If you follow me on social media (or read my very occasional blog posts), you may have noticed that I’ve not posted much over the last few months. So, what’s been going on?
While I love sharing knowledge and connecting with others, the truth is, I do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with social media. The pressure to post regularly (which also means pressure to have a constant supply of new ideas!) to please the algorithm, the time-suck of reading other people’s content – particularly perilous for those of us with ADHD – were combining to form a not-so-fun experience. Trying to run social media for business is also very different to having a personal account. It’s work (but usually without the financial compensation), and with the various other bits of work I was doing for the business, it was feeling a bit relentless.
So, while it wasn’t formally planned, I decided to take a break from it and focus on other areas. One of these was developing an area of my business that I’d had on the cards since the beginning, which was becoming an Associate Coach for an organisation. The organisation I’m working with are led and owned by neurodivergent people and, through psychology and coaching, support neurodistinct individuals to be their best in the workplace. The coaching I do through them is very different to what I do with Not Another Life Coach as it’s more focussed on performance and strategies for the workplace, versus the explorative, transformational and personal style of coaching I do in my own practice. It’s given me the opportunity to work with so many other neurodivergent people, which was another of my central business aims when I started, and I absolutely love it.
I’ve also been experiencing what seems to have been burnout over the last couple of years, which I suspect has been a result of the effects of the pandemic, having ADHD, and age. Many of my trusted ADHD coping mechanisms suddenly stopped working, making doing almost anything feel impossible. After a lot of reading, it seems that this isn’t uncommon in women in their late-30s and beyond, but it’s also not an area that there has been any research on. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me considering that ADHD in girls and women has been historically under recognised, and that the recognition that ADHD persists into adulthood is relatively recent, so there hasn’t been that much research into ADHD across the lifespan…but, the effects of this burnout were making business-related activities very difficult, which was another reason for my scale-back.
After a long wait, I finally started trialling ADHD medication back in February. I was wary at first as my previous trial with medication over 10 years ago was a bit hit and miss. It was great when I needed to focus on Excel spreadsheets for hours, but didn’t help with much else. Happily though, the medication I’m on now has been making a huge difference in terms of focus, task initiation and switching and mental energy levels, as well as other areas. I don’t have a boatload of side-effects either, which I’m grateful for, PLUS, it’s also helped with my POTS symptoms! (I didn’t blog about it here, but I did talk on IG about some bad POTS flare-ups I had last year and the year before. I may do a separate post about it if anyone is interested, but the flare ups were severe enough to majorly impact my function and mobility. Thankfully, medication for that has sorted it out, and having the ADHD medication help too is the icing on the cake).
I’m also, with all this, still a part-time Teaching Assistant and I’ve found it a very different experience 3 years down the line from the start of the pandemic. I still love the job, but it’s definitely been taking more from me than it used to.
So…in a nutshell, that's what's been going on! Now, I’m not going to promise new social media and blog posts on a regular schedule, because I know how I work and that won’t (and I’ve made that mistake before!!). But, I *am* going to try to pop up more often. I miss the community feel of social media, plus I’ve noticed there seems to have been a resurgence of crap, grifty pop-psychology on there, and combating that is part of my mission!
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