Kelly tries to figure out if he’s on the ADHD spectrum with Amanda Perry, a serial entrepreneur, business owner, coach, and speaker who has launched, scaled, and sold four businesses and has been featured in Forbes, The Guardian, and on the BBC. She has a new book: “Brain First Business: The ADHD Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success.”   

You note in the book that statistics suggest that 29% of entrepreneurs have ADHD. 

“Well, there’s an even more interesting stat, Kelly, which is that 55 % of entrepreneurs identify as neurodivergent. So that’s across the whole spectrum: ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, all of it. But 55 % of us are walking around with these brains that are wired so beautifully, behaving as if they’re just wired in the normal, boring way.” 

How did you get diagnosed? 

“My sister started sharing memes with me and my mum. So, for a bit of context, me, my sister and my mum, who was 65 at the time, all got diagnosed in 2020. And it was because my sister was sharing these memes and ADHD content, and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s you.’ And I was thinking, ‘Actually, it feels a bit like me as well.’ And the conversation kind of continued. And at that point, I remembered that someone about five years previously had said to me, ‘I’ve been diagnosed with adult ADHD.’ And I was like, ‘What? that’s not even a thing.’ And she said, ‘I really think you might have it too.'” 

Give us an example of a thing that is hard for you to do because of ADHD. 

“One of the hardest things for me is demand avoidance. I get incredible demand avoidance to the point where it’s not just following through. If I know I have to follow through, I’m already kicking back on that. I’ll give an example that I know your ADHD listeners will relate to immediately. If I say to my husband, I’m going to do something and then he reminds me that I’m supposed to do it, I am no longer doing that thing. I was going to do it. I want to do it, but you’ve now told me that I have to, and I can’t do it. Sorry, it’s not happening. So yeah, demand avoidance is a really, really difficult one to manage because it looks so stupid and petulant, but it’s such a nervous system response to being told what to do and follow through definitely falls into that for me. It’s like the automated tasks that pop up in your Google Calendar. I become blind to them very quickly.” 

Photo Credit: James Melia