ADHD in senior leadership: what my diagnosis explained

As Commercial Director, it was my job to lead pitches to potential customers and investors. I would spend days preparing. I would write and rewrite the pitch deck and then, so consumed by what the room was thinking of me, I would go blank and panic. My confidence hit an all-time low.

Nobody looking at my career would have guessed. I was often headhunted, because I was good at building relationships and had the confidence to speak to anyone. I had the gift of the gab, nothing was too much trouble, I was a people-pleaser. I have worked across many industries and held senior leadership positions in a number of start-ups, as well as building my own consultancy. On paper it reads as competence.

What it does not show is the cost of producing it.

I began to feel sick before every meeting, internal ones as much as external. I couldn't sleep and relied heavily on caffeine. I had to over-prepare, then check and recheck my work, while my colleagues seemed able to just wing it. I would use humour to deflect, then ruminate afterwards on whether I had come across as too much.

Before the ADHD diagnosis I had an explanation for all of it and like most people's, mine was unkind. Disorganised. Lazy. Not trying hard enough. Not good enough. An imposter.

What was yours?

Why leaders are the last to be diagnosed

Seniority is very good at hiding ADHD.

If you are capable, you compensate. You work later than everyone else to produce something on time. You develop elaborate systems that mostly work. You put your energy into being interesting in the room, because being interesting covers a great deal and because the output looks fine, nobody asks the question — least of all you.

The traits that get you promoted can be the same ones that are quietly costing you. Urgency created by deadlines helps in a crisis but is exhausting as a permanent state. Hyperfocus produces extraordinary work and eats a weekend you had promised to someone else. Being able to hold ten threads at once is genuinely useful, right up until none of them can be put down.

By the time someone reaches a senior role, they have usually spent decades building workarounds so effective that the underlying difficulty is invisible. Including to them.

What the diagnosis actually explained

My life made sense when I was diagnosed with ADHD in my forties. My three kids had been diagnosed, but it was only after watching a TikTok sent to me that the penny dropped and I thought "that's me!".

After the diagnosis, I did a great deal of research and began a slow journey towards being kinder to myself. I took on an ADHD coach who helped me uncover my strengths and my values. She helped me construct a life that used those strengths properly, choose the path of sustained interest and put boundaries in place to protect myself. I found tools for my working memory and my time blindness. Life became calmer and considerably more fulfilling.

One thing I noticed early: negative comments and feelings stick to me like Velcro, while compliments and positive feedback slide straight off without registering. I now make a deliberate point of anchoring the positives. It turns out that matters more than I would have believed.

The shift was working with my brain instead of against it. I stopped trying to become someone who tidily processes their inbox each morning, because after four decades of evidence, that person is not going to turn up. I built around what I am actually good at instead.

The research explained a good deal about my personal life too. It explained why I threw myself into hobbies with enormous gusto and then discarded them the moment the novelty wore off, replacing each one with the next. It explained why I found parenting small children mind-numbingly boring unless there were new toys, or crafts, or ponies — and why we always had to have adventures lined up to look forward to. The Georgia with a full social battery would plan multiple social occasions, then dread every one of them once that battery had run down.

And then there is impulsivity, which needs a whole blog post of its own.

What I would say to a leader reading this

If any of this sounds familiar, a few things are worth mentioning.

A diagnosis is not required to change anything. Assessment waits are long and plenty of the people I work with are somewhere in the queue, or have decided not to join it. The coaching works with how your brain actually operates, which doesn't depend on having a letter to prove it.

You are probably not underperforming. The gap that troubles most senior people isn't between them and their peers. It's between the effort going in and the result coming out — and that gap is invisible to everyone but them.

More discipline is not the answer. If willpower were going to solve this, it would have solved it by now. You have more discipline than most people you know. It is how you got here.

One client I worked with was superb at starting things. The new idea was irresistible and the interest generated brought a surge of energy with it. He loved the research, the learning, the building of a team, writing the plan, but once a project was properly in motion, the interest drained away — and his role required him to stay with things to completion. Projects tended to fizzle and some failed.

What he came to see was that his strengths were in strategic thinking and problem solving. He was a big-picture thinker, not a detail person and no amount of effort was going to reverse that. It led to a change of direction: out of a large organisation and into advisory work, where the contribution is made early and someone else carries the detail.

I have seen the power of coaching from both sides, as a client and as the coach. What I want is for people to finish their coaching more confident than they started, with their strengths leading the way rather than trailing behind an apology. Coaching should be empowering.

If you recognise yourself in this, I coach senior leaders and adults with ADHD. Let's talk about what would actually help.