A revelation about my brain and teamwork

Holy hell! I’m not sure how 6 months went by without me writing anything. I’ve certainly had no shortage of ideas…I’ve got a note on my phone where I dump them all and it’s not a short note. But I guess nothing captured my attention long enough to stick with completing or fleshing out. (Which is actually a brilliant segue into what I AM writing about today.)

Sometime about 2 years ago, I began to understand and fully accept how ADHD impacts my brain and life. I had long felt like I related to a LOT of ADHD symptoms and reported first hand experiences (but never ALL of them.) Nevertheless, I started reading more…talking to both my medical doctor and my therapist about it, and came to a conclusion that I’m very much a leaning hyperactive/impulsive subtype (with some inattentive mixed in, but not as much. Most other women present with the inattentive type more prominent, and in general women/girls are more likely to mask their symptoms and be underdiagnosed.)

This opened greater awareness for myself about how so much of who I am and the strengths I love most about myself are a bunch of ADHD coping skills and evidence of how I harness some of my brain’s superpowers that I didn’t even know I was doing. I don’t want to bore you with the journey of self-acceptance this understanding took. But suffice it to say that I had to understand and step away from some heavy judgment/shame narratives related to my brother’s childhood ADHD diagnosis. (In our abusive home, he was cast as the “bad kid” for these behaviors and I was the “good one” in school) etc., etc.

In many ways I am and always have been a very classic Type A, overachieving, enthusiastic, teacher’s pet, nerd who is proud of being a Type A overachieving, enthusiastic, teacher’s pet nerd. I’ve struggled with perfectionism as long as I can remember. I’ve created all kinds of systems and structure to my day, how I work, figuring out when my energy can best be maximized so that I produce, produce, produce. Lack of consistent unconditional love and approval in my childhood means that I’m hardwired to figure out ways to try to get an A+ in situations where grading is not even present.

Let me put it like this, the fictional characters I most relate to are folks like Lisa Simpson, Amy Santiago, Monica Geller, Leslie Knope, Chidi Anagonye, and Jane Villanueva. OH! The most recent addition to this list would be Janine Teagues on Abbott Elementary.

Anyway, once I accepted and understood my ADHD, I started to see how it has manifested in my life and personality in more ways than I could ever count. One of them is directly related to the most common piece of feedback I received early in my professional career. For probably the first 10 years that I was in working environments, the ways that my supervisors (a few of them) would coach me would sound a little like this, “You are so valued here! You are always so on top of it and reliable. You produce and execute projects so well. You have great ideas and you are a problem solver. What you need to work on is some of your interpersonal skills. For example, softening your approach when giving others feedback. You can be a little bit too direct for some people. It would be really great if you could focus more on the positive.” So and and so on, you get the idea.

When getting this feedback, 2 paths were always simultaneously ignited in my mind:

Path one: I couldn’t help but feel shame. Old dynamics I carried at that time said, “being told you have something to work on it NOT an A+, do you had BETTER FIX IT DAMMIT, SELF!!!!!” I could really spin out for a while on something like that. Of course, that’s a lot of me-baggage from aforementioned abusive childhood. Any manager worth a damn will help find ways for you to grow and my managers were not at all wrong in helping me see that I had a skills gap. I wasn’t always communicating in a way that was most effective for my audience (or for me to maintain harmonious relationships with colleagues of all types.) If I didn’t address this, growing as a professional as I hoped to do WOULD become more and more difficult. In my field (nonprofit management that is social work adjacent) it’s not effective to be a harsh manager. (Or at least, I now see that people who operate punitively are not effective managers.) So I took the feedback very seriously (even a bit too seriously in being hard on myself) and I really, REALLY wanted to improve and address it.

Path two: This is one that’s where my ADHD comes in and helps highlight the complexity of what was going on. While I took the feedback seriously because I wanted an A+, I didn’t really understand what they were saying because I wasn’t experiencing myself as negative………………………………………………………..like at all. My dominant feelings were, “I am a problem solver so when I am helping people solve problems, I am inherently positively contributing to our work. I want it to be better and better and that’s positivity. Additionally, I would feel just kind of confused when something like “you’re too direct” was said because I genuinely didn’t (and sometimes still don’t) understand what “too directness” looks like or sounds like. I was simply sharing with my team or my supervisees what needed to be accomplished.

Persistently, I figured out ways that I could “soften” my communication and I tried them out…and things did eventually improve. But the convergence of those two reaction paths I outlined during these formative years in my career, was that I started to feel really self conscious and doubtful about my communication and leadership skills. I constantly worried I was “too much.” I worried I was offending people in ways I couldn’t quite grasp. My anxiety spiked when I had to have ANY tough conversation much more so than it otherwise would have, in already anxiety producing moments. The periodic well-intended comments I’d often get of something like “you were so intimidating when I first met you, now I know you’re so funny and sweet” hit me like a ton of bricks.

I haven’t gotten this particular piece of feedback (soften communication; be more positive) in a few years now. When this topic felt like my Personal Professional Skills Deficit Priority #1 was before I even understood my ADHD. The other day I was reflecting on past me and I had an a-ha moment about this whole situation.

You see, what I needed to hear wasn’t “be more positive” or “soften up.” It was actually something like, “fill us in on how you got there.” If I myself, or my supervisors, had understood how ADHD was driving me, particularly from an impulsivity perspective, I would have appeared as positive as I actually am all along. Because I didn’t have a positivity or kindness gap. I think I actually had a “skipping way too far ahead and not taking others along with me” gap.

In other words, my impulse to get to the heart of matters was so strong that I was arriving at “ways to improve” far too quickly.

What I now understand is that when I am presented with a project and work that I care deeply about (which is all of my professional work in the nonprofit space) I am ALWAYS monitoring and scanning the work landscape for things to improve. To me, improving means that we serve more girls. Improving means we reduce costs and eliminate waste. Improving means we can generate more employment opportunities. Improving means we can better reach our mission. Improving means we can increase compensation for our whole team. Improving means we can innovate and try out new program methods. So therefore, improving is right, smart…everything.

This means I would be looking at a project, product, or outcome and my ADHD-hyperactive-impulsive-go-go-go-let’s-get-to-the-end-ness would spit me out in the critique phase and I was taking the “celebrate the wins” phase for granted. I would so quickly jump past all of the accomplishments and things that were done perfectly and excellently and jump into highlighting the areas that need improvement. I would have some internal/subconscious version of, “HOORAY, THAT’S INCREDIBLE! But no time to dwell, time is money, so let’s cut to the chase and figure out how we iterate so that it’s even better next time.” For me, nothing felt (feels!) more positive and motivating than the work of building improvements on past performance. But what those around me experienced was a bunch of focus on ONLY the areas of improvement and never enough celebration of the accomplishments.

(OK, OK, I have to put a caveat in here that sometimes I really am too blunt with stating my views. That’s a thing I have and will always work on, but that’s not really what was the TRUE root issue of this work challenge for me.)

When I said a moment ago that persistently, I figured out ways that I could “soften” my communication…what I really mean is that I walked my way around accidentally figuring out that I had no right to move a whole team past celebrating victories only to jump to the work that needs fixed. I had to learn that for teams, we need to simmer together in the good stuff much longer than is natural for me. When a whole team becomes more inspired and bonded by time spent celebrating victories, that is objectively, NOT a waste of time no matter how much my impulsivity says, “next thing now…next thing PLEASE.” So I worked to shift my mindset.

Now that I understand my ADHD, now that I have words for how my hyperactive/impulsive nature presents at work and on teams, I get it. I totally understand what I was struggling with before. I acknowledge and feel my own softness and kindness and positivity in there. She wasn’t lacking! She was just glossed over.

Furthermore, it is a GIFT to have colleagues like mine who help me celebrate my own victories too. Because this impulsive trait is definitely NOT one I only put on others. Glossing over my own victories has long been one of my favorite unhealthy self-directed behaviors too. (Queue a link here back to that childhood stuff and never feeling good enough with a dash of capitalistic programming about “productivity” but that’s a post for another day.)

I feel like by thinking about this situation I’ve gained a new level of clarity and maturity and MUCH stronger self awareness. I don’t think that my supervisors did anything wrong, they responded to their understanding of the situation. But I do think that neither they nor me knew we were speaking different languages in a fundamental brain wiring way. I felt confused to be seen as negative because I actually wasn’t negative. But my approach was also NOT positive for my teams. This is a case study for myself in my own management practices as I try to remember that you never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. But when trust and kindness are in the driver’s seat, you can probably, ultimately figure it out together.