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!
The Brilliantly Chaotic Brain
I have been described as many things over the years.
Scattered. Distracted. A bit random. “Can you just get to the point?” remains a personal favourite, usually delivered by someone whose patience ran out somewhere around the third tangent.
And, in fairness, I can kinda see their point.
If you ask me a simple question, you’d better have a cup of tea prepped and be ready to pull up a chair. Because there is every chance I’ll start in Hampshire, take a brief detour through a childhood memory from 1987, somehow involve a conversation I had with a client last week, and then arrive triumphantly at the answer twenty minutes later as though anything less than that level of detail would be a crime. And I make no apology for that, as to me it makes perfect sense.
It might look chaotic from the outside, but my brain isn’t randomly pin-balling off the bumpers, for the sheer sake of it. It’s connecting things. Following threads. Spotting patterns. Making links. The route may be unconventional, but I usually arrive exactly where I intended to go. It just doesn’t always travel by the roads other people were expecting.
This is the thing I wish more people understood about neurodivergent thinking. What can get labelled as scattered, unfocused or chaotic isn’t a dysfunction. It’s a completely different but magnificent operating system doing its thing. One that happens to be running several tabs, three side quests, a background process and an entirely separate investigation at the same time. Which sounds ridiculous until that same brain solves a problem everyone else has been staring at for three weeks.
The scenic route is still a route
Most people are taught that thinking should (don’t we hate that word?) be linear. Step one. Step two. Step three. Nice and neat. Predictable. Reassuring. The sort of thinking that owns a sensible filing cabinet and knows exactly where its passport is.
Unfortunately, many ND brains did not receive that particular software patch.
Our thoughts tend to arrive more like a spider’s web than a straight line. One idea triggers another. A conversation about marketing reminds us of a documentary we watched three years ago, which somehow links to a client problem, which unexpectedly sparks a completely different business idea. From the outside, it can look like we’ve wandered off topic entirely. Internally, however, there is usually a very logical chain of connections taking place at alarming speed.
The challenge is that we forget to explain the twenty-seven invisible steps in the middle. Or maybe we don’t feel the need to.
So whilst everyone else is wondering how we got from A to M, we’re already halfway to T. Then we become mildly frustrated because nobody else seems to be keeping up. Which is deeply unfair, given that we’ve shared approximately 3% of our working out.
The irony is that many of the same people who find this style of thinking confusing are also the people who later marvel at the solution it produces.
Creativity is messy!
Who ever thought that ‘creative’ should be organised? Surely by its very definition it needs to be full of tangents, and ‘emergency stop’ moments?
As Stu says,”creativity is the sat nav of the brain. Truly creative thinking never welds itself to the ego or the concept of “right”. It takes various things “on advice” but it is free to fly to wherever it needs to and then backwards engineering the through line.”
Brilliant ideas are brilliant because they more often than not are non-conformist. They aren’t sitting in their sensible armchair, smoothing out their beige suit trousers, whilst pondering whether to opt for a plain digestive, or a custard cream.
No. They’re the sort of ideas that screech into your brain at 3am, and have you frantically reaching for a notebook before they eject themselves from your brain forever. The ‘thought magicians’ of the idea world, that make you both flinch and laugh at the same time.
Personally, my best ideas have arrived in the oddest of moments. In the shower, whilst driving, halfway through another task, and occasionally whilst trying very hard to think about something else entirely. My phone ‘notes’ app is a smorgasbord of wild brain dumps, including linkedin post ideas, future hobby goals and random numbers that seemed vital at the time, but now read like coded messages from a previous version of myself. I found one the other day that simply read 4690. Is that the code to my eternal happiness? Who knows…
And yet, hidden amongst the chaos, there is always something inspiring.
The problem is that we’ve spent years being told that good thinking should look tidy. So when our process looks sprawling and slightly feral, we assume we’re doing it wrong. But creativity has never really cared about being neat. It wanders. It explores. It takes the scenic route. And more often than not, that’s where the interesting stuff lives.
The bit where your brain is galloping ahead
One of the things I’ve noticed about many neurodivergent people is how quickly their brains can move. Especially if they are sponsored by ADHD. And I say this with no judgement, being the proud owner of one of these magnificent brain beasts myself!
This all sounds wonderful until you’re trying to sleep. Or relax. Or watch a film without simultaneously redesigning your website, solving a client problem, planning next year’s content calendar and wondering whether penguins have knees.
But that same speed can be incredibly useful.
The ability to connect ideas rapidly means we often spot opportunities early. We notice risks before they become obvious. We see patterns emerging before everyone else has even realised there’s a pattern to look for.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had a strong feeling that something wasn’t quite right, only to discover a few weeks later that my brain had already spotted something my conscious mind hadn’t fully processed yet.
What often gets dismissed as overthinking is sometimes pattern recognition running ahead of the pack. Not always, of course. Sometimes it’s just anxiety wearing a fake moustache and pretending to be intuition. But not always.
Too many ideas isn’t the problem
I have never really understood why “having too many ideas” gets treated like a character flaw. Admittedly, it can make life slightly chaotic. But I’d still rather have too many ideas than none at all.
The problem seems to be more that these ideas all arrive with the confidence of drunk Ron at your local boozer, 5 pints of Stella in and telling you how he’d sort out the economy.
These over enthusiastic ideas are why some of us end up with six unfinished projects, three domain names, a half-written book, a business idea involving crochet, and a cupboard full of craft supplies we were definitely going to use.
Eventually, I realised the problem wasn’t having too many ideas. It was trying to store all of them in my head at the same time. But if you are able to create a home for these magnificent specimens. Somewhere safe where they could exist without demanding immediate action, like a notebook (do not take inspo from my notebook app!) Then the chaos just becomes a list of cool things you can come back to.
Because not every idea needs doing today.Some ideas just need somewhere to wait.
A shout out to the pattern-spotting genius
One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking came when I stopped viewing this style of thinking as something I needed to fix. Because in business, it’s often incredibly valuable.
Many ND business owners are exceptional pattern spotters. We notice tiny shifts in behaviour. Small inconsistencies. Things that don’t quite add up. We connect information from completely different places and somehow arrive at useful conclusions before we’ve fully worked out how we got there.
The funny thing is that these strengths rarely feel impressive from the inside. They just feel normal. Like surely everyone else is seeing the same thing.
They’re not.
What feels obvious to you is often the result of hundreds of tiny observations being quietly filed away in the background. Your brain has been collecting clues long before you’ve consciously realised it was solving a problem.
Then everyone acts surprised when you’re right…..Again.
When the chaos starts driving the bus
Now, before we all disappear into a dopamine-fuelled celebration of creative brilliance, there is a small caveat.
Chaos is wonderful right up until it isn’t.
Because whilst creative thinking creates possibilities, it can also create overwhelm. Every idea feels exciting. Every opportunity feels interesting. Every project feels like it could be the thing.
And before you know it, you’ve agreed to launch something new, redesign your website, start a newsletter, learn crochet, volunteer for a committee and somehow become responsible for organising the Christmas party.
The truth is that brilliance still needs boundaries.Not because there’s anything wrong with having lots of ideas, but because attention remains a finite resource. At some point, every opportunity cannot be the priority. Every exciting possibility cannot happen simultaneously. Trust me. I’ve checked.
Structure isn’t a fun killer
I think structure gets terrible press in neurodivergent circles.The moment someone mentions planning, systems or organisation, half the room starts looking for the nearest exit (usually the ADHD half). But good structure isn’t there to suppress creativity. It’s there to protect it.
The right amount of structure creates a container. It gives your ideas somewhere to land. It stops your best thinking disappearing into the void because something newer and shinier turned up five minutes later.
It doesn’t have to be rigid or complicated. But some boundaries around things such as how many projects you can have on the go can be a real gamechanger. Because structure isn’t meant as a cage. It’s the thing that stops all your brilliant ideas escaping before they’ve had a chance to become something useful.
One more time for those at the back. You’re not broken!
The older I get, the more I believe that half the things we were criticised for as children were actually strengths that nobody knew what to do with.
Too many questions.
Too many ideas.
Talking too much.
Daydreaming. (actually it’s blue sky thinking!)
Being “easily distracted”.
And yet they’re some of the same traits that show up again and again in entrepreneurs, creatives, innovators and problem-solvers. The people who challenge assumptions and constraints. Spot opportunities, test what’s needed and what’s excess baggage. Connect dots that everyone else missed.
I think the issue was never that our brains worked differently, but that we spent years comparing them to systems that were designed for a completely different style of thinking.
The challenge isn’t becoming less chaotic. It’s learning how to build a life that gives that chaos somewhere useful to go. Because the people changing things have rarely been the people thinking exactly like everybody else.
Perhaps the problem was never the chaos.
Perhaps the problem was being taught to see it as one.
AMEN!
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.
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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.