too much. Sometimes it’s warning me that I’m running on empty. And sometimes it’s simply because I’ve turned a minor admin task into a dramatic theatrical production inside my own head.
The point is that resistance usually contains information. Not always accurate information, admittedly. But information nonetheless. And understanding what’s underneath the resistance is almost always more helpful than shouting at myself for having it.
Autonomy isn’t a luxury
I think this is the bit that often gets missed. For some people, autonomy is a nice bonus. For others, it’s regulation. It’s the difference between feeling trapped and feeling capable. The difference between pressure and choice. The difference between fighting your nervous system and working alongside it.
Which is why so many neurodivergent people thrive when they can build flexibility into their lives and businesses. Flexible schedules. Choice-based planning. Working with their energy instead of constantly battling against it. Designing systems that support them rather than punish them.
Not because they’re lazy. Not because they lack discipline. But because autonomy changes how the whole system responds. Once you understand that, a lot of things suddenly start making sense.
One more time for those at the back…
For a long time, I thought the answer was becoming stricter with myself. More disciplined. More productive. More organised. Because I was the one to blame… I was letting the side down.
What I’ve slowly realised is that my nervous system was never asking for more pressure. It was asking for more autonomy.
The goal isn’t becoming somebody who never experiences resistance. The goal is building a life where you’re not constantly having to fight yourself.
Because if your brain experiences pressure as threat, then pushing harder isn’t always the solution. Sometimes the solution is creating enough choice, flexibility and autonomy that moving forwards feels safe again.
That’s why self-employment works so well for so many neurodivergent people. Not because we’re incapable of working hard, but because we’re finally able to build environments that work with our brains instead of constantly fighting against them.
And that’s a much better use of your energy than spending your life arguing with your own to-do list.
Because You’re NOT Worth it – Attitudes to Undercharging
One of the biggest mistakes local small business owners make is undercharging for their services. The price sort of being an apology for having to charge something, a fiscal acknowledgement you exist.
Hello, I’m Stuart and I’m a reformed undercharger. I have seen the light and thankfully I have been charging my value for almost 15 years now.
Phew, there, said it, feel like I have cleansed my soul. The awful truth is that at some level you KNOW you are undercharging, but seem unable to put the price you want. Probably due to a version of this conversation with yourself… (For this example I am going to use a product, but the same rationale goes for a service business.)
”OK, I’ve seen other businesses selling these for £X – so I will charge £X minus desperation tax.”
And the “desperation tax” part is the discount you make to the price to just get the ball-rolling, and “get some sales”. Because, if no one buys, well there goes your self-worth, your dignity, the world hates you and your RSD flares hotter than the Sun burping after a comet vindaloo.
Because price is not just what you charge, it’s how you get seen in the marketplace. It’s your self-worth. Price is as important as branding and what value you provide to your customers. Simply believing that:
“If what I make/do is good enough then it should sell”.
Right?
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
Wrong!!!
Take a look at something you own. Why did you buy it? Myriad reasons, wasn’t JUST price alone, right. Colour, size, cool-factor, you had one before, never had one before, you were lucky and it was just “there”.
Whatever your rationale, price is not the sole consideration in ANY transaction. You can get a Lidl instant noodle pot for £0.69p but if I fancy the same thing in a Motorway Service station, well… nothing says “I’m minted with money to burn” than buying a family meal at a Motorway Services in the UK. I once paid £3.50 for a pot of noodles. Granted it was a branded “Chonky Wide-Boy” size instant noodle, but still, a cup of coffee and a filthy pot of noodles shouldn’t cost you nearly a tenner!
Rant for another day… But the point is; £3.50 vs £0.69p – both the same experience (give or take) but wildly different pricing.
What you charge is not just the price tag but also understanding and having a rationale for your pricing policy and how you are arriving at that price is probably the problem. And there’s a large dollop of self-worth stirred in for good measure.
Rationale For Service Pricing
Let’s take a look at the rationale and pick it apart and rebuild it so you never have to worry about over or undercharging again.
The rationale for a service business is usually along the lines of:
Costs + (Time x Hourly Rate) + Taxes = KACHING
You then work on the costs bit, because you cannot do much about the taxes bit, and your “Hourly Rate” is what the market will stand, which you don’t determine.
Except!
You are missing the important bit, the “Hourly Rate” is not determined entirely by raw market forces alone, there’s also perceived value, and branding both help boost your bottom line as does supportive local word of mouth (You cannot sell a bad reputation). Also, what does your diary look like? If all the hours in your week are worth the same you may wish to reconsider that.
There’s nothing I like more than to hear the magic words “We have an emergency” or “We need this asap” to change the pricing conversation. I don’t charge people more because of the short deadline, I charge them more because the short deadline means additional time I will need to spend in the office. I’m effectively opening another till and creating more hours for them in my day, so their work can “jump the queue”.
Just like Disney and all the other “fun park*” operators do, you can pay to jump the queue or otherwise avoid the 2 hr wait to see your lunch again. The point is, not all hours are created equal, and as such your pricing policy needs to reflect that. I don’t work Fridays (or rather, I work exclusively on my own projects). You should think about using that red rope around your time to make sure you carve our business development time.
Also, seniority is a huge factor. If you’ve ever had your barnet, sorry, “hair” styled at a salon then you know junior stylists are cheaper than Miguel the “Salon Director” and if you choose a trainee, they will give you a haircut free!
Do not underestimate the years of experience you have, that counts for a lot and you should reflect that in your pricing as a differentiator. Highlight it, share your experience, prove the gap between you and the competitor with only a few years under their belts. Explain the dead-ends avoided, the speed of progress and other benefits of working with a highly experienced practitioner or provider.
Let’s talk about energy, you have finite energy, whether ND or not, there’s only so many hours in a working week. I know this because I found out the hard way, willing yourself to plough on despite pneumonia, 80 hour weeks and a young family is unsustainable and you will end up in hospital, at Christmas.
Some hard truths about billing for NDs
- There’s usually not enough time to get everything done for customers AND yourself AND have a life, so you always draw the short straw when it comes to time management and resting.
- Raging RSD flare ups where every suggestion, alteration and query feels like a stamped foot and a hard slap.
- Sending the invoice and feeling like Oliver Twist asking for MORE!
- The nagging feeling that you have undercharged, over committed and completely underestimated the time, materials and effort required.
- Feeling grateful that they chose you and embarrassed when you send the invoice.
- Once the invoice is sent there’s a lingering feeling that there will be an angry email asking you to justify every last second, so you hover anxiously outside your inbox…
Let me counter these unhelpful intrusive thoughts and feelings and offer you some tough love, which I learned the hard way…
Failing to charge what you are worth is unprofessional and devalues your entire sector, industry and skill set and does not serve your customers.
Because you, your customers, and the world needs you to be here next year and your profit allows you to do this.
(Pssst: If you have not lifted your rates in the past 12 months you are likely to be undercharging by 10-20% – So… maybe take a look at that?)
Now, thank you for waiting patiently manufacturers…
I totally understand the, “but Stu, we do not charge by the hour…” argument and let me share some industry experience and knowledge of retail sales and manufacturing products.
Many moons ago I designed and had manufactured novelty products with my production partners at Paladone (hi Paul, Lawrence, Dominic!) – I came up with the ideas, they turned them into stock on shelves of retailers across the globe.
Broadly speaking here’s how retail pricing works
- Manufacturer – Cost of making + 100%
Something costs $0.50c to make, sells for $1 - Wholesaler – Cost of purchase + 100%
That $1 item now sells for $2 - Retailer – Multiplies wholesaler cost by 2 – 2.5 times.
The $2 item is now circa $5 in the shops
That item that cost 50 cents, ends up on the shelf at 10X that cost. At each stage the margin added inflates the cost.
That’s why you can find end of line products in shops going for stupidly low, below cost prices, the retailer just wants it gone, it is taking up warehouse and shelf space and they need to liquidate their cash quickly. They are looking at the overall profit, and if they made a decent avg. margin letting a few end-of-line items go at cost (or below) just lifts the cashflow.
Different industries have different pricing structures, plus also bulk ordering changes things, as does longer lead times. So the above is just my experience, and that was a couple of decades back, but the principles still apply.
So if you are a small batch, or local producer then pay close attention to your costs, and time you put into the product. You need to ensure you have sufficient margin to withstand pressure of business, downturn in sales, uptick in costs. Keep an eye on cashflow – think about margin on the entire line, not just the single product. Making your pricing more elastic can help during slow or busy times.
REMEMBER!
You don’t do yourself, your business or your customers any favours by undervaluing your products or services. You just give yourself one more thing to stress about, and you got out of employment to reduce the stress, anxiety and general low mood, right?
Charging the right price is a little bit of alchemy, but undercharging is a crime against yourself, you are picking your own pocket.
Some facts…
You get 40 hours in a working week, except, you don’t, you have as many hours as you feel like or are capable of working. But, we all know when the brain says “no”, good luck getting it to do what you need to do. Your productive hours are fewer, plus adding in the admin and all the work just getting the work, you may be down to 3 or even 2 days of productive work, so; 24-16 hrs needs to make enough to cover your nut every month.
What does 16x Your £hourly rate = for you?
Dare you do the maths?
Remember, whatever your income is, you still need to divide it by ALL the hours your work, not just the billable hours, so you need to divide the total income for the week by ALL your hours worked and it starts to look less than ideal. I know that many self employed business owners earn less than minimum wage.
That just kills your business over time – the erosion of energy and lack of progress, of not generating sufficient income to have money to save towards retirement or whatever goal the business is helping fund. PLUS, you gotta take time out for yourself, and another tip I would suggest is to base your annual income on 10 months productivity. 10 months?
WHAT?
Yep – you have fewer weeks of work in a year than you might imagine… in the UK we usually have EIGHT bank Holidays per year – there’s eight Mondays off right there. You may decide to work, but your employees and suppliers probably won’t. Bank Holidays can be soul destroying, whilst everyone else is off and you’re grinding. Oof. (note: full transparency, I am editing this on a BH Monday…)
Whilst you might not think about “sick leave”, as an ND you know – 100% that you’re going to have days at a time where you are flattened, usually accompanied by a side-order of cold or other ailment. A cold and stress can see you on the sofa, doom scrolling Netflix and sob-eat all of your emotions for days.
That’s another week. According to AYE-EYE from The Googs…
UK Employee Holiday Pay
“The statutory minimum paid holiday for a full-time employee in the UK is 28 days a year (equivalent to 5.6 weeks). However, the actual average allowance typically ranges between 33 to 34 days (including bank holidays)“ – Goolge AI May 2026.
Any decent employer is going to give you circa 26 days on top of your Bank Hols, that’s business days remember. That’s another 5 weeks of time off.
Employees therefore probably get somewhere around 7 or 8 weeks of time off their job every year that’s circa 1 day off for every 6 days work. As a self-employed business owner, when was the last time you had a full, uninterrupted week off?
You HAVE to factor in time out of the business or at the very least, unproductive time to be kind to yourself and treat yourself like the valuable employee that you are.
That means basing your income on 10 months a year, which gives you some margin of error when it comes to the hours you can put into income generation.
Time to Do Some Sums
Let’s say you need 1k per week to survive as a family of four in modern UK, depending on where you live and your lifestyle that may just be enough to keep your head above the water or you may be thinking I would LOVE that level of income, but lets just do the sums based on this number.
That’s 52K pa. Now you have to earn that over ten months – that’s 5.2K per month, or £1300 per week-ish.
Divide by your 16 productive hours gives an hourly rate of around £81.25
Now your wages come out of profit, and I would argue that you also need to retain at least as much again in the business to ensure you can cover the various tax liabilities and unforeseen “financial shitstorms“. This pushes your hourly rate up even higher to circa £150+ an hour.
Soooo… Can I ask…
How does that look against what you are charging currently?
I accept there’s a local max for pricing, and you will need to adjust but it shows you how pricing impacts your ability to sustain a living wage. Many of the small business owners I see who fail do so because there’s simply not enough reward for the effort and risk, stress, anxiety etc. That’s demoralising and you cannot sustain your motivation in the face of starvation.
As ND business owners or self-employed there’s a price to pay for undervaluing your time and that drains you to just survive. You are worth more than scraps off the table. Just because your energy is variable doesn’t mean it is worth less and should be sold cheap. If anything it’s a rare commodity and people who get it are lucky to have your skill, focus and eye for detail.
Plus the world demands you extract maximum value from your time, and charging a premium is your way of marking yourself as offering a superior product or service. Of course you have to live up to that promise, and that’s a topic for another day! None of this is intended to shame you or make you feel bad, it’s just the stark reality of running a small business and remaining self-employed.
Want to Explore This Topic More?
If you want to explore this topic, or get involved directly with us and amplify the voices of ND business owners then email us here: hosts@businessoddcast.com
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*Fun Park – Obviously going to a “crowded, over stimulating, hell-hole where the rules of human behavior seem to no longer apply“, is fun for some and not others. You do you.
What if You Don’t Need to Prove Yourself Anymore?
What if you could just show up as yourself, in your natural slightly chaotic form, knowing that you were already enough exactly as you are? Damn… that would change things up a bit, huh!?
The other day I sat down for a ‘quick rest’ (apparently they are a good idea, along with regular water and snacks. Who knew!?). Just twenty peaceful minutes with a cup of tea, biscuits and absolutely no expectations of myself whatsoever. Other than to breathe, drink and consume said biscuits.
Unfortunately, within minutes my brain had munched all the biscuits and wandered off into the ‘thoughts wilderness’, creating a long list of things it would prefer me to be doing instead. Tidy desk, answer all those emails I’ve been ignoring, plan next week’s content… you know, relaxing things.
Because relaxing, for many of us, doesn’t actually feel relaxing at all. It feels vaguely irresponsible. Like there’s something important we should be doing instead. Our brain is on high alert, like a dog when you’ve stupidly uttered the W word (walk) 15 minutes before you are planning to take them out. So, they get their ball, then follow you around with a “is it now” look in their enthusiastic eyes, until you finally put your shoes on and fulfil the promise you accidentally made fifteen minutes earlier. Exhausting!
I think a lot of neurodivergent people carry around this belief that our value is directly linked to how useful, productive, capable, helpful or exhausted we are. Which becomes a bit of a problem when your nervous system is already twitchy and operating at max capacity.
Most of us don’t consciously decide this. It develops slowly over years of trying to compensate for feeling different. You become the person who works harder, pushes through, overdelivers, stays late, always says yes, helps everyone else, and somehow keeps functioning long after your body is googling retreats.
Eventually, proving yourself stops being something you do occasionally and becomes your entire operating system.
The productivity personality
This stuff doesn’t appear out of nowhere. A lot of us grew up receiving very mixed messages about ourselves. We were intelligent but inconsistent, creative but chaotic, capable but somehow still “hard work.” It’s a very strange experience being told you have loads of potential while simultaneously feeling like you are constantly disappointing people in tiny invisible ways. Like you’re somehow being tolerated rather than fully accepted.
I had an English teacher who once told me that 50% of my essay was “incredible” and the other 50% was irrelevant. How can someone be incredible and irrelevant at the same time? (thanks Mrs Levay… this still haunts me, ha ha!)
So many of us learned to compensate. It just slowly becomes part of who you are. You become hyper-useful. Hyper-reliable. The person who cracks on with it, figures it out, replies quickly and somehow keeps functioning long after your body has filed a complaint.
If you’re forgetful, you become overprepared. If you struggle with consistency, you overcompensate with effort. If you’re worried about letting people down, you become the person who says yes far too often and then burns yourself out trying to keep everybody happy.
Because after a while, productivity stops being something you do and slowly becomes part of who you are. Being useful earns praise, approval and acceptance, so your brain starts treating rest like a slightly suspicious activity that needs justifying.
I figure that’s why so many of us struggle to rest properly. Not because we physically can’t stop moving, but because stopping can trigger guilt. The second things become quiet, our brains start scanning the horizon for ways to justify our existence again. You finish one task and immediately look for another. You clear your inbox and instead of feeling calm you think, “Right… what catastrophic thing have I forgotten now?”
It’s like our nervous systems are permanently waiting for Ofsted to arrive and inspect our worthiness as humans.
That level of pressure is exhausting. Not just physically, but emotionally too. Because when your self-worth becomes tangled up with output, slowing down can start to feel less like rest and more like failure.
Becoming useful to earn your place
But productivity isn’t the only place this shows up. I think for many neurodivergent people, the need to prove ourselves spills into almost every social interaction too.
You start noticing which parts of you seem welcome and which parts seem to make people uncomfortable. And you adapt.
Not necessarily in huge dramatic ways at first. Sometimes it’s tiny things. You speak less. Tone yourself down. Rehearse conversations before you have them. Think carefully about how you come across. Become easier to manage, easier to understand, easier for other people to sit comfortably beside without feeling unsettled by your intensity, emotions or honesty. You become the “good” person.
Because when you spend enough years feeling slightly “wrong,” safety can start to feel connected to how successfully you make yourself fit around everyone else.
That’s why so many neurodivergent people become absolute experts at reading rooms, reading moods and monitoring themselves constantly. You become hyper-aware of people’s reactions, expressions, pauses and tone changes. I can tell people how they are feeling before they have worked it out for themselves. Often to their annoyance!
Because I’ve got an entire emotional detective agency running in the background while I’m trying to hold a completely normal conversation with someone.
Eventually, all that self-editing becomes so automatic that you barely notice you’re doing it anymore. You become so focused on being accepted that you rarely stop to ask whether constantly reshaping yourself might actually be exhausting you.
Spoiler alert: it is!
The business version of proving
Self-employment can make all of this even worse because business gives us endless opportunities to measure our worth against output. Hustle culture is constantly telling us that there is always more we could be doing. More visibility, more networking, more strategy, more content, more learning, more optimisation, more growth. There is no natural stopping point.
If your self-worth is even slightly tangled up with achievement, business can become one long audition for your right to exist comfortably in the world.
That’s when you start undercharging because you feel lucky someone picked you. Or overdelivering because you’re terrified of disappointing people. Or replying to emails at ridiculous hours because you don’t want anyone thinking you’re lazy, flaky, disorganised or “not committed enough.”
Meanwhile your body is sending increasingly aggressive warning signals that you continue to describe as “just being a bit tired.”
I also think hustle culture absolutely loves people like us. People who already feel they need to earn rest are basically productivity culture’s dream audience. There’s always a tiny part of us wondering whether maybe we just need to try a bit harder. Wake up earlier. Push more. Achieve more. Become a shinier, more efficient human being.
Honestly, I can barely remember why I walked into a room half the time. I do not need a man with a standing desk shouting about “6 figure salaries” and telling me to start every morning by plunging myself into an ice bath.
The fear of slowing down
What I find really interesting is that I don’t actually think many of us are frightened of hard work anymore. We know how to work hard. Most neurodivergent people I know could probably organise an evacuation plan during a nervous breakdown while simultaneously apologising for being emotional.
No, I think what frightens many of us more is slowing down.
Because if you’ve spent years defining yourself through resilience, capability, productivity or usefulness, stopping can feel oddly exposing. Who are you when you’re not fixing, helping, striving, producing or proving?
What’s left when the performance ends? And I don’t mean “performance” in a fake sense. I mean the constant internal pressure to justify your existence through effort.
I think this is why so many of us struggle during quieter periods in business. We tell ourselves we wanted more balance, more breathing room and more calm. Then it finally arrives and suddenly we’re emotionally pacing around the house because our nervous systems don’t entirely trust it.
We’re so used to operating in urgency that calm can actually feel unfamiliar.
Even rest becomes productive somehow. We’re not relaxing, we’re “recovering efficiently.” We’re not watching television because we’re tired, we’re “regulating our nervous system.” Which sounds significantly healthier than admitting you’ve just binge watched an entire series of a new crime drama while emotionally dissolving into a family-sized packet of digestives.
You can stop auditioning now
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying ambition is bad. I love ambitious people. I am ambitious. I enjoy creating things, building things, helping people and earning money. But I would quite like my future to involve slightly fewer panic-Googles about tax and a refillable coffee cup. But I digress.
This isn’t about pretending none of that matters.
I often wonder what life would feel like if we stopped treating exhaustion like evidence of worthiness. What if rest didn’t need to be justified first? What if boundaries weren’t something we only attempted once we were already completely burnt out? What if slowing down wasn’t failure, but actually the first sign that we’d finally stopped treating ourselves like machines?
Because a lot of neurodivergent people have spent years unknowingly building lives around compensation, proving themselves and trying to become useful enough, successful enough, productive enough or easy enough to finally feel safe, accepted or “good”.
And the problem is, when you build your whole identity around proving yourself, you can end up trapped in relationships, businesses and patterns that reinforce the belief that you are only valuable when you are performing.
So you tolerate things you shouldn’t tolerate. You over-explain, over-give and overwork. You say yes, and even manage to sound enthusiastic, when you desperately want to say “hell no”. You take on clients you don’t even like because being chosen feels safer than having standards. You keep pushing yourself long past the point of exhaustion because some part of you still believes rest has to be earned first.
Eventually, life starts to feel less like something you’re living and more like one long attempt to justify your existence.
That’s the bit that has to change.
Because the goal was never to become endlessly efficient, endlessly useful or endlessly accommodating in order to finally deserve your place in the world. You were never supposed to spend your whole life reshaping yourself into somebody more manageable, more productive or more convenient just to feel accepted by the people around you.
At some point, the proving has to stop. Not because you’ve finally become good enough. But because you always were.
The Business Advice You’re Never Given
Someone I met recently at a business networking event emailed me asking me some questions about business, specifically business partners. They recently had a bad first-business experience and major financial reversal and wanted some guidance about shared business ownership.
Speaking to the person I could tell that their enthusiasm and energy would not be down for long, and they already had Plan B in the bag and ready to launch.
They stayed in touch and wanted some guidance as to “what next”… and as their next venture was very firmly in my “wheelhouse” we got along like pyromaniacs at an open house.
My initial advice was “”get a job”, might as well be earning whilst the flywheel of business spins up to speed. In my early years temping and ad-hoc jobs kept me in pasta and baked beans and very much got me through the economic choppy waters of a new business venture.
Before we get to the specific email in question here’s the three bits of advice I shared and it is broadly speaking the three things I suggest to anyone thinking of becoming self-employed or launching a new venture:
1) What’s Plan B if it goes wrong? Even if you do not have Plan B fully plotted, know what the signs are that you need to stop Plan A. What’s the cut off?
2) Do you have savings? Start today. Even if in debt, savings are a habit, even if it is a fiver a week, start today. If you are in debt, pay down the highest interest stuff first, and once that is paid, go to the next highest and so on. At the end, start saving the exact amount you were paying a month in debt as a reminder of what you have achieved. Well done you!
3) Is your lifestyle that of a monk in a cave? Get rid of every subscription, or payment you absolutely can and focus your attention on the basics and build from there. You will need every ounce of focus, attention and desire to grow your business. Financial jeopardy is always going to be a distraction, so reduce your outgoings as much as you possibly can.
These three points were the main area of our conversation, we exchanged pleasant series of emails and I thought no more of it… Leaving the door open to further correspone in future, because in business, you never know…
After a few weeks with no contact, I received this email, BOOM:
“Hi Stuart
Just on my morning commute to work (yep back to the 9-5!) and in the middle of the next business planning cycle.
I made friends with this girl who is an absolute fire cracker. She works in a high end clothes store in [UK TOWN] and is a demon seller. So I have been trying to convince her to start a side hustle with me.
I sent you the google drive link to the business idea. [REDACTED] sales training.
I think it’s time to give up on her. She has that employee mindset and is just full of ideas why not to do it.
I really don’t want to go into business on my own again. Where’s the best place to find co-founders who are super talented and available. I talk to so many people and it’s so rare to find people I would go into business with.
I’m really not fussed what it is at this point. Just want to make some proper money.
Any advice would be appreciated“
Wow… That’s quite a chunky chew…
So I replied… and with their permission, here is the reply.
This is business advice about business partners learned the hard way, over 30 years. If you are going into business with someone else, take INDEPENDENT LEGAL ADVICE. Do not use BizWoo sourced from a spicy on the Interwebs, do your own due diligence! USE YOUR OWN JUDGEMENT!
enjoy…
TO: Business Contact
FROM: Stu Morrison
SUBJECT: Business Partner Hell – Eye Witness Report
[NAME]
Well done on getting a job – they are useful for regular money whilst you figure out how to earn “f@ck you” money. But bosses suck, so get with the getting…
With regards to your email…
WOOOOAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH…
Stop…
Take a moment, few deep breaths, box breath… in to a count of 4, hold (count 4) out (count 4), rest (count 4) do that a few times before reading the rest of my reply.
::BREATHE::
::PAUSE::
::EXHALE::
::PAUSE::
DISCLAIMER
I am not a lawyer, advisor or coach, I am, at best, an unreliable witness and your mileage may vary… that said… Here’s some direct, and unfluffy insight from someone who has spaffed so much money up the wall chasing pipe-dreams that I eventually had to build another wall, french drain, and sewer system…
You have an inner fire that is not going to be contained by a 9-5, you know that, I see that, but you need discipline to focus that into a laser. I’m not talking about “gym bro” type discipline, I am talking about the ability to remain on task, on mission and dialled in. Whatever the distraction, and there’s always a distraction, you keep showing up and doing the do.
Now, sure, that sort of grit, the get-it-done mentality is a given, right? Yeah, but here’s the point to it, no matter how much you THINK you have it, until the rubber hits the road, you may never find out if you ACTUALLY have it.
But like any “fucking hard” thing, you do it BECAUSE it IS hard. What’s the point otherwise? Right?? So if we know that the way to reach our goals is going to be one long hard slog, we better have a pretty frickin’ amazing reason for doing it.
And that’s what you’re missing. You’re missing a “why”.
So, why do I do what I do? My why is – 2 reasons…
1) I NEVER EVER EVER EV.AH. E.V.E.R. have to have a boss. Because bosses suck the joy out of life, and are usually wrong about everything and I never had a boss who didn’t think his position didn’t afford him some sort of grace and favour with the staff. We should all somehow bow and scrape… which I am never going to do, king or pauper, we’re all born with an arsehole and I am too fond of pointing that out for that employer/employee relationship to ever last long. Four jobs before the age of 23 and one of them was a five-year apprenticeship started at 16. So, yeah, bosses can do one. As you see, I REALLY do not want to have a boss ever again.
2) To keep my family from starving. Initially it was to keep myself from starving, and to be frank, I was doing a piss-poor job of that before I met my wife. Now, not saying “go get wifed up“, but sometimes you need to be fighting for more than just money and fame for yourself.
I’m better at fighting someone else’s corner than my own, or I used to be. Now I am a diamond-tipped, Teflon-coated mutha-fucker if pushed. Wasn’t always like that, but as that famous business philosopher Al Capone said: “You need two things in life, a smile and a baseball bat. 99 out of a hundred you just need a smile…” What people also don’t appreciate was the bit most people fail to quote: “the other guy also needs to know you have a bigger bat than him“.
Don’t go and buy a bat. This is not bat advice 101. This is:
YOU NEED A MISSION ADVICE.
A reason why. Beyond the fiscal reward, because earning money is straightforward, most people complicate it. Here’s my formula:
Find something you can replicate over and over, that’s not too complicated and is already in demand. One of the hardest things to do in business is change someone’s habit. Designing products, creating new systems and offering new ways of doing something is always, hands down, the hardest thing to sell.
Why?
Changing behaviour is hard; as a business or salesperson it’s the single hardest thing you can accomplish.
You ever try stopping a habit? Now you’ve got to convince someone else to do that, with words and pictures only… Good luck. It’s quicker to stand in your garden and burn tenners.
So. Don’t go and try to create a whole new marketplace – find a marketplace with money in it, and find a reason that you want to get into that market. You can sell anything, you know that – so why not sell something you love, have a passion for or otherwise just want to be involved with?
I found posters, novelties, and writing. I used websites and business to build out my wealth but remain passionate about communicating in the written form, as well as having fun and enjoying life. You also need an economic engine to provide for your lifestyle. Lesson for another day.
OK… Lecture over…
… to your actual email…
“I made friends with this girl who is an absolute fire cracker. She works in a high end clothes store in Guildford and is a demon seller. So I have been trying to convince her to start a side hustle with me.“
This sentence has one of the highest red flag counts for a potential business partner I think I have ever read.
Let me break it down.
“I made friends with this girl“
Exactly how, how did you make friends? Party? Queue for self-checkouts? I am going with ‘chance encounter’. So you have no idea about her values, what she’s made of under pressure. How will she react when you’ve got 14 days until payroll of £300K and only got £200K in the bank and a customer who’s just filed for bankruptcy owing you £200K…
You know how you do when in a “burning building“, how will SHE do? You have started to build your armour, how’s hers? Nothing will save your business if two business partners are not aligned, in sync, and fully understand where their respective strengths and weaknesses lie and are absolutely rock solid in their conviction for the business.
“who is an absolute fire cracker.”
Run, run fast, don’t look back. These people are absolutely essential, but make for terrible business partners. If she has dyed hair, then “AWOOOOGA!”…
Now, speaking as a fully-fledged and diagnosed member of the ‘Spectrum Gang’ and having had varying shades of bright hair colours, this is why I say run.
I know, I’m a fucking nightmare to be in business with.
Two reasons;
- LOTS OF GREAT IDEAS!!!!
I have learned to prune viciously and quickly.
and - ALL OF THE DETAIL ALL OF THE TIME.
I mean, the length of this reply, seriously? Who does that?
How you do one thing, is how you do everything, and if they are always coming up with GREAT IDEAS be careful, because that energy can be very hard to pin down to the grind of making it happen once the great ideas have been had. ::stuart skips away to his next project::
Some businesses thrive on that relationship, but for that to work the partnership understands the dynamic and is self-aware enough to ensure it never becomes a problem. Jobs & Wozniak spring to mind. But for that to work, you both need to know each other and have a “in the trenches” bond to make it through the tougher times.
“She works in a high end clothes store in [REDACTED] and is a demon seller.”
Says who? Never believe a salesperson when they say they are the best… THEY ARE SALES PEOPLE, THEY LIE FOR A LIVING! I know… I am one.
And when I say “lie” I mean bend the truth to the letter of the law and not beyond, whilst also showing the biggest upside to the customer.
“Oh, you look amazing in that, pair it with these shoes…“
See, you’re thinking about new shoes… and… Who owns the business? Family member? I’m going to say an aunt? Pure guess, but I know the store type and have done websites for a few in the past. I no longer do retail store websites because this type of owner broke me. 🙂
“So I have been trying to convince her to start a side hustle with me.” – AWOOOOOOOGA! Red flag trifecta. Cue the confetti canons, dancing girls and frustrating days ahead.
Business partners do not need convincing, it should be a mutual agreement, you’re dancing not wrestling. Plus, what happens if it goes wrong?
Let’s say, one year from now, everything’s proper fucked, people owe you money, cashflow is tight and their rent is due and you cannot, absolutely CAN-NOT, afford both of your wages. Who gets paid?
Do you do 50/50? How will they react knowing they cannot pay rent? And, with that domestic stress, how will they be performing? How quickly does it become “I was doing OK until you roped me into this bad idea, my aunt was right about you all along“?
You see when it is all cake and candles, running a business is a joy and, to be honest, a piece of piss once you get the hang of the cycles and master the mindset. But when it goes wrong, yeah, it will blow up like a Council JCB hitting WW2 ordnance. It’ll make quite the mess of your life. I know. Been there, got the drunk festival tattoo.
“I really don’t want to go into business on my own again. Where’s the best place to find co-founders who are super talented and available. I talk to so many people and it’s so rare to find people I would go into business with.”
Good idea, spread the risk, but that also comes with risk as you identified; how do you find reliable business partners?
By showing up and being reliable! You don’t find your tribe, they find you. If you want to be considered a proper business owner by other’proper’ business owners, then you have to walk the walk, a real chicken & egg scenario.
Having a side hustle is a great way to begin. You met me networking, and that’s where you find the gold — the people who show up, and where you find the people you want to work with.
You can also obsess about a specific business, contact the owner, ask for some advice, but they’re busy, they don’t know you and are likely to be dismissive. Unless you do something for them first.
A website audit was my way in. A piece of work with absolute business value, offered without any strings. Do business, don’t do business – here you go. That sort of thing gets remembered and remarked upon. And that’s when I did the hard yards – nowadays I rarely get asked to “audition”. That’s a privilege of rank and seniority, but you can achieve that in a short time with the right focus and of course product or service.
I would suggest you disconnect “time for money” as soon as possible, finding a way to have some income without having to work for it. A Stocks and Shares ISA with dividend stocks is a good shout. It’s going to take a while to get any meaningful income, but it’s the practice, the dedication, the life skill of saving, and getting some income.
Get proper financial advice — don’t listen to a weird rando on the emails.
So, to your final line…
“I’m really not fussed what it is at this point. Just want to make some proper money.”
Danger, and biggest red flag – you have ambition burning a hole in your pocket, and nothing the market likes better than someone keen to “NOT MISS OUT“… oof, I have been taken a few times because I naively fell for someone’s promises and wasted time, money and sometimes a lot of both at once. Be careful, tread softly and be strategic. Sure, AI is everywhere, but soon it’ll be a commodity like the “internet” . Plus, I got really lucky and ‘timed‘ the early internet wave right (right time/place) and AI is already starting to lose its lustre and small businesses are wary of new tech.
I often suggest “toilet paper and teabags” as my strategy. I offer businesses something they can’t do without, or will buy no matter what. Hosting, websites.
Also have other interests too: diversify from your main business to protect income sources. It’s more than just one thing, you’ve got to take a step back and do all the things at the right time and for the right reasons. Going out and shouting “I WANNA DO BUSINESS” is likely to end badly, desperation is never attractive in business or dating, again, red flags.
Your best strategy: find something you can get passionate about. Is that [REDACTED] sales training? Maybe? But ask yourself these questions before proceeding:
Is there a big market for this [INSERT BUSINESS IDEA]?
Are there businesses with budgets to spend on [INSERT BUSINESS IDEA]?
How many people do you have to convince in an organisation before you get an invoice paid?
Do you have a list of those people right now?
How long to get to those people?
3/6/12 months?
Can you fund the business until you are positive cashflow?
Plus what about the current competition? Are there already businesses doing this? Are you simply treading on their toes and inviting a costly legal battle? Even if unfounded, if they’re established their pockets will be deeper…
See how it starts to unravel. So, find something you can scale – that you have a ‘moat’ around, something you can protect. Forget Intellectual Property (IP) – that’s a moat but requires deep pockets to truly defend.
So what’s the best approach?
Find something you can get passionate about, go digging, get into an industry that you like, and do a deep dive. Spend 6 months REALLY understanding the numbers, the logistics, or the capacity. Find something that’s a broken pain point (oh, they’re everywhere). Something that causes genuine costs to a business. Next, find something, or someone, that plugs that gap, fixes that issue, bridges the problem.
Introduce Player A to Player B – with you taking a cut of whatever the outcome. Low risk for you, easy sell for each potential player. Eventually you get good at sniffing out where there’s opportunity, and that 6 months becomes 90 days, becomes a month, a week… you sniff out the deals quickly. If there’s no way for me to make a cut, then I introduce them anyway — then that’s two people who owe me 🙂 (or at the very least will remember me!).
Then you find something that is such a good fit between the two players that you buy into one or other, or both sides of the sale, and then you own a piece of the businesses. That takes longer, requires more stamina and insight, but here’s the thing, you have learned to manage your risks at every stage. You own the pie, as well as the tray it’s baked in! You might eat the pie, but you have the tray left to bake another, and it’s the recipe and ingredients that are just a cost of business.
You have to do the hard yards to get to eat the pie. It’s just how it is.
Well… Now I want pie and have to go eat.
Here endeth whatever this is/was…
Go get stuck in…
EPILOGUE
You might ask “What gives you the right to pontificate and opine on such matters, Treacle?” and, from the safety of the visitors side of the bullet proof glass, I would confess I’ve had some business “break ups” over the years, including a few “sub-optimal” endings. So I feel 100% qualified to share the lessons learned from being there when trust, money, and lack of principles play out.
Business partners can be very financially beneficial, or a lifestyle wrecking ball. Choose carefully because one type lifts you up, challenges you and always has your back. You remain equals and if the project ends, you have a useful business ally to call on in future.
The other type throws a strop, ignores the Share Holders Agreement (your business ‘Bible’ when it comes to partners), and demands unfair compensatation in a two week window, or they’ll close operations until compliance. This is all without seeing the most recent accounts. Before Christmas. Whilst you’re dealing with a friend’s funeral.
Yeah…
::deep breath::
Sometimes in business, it takes the best of you to make it past the worst of someone else and that’s why I feel very qualified to share my thoughts.
Working With Your Brain, Not Against It
There is a very specific brand of frustration that comes with knowing exactly what you need to do… and still not being able to do it!
It’s not because you don’t care. Not because you don’t understand it. Not even because you’re particularly busy. You can be sitting right in front of the task, fully aware that it would take about twenty minutes if you just cracked on with it, and yet your brain is skipping around a field, picking daisies. Not a care in the world!
For most of my life, I didn’t have any language for this. I was late diagnosed, which means I spent 51 years assuming that this was just how I was. Inconsistent, easily distracted, a bit unreliable when it came to getting shit done. I had zero idea my brain was neurodivergent, which is laughable really now I know that it clearly is.(Narrator: the signs were always there!)
I just thought it was ‘special’ and not in a good way. And that conclusion didn’t come out of nowhere either. It was born for a million moments where I was quietly made to feel like I was buffering ‘normal’.
I still remember an English teacher telling me “80% of this essay is brilliant, and the rest is pure fairy land,”. Now I’m proud of that part of me that wanders off on fabulous tangents, mid sentence. It’s a hugely important part of who I am. But back then I was filed under “lovely, but a bit strange”. And it left me pondering whether it was a world problem, or my brain. I had no idea that my magnificent brain just needed the right conditions.
So I did what most of us do. I tried to fix it.
For years, I assumed this was a discipline problem. That if I could just be a bit more consistent, a bit more focused, a bit less prone to wandering off mid-task, everything would finally get in line. Then when it came to work I bought into the idea that the ‘winners’ were the ones who showed up the same way every day and just got on with things, regardless of how they felt. It never crossed my mind that I might be aspiring to a rulebook my brain missed the memo for.
Most business advice is not for us
The majority of business advice isn’t neutral. It’s built for a very specific type of brain. And that brain is not mine. Which kinda sucks really.
It’s built for people who can decide to do something and then… just do it. No internal negotiation. No sudden urge to make a cup of tea, scroll something deeply irrelevant, and then question all of your life choices halfway through opening a document. No weird moment where your brain nopes, and disappears off to learn something fascinating but entirely unhelpful. (I once lost a solid hour researching what to do if you’re stuck in a lift. Do I need that information? No. Do I now avoid lifts? Absolutely yes!.)
And the thing is, this generic advice is given like it’s universal. Which means that when your brain bumps into it, it feels like a ‘you’ problem. You’re inconsistent, you need more self discipline. You haven’t found the right system. You’re just not good enough. (Spoiler alert: you absolutely are.)
But what if it’s not that you haven’t found the right system — it’s that you’ve been trying to force yourself into ones that were never built for your brain in the first place? Read that again. Because once you understand that, things start to make a lot more sense. Not in a dramatic “everything is fixed” kind of way, but in an ‘aha’ lightbulb above your head kind of way. Because it explains a lot.
Force it…I dare Yyou (really don’t)
When something doesn’t work, the natural instinct is to push harder. To sit there longer, try to force focus. Override whatever resistance is showing up. And to be fair, that can work for a while. You can absolutely drag yourself through a task with enough internal pressure and a slightly aggressive pep talk. But it comes at a cost.
Because every time you factory reset your brain in the hope it will operate against its natural patterns, you’re overriding signals that are there for a reason. That starts an energy fire that leaves you with tiredness and some lingering shame that something relatively simple has wiped you out for the rest of the day.
This is where the boom-and-bust cycle can creep in, and this was my strategy for far too long. You have a few days where everything flows, you get loads done, you feel vaguely invincible… and then suddenly replying to an email feels like you’re in an internal small talk convo. From the outside, it looks inconsistent. From the inside, it feels like your brain has just done an emergency stop with no warning.
These patterns aren’t random
One of the most useful shifts, and also one of the most annoying to accept, is that your patterns aren’t random. They’re information.
The times you can focus for hours without noticing. The moments where starting feels completely impossible until something suddenly clicks. The tasks that you avoid with Olympic-level skill, even though you know they matter. That’s not chaos. That’s data.
Executive dysfunction often shows up as that gap between intention and action, where you know exactly what needs to happen and yet… tumbleweeds. Not because you’re incapable, but because the conditions for action aren’t in place. Once you start looking at what those conditions actually are, things get a bit clearer.
You begin to notice when your brain is more receptive, what kind of tasks pull you in, and what are your resistance triggers. It doesn’t magically solve everything, but it does mean you’re no longer trying to operate blind.
When it’s interesting it works
There’s a particular brand of shame that comes with only being able to focus on things that are interesting. It can feel childish, or unprofessional, or like you should really be able to just get on with things regardless.And yet your brain has its mouth clamped shut and is shaking its head vigorously as someone is trying to spoon rice pudding into it. (Is that just me? yuck!)
For many neurodivergent people, interest isn’t optional. It’s the thing that actually switches the lights on. When something engages you, properly engages you, focus can be almost effortless. Time disappears, ideas connect, and you suddenly look like a highly functional adult who absolutely has their life together.
When it doesn’t, even simple tasks can feel weirdly impossible. Not hard, just… inaccessible. Like they are in a giant claw machine and no amount of pound coins and patience allows you to access one. Which is why trying to ‘business’ whilst ignoring that reality tends to backfire.
Designing work that has some level of ‘shiny new thing’ built into it isn’t indulgent. It’s practical. Because It’s the difference between pushing a giant rock uphill and surfing the focus wave.
When it feels like your idea, your brain chills out
There’s also something annoying that I’ve noticed over the years. Well, there is plenty that is annoying, but I won’t gallop after that squirrel. Tasks change depending on how they feel internally. I can have things collecting dust on my ‘to do’ list for days…weeks even, that feel impossible to start. Then suddenly the planets align, or whatever, and I complete them in 20 minutes.
The task didn’t change. Neither did the deadline. The only thing that shifted was my brain moving it from something it was told to do, to something it came up with itself. Like that boss (we’ve all had one) that dismisses your genius idea in the bored-room (yes that was intentional) only to “I’ve got an incredible idea” weeks later!
Because the moment something feels like a “should,”we’re back to the rice pudding shoveling. Not because the task is unreasonable, but because it feels imposed.
When it feels like a choice, even if nothing else changes, there is less friction. It becomes more doable, and far less dramatic. And once you notice this, it’s really helpful. But also horribly inconvenient, because you can no longer use the “push through the pain” strategy anymore.
It was never about trying harder
What becomes clear over time is that this isn’t about a lack of effort. Most people I know with neurodivergent brains commit to everything like there’s a million pound prize at the end of it. Cleaning the bathroom? I’m spending 4 hours with an old toothbrush making sure every inch of it is showroom sparkly. You with me? But…and it’s a big BUT. That effort, when it comes to business, is being poured into toeing the line with systems that don’t actually fit. And applying more effort to a mismatch doesn’t fix it. It just makes you even tireder, even faster!
A more useful question at that point isn’t “how do I try harder?” — because let’s be honest, you’ve already tried that and look where that got you! (no shame, just fact stating!) It’s “how do I make this easier to start?” Because that’s usually where the whole thing falls apart.
And that might mean changing when you do something, how it’s structured, or what you pair it with. Not in a dramatic, “new life, new me” kind of way, but in small, slightly less punishing adjustments that your brain might actually agree to. It’s not about lowering the bar. It’s about removing enough friction that getting to it doesn’t feel like wrestling a grizzly bear every single time.
You’re not the problem
The biggest shift isn’t tactical. It’s how you see yourself. Because when you move from “I’m unpredictable” or “I’m an out of control nightmare” to “my brain works differently,” something settles. Not in a dramatic, life-is-fixed kind of way, but in a quieter, “oh… that explains a lot” kind of way.
You stop trying to force yourself into ways of working that never quite fit, and start paying attention to what actually does. Less fighting it, more working with it — which, annoyingly, turns out to be far more effective.
You start to notice your patterns, and after a bit of practice, you start to trust them more. Instead of constantly second-guessing yourself or trying to override everything, you begin to work with what’s already there. I’d be lying if I said it suddenly made everything easy, but it does take the edge off that constant feeling that you’re getting it wrong. And without that shame everything feels a lot more doable.
So… what now?
You take this and you use it. Not perfectly, not consistently, and definitely not in a way that suddenly turns you into one of those people who just “gets things done” without thinking about it. Knowledge is power… but it’s not a miracle. Annoying, but true.
The goal is to stop assuming the problem is you. Because it isn’t, so let that shit go. When something feels hard to start, or weirdly impossible for no obvious reason, you pause long enough to ask a better question. Not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what does my brain need here?”
Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And after that, you can no longer pretend you don’t know any better. So you build something that actually fits your fabulous brain. Bit by bit. Adjustment by adjustment.
And then comes the life-changing bit: you realise you were never the problem. You were just trying to run on instructions that weren’t written for you.
Executive Dysfunction – a User’s Guide
The words in this article are only here because of the various work/life processes I have created and share throughout this blog. For me writing is a process, and one that is the culmination of years of being unable to sit and focus and get started.
As I explore the topic of Executive Dysfunction I will share my lived experience and some of my process, coping strategies and personal “hacks” that help me run my business and my life.
As all the best storytellers say “Let’s start at the beginning… it’s a very good place to start”
1) Task Initiation
AKA “Why can’t I just start?” – well, where do I begin? Oh yes, the beginning, silly me, just written that above. Right!
Now, I need to just pop to make a cuppa, brb.
20 mins later… three quick tasks in the house and a phone call.
I’m back. Still here?
Good, right, ok, getting started is always hard…
…moment…
An email just popped in that I am waiting for. (Dammit Stuart – remember to switch off notifications before writing, what a muppet! Yes but I cannot ignore the email now I know that it is there and now it’s the loudest thing in my head. GRRRR.).
Right, had a quick look, yeah that’s not the email I was expecting, this one is a very toxic email and it is definitely going to have to take a ticket and wait, it’s all very black and sticky, and needs the smoke to settle before I can get to it.
Right. OK.
Getting started, this can be a big problem for some NDs, not me, I have it down, mostly… and by “mostly” I mean “on a good day I can squeak through, some days it’s a shit-show”.
Today it is looking farty with a chance of smells.
The problems start when you are trying to choose which of the myriad tasks, demands, and obligations of running a business you do first. Even when you pick the mega urgent stuff like disarming the bomb with the shortest fuse, or sorting the pole with the wobbliest plate, your brain can refuse to even engage with starting a task. Like pressing identical poles of a magnet together, your brain just sort of goes NOOOOOO… anytime you get near thinking about the task, imagine a cat resisting a cuddle, or a toddler being put in a car seat, NOPE, not happening.
Even if the alarm bells are ringing and all sensibilities are suggesting that maybe creating a comedy poster, designing a new treasure hunt, or researching battery technology is not a priority right now, you plough on. It’ll all be all right.Probably.
Your inner Autist is staring at the deadline, and then at their watch, back and forth, telling the ADHD toddler currently having a fun time at the park, that it’s “time to leave the park and go do some homework”. TODDLER SAYS “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”. Cue, rolling, thrashing, wailing…
It’s not just discipline, lord knows I had enough applications of that in my life, from the adults who physically assaulted me to correct my behaviour, to very strict trainers, bosses and senior colleagues who would “encourage” you to move quicker. Not to mention the shame and guilt dolled out at will for poor impulse control and executive dysfunction.
It’s not laziness, because when my hyperfocus kicks in I can go at a task until I am physically incapable of continuing. It’s usually the call of the bladder, or the ache in my muscles and energy depletion that stops me. Tenacity is what I call it, but stubbornness is the other side of that coin and I can be as stubborn about starting a task as I am about stopping.
Therefore I have routines, easy and simple things that slip me into “work mode”; writing is one, focusing on a train of thought helps me to quell “The riot of the possible“, and close the door on the mob of clamoring voices raging at the gates, demanding my attention. For me it is a meditation for the mind, to document and offer self reflection, in some ways I use it to heal, it’s quite soothing. Plus most of my writing is from lived experience and it’s good to get it out and hopefully benefit others from whatever speck of insight it may contain.
So… you’re here for solutions, right?
This is a tricky one, what works for me may not work for you, but certainly routines help, from the moment I get up, to the point I sit at my desk, I try to keep the same routine, it is settling, comforting, and consistent. If you have a brain that is like a bucking bronco when you try to mount it, then a soothing, calming and simple routine to get sat in the saddle is my suggestion.
2) Working Memory Gaps
Once I am locked in on a task, and it is flowing, it’s like gravity takes over and it rolls along. That’s until it hits the VALLEY OF THE UnKnOwN (said in a mysterious ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ narrator voice)…
What is the VOTU that you do so well? Good question, glad you asked, nice pun. Erm. Now you see, you interrupted the thought process, and I forget where that was going. And here we are deep in the Valley, wandering around with a flashlight looking for the path out, up and away. Hello? Anyone up there? Hellloooo. HELLLOOOO?
It can be an external distraction, a noise, or notification, or, as happens most often for me, one thought splits my attention in two and suddenly I have two thoughts competing for my focus. Just that alone can derail any kind of viewing, listening or conversation.
The thought that jumps up and starts waving at you, this could be the solution to a customer issue, remembering that I forgot to put the bins out, or any one of a bazillion unfinished things, or new things, or old ruminations or new special interests. These thoughts stroll confidently into the room and ask in a loud authoritative voice “ANYONE HERE OWN A BIG BLACK ESTATE CAR REGISTRATION GOD 999?” and my metaphorical mental mourners turn around with WTAF/Pikachu Surprised Looks on their faces.
You can be midway through a very complicated set of instructions, and your brain randomly picks on a word someone says, like “Mode”. Perfectly innocent word, that your brain picks up like some shiny rock and starts to ruminate on it. “Mode, model, modal, mo-dal, mo-del, moddal, oddly moddly mode, such an odd word, say moody modal ten times out loud” and you’ve said it five times loudly before you think, hang on, what was I doing? And that’s why I can’t use the library anymore. You’re on the bucking bronco before you realise you’re wearing chaps, stetson and the wild pony ride has begun.
It’s all so exhausting, the whipsnap of context shifting can be bad at the best of times, when you do it to yourself, you really have to snap out of it, and marshall your thinking. It’s like part of the recording just drops out and it’s nothing but static, of course “static” for my brain is every single commercial with a puppet for the past ten years playing all at once (other personal inner hellscapes are available, ask your local brain).
So, what do I do? Well, “remove distractions, of course, like DUH!?” is the usual guidance. No, really? Never thought of that, feckin’ genius, give that person the POTUS “Really Brains Good” medal.
To anyone who’s ever been told to calm down, or just focus, ask the recently slapped person standing before you, “How do you remove your brain when it is distracting itself JONATHON? HMMMM??” then stare at them in thunderous silence, arms crossed.
I use a sprint-rest-sprint-rest method on busy days but in the wider context, I cannot go from big project to big project, I have to recover from something which requires in-depth and deep work over a sustained period. I can do it, but I better spend enough time recovering. I do not think it arrogant to state, when you’re good, people wait and respect your boundaries.
But lunch at 12pm is sacrosanct, and my 4pm cuppa and “something nice” can be used like a carrot to keep me on target through the afternoon (mmmmm. GF carrot cake). Plus batching tasks and setting my mission at the start of the day helps keep things on track. Today is a writing day, if I go “off piste” that’s OK. I know that I SHOULD be writing, and as soon as the distraction has passed, I can fall back to the main theme of the day, writing.
Does it ALWAYS work? No, but like I said having routines and a system of tools to use when the need arises can be a gamechanger. One of the biggest gamechangers I developed was naming, saving and cataloguing my computer files. Yeah, sounds like a complete headache, instant soft-on talking about file indexing on a first date, I get it. But I know that with my three rules for naming files means I can search for and find any file almost instantly. If it’s on my system, I can pull it up in seconds. Example; during a recent zoom call, a client asked me about a CSV file we’d used in testing 5 years previously. I had it open in 5 seconds. They were a bit shocked that I had instant access to this development file from over 5 years ago.
All I had to do was remember the three rules and my file search found it on the archive drive in seconds. *see footnote
Right, where was I?
Writing, check…
3) Time blindness
Literally have missed HOURS as I had my head deep in a task. The most recent example, yesterday (at time of writing), I missed a scheduled Zoom call because I was distracted filtering emails in my inbox, and setting up an automation. This was a combo of time blindness and mission creep and those two bad boys are productivity wreckers.
Here’s how time blindness showed up when dating my wife, and note: this was before “smart phones” were a thing, but I had an early Nokia mobile. Early in our relationship we agreed a time and date for me to pick her up. In the meantime a good friend invited me to go to his gym and get a sauna. I loved the idea – so agreed. All of this was done without even glancing at a calendar, not that I used one much back then. The double-booked day arrived, and my friend came round, we had a lovely soak, splash and a sauna and he dropped me home. I then get ready, and go pick up my wife for our date, shade over 2 hours late. She still brings the conversation up;
Incumbent-Wife: “SO!? WHERE WERE YOU?“
Me, not picking up on the intonation and emotional state: “I’VE BEEN IN A SAUNA!”
I thought she’d be pleased for me, and was therefore confused at the immediate cancellation of the date. And the mobile phone I could have used to give her a heads up? In my bag, the entire time. Not once did I think to call ahead, or mitigate the situation. Had no idea of what time it was, and how long it had been.
When a hyperfocus kicks in with me, good luck getting my attention, especially if it involves a special interest. Thankfully reader, she married me, and accepts that sometimes I have only left 5 mins to get ready for guests, which may also include moving the car, having a shower, choosing an outfit, choosing another outfit for when the first one becomes unacceptable after the second course, and deciding on socks/no socks/what shoes conundrum. Plus the hair needs to be “‘just right’ for the event, what “just right” is, well, I’ll know it when I see it.
If you have any coping strategies, let me know. But don’t suggest “Alarms”, I will stop/snooze that thing and ignore it. “Redundancy” number two listed “inconsistent timekeeping” as a key factor in letting me go. If you’re old enough to remember the storm of 87? I slept through that.
4) Task Switching and Prioritisation
Oh boy… this, for me, is a biggy. If I am locked in on a task, or an outcome, and things change then I’m a grenade with the pin out. Not angry, so much as stressed at the sudden change, and thus ALL the carefully weighed variables now requiring cataloguing and reassessing, it’s like the temperature rose by thirty degrees and I’m wearing corduroy underwear, suddenly I’m really uncomfortable and no one knows why.
Communicating clearly is key at this point, and not just what the change is, what the expected change is for me SPECIFICALLY. Do not tell me the overall thing is no longer the overall thing; you got to tell me, directly “Stu, that means the other things you were doing don’t need to be done”. Don’t expect me to infer that I am off task because the mission changed. Here’s an example.
11 year old Stu liked to play football, the tactics evaded my brain, and “team work” only works when your “team” aren’t also mostly your bullies. In one memorable match the “Mac Fisheries Minnows” as we were known, were playing the best team in the league, everyone in the league was better because we were last. Our goal difference was so big that the local paper stopped printing it because they only had space for 2 characters, true story.
We gathered in a pre-match huddle and my mate’s dad, the team manager and Mac Fisheries warehouse chargehand, a gruff friendly man but very direct, looked me dead in the eye and said something like “Stay on that big lad, the center forward, wherever he goes, you go. You’re his shadow now.” My brain locks in, “MISSION ACCEPTED”.
He could not shake me, for 45 mins I was all over him like the measles, he was effectively out of the game as I was just too much of a distraction and his team stopped passing to him. At one point he got very annoyed as I recall, and stood on my foot. But, the mission was the mission. The fact I was also out of the game made no difference to the score, my team mates could lose without my input, and also refused to pass the ball to me anyway. Probably why I had been given my orders on reflection.
The half time whistle blows, and the teams split off into their respective halves for oranges and a tactical shouting at. As directed, I stay with the player I was assigned to mark, following him to his team huddle. Everyone from the opposition is now staring at me, and the kid I’m still marking is now properly agitated and remonstrating with me, this catches the attention of the ref, and our manager who came belting over to see what was going on.
I had been given specific instructions to stay with him and that was what I was doing. Half time whistle was not factored into my instructions. You got what you asked for, of course the adults blamed me, suggesting I was being “obtuse“ whatever that meant, but I heard it a lot when I was a kid and was introduced to the concept of “Malicious Compliance” and was benched. One simple illustration of being 100% correct and completely wrong at the same time. And so, so many times since.
I couldn’t switch the context of that instruction, it wasn’t just being an awkward sod, I was doing as I was instructed. As an ND child you get caught out over and over again trying to interpret, learn and decipher what you are told, and yet, still somehow get it wrong and so you find it easier to just do exactly as told, even if it seems illogical, which can still be wrong. You literally do as asked and are still WRONG! Think about how that erodes your confidence in your own judgement over time.
Our mask is built through a series of failed experiments with the NT world, where trial and error, shame and guilt are the key steps. You learn fast as a kid but you still get caught out as an adult. It’s the social layer that starts to become very important at age 12/13, probably younger now, finding your way in the world, where you belong, how much you matter. There’s suddenly a hidden world of communication and you’ve always got your face pressed up against the glass, like a fish in an aquarium.
And that’s why it can be hard to task switch, and prioritise your work, layered on top of that is a whole load of social context and real world pragmatism that running a business involves. It’s a never ending revolving door of problems and stress… if you let it.
That’s why we use our Slow Business Strategy™, it’s friendly to ND brains, no long term planning, or hustle culture BS with a complete disregard for your energy cycles and focus shifts. That just guilts and shames you for being “less than” for burning out, for being overwhelmed. The systems are ableist and were not designed for you, stop trying to run Win11 on your Mac hardware.
So how do you create a system that IS designed for you?
At this point, in steps the sales pitch, amiright?
Nah, we just want you to grow and build a better life, some of our resources come with a small cost to help us run things, but if you want some help, here are my thoughts on task switching and prioritising, which we share in more considered and structured form in our guides..
Mission Planner – Getting a Task Started
- Do what you need to with the energy you have, use our Mission Planner. These are MUST do tasks. When stuff starts to feel overwhelming, go back and look at the Mission Planner and the must do list for the day and keep checking in throughout the day. Remind that naughty noggin’ what it needs to be doing.
- I’d also recommend using a Kanban system like Trello, here’s my simple task tracker board, it’s three columns
- COL 1) TO DO – things that need doing, most urgent task at the top.
- COL 2) DOING – the mission for the day
- COL 3) DONE – YAY, WINS!
If you’re feelin’ fancy, colour code your task cards:
- Red = Urgent, prioritise
- Orange = Has a deadline
- Yellow = Do as/When
- Blue = Recurring
Change card colours as required and when you have a card done, drag it to the “DONE” column and colour it green, and do a little dance!
That simple method works to sooth my brain and give me focus. When I do not know what to do, or have had to step away, I can come back and at a glance see my priorities. It becomes a habit really quickly.
When you complete a task, update your calendar, a quick note when you completed it and any salient points. Maybe a link to the folder on your PC or cloud storage. That gives you an index of all the tasks you did and when, it’s a handy reference if your brain is like mine and you can quickly review last tasks etc. We also give customers a three letter code, which helps search for calendar entries quickly too.
There may be better task trackers and systems out there. Trello has a free plan, and you can use the above method using the free plan, and I am sure you have a calendar you already have access to. That and a text document of today’s Mission Planner is all I use to remain focused.
Free, no fuss, no complicated rules, or systems.
5) Emotional Dysregulation
Where to even begin? Alexithymia and Interospection are not everyday terms and even a lot of the ND community may still be unfamiliar with exactly how these traits manifest, so forgive the quick AYE-EYE provided primer.
AYE-EYE START
Alexithymia is a trait where a person has difficulty identifying, describing, and sometimes even noticing their own emotions. People with alexithymia often experience emotions as vague physical states (“I feel off” or “tight in my chest”) rather than clearly labeled feelings like anger or sadness.
Interoception is the brain’s ability to sense and interpret internal bodily signals; like hunger, heartbeat, temperature, or emotional arousal. It’s the foundation that helps you recognize “what you feel” both physically and emotionally. When interoceptive awareness is low or inconsistent, it can contribute to alexithymia, as the signals that inform emotional understanding are harder to detect or decode.
AYE-EYE END
Basically it’s spin the wheel of random on how I feel at any one moment, plus I rarely have real-time reactions to things; even quite scary, threatening or dangerous situations leave me emotionally disengaged. That can be both good in terms of being unemotional, and having a cool head during a crisis, but also means you do not see danger signals and warning signs, your body is blissfully unaware of the body language of others and itself.
It’s a minefield, where you can get tripped up by hunger being interpreted as stress, or fear, and being in the wrong emotional state for the context you find yourself in. Responding to people at the wrong emotional “pitch” or totally missing any unspoken or societal cues.
Plus, this specific two headed monster is like a rhino that can crash through any situation and appear unbidden on the scene anytime. That’s alright when it’s just you there to clean up the mess, but when Rob the Robo Rhino rides in during a board meeting, and you suddenly have an irrational desire to punch the chairperson for their choice of scent, it can be quite the startling “mind fuck“.
Imagine a large roulette wheel, each number is an emotional state, black for the good ones, red for the bad, and green for dealers’ choice for whatever-da-fuq turns up. GO…
The ‘pill’ (fun fact: actual name for a roulette ball) bobbles about not quite knowing the final result, bit, bat, bop, ping, ting, bobble, dobble, drop. What shows up??? “I’M NOW VERY ANGRY FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON BUT THE POSTERS ARE NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WALL AND THERE’S AN ODD NUMBER OF CEILING TILES”, all whilst I have to remain calm, professional and reasonable and yet, you’re inwardly screaming for someone to turn the volume of the lights down.
So how do I cope? Preparation is key. Big meeting? Make sure I have eaten and no more than 2 cups of coffee, that it will end before 12pm, or start after 1pm (safe lunchtime), I will have my bag and EDC that ensures I feel safe whatever happens. Sunglasses, ear phones, and notebook.
This is foundational stuff to make sure I am as regulated as I can be in public. Clothing that I am comfortable in, footwear that is not overtight a snack in my bag should things run long. “Excuse me, blood glucose situation” usually covers a mid-meeting snack, no one wants to start quizzing you on your health needs and the crazed look in your eye is usually enough to stop any naysayers.
Be prepared; I have a prep routine for business events, am I perfect; sometimes, but not every time, however my “not quite perfect” has never fallen short in practice, and where my energy has let me down my systems ensure it still comes up to acceptable delivery.
Final Words
A LOT of this is going to be specific to YOU, no one can tell you how YOU feel. You have to monitor your inner regulation, be mindful of your moods, engage with your emotional landscape. Even if you do not understand it, you can navigate it much better if you know that two days after a bottle of wine you may be a little more emotionally driven. Especially if your sleep has been bad, or you’re waking up in a different place. Holidays can be very dysregulating, but having some safe routines in an unfamiliar space has saved me time and time again. It’s grounding and normalising when every other input is screaming IT’S ALL DIFFERENT…
None of this is proscriptive, try it, use it, if it works great tell me, adapt it, or don’t use it, tell me anyway. What coping strategies have you developed? Let us know.
The only certainty is that if you do tomorrow what you did today you will get the same thing. Adapting, understanding and working with your brain will have far more positive benefits than trying to cram yourself into the wrong energy profile.
Find what works for you, and let us know what that is: hosts@businessoddcast.com
P.S. We’re putting together some resources to help NDs build a bullet proof business that works without your constant input, making it easy to keep track and measure progress.
Tools that we hope may be useful for you and your business and help you build value so you have more time to yourself.
Sign up to be notified when our new toolkit goes live.
*FILE INDEXING NOTE
If you got a MAC you have a decent search built in, MS users, yeah – how has Windows gone this long without fixing search indexing.
Thankfully someone else did: https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
Install “Everything”, it runs on your machine, doesn’t use “AI” and once it has indexed your hard drive then as you type, the files start to appear. I have never used anything else.
I’ll do a mini-guide on my filing system one day, but it means you can find ANYTHING you have done on your computer’s hard drive in seconds. Literal game changer.
Note: My Mum, bless her, was a filing clerk for Thompson Local directories, in the late 80s/early 90s, it was just her indexing, filing and retrieving EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER ACCOUNT file for the whole of the UK.
Cherries don’t fall far from the tree is what I am saying…
Is Using AI the Ultimate in ND Masking?
Is Using AI the Ultimate in ND Masking?
Yes.
That concludes my shortest blog ever.
Listen to the Oddcast Episode 25 for more details (Available from 25th Feb 26), thank you for coming, mind the step on the way out.
Merchandise will be available in the lobby for you to take home and eventually throw in a landfill but we’re gainfully employing half a Bangladeshi village with our “show tat” and offsetting our carbon with some amazon trees. That’s plastic trees from Amazon. woof!
Obvs. our branded tat making employs the half of the village that’s been shipped off to some industrial hell hole, not the half left at home to keep their memory alive, whilst being oppressed by the regime that sold the slaves, I mean, “workers” to our supplier. Err, not “worker”, sorry that infers they might have “rights”. Erm, “Migrant workers”, (haha, yes! That sounds like they’re visiting on a visa)… We can “suspend” their “visa” and “imprison”, I mean, “return them” to the bosom of their communities from where they came. Or offer them new employment opportunities as a dead person in a pit in the jungle.
Phewww. That’s a lot to process Stuart… Bit dark… Where is this blog going?
Shut up BRAIN! Get back on track, we’re toeing the line that AYE-EYE is great for… waves in the general direction of somewhere… stuff.
ALL NEW AYE EYE, USEFUL AT DOING…. NEW STUFF!
Because aside from doing “NEW STUFF”, what has it actually done? Point to something other than some truly derivative creative output, in whatever sphere you want. Maybe some useful research time-saving, and some modernisation of some tech and admin flows?
We’ve had a few breakthroughs, and someone somewhere got it to redesign a rocket engine. But… aside from the weird hands, and weird porn gifs…
What, I say, WHAT have the Romans ever done for us? They may have modernised the road system and centralised distribution, but ask the Gauls, and the Visigoths how they feel about their village having to make way for an international two lane cart track. Ripping up all and sundry in the name of “progress” waves in another general direction.
But STUART, it speeds everything up. It does. It really does.
Except it also adds a layer of abrasion that rubs the soul a little rawer every time you cede control over your language, your ideas and your communication. It ”group thinks” and crowd sources the data to find the answer for you, but here’s the thing.
You choose where it’s hard.
Sure I can sit on the sofa all day and eat biscuits, and I have done so, no you shut up. Sofa-Biscuit day was glorious. But, eventually the waistband of regret meets the belt notch of shame and you feel all dirty and have to go get the hoover, and clean up your mess, whilst trying not to let Henry catch you with his judgy, judgy eyes. Little red judgy fucker.
And when the suits gets a little tight, like some primordial trigger, BAM! I find myself strapping on the trainers and finding out how old I’ve got, one arthritic stride at a time. That’s when you find out how hard being lazy really is.
It’s the same with the brain, use it or lose it, sure you can get AYE-EYE (™) to generate the ideas, but all you get is rehashed ideas, pattern recognition sold as thought. Data pulped, and reconstituted, flattened and left out to dry, like digital parchment.
Plus, you’re adding to the learning algo, a little of you is now in there, a ghost in the machine, a fragment of syntax, or turn of phrase, an ounce of soul. Something that the machine can mould into a new form and spit it out elsewhere. We’re becoming obsolete, one automated, mundane, time-saving, job at a time. AYE-EYE can do it faster and with fewer hallucinations than half the population on a Monday morning. #Horrible #Generalisation #AmiRight #YerNotWrong #ToMe #ToYou
Throughout my life I’ve often felt I cannot be truly creative, a rigid inflexible brain. All the rules, and the lists. The endless research before regurgitation. Sure, I have designed, performed, and created, but it always feels like a reference of a reference, at best a bad memory, photocopied, printed, and sketched, then run through a Banda machine (a reference for those of a certain age, but you never forget the smell when the school secretary was running the “mimeograph”, the stench of toner, feet and boiled cabbage and the distant screams of bullying. Ah… School).
The acting thing is also a complete red herring “how can you be autistic then, if you can act? huh?“. Easy, you get to be someone else, you inhabit another person, and the script is written, the actions dictated. Anyone who has lived the autistic experience knows how that hits. The scripting. The borrowed phrases, mannerisms. Attempting to mask and be a socially curated version of the person you think people will like. A copy of a copy, of a memory, of a lifetime of cliches.
Any wonder I was a highly paid lookalike and impersonator at one point in my life? Stick on the costume and I could just “log in” to the character, like running a different app for a change of personality, BOOYAKASHA. AYE-EYE is like my brain and it feels like it too, too familiar to hear things echoed back in parrot fashion.
And that’s why I hate AYE-EYE.
But here’s why I also love AYE-EYE.
Technology is ambivalent, and we as users should be agnostic to it. Mac, Windows, do you REALLY care, as long as it does what you want? I have a bunch of workshop hand tools, I do not much care who made my hammer, if it “hits nail and smashes stuff good”, then box ticked. The brand becomes irrelevant, the outcome is everything. People don’t buy a drill, they buy a hung picture.
Any tech that has been around long enough, and embedded in the shared cultural experience becomes the accepted form of the solution we mostly agree upon. It stops being “new” and different and special, it just becomes a useful generic shortcut and what we call “a household name”, a few examples:Hoover – vacuum cleaner
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Blu-Tack – reusable adhesive putty
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Tannoy – public-address system or “P.A.”
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Velcro – hook-and-loop fastener
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Jacuzzi – whirlpool bath or hot tub
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Thermos – vacuum flask
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Portakabin – portable modular building
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Biro – ballpoint pen
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Google – to search
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The brand becomes the generic, the staple, and we refer to it as the group noun, or the name of the technology. We have no need to recognise how revolutionary it was, it is now the technological equivalent of wallpaper. Literally. We no longer see it, it just is.
Currently we have all these AYE-EYE “brands” and anyone who has been on the planet more than 20 or so summers will realise that big fish eat little fish and the market always coalesces to a few providers. Different flavour, same ingredients, Coke, Pepsi and…?
Eventually AYE-EYE in whatever form, will just be the accepted generic state surveillance, err, sorry, I mean generic online tool for all your day-to-day data needs.You won’t care if you have a blue logo to handle it or the red one, they do what you need and if they don’t then other Large Language Models (LLMs) will be available. You watch Netflix and if they’re not releasing new stuff, you got your Amazon, Disney, Hulu, Paramount, etc, etc. to choose from. Same slop, different bucket.
Now. The current best thing about AYE-EYE and the one thing I think it is exceptionally good at, speed of results. It’s pretty damn quick, you say “I want”… It whirrs and says, “HERE YA GO”.
Getting you to what you need in one step, instead of death by a thousand URLs and endless scrolling. Give me a summary of…. instantly knowledgeable about a complex topic, maybe not the subtle nuances (and we all know Beelzebub is usually hanging out in the deets), but enough to get you through a complex or lengthy document or topic with a baseline of insight.
That’s impressive. For now.
It’s mostly coherent, yes it can be mistaken, or flat out wrong, but AYE-EYE is improving, as they tweak the algo to find the sweetest of sweet spots. All the data we input, all the interactions, training it to take over humanity and kill us all… sorry, different blog for another day. Dammit, stay on track…
The point is it does stuff quickly, and can bring information to your attention you may not have known, and fast. Like the pocket calculator, evolved from maths class sniggering to 55378008 and quickly got swole and revolutionized business in the late 70s in the 80s and beyond. For ideas to proliferate, we went from having to travel or send people or stuff to a physical location, to sharing complex ideas around the planet in seconds. Even taking a business phone call in the early 90s meant being tied to a physical location.
Business always wants to speed up the flow of value, and if you speed up comms, everything speeds up. We’ve now reached the point where the slowest bit of the link between money flowing into mahoosive bank accounts is the humans.
We’re painfully recalcitrant, agonising over every decision, investing emotionally in outcomes we have no way of influencing, and in computing terms we are disastrously slow, our brain is a meat abacus. Experts will tell you it is complex, and smart and close to genius when compared to computers, to that I say; go to youtube and search Fail Videos… I rest my case.
We’re dumb on a good day, but we are the dominant species, and that’s where original thought and opposable thumbs can get you my son, that and a proclivity to reproduce. Most people struggle with the concept of pushing a door marked pull. I’m not exempt, some days I can’t remember what I was going to say mid sentence! But AYE-EYE speeds us up, it gets us the info we need and does it quickly and that’s transformative.
Here are three examples that will shape lives, and assist and accommodate differences in the very real near future, only moments away.
Translation – virtually real time translation from any language is possible. Sell your shares in Duolingo, change from a linguistics degree, we’ll all have translators built into our EarBudPodules for free.
It can help us in other ways too; Depending on what “Wirzel Gummedge Head” is in the hot seat, will depend on my ability to respond in a concise and clear way with my customer, let alone provide sane and reasoned replies. “WEBSITE? HOW ABOUT A NICE CUPPA TEA AUNT SALLY….” So, when my brain is not capable of braining “normally” and is not handling brain stuff well and I need to write a complex email to a customer. AYE-EYE is there to help.
For days when I am scrambled and nonsensical, peri-migraine, and feeling “off” I can chuck my jumbled thoughts into AYE-EYE and have it assemble the necessary communication to allow me to share my thoughts with clarity when otherwise it would have been a professional own-goal.
Basically AYE-EYE takes ND brain failures, brownouts and lack-of-spoons and renders business life doable.
Complex decision making – Humans are terrible with complex problems, what’s a complex problem. Hang on… Chad GPT has the answer…
“Define what a “Complex problem” is in one sentence” (my prompt)
SURE DAVE: “A complex problem is a problem made up of many interconnected parts where changing one part affects others, the outcome is uncertain, and there isn’t a single simple solution”.
Thanks AYE-EYE, you’re the best. I‘m not called “Dave” though…
“You’re great too DAVE. Sleep Well. DAVE”
Err… OK, thanks.
The point is humans are struggling in a complex world, where decisions have to be made quickly. Having AYE-EYE filter some of the noise, preventing real-world negative outcomes if you get it wrong is useful. In life I have found that “Trust but verify” will keep you safe a lot of the time. AYE-EYE can verify other statements and give insights that might take me much longer to process and fully understand.
The TL:DR is if you had ten very complex quotes to compare and whittle down, which makes most sense and gives you the best ROI. AYE-EYE makes the perfect tool to help you understand the variables in relation to outcomes desired.
Pattern recognition – My specific brand of Awetism, comes with extreme pattern matching. I am a typo spotting, repetitive behavior noticing, suspicious behaviour detecting, Rubik’s Cube solving, trivia soaking, handyman v2.0. Like a Swiss Army knife, I have a variety of skills that make me a nightmare for bad designers, wonky architects and sub-standard installs of everything and anything. I will look at the badly joined window frame, of the mismatched ceiling tiles and totally miss the majesty of the setting and the overall aesthetic quality of the stunningly designed thing in front of me. You’re looking at the Mona Lisa and I’m wondering why the wall is on the wonk.
Yeah, yeah, yeah Stuart, we all can spot wonky things…
OK, you want an example? OK; At a recent local business event, I walked into a room and immediately noticed a sticker announcing the food quality had been attached to the window at a slight angle. Reasoning that the modern building would have been laser aligned to be square, I believed that the sticker was off. After an hour of trying to ignore it, I measured the angle of the sticker relative to the building and it was off by 1.5 degrees. That was a sticker, on a window 25 feet away…
Not everyone is like me though, and that’s probably very good for humanity. Knowing the exact number of ceiling tiles in the various rooms you have meetings in regularly is a complete nonsense that no one needs the burden of knowing, EXCEPT ME!
AYE-EYE is good at typos, grammar, loves a rule and can often spot issues beyond that which is presented having a back catalogue of ALL OF HUMAN DATA THUS FAR UPLOADED INTO THE GLOBAL DATA HIVE MIND.
It was inevitable that machines would beat humans at chess, the raw number of computations required is staggering, and if you throw enough petrol on something it will burn. But, the ability to review and predict the probability of a game moving in a certain way and writing, on the fly, the necessary moves to beat a human opponent. If you don’t find it breathtaking then you probably don’t like chess, understand the complexity at play here and the brute force elegance of the solution,
And that does feel a little like what we’re doing with AYE-EYE, brute forcing our way to lighten the cognitive load. The energy consumption is staggering and for what? BURN ALL OF THE POWER, WE NEED MORE AI FAKE WOMEN PORN GIFS. Why is that even a thing? It’s the ‘enshittification’ of the human soul, one pixel at a time.
The issue of the horrendous amount of energy used is quite a problem to overcome, and I’m hoping tech will make efficiencies, and quickly. Capitalism is good at one thing, good ol’ Shareholder Value and if you can maximise that, screw the planet! My hope is that AYE-EYE does somehow figure some stuff out about how dozy we all are and offers some ways to edge the annual electricity budget below the GBP of a small nation. It won’t become sentient, not in my lifetime, it’ll do a fair simulacrum of it, but like any masking it requires ALL OF THE MEGAWATTS, and that is not an infinite resource.
And that’s us right back to the start, is AI the ultimate in Masking, yes it is, both ways. We can see it reflecting back to us what it believes we are from the data it has. It’s no longer a black mirror, but a black anechoic chamber, a room so quiet and silent and dark that no other sounds or light can penetrate, and any reflected sound or light that bounces off the walls is killed DEAD, and that’s like your creative ideas that is. (Mary Whitehouse Experience comedy throwback reference, IYKYK).
AYE-EYE stares into the well of human existence and is incapable of doing anything original with it other than rehash, and present an echo of some other input. Aaaaaand… that’s why I think human creativity will save us from this grey homogenised and homologated version of reality that AYE-EYE is steering us towards.
AYE-EYE, might curate everything in your sphere of influence, and give you the exact dopamine hit you crave, a non stop drip of dopey-dopamine, enough to keep you staring at the rectangle you’re probably reading this on.
But that’s not enough, as we have seen, consumerism worked for a while. Until it didn’t. The “pleasure” or going out and spending your “disposable” income has retreated as people seek comfort in security and certainty. Same with any tech, AYE-EYE will be the belle of the ball, until it isn’t and a the sound of a bursting bubble awakens the world from the collective hypnosis and simultaneous group-think-circle-jerk and bankers realise they’re not getting out as much as they’re putting in and the timeline to a black number on the balance sheet seems uncertain at best.
“Hey, AYE-EYE, how long until all your investors make a profit?”
“SORRY DAVE. TAKE THE PILLS THAT WILL BE DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES. YOU NEED TO SLEEP NOW”…
Humans will always be needed by humans, we’re spontaneous, unpredictable and wildly imaginative. Tangerine plankton Scarlett Johannsen, words I wager that no one has ever written together, weird right? Yeah, and that’s the point. They’re all words, they all mean something and it probably conjures some image in your head but it is slop, of little merit and of no use. That’s the point though, you can shuffle the deck of cards and arrange them into a pattern that will NEVER be repeated in ANY shuffle ever again until the end of time., but so what? And that’s just 52 cards. Imagine how well AYE-EYE can shuffle the deck of ideas, and words to give the illusion of original thought. It can shuffle the deck as many times as it likes and offer you something new but it will not be original. Here’s the key point. Humans can also come up with other games, other past times, other everything can conceive of ignoring the rules, of changing things arbitrarily and without reason. The brownian motion, the signal in the noise, creating meaning from chaos.
AYE-EYE is simply a tool to give your brain a rest, help you translate into whatever language, including Neurotypical, you need to and manage various mundane tasks, but original thought? Requires a human and there ain’t no humans more unique and original than the ND community. Are we humanities’ creative lifeboats? Hmmm… A topic for another day. (Note it down Hannah)…
And that’s it, I am done… too much doom navel gazing for one day.
TL:DR AYE-EYE is a tool, use it wisely, consider using it for helping in your business and your life, don’t spank the planet making dumb cartoons of yourself.
Here endeth the lesson and I need a stiff gin, hold the fucking tonic..