Alongside my day job I’ve been making a concerted albeit slightly haphazard effort to build a consulting career over the last few years. This means having a blog (hi!), having an increasingly occasional newsletter, starting a podcast, posting on LinkedIn, making connections, reading books, reviewing them and being an enabled and activated member of a community.
If that wasn’t enough, I’m also writing a novel.
As you can tell, I don’t like being bored. Additionally I feel like I’ve got a clock ticking all the time driving me onwards.
However, it can come as a bit of a shock if you discover one day that you probably have ADHD and associated anxieties, and you are probably less extroverted than you thought and have just been high-level masking for a lot of your adult life.
This did explain a few things. It explains why you’re always second-guessing yourself, worrying that you’ve offended people and are not pulling your weight. Wanting to be more and failing to deliver it.
And this kind of feeling, while challenging at work, is thrown into sharper relief when you’re trying to be an entrepreneur working in professional communities.
In other words, a community can start feel like a real job. And the very reason you’ve taken (usually) short-term contracts in preference to “real jobs” is precisely because you don’t want to have the associated emotional and social baggage that goes along with it.
So you’re masking, you’ve got highly evolved coping mechanisms, you’ve survived this far and yet when something amazing comes along in your entrepreneurial life you still feel that it’s a trick or a joke. You’re not supposed to be a part of it, you’re an imposter.
Help.
Cognitive Distortions
It’s easy to catastrophise. While I was thinking about this aloud, I was sent this excellent article via the Rands Slack about How to Stop Ruminating.
I usually don’t lose sleep over bad interactions. I’m good at putting those into context. I have always struggled with the larger “over the horizon” plays. When you need patience to see the fruits of your labour. Then, when you start to see the fruits of it, you will believe that what you see is the result of your actions and not some mirage or coincidence.
A big part of dismantling our cognitive distortions is simply being aware of them and paying attention to how we are framing things to ourselves. Good mental habits are as important as good physical habits.
How To Recognize and Tame your Cognitive Distortions
I’ve discovered that a lot of my imposter syndrome and lack of belief in direction is purely due to my cognitive distortions and biases overriding or sabotaging the work I’ve put in previously.
What I will learn to do is to recognise when my thinking is becoming distorted and I’ll do this by writing. I write notes, I write ideas and more than that, I write my feelings down so I can contextualise them later.
Increasingly, I use this blog as well as my book blog as a memento mori. This is where my notes live. This is where my thinking occurs. Even writing this article makes me understand myself a little better.
Being Atypical
So with experience, one gets to know that there are ways that the neurotypical world likes to behave. If you’re on the neurodivergent spectrum, there will always be ways in which your interactions with the rest of the world generate friction.
And unfortunately, it seems that it’s up to us neurodivergents to lead the way. We have to be more self-aware than neurotypicals. We have to explain how we interact with the world around us, and we have to be prepared to contextualise our lives to optimise them.
Now, we don’t all have to do this all the time it seems. For a long time, because I could mask and also be invisible. Because I’m a man, I’m white, I’m middle class I could still make a reasonable stab at having a career without total failure. I was perhaps just “a little out there” or “moody” or “easily offended” or “difficult”. But to fly, to truly fly and connect, means we have to work harder than the rest. And for some people, it’s not even possible to hold down a single job, pass a single exam, feel like they are good enough to do anything in this world. My struggles are insignificant compared to those who can’t even move for fear of failure.
But our world, the human world, is a social one. And we have to, at some point, interact with it if we are to support ourselves. That is an indisputable fact of life no matter where someone lives on the neurodiversity spectrum.
So this can mean, depending on your organisation, a certain amount of social climbing and annual reviews. This makes it hard if you don’t understand how neurotypical people think.
It can be hard holding down a job, just like it can be hard being in a community.
Communities vs Jobs
Professional communities are typically more forgiving, more open and more friendly than organisations. However, communities also come with their own rules, either written or unwritten. This can make them as difficult to navigate as work organisations.
When I tire of a community, it’s usually because I’m overwhelmed. Communities come with expectations which are less clear cut than work. There is no boss or referee often in a community. While communities have inclusivity guidelines and principles, they still, to me, often feel like neurotypical clubs.
And this is when the similarities between work organisations and social organisations overlap in my mind.
I think it’s the “letting people down” or “disappointing people” aspect to my career that I’ve had the hardest time with. I’ve had plenty of jobs where I’ve fitted in. I’m a people pleaser when I start, but then I get grumpy, I get bored, I get restless. The only real way I can avoid doing that is either by not taking on too much responsibility for others or having a very understanding and supportive boss.
While communities have inclusivity guidelines and principles, they still, to me, often feel like neurotypical clubs
For the most part, I’ve learned that if I stick with being an IC (Individual Contributor) and I really specialise on the aspects of that which I feel are important: technical excellence, socio-technical thinking, product alignment, automation, mentoring and coaching – then I get on fine.
If, like in the past, I take on a lead role or a management role where I have no or little support, I struggle to allocate my time effectively, struggle to delegate and become paralysed by inaction. It doesn’t mean I don’t care, it means that I care too much about everything and simply cannot decide what I need to do.
In a professional community, I need to contribute. It’s not enough to just be there. I believe that this is a cognitive distortion for the most part. Just being there is enough. Sometimes it’s more than enough to just be there.
Finding Your Audience
I went through a stage about 18 months ago of submitting talks to conferences, getting accepted and standing on stage and delivering them and pretending I enjoyed it. I didn’t. So just as it was taking off I stopped doing it.
That was the right call at the time. I wasn’t invested in what I was talking about, I was making things up for the sake of fitting in. I see this as a stand-up comedian writing a show purely to take advantage of an existing audience. You might occasionally land a laugh, but if you’re not connecting with your audience, you’re just a guy on stage telling bad jokes. Comedians are at their best when they are still looking for their audience.
My obsession for the last year is novel writing. It’s going well. I’m staying interested. I can rewrite it continuously, which allows me periods of boredom or downtime, and that’s ok. I can find the energy to start anything, but the amount of anxiety I get from consistently having to put myself out there the whole time to get the work as well as delivering it is often just not maintainable.
So, I need to find a balance between writing and audience. A balance between putting myself out there and being creative.
The Journey Starts Again
As a creative entrepreneur, it’s important to match the boredom threshold to the anxiety threshold. As a neurodivergent individual in a neurotypical world we must do more to make our work accessible and relevant. We must work harder at our relationships as well as our self-compassion.
This will be tiring. So my advice is:
- find the work that lights you up
- find the delivery mechanism that fits your social batteries
- find a community that fits
- find time for space and self-compassion
- find energy to explain how you feel both to yourself and to others
It will be hard and take a lot of time and effort. It’s a long list and one I will have to come back to every day.
But we start and we continue and we do great things not because they are easy.