You can be brilliant at what you do and still lose money every single year.

Hiya,

I want to tell you about someone I work with.

She's a creative.

She has Loyal clients and a beautiful product they loved and always wanted more of.

A business backend that wasinvisible chaos she'd been holding together with workarounds and willpower for years.

And she was completely burnt out.

Not tired,

not just feeling a bit flat.

The kind of burnt out where you sit down to do the thing

and nothing comes,

the non trendy version of the word.

Where the laptop is open and you're staring at it

and your brain has simply left the building.

Where you've been running on empty for so long

that functioning feels like something other people do

and you can’t possibly fathom how to get back to that place.

She is a menopausal woman with a gorgeous ADHD brain

who has been white-knuckling a business alone for years

and her nervous system had finally said: enough.

That's where we started.

Not with her figures.

With her.

Here's what actually changed.

It wasn't a rebrand

or a new offer pulled together in a weekend hyperfocus retreat.

It wasn't a productivity system or a morning routine, trotted out to many.

She stopped doing it alone.

And when I say figures — her version of checking the finances was opening the app, finding the cash balance, and closing it before the rest of it could ruin her day.

That's not a character flaw,

it’s totally textbook ADHD avoidance.

The kind that makes complete sensewhen your nervous system is already at capacityand the numbers feel like one more thing that provesyou're failing.

That's where we started.

Not with a spreadsheet or a strategy,

just with a woman who was completely frozen.

The kind of frozen that doesn't look dramatic from the outside —

it just looks like procrastination,

like excuses,

like another thing not done.

But from the inside it's paralysis.

Real,

physiological,

your-nervous-system-has-left-the-building paralysis.

She wasn't underperforming.

She was dysregulated.

There's a huge difference and not enough people understand the nuances of it.

And underneath the freeze was shame.

Years of it.

The specific, cruel shame of a woman who is brilliant and caring and will move mountains for everyone else —and cannot seem to do the same for herself.

Who had been quietly treating her own business like it didn't quite deserve to be taken seriously, not because she didn't believe in her work— but becauseshe genuinely couldn't see which direction to go.

She couldn't see what to try that she hadn't already tried and the path wasn't just hard, it felt invisible.

So that's what we worked on first.

Not the strategy or the systems.

We worked on where her story came from and whether it was actually true.

Her brain had been filing decades of evidence under character flawinstead of neurological reality and difference.

No wonder she felt exhausted.

Slowly, she started to understand how her brain actually worked.

We built a toolkit together —

for the executive function wall,

for the dysregulation,

for the moments when overwhelm hit and everything shut down.

And she knew,

on the bad days, that she wasn't alone in it.

That there was a WhatsApp message she could send.

That the difference between a completely lost week

and a short frozen period followed by a reset was just that —

someone who already knew the territory,

right there at the end of a message.

She started paying herself.

Properly.

Superannuation.

Investment back into her business and her learning.

The things she'd always told herself were for later.

Her revenue has grown 64%in the time we've been working together.

She went from an annual loss to a profit.

She's already hit last year's entire annual turnover — with four months still to go.

For every dollar that comes in, 50 cents are costs.

The other 50 cents are hers, profit.

But honestly?

That's not what she leads with when we talk about what's changed.

What she leads with is her clients.

How happy they are.

How much they love what she's creating.

Her own thoughts and ideas, finally getting the room they deserved.

That's what she calls success.

The figures are the evidence that the business works.

The clients — and what she's building for them — are the reason it matters.

And underneath both of those things is something she'd almost stopped believing in: her own self-belief.

Quietly rebuilding.

The bit she said that I keep thinking about:

"I'm not there yet.

But I'm starting to believe I can get there.

That's new for me."

That last sentence.

That's not a transformation story.

That's a woman who spent decades collecting evidence against herself — finding a few small glimmers of evidence for herself instead.

Not a single turning point.

A few.

Quietly accumulated.

Enough to keep going.

She still has hard weeks.

The ADHD didn't go anywhere.

Menopause certainly didn't.

But she understands herself differently now.

She has a toolkit that actually fits her brain.

And she's not doing it alone anymore.

If any of this is sitting somewhere in your chest right now —

if you recognise the freeze,

the gap between what you deliver for everyone else and what you've managed to build for yourself —

I want you to know something.

That gap is not evidence of what you're capable of.

It's evidence of what happens when a brain like yours has been trying to operate without the right conditions for a very long time.

You don't need to have it sorted before you reach out.

You don't need to be at rock bottom either.

You just need to be at the point where staying exactly where you are is starting to cost more than the conversation.

If that's where you are — even quietly, even just a little — I'd love to talk.

No pressure.

No pitch. Just a proper conversation with someone who already knows the territory.

I'm off to drink my very sad decaf and pretend Criminal Minds counts as research.

Mel x

And as always — lived experience plus research-backed practice (lucky I like reading!)

This week's research threads:

1. ADHD, burnout and executive function Turjeman-Levi, Y., Itzchakov, G., & Engel-Yeger, B. (2024). Executive function deficits mediate the relationship between employees' ADHD and job burnout. AIMS Public Health, 11(1), 294–314. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11007411/

2. Shame, self-blame and late diagnosis in women Attoe, D.E., & Climie, E.A. (2023). Miss. Diagnosis: A systematic review of ADHD in adult women. Journal of Attention Disorders, 27(7), 645–657. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10870547231161533

3. ADHD symptoms and menopause — Monash University, Australia Osianlis, E., & Gurvich, C. (2024). ADHD and sex hormones in females: A systematic review. Journal of Psychiatric Research. HER Centre Australia, Monash School of Translational Medicine. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10870547251332319

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