ADHD Coaching for high performers
(fast brain, no diagnosis or label needed)
You know you can do it.
So why is it so hard?
At your best, you make difficult things look effortless. Then something everyone else finds easy can feel almost impossible.
You’re clearly capable
You’ve built a successful career. You can solve difficult problems, take on responsibility and perform when it matters.
In fact, you’re probably pretty damned good at that stuff. That’s part of how you got here.
And then there’s the stupidly simple stuff
Replying to the email. Starting the document. Booking the appointment.
The project that gets to 80% and somehow never quite gets finished. The 40 browser tabs. The thing you’ve been thinking about for six days that would probably take twenty minutes.
You know you can do it. Which somehow makes it even more infuriating when you don’t.
So you learn to make it work
When there’s a deadline tomorrow, suddenly you’re brilliant. When something goes wrong, you’re the calmest person in the room.
But ask your brain to steadily chip away at something boring for three weeks and apparently we have a problem.
So you compensate, create systems, manufacture urgency. You say yes because somebody else now expects you to deliver. You pull off something heroic at the last minute and promise yourself you’ll never do it that way again.
Then you do.
And you can become very good at making all this work.
There are plenty of useful tactics for that. But tactics only get you so far.
Because making it work has costs
You can be brilliant in the room and empty by 11am. You can get the promotion and barely feel the win.
“I didn’t really do anything” says the voice in your head.
You can become the person everyone depends on while privately wondering how long you can keep all the plates spinning.
You hold it together at work, and fall apart at home.
From the outside, it looks like success. Because it is success.
It’s just expensive.
Eventually, you wonder if you’re broken
Why can’t I just do the thing? Why do I need this much pressure? Why can’t I be consistent?
How does everyone else seem to make ordinary life look so bloody easy?
Over the years, those questions pile up. And your brain starts answering them: you’re lazy and undisciplined, too much and somehow not enough.
You promise yourself that next time you’ll be more organised and more grown-up.
And somewhere along the way, you stop just fighting the task.
You start fighting yourself.
What if the problem isn’t effort?
A Formula 1 car isn’t broken because it struggles in city traffic. It’s built for the track.
Put it in the right conditions and it flies. Ask it to crawl through stop-start traffic and do the weekly shop, and it becomes miserable to drive.
You can be like that too.
Under the right conditions, you move fast and think clearly. Under the wrong ones, everything seems to create friction.
So the question isn’t only: How do I get myself to do this?
It’s: What brings out my best?
And eventually: What would fit me better?
"Find out who you are and do it on purpose" — Dolly Parton
That’s the work
Not fixing you or giving you another perfect system to fail at.
We work out how you operate.
And we look at what you’ve been putting up with because you assumed that’s what successful adults do.
Sometimes the answer is tactical
Make the next step visible. Change the environment. Borrow some accountability. Work in a sprint. Stop relying on memory. Make the boring thing more interesting.
Sometimes a small design change really is enough.
And sometimes it’s bigger than that
You can optimise the hell out of a life that still doesn’t fit, and become extraordinarily efficient at doing work that drains you.
You can build elaborate systems to survive a role that mostly asks you to suppress the things you’re best at.
At some point, another productivity hack isn’t the answer.
The more interesting question is: What are you trying so hard to make yourself fit into?
The goal is a better fit
A better fit means more of your week goes on what you’re good at, and less on fighting how you work. Fewer last-minute rescues, less time judging yourself for being inconsistent, and more room for the work, and the life, you want.
“I can’t have ADHD. I worked at Google.”
That was genuinely my first thought when somebody suggested it. I’d spent six years at Google, then two at Amazon, where I led a 100-person organisation. Surely people with ADHD didn’t do that?
Except, of course, they do. I did.
I just compensated, tried harder, forced myself to perform the way I thought I should.
For years I treated my career as evidence that whatever I was doing must be working.
And it was.
It just didn’t tell me how much effort I was spending making it work.
My diagnosis gave me a much more useful way to understand a pattern I’d lived with for decades:
Speed under the right conditions. Friction under the wrong ones.
That doesn’t mean my ADHD is your ADHD. And you don’t need the same label for your experience that I use for mine. I’m not going to hand you my system and tell you to copy it.
The useful question is: How do you work?
What this can look like
Names and details changed. The outcomes aren't.
Senior operator, plateaued despite capability
The pattern: Diagnosed with ADHD years earlier. Full of ideas. Stuck at the same level for years. Convinced he had untapped potential he couldn’t access, with more ideas than he could ever finish.
What we worked on: Prioritising by energy and capacity instead of guilt. Deciding what to do, delegate, drop or defer. Accepting that being excellent at some things doesn’t require becoming an all-rounder and doing everything.
What changed: He built a prioritisation system he could use, had the internal-move conversation he’d been avoiding for months, and changed how his team worked so he stopped quietly absorbing their work himself.
Senior operator, technology sector
The pattern: He kept succeeding, getting promoted - and eventually ending up in conflict with the people above him. It had happened more than once. Privately, he had started to conclude that he was defective.
What we worked on: We separated character from context: how he naturally created value, what changed as he moved up in the organisation, and when a role stopped fitting.
What changed: “Getting fired for being himself” became a pattern he could act on. He could judge the next role by whether it would let him do his best work, rather than just look good on paper.
Senior leader, global technology company
The pattern: Highly successful. Exhausted. Wondering whether he was using his potential or just running faster on the same treadmill.
What we worked on: Where his energy came from, what he was pursuing for approval, and why he kept taking work back instead of making his standards clear.
What changed: He began treating overwhelm as information. He recognised how needing the credit kept him hoarding work, started stating his standards out loud and began letting other people carry more.
Senior operator moving from freelance to full-time
The pattern: Doing well independently, but chasing a prestigious role she didn’t really want. Success only seemed to count when somebody important confirmed it.
What we worked on: Separating authority from self-worth. Noticing how she made herself smaller to be useful. Learning to register a win instead of explaining it away.
What changed: She turned down the prestigious role and chose a Chief of Staff position on her own terms. Her new CEO later called her the best hire he’d made in his career. This time, she could take it in.
You don’t need the label
Some of my clients have an ADHD diagnosis. Some suspect they might have ADHD. Some found out when their child was diagnosed. Some have absolutely no interest in the label, but recognise the pattern on this page immediately.
I sometimes use fast-brained as shorthand.
You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t even need to believe ADHD is the best explanation for what’s happening.
If the way you’re working isn’t working for you, let’s talk.
What we actually do
Fast brains tend to get stuck in a few places:
Starting before panic takes over. Finishing the last 20%. Deciding what matters when everything feels important.
Enough structure to help, without building another system you’ll abandon.
Protecting focus. Handling interruption. Getting thoughts out of your head and somewhere you can trust them.
Making the important thing harder to lose.
Working out what gives you energy and what drains it.
Designing a week that doesn’t assume you have the same capacity every hour of every day.
The frustration when you can’t just do the thing. The reaction that feels bigger than the event. The shame afterwards.
Finding ways to recover when the day goes sideways, before pushing harder becomes the only option.
What you’re unusually good at, and what you’ve simply learned to perform well. Most fast brains have a spiky profile: unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others.
Creating more room for the work that brings out your best.
Sometimes the problem is the job, the environment or the expectations you’ve taken on.
Then the question gets bigger: what would fit you better?
How I coach
We start with what you want to be different, and what actually happens now.
Often the first changes are practical. That might mean changing your environment, simplifying a system or preparing for a difficult conversation. We treat it like a startup: try something small, see what happens, keep what works. When something doesn’t work, we learn just as much.
Then we look at the bigger pattern, like how you plan your week and what you say yes to.
And then at what sits underneath: the beliefs about yourself you’ve built a career on, like “rest has to be earned” or “if it was easy, it doesn’t count”. Changing those is usually what makes everything else last.
How it works & what it costs
No commitment until we're both sure it's what you need.
20 minutes, free
Clarity Call
No pitch, no prep. Just enough for both of us to know whether we could work together. If we think we could, we book a Deep Dive to find out.
90 minutes
Deep Dive
We block out 90 minutes, and use what we need. It can go surprisingly deep, and most people see things differently by the end. You only pay if it serves you.
Stop or continue
You decide
It wasn't valuable
You pay nothing.
Tell me what would have made it better, and we leave it there.
It was enough
incl VAT
The Deep Dive did the job and you don't need to go further.
You pay for the session, and we're done.
You want more
€1,000
6 sessions, incl VAT
The Deep Dive becomes session one of six.
We book five more 50-minute sessions, about every two weeks, accounting for holidays, travel, and other fixed commitments.
This pricing applies only to self-funded, 1:1 clients. If your company is paying, book a Clarity Call, and we’ll discuss fees and how we might customise the engagement for you.
Need a different rhythm? We can discuss that in the Deep Dive.
I don't normally publish my fees. I love this work, I'm at my best doing a lot of it, and right now I have room for more. When my calendar is full enough, the fee for new clients goes up.
20 minutes. Free. Confidential.
Frequently asked questions
Not quite what you’re looking for?
Become the bottleneck in the company you run? Startups →
Great at the vision for a big change, and paying for the follow-through? Transformation →
Wondering whether your job really fits how you work? What’s next? →
