Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Honest ADHD Talk with Sue Day

Welcome back to Autistic Techie.

I am psyched today to be joined by Sue Day.

She runs Pathway Forward ADHD coaching.

Having been diagnosed at a pretty early point in her own journey, she has had tremendous success with her coaching program, working with people from all across the neurodiversity

spectrum, focusing in ADHDers to help people feel more complete, more whole, whether it's in their life, whether it's on the job.

and just helping ADHDers like yourself feel more confident and prepared to take on life no matter what twists and turns there are.

Sue, welcome to Autistic Techie.

Oh, thank you so much.

What a great introduction.

really appreciate you introducing me and having me on your show.

I, as I was looking into more of your background, I noticed that there was the ADD coaching academy.

I hadn't heard about that before.

What is that program exactly?

And they are, I think, the first coaching academy that developed specifically to coach people with ADHD, to coach coaches to coach people with ADHD.

um And it's, uh I guess, at least when I started, it was considered the gold standard of ADHD coaching education.

uh And it was a one and a half, two and a half, a long time, time.

I think we'll probably even touch on this today, time and ADHD don't go super well together, so it was a long program that happened.

I think it was one and a half years, and we went through, um they're really thorough.

They go through a whole block of time about what is ADHD and what does the research say, what does the current research say, because everything's always changing, um and then they

make us go through a personal transformation and deal.

with our own ADHD in really productive ways.

So we learn how to do the coaching on ourselves before we even learn to start coaching others.

And then we learn how to coach others with ADHD.

And all of the coaching I do, I'm considered a life coach, but everything is with a neurodivergent lens.

And that's really important for people who are not neuro-typical because...

our brains work so differently.

so, yeah, so that's why that's what the long story behind what ADCA is.

And are most or all of the coaches who participate in that also ADHDers or ADDers themselves or is it like majority?

I would say it's the majority, but it's not everybody.

They do um coach non-ADHD folks.

em Although I think a lot of people who think they don't have ADHD as they're going through the program find out that they maybe do.

Because ADHD is really misunderstood by people who are neurotypical.

And I actually really believe that the people who like to hang out with people who are not neurotypical

generally are not neurotypical.

But that is a stereotype on my side.

that happens to me all the time.

I attract people who are claiming to be neurotypical and then we hang around and I'm like, Hey, have you ever thought about this part of neurodiversity?

they're like, no, no way.

I go do some homework or they go talk to a professional.

And they're like, okay, so it turns out you're not going to believe this.

might actually be uh autistic or I might actually be ADHD.

And obviously getting a diagnosis is a separate conversation, but I have found that people who gravitate toward me are

likely, not always, neurodivergent especially in my social and friends circle

Yes, I think that is uh very common and that's why a lot of us neurodiverse folks think that the number of people who have our neurodiverse are larger because that's who we hang

out with.

We end up attracting to us and being attracted to.

Yes, exactly.

just, I had a conversation with somebody earlier.

They were talking about how it's like another language almost.

When I communicate to autistic people or other neurodivergent folks, it's different than how I communicate with neurotypical people.

Do you find that you have a similar experience with any of your clients or even just with your neurodivergent peers?

Absolutely.

ah After I went through the ADD coaching academy, I ended up going to um the ADHD International Conference that happens every year.

The first one I went to was in Baltimore a couple years ago.

2,000 neurodiverse people in one hotel.

It was astounding.

The feeling of like, whoa, this is...

I'm actually way more normal in my group of people with my neurodiversity than I ever knew.

It just felt so amazing and yeah, most of my good friends um have almost all turned out to be, to have some level of neurodiversity and I think it allows us to um unmask a bit ah or

even a lot.

uh

working with people who are neurotypical, who don't understand our brains as much, we have to sort put up a front in order to feel accepted by them.

It's masking, because you have to operate in a way that people expect you to behave.

But when you're around people who don't want to or don't want to put up with that stuff, then why mask?

Why bother?

Who are you doing it for?

What was the most surprising thing about having 2,000 neurodivergent people all in the same place?

What about that experience surprised you the most?

Um, it's funny, I sort of still get chills thinking about it and it was, some of it was like, Whoa, okay.

These people all have the same challenges as me, right?

There's like, nobody knew where they were going.

Nobody knew what time it was.

Everybody was trying to do too many things.

it was, you know, it was just, everybody was sort of in this like, I have ADHD and this is amazing.

overwhelming and it was just really incredible to see uh also the ability I think when the most as I process through that the most surprising thing was to see how well once people

understood they were safe and around people who were like them how well they were able to adapt their own needs to what they were doing so I think that was

Sorry, I think that was the most really inspiring part of it.

It's so interesting talking about how neurodivergent people interact with each other versus neurodivergent, neurotypical people.

feel like it's odd how much more malleable and easily we gel with other neurodivergent people versus when, in my experience, often talking to neurotypical people that kind of

expect us to conform to them, but not the other way around.

Not that they always exist in state of opposition, but I think the experiences that I've had that are most negative and immutable

stem from environments where I've had to mask a lot.

I'm not sure if that resonates with you at all as far as what the idea of masking and forcing this square peg for a round hole looks like for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I absolutely, though I didn't know it for a long time.

um Even though I was diagnosed early on, know, nobody believes, especially in 1988, nobody believed in ADHD.

Certainly nobody believed in ADHD in women.

then, over, so over time, even though I had the comfort of knowing that my brain was just different, it wasn't broken.

I wasn't broken.

I had that.

At least I had that diagnosis, but still over time I didn't try to do anything different.

I tried to force my square peg into a round hole over and over over again until I finally stopped, you know, three or four years ago now.

um And it's just been, I think I lost track of your question a little bit, but it's just been so freeing to be able to, as I stop forcing this square peg into the round hole, as I

start.

Making my brain and my environment suit my brain and my needs life has changed so much

If you could point to one thing or a couple of things that have really opened up your cognitive capacity, because you don't have to mask about it anymore, what are those

things?

Hmm ah

I think one of the biggest ones for me because I have social anxiety has been just to be gentle with myself in all situations.

Like if I say the wrong thing, I don't beat myself up about it for years and years anymore because I used to.

I used to say the wrong thing and I would worry about that one five second thing for for years.

uh

and where the other person probably didn't even ever think about it again, right?

I just, uh just learning how to be really gentle with myself and understand that my brain works differently.

I don't have to fit it into any square, whatever round square bowl.

Learning to be gentle about my words and when I lose them or when I lose track of a question, I think I said in the last question, I think I lost track of your question.

I just admit it.

and move on instead of getting so worried about it that I lose my words.

ah So just figuring out how to be really gentle with myself has really changed my entire life in profound ways.

And you're confident in your ability to talk about that.

It's not just your ability to know that this is a thing on your mind, but how you feel actually saying, articulating it to other people to say, Hey, this is something that's

coming up.

Whether it's I lost track to the question, can you repeat it?

Or can we shift to a different question?

That's on me to ask questions more clearly and obviously.

And I also learned something as well about how I communicate.

And what I've found that what I love to hear from you about is that some

people don't want to hear that feedback or don't want to be flexible.

I found that it's their way or no way and there's no bend.

It just has to be a certain specific way that conforms to how the rest of the world does it.

If we can all do it this way, why can't you do it this way?

Yeah, yeah, I think I've lost a lot of that.

And I don't know if that's because, I mean, a lot of it is because of unmasking, but also becoming an older woman.

I just start to lose like, how much do I really care what other people are think or how other people want me to live my life.

I don't really care that much.

So the people that do want me to be different don't tend to get the satisfaction of me actually making that change and therefore.

Again, I'm just not hanging out or being around the people who want me to do things differently than I am doing.

And now that's not saying that I, that if somebody is, if I'm inconveniencing somebody or making somebody feel badly or whatever, I very much take that seriously in my life.

Like my ADHD makes me late sometimes.

I am really careful to communicate with people about the potential and about, you know, exactly how late I'm going to be if I'm going to be late.

It's usually five to ten minutes and I think um that's a threshold I'm okay with.

when I was younger, it was much longer than that.

And I had to really work on that to make sure that m I didn't inconvenience other people.

So there's sort of a flip side of like, yes, I have unmasked, I am working on being exactly who I am.

And I also feel it's really important that with my ADHD, I can still function with the people around me without making them feel, adapt everything to me.

So it's not all, I make sure it's not all about my ADHD.

It's about like, hey, let's live in community.

Now this is silly question, but I'm really curious.

Are you going to take the person who will set your clock fast by a couple of minutes so you have to get out of bed earlier, or does it have to be accurate regardless?

has to be accurate regardless.

does not work.

cannot trick my brain into it.

ah The only thing that seems to sometimes work is if I ah like, okay, I need to be here.

Cause mostly I'm late because I forget like, I need to be here to see how long it's going to take for me to get there.

So I just like leave the house in that, within that period of time.

And then I forget like, well I also need to park and actually walk there and you know, do all those things.

So, ah

setting a reverse timeline seems to be the only thing that really works.

um And that way, I think probably because I can't lie to my brain, it gets mad at me if I do.

So I actually need to do it really um honestly.

You have to be fair to yourself.

Mm-hmm.

I want to shift gears to talk more about how you coach and how you work with your clients.

many talked a lot about as well with being honest and unabashed regarding your own brain and your own experiences, things that work for you and things that don't.

How do you work with your clients as far as encouraging them to be more honest with themselves?

Recognizing that some clients are different stages of that journey, how do you approach that idea with clients of yours?

Yeah, with coaching, uh I use a type of coaching.

It's called reflective inquiry.

I try to reflect back people's words, their energy levels as I see them, uh their facial expressions, their body language, asking them if that's accurate, asking them how they

feel in their bodies when they're talking about things.

And through that reflection,

People start to become aware a little bit more about how what they're moving through is impacting them and so uh I'm very gentle, but I'm also fairly upfront about you know, hey

I hear I heard you say this thing, you know four times But every time you say it your face falls your shoulders drop It's just clearly even though you're saying you want to do this

thing.

It's clearly energy isn't there.

So let's talk through

um either how to get the energy for that if it's really important to you, or maybe you need to switch directions like, how do you feel about that?

And so it's just a really gentle reflection of what I'm And because we often just don't see or feel very or hear what we're saying in a way that's how it's truly impacting us.

So I help people see that side of what they're talking about.

Coaching requires a lot of trust.

For somebody to enter into a relationship with a coach, they have to be willing for the coach to push back a little bit.

It's not therapy.

And I saw a career coach, someone from a life coach for a while, and I would always have to be conscious of saying, like, I don't want to vent here because that's not what I'm

paying you for, but instead I need to be productive and work about something.

If somebody enters into a relationship with you for coaching, how do you help them figure out what

it is they're there for?

Do you feel like some people pull the trigger about knowing what they're trying to do?

And do you think that that is a happenstance byproduct of ADHDers?

Hmm, I think Generally people have a basic idea of what they're there here for I think also Generally people don't really understand what that means um People come to me for

coaching on like how do they get through their to-do list without being so stressed?

How do they you know sort of?

fit themselves into a more neurotypical timeframe?

How do they fit themselves into their world in a way that works better for them?

ah And what they don't really understand is that and what I help them work on is actually, know, and I talked a lot about this being gentle with ourselves is like, actually, how do

we make your to do list fit both what you need to do

and how you need to do it for your brain, your, I don't want to say sanity, it's not sanity, it's for your calm and free life.

I find that resonates so strongly with neurodivergent people.

It's what can I do for my body, for my brain to feel like I can live in this world?

Not necessarily that I have to look like everybody else, fit in like everybody else, but that I can be who I am.

What's been the most surprising thing that you've learned about yourself or about ADHD through your coaching?

um One of the most surprising things I found out about coaching very early on is that it is a two-way street.

I learned so much about myself when I'm coaching other people.

It's amazing.

ah I come out of every coaching session feeling like I have just sort of turned another page in my life.

ah

And so it's one of my, you know, that's my like another form of payment for me, guess I should say.

It's just a beautiful thing that like I can share these transformations with people because our brains are working in similar ways.

We're going through similar things.

Everything I learn, everything they learn impacts me as well.

um And I think the most, from when I started to go into coaching,

The most surprising thing that I learned is it's not all about executive function.

It's not all about how do we get the things done that people say we need to do.

It's actually how do we figure out what we want to do in order to create our lives in a way that our brains are feel happy and calm.

And it's just, it's a, know, most people think.

It's about how do we get to do the things, but it's actually more like how do we craft the things to make them happy.

It could be inertia.

Like you see something that you want to do, but you don't know where to start.

You don't even know that you have to do the thing.

Whether it is something like cleaning up your room with the laundry or wherever it's just going for your to-do list.

Like it can feel intimidating, but until you even know what the first step is, you don't want to touch it because it seems scary.

Yeah, and but a lot of the motivation comes from um first of all forgetting, trying to accept or forget or however you want to call it, um that what the negative emotions we

have around it are.

So, you know, cleaning our room.

We probably have had a lot of people in our lives saying how bad we are at it.

And we've probably taken that on to in our own brains.

And we tell ourselves we're bad at it.

We just can't do it because we're bad at it.

uh But learning like how to sort of accept that today is a new day.

Let's move forward.

And what's it going to feel like when your room is clean?

Instead of I just have to do this because I should.

You know, like, what's your future self gonna feel like when your room is clean?

How's it gonna feel to walk in that room?

How's it gonna feel to go to sleep in that room and wake up in that room?

And how is that gonna impact your life?

It's not all about that, you know?

It is also, as you said, it's about taking that first step.

Like, how do I get my room clean?

Well, that's another question.

has no bearing on the fact that you haven't been able to get your room clean.

How you get your room clean today is how you get your room clean today.

So leaving behind those judgments of I can't do that because I have ADHD and I haven't been able to do it in the past and I'm bad person because I couldn't.

Leaving that behind and moving forward is one of the biggest steps.

There's never half to that as well.

It's I'm a bad person or I'm bad at this task because either I think I am or somebody has told me so.

And so much of what I've experienced personally and what it sounds like you work on with your own clients is unwinding that behavior.

Whether you think you're predisposed to being bad at something or being traumatized by people telling you that you're bad at something and never touching anything again, even if

you actually might be good at it or at least just good enough.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly Nicely stated.

I just said nicely stated

yeah, it's really weird because I have, I am a conflict averse person.

I'm also not the biggest risk taker, especially for me, it's silly.

Like I have weird taste buds.

so I'm like, what's the worst thing that can happen for me in trying a new food?

Worst case scenario is typically nothing unless I discover a new allergy that I didn't know that I had, but I would have figured it out beforehand.

And when I have...

talk with other ADHDers or met them in my own life, they are really worried about trying something new and getting really sucked into it.

That's the thing that they have expressed to me is that they're worried about tipping their toes into something unknown because they might spiral into it or they might become a

little bit too much of a fixation.

How do you discuss the idea of balancing time and balancing the time blindness as we've talked about with ADHDers?

Yeah, there's that we do a lot of work around that.

You know, we have this hyper focus when we get get really into something and it's really hard for us to stop.

ah And that is uh different.

There's a few things happening around there or lot of things happening around there.

ah One is I love to point out that because a lot of us think that we can't, you know, focus because that's what our the name of our disorder.

says we have a deficit of attention when when actually we probably have way too much attention.

um And so when we do get sucked in to a task, that's because our attention, our interest in that is so focused, like, wow, this is fascinating.

We dive into it, and we can't get out.

um And that does a million things to us that quiets our brain.

So

for once instead of having 800,000 things going through our brain.

We only have this one thing.

So it feels almost like a drug.

And so figuring out how to get out of that is a real challenge.

And I think it's a real challenge for everybody on both the ADHD and autism spectrum is that it's so peaceful when you're in that hyper focus.

you try to figure out how to get out of it, it just hurts is you don't want to because because there's you're locked in and you don't know if you're going to be able to get back

there.

You know, you don't know if you're going to have that same interest.

So that's one of the biggest challenges and figuring out how to break that hyper focus without losing the ability to do it again is really all about like figuring out the right

transition points.

and how to move in and out of, is that you're really learning how you move in and out so you can gain some confidence that you can in fact move in and out, if that makes sense.

It makes sense, and I've experienced that same hyper-focused state, and then the slightest puff of breeze, that kingdom of cards falls, and I have to figure out how am I going to

get back into that state?

I wear big and obvious headphones in the office for a reason, because it tells people, don't bother me.

I have three rules for which you can't bother me.

There's a fire.

if there's puppies or if there's free food.

You're allowed to bother me under those circumstances.

But unless I'm late, and the fourth one is if I'm late for a meeting, that's it.

Those are the only reasons why you should bother me.

And that helps people understand the severity to which I am not to be bothered, lest I waste time and completely blow away the work that I've been doing or the focused state

that I have been in.

Yeah, it can get really hard to get into it.

And so um if we're not, if we do get interrupted, you know, figuring out how to get back into it is also, it's, time consuming and, and it, lose your track.

And I mean, we, I don't know about you, but I have terrible memory.

Like I don't even always remember where I left off.

So it's just, uh it can be really disruptive.

But that said, similar to being late, we can't just expect that, that

ever the world to rotate around our hyper focus.

So putting great boundaries up around that and then also doing some work on our own of like, okay, so how do we efficiently slip in and out of hyper focus?

How do we do these things so that it's not so devastating when we do get it.

It is not jarring.

It's not like, whoop, suddenly I'm focusing and whoop, okay, I'm back in now.

It's more gradual, like going on and off of a highway.

You can speed up and you can slow down, but you don't want to crash out or change lanes too quickly.

If you could leave ADHDers who are on events about coaching with any one insider, any one takeaway, what would you say to people who are on the fence about coaching?

gosh, that's a hard one.

Um, I think, I think I would say that it's an investment into your future self.

And though it feels like it's really hard or intimidating, it's actually a super gentle process.

Doesn't mean we don't get into hard things, but it's a really gentle process.

And the reward of learning how to love your brain and love your ADHD or even just to get along with it is so huge that you'll never even think about like, oh, I wish I hadn't done

this.

I love that insight.

And for people who are interested in ADHD coaching with you or want to learn more about your coaching, where can people find you on the web?

Yeah, so you can find me at pathwaysforwardcoaching.com.

I also, if you want a gentle introduction, sorry, I meant to have that more close range, but I have a book.

This is actually written about uh my big coaching program, which is a 10 step, a 10 session journey through your ADHD.

I created a book around that uh and it's really easily accessible, research-based and uh

It really helps provide that journey through like how do you learn how to get through your ADHD, to love it, how to figure out what you love and why you want to do things, what

tools do you need to get there, and how do you remember all of that stuff in the end.

um So my book, ADHD Brilliance, is also uh available widely.

Amazon, Barnes & walk into your bookstore and ask for it.

They can order it for you.

uh

So that's a uh little bit more of gentle introduction into coaching as well if you're interested there.

If people are interested in coaching with you and want to learn more about your coaching, where can they do that?

Sure, you can find me at um PathwaysForCoaching.com and I also wrote a book called ADHD Brilliant, A Journey Into Your Extraordinary Brain ah that is sort of a...

I'll let you go from there.

Great, easy, perfect.

Sue, this was an awesome conversation.

I learned a lot about ADHD coaching, about being more full and authentic, and the fact that everybody's a little bit time blind as well, autistic ADHD folks especially.

Sue, thank you for coming on to Autistic Techie.

All right, thank you so much.

really enjoyed the conversation and I can't wait to see more of what happens with your podcast as well.

Thank you.