Are you someone who is constantly driven to achieve? Someone with ridiculously high expectations of themselves and sets incredibly lofty goals, only to think they weren't that important when you do actually achieve them? Do you ever feel like you'll never arrive where you want to be? If so, this may be for you.

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Neurodivergent Life Was So Much Simpler At School….

I’m sitting here in my thirties thinking back to school and the profound effect it has on many of us. For those of us who learned to thrive there, understood the rules: We put in the work and we get the grades, this can stick with us for a very long time. Unconsciously we structure our life like this.

Get the degree, get the job, get the promotion. Collect the grades in the music hobby, the belts in jiu jitsu. If this sounds oddly specific it’s because I’m calling myself out here. But collecting these accolades is never enough. It’s like success is a horizon that moves further and further away every time you take a step towards it.

Somewhere along this journey the point of disillusionment arrives. You suddenly realise that you don’t know why you’re doing this anymore. But you don’t know how else to live so you continue down the path. Yet it’s now a slog, one that eventually leads you to be at the end of your tether.

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The cost of High Performance

I like to talk about this stage as “hitting the wall”. That moment when you realise you can’t do this anymore and something needs to change. When you feel like everything is crashing down all around you. A lot of that time not only do you end up with a profound feeling of failure (unfair, I might add, but I’ll come back to that) but also a brand new ADHD or Autism or Dyslexia or insert neurodivergence here diagnosis.

You go from being the highly capable Leslie Knope of the office (again, the specificity is for me!) to someone who is questioning everything. What you don’t see when the wall is smacking you right in the face is that you’re not a failure, you’re just burnt out from chasing something you never should have been chasing in the first place.

Let me explain a little, because those of us in these situations were neurodivergent the whole time, just no one knew it. Or rather no one knew what it was. Funnily enough children tend to have a nose for it even if they can’t articulate what it is and often those of us who are neurodivergent can remember the feeling of not being like the other children, of not fitting in.

The adults spot it too, though they’re also usually lacking the vocabulary. So much so that ADHD expert Doctor William Dodson has remarked that by age ten children with ADHD have received 20,000 more negative or corrective comments than their neurotypical peers. It leads to consequences for our behaviour. Reprimands for not trying hard enough or being too distracted. For boring the other children when we talk about our favourite show. It leads to social signals that tell us we’re not doing this whole life thing right.

*More of a ‘kicking’ the wall than ‘hitting’ but you get the point!*

Masking And Chasing The Rewards

For those of us who made it to adulthood without getting diagnosed, we picked up on that information and we did something with it. We learned the patterns, which interactions led to negative reactions from our peers, which behaviours led to praise from the adults around us. We started subconsciously running this optimisation problem, learned to self-police away the parts of us that didn’t fit the mold.

As a now diagnosed adult, you now know that what I’m describing is masking, a way of hiding your neurodivergent traits to become neurotypical. And if you’ve gone through the process of learning to start unmasking you’ve probably realised the amount of effort it takes to continually put the mask on.

That effort was there when you were young, it just became normal for you to bear it. And you were rewarded for it. And that’s where it begins, that association between hard work and reward.

This led to a cycle where you’d work to get the rewards. And if even the exam results themselves came easy to you, you were working hard in other ways: to fit in, to improve in the things you were bad at so you’d be perfect across the board.

This was amplified further by accusations of laziness when it came to executive function challenges. I remember being told I was faffing instead of getting on with my chores. It reinforces the message: try hard, get results. Struggle and achieve.

*Many neurodivergents dismiss their achievements as nothing to be proud of.*

As a rational adult now you’re probably nodding along. Maybe you’re also internally debating me: You’re far more internally motivated now. You’re no longer looking for approval from peers. And yes, if you’ve been on that growth journey the expectations are no longer external. But that doesn’t make them any less heavy.

Because I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard my clients brush past awards they’ve won, accolades they’ve collected, degrees they’ve obtained alongside a full time job as if they aren’t real achievements and do you know why they think that? Because they didn’t have to struggle.

I do it too! Recently I sat through the donut tutorial in blender and made this beautiful donut before going on to make some stuff on my own and you know what I do every time I show someone the donut. Go: “Oh I followed a tutorial for that.”

Yes, I followed a tutorial. So did hundreds of thousands of people around the world, maybe even millions. Do you know how many people actually finished it? A tiny fraction of that.

But to me it didn’t feel hard. I’m good at following instructions so it didn’t feel like a high strain achievement. That didn’t mean it wasn’t an achievement full stop.

I also see this with my clients when I get them to do a strengths assessment. They’ll have paragraphs upon paragraphs telling them all the things they’re good at and they’ll scroll straight on past them to get to the two bullet points to tell them what to watch out for. Because that’s the stuff they’ll struggle with, that feels like it could be real achievement.

So how do you decouple this marriage between hard work and achievement that leads you to brush aside very real achievements as if they’re nothing. There are going to be people out there who are going to tell you to employ positive thinking, to look at your reflection in the mirror and tell it: “I am worthy. I am enough.” I’m really envious of the people that works for.

Because for me, I’m a hyper-rational autistic as well as a chaotic ADHDer and I can’t just say the thing and believe it. I need evidence.

Lets Take A Look At The Evidence

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to collect that evidence. I’m going to start you off with three categories of evidence to collect and you are going to start writing them down, and this part is particularly important, by hand.

A list of everything you’ve achieved. Whatever you think of. It can be something really simple like “When I was six I won the easter hat parade”. It can be anything that you can tick off that you’ve achieved. And I want you to think deeply about this. I work with clients all over the world and so many of them have changed countries and are working in languages that aren’t their first language and don’t even stop to think about how much of an achievement that is. So I really want you to spend some time thinking about the things you can write down here. Aim for at least ten.
The second is everything you’re proud of. It’s going to overlap a lot with the last category so don’t separate them out, but by changing the framing slightly you might find different things. For example, I took a parkour class recently and jumped from a box that was at my nose height to the floor. I don’t know if you’d class that as an achievement or not but I’m someone with a fear of heights and the first time I got up on top of that box I couldn’t jump. I had to lower myself into sitting and drop from there. But I faced my fear of heights and jumped down from there. Multiple times. I was still scared but I did it. This is what I mean by something you’re proud of that might not be obviously an achievement.
Compliments people have given you. This one is particularly important because many of us have been called out for brushing off compliments people give us. Then we get called out and told to just say thank you so we do just so people stop calling us out. But the “thank you” becomes punctuation, a way to deflect the compliment without getting called out. See, I can tell your clever trick. We’re going to combat even this one by writing them down.

The reason we write them down is for highly intelligent neurodivergent people, our brain is often whirring with lots of complexity and thoughts and typing it up or copying and pasting into a document means it passes through our brain incredibly quickly. Handwriting though is different. It forces us to slow down, to take the time to process exactly what it is we’re proud of or someone has said about us.

*It’s amazing how seeing things written down can help when reflecting*

And then you read it out. To your partner, best friend, cat or even teddy bear. No matter how silly you feel you pick at least one of them and you tell the story behind it. What did you do to achieve the thing? What was hard about it? How did you overcome that? Why did that person give you that compliment?

This way we can see it from another person’s point of view, even if that “person” is an inanimate object. When we tell the story in that level of detail we pick up the things that we missed before. The reasons why “just anyone” couldn’t do it. The reason it counts, regardless of how much effort it cost us to get there. Besides, even when it feels easy, that doesn’t mean we’re cheating. It just means that we’re allocating our assets effectively.

Of course this only works if you take it seriously, spend the time to sit with it. So I have a challenge for you to encourage you to. Leave me one of yours in the comments below. Tell me the story and let me be proud of you. I’m going to make sure I monitor the comments on this one to give you the cheer you need.

And as usual, if you want a bit of help with navigating the world of neurodivergence and leadership in a way that is fully personalised to your unique mind, this is exactly what I do, tailoring the work to each individual client to help them grow in the way they need to. If you’d be interested in finding out a little bit more you can get all the details you need in the description.

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Why High Achievers Dismiss Their Own Success. Twice Exceptional (2e) Leaders