2021: leap & the net shall appear

If someone had told me that by the end of 2021, I would have sold over 500 copies of a new book, ‘ADHD: an A to Z’ which was then bought by a major publisher, have trained companies like Microsoft, Lewis Silkin & Adidas on mental health, and quit my job to thrive as an ADHD Coach, I probably would have burst out laughing.

Since being diagnosed with ADHD a few years before, it was something I was vaguely embarrassed about. However, experiencing how much my life had changed as a result of being diagnosed & learning about the 7 year waiting list for NHS assessments made me write up something to help others access help and avoid the struggles I’d had, so I wrote up another book. It sat on my laptop for months, until I had coaching and realised that intense fear prevented me from doing anything about it.

Fear of getting it wrong, making an idiot of out of myself, of not knowing everything there is to know about ADHD, of stamping a permanent label onto my forehead, of opening up about my own messy experiences to others for judgement, and of failing.

Coaching helped me remember the point of this book: to help people who needed it.  It was about them, not me. So, I made a cover on Canva in about 15 minutes, figured out how to upload it to Amazon, and had a book in my hands days later. After posting about it online, I realised I’d misspelt the title: ‘AHD: an A to Z’.

This sent me spiralling into intense shame, and after unsuccessfully trying to unpublish it, but managing to change the title, I pretended the book didn’t exist – the fear was still there. A few weeks on, a woman messaged me to say how much the book had helped her & invited me to speak about ADHD at her company, Microsoft.

By this point, coaching had helped me figure out my other blocks about earning money for doing something I feel passionate about. I must have given away almost every single copy of ‘the Model Manifesto’ I owned. I put this one through a previous agent and am still in shock at how much Microsoft paid me to provide training to them, along with ordering 50 books.

Mind Café magazine asked me to write a paid piece for them about the book, which was another shock to the system, after hardly promoting it at all. Then Adidas paid me to speak to them about mental health, ADHD and body image. Back then, I’d have happily done this all for free, but this was preventing me from being able to fully commit to it, because I still had to survive. 

I’d also started getting messages from people all over the world about this book. They were heartfelt, deeply emotional and said how the book had transformed their life by making them feel less alone. Strangers wrote to me about how they’d sat in bed reading the book for an entire day straight, crying. Others bought copies for their partners, to help them understand them better. Others said it helped them get a diagnosis. I was in awe at how the words I’d typed almost straight out of my brain to the page without even thinking about them, had made people feel this way. 

This opened up new parts of my life. I realised the power that ADHD coaching could have and signed up for a course to become one myself. A few months later, I left my full-time job in law and became an ADHD coach. Being self-employed for most of my career has given me a core base of resilience: you can always get by (such as shooting for Tommy Hilfiger this year). Life is extremely short, and none of us know if we’re going to be here tomorrow – so we might as well chase our dreams today.

My coach, Stephanie, said to me, ‘leap and the net shall appear’ – and it did. Days after leaving my job, a leading publisher, Hachette, messaged me out of the blue. I’ve now signed a global book deal with them for the ‘ADHD: an A to Z’ book to be republished – something I was told repeatedly would only happen once I’d had 10,000 Instagram followers.

By the end of the year, I was training law firms like Lewis Silkin on invisible disabilities and coaching over 10 people. One of these people sent me a video to show the impact our sessions had had on her life, and I couldn’t believe it. It was tangible proof that by ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’, I’d achieved what I’d set out to do: help people who needed it.

Along the way, I’d far surpassed the Model Manifesto – this book not only outsold it, but outgrew it – launching me into truly living wholly in what I was writing, instead of retreating from it. I stamped the label on my forehead with pride and owned it, instead of hiding within the safety of a ‘stable’ job. Every day I still have to remind myself to face the fear and do it anyway, but it makes life a whole lot more meaningful.