Not me. Not you. Somebody else entirely, a long time ago, and the rest of us have spent our whole careers trying to fold ourselves into a shape we never agreed to.
Up early. Structured hours. A to-do list attacked in order. Breaks at sensible intervals. Focus expected on demand because the clock said nine o’clock and that’s apparently when focus is supposed to show up.
We do it because everyone else seems to be doing it, because nobody ever suggested there might be another way, and because the few times we tried working differently we got the message loud and clear that something was wrong with us rather than something was wrong with the model.
I got my ADHD diagnosis just before I turned fifty. By then I’d spent decades assuming I was simply worse at the basics than everyone around me – worse at routine, worse at sitting still with one task, worse at the parts of working life that seemed to come naturally to everyone else.
I wasn’t worse at any of it. I’d been working against a structure that was never designed for how my brain operates, and burning an enormous amount of energy on the friction that created.
We’ve built an entire culture around one version of productive and called it the grown-up way to work, and everyone who doesn’t fit it gets nudged towards feeling like they’re falling short of something.
That model isn’t the only way to build something that works. It’s just the version that got written down first, by people whose brains happened to operate that way, and the rest of us have spent generations trying to retrofit ourselves into it.
We don’t have to keep doing that.
I work in bursts now. The thinking and the processing happen in the background, and when the sprint comes it gets more done in three hours than the old structured version of my week managed in three days. I stopped fighting the bits of myself that don’t fit a conventional pattern and started building around them instead, and the business runs better for it because of how I’m wired, not in spite of it.
So many of the coaches, healers and business owners we work with are doing exactly the same thing to themselves – forcing a midnight brain into a 9am content calendar, booking fifteen-minute interruptions into a day that needs total silence, measuring an energy that comes in waves against a standard built for people whose energy runs flat and even, and wondering why it never quite fits.
None of that is a flaw that needs fixing. It’s information about how we actually work.
Something to try this week.
Notice where you’re forcing yourself into a structure that doesn’t fit – a working pattern, a routine, an expectation about what productivity is supposed to look like – purely because it’s what you’ve been told good business owners do. Then ask what would happen if you built your week around how you actually function, even if it looks nothing like anyone else’s.
We get to decide that. Nobody else does.
#UnleashYourAwesome