How to make ADHD work for your career
Look I get it, ADHD can be super hard and I have been fighting my ADHD so hard to get this video made in particular. But it can also help our careers in huge ways. Let’s talk about how.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
A lot of the time, people come to me because they’re struggling. ADHD can be hard. Emotional dysregulation is a struggle. Executive function is a struggle. Rejection Sensitivity is a struggle. All of these things make living and working with ADHD so much harder than life needs to be.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t manage these challenges. I’ve put out posts on rejection sensitivity and executive function already and will likely tackle emotional dysregulation at some point in the near future as well. But let’s be real, yes managing your ADHD got you to where you are today but it’s not what got you here today, it’s your strengths, all those amazing parts of you that create your successes, not managing the hard parts.
Now a lot of your strengths will be personal, maybe you are an amazing artist or an exceptional ability to resolve conflict and bring people together. But there are also aspects of your ADHD that can be harnessed and turned into a strength, and I want to talk about those today.
Before I get going I do want to acknowledge that not every one of these will apply to you. Everyone’s neurodivergence presents differently and so while some of these things might sound right up your street, others won’t and that’s okay. When we have spicy brains we need to try things on for size and see what works and throw out the things that aren’t serving us - our brains are too busy for them anyway. So with that in mind, let’s dive into today’s topic.
The first place that I want to start today is with a quote that comes from a paper I read which has an amazing name of “The untapped potential of the ADHD employee in the workplace”. Now this paper takes quite a pragmatic position that the number of people getting diagnosed with ADHD is increasing to a proportion that is too high for companies to just ignore and that if they don’t make things ADHD friendly then they are shooting themselves in the foot, but the quote I like is:
“In relation to someone’s value within the workplace, an employee with ADHD may be the quintessential “diamond in the rough.” Accordingly, ADHD employees have a special propensity to outperform other employees when managed properly.”
It then goes onto talk about how we might be better equipped to perform well in jobs like sales that aren’t sedentary and highly creative jobs like advertising and graphic design.
Part of the reason for this is our ability to be creative thinkers. It’s often stated that we are divergent thinkers, those able to create new and novel ideas and it is considered to be a measure of creativity (Sedgwick et al., 2018). In fact this creativity has actually been measured.
In the 2011 paper “Creative Style and achievement in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder”, the authors found that adults with ADHD showed higher levels of original creative thinking on the verbal task of the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, a standardised measure of creativity, and also had higher levels of real-world creative achievement compared to adults without ADHD.
This creativity was also mentioned in one of the papers I referred to last week based on interviews with ADHD adults about their experience in the working world (Oscarsson et al., 2022).
When I think about this creativity in the context of ADHD traits, there are a few aspects of our ADHD that I think directly contribute. The first is that we go through hyperfixations, intense bursts of interests in particular topics that last for a period of time before we move onto different topics. When we are hyperfixated on something, we invest so much time and energy into this topic, spending hours learning about it.
We are also inherently curious (Hatak et al., 2020), coming from the part of our brain that needs variety, and that curiosity is another reason why we seek out and learn information.
Searching the word “curious” allowed me to find this quizzical looking puppy and I had to include it.
We also tend to change jobs more frequently (Murphy and Barkley, 2007) which is often touted as a bad thing for your career, but in reality is another way we collect information from a wide variety of backgrounds.
All of these mean that we have such a wide breadth of knowledge and we can use this wide breadth of knowledge to ideate and come up with a variety of ideas.
If you’re still not convinced, I’d really recommend reading the book “Range: How Generalists Triumph In a Specialised World” or sometimes the subtitle starts with Why instead of How, this confused me when I googled it because I thought I’d got the subtitle wrong.
I haven’t actually re-read this book since getting my diagnosis so I’m going to tackle it again from an ADHD point of view and do a post on it in the future, but the summary is that research into the world’s top performers in a wide variety of domains shows that generalists are much more likely to excel than specialists who have dedicated their lives to just one pursuit.
If you have ADHD, then chances are you’re a bit of a generalist, like I am. So lean into it. Learn about different domains, bring together thoughts from areas that might not obviously be related to where you are now. Lean into this skill to generate creative ideas.
We can also use this from a people perspective as well. I once read a comment someone made that their ADHD meant they couldn’t just focus on their day job, and it meant that they volunteered for so many “extra-curricular” initiatives at their day job. I was the same in my corporate life. I was on the committee of our small workplace choir. I was part of various innovation groups and took part in a wide variety of workplace events.
Music is my special interest so managing to combine it with work in some small way brought me so much happiness.
Taking part in all of these activities had benefits. For one thing, it gave my ADHD brain dopamine and variety. I was also contributing to workplace culture and innovation, pointing back towards the discussion of ideation earlier. But there was also one huge benefit from doing this that I think people underestimate: just how powerful it was for networking.
Through taking part in all of these events I was meeting people from different areas of the company and when it came to my team or project needing to talk to a different department, I often had a way in through someone I’d met in one of these extra-curricular activities.
This was something I actually became known for and one of the juniors I mentor used to introduce me to people as “the most connected person in the department”. I had this amazing ability to get things done because I had so many colleagues I could send a message to if I needed help who would take time out of their busy day to reply to me because we knew each other already.
Now I know that this is going to put some people off already, because I’m basically telling you to network and we can sometimes struggle with those personal relationships, but I want to help calm some of these nerves. For one thing, the relationships don’t have to actually be that close. Often the situation was something simple, like we took part in a team event together and that shared experience in itself created the start of a bond without us having to put extra effort into the relationship. That small bond formed from one event can often be enough for that person to remember your name and the positive interaction and be a positive connection for you in the future.
But also, we do have some skills in this realm as one of our strengths is often our sense of humour. In fact, a 2018 study found that when people were asked what they would miss if their ADHD went away, all of the participants referred to their sense of humour being the thing they’d missed the most! (Sedgwick et al., 2018).
Shared bonding through humour in my opinion is one of the most beautiful aspects of life.
Humour itself encourages tolerance and compassion towards ourselves and others and a sense of identification with humanity as well as self-acceptance. Through sharing humour with others, we are creating those positive relationships that will be a benefit to our careers.
Another situation in which I found myself regularly bonding with my colleagues was in crisis situations. I worked in a role where nothing was ever life or death so I’m not talking about traumatic crisis situations, but I am talking about high stress situations where pressure from others was creating an environment that felt like a crisis. Of course these situations aren’t pleasant, and I wouldn’t go as far as to say I enjoyed them, but one thing I did notice was that I would often feel a closer relationship to those I was in the trenches with, so to speak, when we reached the other side.
It also helped that my brain was amazing in a crisis. I’ve actually struggled to find studies on this exact topic but I’ve seen so much anecdotal evidence both in my coaching practise and the communities I move in on and offline that suggests that crisis situations have this amazing ability to focus our brains and keep us calm while others are panicking.
This calmness is a huge advantage because it enables us to stay collected while we make decisions and execute on important tasks needed to move through the crisis situation and the recognition we can receive for successfully navigating a workplace crisis can be huge.
Now this is something we have to be a little careful about, too many crises and we can get overwhelmed and burnt out. But by becoming known for being someone who is reliable in those clutch situations, and trusting in our brains to be able to work through them successfully, we can really use these opportunities to advance our careers.
That feeling of pulling through something difficult at work is an amazing dopamine boost and sharing that win is really rewarding.
Another thing I wanted to highlight is how we can utilise our passion to build our careers. Those of us with ADHD are passionate people, full of excitement and energy (Sedgwick et al., 2018). This passion, and more importantly ambidexterity of passion, was found to be a predictor of entrepreneurial success in people with ADHD (Hatak et al., 2020), finding that passion in developing and founding (but actually a lack of a passion in inventing) was key to successful entrepreneurial results.
One last note is that I feel like whenever I talk about positive aspects of ADHD I always have to throw in a thought about hyperfocus. It’s something that can be used as a pro and we can be so productive and effective while during a hyperfocus but it’s also inconsistent. We can’t choose to go into a hyperfocus. We can’t choose what we hyperfocus on, but when the stars align, we are super interested in what we’re doing and we slip into hyperfocus, we are just unstoppable.
And that’s it for today’s post. I hope this has been helpful for looking at ways we can harness our ADHD in a way that is incredibly useful and powerful in our careers. I’ve been lucky enough to meet so many inspiring ADHDers with incredible backgrounds and it’s really shaped how I look at my own ADHD in my career in the future. I know that it’s going to take me to interesting places and I’m so excited to see what the future holds.
References:
The untapped potential of the ADHD employee in the workplace (Robbins, 2017)
ADHD symptoms, entrepreneurial passion, and entrepreneurial performance (Hatak et al., 2020)
Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, (Epstein, 2019)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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